Reruns

Jonathan Baumbach's Reruns is the hilarious nightmare of a morose middle-aged filmmaker condemned to reimagine his past in the hope of one day escaping it. This perpetually abashed and variously-named narrator screens his terrors during thirty-three nights of Oedipal farce and unrelieved performance anxiety.

His failures are legion: potency, imagination, combat, marriage, memory, fathering, even bladder control. Everywhere patriarchs loom, mincing mothers abandon their helpless sons, and lascivious schoolteachers praise little Honcho's good manners while unbuckling his pants.

Part inverted bildungsroman, part farce of arrested development, this inaugural release by the Fiction Collective retains its power of hallucinatory exorbitance and lugubrious charm into its fourth decade.