Raoul Peck’s gripping documentary is the sole standout in this handful of festival offerings.

This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the work being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Following in the wake of Halloween Kills (2021) and Sick, Departing Seniors, the debut feature from Clare Cooney, continues the Chicago International Film Festival’s tradition of programming its late Opening Night slot with a deeply mediocre horror film that spends more time reminding viewers of better movies. This is one of those films that borrows so many elements and ideas from other films that astute viewers could amuse themselves by trying to see how many references, homages and borrowings they can spot, mostly because there isn’t much of anything else interesting about it.

Following a prologue in which we see one of the jock bullies at Springhurst High tormenting a nerdy classmate, only to be gruesomely dispatched by a masked figure in a manner that leaves everyone believing his death was a suicide, the film cuts to the last seven days of the school year. We follow Javier (Ignacio Diaz-Silverio), a smart, gay Mexican-American senior who’s a target for the mean kids on campus, including alpha male Trevor (Cameron Scott Roberts), his girlfriend Ginny (Maisie Merlock), and his best pal Brad (Sasha Kuznetsov), all of whom conspire to make his life a daily hell. The only ones who appear to be in his corner are sassy best pal Bianca (Ireon Roach), supportive English teacher Mr. Area (Yani Gellman) and William (Ryan Foreman), the recent transfer student who seems to be on Javier’s wavelength in all manner of things.

When Javier finally decides to fight back after yet another humiliating prank, he’s knocked down a flight of stairs, landing on his head. When he comes to in the hospital, he discovers that his injury seems to have unleashed some latent hereditary psychometric traits that allow him to have trippy visions involving anyone he touches. Inevitably, this includes visions of his tormentors being murdered in ways designed to resemble suicides. Alas, these visions are maddeningly vague when it comes to the identity of the killer and as the end of the year approaches and the body count rises, Javier struggles to piece everything together and identify the killer.

Screenwriter Jose Nateras has essentially cobbled his script out of bits and pieces taken from a number of genre favorites, including everything from the paranormal touches lifted from the likes of Carrie and The Dead Zone to the self-referential meta-humor of Scream. It borrows most heavily from Heathers, which also featured a string of murders being disguised as suicides, and used Moby Dick as a metaphor for its view of teen angst and high school power dynamics. The trouble is that while Nateras has enough taste to borrow from the good stuff, he has no real idea of how to take that material and make it into something new (or at least reasonably distinctive).

The script touches on such subjects as bullying, queer identity and the like, but has nothing to say about them and as a result, things grow fairly tedious pretty quickly. The mystery element is also badly mishandled: it sort of wants to be a whodunnit, but there have been Scooby-Doo episodes with more complexities than what’s presented here. For instance, you don’t need to be endowed with latent psychic powers to figure out the identity of the killer after the first ten minutes or so.

Cooney presents the material in a slick and impersonal style that makes Departing Seniors at times feel like a Jennifer Reeder film without Reeder’s genuine (if not always realized) ambitions as a filmmaker. It isn’t particularly funny or scary, and the insights it offers are nebulous at best. The young cast is decent enough but none of them are quite able to cut through the cliches and make their characters into fully fleshed-out individuals. The result is little more than a cinematic calling card, the kind of low-budget item that people do to prove to others that they can actually make a film before embarking on future projects presumably closer to their hearts.

Nyad, on the other hand, is a pure and unadulterated piece of award bait whose primary motive for its existence is to finally land Annette Bening her long-overdue first Oscar (assuming that Hilary Swank doesn’t turn up at the last second to mess things up for a third time). In it, she plays Diana Nyad, the real-life swimmer who made incredible achievements in her younger years, but was unable to pull off her dream of swimming the 101 miles between Cuba and Florida during a 1978 attempt. More than three decades later, after turning 60, she finds her love of swimming returning and decides to try once again to make the Cuba dream into a reality despite the unavoidable factors of her advanced age and the incredibly dangerous waters. Nevertheless, she convinces best friend Bonnie (Jodie Foster) to help her on her mission and the two assemble a crew to try to make the impossible happen for her at last.

