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Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2024, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.

When reflecting on any year in movies, the theatrical experience rings most memorable. From driving across the border to Ohio with friends to watch No Country for Old Men in 2007, to a 35mm screening of Stalker at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2011, with so rapt an audience I was terrified to swallow for fear it would disrupt their experience—each year holds it own special memories and 2024 was no different. There was a lively afternoon matinee of Between the Temples in which I was the youngest present by about 25 years, and a sold-out Wednesday screening of Showgirls at the Academy Museum with Elizabeth Berkley in person. But judging from reactions on X.com, I’m not alone in my favorite 2024 theatrical screening being witnessing Interstellar in 70mm IMAX.

Illustrations by Stephanie Lane Gage.In 1996, Brian Eno reflected on his run of ambient albums for Eg Recordings twenty years prior, writing that he recognized a desire among his friends “to use music in a different way—as part of the ambience of our lives—and we wanted it to be continuous, a surrounding.”1 I was reminded of these lines while watching Harmony Korine’s Aggro Dr1ft (all films 2024), a film characterized less by its plot or its performances than what Eno refers to as a “sonic mood.” The picture floats by on an ocean of sound that ebbs and flows but never breaks, never crashes. Over the last few years there has been a slew of articles complaining about the lopsided sound of major blockbusters—especially since the pandemic provoked an escalation in the streaming wars. Netflix, Apple TV+, & co. are aware that many home-cinema viewers are only half-watching...

Following The Film Stage’s collective top 50 films of 2024, as part of our year-end coverage, our contributors are sharing their personal top 10 lists.

No matter what 2025 brings, 2024 in cinema felt like a year of unprecedented freedom and resistance in global and domestic affairs. In many ways, the anxieties expressed in 2024 reminded me of 1999. Culture can be a canary in the coal mine.

The year’s best and most essential films chose to fight back and comment on the “machine.” This year’s boldest films included sprawling epics, essential documentaries, personal stories, and a surprising number of unhinged works of fantasy. Call it the year of Yolo (full disclosure – one of the films I missed this year was Jia Ling’s Yolo), where on one end, films like Love Lies Bleeding, Aggro Dr1ft, Rumours, Megalopolis, Longlegs, Anora, Strange Darling, Armand, The Beast, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, Kinds of Kindness, The End,...

Harmony Korine met photographer Larry Clark while he was still a teenage skater bumming about Greenwich Village in New York. Clark and Korine began talking, and Clark revealed that he wanted a screenplay, written with an authentic point of view, all about modern, largely unsupervised teens and the way they wrestle with the AIDS crisis. Korine was happy to participate, and wrote the screenplay for the highly controversial "Kids," released in 1995. "Kids" was dark and edgy at the time, as it was incredibly frank about the sex lives of high school students. Even today, opinions on the film are mixed. 

Korine, however, instantly became a new Enfant Terrible in the indie cinema world, and made his directorial debut in 1997 with "Gummo," a stylized poverty drama about a random assortment of oversexed and undereducated Ohioans recovering from a recent tornado. He followed that film with "julien donkey-boy" in 1999, which he made...

If one had to guess which filmmaker a film journalist could catch themselves conducting an interview with at two in the morning, at a table inside a hotel bar overlooking the Venice canal, Harmony Korine would probably be the most likely choice.

Coming off the world premiere of his new project “Baby Invasion” at the Venice Film Festival, the innovative, enfant terrible filmmaker is still struck by the heat inside the Sala Grande (“it was like a sauna”), but he’s also been processing the joy it felt to receive one of those signature applauses that lasts so long, security had to shut it down — especially for a film like this.

“I never seen anything like that in a place like that,” said Korine, back at the festival one year after premiering “Aggro Dr1ft” there, the first film produced under his new Edglrd banner. An 80-minute film inspired by first-person shooter games,...

Harmony Korine is going to do whatever the hell he wants, and in the case of his disturbing and anti-audience movie “Baby Invasion,” he turns the trigger-junkie protagonist at the top of a video game into the eyes and ears of a motion picture. If that’s what you call this disquieting and sickeningly compelling new project, framed from the perspective of an assassin pillaging shiny happy McMansions in Florida, Korine’s haunting grounds of late from “Spring Breakers” to his disastrously boring “film” “Aggro Dr1ft” last year. Where that infrared twisted techno dance pivoted on desperate dancers and sex workers twerking into the void as a hired killer fired shots all around them, “Baby Invasion” has a clearer focus this time: It’s to make you, the viewer, feel bad, and often wanting to beg to the screen, “Please god let this end,” or perhaps more aptly, “end me.

