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There’s so much about Nickel Boys I love but the format makes it really hard for me personally to get invested as much as I really wanted to. I feel bad for not rating it higher because this is undoubtedly an incredible film but the first person perspective was tough for me.

Watched on Saturday June 7, 2025.

90% of what makes Bone Tomahawk good is the sound design. Everything sounds so dry and crunchy and the near-total lack of score gives plenty of space for the audio to show just how grim the world of this film is.

The other 10% is the ensemble cast. Everyone does a great job in their roles, with Matthew Fox being a particular favourite for me. Kurt Russell also does an irable job adding a sense of humanity to a story that's quite pointedly lacking in it.

Unfortunately, the bad is... pretty much everything else. Bone Tomahawk isn't exactly trying to hide that it's borrowing generously from 1959's The Searchers but it establishes itself as a horror film so early on that the actual western adventure part of the film, which comprises a good two thirds of the runtime, just feels kind of dull while we wait to get to the inevitable finale.

The final act of Bone Tomahawk is infamous and that crunchy sound design certainly does a great job of punctuating some already quite extreme gore. It doesn't help that so much of the climax is spent in a very cheap-looking set. Making films on a budget is hard but it's very hard to buy into what's happening when it takes place in a locale you might whizz past on a Six Flags mine train ride.

The big elephant in the room is the racism of this film. Bone Tomahawk attempts to deliver a form of apologia by having a Native American character explain early on that the antagonists aren't natives, but savage troglodytes. It's trying to give you permission to not feel guilty at how exploitative this is.

While The Searchers explored the xenophobia and greed that motivated the mass murder and forced resettlement of Native Americans, Bone Tomahawk just shows them as unambiguously evil savages and then has the gall at the eleventh hour to give some very heavy-handed "all men are foolish and cruel" moral to the story. It doesn't work.

I had high hopes for this as it's developed a bit of a cult following but there's too much going against it for me.

I wasn't expecting this but... I think Final Destination 5 might be my favourite?

They definitely swung for the fences in of coming up with the most grimace-inducing kills in the series. Candice's definitely stands out as being particularly gnarly

We get lots of Tony Todd in this one too, which I absolutely love. It's probably not a coincidence that the one he wasn't in happens to be the worst in the series. He always lights up the screen when he shows up. The acting performances are really solid in general, a refreshing attribute for the fifth entry in any horror franchise to have.

The story gets a bit muddled and I'm not sure the whole concept of killing someone to be skipped by death was ever adequately explained but this is still a really strong entry in the series overall.

Utter dreck. It was fun watching the first three entries and see the series slowly start to refine itself… but everything here is so much worse?

It’s never a good sign when your film opens with a Shinedown song and the opening accident sequence is comfortably the worst of the series so far. Just shitty CG gore effects, a general sense of mean-spiritedness and acting below the standard of a porno.

The only thing I enjoyed about this was the credits listing characters as “Racist” and “MILF”.

Final Destination 3 has some of the best kills in the series and there's a general sense of the third entry having just that little bit extra polish.

The biggest improvement over the first two is that FD3 rightly assumes you know what the concept of the series is by this point and focuses a lot more on slowly building up the tension, leaving you guessing where the inevitable kills are going to come from.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead really elevates the material she's been given to work with too. They definitely lucked out having an actor of her caliber so early in her career.

This film isn't a masterpiece by any means. All the usual shlocky horror trappings are still here with a general lack of depth and mostly unlikeable cast of characters but this does still feel like the series really starting to use its concept to the fullest potential. I'm sure things will only improve from here, right?

This review may contain spoilers.

I like how much of this series is just ominous shots of liquids moving across the ground.

This is a classic "It happened again?" kind of sequel. Spends far too much time establishing the lore of the series and trying to tie things back to the first one but makes up for it by having much better pacing.

FD2 abandons a lot of the thriller elements of the first one and instead goes all in on a style I'm now dubbing as "sleepover-core". The death scenes are all fun and creative, so you and your teenage buddies can just fast forward to those and skip past all the talking parts, which are mostly just dull.

As with the original, the opening premonition sequence is excellent. Clear Rivers deserved better though.

Final Destination is great in concept but mostly let down in the execution. The series is effectively about people dying in creative Rube Goldberg-esque ways but that didn't really reach its peak in this first entry.

Instead, we have a fairly dry horror-thriller occasionally broken up by death scenes that miss more often than they hit. The late great Tony Todd shows up in one scene to remind the audience what a good acting performance looks like. Every character's name is, rather distractingly, a reference to a famous horror director.

With all that being said, the opening sequence with the plane crash is fucking excellent. It builds tension so well and the editing is suitably snappy as the accident starts to play out. If I had seen this when I was slightly younger, it definitely would have given me a fear of flying.

Watched on Thursday May 8, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday April 29, 2025.

So much of Pulp Fiction feels like Quentin Tarantino cribbing off of other films and over-writing every scene with a smug self-satisfied look on his face.

But you know what? The execution is so good that I can't bring myself to hate the guy.

Never mind Art the Clown, the worst killer of all in Terrifier 2 is the runtime. Any sense of momentum in this film is ruined by expository scenes that run on far too long and set pieces that leap straight to the bloody climax instead of building any kind of tension or suspense. I can't believe I found myself praying for a jump scare.

As many others have said, there's probably a really good 90-100 minute movie in here. Damien Leone is an effects guy and, quite fittingly, Terrifier 2 does at least deliver on the blood and guts with really impressive practical effects. David Howard Thornton does an irable job of carrying the film as the murderous clown, injecting a vaudeville-esque quality into the mute antagonist. He's probably the most iconic horror antagonist of the past decade - Not bad going for something with such a modest budget.

