review film bad education

‘Bad Education’: Film Review

Hugh Jackman delivers an acting master class, trading on his charismatic star persona to reveal the rotten core of bad-apple superintendent Frank Tassone.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Going forward, what will Hollywood do when it needs a Kevin Spacey type? The disgraced Oscar winner is precisely the actor a movie like “ Bad Education ” calls for: Cory Finley ’s audacious second feature centers on the true story of Frank Tassone, district superintendent of the Roslyn School District in Long Island, N.Y. — a hero to parents and students alike, responsible for turning Roslyn High into one of the state’s top-achieving public schools, while exploiting the trust the community put in him. It’s a tricky, two-faced role that calls for the kind of firm-handshake, direct-eye-contact duplicity Spacey brought to “House of Cards” and half a dozen movies before it. Go ahead, Google “Frank Tassone” and tell me that I’m wrong.

Now, Hugh Jackman isn’t the actor I would’ve expected to fill those shoes. He’s more movie star than character actor, and this role presents him in such an unflattering light — quite literally so, shooting its cast such that their skin looks like raw chicken and every wrinkle casts a shadow — that you’d think his agent would have advised him against it. (George Clooney’s probably did.) That’s what’s so courageous about Jackman’s decision, and one of several reasons that “Bad Education” is the best work he’s ever done.

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Here’s a star at the height of his powers leveraging his own appeal to remind that even our heroes are fallible and that you can never really judge someone from the outside. And Finley — whose only prior feature credit is the ice-cold, Patricia Highsmith-worthy high-wire act “Thoroughbreds” — is every bit the director to bring it home, pairing Jackman with an equally astonishing Allison Janney as school business administrator Pam Gluckin, Tassone’s creative-accounting accomplice. Finley, who clearly thrives when dramatizing morally complicated situations, doesn’t do the first thing you’d expect from any telling of this national-headline-making story (one that was first exposed by the school paper, the Hilltop Beacon): He doesn’t sensationalize it. Not that it would have been wrong to do so.

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It worked for Martin Scorsese in “The Wolf of Wall Street.” It worked for Steven Soderbergh in “The Informant.” Splash it up — that’s the obvious answer. Make the colors pop, the movie’s carotid artery bulge. That’s how such material is usually played. Look at this story on paper — a high school student exposes an $11 million embezzlement scheme perpetrated by the institution’s most admired figure — and you might expect a tongue-in-cheek cross between “Election” and “To Die For” (the Gus Van Sant-directed satire inspired by Pamela Smart, a high school employee locked up after enlisting her teenage lover to murder her hubby).

Written by Mike Makowsky (“I Think We’re Alone Now”), who was attending Roslyn Middle School when the Tassone scandal broke, “Bad Education” doesn’t shy away from the humor of the situation, but it doesn’t go for the cheap laughs either (unless you count some of the distractingly tacky decorating choices in Gluckin’s ready-for-remodeling home). With their strong accents and “Sopranos”-like way of dressing, the movie’s all-too-trusting Long Island residents would’ve been an easy target for parody, but that’s not the tone Finley’s going for. From the high-contrast, stark-widescreen look of things, he’s most interested in the way that people like Tassone and Gluckin could rationalize what they were doing.

That’s easy: Of all the careers in America, educators are by far the most undercompensated. In New York, where the cost of living is high and the real estate outrageous (the latter ironically exacerbated by the quality of the public schools), how are teachers supposed to afford being part of the community they serve? That doesn’t justify graft, mind you, but it suggests how people who’ve dedicated their lives to a low-earning field might find themselves bent toward skimming a little something extra for themselves out of the school budget.

“Bad Education” makes a point of showing how much Tassone meant to the community. Early on (the year is 2002, as signified by flip phones, compact discs and other period details), Tassone is seen tweezing his nose hairs before going onstage to take credit for turning the school into a success. Roslyn is ranked No. 4 in the country. Test scores are up. Seniors are getting into Ivy League schools in record numbers. And Roslyn is set to break ground on a $7.5 million “sky walk” that could give the community a massive boost.

Rachel, a sophomore played by “Blockers” standout Geraldine Viswanathan , has just joined the school paper, whose editor isn’t prepared for the deep dive into the school’s financial records that she has in mind. “We are an extracurricular designed to get us into good colleges,” he says. But Rachel (a fictional character based on an actual student journalist) has something to prove — to herself; to her father (Harid Hillon), who was canned in an insider-trading scandal; and to Tassone, who truly cares about the students, encouraging her to turn the puff-piece assignment into something meaningful.

At times, the story borders on the incredible, and it may spoil the surprise to read some of the details that follow. Through an imbecilic mistake — in which Gluckin’s son charges thousands of dollars of home renovation supplies to the school account — the school board gets wind of Gluckin’s financial misdeeds. When it happens, audiences don’t know whether or to what degree Tassone is involved, and it’s fascinating to watch Jackman in action: Like a master politician (or a brilliant actor), he sizes up the situation, assesses his audience and begins to spin things to best protect all involved. In other movies, scenes like these are played such that viewers can see the con man’s hand, but Jackman keeps a poker face, which protects the remaining surprises until such time that Rachel can reveal them.

True-crime movies so often serve to reinforce the notion that wrongdoers are eventually brought to justice in this country. But “Bad Education” refuses to get so reductively didactic. Yes, Tassone and Gluckin stole millions of dollars, but they also made Roslyn an extremely successful school (if you don’t dwell on the leaky ceilings and outdated equipment). When certain details of Tassone’s private life come to light — including a reunion with a former student (Rafael Casal of “Blindspotting”) and an unconventional arrangement with one of the school’s mysterious suppliers (Stephen Spinella) — one may be tempted to judge. But the real takeaway is how hard that can be.

Maybe Spacey isn’t the only one who can handle the ambiguity such a performance demands. The way Jackman plays it, Tassone was a villain who didn’t see himself as such. Finley finds creative ways to suggest the discrepancy between inner and outer selves. The hair-slicked, health-conscious superintendent is constantly watching his cholesterol, forgoing carbs in favor of charcoal smoothies — which amounts to nourishing his insides with what looks like black bile. Late in the game, before the jig is up, he goes in for a face-lift — another reminder of the mask Tassone wears (and an unexpected sight for a now-50-year-old movie star). Appearances can be deceiving. This we know. But how do young people cope with having their images of their heroes shattered? And is it really any easier for adults? “Bad Education” can be a hard lesson to accept, but a necessary one in how the world works.

Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival (Special Presentations), Sept. 8, 2019. Running time: 108 MIN.

• Production: An HBO release of an Automatik, Sight Unseen, Slater Hall production. (Int'l sales: Endeavor Content, Los Angeles.) Producers: Fred Berger, Eddie Vaisman, Julia Lebedev, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Oren Moverman, Mike Makowsky. Executive producers: Leonid Lebedev, Caroline Jaczko.
• Crew: Director: Cory Finley. Screenplay: Mike Makowsky, based on the New York Magazine article "Bad Superintendent" by Robert Kolker. Camera (color, widescreen): Lyle Vincent. Editor: Louise Ford. Music: Michael Abels.
• With: Hugh Jackman, Allison Janney, Ray Romano, Geraldine Viswanathan

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‘bad education’: film review | tiff 2019.

Hugh Jackman, Allison Janney and Ray Romano star in 'Thoroughbreds' director Cory Finley's second feature, 'Bad Education,' which was inspired by a school district scandal on Long Island.

By Jordan Mintzer

Jordan Mintzer

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An embezzlement scheme whose total take was $11.2 million seems like peanuts compared to Enron, Bernie Madoff or any other billion-dollar fraud of our epoch.

But in Cory Finley’s engagingly devious new dramedy Bad Education , it takes on the guise of a real-world morality play where the mighty fall from up high — even if up high means the superintendent seat of a public school district on Long Island.

The Bottom Line Gets a solid B+ without even cheating.

Based on a scandal that rocked the upmarket New York suburb of Roslyn over a decade ago, and adapted to the screen by a former student, Mike Makowsky, who witnessed the ordeal firsthand, the film marks something of a departure for Finley from his pitch-black comic debut Thoroughbreds , which drew more than one comparison to Heathers .

Here, the satire is softened to let reality sink in, with characters and plot points drawn from actual sources, resulting in a movie that plays like a slow-burn investigative thriller with comic touches and a major comeuppance in the last act. It’s perhaps less flamboyantly enjoyable than Finley’s first feature, but it also digs deeper into the souls of its characters, asking how a few people meant to ensure the pedagogy of hundreds of children could flunk out so badly.

The man behind all the monkey business was one Frank Tassone ( Hugh Jackman ), the beloved Roslyn School District superintendent who rules over his fiefdom like a lifelong educator, assuaging the fears of overzealous parents and encouraging his students with generous pep talks. He’s assisted by Pam Gluckin ( Allison Janney ), who minds the budget in the office next door, and flanked by school board president Bob Spicer ( Ray Romano ), who works as a local realtor and sees Frank’s success as his ticket to major bucks.

With his house-of-wax complexion, oversize suits and jet-black pompadour, Frank resembles a textbook New Yawk bureaucrat, even if he reads Dickens for fun and appears to be more refined. Jackman slips into such a role perfectly, staring beady-eyed at his interlocutors in the creepy way we all remember school officials used to look at us, and joining Janney, Queens boy Romano and the rest of the cast in a chorus of Long Island accents that could constitute its own Billy Joel fan club.

Initially the film’s plotting seems a bit subdued as we follow Frank on his mission to make Roslyn number one in the region — only in such a location-specific movie could the competing towns of Jericho and Syosset be referred to as “sons of bitches” — watching as he deals with the dull day-to-day duties of running his district. Things seem to be going fine, and Frank seems like a great guy, so why should anybody worry?

It’s at this point that the superintendent dishes out advice to an eager but somewhat inhibited student reporter, Rachel (the excellent Geraldine Viswanathan), telling her to take the puff piece she’s writing about a planned school renovation a little more seriously. Little does he know that Rachel will become the Woodward & Bernstein to his Richard Nixon, spinning her story into a full-blown inquiry that will open up a giant can of worms.

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Things slowly but surely unravel, and then completely fall apart, as we learn that the supposedly grieving widower Frank leads a double life both professionally, where he’s been generously serving himself from the district cash till for a good decade, and personally, when we see him start a fling with a former pupil, Kyle (Rafael Casal), now working as a bartender in Vegas. Meanwhile, right-hand gal Pam has been doing some unruly things with the official credit card, including making major improvements on a house in the Hamptons that seems way over her pay grade. This will get her fired, but it will also be the tip of the iceberg in a much bigger conspiracy.

If Finley eases us into the action during the first hour, teasing out lots of information with occasional jokes and digressions, his film snowballs into a tragic-comic tale of retribution in the second half as Frank’s glistening mask of Botox tumbles, taking down everyone else in the room. It’s at this point that emotions run high, especially during a rather moving montage and dance sequence — set to Moby’s “In This World,” which came out a few years before the actual scandal broke — where we see Frank experiencing one sad last hurrah before his number’s up.