Midnight screenings rarely come more fitting than “Baby Invasion,” Harmony Korine’s latest experimental, unconventional and video game-like assault on the senses, which had its world premiere on Saturday night in Venice to an 8.5-minute standing ovation.

The film served up a provocative array of unique visuals: We saw our heavily armed, baby-faced criminals torturing people, dancing to Burial’s thumping techno score, chopping up huge piles of coke and throwing up the middle finger while sitting on the toilet.

Whatever it is we witnessed, the crowd seemed to lap it up. Once the hour and 20 minute movie wrapped, cheers erupted from the audience as Korine danced to the beat that soundtracked the credits. And it didn’t stop there: fans erupted into a chant of “Harmony! Harmony! Harmony!” as the director waved his arms as if to say, “More! More! More!”

At one point in the film, one of...

Iconoclastic auteur Harmony Korine delivers another tripped-out feat of movie gamer madness with Baby Invasion, which follows last year’s Aggro DR1FT down a similar rabbit hole (one that includes lots of digital rabbits this time) in which violence, mayhem, masks and McMansions come clashing together in the Florida sun.

Whereas DR1FT was a freewheeling assassin flick whose images were processed and reprocessed until they looked like drug-addled nightmares, Invasion applies a different aesthetic but a comparable narrative approach, breaking the barriers between cinema and video games until we no longer know if we’re watching one or the other. And just in case you didn’t get that, onscreen titles come up at some point saying: “This is not a movie. This is a game. This is real life. There is no real life.” All clear now?

Anyone going into Korine’s latest expecting to sit through an...

Early on in “A Clockwork Orange,” Alex and his fellow droogs break into a rich writer’s home and rape his wife, which would be wrong enough if he weren’t crooning “Singin’ in the Rain” in the process. Half a century later, the scene seems no less appalling, given the way Stanley Kubrick made such ultraviolence look like fun for the demented kids who were doing it. Could there be anything more nihilistic than that?

Middle-aged bad boy Harmony Korine certainly thinks so. The latest stunt from his taboo-razing Edglrd studio, “Baby Invasion” blurs the lines between real life and a gnarly video game, so much so that it’s hard to tell what we’re watching for most of the trippy project’s 79-minute running time.

First-person footage of Florida McMansions ransacked by screen-addicted sociopaths? Creepy face-replacement technology that turns armed vandals into demon-horned Gerber babies? AI-generated cameos from an elusive CG rabbit?...

During a press conference at the Venice Film Festival, a cigar-puffing Harmony Korine advised the U.S. film industry to “encourage the youth” because he believes that Hollywood is starting to “crumble creatively.”

Korine has returned to the festival with his new film Baby Invasion, which is imagined as an ultra-realistic, multiplayer Fps game that follows a group of mercenaries using baby faces as avatars. Tasked with entering mansions of the rich and powerful, players must explore every rabbit hole before time runs out.

Accompanied by his designer Joao Rosa and a green-masked Gaspar Noé, Korine started the conference by lighting up a cigar.

He first discussed the storytelling format for Baby Invasion. He described the film as the “base layer” with “three or four other sub films” coming later for audiences to experience the story from different points of view. He added: “When we release the film, there’ll...

Director Harmony Korine took a moment at the Venice Film Festival press conference for his latest film “Baby Invasion” to encourage Hollywood to start embracing the forms of entertainment that have taken over youth culture, like gaming and streaming.

“What’s happening in Hollywood — and you’re starting to see Hollywood, I think, crumble creatively — is that they’re losing a lot of the most talented and creative minds to gaming and to streamers. Like IShowSpeed is a movie, Kai Cenat is a movie,” said the “Spring Breakers” and “Aggro Dr1ft” filmmaker, shouting out two of the most popular personalities on YouTube and Twitch.

In making a point about how Hollywood power players are locked into convention to the point of scaring off young creative minds from attempting traditional filmmaking, Korine went on to say, “They go other places because movies are no longer the dominant art form. Always, they were the dominant art form,...

Harmony Korine, puffing a cigar and flanked by an artistic collaborator wearing a neon ski mask, brought his signature antic energy to Italy’s Venice Film Festival Saturday as he discussed his latest video game-inspired art film Baby Invasion.

The project, which Korine took pains to emphasize isn’t really a “film” at all, follows a group of mercenaries calling themselves the “Duck Mobb” as they loot mansions at gunpoint while wearing baby faces as digital avatars to conceal their identities. Resembling a first-person shooter game, the 80-minute visual experience will premiere Saturday night just before midnight at Venice’s historic Sala Grande cinema.