The film Terrifier 2 reminds me the most of is the original Nightmare on Elm Street. Both films have charismatic antagonists, creative kills and a main character whose concerns are dismissed by others as fantasy. Unfortunately, Damien Leone's direction does not hold up to Wes Craven's and we're instead we're left with a film that doesn't seem to serve much purpose beyond throwing it on at a party and fast forwarding through all the boring bits to gross out your friends with the kill scenes.

This film is frequently gruesome but I wouldn't call it upsetting and certainly not scary. Once the initial shock of Art's cruelty in any given scene wears off, you're just ively and impatiently waiting for it to be over. There's no tension to be released, nothing to be learned. This should be better and it's frustrating that it's not.

Really terrific TV drama that brings to life the sheer cost of the Chernobyl disaster, not just to humanity but to the entire planet. Everyone knows of the Chernobyl disaster but may not be aware of how exactly it played out or how horrific the experiences of some of its victims were (acute radiation syndrome is way up there on the list of worst ways to die).

Chernobyl also brings to life the layers of bureaucracy, cost-cutting and all the human shortcomings enabled such a disaster. This disaster was hardly unique in that regard and flawed institutions, both private and governmental, continue to kill untold numbers of people every year in the name of gussying up quarterly performance reports.

Ideally, this should have starred actors from actual former Soviet states speaking their native languages. The British cast uniformly do a great job with the material but the voices do feel distractingly out of place, especially when Ralph Ineson shows up with his thick Yorkshire accent. The show is still fantastic however.

A Minecraft Movie has been in development for over a decade, so it's shocking that the script they finally went with is one of the laziest I've ever seen. I was curious when the rumours of this project started circulating because, having played the game and being a big fan of it, it seems very difficult to adapt. It's certainly not impossible however and the audience deserves far better than what we end up getting. It's like the screenwriters took all of the most obvious tropes and story beats imaginable and bashed the whole thing out in an afternoon.

I don't necessarily think tropes are a bad thing by default but they need to be backed up by good execution and the execution of this film is godawful. There's a specific moment where our characters arrive in the Minecraft overworld for the first time and we immediately get the big money shot of the sprawling landscape of different biomes and Steve's builds, then it cuts back to all of the characters reacting in awe, then returns to that same money shot. I'm not an editor but surely it would be more impactful to see everyone's reactions before we're shown the thing they're looking at? It's just one instance of the general sloppiness with which this film is put together.

There's a debate swirling around A Minecraft Movie around how audiences should be more tolerant of its lack of quality because "it's a film for kids!" and, while I certainly agree that films need to sacrifice some nuance to reach younger viewers, I just can't accept that argument. Things like character motivation aren't the sole preserve of fiction made for adults, or good acting, or a general sense of stakes... all things that most worthwhile narrative fiction will have in abundance but A Minecraft Movie is distinctly lacking in.

Minecraft isn't even faithful to its own source material in ways that will be apparent to anyone who's ever played the game before. The film opens with a tiny snippet of C418's incredible music for the game, recently and deservingly added to the National Recording Registry, and it immediately leaves me longing for a Minecraft film that simply isn't this.

I can't give this a half-star rating because the bromance between Jack Black and Jason Momoa is quite fun and an early scene where a teacher tells his class how miserable his life is got a genuine laugh out of me. The list of good things I have to say about this is depressingly short however. This film is doing gangbusters at the box office and it's not especially clear if that's because of or in spite of how bad it is. It does ensure that there will be more of these and I hope the next bite of the cherry is better.

Caligula is one of those films I just assumed I'd never watch. I'd seen enough clips and heard about all the behind-the-scenes shenanigans to create an idea in my head of what Caligula is: A bizarre exploitation film notable for how explicit and high-budget it is, a film which should be left in the past as a mildly interesting historical artefact.

I can't say exactly what compelled me to watch a film about an insane tyrant, obsessed with offensively gaudy decor, utterly incompetent at running a government, holding everyone around him in utter contempt, save for being sexually attracted to a blood relative. Thankfully, there's no such figure in the real modern world.

Anyway, imagine my surprise when Caligula was indeed what I thought it was... but I quite enjoyed it anyway? I don't know if it's the ridiculously elaborate sets and production design or a really strong central performance from Malcolm McDowell but this wasn't as much of a slog as I was expecting.

Caligula is by no means a great film but it certainly flirts with the idea every once in a while. I kept thinking of Pasolini's Salo and how, if Caligula weren't so concerned with pornography, this could have been a similarly affecting tale about corruption and tyranny.

Despite having complained about other films being too rapey, Caligula's depictions of sex and sexual violence rarely feel as impactful as they should. In 2025, I'm not shocked by seeing a bunch of nudity and unsimulated sex onscreen. There's a whole lot of it in this film and most of it is interminable.

Towards the end of the film, Caligula comes up with a cruel solution to balancing Rome's books: He enslaves the wives of his senators and sells their bodies. This sexual slavery is depicted in the form of a lengthy orgy scene, where all participants, including the slaves, appear to be partying like porn stars and having a great time? It's a strange thing to say about a film that had an unprecedented amount of sex in it but Caligula pulls too many punches. The sex scenes tell us almost nothing, make us feel nothing. A missed opportunity to show the full depths of the emperor's depravity. Why bother showing them at all?

That's a lot of criticism from me, so I'll stress again that McDowell really is terrific, full of the same charisma that could almost make you forget his villainy as he showed in A Clockwork Orange. The sets are lavish and everything's shot beautifully, rich with colours and a general sense of opulence befitting a man who thinks himself to be god.

On those occasions where Caligula doesn't pull its punches, it can be really disturbing. There's a few death scenes that had me grimacing and the excess of it all sometimes tips over from being debauched to being outright hellish. Maybe I'm writing favourably about the film I wish Caligula was instead of what it actually is but there's something to this I can't help but feel compelled by.