While the filmmaking overall is less distinctive here than in Thoroughbreds , the characters seem more lifelike and the story itself is riddled with irony. Frank is not only undone by one of the very students he tried to motivate, but the movie ponders what his guilt means in a place where parents, many of them way wealthier than he is, are constantly pushing him for favors and then showing little gratitude for it: Didn’t the guy deserve a few million for helping so many of their kids get into Harvard?

Working once again with cinematographer Lyle Vincent, Finley captures this ethical shit show in cool colors and wide lenses that frame Jackman against some of L.I.’s finest schools, administrative offices and seven-figure homes. Production design by Meredith Lippincott and costumes by Alex Bovaird further add to the suburban authenticity, turning Bad Education into a paean to bad taste and even more questionable morals.

Production companies: Automatik, Sight Unseen, Slater Hall Cast: Hugh Jackman, Allison Janney, Geraldine Viswanathan, Ray Romano,  Alex Wolff Director: Cory Finley Screenwriter: Mike Makowsky Producers: Fred Berger, Eddie Vaisman, Julia Lebedev, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Oren Moverman, Mike Makowsky Executive producers: Leonid Lebedev, Caroline Jaczko Director of photography: Lyle Vincent Production designer: Meredith Lippincott Costume designer: Alex Bovaird Editors: Louise Ford Composer: Michael Abels Casting directors: Ellen Lewis, Kate Sprance Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Special Presentations) Sales: Endeavor Content (U.S. and international), CAA (U.S.)

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‘Bad Education’ Review: Hugh Jackman Is Brilliant in Diabolically Smart American Crime Story

David ehrlich.

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One of the more beautiful things about being an American is that it’s easy to justify your own success — at least to yourself. This is the land of opportunity, and people are taught from an early age that they get what they deserve, and they deserve what they get; if they weren’t, the injustice of it all might spoil the fun. You don’t necessarily have to earn your good fortune, you just have to believe you’re entitled to it. Needless to say, we are up to that challenge! And we’ll do whatever it takes to keep everything in its right place.

With that in mind, it’s strange that, as Americans, we still tell ourselves that corruption is usually a symptom of greed, as opposed (or in addition) to something that happens when people can’t afford to question their own worth. It’s a red, white, and blue twist on a universal kind of perceptual asymmetry: When you do something wrong, you think of an excuse — when someone else does something wrong, you think of a motive. The incredible magic trick of Cory Finley ’s “ Bad Education ,” a diabolically smart true-life crime drama that stars Hugh Jackman in his best performance since “The Prestige,” is how it manages to balance that asymmetry in the most savage and softhearted of ways, inviting sympathy for the devil even after it convinces you why he should go to hell.

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Heavy with poisoned humor and as panoramic as Finley’s “ Thoroughbreds ” was laser-focused, “Bad Education” is in no hurry to reveal the full picture; watching the first hour of the movie, it’s hard to imagine how this seemingly benign story of suburban malfeasance could possibly explode into the biggest embezzlement scandal in the history of the American school system. But the pieces are there from the moment the film starts, buried just under the sand. Screenwriter Mike Makowsky — whose script is a well-calculated masterclass in narrative economy — takes us back to the Long Island high school where he was a student in 2002.

From the looks of things, that seemed like a great time to go there. Facebook hasn’t been invented yet, college early-admission rates are soaring, and the cash-flush administration is about to pass a budget that allocates $7.5 million for a useless but presumably cool-looking “skybridge.” They’ve earned it. When “Bad Education” begins, Roslyn, New York, is the number-four school district in the entire country, and much of the credit for that belongs to the man, the myth, the legend — Dr. Frank Tassone (Jackman).

It’s rare to see people react to a superintendent like he’s — let’s go with a 2002-appropriate reference — one of the All-American Rejects, but it’s basically pandemonium whenever this guy appears before the PTA. And can you blame them? This is the guy who’s going to get their kids into Yale, even if he has to write all their recommendations himself (Frank never forgets a student). He’ll grant your son extra time on a test if you ask him nicely, he’ll join you for an extracurricular discussion about Dickens at an otherwise all-moms book club, and he won’t even embarrass you when you try to kiss him in the kitchen after everyone else has gone home. Besides, any man that handsome — he’s a dead ringer for P.T. Barnum! — is probably used to being flirted with by now, and there’s a tantalizing layer of sadness beneath that perfect head of slicked-back hair. Frank has been a widower for as long as anyone can remember, but he’s still never seen without his wedding ring.

This may not sound like a particularly engaging world, and “Bad Education” resists the temptation to sex it up for the sake of things, but Finley’s rigid compositions and Lyle Vincent’s gliding camera moves galvanize Frank’s administrative fiefdom with a sense of absolute purpose. The office is a well-oiled machine. Frank and assistant superintendent Pam Gluckin (an excellent Allison Janney , as if there’s any other kind) are a perfect twosome, even if she tantalizes him with the carbs she’s sworn off. Even the millionaire school board president (Ray Romano) is thrilled. God is in his heaven, and all is right with the world.

Except, it isn’t. And it’s not the leak in the high school’s hallway ceiling. Secret lives and brazen incongruities abound. In a film where even the most innocent scenes crackle with nervous energy and even frustrated erotic tension, a chance Las Vegas encounter between Frank and an old student (Rafael Casal) is electric with a where-else-could-this-be-going intensity. Your first inclination will probably be to pity Frank for feeling like he needs to live in the closet. Is this the mask that always seems like it’s about to slip off his face? Did his wife know when she was alive?

Meanwhile, back on the ranch, an intrepid student reporter (“Blockers” and “Hala” actress Geraldine Viswanathan , continuing to strike the right balance in every part she plays), is writing a story about the skybridge. That wouldn’t be a problem if Frank hadn’t encouraged her realize her full potential and not settle for a puff piece; it wouldn’t be a problem if Pam’s idiot son (hopelessly typecast “American Vandal” star Jimmy Tatro) hadn’t bought hardware supplies on the corporate card she’s been using to steal money from the school for years. Janney, who affects a hard Long Island accent that resists parody even during her funniest scenes, affects the part of a wounded lioness; survival is top priority, but it’s not that simple. Pam isn’t a sociopath, just someone with a warped perception of what’s best for everyone. And she’s about to be the victim of a generational reckoning that she never thought necessary.

She isn’t the only one. “Bad Education” always finds its way back to Frank, but Makowsky’s patient script has a knack for catching the superintendent unawares. Here is someone who doesn’t have the good sense to realize that he’s the main character of a movie; someone who thinks that he’s always just outside the eye of the storm. That misperception gives Jackman the space needed to be life-sized in a way that his “bigger” roles seldom have.

This is the most human performance he’s ever given, wrapped in translucent vanity and cut with finely sliced layers of doubt and denial. Whether locked in an oppressive close-up (the vibrating film stock reacting to even the most imperceptible muscle twitch) or trying to wrestle back control of Frank’s domain, Jackman always threads the needle between shock and showmanship. Through him, Frank seems both innocent and guilty at all times, and the actions he’s able to justify (good optics sometimes require bad choices!) steer him right into his blind spots. Early in the film, Frank tells a struggling lower schooler that he was also bad at math, and now look at him: He’s the guy who designs the math curriculum. The tragic thing about Frank — and the most brilliant thing about “Bad Education” — is that he honestly doesn’t understand why that might not add up.

“Bad Education” has some blind spots of its own, not least of which is a reluctance to dig into Frank’s stunted desire for upward mobility. He doesn’t want to be richer, but he still resents the fact that he makes a little bit more than a teacher’s salary while his boss is a multimillionaire; affluent local parents lean on Frank like every test their kids take is a matter of life and death, and they don’t even bother to say thank you once the college acceptance letters go out. “Bad Education” is appreciably embittered about teachers and on the school administrator’s behalf, but the film is doing so many different things — and juggling enough different tones to make Bong Joon-ho blush — that it has to squeeze the distance between its peaks and valleys. Michael Abels’ jangly, effective score sounds like a malfunctioning factory assembly line, and the disorder is such that Finley can’t spare the extra moment he needs to explore the relationship between the underpaid faculty and the wealthy community they serve.

However disappointing it might be that “Bad Education” is too delicate (and true) to really go wild and let Finley indulge in the flamboyance that made “Thoroughbreds” such a wicked treat, this is a young director who can see the whole chess game 20 moves in advance. Whatever compromises he makes are excused and then some by a remarkable third-act scene that defies every rule about conventional filmmaking — a wordless and shockingly moving dance number so human and desperate that it makes you take all your own judgments with a grain of salt. The “Nightshift” sequence from Claire Denis’ “35 Shots of Rum” may never be equalled, but Finley comes awfully close. Dr. Frank Tassone deserves what he gets, but — for at least one perfect moment — we’re all invited to wonder if he truly gets what he deserves.

“Bad Education” premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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Review: Hugh Jackman is at his best in the engrossing school-scam drama ‘Bad Education’

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Adamantium claws may have made Hugh Jackman famous, but his real secret weapon has always been that seductive mega-watt grin. It’s the smile of a seducer, a razzle-dazzler, a man born to play top-hatted magicians and carnival barkers in 19th-century spectaculars like “The Prestige” and “The Greatest Showman” — not that his characters and their dubious motives are in any way restricted by period.

In the appallingly funny HBO drama “Bad Education,” premiering Saturday, Jackman’s two-faced charm translates to upscale American suburbia with velvety smoothness. This devil doesn’t wear Prada; he sports a phony wedding ring and a closet full of perfectly pressed suits.

His name is Dr. Frank Tassone, and as the beloved superintendent of Long Island’s Roslyn Heights school district, he’s one of the shiniest pillars of a community defined by wealth and ambition. Early on, director Cory Finley throws in a quick montage of McMansions flying past Frank’s car window, as if to emphasize how closely tied they are to his legacy.

Under the slick leadership of Frank and his close deputy, Pamela Gluckin (a lethally good Allison Janney), the school district has become one of the highest ranked in the nation. Roslyn High graduates are flooding Ivy League schools; property values are soaring. A plan to construct a very expensive skywalk campus is under way.

If it all sounds too good to be true, it is. Something similar might be said about the highly image-conscious Frank, whose every decision — the strict low-carb diet he can’t help mentioning around the office, the determination in his stride as he marches across campus every morning — teems with the same aggressive, go-get-’em spirit. But the more Frank broadcasts his all-around awesomeness, the more you wonder what he’s hiding: Just try ignoring the framed photo of a beautiful bride, presumably his late wife, displayed a little too conspicuously in his office.

If strenuous image management were a crime, of course, a lot of us would be in the clink. But Mike Makowsky’s sharp, layered script treats Frank’s vain dissembling as a psychological clue, hinting at far more serious and costly misdeeds. You may already know something about the staggering real-life embezzlement scandal that inspired “Bad Education”; if you don’t, you may as well save the outraged Googling until after you’ve watched it. Suffice to say that, like most good scam movies, this one offers queasy pleasures that aren’t difficult to parse: It’s always fun to watch a grifter’s elaborately constructed house of cards come crashing down.

