the last call movie review

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On November 19, 1953, poet Robert Lowell wrote to his friend and fellow poet, Elizabeth Bishop:

"I guess you’ve heard about Dylan Thomas ’s death. He died four days after a brain stroke which seems to have immediately finished his mind. The details are rather gorgeously grim. He was two days incommunicado with some girl on Brinnin’s staff in some New York hotel. Then his wife came ... and tried quite literally to kill and sleep with everyone in sight. Or so the rumors go in Chicago and Iowa City. It’s a story that Thomas himself would have told better than anyone else; I suppose his life was short and shining as he wanted it — life, alas, is no joke."

As the legend (most probably apocryphal) goes, Dylan Thomas' final words before collapsing in the Chelsea Hotel were, “I’ve had 18 straight whiskies. I think that’s the record." People who were actually there in the White Horse Tavern that day dispute this, but those mythical 18 whiskeys are the organizing principle of Steven Bernstein ’s "Last Call," with Rhys Ifans as the Welsh poet drinking his way into delirium, surrounded by a hooting crowd of admirers and concerned "friends." This is well-trod ground (most recently, in 2014's " Set Fire to the Stars "), perhaps because there's something garish and hypnotic about Thomas' death and those final words, in all their sickly bravado. "Last Call," also written by Bernstein, takes the legend as truth, and expands on it, making Thomas' march towards that 18th drink a deliberate piece of performance art. "Last Call"'s original title was "Dominion," after one of Thomas' most famous poems, "And death shall have no dominion" (quoting St. Paul's epistle to the Romans). "Dominion" is a far better title than the generic "Last Call," but the problems here go beyond the title. Watching a man drink himself to death, seemingly on purpose, is a pretty tough whiskey to swallow, even if he is articulate and dramatic, even if he is a famous poet, and even if he is played with a shamanistic power by Rhys Ifans. 

Dylan Thomas was always more shaman than poet, and his poetry readings were major events. He didn't just have admirers. He had fans. He wasn't just a well-known poet. He was a "star." Like Anne Sexton was a star, like Edna St. Vincent Millay was a star: these poets crafted public personae, like movie stars do, and they wove spells over their audiences, in the same way Jim Morrison did, or Mick Jagger did. By the time period covered in "Last Call," Thomas already felt the emptiness of much of what he was doing. He knew he was a ham. He felt there was something fraudulent in how things were going. He admitted it himself once: "I'm a freak user of words, not a poet." In his mind, the American reading tours were cynical cash grabs, and he drank up all the profits anyway, leaving his wife and children at home in Wales, destitute. It was during one of these tours that Thomas stopped off in New York, to attend early rehearsals for a production of his verse play Under Milk Wood . He was already extremely unwell.

"Last Call" jumps around in time, and Bernstein switches up the styles, moving from desaturated color to black-and-white, bringing in fuzzy hallucinations and using rear-projection for some of the New York scenes. There's a lot of cross-cutting between scenes and locations and times, moving from Thomas giving readings at different colleges, back to Wales, where his wife Caitlin ( Romola Garai ) writes increasingly furious letters, begging for money. Meanwhile, Thomas' "handler" and eventual biographer John Malcolm Brinnin ( Tony Hale ) and Thomas' cynical doctor Dr. Fenton ( John Malkovich , who also produced), commiserate over what to do with their increasingly incapacitated client. Zosia Mamet plays Penelope, a young Vassar student, who's booked Thomas to come and speak at her college (incurring the wrath of the administration, who consider Thomas a dangerous libertine. They're not entirely wrong). Penelope loves Thomas with the passion of a fangirl, declaring to a friend, "I love everything about him. I'd have his child if he asked me to." Her friend says, "You are joking." She says, "Which part." 

All of these characters converge on Thomas as he holds court at the White Horse Tavern, being poured enormous shots of whiskey by bartender Carlos ( Rodrigo Santoro ), who has never heard of the words, "Okay, sir, I'm cutting you off." The film is broken up with grim time-stamps—"10:00 a.m.," "4:00 p.m."—showing Thomas' progression into that good night. Caitlin, whose behavior was even more scandalous than her husband's, shows up in a hallucination, " Pleasantville "-style, she in color surrounded by black-and-white. Sometimes there are flashbacks to Thomas' childhood, a small boy running through wide snow fields. It's a very busy film, stylistically. 

Most of the actors do very well in what are fairly thankless roles. Hale stands on the sidelines, watching helplessly as Thomas drinks himself to death, and also wondering if his idol has had a chance to read his manuscript yet. (One wants to say to Brinning; "Why are you giving a man on a bender the only existing copy of your manuscript? Have you ever met an alcoholic before?") The "Caitlin" sections are not all that successful, particularly since Garai is forced to read the letters she's writing out loud. This device would work beautifully onstage. On film it looks phony and presentational. 

Ifans, who recently played Captain Cat in a film adaptation of Thomas' Under Milk Wood , is glorious in the role, and the film is filled with shots of him reading Thomas' poetry during the preceding American tour: "Fern Hill," "A Child's Christmas in Wales," "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." Audio clips of Thomas reading his work give a feel for the spell he wove on his audiences. Thomas didn't speak so much as he sang; he didn't articulate so much as he rode the waves of sound he produced. Ifans captures Thomas' thrumming recitative style, which was more about creating a mood than conveying meaning. Bernstein's repeat shots of college girls staring up at Ifans, agog, rapt, are eloquent. This is more like the spoken-word poetry jams of later decades, the coffee-house folk-music culture of the 1960s. No wonder college kids were caught up in Thomas' magic. (It has always struck me as interesting that Thomas' most famous poem, "Do not go gentle into that good night" was a villanelle, one of the most rigorous rules-based forms in existence. When Thomas wanted to, he could submit to the rules, and he did it brilliantly!) 

Too late in the game, the film suddenly gets fascinating, albeit in an esoteric way, as Carlos the bartender moves from out behind the bar and takes over the narrative. Carlos reveals hidden depths, first in a spontaneous tango with the disillusioned Penny, and then in a brutal monologue where he cuts Thomas down to size. All along, Carlos has pretended to not be familiar with Thomas' work. Now it is clear Carlos knows it very well and finds it extremely wanting. He says, echoing many of Thomas' critics, that Thomas "mistakes sound for substance." Then he says, and it's the killshot, "You and I both know there's nothing there but the cadence of the language. Not Auden. Not Yeats." 