Kind of interesting in concept and shot beautifully, Women Hell Song is unfortunately let down by its apparent refusal to really explore any of its themes. Felt pretty rapey even by pinku standards.

Watched on Saturday April 5, 2025.

Overly-sentimental propaganda that also happens to be very prescient in showing how news media is more concerned with getting as many eyes as possible than it is with telling the truth. It even namechecks fake news multiple times!

Rather depressingly, very little has changed in the 80 years since this released. If anything, it's gotten worse and made Power of the Press look even more hokey and contrived.

The film itself is perfectly okay, following a rather interesting setup of a murder mystery being investigated by newspapermen with their own biases, rather than your usual cops and gumshoes. Unfortunately, this mystery plot largely plays second fiddle to a Hallmark-esque tale of a good old-fashioned small town editor taking over a big city paper, wowing everyone with interminably long speeches about the importance of ethics.

After watching a lot of Buster Keaton shorts, it took a little while for The Cameraman to get going by comparison.

Of course, once it does get going it's all the Buster goodness we've come to know and love. It's difficult to pick one standout scene but the entire swimming pool sequence is incredible, as is the gang war (featuring a monkey sidekick too!)

When The Cameraman isn't being a comedy, the moments of romance are genuinely really beautiful. Buster Keaton's characters sometimes come across as more malicious and vindictive in some of the other films, but here he's just a guy who's hopelessly in love. We've all been there, buddy!

Everything about Lynch's Dune feels compromised. The source material is so lore-heavy and dense with plot that anything in this film which would establish the characters and the world is jettisoned in order to hit that 135 minute runtime and still feel at least somewhat coherent.

The end result is a film scrambling so frantically to get from A to B that we lose all sense of why everything is happening or why we should care. By contrast, Denis Villeneuve was actually given the time necessary to do all the "why" bits and, while I'm not a great lover of his Dune either, they're undeniably a great achievement in showcasing a lot more of what has made Frank Herbert's novel an enduring sci-fi classic.

Dune 1984 isn't irredeemably bad. There's some really cool production design and Lynch seemed far more willing to embrace some of the weirder aspects of the source material. That being said, the heavily middle eastern and Islamic-inspired elements of Dune are almost entirely ripped out. I love Everett McGill but he's not the ideal face of an alien culture.

I stand by my claim that David Lynch would have made been a blockbuster director in another life. though I don't know how much of this film being a disaster is down to studio meddling and how much of it is a relatively inexperienced director buckling under the weight of a massive production. It's a miracle he got another chance to direct anything after this.

Perhaps the greatest testament to David Lynch's artistry is that, in another life, he could have made countless blockbusters, prestige dramas and crowd pleasers. He didn't go down that route and we as an audience are all the more blessed because of that but, in The Straight Story, we're reminded that he was and always had been someone who deeply understood how to tell an accessibly powerful and moving tale.

That's not to say The Straight Story isn't Lynchian because all the sincerity and Americana we've come to know and love is here. This is essentially Lynch's take on Bergman's Wild Strawberries: a story of an elderly man named Alvin, wonderfully portrayed by Richard Farnsworth, going on a journey and reflecting on the life he's lived.

There's a warmth and kindness about Alvin that makes him instantly likeable. He's as stubborn as a mule and lives with deep emotional and physical pain, but that never seems to hinder his ability to parse right from wrong, unbroken by the iniquity he and his fractured family have had to deal with.

The drama of The Straight Story is of course whether Alvin can really complete the journey and, if he does, whether his sick brother Lyle will be happy to see him - if Lyle is even still alive by then. Over the course of the journey and through his interactions with the people he meets along the way, we get fragments of Alvin's backstory but never the full picture as to what caused his estrangement from his brother. It's enough to paint a picture though and it's one of hardship and resilience.

This isn't a film to be dismissed as an odd curiosity from a director typically known for mind-bending surrealism. It's well-worth seeking out.

Black Bag is perfect for what it is. This might be one of the most efficiently-made films I can ever watching. Soderbergh trims out all the fat and packs so much into a 90-minute spy thriller. Every scene and every shot serves a purpose to either move the plot along and/or give us important information about a character.

With the greatest of respect to Michael Fassbender, I was a little trepidatious going into this because he's an actor who's always good in movies but isn't always in good movies. Thankfully, Black Bag is a good movie and Fassbender has great chemistry with the predictably fabulous Cate Blanchett.

This isn't particularly erotic but it is most definitely a sexy film where, in a world of everyone double crossing each other, the sole thing which can be relied on is having someone else you'll do anything for and will do anything for you too.

Come the end of the year, I don't expect this to trouble the top end of my list of favourites for 2025 but I still left the theatre grinning from ear to ear, having gone in with no real expectations. For the love of god, go watch this instead of Snow White!

This review may contain spoilers.

What we now know to be David Lynch's final major work is almost too immense to put into words but I hope my ramblings can allow me to unpack at least some of my feelings about The Return.

The original run of Twin Peaks was groundbreaking television but executive meddling and premature cancellation sent the show in a direction that David Lynch and Mark Frost had never intended and certainly weren't overly pleased with. Fire Walk With Me righted a lot of those wrongs before 25 years of nothingness.

The Return first aired in 2017, a time when audiences weren't yet totally fed up with nostalgia pandering. With almost all of the surviving original cast on board, this could have easily been 18 episodes of coffee and doughnuts and Tibet and all the other hallmarks of Twin Peaks we cherish. The snippets of fan service we do get here are great but The Return is quite defiantly not the show many hoped it would be and it's all the more compelling because of that.