But there’s another kind of pleasure at work here, and in some ways it’s even more irresistible: the thrill of allowing seasoned liars to lure you into a privileged intimacy. “Bad Education” reminds us how synonymous great acting and great lying can be. Jackman and Janney, both giving their richest performances in some time, manage to pull the wool over your eyes with one hand even as they teasingly pull back the curtain with the other. As two hard-working leaders and inveterate schemers who know the system inside out, they lure you into a delectable gray zone somewhere between the conned and the complicit.

One of the picture’s slyest suggestions is that what makes these characters so cunning — their eye for human weakness, for the little details that (almost) anyone else would miss — is also what makes them very, very good at their jobs. Janney locates unexpected flashes of wit and tenderness beneath her character’s acerbic veneer; she makes clear that Pam’s real talent isn’t intimidating people but putting them at ease.

And Jackman, warmly affectionate one minute and coolly reptilian the next, makes Frank an even more complicated antihero: He’s a repressed, narcissistic phony and a brilliant educator, with an entirely genuine interest in sharpening young minds. When a student journalist, Rachel (the terrific Geraldine Viswanathan), interviews him about the skywalk project, he encourages her to take the assignment deeper: “It’s only a puff piece if you let it be a puff piece.”

He will regret his words. Rachel — a composite of several intrepid young muckrakers at the Hilltop Beacon, Roslyn High’s student newspaper — turns out to be one hell of a reporter, and it isn’t long before she uncovers some curious discrepancies in the district’s financial records. But if “Bad Education” is about the triumph of intelligence and tenacity (and a welcome reminder of the importance of a fully empowered independent press), it’s also about how bumbling stupidity and sheer rotten luck can unravel any conspiracy.

In his arresting debut feature, “Thoroughbreds,” Finley employed the perspective of two chillingly nihilistic teenage girls to lay bare the emptiness of upper-class American suburbia — hardly the freshest of targets, though the movie had visual poise and art-horror style to burn. Apart from a few formal flourishes — some pointedly symmetrical frames in Lyle Vincent’s photography, the Yorgos Lanthimos-style dissonances in Michael Abels’ score — “Bad Education” is a more straightforward movie and, ultimately, a more satisfying one. Finley is still eviscerating upper-middle-class mores, but this time he closes the distance between us and his characters; his distaste for them is held in check by his curiosity.

His conclusion seems to be that while Frank and Pam may be exceptionally dishonest, irresponsible people, their base condition is a universal one. The things they want out of life — beautiful homes, luxury vacations, successful careers, contented loved ones — are banal, even commonplace. They have a lot of friends, colleagues and family members relying on them, and the movie, without courting either your derision or your sympathy, suggests that the most desperate con artists are motivated by a need for love and belonging as well as basic greed. (The terrific supporting cast includes Ray Romano, Annaleigh Ashford, Rafael Casal, Jeremy Shamos and Stephen Spinella.)

Early on, well before all hell breaks loose, there’s a seemingly throwaway moment that encapsulates nearly everything this movie is about: the insatiability of the human appetite and the pleasure of breaking the rules. Frank and Pam are having lunch on the bleachers at Roslyn High, and Pam, seeing Frank miserable over his diet, waves a pastrami on rye in his face. “You bitch,” Frank marvels, and you can hear the affection and the guilt in his voice. Pam shoves the sandwich at him with a reassuring, conspiratorial smile: “I’m not gonna tell anyone,” she coos. Of course he takes a bite. It’s delicious.

‘Bad Education’

Not rated Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes Playing: Premieres 8 p.m. Saturday, HBO; also streaming and on demand

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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The Perfect-Life Facade Crumbles Fantastically in ‘Bad Education’

By Peter Travers

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Truth trumps fiction once again in Bad Education , Cory Finley’s whipsmart and wickedly fascinating take on a 2002 scandal about trusted educators who embezzled more than $11 million from the public-school system in Long Island, New York. A stellar Hugh Jackman , like you’ve never seen him (or Wolverine) before, tackles the complex role of Long Island school superintendent Frank Tassone, a hero in the posh district for making Roslyn High fourth in the country by getting top seniors into Ivy League colleges, which brings cheers from parents and students — he knows all their names — and ups the real-estate value of the neighborhood. Everybody wins.

Maybe that’s why no one notices right away that Tassone and his assistant superintendent for business, Pam Gluckin (the ever-amazing Allison Janney ), have their hands in the kitty. The exception is Rachel (a terrific Geraldine Viswanathan of Blockers ), a sophomore used to writing puff pieces for the school paper. It’s Tassone, of all people, who urges Rachel to act like a real journalist and ask hard questions. That’s when Rachel discovers discrepancies in the competing bids to build a $7.2 million skywalk for Roslyn High. Where do you get that kind of dough when the school ceilings are leaking? It’s just the tip of the iceberg for a bigger fraud being perpetrated on taxpayers.

Working from a devilishly clever and detailed script by Mike Makowsky ( I Think We’re Alone Now ), who was himself a student at Roslyn Middle School at the time, Finley dodges the banal trap of pointing fingers to investigate how venality happens, especially to good guys. And that’s what Tassone and Gluckin once were, back in their day as underpaid servants of the public trust who had to stand by and watch as the fat cats — such as the school board president (a dynamite Ray Romano) — raked in salaries that hit the million mark. If you’re Tassone, you start by charging a quick pizza to the school credit card before you move on to European vacation trips on the Concord, paying off your mortgage, and dressing in designer duds that edge you out of the classroom and into the corridors of power. Without ever condoning criminality, Finley astutely traces its roots. In his striking 2017 debut film Thoroughbreds , Finley showed how quickly two teen girls could go from fantasizing about murder to the real thing.

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All credit to Jackman for digging deep into the human side of Tassone, a closeted gay who keeps a photo of his late, alleged wife on his desk to discourage amorous mothers. A furtive lifestyle came early to Tassone who lives in Manhattan, away from prying eyes, with his age-appropriate life partner (Stephen Spinella) while supporting a former student ( Blindspotting ’s Rafael Casal) he hooked up with during a school convention in Vegas. The younger man, an exotic dancer-turned-bartender, flatters Tassone’s youthful sense of himself, which he maintains with facelifts and Botox treatments paid for by the same creative book-keeping that Gluckin uses to remodel her houses and keep family members on the payroll.

As it happens, it’s Gluckin who gets nailed first and Tassone who throws her under the bus, spinning the facts to clear himself and to buy her silence by making sure she keeps her pension even after she’s canned. His argument to the board is that a scandal of this magnitude would kill the school’s hard-won prestige and end its days as a cash cow for the entire community. The cover-up is a hustle on par with P.T. Barnum, the famed promoter who Jackman played in The Greatest Showman . But the board members go along with it, accomplices in their own defeat.

Ironically, it’s Rachel’s expose in the school paper that brings down Tassone’s house of cards. And Finley tracks the ruination without hype or mealy-mouthed moralizing. Jackman could have parodied Tassone as a pathetic sadsack, Instead he lets us see a man who truly dedicated himself to his school and the students he once taught literature from Shakespeare to Salinger. Tassone’s tragic flaw is hubris, the feeling that he could talk his way out of anything.

Not this time. You can Google what happened to Tassone after his conviction. No spoilers needed since Jackman lets you see the loss and devastation in his every look and gesture. It’s a career-best performance from a movie star with a genuine actor’s depth and range. Bad Education is going directly to HBO ; thankfully, Academy gurus have just changed their rules in regards to VOD/straight-to-streaming films originally intended for theatrical release being eligible to compete*. Jackman could get nominated for an Oscar here — but whether he does or not, the audience is still rewarded with a steadily riveting provocation that jabs at the culture of money that makes us all complicit.

*This review was been modified to reflect the Academy’s change in rules re: eligibility.

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Review: bad education.

An embarrassment of riches, the film addresses the almost vampiric relationship between audiences and movies.

Now after more than a dozen films to his credit—from the punk-era gonzo comedy Pepi, Luci, Bom to the comatose rape dramedy Talk to Her —Pedro Almodóvar releases something of a greatest hits package: the spectacularly meta Bad Education , the story of two friends and their complicated love for one another and the cinema. For the first time in his career, Almodóvar has made a film that will appeal equally to fans of his anarchic screwballs ( High Heels and Kika ) and his more popular mainstream dramas ( All About My Mother and Talk to Her ). A giddy cinematic pastiche of film noir and high camp, Bad Education is about the shape-shifting artifice of dreams and the experience of going to the movies. If it isn’t the best film of Almodóvar’s career, it’s certainly his best work since 1987’s Law of Desire .

Ignacio Rodríguez (Gael García Bernal) walks into the office of film director Enrique Goded (Fele Martínez), who’s flipping through newspapers looking for a gimmick for his latest screenplay. Fascinated by the story of a dead man riding a motorcycle and, much later, the hysterical account of a woman eaten alive by alligators, Enrique’s writer’s block suggests a form of memory deprivation. In love with Enrique when they were students at a Catholic school in the ’60s, Ignacio reconnects the director with his past and suggests that he turn their experiences of abuse at the school into a film. But along with the film’s aspect ratio, realities and identities frequently shift, and it becomes increasingly difficult to tell truth from fiction and the ruthless desire to love with the even more insatiable desire to create.

More so than Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers , Almodóvar’s heartbreaking Pieta acknowledges cinema as an extension of the soul. Because it seems to touch on every theme and perversion seen throughout the director’s illustrious 20-plus-year career, Bad Education truly evokes the sensation of a Jackson Pollock “action” painting: Almodóvar’s canvas—like that of another hot-blooded drama queen, Federico García Lorca—is one of uncensored emotion and pure energy. There isn’t a single person in the film (or film-within-a-film) whose life isn’t fractured, states of unrest the director fabulously emphasizes by frequently situating actors before mosaic art or walls covered in paper decorated with jagged lines shooting in all sorts of directions.

Just as everyone remembers the silent film sequence from Talk to Her , no one will forget the “Moon River” scene from Bad Education . During a school retreat, a young Ignacio (Ignacio Pérez) is forced by Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho) to sing the Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer classic while the boy’s buddies swim in a nearby spring. Unlike Talk to Her , Bad Education isn’t gimmicky, but it is schematic; this is because Almodóvar scripts a complex interpretation of the world by conflating movie dreams and sexual awakening. This subversive sequence is at once funny and tender: Almodóvar tastefully and cleverly obscures Manolo’s abuse of Ignacio at just the right moment (“Waiting ‘round the bend,” the boy sings), anticipating the masochistic role-reversal of their future relationship in the emotional back-and-forth of the song’s lyrics, much in the same way the scenes of the swimming children prefigures the incredibly erotic pool sequence between the two leads later in life.