In a wide-ranging, at times deliberately incoherent press conference, Korine shed light on the way his Miami-based art collective Edglrd works, while also taking a few gleeful shots at what he considers to be the “dying” art form of the traditional film industry.

“I’m not...

Harmony Korine doubled down on his thoughts about the current state of the film industry at a Venice press conference on Saturday, saying that “we’re starting to see Hollywood crumble creatively” because it’s “so locked in on convention.”

As he puffed on a cigar, causing smoke to invade the conference room, Korine — seated next to his designer Joao Rosa and a neon green-masked Gaspar Noé — waxed lyrical about how the industry is misusing its youth.

“Hollywood needs to encourage — they don’t need to, but they would be smart to — encourage the youth, the kids. Why we’re starting to see Hollywood crumble creatively is because they’re losing a lot of the most creative minds to gaming and to streaming,” he said. “They’re so locked in on convention and then all those kids who are so creative are now just going to find other pathways and...

Say what you like about director Harmony Korine, but the man is rarely dull. Korine's in Venice this weekend for a midnight festival screening of his new movie Baby Invasion—a first-person film where people with their heads digitally swapped with babies stage a home invasion, natch—and he didn't disappoint in his panel today,...

Burial has composed the score for Harmony Korine’s new movie Baby Invasion, which is set to premiere at Venice Film Festival this summer.

Baby Invasion isn’t Burial’s first time doing a film score. He also composed the score for Andrea Arnold’s Bird starring Barry Keoghan, which debuted at Cannes Film Festival in May.

Billed as a surreal home invasion thriller, Korine’s new movie comes from his Edglrd company. It was filmed as a first-person shooter and used AI to swap intruders’ faces with those of babies.

“We’ll create these almost like freakish cartoon filters that these invaders will have, that they’ll wear throughout, but then you could also possibly change them as you go,” the filmmaker previously told Variety.

The official description reads: “Baby Invasion is a new ultra-realistic, multiplayer Fps game following a group of mercenaries using baby faces as avatars to conceal their identity.

Burial has composed the score for Harmony Korine’s new movie Baby Invasion, which is set to premiere at Venice Film Festival this summer.

Baby Invasion isn’t Burial’s first time doing a film score. He also composed the score for Andrea Arnold’s Bird starring Barry Keoghan, which debuted at Cannes Film Festival in May.

Billed as a surreal home invasion thriller, Korine’s new movie comes from his Edglrd company. It was filmed as a first-person shooter and used AI to swap intruders’ faces with those of babies.

“We’ll create these almost like freakish cartoon filters that these invaders will have, that they’ll wear throughout, but then you could also possibly change them as you go,” the filmmaker previously told Variety.

The official description reads: “Baby Invasion is a new ultra-realistic, multiplayer Fps game following a group of mercenaries using baby faces as avatars to conceal their identity.

Harmony Korine is returning to his “Kids” roots, quite literally. The director’s latest is the upcoming “Baby Invasion,” billed as a surreal home invasion thriller. The feature, produced through Korine’s multimedia design collective Edglrd, uses artificial intelligence technology to swap the intruders’ faces with those of babies. “Baby Invasion” is filmed as a first-person shooter and will be debuting at Venice 2024.

The first Edglrd release, Korine’s divisive “Aggro Dr1ft,” premiered in September 2023 at the festival. It’s since taken an unusual release pattern, with screenings at strip clubs and online premiere via Edglrd’s website.

The official synopsis for Korine’s new film reads: “‘Baby Invasion’ is a new ultra-realistic, multiplayer Fps game following a group of mercenaries using baby faces as avatars to conceal their identity. Tasked with entering mansions of the rich and powerful and leaving nothing behind, players must explore every rabbit hole before time runs out.

Buckle in, film buffs, we’re not done with festival season yet. The 2024 Venice Film Festival lineup was announced on Tuesday, and rest assured there will be plenty of glamorous movie stars waving from boats. The lineup includes expected entries like Joker: Folie à Deux, starring Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix...

The Venice Film Festival on Tuesday unveiled its official, star-packed lineup for its 81st edition, which runs from Aug. 28 to Sept. 7.

Joker: Folie à Deux, Todd Phillips’ sequel to his 2019 Golden Lion-winning Joker, will also bow in Venice. Joaquin Phoenix, who won a best actor Oscar for his portrayal of Arthur Fleck, aka Joker, in the original, returns in the musical sequel, with Lady Gaga playing Harley Quinn, his love interest and partner in crime. Zazie Beetz, Brendan Gleeson and Catherine Keener co-star.