Is Carlos real? Or is he Thomas' worst fears made manifest? In his essay "Dylan the Durable," Seamus Heaney wrote of "Do not go gentle into that good night," "This is a son comforting a father; yet it is also, conceivably, the child poet in Thomas himself comforting the old ham he had become; the neophyte in him addressing the legend; the green fuse addressing the burnt-out case." 

This is an intriguing thing to consider when you read the poem, and it's something Ifans appears to understand intimately in his performance: The emptiness behind all those words, those freaky words that came so easily to him, that added up to so little. 

If you find Thomas fascinating, as I do, then there's a lot here to chew on. But "Last Call" is a pretty grim watch. Not "gorgeously grim." Just grim, end-stop. 

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Last Call (2020)

101 minutes

Rhys Ifans as Dylan Thomas

John Malkovich as Dr. Felton

Rodrigo Santoro as Carlos

Tony Hale as Brinnan

Romola Garai as Caitlin Thomas

Zosia Mamet as Penny

Jeremy Ferdman as Michael

• Steven Bernstein

Cinematographer

• Antal Steinbach
• Adam Bernstein
• Steven Bramson

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‘Last Call’ Review: A Split-Screen Stunt Obscures the Statement at the Center of This Suicidal Plea for Help

Suicide is too important a subject to be treated the way Gavin Michael Booth does here, using a man’s depression as the hook for his show-offy shoestring indie.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

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“ Last Call ” is a movie about a man in need of an intervention. Not Scott (Daved Wilkins, co-writer of the downbeat film), who misdials the suicide hotline and gets a janitor named Beth (Sarah Booth) — who’s working late at the local community college — instead, but director Gavin Michael Booth, who has fallen for the fad of shooting an entire feature in a single take — or a double take, in this case. Booth films both sides of this high-stakes phone conversation simultaneously, then crowds them into the same frame, so audiences can watch this miserable melodrama play out in real time.

Someone should step in and stop inexperienced directors from pulling this sort of stunt, especially when masked as some kind of statement, the way Booth does. I don’t mean to trivialize suicide by suggesting that “Last Call” doesn’t take the subject seriously. It’s just that Booth has chosen a technique that calls attention to itself in a way that other “oner” movies (“Birdman,” “1917”) manage to avoid. While it’s undeniably suspenseful to watch someone threaten to end his life in one half of the screen while a complete stranger ill-equipped to intervene struggles to talk him off the proverbial ledge, the director doesn’t seem especially invested in advancing public awareness about self-harm — which is ostensibly the reason that Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas and Laemmle Theatres are releasing this shoestring indie during Suicide Prevention Month.

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In interviews, helmer Booth (who has produced a ton of music videos and shorts, but only a couple other low-budget features) has admitted that he initially thought of making the Beth character a crisis hotline operator, but then he learned how those professionals are trained to deal with such calls. Their checklist didn’t point to the ending he wanted, so he made it a wrong number instead.

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On one hand, that adds a layer of unexpected drama to the situation. On the other, it reveals how disingenuous Booth and co-writer/co-star Wilkins were about saving Scott’s life. They’ve already decided how “Last Call” should play out, reverse-engineering their script to get audiences to that point, while hoping the formal conceit will impress and/or distract us from the insincerity of their intentions. Yes, the split-screen approach allows audiences to see what both characters are doing, but that’s also how traditional cross-cutting works — and here’s a story that should have been told in half the time.

Ironically, what’s wrong with “Last Call” isn’t the fact that it’s calculated, but that it’s not calculated enough . If you’re going to make an ultra-low-budget movie that takes place in real time, everything really ought to be planned out meticulously, but there’s so much dead space here, and it’s unfair to ask composer Adrian Ellis to fill it all: The two characters wander in and out of the frame, and DP Seth Wessel-Estes’ cameras have not been choreographed to do anything in their absence, leaving one-half of the shot “empty” at times. That’s something Mike Figgis realized when he made “Timecode” all the way back in 2000: If you’re showing concurrent action in multiple windows, it’s the director’s job to direct the audience’s attention. Booth doesn’t.

At the outset, he divides the screen horizontally, creating two dramatically widescreen windows stacked one on top of the other. Above, Booth shows a bar near closing time, although this shot doesn’t initially appear to be focused on anyone in particular. Down below, Beth’s half of the image is practically an action movie by comparison, as the single mom drives in to her night shift, juggling calls about her missing son — a dangling personal crisis that might deserve a film of its own (Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s Oscar-nominated short “Madre” comes to mind), but which remains maddeningly unresolved until the final seconds of this one.

Scott is depressed, and once he reaches Beth by phone, the dividing seam rotates until they appear side by side. The two characters eventually bond over their children, but the film is frustratingly slow to build, and suicide should never be used as a device in cinema. It’s too serious a subject (I’ll never forgive another Oscar short, “Curfew,” for being glib in that regard). Once Scott’s intentions do become clear, it’s even more frustrating to realize that Beth has no way of identifying where he is.

Booth the actor gives Booth the director (the two are married) a terrific, totally relatable performance, but there’s a cruelty to what the movie puts people through that would have been unbearable if the film had focused only on her side of the story, à la Gustav Möller’s “The Guilty” (a tightly scripted thriller told entirely from the POV of a 911 operator). Frankly, I don’t get this flavor-of-the-moment obsession with real-time storytelling. It’s been the default mode of live theater for centuries. More impressive are the directors who show they can create and sustain suspense by manipulating perspective and time. Booth is more invested in manipulating emotions, using suicide and that split-screen gimmick to turn “Last Call” into a personal calling card while the characters become casualties to that agenda.

Reviewed online, Los Angeles, Sept. 18, 2020. Running time: 76 MIN.

• Production: A Mutiny Pictures presentation of a Mimetic Entertainment production. Producers: Gavin Michael Booth, Daved Wilkins. Executive producers: Michael T. Delellis, Susie Delellis Petruccelli, Shelby Williams.
• Crew: Director: Gavin Michael Booth. Screenplay: Daved Wilkins, Gavin Michael Booth. Camera: Seth Wessel-Estes. Editor: Gavin Michael Booth. Music: Adrian Ellis.
• With: Daved Wilkins, Sarah Booth.