Like Talk to Her , Bad Education similarly touches on themes of unconscious desire, except its characters are always, well, conscious. But being conscious doesn’t always mean being lucid, something embodied by Ignacio’s sad relationship to Enrique. Like Eusebio Poncela’s bond to Antonio Banderas in Law of Desire (and Naomi Watts’s obsession with Laura Harring in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive ), this power struggle is one part ego trip, one part wish fulfillment—a dangerous combination Almodóvar likens to our quasi-narcissistic relationship to movies. We respond most to films that reflect our deepest aesthetic and emotional passions and notions of the world. So when Enrique discovers—semi-spoiler alert—that Ignacio isn’t who he says he is, he continues the relationship because it’s easier on his conscience to accept that Ignacio turned into someone who looks like Gael García Bernal and not the ostensibly fictional junkie transexual from The Visit . And if truth is stranger than fiction in Bad Education , Enrique hopes to make it sell.

An embarrassment of riches, Bad Education addresses the almost vampiric relationship between audiences and movies—a give-and-take that helps Ignacio and Enrique keep their memories alive. As children they jerk each other off inside a movie theater that plays the 1969 melodrama Esa Mujer starring Sara Montiel as a naughty nun. Before they reach orgasm, Montiel’s face turns toward the camera and the children don’t miss a beat. Almodóvar understands the rapture of going to the movies, and if he had his way the director would probably never stop making them. Throughout Bad Education , memories and images repeat, none more memorable than a young Enrique (Raúl García Forneiro) leaving two lovers behind. In both cases, a gate impacts their separation anxiety, and the ecstasy and pain of the moment is not unlike leaving a movie you never want to end.

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Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine . A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice , The Los Angeles Times , and other publications.

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• Entertainment
• HBO’s Gripping <i>Bad Education</i> Tells the Story of a Truly Epic Scam

HBO’s Gripping Bad Education Tells the Story of a Truly Epic Scam

N o one likes getting older, least of all actors. But there are reasons actors often do their best work in their 40s, 50s and beyond: if they can free themselves from the desire to play likable characters, they can move into the far richer territory of playing polychrome ones. In Cory Finley’s white-collar-crime dark comedy Bad Education, on HBO beginning April 25, Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney use their chief currency—their inherent likability—to lead us down a thorny, jagged path. As modern humans, we take so much pride in knowing everything that we forget how pleasurable it is to be duped. It’s fun to put ourselves in the hands of expert bamboozlers, and in Bad Education, Janney and Jackman are exactly that.

Jackman stars as Frank Tassone, the much loved and highly efficient superintendent of an affluent Long Island school district, Roslyn, in the early aughts. Under Frank’s guidance, the district’s academic record has soared, raising property values and thrilling parents, who are overjoyed to see their little Justins and Jessicas being funneled into Ivy League schools. Frank is the sort of guy who remembers kids’ names and what they’re interested in—his people skills are half slick, half genuine. His second-in-command, Janney’s Pam Gluckin, is more hard-nosed—her deadpan glare is practically a death ray. Together, these two are a great success story, and their community adores them for its own selfish reasons.

Then a bright student journalist, Rachel (Geraldine Viswanathan, in a sly, quietly vital performance), pops into Frank’s office for a story she’s working on, about a skywalk the school is planning to build. She seems happy with the quick quote she gets from him, and when he presses her—Doesn’t she want to ask any follow-up questions?—she assures him it’s just a puff piece. “It’s only a puff piece if you let it be a puff piece,” he tells her, thus handing her the keys to a cabinet full of not-so-carefully hidden secrets.

Bad Education, based on real-life events, is a story about old-fashioned shoe-leather—or, in this case, sneaker-sole—journalism. There’s something heartening about the way Rachel is driven to pursue what starts out as a nonstory, even as plenty of those around her (including the paper’s editor, played by Alex Wolff) claim she’s wasting her time. This is how journalism, a notoriously low-paying profession that’s increasingly endangered, will survive.

But Bad Education is also a story about hubris, vanity and the way regular people just can’t help desiring status and fancy things—and about the reality that people are often more complicated than we want to believe. These are roles that Jackman and Janney can dig into, and they turn up all sorts of dark, glittering surprises. Janney has the face of the best friend you’d trust with your life, and she uses that to wily effect here: Pam gets stuff done by barking commands even as she maintains a sense of humor—but you also see ripples of repressed anger shimmering beneath her gal-Friday surface. And Jackman is terrific here, a preening peacock in an array of meticulously pressed suits. Frank is the kind of guy who’s spent so long polishing his public mask that he’s lost sight of the man inside—yet he still betrays the occasional glimmer of tenderness or generosity. Bad Education is a story of small-town villains who just can’t help themselves, and it’s fun to see how their own carelessness trips them up. These are people we can’t trust, played by actors we trust implicitly. Why not be flimflammed by the best?

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Bad Education’ on HBO, a Funny White-Collar-Crook Bio Featuring Hugh Jackman’s Best Performance Yet

Where to stream:.

• Bad Education (2019)

Writer Mike Makowsky was a firsthand witness of sorts to the real-life events inspiring Bad Education , which debuted at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival and now sees wide launch via HBO. He was a six-year-old student in Roslyn Public Schools when he first met Frank Tassone, and witnessed firsthand how revered and influential the superintendent was — until he was busted in 2004 for embezzling millions from the district, engineering “the largest school theft in American history.” With Makwosky’s close ties to the saga, and Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney cast as leads, will the movie be more than just another based-on-a-true-story story?

BAD EDUCATION : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Roslyn High School is fourth in the country in college-acceptance rates. Fourth! And it’s all due to Frank Tassone. He meticulously grooms himself in the morning, spritzing cologne on his neck and plucking stray nose hairs. He walks into his office, decorated with silver balloons shaped like 4s, a “snow day magic wand” and issues of Life Extension magazine. He says absolutely perfect things to a helicopter parent hyperventilating about her son’s troubles in school. He inspires a young journalist from the school paper to write more than just a “puff piece” about the school’s multimillion-dollar skywalk project. He’s thanked with a basket of candy from local real estate developers, who love him for making the district great and therefore inspiring skyrocketing property values.

At lunchtime, Frank sits in the football-stadium bleachers with assistant super/business manager Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney). He laments the health-food smoothie he’s consuming. “I would kill somebody for a carb right now,” he says, and she feeds him a big honking bite of her pastrami-on-rye. He leads the local ladies’ book club, and attendees didn’t even read the selection. They’re in awe of him, in his crisp light-blue oxford with white collar and cuffs adorned with fancy cufflinks. He offers to help with the dishes, and the hostess leans in, but he leans away. The memory of his late wife is too fresh, he says.

He goes to Vegas for a conference, and dutifully attends snoozy lectures while his colleagues gamble. Afterward, he sits down for a drink and recognizes the bartender: Kyle Contreras (Rafael Casal), a former student from 15 years ago when he taught English. Frank remembers his name, because he remembers everybody’s name, because he and Gluckin stay at work late so she can quiz him on everybody’s name. He and Kyle have dinner, and then go back to Frank’s hotel room and make out and then the movie cuts away. Hey now.

So about that young journalist, Rachel (Geraldine Viswanathan). She’s no longer OK with writing a crappy puff piece, so she confidently plops down in Gluckin’s office and asks about project budgets and contractor bids. Gluckin is only slightly icy when she tosses Rachel the key to the firetrap basement records room, although if Rachel saw Gluckin’s seaside near-manse and Corvette convertible, she might have even more questions about how a public school administrator’s humble salary can indulge such extravagant tastes. I mean, Gluckin’s husband is a car salesman. Gluckin’s niece (Annaleigh Ashford) is the office secretary who helps Rachel make a zillion photocopies of school records with some big numbers on them, and it seems like only a matter of time before some of the people in charge around there are something that rhymes with “glucked.”

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Remember how Philip Seymour Hoffman totally owned Owning Mahowny , playing a buttoned-up gambling addict who bilked big stacks of cash from the bank he worked for? You don’t? (Does anybody who’s not a movie critic remember?) Well, watch the damn thing, and you’ll see a character who’s pretty much the opposite of Frank Tarrone in a similar stressful situation.

Performance Worth Watching: This is easily one of Jackman’s best performances — possibly THE best, especially in the first act, when he’s sparklingly charming. And the second act, when he tries to keep all the squirming puppies in the box And in the third act, when he shows how a life of subterfuge — sad on one hand, infuriating on the other — can quickly crumble, and he makes a hard left into villainy.

Memorable Dialogue: “Skywalk is big. Gets us to first!”, Frank chirps.

Sex and Skin: None.

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Our Take: Director Cory Finley ( Thoroughbreds ) and Makowsky initially strike the perfect, slyly satirical gettin’-away-with-it tone, then, as soon as Gluckin goes up in flames and locks angry eyes with Frank for throwing her under the bus, seamlessly segue to I-feel-like-I’m-sitting-on-an-atomic-bomb-waiting-for-it-to-go-off suspenseful drama. They nurture uniformly excellent performances, from Jackman’s multifaceted charisma to Janney’s trademark irascibility to Ray Romano’s fluster as the school-board president to Viswanathan’s earnestness, which anchors the story.

The filmmakers cleverly embed character bits in the movie’s little visual details. The way Frank is yanked off a beanbag chair while chatting with sixth-graders so he can be informed of Gluckin’s malfeasance, for example. Or, in a touch of shrewd symbolism, how he carefully applies concealer to his eye wrinkles. Or how Rachel spreads out the school’s sketchy budget paperwork on the floor of her bedroom with a pile of period-specific Beanie Babies watching. This is a terrific movie, smart, character-driven, frequently funny and highly entertaining.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Bad Education bullseyes the sweet spot between realism and elevated drama, making it several cuts above the usual based-on-a-true-story fodder.

Should you stream or skip #BadEducation on @HBO ? #SIOSI #BadEducationHBO — Decider (@decider) April 26, 2020

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba .

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Bad Education

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A layered, wonderfully-acted, and passionate drama.

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Pedro Almodóvar

Fele Martínez

Enrique Goded

Gael García Bernal

Daniel Giménez Cacho

Padre Manolo

Lluís Homar

Sr. Manuel Berenguer

Javier Cámara

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Bad education, common sense media reviewers.

Tragic story of church's betrayal; adults only.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

This movie is filled with bad people. Main charact

Murderous neck breaking.

Faux nudity through the design of a drag queen&#39

Sexually vulgar language.

Characters drink until incapacitated and snort and

Parents need to know that this is a dark and tawdry film. Main characters are junkies, pedophiles, and murderers. The film deals with molestation within the Catholic Church, and all in all presents the church in a negative light. Parents should also be note that the film centers around the life of a molested boy…

Positive Messages

This movie is filled with bad people. Main characters abuse drugs and each other. Characters with whom we are supposed to identify lie, murder, and blackmail. As few really end up being happy, the film does not seem to highly promote this type of behavior. No one really benefits from bad behavior.