Venice favorites Brad Pitt and George Clooney will return to the Lido with Wolfs, an action drama from Jon Watts (Spider-Man: No Way Home) about two lone-wolf fixers assigned to the same job. The film, an Apple Original Films production that Columbia/Sony will release theatrically worldwide, will screen out of competition, as will Broken Rage, the latest feature from legendary Japanese director Takeshi Kitano.

Angelina Jolie...

Didn’t get to see Harmony Korine‘s “Aggro Dr1ft” in theaters (or you did but didn’t get the hype)? Not to worry: Variety reports that the iconoclastic director has his next two projects lined up at this multimedia design collective Edglrd, including a resurrected old project. So if “Aggro Dr1ft” didn’t resonate, here’s a second and third chance to figure out what Edglrd is all about.

Continue reading Harmony Korine & Edglrd Have Anime Crime Film ‘The Trap,’ A Comedy, ‘Baby Invasion,’ & A Supernatural Thriller From Stillz On The Way at The Playlist.

Harmony Korine is making his animated debut with his long-gestating “The Trap,” though without its original stars and in a whole new medium. The filmmaker was first set to reunite with “Spring Breakers” stars James Franco and Gucci Mane back in 2016 for the feature, which was then set up at Annapurna as a live-action film.

Back then, Benicio del Toro, Al Pacino, and Jamie Foxx were also attached to star in the film. The feature floundered for years, and Korine is now resurrecting the project at his multimedia design collective Edglrd. Variety first reported the news. Korine’s “The Trap” will now be an animated adventure and Edglrd is in discussions with production partners in Japan.

The film is described “as ‘Oldboy’ set through a hip-hop filter, ‘The Trap’ imagines another sun-kissed gangster saga, following an ex-con newly released from prison and deadset on revenge once he learns that his...

Harmony Korine has lined up his next two features, setting up his animated debut “The Trap” and a still-untitled mo-cap assisted comedy through his multimedia design collective Edglrd.

The Miami-based collective has also backed the feature debut of acclaimed music video director Matias Vasquez — better known as Stillz – and is eyeing a 2024 release for the feature already in post-production.

This heady slate marks a busy period of development and production for the new-media outfit, which has just made its freshman effort “Aggro Dr1ft” available on-demand through the new Edglrd website. In keeping with the company’s design background, the VOD release also comes with a merch drop.

Described as “Oldboy” set through a hip-hop filter, “The Trap” imagines another sun-kissed gangster saga, following an ex-con newly released from prison and deadset on revenge once he learns that his one-time accomplice has become a top-selling rapper.

Originally set-up at Annapurna,...

Everything is ready for the 14th edition of the Festival Internacional de Cine Unam (Ficunam), which will take place from June 13 to 20 in Mexico City. As part of the Atlas section, we will finally be able to see Harmony Korine’s new experimental film in Cdmx: Aggro Dr1ft, starring rapper Travis Scott and notorious for having been “shot entirely through termal lens.” This section, dedicated to international auteur cinema, also includes recent works by Wang Bing (Youth (Spring)), Mati Diop (the documentary Dahomey), Tsai Ming-liang (Abiding Nowhere), Kleber Mendoça Filho (Pictures of Ghosts), Pedro Costa (The Daughters of Fire), and Hong Sang-soo (A Traveler’s Needs). Straight from Cannes comes Payal Kapadia’s Grand Prix-winning drama All We Imagine as Light. This Mumbai-set film is part...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Adria Arjona, Richard Linklater, and Glen Powell on the set of Hit ManImage: Netflix

Loosely based on a 2001 Texas Monthly profile, Richard Linklater’s Hit Man mythologizes the life of Gary Johnson, a part-time college professor who moonlighted as a fake hit man for the Houston Police Department. Of course,...

Some kind of creature from Aggro DR1FT Image: Courtesy of Edglrd At Metrograph in downtown Manhattan last month, Harmony Korine, clad in a neon ski mask, introduced his new film, Aggro Dr1ft, to a room of about 75% men. The film, which had played the festival circuit during the preceding fall...

Some kind of creature from Aggro DR1FTImage: Courtesy of Edglrd

At Metrograph in downtown Manhattan last month, Harmony Korine, clad in a neon ski mask, introduced his new film, Aggro Dr1ft, to a room of about 75% men. The film, which had played the festival circuit during the preceding fall...