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Drinking, sex, swearing in unlikable coming-home drama.

A Lot or a Little?

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

Clear negative messages, including iffy behavior w

Characters are deeply unlikable and frequently arg

Brothers fight and shove each other. Arguing in ba

Constant crude sex-related talk and/or sexual gest

Extremely strong, near constant language includes

Reference to Zabar's.

Takes place in a bar, with constant drinking (whis

Parents need to know that Last Call is a drama about a man (Jeremy Piven) who returns to his hometown and clashes with his friends and family while his crooked boss tries to get him to help build a casino. It has crude and sometimes offensive humor, unlikable characters, and other mature content. While there…

Positive Messages

Clear negative messages, including iffy behavior with no consequences. A racist joke (using a fake Indian accent). Italians are referred to as "guidos." A comment about "getting AIDS." Main argument seems to be whether it's better to leave home and find a job (no matter how sleazy or crooked) or stay behind and do as little as possible. Neither answer seems very appealing.

Positive Role Models

Characters are deeply unlikable and frequently argue and tease one another mercilessly, even though they're supposed to be best friends and/or family.

Violence & Scariness

Brothers fight and shove each other. Arguing in bar; characters go outside to fight, which isn't shown. Funeral sequence, with body lying in state. Character pepper-sprayed in face. Boy hit really hard with a ball; falls to the ground in pain. Boy urinates on trash (nothing shown).

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

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Constant crude sex-related talk and/or sexual gestures. Scantily clad women at party referred to as "hookers." (One has a whip.) One woman grinds on a man's lap (semi-lap-dance). A couple has sex with a man behind a woman; he films it in the mirror (there's thrusting but no graphic nudity). Couple emerges from the back of a truck, presumably having just had sex. Characters make a bet to see who can have the most (and most interesting) sex. Man sleeping in a bed with two sex workers. A character goes to confession to trick the priest into giving him the names of "loose women." Condoms used as water balloons to attack people and cars. Inflatable sex doll shown. T-shirt that reads "I came on Eileen." Reference to an "Alabama hot pocket, with an oral twist." Police car covered in hundreds of sticky notes with drawings of penises. Character caught in a comical, sexual-looking position while helping another character "pop her back."

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

Extremely strong, near constant language includes swearing and slurs: "f--k," "motherf----r," "s--t," "c--k," "c---sucker," "c--t," "p---y," "t-ts," "a--hole," "f--got," "ass," "bitch," "bastard," "pr--k," "d--k," "suck d--ks," "piss," "cahones," "hard-on," "erection," "stroker," "hooker," and exclamatory use of "Christ." Middle-finger gesture.

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

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

Takes place in a bar, with constant drinking (whiskey and beer). There are never any consequences, no hangovers, no other damage done. One character appears staggering drunk in one scene. Brief instance of teen drinking. Character arrested for having an open container and a marijuana pipe. Characters smoke pot using a gas mask. A priest drinks from a flask while hearing confession. Cigar smoking and cigarettes shown. Reference to selling crack.

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 Last Call is a drama about a man ( Jeremy Piven ) who returns to his hometown and clashes with his friends and family while his crooked boss tries to get him to help build a casino. It has crude and sometimes offensive humor, unlikable characters, and other mature content. While there's no nudity, there are plenty of explicit sexual references and gestures, simulated sex with thrusting, a bet between two men to see who can have more sex, scantily clad sex workers at a party, a lap dance, and more. Language is extremely strong and constant, with almost every word imaginable used. A bar is a main setting, and there's constant drinking, day and night, with seemingly no consequences. One character appears drunk once. Characters also smoke pot, cigarettes and cigars are shown, and there are other drug references. Violence includes some mild/off-screen fighting. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

In LAST CALL, Mick ( Jeremy Piven ) returns to Darby Heights, Pennsylvania, to attend his mother's funeral. He butts heads with his widowed father, Laurence ( Jack McGee ), who's a small-time crab fisherman and runs a local but beloved dive bar, and his brother, Dougal ( Zach McGowan ), who has a criminal record and does little more than drink and smoke pot. Everyone picks on Mick for leaving, going to college, and getting a job in real estate. But he maintains that he has ambition, while his friends do not. His company plans to build a casino in Darby Heights, so Mick gets to work securing the signatures of his neighbors, promising them that the casino will help bring the neighborhood back to life. But Mick's childhood crush, Ali ( Taryn Manning ), discovers the dark side of the deal. So Mick must try to set things right.

Is It Any Good?

This drama tries to capture the feel of community in a certain urban neighborhood, but it's totally undone by unlikable characters, dangling plot threads, and a distractingly uneven tone. Last Call begins with a death, and the moment the funeral scene ends, no one ever really seems to mourn again; it's forgotten by the very next scene. This lapse seems to happen to many plot threads in the movie. It's as if each scene were improvised from the ground up, and whatever details that didn't fit were just left hanging. In some scenes, Mick's father is working on a hopelessly dilapidated boat, and in other scenes, they go crab fishing in a brand-new boat (despite the fact that they have no money and the bar is struggling).

A light, bittersweet score tries to tie things together, but it, too, usually feels wrong for whatever the scenes are trying to convey. Then Mick claims to be "in his 40s," although he looks (and actually is) mid-50s, and the other characters appear to be the same age. Yet they act like immature jerks, drinking all the time (with no consequences), playing dumb practical jokes, and making bets about who can have the most sex. They constantly yell at and pick on one another and get into fights, and it's not very easy to like any of them. The rushed, last-minute, save-the-day finale is so hard to believe that it feels like Last Call leaves off with an insult.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about how Last Call depicts drinking . Does the movie make drinking look fun? Does anyone ever appear to be drunk or hung over? Are any other consequences shown? Why does that matter?

How is sex viewed in the film and by the characters? What values are imparted by the idea of a sex contest?

Did you find any of the movie's jokes or humor offensive? Is saying something racist less problematic if it's said for a laugh? Why, or why not?