Violence & Scariness

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Faux nudity through the design of a drag queen's beaded dress, partial male nudity, relatively graphic gay sex, suggestions of child molestation.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters drink until incapacitated and snort and shoot illegal drugs (but suffer the consequences). A main character overdoses on heroin.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this is a dark and tawdry film. Main characters are junkies, pedophiles, and murderers. The film deals with molestation within the Catholic Church, and all in all presents the church in a negative light. Parents should also be note that the film centers around the life of a molested boy turned junkie transsexual. It includes scenes of graphic gay sex and vulgar language. It's not appropriate for anyone under 17. (Note: This film is in Spanish with English subtitles.) To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 1 parent review

What's the Story?

Interweaving a priest's betrayal and a brother's secret with a tragic story of lost youth, BAD EDUCATION presents a complex story within a story (within a story). Spanish filmmaker Enrico Goded (Fele Martínez) finds himself stumped while searching for his next film subject. When a man calling himself Ignacio Ramirez (Gael García Bernal)--Goded's first love and the boyhood victim of a lascivious priest -- walks back into his life, fact, fiction, greed, lust, and art collide. Goded begrudgingly agrees to produce, direct, and adapt Ignacio's short story chronicling the boys' early love and the author's abuse at the hands of Father Manolo (Daniel Giménez Cacho). In the meantime, he must contend with a stream of secrets held by the man calling himself "Ignacio." Ultimately, Bad Education is a tale of love, lust, abuse, deceit, and the ambiguous role of art -- confessional, weapon, or opportunity.

Is It Any Good?

This excellent but weighty quasi-autobiographical film follows on the heels of Pedro Almodóvar's 1999 Academy Award winning film All About My Mother ( Todo sobre mi madre ). The director spent ten years working on Bad Education . While loosely based on his youth in a Catholic boarding school, Almodóvar says he spent years reworking the story to distance it from his own life. (The filmmaker acknowledges a childhood fear of priests, but says he suffered no sexual abuse.) All in all, he created a gorgeous film that beautifully weaves in and out of past and present and fact and fiction, often creating momentary vagaries of time and space.

Because this film deals with adult themes that are inappropriate for kids, parents are better off sharing this with mature older teens only.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about issues such as the pressures of small town living, the torture of keeping secrets, honesty, and tolerance. The bad behavior of the film's characters can produce much conversation. The film can also spark conversations about art. How can art -- writing or filmmaking -- function therapeutically? Also, how would this story have been different if set in the United States?

Movie Details

• In theaters : November 19, 2004
• On DVD or streaming : April 12, 2005
• Cast : Fele Martinez , Gael Garcia Bernal , Javier Camara
• Director : Pedro Almodovar
• Inclusion Information : Gay directors, Latino actors
• Studio : Sony Pictures
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 105 minutes
• MPAA rating : NC-17
• MPAA explanation : a scene of explicit sexual content.
• Last updated : January 29, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Bad Education Film Review: Hugh Jackman’s Gay in Fact-Based Dramedy

Enjoying its world premiere at the  2019 Toronto International Film Festival , Bad Education is a fact-based dramedy about an infamous school-larceny scandal that rocked Long Island.

Bad Education director Cory Finley recruited an all-star cast featuring performances by Hugh Jackman, Allison Janney, Ray Romano and Geraldine Viswanathan. The crowd-pleasing film was snatched up by HBO for $20 million at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, among the most expensive festival buys ever.

Bad Education Film Review

Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman) and Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney) reign over a popular Long Island school district on the verge of reaching the nation’s top spot. The school’s successes spur record setting college admissions and soaring local property values.

Frank, always immaculately groomed and tailored, is a master of positive messaging, whether before an audience of community leaders or in an office with a concerned student or parent. It seems Frank can do no wrong, until a student reporter (Geraldine Viswanathan) decides to dig deep into Roslyn School District’s expense reports and begins to uncover an embezzlement scheme of epic proportions.

Inspired by a true story, Cory Finley’s Bad Education film is a brilliantly casted and a darkly hilarious chronicle of a $11.2 million dollar embezzlement scheme, purportedly the largest financial crime in the history of the US school system.

The film offers a master class in duplicity, with the charismatic school superintendent taking extreme measures to not only shield himself and his colleagues from the law, but also to keep his carefully constructed façade from cracking.

Bad Education’s storyline sheds a light on a series of timely and topical themes. In a time when America is constantly having a conversation around “fake news,” the hero of this story is a student reporter keen to unveil the truth. Offering another example to why journalism is such an important part of a healthy and just society. Bad Education will also offer plenty of conversation around America’s recent College admission scandal. Many of the members of the community who try to cover up the scandal do so to ensure the school’s rankings don’t drop. Parents are worried if the truth is unveiled their students won’t get into their preferred private school, while local real estate agent’s fear market will tank.

Bad Education Gay Themes

One of Bad Education’s most endearing narratives relates to Frank Tassone’s secret sexuality. The audience slowly discovers the star superintendent is gay behind closed doors. While it appears his colleague Pam Gluckin’s is in-the-know on his sexual interests, the town assumes he’s a single straight man ripe for the plucking.

Hugh Jackman brilliantly showcases with subtle nuance the anxiety that builds as a hero loses his crown. While any other crook would be worried about the financial crimes committed, an additional layer of angst is present as the protagonist grapples with the stress of keeping his love life private.

In Bad Education, Tassone’s sexuality is used as a shifting plot point, exposing how easy it is to lie about many facets of ones life. Jackman embodies the aging gay man archetype with ease. We see his iteration of Tassone, obsessed with the perfection of his appearance, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of school funds on dry cleaning bills, designer suits, haircuts and even plastic surgery.

Director Corey Finley does an excellent job at weaving Makowsky’s story of deceit between the protagonists financial crimes and his more personal shame over his sexuality.

We first realize Tassone is gay when he attends an educators conference in Las Vegas . At the hotel bar he encounters a young man, who years back was one of his star students. They return to his hotel room and embark on an evening of unexpected passion. Tassone continues his long distance relationship with his lover in Vegas, what seems like an attempt to cling to his own sense of youth.

When the film’s fearless student reporter take the train to Manhattan to check out one of the suspicious suppliers on her hit list, she arrives at a luxurious condo, greeted by an older gay man. Moments later Tassone arrives to the apartment after work and discovers his student snooping around. He’s now faced with shifting fears, being exposed for fraud as well as his sexual orientation.

Bad Education’s gay narrative digs deeper towards its conclusion. Once Tassone realizes the seriousness of his situation, he impulsively flies back to Vegas to see his young lover. The duo dance under a disco ball at a local gay bar, passionately kissing in public for the first time. Hugh Jackman’s string of memorable man-on-man smooches in Bad Education make it one of the best gay films at TIFF 2019 .

After the couple return home, police sirens sound off in the distance and moments later our soon-to-be imprisoned protagonist is taken away in a cop car. Later, when police question the mysterious man in the luxurious Manhattan apartment the audience discovers he’s been in a common law relationship with Tassone for years. The police reveal that his seemingly perfect partner was found in Vegas after purchasing a home for a much younger man.

The audience realizes with crystal clarity that Tassone’s immoral actions didn’t just live within his work, but infested his life, deeply wounding his friends and family.

Making the Bad Education Film

Screenwriter Mike Makowsky, who was a student in the Roslyn School District when the scandal became public in the mid-’00s, jumped out at director Corey Finley. The filmmaker comments, “In a world flooded with predictable genre pieces, it was marvellously undefinable, with a precise and appealingly tricky comic tone.”

Finley adds, “I also related to it very deeply, on many levels: I have a family full of educators working in both public and private schools, and I worked for years myself as an SAT tutor, so the complexities of American education (and especially the ways it interacts with economics and class) are fascinating and personal to me. Mike’s script was a singular, surprising way into those issues. I’m drawn to morally complex leads, and Frank’s slow collapse under the weight of his own deceptions felt vividly real to me.”

For Bad Education’s screenwriter Mike Makowsky, crafting the true-to-life narrative was deeply personal. “I grew up in Roslyn, New York a suburb of Long Island, in the early 2000s and attended their public-school district for the duration of my primary education.”

Makowsky adds, “Our district superintendent was a man named Frank Tassone, a supremely personable and passionate educator who was incredibly popular among the parents and taxpayers in our town. In his twelve years at Roslyn, he’d revolutionized our education system to the extent that the Wall Street Journal listed us as one of the top public-school districts in America . More students were getting into Ivy League schools, doing better on their SATs. Property values in the town went up considerably. So if Tassone requested a bigger school budget, parents were happy to oblige.”

Makowsky was in awe at how the scandal broke, “I was probably too young at the time to fully understand the implications of what had happened. But in high school, while on staff at our newspaper, The Hilltop Beacon, I realized that the student reporters at the time actually broke the story – the New York Times only ever reported on it after one of their writers saw the copy of the Beacon his son had brought home from school. Which seemed craziest of all.”

In 2016, Makowsky went back to Roslyn to do his own research – speaking with old teachers, parents and taxpayers who experienced the scandal and its ramifications on a deeper first-hand level. He was even able to talk with the student reporter who broke the story for the Beacon.

Bad Education’s Cast of Characters

Every new twist in the Bad Education film’s plot is conveyed by Jackman and Janney, the perfect pair to carry off their characters’ journey of camaraderie, conspiracy, and betrayal. Finley comments, “I knew that to tell the story the way I wanted to, the number-one most critical aspect of Frank was a bone-deep, sincere sense of goodness. I’ve found this to be one of Hugh’s most wonderful qualities: he’s a throwback movie star, and his charm makes the character’s arc as surprising and ultimately devastating as it is. And Alison is an absolute powerhouse, able to flip from comedy to tragedy on a dime.”

The Bad Education filmmaker adds, “The two of them had never worked together, but they got along instantly, and anyone would have thought they were old friends. They’re both stellar improvisers, and I learned quickly that if I didn’t call “cut” at the end of the scene, they could keep going indefinitely. A throwaway moment in an early scene where Pam gives Frank a bite of her sandwich became a fully-improvised comic set piece this way, with the sandwich becoming a delightfully bizarre little microcosm of their characters’ longstanding relationship.”

Geraldine Viswanathan’s character as a student reporter is central to the Bad Education story. She plays a composite character, inspired by several journalists at Roslyn’s Hilltop Beacon that played a role in bringing the scandal to light. Filmmaker Cory Finley explains, “Viswanathan’s character, I think, is Mike’s smartest structural move as a writer. She’s a foil to Frank, a dogged investigator with a deep backstory of her own. In some way’s she’s also the movie’s toughest role to nail, and in lesser hands could have come off opaque. But Geraldine brings her an incredible humanity and specificity.”

Bad Education

Hugh Jackman, Allison Janney, and Ray Romano star in this fact-based dramedy directed by Cory Finley about an infamous school-larceny scandal that rocked Long Island.