Harmony Korine’s AggroDr1ft unfurls through sheets of kaleidoscopic color — neon shades of gold, aqua and red — that ripple and pulse, achieving almost an intelligence of their own as they add expressionistic textures to the film’s Miami-set tale of a melancholy hitman out for a demonic Final Boss. And while the narrative recalls, at times, Robert E. Howard, Michael Mann and Grand Theft Auto, the film’s genuinely unique method of production allows its hallucinatory vibe — aided by an insidious AraabMuzik score — to reign supreme. Working with his team at new production outfit Edglrd, including creative director Joao […]

The post “The Fact That It’s Thermal Imagery, It Hits Memory in a Different Way”: Edglrd Creative Director Joao Rosa on Harmony Korine’s Visionary AggroDr1ft first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Harmony Korine’s AggroDr1ft unfurls through sheets of kaleidoscopic color — neon shades of gold, aqua and red — that ripple and pulse, achieving almost an intelligence of their own as they add expressionistic textures to the film’s Miami-set tale of a melancholy hitman out for a demonic Final Boss. And while the narrative recalls, at times, Robert E. Howard, Michael Mann and Grand Theft Auto, the film’s genuinely unique method of production allows its hallucinatory vibe — aided by an insidious AraabMuzik score — to reign supreme. Working with his team at new production outfit Edglrd, including creative director Joao […]

The post “The Fact That It’s Thermal Imagery, It Hits Memory in a Different Way”: Edglrd Creative Director Joao Rosa on Harmony Korine’s Visionary AggroDr1ft first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Once upon a time, I believed any completed movie that found release was a minor miracle. After enduring Harmony Korine’s infrared-only Aggro Dr1ft (written in “leetspeak”), the first production under the filmmaker’s new boundary-pushing “multimedia design collective” Edglrd, that mantra is shattered. This movie is theatrical imprisonment. Its duration? A life sentence. Aggro Dr1ft is an 80-minute music video masquerading as a provocative and startlingly stylized action flick that’s devoid of any provocation, groundbreaking style, or on-screen action.

Aggro Dr1ft follows a downtrodden Miami-based mercenary, Bo (Jordi Mollà), who wishes to vanquish a demonic crimelord and become a stay-at-home family man. It’s a crayon-box blur of fuchsia skies and lavender skin tones, paintball-masked mini militias mean-mugging on yachts with hot tubs, mumbled dialogue lost underneath Edm tracks, and robotic performances so unintelligible you’d think you’re being pranked. Travis Scott randomly appears as a next-generation assassin,...

Plot: An assassin (Jordi Molla) is hired to kill a deadly adversary.

Review: Note – This Was Reviewed At TIFF 2023. There’s at least one thing about Harmony Korine‘s Aggro Dr1ft that’s amazing: the fact that being shot in infrared isn’t the most obnoxious thing about this 80-minute endurance test. It’s not much of a film but rather purely experimental fare that Korine could have released online rather than at a major film festival. Many have pointed out that it plays like a cutscene from Grand Theft Auto, where it is directed in infrared by a horny, none-too-bright teenager obsessed with the imagery for nineties gangster rap videos. This is a movie where the bad guy goes on for minutes swinging swords repeating “dance b*tch, dance” over and over (and over) again.

One does have to give Korine some credit for his audacity in that...

“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” (Disney) opened to $56.5 million, slightly above pre-opening projections, which is encouraging after “The Fall Guy” (Universal) last week. That’s a relief to theaters that hope summer releases meet their potential and buffer what is expected to be a major drop in revenues versus last year.

20th Century Fox released “Planet of the Apes” in 1968. For an old franchise, this is one that still has plenty of life: The “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” opening matched the last “Planet of the Apes” installment in 2017 (albeit when tickets cost 15 percent less). Speaking of old franchises, it also beat the $55 million opening of the 2021 Bond entry “No Time to Die.” Disappointing B Cinemascore aside, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” seems poised for a solid run.

The opening for “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” doubled that of “The Fall Guy...

Rarely has a star been less visible than Jordi Mollà in Aggro Dr1ft. You could surmise this only knowing the film by random screenshots invariably featuring the Spanish actor––iconic across multiple continents for his dark swoop of hair and eyes so piercingly blue they make Peter O’Toole’s look tame––bathed in infrared light. Harmony Korine’s film often places him in a game-like third-person perspective with bodysuit and mask, all the while Mollà relaying some of the most delightfully inane voiceover in years.

So: no normal performance. I thus sensed the conversation with Mollà could go many directions, but still didn’t expect him to be so relaxed and gregarious: calling from his home in Spain, the actor smoked two or three cigarettes while following numerous paths that have nothing (or plenty?) to do with Korine’s feature. As a consummate storyteller he made all of these strands compelling,...