The movie argues between leaving your hometown to find work and make good and staying true to your roots and not leaving. What are the pros and cons of each path?

Movie Details

• In theaters : March 19, 2021
• On DVD or streaming : March 19, 2021
• Cast : Jeremy Piven , Taryn Manning , Zach McGowan
• Director : Paolo Pilladi
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : IFC Films
• Genre : Drama
• Run time : 102 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : crude sexual content, pervasive language and some drug use
• Last updated : January 27, 2023

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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‘Last Call’ Review: A Split-Screen Stunt Obscures the Statement at the Center of This Suicidal Plea for Help

“ Last Call ” is a movie about a man in need of an intervention. Not Scott (Daved Wilkins, co-writer of the downbeat film), who misdials the suicide hotline and gets a janitor named Beth (Sarah Booth) — who’s working late at the local community college — instead, but director Gavin Michael Booth , who has fallen for the fad of shooting an entire feature in a single take — or a double take, in this case. Booth films both sides of this high-stakes phone conversation simultaneously, then crowds them into the same frame, so audiences can watch this miserable melodrama play out in real time.

Someone should step in and stop inexperienced directors from pulling this sort of stunt, especially when masked as some kind of statement, the way Booth does. I don’t mean to trivialize suicide by suggesting that “Last Call” doesn’t take the subject seriously. It’s just that Booth has chosen a technique that calls attention to itself in a way that other “oner” movies (“Birdman,” “1917”) manage to avoid. While it’s undeniably suspenseful to watch someone threaten to end his life in one half of the screen while a complete stranger ill-equipped to intervene struggles to talk him off the proverbial ledge, the director doesn’t seem especially invested in advancing public awareness about self-harm — which is ostensibly the reason that Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas and Laemmle Theatres are releasing this shoestring indie during Suicide Prevention Month.

In interviews, helmer Booth (who has produced a ton of music videos and shorts, but only a couple other low-budget features) has admitted that he initially thought of making the Beth character a crisis hotline operator, but then he learned how those professionals are trained to deal with such calls. Their checklist didn’t point to the ending he wanted, so he made it a wrong number instead.

On one hand, that adds a layer of unexpected drama to the situation. On the other, it reveals how disingenuous Booth and co-writer/co-star Wilkins were about saving Scott’s life. They’ve already decided how “Last Call” should play out, reverse-engineering their script to get audiences to that point, while hoping the formal conceit will impress and/or distract us from the insincerity of their intentions. Yes, the split-screen approach allows audiences to see what both characters are doing, but that’s also how traditional cross-cutting works — and here’s a story that should have been told in half the time.

Ironically, what’s wrong with “Last Call” isn’t the fact that it’s calculated, but that it’s not calculated enough . If you’re going to make an ultra-low-budget movie that takes place in real time, everything really ought to be planned out meticulously, but there’s so much dead space here, and it’s unfair to ask composer Adrian Ellis to fill it all: The two characters wander in and out of the frame, and DP Seth Wessel-Estes’ cameras have not been choreographed to do anything in their absence, leaving one-half of the shot “empty” at times. That’s something Mike Figgis realized when he made “Timecode” all the way back in 2000: If you’re showing concurrent action in multiple windows, it’s the director’s job to direct the audience’s attention. Booth doesn’t.

At the outset, he divides the screen horizontally, creating two dramatically widescreen windows stacked one on top of the other. Above, Booth shows a bar near closing time, although this shot doesn’t initially appear to be focused on anyone in particular. Down below, Beth’s half of the image is practically an action movie by comparison, as the single mom drives in to her night shift, juggling calls about her missing son — a dangling personal crisis that might deserve a film of its own (Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s Oscar-nominated short “Madre” comes to mind), but which remains maddeningly unresolved until the final seconds of this one.

Scott is depressed, and once he reaches Beth by phone, the dividing seam rotates until they appear side by side. The two characters eventually bond over their children, but the film is frustratingly slow to build, and suicide should never be used as a device in cinema. It’s too serious a subject (I’ll never forgive another Oscar short, “Curfew,” for being glib in that regard). Once Scott’s intentions do become clear, it’s even more frustrating to realize that Beth has no way of identifying where he is.

Booth the actor gives Booth the director (the two are married) a terrific, totally relatable performance, but there’s a cruelty to what the movie puts people through that would have been unbearable if the film had focused only on her side of the story, à la Gustav Möller’s “The Guilty” (a tightly scripted thriller told entirely from the POV of a 911 operator). Frankly, I don’t get this flavor-of-the-moment obsession with real-time storytelling. It’s been the default mode of live theater for centuries. More impressive are the directors who show they can create and sustain suspense by manipulating perspective and time. Booth is more invested in manipulating emotions, using suicide and that split-screen gimmick to turn “Last Call” into a personal calling card while the characters become casualties to that agenda.

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Last Call Review: Closing Time

For a movie as juvenile and hollow as Last Call appears from its promotional material, it possesses a strange amount of heart. The film stars Jeremy Piven as Seamus "Mick" McDougal, a successful real estate developer who made it out of his blue-collar neighborhood in Philadelphia only to be pulled right back to the homestead when his mother passes away and the pub his father owns is floundering.

It's a movie that sees itself as a comedy first, indulging far too much in some truly regressive "bro" humor. But beneath that clumsy façade and its lower-budget aesthetic, it's clear the filmmakers wanted to craft a sincere ode to the old neighborhood bars of their past, acknowledging and exalting them as the formative foundation of so many lives.

It's just a shame that, in doing so, they could not find a better balance between accurately depicting the kind of cringeworthy jokes you're likely to constantly hear in such establishments with pursuing a more earnest exploration of gentrification and the dramatic difficulties inherent in returning home a changed man.

The result is a movie hobbled by tonal whiplash. It is a film that draws the viewer in with moments of genuine pathos before gobsmacking them with repetitive gags of questionable comedic value.

Funny, but not funny ha-ha

When we meet Mick (Piven), director Paoli Pilladi introduces the dichotomy between his upbringing and his exodus from the neighborhood by contrasting sweet moments of him as a youth (like getting teased by his degenerate friends) with his loftier present life (getting a back massage from SNL vet Cheri Oteri.) There's a twinkle of sweetness to the childhood flashback that suggests Last Call is going to be close in tone to, say, something like Kevin Smith 's Jersey Girl , a John Hughesian dramedy that is heartfelt first and only relies on humor for relief.