Date Created: September 11, 2019

Runtime: 108 min

• Fred Berger ,
• Julia Lebedev ,
• Brian Kavanaugh-Jones ,
• Oren Moverman ,
• Mike Makowsky ,
• Eddie Vaisman ,
• Cory Finley
• Mike Makowsky
• Hugh Jackman ,
• Geraldine Viswanathan ,
• Ray Romano ,
• Allison Janney ,

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Film Review #78: BAD EDUCATION

*This film review may contain plot spoilers  , reader discretion is advised.*

Taiwan’s film industry has always been a passionate field of study for me, but admittedly I have lesser knowledge in more contemporary releases than I would like. That is something I have been taking an active effort in remedying, and from my preconceptions of the title, Kai Ko’s Bad Education aimed to be an at least interesting watch. Films that take a critical look at the schooling system and the students in them, such as 2020’s Babi, can often use that framework to tap into a wider social commentary, which, despite potential heavy-handedness, could be enlightening or revealing.

Bad Education begins as such, announcing headfirst its thematic ethos in the form of a question, before we go into the story proper. Three boys; Wang Hung-Chuan, Han, and Chang Po-Wei, have just graduated high school and are celebrating above a rooftop at night. They drink and talk smack with each other about their future prospects, before deciding to make sure to “solidify” their friendship by telling each other a secret they have never told anyone else. What goes on from there can only be described as an odyssey, as they are left to deal with the consequences of their actions. 

Film still from Bad Education

What will strike audiences right off the bat is the atmosphere that Bad Education seeks to establish. Thoroughly basking in its almost-completely nighttime setting, from sharp lighting to the stark shadows of the night, the movie pushes a slick yet seedy and very much intentionally offsetting tone; stylistic-fluorescent-on-crass. This is accentuated by the various characters that the trio come across their escapade, a continuous string of people of dubious morality that ties back to the film’s central question. It reminded me of, perhaps tangentially, of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, a similar tale of a long journey across one night where the character is introduced to the underbelly of society.

Indeed, that seems to be the main point of the film. The introduction of the three students initially too paints them akin to such a fate, before further revelations are revealed. Kent Tsai, Edison Hong and Berant Zhu, playing the trio, scream and suffer and experience retribution of their own undoing, even when some are more innocent than others. They give it their all in their performances, which is able to push through the aforementioned heavy-handedness that this movie admittedly does suffer from, though I shall give it credit for subverting my expectations on that front. They hit on some visceral nerves, and by the end, it’s hard not to at least sympathise with one of them.

Bad Education is not an easy watch by any means, which is by design. What it insinuates and shows flies right through any sense of “bad taste” and into the morally abhorrent, but it defiantly pushes those buttons to dig into deeper social issues that are frankly less concerned with education, as the title might suggest, and more on an individual’s sense of morality. If you’re looking to feel uncomfortable, to go through a journey of fear, pain, and ultimately absolution, then this is worth seeking out. At a lean 75 minutes, there are longer films that give far less to think about.

——————————————————————————-

About the Author:   Wei Li Heng is an avid lover of uncovering and writing about obscure and underseen Asian cinema. He hopes to discover local cinematic gems and share them to a wider audience.

This review was written for SFS Special Presentation: BAD EDUCATION on 26 August and 3 September 2023.

Tickets are available here: https://theprojector.sg/films-and-events/bad-education/

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Longlegs, billed as 2024’s scariest horror movie, is actually pretty hilarious

There’s a big difference between scary and creepy

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If you’ve heard anything at all about Longlegs , the new horror movie starring Nicolas Cage, you’ve probably seen someone claiming it’s one of the scariest movies ever made . From the movie’s excellent marketing to the avalanche of disturbed reactions from early screenings , all of the buzz ahead of this movie is that it’s utterly terrifying. It isn’t, though. Most horror fans aren’t likely to find it scary at all — which doesn’t stop it from being a great, supremely creepy movie. Longlegs situates itself in the long line of classic horror-thrillers like The Shining and The Silence of the Lambs — movies that are better at making people squirm than making them jump. Director Osgood Perkins ( The Blackcoat’s Daughter ) is clearly more interested in hearing audiences’ nervous laughs than just their screams.

On its face, the movie is a fairly straightforward serial-killer hunt with a few supernatural twists. Horror veteran Maika Monroe ( It Follows ) plays Lee Harker, a young FBI agent who seems unusually talented and intuitive. As a result, she gets assigned to investigate one of the FBI’s longest-standing mysteries: a series of brutal killings in which a father murdered his family in their own home, then killed himself as well. The only things linking these killings is that a daughter in the family has a birthday on the 14th of the month and that at each of the crime scenes is an encoded, seemingly Satanist note from someone who calls himself Longlegs. But there’s no evidence that anyone outside the family was ever at any of the homes when the crimes occurred.

Perkins’ script plays out all this setup with a deft hand, pulling in visual and narrative references from movies like Zodiac , Seven , and The Silence of the Lambs to help orient the audience as quickly as possible. Within the first 20 minutes or so, we already know all the details about the case and everyone involved, which frees Perkins to start infusing the movie with his unique brand of off-kilter creepiness.

Take Lee Harker, a character visually patterned after The Silence of the Lambs’ Clarice Starling, but lacking her put-upon steeliness. Monroe plays Lee with an off-putting vacantness. She’s unquestionably brilliant, but her interpersonal demeanor is uncomfortably terse, as if talking to people or even looking at them is an unpleasant chore for her, and a distraction from finding her next clue. This dynamic makes every scene she’s in disquietingly awkward, cleverly making viewers uneasy even when there aren’t brutal crimes on screen, and adding to the movie’s ever-building sense of tension.

Perkins isn’t afraid to leverage Monroe’s fantastically strange performance for comedy, either. In one early scene, Lee meets the daughter of her FBI boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood). Lee sits on the girl’s bed with her whole body locked in tension, examining the room like a crime scene, desperate for something to talk about. Finally, after drawing the awkwardness out, she picks up a ballet trophy that’s missing its head. When Carter’s daughter says she doesn’t know where the head is, Lee comments, straight-faced, that locating a missing head would be her job, not the girl’s. It’s a pitch-perfect joke about her own strangeness, and Lee is the only one who isn’t in on it.

It’s a genuinely funny scene, but in a way that feels refreshingly antagonistic. It’s like Perkins is daring us to laugh our way through the characters’ awkward discomfort. Longlegs is full of these inappropriate little punchlines — and as the movie’s violence increases, and its tone becomes darker, they get even more effective. Each one is a little challenge to see just how disturbing a scene can be while still forcing an uneasy chuckle out of the audience.

Balancing a mood like this, equal parts terrifying and funny, feels nearly impossible, particularly when falling too far to either side would topple the movie entirely. But Perkins never slips — he keeps the tension and discomfort perfectly measured throughout. That tone is exactly what makes Longlegs creepy, rather than scary.

Scary, in this case, is something physical a movie does to you: an increased heart rate, a nervous sweat, muscles tensing in anticipation of an inevitable jump. Scary comes in waves. It ebbs and flows, coils and releases in a steady rhythm. Creepiness, on the other hand, is dread that constantly builds on itself. While the fear from a scary movie comes from the anticipation of the tension releasing, creepy movies find fear in the idea that that tension might never release at all.

Perkins has frequently brought up David Lynch as a source of inspiration, and movies like Mulholland Drive or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me are prime examples of the heights of this kind of creepiness on film. In Longlegs ’ case, every inch of the movie feels crafted to heighten this oppressively discomforting mood and the uneasy feeling that you might never escape its particular brand of off-kilter, Satanic strangeness. In no place is that more straightforwardly clear than in Nicolas Cage’s performance as Longlegs himself.

Far from the perfected psychopath that generally defines the serial-killer mold, Cage’s performance is built on discomforting goofiness. He screams in his car to hard rock music, speaks with a clownish voice that feels more fit for a character on a children’s TV show from hell, and generally floats around scenes with a perverse giddiness that suggests he’s confident that he has Satan’s full backing. It’s a thoroughly unnerving performance, but also a hilarious one. Perkins allows Cage to play up Longlegs’ silliness for laughs, only to juxtapose it with his grisly murders immediately afterward. The humor and horror enhance rather than undercut each other, making each chuckle feel like you’re slipping deeper into Longlegs’ own twisted, gross reality.

All that said, Cage’s performance is unmistakably big, and full of bold choices. It’s likely to be a litmus test for whether you’re on the movie’s wavelength. Longlegs ’ lack of direct scares combined with Cage’s performance and the script’s sense of humor is likely to put some viewers off the movie right away, particularly when combined with the marketing’s overinflation of the movie’s terror.

Longlegs isn’t the generationally terrifying movie it’s been sold as. It’s funny, strange, and creepy in exactly the right measures, but that won’t stop some viewers from being disappointed over having their expectations set incorrectly. With Longlegs , Perkins doesn’t want viewers to flinch in the theater; he wants to make them flinch later, anytime they hear a noise in the dark. Or to spend a few days wondering what made them laugh at something so grotesque, even though the movie invited those laughs in the first place. When we’re far enough away from Longlegs ’ marketing push to forget it entirely, we’ll still feel lucky to have the film asking those questions on its own terms.

Longlegs debuts in theaters on July 12.

Hell yeah, the sequel to Netflix’s best horror-thriller has a trailer and release date

What the hell is nintendo teasing with this creepy smiling man video, did ti west cut an entire gay subplot from maxxxine, loading comments....

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Fly me to the moon ending explained.

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Where to watch fly me to the moon: showtimes & streaming status, fly me to the moon review: i want more movies like this, hollywood.

This post contains major spoilers for Fly Me to the Moon

• Fly Me to the Moon ends with a happily ever after, praised by critics for its rom-com story and strong performances by Johansson and Tatum.
• Project Artemis in the film, a staged moon landing backup, was inspired by a real conspiracy theory and NASA's Artemis program.
• The black cat, considered bad luck, ends up saving the mission by crashing the fake moon landing set, leading to Moe Berkus's defeat.

Fly Me to the Moon ’s ending is a happily ever after affair for all involved. Starring Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum , the film follows the leads as they prepare for Apollo 11’s mission to the moon. Fly Me to the Moon ’s movie reviews have been mostly positive, with many critics praising Tatum and Johansson, and its rom-com story. The film, directed by Greg Berlanti , ends with NASA successfully sending astronauts to land on the moon. Kelly admits the truth to Cole, and they come up with a plan to counter Moe Berkus’ fake footage of the moon landing.

With the help of Kelly’s assistant and key NASA employees, they’re able to rewire the camera they’ve attached to the space shuttle and link it to a new TV to monitor both the real and fake footage. Moe watches the fake setup thinking it’s the one being broadcast. However, the black cat crashes the fake set, confirming the real footage is the one that’s airing. Moe is relieved and asks Kelly to destroy the set and any documents associated with Project Artemis. Kelly reveals her real name, Winnie, to Cole and the pair start anew.

Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum tackle NASA's space race, and this is where to watch Fly Me To The Moon in theaters or on streaming.

Fly Me To The Moon’s Project Artemis Explained (Was It Real?)

Moe berkus started project artemis in the film.