Agent Cooper is barely in The Return, at least not the Coop we know and love. Instead we get Mr C, the evil doppelganger released into the world at the end of season 2. We also get "Dougie Jones", actually Cooper in a near-catatonic state, a man who improves the lives of everyone around him simply by existing. Kyle MacLachlan is incredible in both roles. Mr C is menacing and terrifying in ways the world of Twin Peaks can hardly stand to bear. Dougie Jones is a somewhat contentious character among Twin Peaks fans but I love him; MacLachlan is frequently hilarious as Dougie but there's always a lingering sense of tragedy hanging over him.

For the other characters from the show, time has not been kind to most of them. Shelly Briggs still works at the diner, her addict daughter regularly shaking her down for money for her and her addict boyfriend to waste. The now-reformed Ben Horne atones for his sins in the monk-like solitude of his office. Audrey is trapped in what can only be described as a living nightmare. The town itself is sick, no longer a quirky and wondrous place but instead teaming with vice and corruption far exceeding the darkness depicted in the show's original run. Everyone is older and wearier.

There's still a fair amount of levity to be found, especially with a deep cast featuring almost every single actor in Lynch's phonebook. There's too many cameos and small roles for big-name actors to mention them all but they're uniformly fantastic, with Naomi Watts particularly standing out as Janey-E.

Most of the episodes close with an end-of-credits dedication to actors from the show who are no longer with us. In the cases of Miguel Ferrer and Catherine Coulson, they completed shooting but were sadly not around by the time The Return aired. Albert has always been a favourite of mine and Ferrer is excellent in every scene, but Catherine Coulson's performance as Margaret "The Log Lady" Lanterman is almost transcendental here. Coulson filmed her scenes in the very final days of her life and her character, always the quirkiest of a quirky cast, continues speaking in riddles but they're words shaded with an inescapable sense of mortality. Just thinking about her final scene makes me tear up.

I guess this is all a very roundabout way of saying the fiction of Twin Peaks in inexorably tied to the reality of its production. Time is always moving and people are always changing. It's dangerous to want to go home because "home" might not exist anymore, or might only exist in a state contrary to how you wanted to preserve it in memory.

There are many things in The Return that are beyond my comprehension but Lynch's main thesis is clear: Darkness permeates everything as an unavoidable fact of life. We can invent different versions of ourselves and those around us but we cannot go back and change the past. The only way to heal and grow is by ing through these dark places with perfect courage, love and empathy. Cooper couldn't save Laura Palmer because to do so would be to deny what had already transpired. There's some fear in letting go.

Watched on Wednesday March 12, 2025.

This review may contain spoilers.

Mickey 17 is a frustrating film to review because there are lots of things in it that I really enjoyed, namely a fantastic Robert Pattinson performance, a level of commitment to weirdness that I've come to know and love from Bong Joon-ho and a premise that's really great.

Despite all that, this feels like another case of BJH biting off a bit more than he can chew in of wanting to make a film with a bunch of disparate elements and still have it feel cohesive. Mickey 17 is a sci-fi comedy thriller filled with (often quite heavy-handed) social commentary. In short: It's a Bong Joon-ho film, with Okja, The Host and Snowpiercer being the closest points of reference from his filmography.

After the first act gets through the lengthy setup of explaining the premise and establishing Mickey and all of the other characters, there was never a point where I felt like I had a handle on where the film was going. Sometimes, it's really fun to be taken on a ride by a film like that but here it just felt dissonant.

In a vacuum, most of these scenes are great (particularly the dinner scene) but there's not always a sense of everything flowing together. Mark Ruffalo chews the scenery as a Donald Trump stand-in, with Toni Collette turning in a great performance as his ghoulish partner. Bong's got a lot of things to say about the state of the world and he wants to make sure you know about it!

I can't help but ire him for going from a language-barrier shattering classic in Parasite, which is one of the very best films of the 21st century, to a film so delightfully strange the distributor didn't know how to market it. He's a director who's never afraid to take massive swings.

Those expecting the classic ethical dilemmas arising from Mickey 17's premise will be shocked to find that the film instead asks the truly important questions: Would you fuck a clone of yourself? Is it cheating if your clone fucks your partner? What if your partner likes fucking your clone more than you? Bong Joon-ho, never change you magnificent weirdo.

This review may contain spoilers.

Most of what's in The Missing Pieces is probably superfluous to Fire Walk With Me but pretty much everything here is either really entertaining or gives important lore and context for the series.

Especially loved the scenes of Bobby throwing away the "cocaine" in the woods, Leland slowly walking up to the house as Laura is sneaking out, the entire sequence above the convenience store... This is definitely worth watching for any diehard Twin Peaks fan.

This review may contain spoilers.

Throughout this viewing of Fire Walk with Me, my mind kept returning to Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon. Other than both being deconstructions of classic American tales, a similarity between the two I can't shake is how they both seek to dismiss the myth of the crime story. In a perverse way, we seek out macabre stories both real and imagined but we're always slightly detached from the reality of it, insulated from the cruelty even when we're given direct s of it.

Lynch and Scorsese sought to cut through all of that and show the real human suffering in all of its ugliness and senselessness.

The Twin Peaks TV series opens with a fairly typical mystery: who would want to hurt the homecoming queen who was beloved by all? Over the course of the series, we of course learn that Laura Palmer had many demons beneath the perfect exterior of her life when viewed from a distance. While I don't think it was Lynch and Frost's intention and more just the limitations of what you could get away with on network television, the reveal of Laura's vices and troubles seems to condemn her on some level, at least in the first season. Like the victims of Jack the Ripper were "just prostitutes", the TV series offers a convenient line between a person doing wrong and then dying an untimely death, as though they somehow deserved it. Our minds can rest easy knowing that such a thing could never happen to us.