But within ten minutes of Mick arriving back at the Bucket, the pub his father Laurence (Jack McGee) owns and lives in, that illusion is shattered rather quickly.

Bruce Dern is there as Coach, a mainstay at the bar with a tab the length of a giraffe's neck. So are Mick's childhood friends Whitey (Jamie Kennedy wearing an omnipresent and outdated bluetooth headset) and Paddy (Chris Kerson, splitting the difference between young Billy Crystal and old Jon Gries). His brother Laurence "Dougal" McDougal (Zach McGowen) arrives late to the wake, in handcuffs, after waking up drunk in his car.

After a tense scene between Mick and Dougal arguing over the responsible brother abandoning his clan and the ne'er-do-well sibling deflecting his obvious failings, Pilladi cuts outside the Bucket to a cop car covered in Post-It notes with vulgar drawings on them and a small group of children scurrying away. This juxtaposition is the film in a nutshell.

When the movie takes the time to unpack Mick's baggage about leaving the neighborhood and his frustrations with his family, it functions surprisingly well. There's a running subplot about a rival real estate developer, Mick's boss and what appears to be a deep corruption scheme ravaging the neighborhood. Within that framework, there's plenty of room to wring some drama from Mick's complicity and how he became the kind of person his former friends despise.

Instead of digging into that in a meaningful way, however, the film repeatedly gets bogged down by diversions surrounding Dougal, Whitey and Paddy's childish activities, principally among them an ongoing "sex bet" whose ultimate victor will receive the greatest possible MacGuffin, a VHS tape recording of a little league baseball game the trio has been obsessively debating their entire adult lives.

While Kennedy avails himself quite well through the film's man-child hijinks, offering a supporting character with the texture and internal consistency necessary to make his goofiness really sing, everyone else just doesn't fit. Sure, the material itself is laughably unfunny, but actors like Kerson and McGowen just possess too much genuine dramatic energy to make the comedy feel natural, making every extended bit or jokey aside feel particularly egregious and diversionary. Dern and Raging Bull 's Cathy Moriarty are pleasant to see anytime, but they aren't given much to do either.

Comedic relief is supposed to foster laughs, not eye rolls or yawns.

Wasted potential

But the film's biggest tragedy is how sharply it encapsulates the tragedy of Jeremy Piven's acting career.

On the surface, Mick is the perfect role to capitalize on Piven's strengths as a performer. He has natural comedic ability, his own unique kind of charisma, and the range to deliver serious drama within his signature persona. Few other guys are better suited to portray the inner conflict of a hooligan gone straight reconnecting with his roots.

But since Entourage , Piven has received no roles commensurate to the absolute meal he made out of Ari Gold. That show could have been a tipping point for Piven to move into more meaty leading man roles or, at the very least, a better string of interesting supporting turns. Instead, he only ends up in half baked, small release films like this one, movies that fail to live up to their own potential in precisely the way he has. To watch him play a guy who did get out and make something of himself while seeing how trapped he is in this cycle is somehow more painful than the actual conflict onscreen.

There are bits of the subplot between Mick and his childhood crush/current love interest Ali (Taryn Manning) that feel genuine and engaging, not unlike some of the better romances in even the silliest Adam Sandler comedies. Their work together, while housed in an otherwise middling picture, is a cruel reminder of the kind of movies he could be making but never seems to get to.

Perhaps this is a stretch, but there are few things someone like, say, Robert Downey Jr. does in any given Marvel movie that Piven couldn't also sleepwalk through. How has this dude not played a smarmy villain for Big Disney yet?

Maybe on some level he's more drawn to this kind of material and, despite the smaller cultural footprint, is actually happy making movies like Last Call . Perhaps the film, originally titled Crabs in a Bucket , just meant more to him on the page, or his agent has been explicitly directed not to campaign for higher-hanging fruit in Piven's name.

It's fun to imagine an alternate recent Hollywood history where the man has branched out into better, more fascinating roles, or at least simpler turns that make more money. But maybe making deeply unfunny movies written as love letters to bars is more his wheelhouse. If so, expect to see two to three more Last Calls every year until he retires.

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Last Call review: HBO's serial killer doc is powerful and infuriating

Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York is streaming now on Max.

Kristen Baldwin is the TV critic for EW

There are murders in HBO 's Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York — at least five, probably more. But the other crime at the heart of this powerful and infuriating true-crime documentary is why it took decades and countless pleas for help from the LGBTQ+ community to capture the man responsible for so much death.

This thoughtful, well-paced series from director Anthony Caronna weaves together illuminating social and historical context, loving explorations of the victims' lives, and a gripping criminal mystery to create an emotional and educational odyssey that transcends the standard boundaries of true crime.

In 1991, a maintenance worker in Lancaster County, PA found a dismembered male body — that of Peter Anderson, a 54-year-old banker from Philadelphia — in a rest stop trash can. Then came Thomas Mulcahy, 57, a married father of four, whose dismembered body was discovered in 1992 by maintenance workers in Woodland Township, New Jersey. Anthony Marrero, a 44-year-old sex worker, was next, found in the woods of Ocean County, NJ in 1993, followed by Michael Sakara, a 56-year-old typesetter, whose partial remains were found by a hot dog vendor in Rockland County, NY. Though the men didn't know one another, all of them had one thing in common: They were last seen in New York City, in areas and bars frequented by gay men.

Based on the nonfiction book by Elon Green, Last Call hones its focus on the many ways these murder investigations — which remained separate for years, due to jurisdictional issues and sub-par communication between law enforcement agencies — were hindered from the start by implicit and overt police bias. "More often than not the police back then were either indifferent or hostile" to the LGBTQ+ community, says Matt Foreman, a former director at New York City's Anti-Violence Project, which was founded in 1980 after a rise in bias attacks.