Moe introduced Project Artemis in Fly Me to the Moon as a backup to the actual moon landing. Worried that something could go wrong, Moe wanted Project Artemis — named after the moon goddess and Apollo’s twin sister — to be a staged and filmed moon landing attempt to ensure the public success of the Apollo 11 space mission. Moe suggests the president doesn’t know about it when he pitches it to Kelly, though Project Artemis was not a real government project . The staged moon landing is based on a real conspiracy theory, though, which suggests the moon landing never happened.

Interestingly, NASA did establish an Artemis program in 2017 to return people to the moon , which hadn’t happened since 1972’s Apollo 17 mission, and establish a base on its surface. From there, astronauts would be able to fly missions to Mars. Artemis 1 first launched in 2022, successfully traveling around the moon and back to Earth. Artemis 2, which is expected to launch in 2025, will have four astronauts onboard. All that said, it’s likely Fly Me to the Moon took some true story inspiration from this particular NASA project.

What Happens To The Black Cat In Fly Me To The Moon

The black cat was considered bad luck for the mission.

The black cat is first spotted by Cole at the start of Fly Me to the Moon , and becomes a character unto its own throughout. Cole is wary of the black cat, considering it bad luck. He’s traumatized by the Apollo 1 tragedy and doesn’t want anything to potentially ruin the moon landing mission. But the unaware cat turned out to be a lifesaver, crashing the set of the fake moon landing set, which confirmed the live feed was actually from Apollo 11’s real moon mission.

While everyone tried to catch the black cat, it managed to escape. Someone was already feeding it, so it probably ran off again, though it's still near the multiple NASA facilities. Considering what it did for the moon mission, it’s possible Cole has made peace with the black cat’s continued presence at NASA and won’t bother trying to kick it off the premises . Whether the feline will eventually find a home with one of the employees or astronauts remains unclear, but it’s at least free to roam around and live as it pleases without being bothered as much as before.

What’s Next For Kelly Jones & Cole Davis

Kelly and cole butted heads a lot throughout fly me to the moon.

Kelly vowed not to trick people into doing what she wants anymore, which could indicate a shift in her profession. Advertising has been her whole life, but something’s changed since meeting Cole. It’s possible Kelly could stay in advertising (she’s really good at it), but will tackle it from a different perspective moving forward, one without all the extra layers of deception. A permanent position in NASA’s public affairs department could be next .

As for Cole, he’ll probably remain NASA’s launch director for the foreseeable future. While he might never be able to go to space because of his heart, Cole will continue being dedicated to NASA. And with the truth laid bare and no big secrets between them anymore, Cole and Kelly (or Winnie) can restart their relationship while being on the same page for the first time since they met.

Why Moe Berkus Wanted To Use The Fake Moon Footage No Matter What

Moe was trying to control things behind the scenes.

Woody Harrelson's Moe Berkus is a shadowy government agent who manipulates situations and people to control them. Once Kelly’s idea for televising the moon landing was put into motion at NASA, Moe took things entirely into his hands. Not only did he want to film a backup moon landing in case something went wrong with the real thing, but he wanted to use it regardless of whether NASA was successful. Moe was going behind the president’s back as well. In his mind, airing the fake footage was a sure-fire way to win the Space Race .

Getting to the moon was no longer the most important thing — it was ensuring American ideology won over Russian ideology on the world stage. Moe wanted to make sure the US was calling the shots over Russia , and that meant making sure the moon landing was an international success story. Moe couldn’t afford for the moon mission to go wrong. With the moon landing being broadcast, the risk was too high for public embarrassment and disappointment.

Kelly’s Past & Why She Kept It A Secret From Cole Explained

Moe used kelly's past against her throughout the film.

Kelly finally reveals the truth to Cole after feeling bad for helping to stage a fake moon landing. It’s not that she didn’t trust him, but she had become accustomed to hiding behind a facade that went unchallenged by others. Cole was probably the first person to question her deceptions and want the truth. What’s more, Kelly likely kept her past a secret from Cole because she was ashamed of her history and didn’t want to be reminded of it.

Kelly spent years scamming people for money alongside her mother, who was in prison for killing a man during a scam gone wrong. Kelly had come such a long way following that particular part of her life, but lying was the only thing she knew how to do best. It didn’t matter how truthful or sincere Cole was, Kelly kept her past secret to protect herself. Working to advertise the moon landing was just a job she thought she’d move on from after it was over, so Kelly kept the truth of her life close for fear of being hurt .

What Fly Me To The Moon Is Actually Based On (It’s Not A True Story)

There's not much in greg berlanti's film that is true.

Considering the real history-making event that takes place in Fly Me to the Moon , it’s only logical to wonder what else besides the moon landing is true. But the fact is, beyond the moon landing and the inclusion of real-life astronauts like Neil Armstrong, the rest of the characters and story are not based in truth. The only thing that’s really true is that NASA’s public relations department did push for the moon landing to be televised .

The cabin fire that killed the crew members of Apollo 1 did actually happen.

But it wasn’t Kelly Jones’ idea because she didn’t exist; Cole Davis and Moe Berkus are also fictional. Fly Me to the Moon is based on both the decision to broadcast the moon landing and the long-held conspiracy theory that the moon landing was faked. The circumstances and the events involving the characters that led up to the launch are all fictionalized for the sake of the film’s story.

The Real Meaning Of Fly Me To The Moon’s Ending

Fly Me to the Moon ’s ending reiterates the importance of honesty. Had the fake moon landing footage actually aired, it would have been deceiving the American people and the world. Deep down, Kelly knew it was wrong, just like she realized keeping her past a secret and running away wouldn’t do her or Cole any good. Lies only hurt people, and made it difficult to trust others as well. Manipulation tactics might’ve worked for Kelly and Moe in getting people to do the things they wanted, but it also put them in sticky situations they had to get out of.

Fly Me to the Moon (2024)

Starring Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum, Fly Me To The Moon is a sharp, stylish comedy-drama set against the high-stakes backdrop of NASA’s historic Apollo 11 moon landing. Brought in to fix NASA’s public image, sparks fly in all directions as marketing maven Kelly Jones (Johansson) wreaks havoc on launch director Cole Davis’s (Tatum) already difficult task. When the White House deems the mission too important to fail, Jones is directed to stage a fake moon landing as back-up and the countdown truly begins…

Movie Reviews

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Everything about Osgood Perkins ’ “Longlegs” is designed to rattle you, unsettle you, and make you think about it hours or even days later. It’s a very purposefully exaggerated film, from the oppressive sound design to the heavily mannered performances, going for something closer to a cinematic nightmare than anything approaching realism. To that end, despite obvious narrative influences, comparisons to Jonathan Demme ’s “ The Silence of the Lambs ” feel a bit off. Sure, there’s a female FBI agent and a serial killer, but Perkins is seeking something different tonally. It's basically like watching the scene where Clarice hunts around the storage unit in the dark for 100 minutes. There's little room to breathe.

Perkins sometimes loses his grip on that fever dream tone, such as in a late-film exposition dump that too directly and bizarrely seeks to explain what’s happened for the previous hour and change. Nightmares don’t need exposition dumps. It might sound nitpicky, but it’s indicative of an overall problem that hampers “Longlegs.” Despite the notable pre-release work by Neon to build buzz, and the incredibly low Cinemascore likely coming its way, this strange film sometimes doesn’t seem willing to commit to its creepy weirdness all the way, pulling back or explaining its intentions when it should be seeking confusion as much as explanation. We remember the nightmares we're still trying to understand more than anything.

“Longlegs” opens with arguably its most effective sequence, a flashback framed like you’re watching someone’s home movie through a family room projector. A car pulls up to a remote home, from which a young girl emerges. Immediately, Perkins is playing with perspective, not only locking us into the tight frame but basically giving us a child’s POV on the encounter that happens next, one that will impact everything that follows.

Cut to years later, sometime in an exaggerated ‘90s – there’s a photo of Clinton on the wall of the FBI Director’s office to set the time, but a lot of the production design feels even older than that era, once again creating a sort of dream-logic disconnect – where new agent Lee Harker ( Maika Monroe ) arrives for her first case. Acting on a sort of psychic hunch, she captures a serial killer, leading the FBI to suspect she may not be just another ordinary agent, sending her through a series of mental tests to prove she has unique abilities. Sadly, this thread gets lost a little bit as the film goes on, mostly used to set Lee up as “special,” but Perkins' screenplay does too little with that aspect of her character. It’s one of several places in which “Longlegs” could have leaned even more into its quirks. Sure, this movie is weird for the multiplexes of America, but my argument would be that it should have been weirder .

One person certainly giving it his weird all is Nicolas Cage (and he has more weird in his bag of acting tricks than most), who plays the title character, a Satan-worshipping serial killer who seems sort of inspired by Ted Bundy and Tiny Tim (the singer, not the urchin). Harker is brought in by Agent Carter ( Blair Underwood ) to investigate a series of family murders, those horrible events we hear about wherein a parent, usually the father, slays the children and spouse before taking their own life. No one would even think these were anything but tragic, self-contained events if there wasn’t a mysterious figure out there sending cryptic, Zodiac-esque notes about the crimes, tied to specific dates on a calendar. How is Longlegs orchestrating such brutality? And what do the dates mean? Alicia Witt plays Ruth, Lee’s ultra-religious mother, who’s always asking her daughter if she’s said her prayers. One senses Lee is going to need those prayers.

Everything in “Longlegs” feels very deliberately crafted and chosen by the undeniably talented writer/director of “The Blackcoat’s Daughter” and “ I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House .” From the consistently low camera angles that enhance tension by giving us a reduced POV to the quick bursts of imagery and sound that feel nearly subliminal to possibly even the names of the characters. Without spoiling anything, Lee has a connection to the very vampiric Longlegs that made me wonder if Harker was a Bram Stoker ’s Dracula reference (pretty sure it is). And is it a coincidence that the only survivor’s surname is Camera (played by Kiernan Shipka , in an impressive single-scene performance)? After all, it’s Lee’s camera, and, by extension, Perkins’ camera that keeps the story alive.

This kind of mental unpacking of a film can be fun and will almost certainly lead to hours of TikToks and YouTube videos drawing connections like the paragraph above. But it’s hard for a film to be calibrated this carefully and feel as unhinged as this story should at the same time. There’s a version of “Longlegs” that hides its strings better, one that doesn’t feel the need to explain everything away with an insanely long exposition-dump monologue. "Longlegs" has one that is so misguided, not only because nightmares are better with a few lingering questions, but because the scenes that follow basically serve the same purpose through plotting. This is a movie with a haunted doll, psychic FBI agent, and a serial killer with a connection to Satan. We don’t need to connect all the dots.