"No mercy!" Edglrd has debuted another extra trailer for Harmony Korine's loud and obnoxious Aggro Dr1ft. This film is actually getting a quick theatrical release mainly at various Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas (and a few others), even though I hope no one wastes their time on this. Korine's experimental, video game-inspired Aggro Dr1ft hitman film first premiered at the 2023 Venice Film Festival last fall and I hated it - my full review. In this "sensual experimental elegy" by Harmony Korine, spellbinding infrared photography evokes a dreamlike portrait of a tormented assassin. It's shot in and presented entirely as infrared footage, with annoying, blaring sound and music that will make you want to drive right off a cliff... Starring Jordi Mollà and Travis Scott and some other random people you can't even make out on screen. It's so terrible it even features A.I. visuals making half the scenes worse. I...

Harmony Korine is definitely a filmmaker who marches to the beat of his own drum. His films are often wild and subversive, toying with audience’s expectations of what the medium is capable of. And his newest film, “Aggro DR1FT” is no different. In fact, it is easily his most unique film yet.

Read More: ‘Aggro Dr1ft’ Review: Harmony Korine Goes Sicko Mode In A Visually Stunning Journey Through Miami Thug Life [Venice]

As seen in the trailer, “Aggro DR1FT” tells the story of a hitman with a family, as he tries to balance his life as a father and as a hired killer.

Continue reading ‘Aggro DR1FT’ Trailer: Harmony Korine’s Infrared Thriller Hits Theaters This Week at The Playlist.

After a contentious fall-festival run where people either had to declare Aggro Dr1ft the future of cinema or an abject embarrassment––I propose it’s sufficient to think “this looks neat” and find yourself chortling across 80 fleet-enough minutes––Korine’s Edglrd is migrating from initial public venues (L.A. strip clubs) to a proper theatrical release: 17 coast-to-coast theaters between May 10 and 16. With that set, there’s a new trailer that gives greater sense of the visual onslaught, narrative scope, and humor.

Safe to say if this amuses, you’ll get something from the film at large. As Rory O’Connor said from his review out of Venice, “Korine has named this new aesthetic ‘gamecore,’ which seems pretty apt. Even the most casual player will recognize the rhythms and visual cues here: the actors move and converse like NPCs, repeating phrases and gestures, and moving around with all the personality of an avatar in Second Life.

Coming on the heels of his experimental assassin flick “Aggro Dr1ft”, which made extensive use of infrared technology, and the forming of his new production company/design collective Edglrd, Harmony Korine is adding to its output with a new music video from bladee and Yung Lean called “One Second”.

Featuring a constant bass-pumping beat and visuals that range from hi-def gaming sequences to classic fish-eye lens close-ups on bare bellies and disarming masks, “One Second” plays as a level-up on the kind of chaotic splendor Korine introduced with films like “Spring Breakers” and “Trash Humpers”. Korine is clearly a fan of bladee and Yung Lean, as exhibited by the DJ sets he performs with them at Miami’s Boiler Room Club. The club setting seems to be the perfect environment for Korine’s experimentation, as he recently screened “Aggro Dr1ft” in Los Angeles at a strip club for its first ever immersive experience.

A month so staggering in quality new releases that a new Mad Max film from George Miller barely cracked the top five, May kicks off the summer movie season with a bang. From the best American film of the year to a long-awaited U.S. release from the director who topped last month’s list, and much more, check out my picks of the best movies arriving this month below.

17. Aggro DR1FT (Harmony Korine; May 10-16 in theaters)

Though a film I almost actively hated in the moment, reflecting back on Harmony Korine’s Aggro DR1FT, it’s certainly a nightmare that has stayed with me. Rory O’Connor said in his review, “Is it possible to leave your enfance without losing your terrible? The one-and-only Harmony Korine, now 50 years young, returns with Aggro Dr1ft, a premiere out-of-competition at the Venice Film Festival this week and, by my count, the only...

Vashon Film Institute has set the date for the third annual Vashon Island Film Festival, which is slated to take place Aug. 8-11. The announcement comes with the launch of two new divisions of the Vashon Film Institute and a new donation arm, which accepts restricted funds to be used solely to fund improvements at the Vashon Theatre.

Vfi’s new divisions are the Quartermaster Lab, a collective of filmmaking programs, and VFIpresents, its sales, distribution and release division, which will also focus on organizing community events outside Viff.

“The quintessential goal in founding Vfi was to support independent filmmaking in the Pacific Northwest,” said Mark Mathias Sayre, founder of Vashon Film Institute. “To that end, Viff has already brought compelling indie features and documentaries to local audiences and will continue to do so. But that’s only part of the game plan: We’re equally committed to engendering the...

Former enfante terrible filmmaker Harmony Korine (“Gummo“) has said he’s bored with conventional moviemaking and thinks video games, A.I., and experiential films are the way of the future. And well, he’s really putting his money where his mouth is with “Argro Dr1ft,” his latest feature, an experimental assassin movie that debuted at the Venice Film Festival last year (read our review).

