© Roadside Attractions
Cookie Queens (2026)
Cookie Queens (2026)
Cookie Queens
(Opens at Downer Theater, Aug 7)
As a former Brownie and a frequent Girl Scout Cookie buyer, I find director Alysa Nahmias’s Cookie Queens, both comfortably familiar and mildly disturbing. The four Girl Scouts featured in her documentary each have reasons for setting specific cookie-selling goals. One is desperate to win a summer camp session. Another longs to impress her elder Girl Scout sisters.
The family of 12-year-old Olive purchases the cookies filling a 16-wheeler, with the expectation that their daughter will be the state’s cookie-selling champ. Lastly, five-year-old Ara tests her wings as she pulls a little red wagon stacked with the 50 cookie boxes she’s pledged to sell. Earning sales is hard work, prompting one Scout to question whether the cookie drive uses the girls as slave labor. Even so, she soldiers on—pleased by the praise and admiration heaped upon her. Like many relationships ... it’s complicated. (Lisa Miller)
The War Game
(Severin Blu-ray/Ultra HD)
The War Game is a faux documentary, but it’s no Spinal Tap. The topic is deadly serious, nothing less than the outbreak of World War III. In this 1965 film, British director Peter Watkins staged his country’s response to war with the Soviet Union according to government plans devised in the early ‘60s.
The newscast voiceover sets out the scenario at the onset: It’s believed the Soviets would target the UK’s 25 key cities, containing one-third of the population. Watkins dramatizes the implementation plan for the mass evacuation of women and children from those cities (men would remain in place). Some 10 million city dwellers are brought by bus to small towns and forcibly billeted with often inhospitable hosts. The police remind one of them, balking at accepting eight strangers into his home, that the penalty of refusal is prison. One evacuee wonders whether her temporary home will include “colored” people.
And then there is rationing of all essentials as part of the plan that harkens back to what Britain did during the Nazi blitz of World War II. Problem: as The War Game shows, the danger of radiation within the confined borders of the British Isles won’t easily be overcome.
The War Game’s geopolitics is obsolescent, yet nuclear stockpiles are growing and other nations want to join the atomic club. The film’s new release in a hard-shell package includes a booklet setting out the UK’s strategy. The War Game is all the more evocative for being filmed in black and white. (David Luhrssen)