Of course, this isn't true and Fire Walk With Me addresses that directly. Laura Palmer was being abused by her father and had been for a long time. Leland, in turn, was also a victim of abuse. Beneath the whodunit mystery is a very sad and very real cycle of violence.

In Laura's final days, we see her highs and her lows. Even knowing what's going to happen to her, there's always a hope on every viewing that some way, somehow, she's going to be alright in the end. Sheryl Lee's performance is incredible and deserves to be discussed in the same way we talk about Isabel Adjani in Possession or Shelley Duvall in The Shining when it comes to all-time great horror performances. Despite the sadness permeating the performance, there's also so much love and strength that shines through Laura as she tries to put on a brave face and protect those she cares about, even at the cost of her own safety.

As a horror film, FWWM depicts the home as the site of all the nastiness, the place when you're most unsafe. The scene where Laura returns home and Leland inspects her fingernails at the dinner table is more terrifying than any jump scare. Similarly, Leland's blasé nature the morning after drugging his wife and raping his daughter feels almost as disturbing as the acts themselves. Leland is a man who has suffered and, courtesy of a fantastic Ray Wise performance, still grapples with guilt over his actions. Yet he still does it and then he'll smile at you the next morning and pretend that everything's okay and he'll do it again and again because no one will stop him the same way no one stopped the person who was hurting him.

Lynch's direction and sound design is at its most nightmarish here. The pink room scene stands out in particular for how it depicts a sleazy nightclub as hell itself, soundtracked by endless slinking guitars and drums. The women are all in various states of undress but the men are fully clothed, of course. It makes you want to jump through the screen and whisk Laura away from there the same way she manages to save Donna after she's drugged.

I've not yet talked about the film's first act, which concerns the investigation into the murder of Teresa Banks, an earlier victim of Leland's who looks eerily similar to his daughter. This whole section of the film is very deliberately set to be the bizarro version of Twin Peaks, with uncooperative cops, a run-down diner and warm pine lodges replaced by a decrepit trailer park. While there are some comedic moments here, like the abrupt cutaway to FBI agents patting down a bus driver at gunpoint while children scream in the background, I mostly just find this whole part of the film to be deeply unsettling in a way that's difficult to put into words. The decay on display here feels like a prototype for the world depicted in The Return.

I've rambled on about how much I love this film too much already. Lynch had an incredible ability to showcase humanity in a way that felt so honest and empathetic. It's easy to be distracted by the strangeness and miss the way his work makes you feel. Keep your eye on the donut, not on the hole.

Watched on Tuesday February 18, 2025.

Occasionally stops being racist for long enough to have moments where it feels like a proto-Borat examination of Hong Kong culture, using a caricature of a foreigner to expose its own prejudices and shortcomings.

This review may contain spoilers.

It's been a shade under a year since my last Twin Peaks rewatch and I certainly wasn't expecting to revisit the town so soon. Of course, David Lynch's ing drew me back, though I rarely need much of an excuse to watch this show.

What makes Twin Peaks so wonderful is that Lynch and Frost clearly have a deep understanding of how to appeal to the masses. They know how to dial up the music at just the right time as the emotion reaches its crescendo. They know how to write and pace a classic murder mystery. They know how to balance comedy and tragedy. In another timeline, these two guys would have spent their whole careers laughing their way to the bank after churning out one blockbuster after another.

Instead, they made Twin Peaks. They made a show that has all the soap opera drama and then so much more on top of that. The great subversion of the whodunit story gives way to some of the saddest and darkest television ever produced. It wasn't just the shady brothel owner or the jealous boyfriend or the drug-running trucker. It was an evil that exists inside the home, inside the people we love and trust. An evil that, despite the supernatural leanings of Twin Peaks, is very real.

It's Lynch at his best, taking all of the classic iconography from American media and then lifting up the sheet to show you what's really underneath: violence, corruption and sleaze. It's not a coincidence that the malaise of the second half of season 2 is finally broken when the show returns to the story of Laura Palmer, the embodiment of all that is right and wrong in the world.

The pilot episode in particular stands out to me. Its pacing is exquisite and I love how everything in the first act just builds and builds until the dam bursts and Sarah Palmer has to confront her worst fears, then we're finally introduced to Coop and the wheels are set in motion.

As in my last review, the bad run of season 2 is rough. There's no getting around it. The James-Evelyn subplot needs no discussion at this point but Josie's storyline is what really hurts me. I really like her role in the first season but everything just collapses in the second and I honestly couldn't explain to you with any great confidence the exact relationships between Josie, Catherine, Thomas Eckhardt and Andrew Packard. It's just messy and culminates in such bizarre fashion that even this ardent Lynch fan can't begin to parse.

Still, the Ben Horne civil war plot is a guilty pleasure of mine. It's also bizarre but it's bizarre in a fun way and I can at least attempt to unpack it as Ben needing to pretend the bad guys won as some kind of personal redemption for himself. Strange, but it's a flavour of strange I vibe with.

My personal MVPs of this watch-through were Bobby and Shelly. Those two are as dumb as they are beautiful but I can't help but love them anyway. Dana Ashbrook's emoting in this show is top-notch and Shelly's relationship with Norma just makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside, even with all of the horribleness swirling around them.

Special shoutouts also go out to: Albert, BOB, Big Ed, Maddy and the Log Lady. What a murderer's row of great characters this show has. I love Twin Peaks!

Went into this expecting a full-on hate watch and was instead just frustrated.

Emilia Perez offers the occasional glimpses of quality: A cool shot, a musical number that isn't awful, acting performances that are all broadly very good (Zoe Saldana in particular really gives it her all). The problem is it's bogged down at every turn by direction that I can only describe as... noncommittal?