Today, Korine’s Miami-based multimedia company Edglrd (pronounced “edgelord”) announces the limited theatrical release of “Aggro Drf1t.” For one week only, this May 10-16, 2024, Korine’s new experimental action will screen at independent theaters across nearly 20 key locations nationwide: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, New York, Portland, Raleigh, San Francisco, and Washington DC.

Continue reading Harmony Korine’s Experimental ‘Aggro Dr1ft’ Coming To Theaters For One Week In May at The Playlist.

Is Aggro Dr1ft the future of cinema? Not in any quantifiable, justifiable sense. Does it have anything to say? I admire Harmony Korine using infrared images and abstract editing to convey anxieties about growing older, being a married man, and serving as father to two children in this violent world. Did I laugh at the angel-winged, sword-wielding, gravel-voiced bad guy saying, “Dance bitches. Dance bitches. Dance bitch. Dance bitches”? Well…

After a contentious fall-festival run where people either had to declare Aggro Dr1ft either pisses on the graves of Eadweard Muybridge and Orson Welles or is an embarrassment for which Korine should be ashamed––I propose it’s sufficient to think “this looks neat” and find yourself chortling across 80 fleet-enough minutes––Korine’s Edglrd is migrating from initial public venues (L.A. strip clubs) to a proper theatrical release: 17 coast-to-coast theaters between May 10 and 16.

Release dates are below; we...

There’s plenty of grim box office results on Super Bowl Weekend — based on attendance, it’s an all-time historical low for the weekend — but why not start with the good news?

Tran Ahn Hung’s “The Taste of Things” (IFC), France’s submission for the International Oscar (although it failed to make the final list) opened in three New York/Los Angeles locations to a sensational $126,000 or $42,000 per theater.

Wim Wenders’ “Perfect Days” (Neon), the International Feature nominee from Japan grossed $180,000 in its first five days in five theaters.

Harmony Korine’s “Aggro Dr1ft” (Edglrd), an experimental action narrative shot in infrared, amassed $46,300 in five shows over four days in Los Angeles with an innovative release strategy.

And Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things” (Searchlight) continues to thrive after its strong Oscar nomination haul with another $1.125 million, putting it over the $30 million mark. That’s the best specialized total since “Everything Everywhere All at Once.

Early on in Harmony Korine’s new experimental action film Aggro Dr1ft, hitman protagonist Bo (Jordi Mollà) strangles a guy to death in his pool. Or maybe that happens toward the end. And, come to think of it, that might have been a hot tub. You’ll have to forgive my confusion, because the movie is defiantly nonlinear, shot entirely in the garish neons of infrared vision, and not anchored in any baseline reality: the moment he snuffs out this man, Bo unleashes a gigantic Balrog-like kaiju that appears to...

If you happened to be hanging around the Crazy Girls gentleman’s club in Los Angeles as Wednesday night turned into Thursday morning, the familiar haze of blunt smoke and neon might have lulled you into a false sense that this was a typical night of debauchery. Dollar bills covered the floor while laser lights flashed and scantily clad women twerked. The crowd of increasingly intoxicated men yelled “I Think You Should Leave” quotes and OutKast lyrics at the top of their lungs. The only thing separating it from your average bout of Wednesday night horniness was the fact that virtually no one was looking at the strippers. Despite the endless opportunities to gaze at beautiful women, all the boys’ eyes were on Harmony Korine.

Flanked by an entourage wearing the horned demon masks that have become his trademark in recent months — as well as two women in ghost makeup,...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSEvil Does Not Exist.We are saddened to learn that Issue 97 will be Cinema Scope’s last in its current form. To “do something valuable in this field,” editor and publisher Mark Peranson writes, “one needs creative freedom.” This is exactly what, for twenty-five years and just under 100 issues, Cinema Scope was able to provide, offering a space that allowed, per Peranson, “a certain kind of filmmaker’s work to be treated with the intellect and respect they deserve.” The print issue is on its way to subscribers now, and its entire contents—including interviews with Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Rodrigo Moreno, and Alex Ross Perry—can also be read online.Sandra Milo has died at the age of 90. She starred in Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963) and Juliet of the Spirits...

"I was born to kill." Edglrd has revealed some footage for this infrared hitman film. Feast your eyes on the official trailer for Harmony Korine's Aggro Dr1ft, one of the stupidest films ever made. Yes, seriously. Even though I may hate it, this trailer is worth sharing just so you can see how bad it is in order to help save your time & money. Aggro Dr1ft premiered at the 2023 Venice Film Festival last year and I hated it - here's my full review. In this sensual experimental elegy by Harmony Korine, spellbinding infrared photography evokes a dreamlike portrait of a tormented assassin. It's shot in and presented entirely as infrared footage, with annoying, blaring sound and music that will make you want to drive right off a cliff... Starring Jordi Mollà and Travis Scott, who I am sure both regret participating in this utterly awful hitman project. It's so terrible it even features A.