As a result, the cops themselves knew nothing about the community whose help they would need to stop the killer. "You know, it's just a different world," says Nick Theodos, a former NJ State Police detective who was brought in to work the Mulcahy case. Using interviews with community organizers, archival footage, and news reports from New York's Gay USA public-access broadcast, Last Call composes a vivid illustration of the distrust and suspicion that divided the city's gay community from law enforcement at the time. Because queer New Yorkers felt safer reporting crimes to groups like AVP than the police, the detectives investigating these murders were also less likely to connect them to the ongoing rise in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes .

The series is particularly successful at revealing how this barrier — and other issues facing the LGBTQ+ community at the time — persist to this day. At the conclusion of his interview with Anthony Caronna, former Pennsylvania State Police corporal Carl Harnish asks the director, "Why is the emphasis on the gay part?" Jay Musser, Harnish's former partner on the Peter Anderson murder, repeatedly insists that the victim's sexuality was "irrelevant" to the investigation, adding, "I don't know anything about the community." In the next episode, Caronna interviews a man who was drugged and taken back to his apartment in 1992 by a man who had a duffle bag containing rope. He escaped but didn't call the NYPD. "What are they gonna do?" he scoffs. "Nothing!"

It took 10 years for police to locate and arrest the perpetrator, Richard Rogers, a 51-year-old nurse at New York's St. Vincent's hospital — but as Last Call reveals, the story only gets more devastating from there. Thankfully, Caronna balances the agony of the myriad injustices with attentive and affectionate interludes devoted to the men who were murdered. Through interviews with friends, former partners, children, and family members, Last Call carefully constructs portraits of Anderson, Mulcahy, Marrero, and Sakara that celebrate them as men who loved and were loved. And Marrero's great-nephew, Antonio Marrero, reveals that his own parents disowned him when he came out as bisexual — which made him even more determined to keep his uncle's memory alive and break the cycle of shame in his family.

Antonio's story dovetails effectively with Last Call 's overarching message: Every hard-fought victory for the LGBTQ+ community is built on a mountain of setbacks, and the prize of progress, though essential, is never perfect. Grade: A-

The first episode of Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York is streaming now on Max. New episodes air Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.

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Renowned writer F. Scott Fitzgerald is living the last months of his life with his youthful secretary, confidant and protege who later wrote a memoir of their time together. Renowned writer F. Scott Fitzgerald is living the last months of his life with his youthful secretary, confidant and protege who later wrote a memoir of their time together. Renowned writer F. Scott Fitzgerald is living the last months of his life with his youthful secretary, confidant and protege who later wrote a memoir of their time together.

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• Trivia The gray haired woman in the final scene at the bookstore who is looking at a display of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels in the window, is the real Frances Kroll.

F. Scott Fitzgerald : Frances; am I correct in thinking that you're jewish?

Frances Kroll : Yes I am. Why?

F. Scott Fitzgerald : And your father? Hes a self-made man?

Frances Kroll : Yes, very much so. Hes intelligent but the only education hes had is reading the bible in Hebrew.

F. Scott Fitzgerald : Perfect. Where was he born?

Frances Kroll : Russia. Why?

F. Scott Fitzgerald : And what was his trade? What does he do for a living?

Frances Kroll : Hes a furrier.

F. Scott Fitzgerald : You see Cecelias dad Brady would probably be Jewish in reality but I've made him Irish because hes the bad guy and I don't want to make the bad guy a Jew.

Frances Kroll : Why not?

F. Scott Fitzgerald : Hitler.

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Last Call Review: A Serial Killer Mystery with a Much Scarier Crime

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The acolyte continues to break a major rule george lucas had for jedi, every tv series coming to major streaming in june 2024.

Say their names: Thomas Mulcahy. Peter Anderson. Anthony Marrero. Michael J. Sakara. Frederic Spencer. These men fell victim to a serial murderer dubbed the “Last Call Killer,” a predator that stalked LGBTQ+ men during the 1990s in New York City.

Interviews with the families and friends of said victims make up the bulk of the runtime of Last Call , the new HBO docuseries that chronicles the search for the killer. True-crime fans should take note: this is not your usual whodunit.

For the record, viewers of Last Call do find out 'whodunit' over the course of the series’ four episodes. As directed by Anthony Caronna ( Pride ), however, the show doesn’t follow the traditional clue-by-clue mystery format that invites an audience to solve the crime as they watch. Caronna instead takes a different approach: one focusing more on the lives of the victims, and on a community forsaken.

Watching the debut episode, it first seems like Caronna has fallen into the trap of so many recent docuseries : stretching a too-thin story over multiple hours to meet an episode quota. The show opens with police recalling the discovery of a human head along rural Route 72 in New Jersey. It belonged to Thomas Mulchay, a Massachusetts businessman, husband, and father. A search by law enforcement turns up the rest of Mulchay’s remains, dismembered, packed in plastic bags, and stretched out over several miles.

An analysis of his movements the night he disappeared reveal that he’d stopped at a posh New York City bar, The Townhouse, just prior to his death. At first, investigators don’t see any significance to the location. Interviews with bar patrons, however, turn up something unexpected: The Townhouse is a clandestine gay bar, catering to wealthy closeted and married men.

At this point in the series, Caronna takes a hard left turn in his narrative. Whereas any other big true-crime show — 20/20, To Catch a Predator — would have focused solely on the investigation, with family and friends weeping for the cameras, Last Call jumps into biopic territory. Mulchay’s adult daughter, Tracey O’Shea, remembers her dad, speaking of his parenting skills, his favorite activities, his personality quirks. Queer community activists then enter the frame, discussing their relationships with police, and how they set out to warn the community about a killer on the loose during a period of extreme public homophobia. It seems like a digression from the show’s main focus—finding the killer.

Not What It Seems

When Caronna uses a similar approach in Episode 2, discussing the murder of Anthony Marrero, a gay sex worker, it becomes clear that the director has a different story in mind. Last Call doesn’t want to titillate viewers with a real-life murder mystery and all the salacious detail that comes with it. Caronna wants his audience to get mad .

Every frame of Last Call teems with anger — as much rage against the killer as against a homophobic police department ill-equipped to aid a community in need. In the 1980s and 90s, even in a city as liberal as New York , LGBTQ+ people lived life constantly glancing over their shoulders to avoid violence. Yes, Greenwich Village (home of the fabled Stonewall Inn) had a reputation as an oasis for queer people looking to live openly among other members of their community. That didn’t stop outsiders — or police — from harassing residents on a regular basis.