Unlike Nyad’s quest for glory, the film seems to be a can’t-miss proposition on paper and it is therefore disconcerting to see it do practically nothing but miss throughout. Having made their names with the hair-raising documentary Free Solo, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin make their narrative feature debuts here but have made the odd decision to apparently hedge their bets by including numerous bits of news footage and clips of the younger Nyad in an apparent attempt to try to have it both ways. The problem is that all of the documentary stuff prove to be a major distraction (especially at one point when we see Bening’s Nyad watching the real-life younger Nyad in an old video) and makes you wish that the filmmakers had just chosen one approach or another to keep things consistent.

There are bigger problems with the film beyond the real/reel dichotomy. The big flaw is that the screenplay by TV writer Julia Cox is a flat and curiously uninvolving piece of writing. At no point do we ever get any real sense of what it is that makes Nyad tick, or what would continually drive her to attempt a feat that would strike most people, young and old alike, as unimaginably dangerous and foolhardy. Cox tries to beef up Nyad’s inner turmoil with a series of brief flashbacks of her being sexually abused as a child by her swimming coach, but they also fail to add anything to our understanding of who she is or what continues to drive her. There is also the inherent problem that unless a shark or Gil;-Man is involved, swimming is just not particularly dynamic from a visual sense. While Vasarhelyi and Chin try to make up for that with a number of gaudy flourishes, my guess is that most viewers will spend these moments trying to figure out whether they’re seeing Bening or her presumed stunt swimmers at any given moment.

Bening’s performance is technically fine, but compared to the truly knockout performances she’s given throughout her career, this one can’t help but come out a little short in comparison. If she does win the Oscar for it, it would be similar to Al Pacino delivering one indelible performance after another and then winning for his hambone turn in Scent of a Woman. Meanwhile, Foster—in only her fourth big-screen appearance in the last 10 years—ends up quietly but determinedly stealing every single scene that she is in with a performance that overcomes the triteness of the material with her effortless and enduring screen charisma. It may not go down as one of her great turns, but it is a hugely entertaining performance that gives the film its few genuine moments of life and emotion. It may be Bening out there in the water for much of Nyad’s running time but it is Foster who winds up making the waves in the end.

For real drama, few movies could begin to equal the sheer emotional impact on display in Silver Dollar Road, the new film from Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro). It tells the often-infuriating story of the Reels, a Black family that, for nearly 100 years, owned 65 acres of property in Carteret County, North Carolina. The Reels lived on and maintained that land, which became a center of the local Black community because of their willingness to allow access to the beach on their property to those who were barred from whites-only beaches. When Mitchell Reels, who purchased the property from his father in 1911, passed away in the late 1970s, he died without a will and the land was left to all of his heirs. Unfortunately, his brother, Shedrick, claimed to have a deed (one never investigated by the courts) stating that he owned 13 acres of the land, specifically the potentially lucrative beachfront. 

When the courts ruled in favor of Shedrick, despite the documentation refuting his claims submitted by the rest of the family, he then sold it to the local development company Adams Creek Associates. To make matter more complicated, two members of the Reels family—brothers Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels—both lived on that beachfront, where Melvin also ran a long-established fishing business.  Nevertheless, Adams Creek Associates wanted them gone and since the brothers had no intention of leaving, this kicked off a lengthy legal standoff between the two parties that eventually culminated in—and you are reading this correctly—Melvin and Licurtis being charged with trespassing, just by staying in their homes, and eventually spending eight years in prison.

This story, which was the subject of a 2019 ProPublica investigation, is absolutely enraging (and as jaw-dropping as the story may already sound, it gets even more so as it goes on) but one of the most interesting things about the film is the way that Peck channels that rage cinematically. Instead of going for a more incendiary, rabble-rousing approach to put the story across, Peck utilizes a more methodical approach that coolly and precisely lays out the twisty tale of the Reels family and their claims, while at the same time using their case to explore the charged subject of Black land ownership and the ways in which others have habitually used everything from the machinations of the legal system to outright violence to usurp their claims.  

As gripping as it is when dealing with the legal matters at hand (presenting them in a manner that brings a welcome sense of clarity to the material), it is just as good as a portrait of the Reels family overall. Utilizing old home movie footage along with a wealth of material that Peck shot with them, we get a detailed portrait of who they are and why they are willing to continue to fight for their land in the face of a system that seems engineered to ensure that it won’t happen, along with the psychological toll that it takes on them all. Alternately enraging and engaging, Silver Dollar Road is one of the most vital documentaries of the year, an examination of the myriad ways in which the legal system repeatedly fails Black people that will be a real eye-opener for some viewers but, unfortunately, not much of a surprise to others.