Rapper Travis Scott recently teamed up with the entertainment company A24 and director Harmony Korine (Kids) on two different projects. One was Circus Maximus, a companion piece to Scott’s album Utopia that reached theatres the day before Utopia was released. The other is the “action-oriented feature” Aggro Dr1ft, which was shot entirely in infrared and has been making the festival rounds. JoBlo’s own Chris Bumbray wasn’t very impressed with Aggro Dr1ft after catching one of its festival screenings, giving it a 5/10 review that can be read Here. Next up is a February 7th screening at a strip club in Los Angeles called Crazy Girls (tickets are available at This Link), and in anticipation of that screening a trailer for the film has arrived online. You can check it out in the embed above.

Aggro Dr1ft has the following logline: Breaking away from the traditional parameters of cinema,...

The newest film from Harmony Korine is titled Aggro Dr1ft, and it looks to be a bizarre piece of experimental cinema that will surely prove divisive.

Aggro Dr1ft explores the onslaught of digital ephemera and interrogates modern life through the vernacular of video games. Shot entirely through an infrared lens, the film follows a Miami Beach hitman as he embarks on the relentless pursuit of his next target.

Watch the official trailer below.

Joe Lipsett explained in his festival review of Aggro Dr1ft for Bloody Disgusting, “Harmony Korine has always been a provocateur, so it’s hardly surprising that his latest film, Aggro Dr1ft, is unconventional. The 80-minute feature is filmed entirely in infrared thermal imaging, which means the production is wall-to-wall vibrant reds, yellows, blues, and neon greens.”

Joe’s review continues, “Ultimately this is avant-garde, countercultural cinema that was never intended to appeal to the masses. As an artistic experiment,...

When Harmony Korine announced plans to form Edglrd, a Florida-based multimedia collective aiming to produce films, video games, and other new media experiments that blur the line between traditional categories, it felt like a logical step in the filmmaking maverick’s creative evolution. The “Spring Breakers” director has been open about his boredom with conventional films and his newfound interest in the gaming industry, saying that the “Call of Duty” trailer “looks better than anything Spielberg’s ever done.”

“Aggro DR1FT,” the first film project from Edglrd, is an extension of that creative ethos. Shot with infrared cameras, the film starring Jordi Mollà and Travis Scott uses thermal imagery and AI-generated animations to tell a story about a Miami hitman trapped in a criminal underworld that looks like nothing we’ve ever seen in movie theaters.

Fittingly, the first non-festival audiences to see “Aggro DR1FT” won’t actually do so in movie theaters.

Is Aggro Dr1ft the future of cinema? Not in any quantifiable, justifiable sense. Does it have anything to say? I admire Harmony Korine using infrared images and abstract editing to convey anxieties about growing older, being a married man, and acting as father to two children in a violent world. Did I laugh at the angel-winged, sword-wielding, gravel-voiced bad guy saying, “Dance bitches. Dance bitches. Dance bitch. Dance bitches”? Well…

After a contentious run on the fall-festival circuit, where people either had to declare Aggro Dr1ft was putting a stake in cinema’s heart by righteously pissing on the graves of Eadweard Muybridge and Orson Welles or an embarrassment for which Korine should be ashamed––I propose it’s sufficient to think “this looks kind of neat” and occasionally laugh across 80 fleet-enough minutes––Korine’s Edglrd is beginning their roll-out of the film at the Los Angeles strip club Crazy Girls...

Rapper Travis Scott stars in the first trailer for his and director Harmony Korine’s indie film “Aggro Dr1ft,” which was shot entirely in infrared.

The short trailer is bathed in the starkly contrasted colors of the infrared lens, and it follows an assassin on his journey. “Breaking away from the traditional parameters of cinema, ‘Aggro Dr1ft’ explores the onslaught of digital ephemera and interrogates modern life through the vernacular of video games. Shot entirely through an infrared lens, the film follows a Miami Beach hitman as he embarks on the relentless pursuit of his next target,” reads the logline.

“As it is, ‘Aggro Dr1ft’ is visually thrilling but somewhat tedious to sit through — better as wallpaper than the main attraction,” wrote Variety chief film critic Peter Debruge in his review. “Still, as with James Cameron’s ‘Avatar,’ there’s wisdom in the generic quality of his script. Cameron was...