Emilia Perez is a film that doesn't seem to know what it's about. It's a musical that seems embarrassed that it's a musical, with most of the songs starting with a strained singing whisper and then never really exploding into something more grandiose.

It's a film about a person transitioning but has very little to say about the trans experience, instead leaving it ambiguous as to whether Emilia even is truly a trans woman or whether she just wanted to deceive everyone and abandon her past criminal life. It's regressive at best and borderline offensive at worst.

While the acting performances are all good, the characters themselves are not. Motivations are nebulous at the best of times and, moment to moment, it can be hard to parse what's happening and why. This isn't a convoluted plot, there's just a general lack of momentum propelling the story forward. It's just a series of scenes that happen.

I'm not Latin American and I don't speak Spanish, though I watched this with a few friends who are and they definitely picked up how inauthentic to Mexico everything feels, which is unsurprising considering that this is a French director and a principle cast of non-Mexican actors.

It all begs the question of why does this exist? Conceptually, Emilia Perez could be really great if it immersed itself entirely in campiness or went in the other direction and took itself much more seriously. It's a musical with no good music, a drama with characters we don't care about, a political thriller with no interest in its real-life subject matter. Even when evaluating this as Green Book or Crash-esque fodder for straight white cis voters, it's just not good enough on a technical level.

Of course, Emilia Perez's Oscar hopes have mercifully been derailed by some very ugly dramas behind the scenes. Karla Sofia Gascon's historical comments are abhorrent and her inclusion in this film represents a complete lack of due diligence on the part of its producers. Elsewhere, Jacques Audiard's interviews have all reinforced the notion that he is a director utterly disinterested in exploring his superficial themes in any meaningful detail or doing any of the legwork to make compelling art.

Of course, Jacques didn't need to tell us any of that. His work speaks for itself.

Watched on Sunday February 2, 2025.

This review may contain spoilers.

Despite talk of its daunting runtime, The Brutalist does the most important thing a film of its stature should do: It doesn't feel its length.

The intermission (intermissions are back, yay!) perfectly separates the rise from the fall, the American dream and then the American reality. That being said, the warning signs are all there in the first half. A key detail my mind keeps returning to is how Van Buren is initially appalled by what László does to his library, only to change his tone once the renovation is hailed by those in the know as a masterpiece.

Van Buren is not a man of taste, but rather a man who wants to project an image of taste beyond the limitations of his own narrow mind. Everyone wants to be seen as worldly and cultured until it's time to foot the bill, creativity forever compromised by economics.

László Toth, wonderfully portrayed by Adrien Brody (though we'll put a bookmark on that for now), is a man guided wholly by his principles and his artistic vision. He's a genius and he's also painfully stubborn, at a few moments stubborn to a point where I almost thought his problems were of his own making. We also get a strong sense that he loves his wife, Erzsébet, and wants nothing more than to rescue her and his niece Zsófia.

The Brutalist's story of the American dream is not a particularly new one but it is executed incredibly well. Corbet's direction generally eschews grandiosity in favour of a more intimate feeling, handheld cameras pulling in close and letting the actors act. It's fitting that The Brutalist never goes down the path of focusing more specifically on Toth's work: The renovation of Van Buren's library is the only project of his we see play out in its entirety, though we do eventually see the final results of his community centre project in the epilogue, which somewhat clumsily explains the film's thesis in case you dozed off during the intermission.

The two elephants in the room must be addressed however: The film's alleged use of AI to produce certain shots and to "fix" Brody's Hungarian dialogue is incredibly disappointing if it happened. This is a story of compromised artistry but, if AI was utilised, the film itself is artistically compromised. Brody's performance is still incredible, but will now always have that black mark against it. I do not consider this an "old man yells at cloud" moment of railing against a new technology. Machine learning tools can only ever produce an approximation based on information they've already been fed. AI offers filmmakers no creative solutions and no space for innovation. It is not another tool in the box. It is death.

The other elephant in the room is the film's portrayal of Jewishness and Zionism. While set almost entirely in America, an important theme in the film is the parallel with the formation of the state of Israel. Toth flees persecution in Europe, only to be greeted with an ever-so-slightly different flavour of it in America. Israel has spent the better part of a century committing crimes against humanity in Palestine. There are people more qualified than me to discuss whether this is pro or anti-Zionist however, though I wanted to address to the degree that I can address it anyway.

The Brutalist is undeniably very good in spite of its baggage and I do really hope it encourages other filmmakers and studios to start adding intermissions to more films. My legs and my bladder can't take much more.

Watched on Sunday January 26, 2025.

I have a soft spot for the early 2000s aesthetics, the nu metal soundtrack, and general cheesiness but this just isn't good. In addition to that, it's also a serious indictment of video game adaptations that Resident Evil is probably one of the better ones.

Resident Evil has bursts of somewhat exciting action and cool production design, but so much of the film is spent navigating anonymous corridors with an anonymous cast of cannon fodder. George Romero was at one point pretty heavily involved in the Resident Evil project but it seems that very few, if any, of his contributions made it into the production. It's a shame because the anti-corporate theme running through the game series seems like perfect material for Romero to work his magic, even if it was slightly diminished magic by the late 90s/early 2000s.

Video games often seem, at face value, to be fairly adaptable to film and TV but the reality is that so much of the experience is delivered through the gameplay and it's very hard for filmmakers to capture that. Survival horror games aren't just a series of exciting set pieces separated by drawn-out moments of tension. They're environmental storytelling, resource management systems and awkward controls that ensure you never feel completely on top of any given situation.

I get the impression that Paul WS Anderson broadly understands what makes the Resident Evil games entertaining but he struggles to convey that in this film. Maybe he did a better job at it in the following 6(!) entries.

They certainly got sick!

Watched on Saturday January 18, 2025.