And yet, Perkins is simply too talented when it comes to framing, mood, and tension to completely dismiss “Longlegs.” The film will likely draw horror fans through its unapologetic brutality – the murders here are bloody and often crunchy – but there are also some themes worth unpacking about how much can be hidden by faith, marred by evil, and even the roles our own parents play in shaping those narratives. (A fascinating read of the film comes when one considers how much Osgood’s father Anthony Perkins hid from his family and the fact that his mother died on 9/11 given how much the film is about generational trauma.) Absolutely no one is phoning in “Longlegs,” and that commitment to craft and mood has an impact. It may be disappointing that it doesn’t land with the same force promised by the viral marketing, but nightmares are unpredictable like that.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

Longlegs (2024)

101 minutes

Maika Monroe as Agent Lee Harker

Nicolas Cage as Longlegs

Blair Underwood as Agent Carter

Alicia Witt as Ruth Harker

Michelle Choi-Lee as Agent Browning

• Osgood Perkins

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‘Longlegs’ Review: Daddy Danger

Nicolas Cage plays the cheery evil entity behind multiple murders in this weakly plotted, strongly styled chiller.

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

Any horror movie that opens, as “Longlegs” does, with a quotation from a British glam-rock hit of the 1970s, suggests a filmmaker with, at the very least, an offbeat sensibility. Even so, this latest feature from the abundantly talented writer and director Osgood Perkins is a puzzler: Stuffed to the rafters with serial-killer clichés — coded messages, creepy dolls, satanic symbols, an androgynous maniac — the plot plays like a sampler of many, more coherent precursors. There’s even a minion dressed as a nun.

And that’s before we attempt to process Nicolas Cage (who else?) as the titular nut case. His appearances are brief, but resounding — and, as can happen with Cage, waver on the brink of parody. Much like the film itself, righted in part by the magnificently bleak mood and prickling sense of premonition that emerge from Andrés Arochi’s mold-colored images. This man can make a deserted, plastic-draped lair look as ominous as hell’s anteroom.

Preparing to enter is Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a rather green F.B.I. agent on the trail of a serial killer who somehow persuades fathers to slaughter their families and then commit suicide. Coded notes, signed “Longlegs,” are left at the crime scenes and law enforcement is stymied. But Lee, who had a disturbing encounter with Longlegs as a child, appears to have a psychic connection with the monster. So, too, does her mother (Alicia Witt), and the two’s haunted, wary relationship thrums with unspoken secrets.

Set in Oregon in the 1990s, “Longlegs” wrestles to maintain its eerily menacing tone. The movie’s echoing spaces — a snowy landscape, Lee’s wondrously gloomy home — and wily performances (especially from Kiernan Shipka as an institutionalized survivor of the killings) are too often undercut by a strangely off-kilter comedy. Much of this resides in Longlegs himself, an apparent victim of botched plastic surgery whom Cage plays as a rhyming-and-singing lunatic beneath a frizzed gray wig. In one amusing scene, as Longlegs enters a hardware store sporting what appear to be slippers and a housedress, he resembles nothing so much as a bizarre amalgam of Buffalo Bill and Tootsie . He should have been a breeze to catch.

Scenes like this one (which benefits from a dry cameo by the director’s daughter, Bea Perkins, as a spectacularly unfazed clerk), in common with random moments throughout the movie, have a dottiness that seems intentional and suggests that Perkins might be messing with us. As chilling and stylish as it is, “Longlegs” is a frustrating pleasure. In films like “ I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives In the House ” (2016) and “The Blackcoats Daughter” (2017), Perkins allowed his gift for ominousness and insinuation to take center stage. Here, we’re never quite sure if his tongue is in his cheek or his hand is on his heart.

Longlegs Rated R for malevolence, madness and mass murder. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters.

What is Project 2025? The Presidential Transition Project explained.

The detailed plan to dismantle and reconstruct the government laid out by  conservative groups  known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project has critics up in arms over its " apocalyptic " and " authoritarian " nature.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., led an effort to create the more than 900-page  "Mandate for Leadership,"  published in April 2023, reimagining the executive branch and presented a plan to overhaul several federal government agencies, including the FBI, for the country's next conservative president to follow.

More: Project 2025 head says 'second American Revolution' will be 'bloodless if the left allows'

According to the Project's website, the playbook provides a governing agenda and a lineup of people ready to implement it to "rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left." It includes a domestic and  foreign policy  agenda, a list of personnel, training, and a 180-day playbook.

"It is not enough for conservatives to win elections," Project 2025  said on its website . "With the right conservative policy recommendations and properly vetted and trained personnel to implement them, we will take back our government."

Project 2025's Director is  Paul Dans , who served as the U.S. Office of Personnel Management chief of staff in former President Donald Trump's administration. Although it mentions Trump by name, the handbook does not directly assume the Republican party's presumptive nominee will be the one to carry out its agenda.

What is in Project 2025?

The mandate attacks several policies that former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden instituted, including  student loan forgiveness  and  Obamacare . It simultaneously calls for expanded executive power for the commander-in-chief while criticizing what Project 2025 members perceive as overreaches by the Biden administration.

"Presidents should not issue mask or vaccine mandates, arbitrarily transfer student loan debt, or issue monarchical mandates of any sort," the plan reads. "Legislatures make the laws in a republic, not executives."

The playbook calls for the reinstatement of a  Trump executive order  augmenting a president's power to hire and fire federal officials by replacing civil servants with political appointees throughout government.

It also seeks to repeal aspects of the  Affordable Care Act , urge the Food and Drug Administration to reverse the  approval of abortion pills , and further empower Immigration and Customs Enforcement to  deport undocumented immigrants .

The plan also specifically addresses LGBTQ+ issues and attacks "radical gender ideology." In addition to calling for an end to the Department of Education, it suggests legislation that would forbid educators from using transgender students' names or pronouns without written permission from their guardians. It also appears to oppose same-sex marriage and gay couples adopting children by seeking to "maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family."

Project 2025 generates concern

Project 2025 has received substantial criticism from Democrats, including  Representative Jasmine Crockett , D-Texas, who called out the controversial plan during a congressional hearing last month.

"I don't know why or how anybody can support Project 2025," Crockett said. "In the United States of America, dictatorships are never funny, and Project 2025 is giving the playbook for authoritarianism as well as the next dictator to come in."

Progressive Democrat U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts called it a "far-right manifesto" in a  post on TikTok . The Biden campaign captioned a video detailing Project 2025, stating it "needs more attention."

Rachel Barber is a 2024 election fellow at USA TODAY, focusing on politics and education. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, as @rachelbarber_

Bad Boys Franchise Reaches New Milestone Thanks to Ride or Die's Success

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Bad Boys: Ride or Die continues to live a charmed life at the box office. As the latest Bad Boys sequel gathers increased momentum during its theatrical run, the titular franchise reaches a new milestone.

Per Collider , Ride or Die has now earned over $362 million at the global box office, $179 million of that total coming from domestic theaters . As a result, the Bad Boys franchise has now passed the $1.2 billion mark since its inception in 1995. The film series passed the billion-dollar mark less than two weeks after its Jun. 7 premiere.

Will Smith Lands Next Big Movie Role After Bad Boys 4 Success

Bad Boys: Ride or Die co-star Will Smith picks up his next major movie role after the action-comedy sequel's positive reception.

Ride or Die still has some way to go to become the Bad Boys film series' biggest earner, chasing Bad Boys for Life 's tally of $426.5 million made worldwide following its 2020 release. The last two Bad Boys sequels were directed by long-time collaborators Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah , with both films comfortably earning the best mark from critics.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die Was a Huge Hit With Audiences

Boasting a franchise-best audience score on Rotten Tomatoes , Ride or Die sees Will Smith and Martin Lawrence reprise their leading roles as Miami PD lawmen, Detective Lieutenant Mike Lowrey and Detective Lieutenant Marcus Burnett. Mike and Marcus face their toughest task yet as they face corrupt law enforcement officials and officers from their own department as they try to clear the name of their fallen police chief, Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano), who stands wrongly accused of conducting business with drug cartels. Mike and Marcus are on the run for much of the film and require help from Mike's estranged son, Armando Aretas (Jacob Scipio) to protect them and their former boss' legacies.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die's Biggest Cameos

Bad Boys: Ride or Die features some surprising cameos from friends and villains Will Smith's Mike and Martin Lawrence's Marcus made over the years.

Ride or Die also stars Paola Núñez, Vaness Hudgens, Alexander Ludwig, Eric Dane, Ioan Gruffudd, Dennis McDonald and Tasha Smith. The film is also Smith's second film release since his infamous slap at the 94th Academy Awards, with the sequel winning him some much-needed goodwill and even making a sly reference to it during its closing sequence.

The continued success of the Bad Boys franchise has sparked further speculation about whether there will be a fifth installment of the action-packed franchise. Smith and Lawrence are open to doing Bad Boys 5 , while franchise producer Jerry Bruckheimer recently revealed behind-the-scenes talks have happened about the sequel.

Ride or Die is now showing in theaters.

Source: Collider

Bad Boys: Ride or Die

Fourth installment of the 'Bad Boys' film series.

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Will smith’s ‘bad boys’ i and ii among movies new on netflix this week.

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Martin Lawrence and Will Smith yelling at each other while holding machine guns to defend themselves ... [+] in a scene from the film 'Bad Boys', 1995. (Photo by Columbia Pictures/Getty Images)

Will Smith and Martin Lawrence’s original action comedy Bad Boys and its sequel Bad Boys II are new on Netflix this week.

Fans are currently being treated to a Bad Boys renaissance with the new summer movie hit Bad Boys: Ride or Die , which teams Smith and Lawrence’s Miami Police detectives Mike Lowrey and Marcus Burnett for a fourth Bad Boys adventure. The new movie follows the 2020 release of hit third movie in the series, Bad Boys for Life .

The original Bad Boys film was released in 1995 and Bad Boys II hit theaters eight years later in 2003. The first two Bad Boys films were directed by Armageddon and Transformers filmmaker Michael Bay.

Both Bad Boys and Bad Boys II will debut on Netflix on Monday.

The first two Bad Boys movies were big hits in theaters. According to The Numbers , Bad Boys earned more than $141 million at the worldwide box office against a $19 million production budget before prints and advertising costs.

In addition, the box office tracking site said, Bad Boys II had a global take of $273 million against a $130 million production budget before P&A.

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While Bad Boys and Bad Boys II were both hits with fans, neither film found much love from critics.

Rotten Tomatoes critics gave Bad Boys a collective 44% “rotten” rating based on 68 reviews, although RT users countered with a “fresh” 78% Audience Score based on 250,000-plus user ratings.

Bad Boys II , meanwhile, earned a dismal 24% “rotten” rating from RT critics based on 168 reviews, while again more than 250,000 user ratings gave the sequel a 78% “fresh” Audience Score.

Other New Movies On Netflix This Week

Kicking off July with the Netflix original movie Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F , the streaming service has four more original films that will debut this week.

On Wednesday, the romantic comedy Wild, Wild Punjab from India will debut. The movie finds four friends taking a trip across the northwestern state of Punjab in India to find love for one member in the group who has just gone through a breakup.

On Friday, three more new Netflix original movies will be released: Blame the Game , a comedy thriller from Germany; The Champion , a sports drama from Spain and Lobola Man , a romantic comedy from South Africa.

Among the new Netflix original films coming yet this month is Find Me Falling , a romantic comedy starring Harry Connick Jr.

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