Related: Best True Crime Documentaries on Max

At one point in Last Call , a community activist holds up a map of The Village, with tiny purple dots indicating the location of attacks in the first few months of 1992. That the dots look like a giant blood stain feels appropriate: there were over 600 acts of violence against LGBTQ people in the first three months of the year alone. Virtually none of those crimes were ever prosecuted. Young people — in particular young queer folks — should take note. Never say older gay and trans people didn’t have it hard.

Homophobia Is the True Crime

Caronna devotes so much of Last Call to this backdrop, we suspect, because the director knows the murders committed by the Last Call Killer are not the most egregious crimes in this story. During one interview, two investigators ask Caronna why it’s such a big deal that the sexuality of the victims was important to the case. In another, the brother of a career hustler insists his deceased sibling couldn’t possibly have been gay. When Tracey O’Shea weeps for her father, she doesn’t cry because he had a secret life. She cries because she understands the kind of shame that forced him to have one.

The biggest crime here is homophobia, pure and simple.

Caronna avoids making his narrative overly didactic by finding a perfect balance of plot threads. Friends remember victims, community organizers vent their anger with law enforcement, police and other investigators share their frustrations with investigating the murders, and so on. The four episodes of Last Call feel cyclical in that way. That approach also gives the show an eerie quality. The viewer knows that another murder always lurks around the corner.

Related: The 10 Greatest Serial Killer Movies of the 2010s, Ranked

An Angry Call

The fourth episode of Last Call details the break in the case that finally leads police to the Last Call Killer. Here, Caronna avoids heavy-handed psychoanalysis. Instead, he interviews longtime friends of the killer. It will astonish viewers how of their testimony echoes that of the family members of Last Call Killer’s victims: how they had no idea that he led a double life, how they suspected he was gay though he denied it, how they had no clue that amid his extensive video and photo collection, he’d drawn blood and wounds over images of muscular men.

Caronna intimates that the same homophobia which compounded the investigation into the Last Call Killer, on some level, also motivated his crimes. In that way, the director almost evokes sympathy for his villain. Almost.

Caronna devotes the final minutes of Last Call to the rash of hate crimes against queer people that exploded in the 1990s, and draws parallels between the homophobic rhetoric of the time with the current anti-LGBTQ words of American politicians. He makes the case that public demonization of queer Americans stokes the violence that claimed the lives of the Last Call Killer’s victims, as well as that of Marsha P. Johnson, Brandon Teena, Matt Shepherd, the victims of the Pulse Massacre and so many others. Last Call is not the usual siren call of crime-as-entertainment.

Last Call is a cry of anger.

Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York premiered its first episode Sunday, July 9th, with the next three episodes airing Sunday nights. It can be streamed on Max.

• Movie and TV Reviews
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Release date

29 th March 2021

All films, even bad ones, make some sort of case for their own existence – for the story they want to tell. It’s bewildering as to why Last Call was even made. Perhaps the movie is somehow the end result of an elaborate tax-evasion scheme? Perhaps everyone involved lost a bet?

Jeremy Piven is Mick, who thought he left the nondescript suburbs of Philadelphia behind, having moved to the city and made a name for himself as a real-estate developer. After the death of his mother, he ceremoniously returns home (which appears to have taken a grand total of five minutes driving). Will he work with his father and brother to resurrect the family pub to its former glory, or will he push ahead with his plans to build a new casino which threatens to strip the neighbourhood of its local colour?

It’s actually an achievement to have produced a feature that manages to be so clumsy on every conceivable level. Some of the choices are simply baffling. Jeremy Piven (in his mid 50s) plays a man in his f40s, with the great Cathy Moriarty (a mere five years older than Jeremy), playing the grandmother of his love interest, who appears to actually be in her 40s. Incidentally, Moriarty plays her role with a vague Eastern European accent, which she seems to forget about halfway through a sentence, before remembering. The performances range from lazy to just plain bad.

The end result is worryingly amateurish, with random profanities seemingly intended as jokes. The protagonist is repeatedly accused of suffering from erectile dysfunction. Apparently this is hilarious. Unsurprisingly, there’s also (lethargic) homophobia and transphobia, but this is the work simply trying to be edgy. However, by this point anyone still watching will be hoping that the flick falls off the edge of something. From a great height.

From the inexpert, almost arbitrary ways in which shots are composed, to the nonsensical editing, to the slapdash sound mixing that makes the sparkling dialogue difficult to hear, perhaps the greatest sin committed by Last Call is how thoroughly unlikable everyone is. Evidently, all the main characters are heavy drinkers, so at least viewers can keep their fingers crossed that alcohol poisoning will soon claim them all.

Oliver Johnston

Last Call is released digitally on demand on 29 th March 2021.

Watch the trailer for Last Call here:

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Last Call Reviews

An entertaining ride for horror fans which benefits from great production design, The Call uses its clichés for a purpose and has fun along the way.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 19, 2021

This somewhat pedestrian documentary by Jon Brewer doesn't have enough performance footage, and has too much commentary by some questionable experts.

Full Review | Sep 26, 2020

Intensely personal, evocative drama about suicide.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 22, 2020

The drama never exploits the themes of suicide and grief to manipulate its audience, instead giving a realistic and heart-breaking account of a man whose life is on the line and will stay with its audience long after viewing.

Full Review | Sep 21, 2020

An impressive piece of ambitious filmmaking and acting that handles the difficult topic of suicidal ideation well, but sometimes veers too far into melodrama.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Sep 21, 2020

A simple story told in a captivating style, Last Call is a compelling and devastating portrait of depression and the power of human connection in an unexpected form.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 20, 2020

Forgiveness and compassion are human qualities that we may not have witnessed in a long time in ourselves, others, and on the news. It's on full display in Last Call and is worth seeking out.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Sep 18, 2020

If you're going to make an ultra-low-budget movie that takes place in real time, everything really ought to be planned out meticulously in advance, but there's so much dead space here, and it's unfair to ask composer Adrian Ellis to fill it all...