It’s crazy to watch these old Buster shorts and see, in real time, him creating so much of the language of comedy on film that’s still used today.

Watched on Friday January 17, 2025.

Impossible to unpack completely straight after watching but I do so adore Lynch's forays into horror and he nails that vibe of things almost being normal but not quite, in a way you can't really put your finger on beyond feeling that it unsettles you greatly.

Lynch's love of twisting classic Hollywood tropes and visuals into something more contemporary and twisted is on full display here, with gangsters and femme fatales and long car rides into the California desert, with frequent detours into sex and violence.

As is usually the case, it's difficult to discern where reality ends and fantasy begins with Lost Highway. I'm not sure it really matters, with the key being Bill Pullman's early line about how he prefers to return to his own memory of how things happened, rather than the cold reality of how they actually did.

What I can say with certainty is that there will never again be filmmaker like David Lynch. What we have now is all we'll ever have of him and that means these things must be cherished. The clock's just ticked over past midnight as I've written down my meandering thoughts and, if you can believe it, it's Friday once again.

Rest in peace, David. Thanks for everything.

This review may contain spoilers.

Just as good the second time round. Saint Maud was a fantastic debut and I love how Rose Glass went in a complete different direction with this film. She has range and I'm very excited to see what she does next.

It's difficult for me to pin down exactly what it is that makes Love Lies Bleeding so good. At face value, it's fairly standard exploitation fare with the added bonus of being very queer. Everything is just so stylish and well-executed that it really brings this the film to another level.

I also loved Ed Harris as the scary bug-eating skullet-having crime boss dad, and how Kristen Stewart's performance as Lou shows a young woman who hates her father but is very clearly her father's daughter, as much as she wants to put that behind her.

The turn into magic realism in the film's final act is unexpected but I do like how it plays into Lou and Jackie's desire to just escape from everything, even reality.

Someone really ought to tell the people involved in the production how steroids work and what side effects they actually have though.

This would be a solid little action flick if you simply removed all the homophobia, the misogyny, the nauseating editing of the action scenes, the entire switching identities story angle... in fact, just remove Martin Lawrence completely.

Bad Boys isn't just a dumb film, it's unapologetically dumb. It's an old cliche but this film would only be about 30 minutes long if the characters ever stopped shouting and talked to each other like normal human beings. So much humour and conflict here is mined from misunderstandings that no adult of sound mind would ever fall for.

Here we have Will Smith at the peak of his powers, full of all the charisma that made him the safest bet in Hollywood for over two decades. In fairness to Big Willy, he always lights up his scenes. Weirdly however, it feels like he gets much less screentime than Lawrence's character, who is just absolutely loathsome and not in a way that's interesting. Having the loser comic relief character carry the whole dramatic weight of the story is a bold choice and one that misfires horribly.

In spite of it all, I just can't bring myself to hate Michael Bay's films. They're incredibly juvenile but I still ire how he puts all of his budget up on screen, immediately putting them a notch above so much of the modern dreck that costs a bajillion dollars and evaporates on with a multiplex screen. In Bad Boys, things are constantly being broken and crashed and, of course, exploded. Bay shoots it all from every angle and then cuts it so fast you can barely follow what's happening anyway.

Bay's style of filmmaking was thought of as a joke for many years and perhaps deservedly so, but at least he has a distinct style to his films. Watching Bad Boys, you can easily imagine in your head what the generic by-the-books version of this film would be and maybe that film would be better than what Bay's put together but would it be as memorable? I think not.

Watched on Sunday January 12, 2025.

HARRY'S ON THE CASE! ANY HOLE'S A GOAL!

Wow! We've got a stacked cast of great actors, a script based on a Scandinavian crime thriller (red hot right now!) and Martin fucking Scorsese set to direct! This must surely be a recipe for success, right?

What, Scorsese pulled out? Val Kilmer has cancer and can't do a speaking role but also can't be recast? We now only have four days to shoot the film? What do you mean we don't know who the killer is? Wait, the protagonist is named what?

Lots of reviews from other s mentioned falling asleep during this. I somehow managed to stay awake and that did not make the plot any more intelligible. It's estimated that 10-15% of the screenplay simply wasn't filmed but it feels like that percentage should be MUCH higher because nothing in this film makes even a lick of sense.

There are subplots that go nowhere, no suspects in the murder mystery and the characters are paper-thin. I refuse to believe that an extra 15 minutes of footage would have salvaged this production. I don't want to rail too much on the editing because Thelma Schoonmaker is one of the greatest editors of all time but the shot-to-shot and scene-to-scene cutting is completely baffling. With 20 minutes to go, it didn't even feel like we were closing in on cracking the case. The film never leaves the first act.

I can only think this was a Madame Web situation where everyone involved realised early on that they would not be spinning straw into gold but were contractually locked into delivering something. This only avoids the lowest possible rating because it's occasionally well-shot but that's really the only positive thing I can say about it.

Tom Hooper should be in jail.

Every actor in this is trying so hard and the direction is doing them no favours whatsoever. He's constantly shoving his camera in everyone's faces, as though he thinks a wide or establishing shot will condemn him to 20 years of hard labour or, even worse, having to perform in a Tom Hooper film.

My major gripe with musical adaptations on film is that they're rarely constructed to be films. Seeing Les Mis on the stage is probably spectacular but here, the pacing is turgid, the editing disted and the production design carries the dark whimsy of a Tim Burton t, in contrast to the weighty subject matter.

Occasionally, there's a good scene and it always feels serendipitous rather than intentional. Anne Hathaway had the good sense to show up, do the Oscar scene and then get the fuck out with close to two hours of runtime remaining. If only the rest of us were so lucky.

