The Moment: Charli XCX and Kate Berlant – Photo: A24
Charli XCX lassoed the zeitgeist like lightning with Brat Summer 2024. BRAT — the chart-topping album, the feeling, the songs, and that specific color green — permeated pop culture, queer culture, and even presidential politics, landing the British pop-dance artist at the center of a trend that had everybody from Time magazine to your Aunt Kamala asking, Are you brat? Is she brat? What is brat?
It was a true phenomenon, as persuasively illustrated in The Moment, the aptly titled mockumentary taking a behind-the-scenes look at Charli’s life inside the Brat bubble.
Media montages of Charli popping up everywhere, from newscasts to podcasts, parties, talk shows, videos, and concerts, establish this singularly successful moment in her career. BRAT anthems like “365” on the soundtrack establish the nonstop party vibe that ruled that moment. But every party comes to an end, and then?
The film finds the pop star and her inner circle trying to figure out how to follow up the phenomenon, while her record company would be happy to just stretch out the moment. Or, as Tammy, the head of her label Atlantic Records, puts it bluntly, “How do we keep this Brat thing going?”
Played by Rosanna Arquette, Tammy is one of the more genuinely funny features of The Moment. A crass record exec isn’t groundbreaking satire, but Arquette wrings every drop of knowing, sardonic humor from her deadpan presence.
Tammy gets behind ideas like a Brat credit card, and teaming with Amazon Music to produce a BRAT Tour concert film, for which they hire quirky Scandinavian auteur Johannes, portrayed by Alexander Skarsgård (also funny), to direct.
Much of the major conflict in this film — based on an idea by Charli XCX, and directed and co-written by Aidan Zamiri — stems from Charli and her team, especially her creative director Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates), butting heads with Johannes. Charli’s up for making a concert film, but Johannes wants to document her life and fame in detail, the good, the bad, and the ugly, while also altering the look and staging of her tour.
She might not like yielding control to Johannes, but his doc ultimately isn’t that invasive or revealing. And, aside from one withering rant at her manager Tim (Jamie Demetriou) in the back of a limo, and an unintended social media fuckup related to the Brat credit card promo, Charli never comes off looking too bad as this exaggerated version of herself.
Since this whole movie is a joke that she was in on from conception, Charli and Zamiri — an accomplished music video director with clips for Billie Eilish and FKA Twigs to his credit — definitely could have gone harder in their meta deconstruction of 2020s pop celebrity. Staging bland run-ins with other cool-girl celebs like Rachel Sennott and Kylie Jenner doesn’t pierce the bubble so much as send it floating on air.
The Beauty star Isaac Powell has an intriguing but underwritten role as Lloyd, another sort of celebrity friend, the guy in Charli’s circle who constantly shoots content for her social media. As one of the trappings of modern celebrity, the 24/7 content creator is a figure ripe for caricature and commentary, but nothing meaningful arises from that relationship here, or from much of what happens in The Moment.
For a truly eye-opening look at pop stardom right now, this movie’s got nothing on Lurker, Alex Russell’s underrated 2025 thriller about a pop star stalker who infiltrates his idol’s inner circle. Somehow that film’s harrowing fiction of fame feels closer to truth than The Moment‘s faux reality.
The Moment (★★☆☆☆) is rated R and playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.
Jodie Foster acts in fluent French but still curses in English as neurotic psychotherapist Dr. Lilian Steiner, an American living in Paris, in the urbane mystery-thriller A Private Life.
To be precise, the movie's thrills are minor -- some light action and peril in the vein of a Murder, She Wrote or Moonlighting. And the central mystery, surrounding one of Dr. Steiner's patients who goes missing, generates too few "a-ha!" revelations in its winding road to an anticlimactic resolution.
Steeped in an atmosphere of suspicion, the film, from writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski (Other People's Children), better serves as a drama exploring the emotionally distant doctor being shaken from the stasis of her lonely life. A complicated woman, Lilian Steiner provides two-time Oscar-winner Foster a chance to command the screen with subtle intensity in a context we've never seen from her in fifty-plus years as a leading lady.
Where were you when electroclash exploded at the turn of the millennium? The slinky new new wave fusion of synth-pop, electro, house, and punk bubbled up from the underground to sweep across early 2000s clubs, concert stages, and CD players (if not radio), and rapper-singer, songwriter, and performance artist Peaches was right there at the forefront.
Somewhere close by, apparently, was filmmaker Marie Losier (Cassandro, the Exotico!), rolling her 16mm camera, documenting nearly every stage of Peaches' life and career as an electroclash trailblazer, touring artist, and feminist icon propelled by her breakout single "Fuck the Pain Away."
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