Full Review | Sep 18, 2020

Where one-take dramas often lose their propulsive drive, this is a tight 77-minutes composed of a continuous fight or flight adrenaline rush whether dialogue is spoken or not.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Sep 18, 2020

[It's] built around a gimmick that has fallen flat on its face for other filmmakers, but works rather well for the subdued and sad story being told here

Full Review | Original Score: 6.5/10 | Sep 18, 2020

By the end, we know these characters, their pain, and the real cost of what has unfolded.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 18, 2020

An important scenario told through a dynamic narrative style, Last Call offers up a necessary dialogue on a topic that is all too often branded as taboo.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 14, 2020

LAST CALL is a marvelous film. It plays on many levels, and the themes of heartbreak and depression never feel forced or insincere.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Sep 11, 2020

... Last Call will pull you in with its creativity and then absolutely knock you on your ass with its climax.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 11, 2020

ruthlessly intense in the suspense it engenders in the audience as these two characters discover the intimacy of instant communication by phone has its inevitable limitations

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 6, 2020

Gavin Michael Booth faultlessly achieves the split-screen/single-take technique, while also exploring the matter of suicide with unadorned honesty.

Full Review | Apr 1, 2020

A generic suicide hot-line thriller memorable for its long-take/split screen gimmick, and little else.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 14, 2019

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Last Call Sees What Most True Crime Misses

On the surface, Last Call looks like dozens of other true-crime series. All the familiar visual language is in place: footage of recreated scenes, lots of talking heads, timelines that flash across the screen, piles of images of documents and police evidence. Most true-crime docuseries use this kind of material to add up to proof of guilt or draw out the pleasurable dissatisfaction of a mystery that hasn’t yet been solved. Last Call still does those things, but with a marked lack of fanfare. Given the course of a story that’s subtitled When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York, it’s necessary to identify a killer, to consider that person’s life and the details of their crimes, and yet Last Call treats those narrative necessities with an almost reluctant eye. Yes, these things are important, but other things matter more.

Directed by Anthony Caronna and adapted from the book of the same name by Elon Green, Last Call makes a suggestive companion to the recent Black Mirror episode “Loch Henry,” which casts a sardonic eye on the true-crime genre as it’s usually deployed: the promise of careful sensitivity and the end result of naked sensationalism. As a story about a serial killer who murdered several queer men in New York in the early ’90s, Last Call could very easily have been exactly the kind of true crime “Loch Henry” sneers at, a dime-a-dozen streaming thriller full of shock and disgust and obsession with a killer’s mind. But it’s more interested in the lives of the victims than the killer, more attentive to history and cultural context than to repetition of violent details, and vastly more curious about systems of bias than individual criminality. It’s gentle and careful and immensely loving, even when it’s also full of palpable fury — everything true crime so rarely understands how to be.

The series’s four episodes, which roll out Sunday nights on HBO and Max beginning July 9, spend significant time with victims’ families, friends, and lovers, and their accounts become multifaceted portraits of who these men were. Because they were queer men, and because not all of them were out to everyone in their lives, the varied, overlapping perspectives help resist any simplistic reading of who they were and how they’re remembered. Thomas Mulcahy’s daughter talks about how loving he was, and about the pain of losing him in young adulthood, just as she was beginning to know him as a person beyond just her father. Peter Anderson’s lover describes their yearslong relationship and how rich it was, and what it was like to keep their sexuality a secret for all that time.

Last Call ’s humanizing impulse permeates the entire series, but it’s most striking in the treatment of Anthony Marrero, a Puerto Rican sex worker whose story stands in contrast to the killer’s other white, more economically privileged victims. Last Call includes some of the contemporaneous coverage of Marrero’s murder, which was dismissive at best and occasionally almost glib. Rather than stopping there, though, with an uninterrogated pat on the back at how far we’ve come, Last Call digs in with lengthy interviews with Marerro’s brother, who still can’t acknowledge that part of Marrero’s life, with a friend who knew Marrero well, and with Marrero’s great-nephew, who’s trying to push back against the way Marrero was erased within his own family. The result is not trying to be — cannot be — an exhaustive picture of who Marrero was. But it makes him a person, memorable and complicated, someone loyal, with an incredible capacity to charm, a man with a sense of style, a person not easily reducible to a homophobic headline or buried on a list of more white-coded names.

Last Call does this for as many of the victims as it can, with as much attention to multiple areas of the person’s life as it can possibly provide. At the same time, the series does tell the story of the investigation into who killed these men through interviews with law-enforcement officers, but many then and some even now struggle with how to find a killer who targeted a community of gay men. In one especially telling interview early in the series, we hear the director, off camera, ask two former Pennsylvania state police officers who investigated one of the murders if there are any questions the production team should have asked but did not. “Yeah,” one of them replies, asking of this docuseries, “Why is the emphasis on the gay part?”

Again and again, Last Call finds ways to answer that question. The most direct answer is simply that if police officers can’t see gay life, they’ll inevitably fail to see the details of these crimes. Beyond people who knew the victims, the most prominent voices in Last Call are activists who struggled to illuminate and eradicate anti-gay violence in the city during the ’80s and ’90s, especially New York Anti-Violence Project members Bea Hanson and Matt Foreman. Because of their presence in the docuseries, Last Call can continually return to emphasize New York City as a site of violence but also a crucial haven for gay life. As much as anything, Last Call is about the ways each of these men had joy in their life and how tragic it is that their lives ended in violence.

The most surprising thing about watching Last Call is that it is deeply, intensely sad, but that surprise is odd. Surely all documentaries about murder are sad. Why should this one be different? It is, though, and that surprise comes from the slow-rolling realization of how rare it is to come away from a true-crime production with feelings of grief instead of shock or disbelief or giddy, thrilled disgust. There’s another sadness, too: More true-crime stories could be told this way and aren’t. It’s not a loss on the same scale as the murders of Peter Anderson, Thomas Mulcahy, Anthony Marrero, and Michael Sakara, but it’s a loss all the same.

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Giovanni is a writer and video producer focusing on happenings in the video game industry. He has contributed stories to Inverse, Fanbyte, The Inventory, and more. He was previously a segment producer on Polygon’s daily gaming show Speedrun and he currently hosts the Left Trigger Right Trigger podcast. Four Tetris 99 wins, and counting.