As an addendum, Russell Crowe's performance in this is often the focal point of criticism but he's perfectly fine in this? He's not noticeably any worse or better or any of the other main cast . Hooper's poor direction does not discriminate.

Watched on Wednesday January 8, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday January 7, 2025.

If this had been made in the 70s, we'd now be getting a restored Blu-Ray release from Arrow Video or Vinegar Syndrome. We'd be hailing it as an underseen Italian exploitation classic.

Unfortunately, Immaculate is a modern trashy horror film and has all the usual trappings of a modern trashy horror film. I have to give kudos to Sydney Sweeney for carrying the flag for this project and for a lead acting performance that is more often than not very good.

The problem is the brainless jump scares and a general reluctance to get really freaky with the subject matter. You can do a lot with this concept but instead it's Rosemary's Baby with all of the subtlety and allegory removed. This could be something really great and it's frustrating that it's not.

This review may contain spoilers.

Across a truly glittering career, this might be the greatest Cage performance of them all. Here, he plays a crooked cop who's permanently strung out on drugs and can't help but make things worse for everyone around him. We spend the entire runtime with Cage and his performance really is exceptional, his character should be loathsome, someone who deserves to be punished for all his wrongdoing and punished severely, but you can't help but sympathise with him anyway.

Werner Herzog has an incredibly broad filmography but this feels most similar to Stroszek, as both films are darkly satirical takes on the American dream, backdropped by the decay of American reality. Bad Lieutenant touches on a bunch of different themes, set in a New Orleans still reeling from the effects of Katrina and people are suffering, something Cage's character seems indifferent to or actively annoyed by. He threatens to kill a terminally ill elderly person, takes advantage of institutional racism to force complicity from any black person he comes across, uses his girlfriend's body as a bargaining chip among many other indiscretions. I guess Herzog is commenting on the dog-eat-dog inhumanity of modern America and also giving us a fairly extreme example of the old "hurt people hurt people" saying.

All of this dark satire is couched in Bad Lieutenant's grimy straight-to-DVD visual aesthetic, effortlessly blending in with the countless other crime thrillers you'd find in the supermarket bargain bin about 15 years ago. There's an art to the ugliness of it however, frequently utilising handheld shots to match the manic energy of Cage's performance, giving a grim colour palette to a grim story.

Despite the absurdity and humour of so many of this film's scenes, there's also a disquieting horror always accompanying it, very Lanthimos-esque. I've not seen the original Bad Lieutenant but I know Abel Ferrara was very upset with this film, the only similarity it shares with the original supposedly being the name. I'm curious to see whether that's the case because Herzog is an absolute man if so. I don't know who greenlit this or gave it enough money for them to cast so many name actors but I love that it exists.

Watched on Saturday January 4, 2025.

• Häxan
• Night of the Demon
• Jigoku
• Repulsion
• Spider Baby
• Horrors of Malformed Men
• The Baby
• The Omen
• Rabid
• Mystics in Bali

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Alien
2. Aliens
3. Prometheus
4. Alien Resurrection
5. Alien³
6. AVP: Alien vs. Predator
7. Alien: Covenant
8. Alien: Romulus
9. Aliens vs Predator: Requiem

1. Fateful Findings
2. Thru
3. Twisted Pair
4. Double Down
5. Cade: The Tortured Crossing
6. I Am Here....Now

• Alien
• Hereditary
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
• Daisies
• The Godfather
• Tampopo
• The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
• Eraserhead
• Beauty and the Beast
• Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

1. The Empire Strikes Back
2. Star Wars
3. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith
4. Star Wars: The Force Awakens
5. Return of the Jedi
6. Solo: A Star Wars Story
7. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
8. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
9. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
10. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Parasite
2. Memories of Murder
3. Mother
4. Okja
5. The Host
6. Barking Dogs Never Bite
7. Snowpiercer

1. Wild Strawberries
2. Scenes from a Marriage
3. The Seventh Seal
4. Summer with Monika
5. Through a Glass Darkly
6. Hour of the Wolf
7. Shame
8. The ion of Anna
9. Smiles of a Summer Night
10. Saraband

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
2. Chungking Express
3. Bait
4. Beau Travail
5. Love & Pop
6. Koyaanisqatsi
7. Safety Last!
8. Good Morning
9. Uncut Gems
10. Like Father, Like Son

1. Rosemary's Baby
2. Dawn of the Dead
3. The Reflecting Skin
4. Tenebre
5. The Return of the Living Dead
6. The Night of the Hunter
7. Dark Water
8. Lake Mungo
9. Martin
10. The Night House

...plus 24 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. A Nightmare on Elm Street
2. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
3. New Nightmare
4. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master
5. Freddy vs. Jason
6. A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge
7. Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare
8. A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child
9. A Nightmare on Elm Street

1. Stalker
2. Wings of Desire
3. Late Spring
4. The Exorcist
5. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
6. 8½
7. Suspiria
8. Bicycle Thieves
9. Chungking Express
10. Tampopo

...plus 59 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Ranking of the Dario Argento films I've seen

1. Suspiria
2. Tenebre
3. Deep Red
4. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
5. Phenomena
6. Opera
7. Inferno
8. Four Flies on Grey Velvet
9. Two Evil Eyes
10. The Cat o' Nine Tails

A ranking of the horror (and horror-adjacent) films I've watched during the Halloween season in 2020.

1. The Exorcist
2. Suspiria
3. House
4. The Evil Dead
5. Halloween
6. The Witch
7. Vampyr
8. Possession
9. Carrie
10. Pulse

...plus 29 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Decalogue V
• Decalogue VI
• Decalogue I
• Decalogue III
• Decalogue X
• Decalogue IX
• Decalogue VII
• Decalogue IV
• Decalogue II
• Decalogue VIII