Rome '78

A 90 minute costume drama that looks like a toga party in Little Lulu’s clubhouse. With one tooth blacked out, spindly David McDermott III plays the megalomaniac Caesar as a sniveling, screaming six year old ranting ‘I am God!’ on the steps of Grant’s Tomb. Meanwhile, Mitchell – scratching his armor and mumbling “pretty weird,” as though Stanley Kowalski had stumbled onto the set of Quo Vadis? – chain smokes through a tepid love scene with the coyly simpering Lydia Lunch. A black slip hiked over her thighs and a spiky mop of hair cascading onto her face, she rises from her mattress-on-the-floor divan to chase McDermott around the camera with a whip. —J. Hoberman