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Absolutely mythic and mesmerizing

I'm not here to reclaim this over Goodfellas, but I will say this was Scorsese at his most refined, his technique was so sharp and precise it was like his version of a Wes Anderson movie (who's career he would be an early champion of only a year after this released) where the style is applied so effortlessly it at times feels like the director is parodying themself

A shaggy shaggy dog of a film, so fun and twisted, and a great great Lakeith performance

De fucking sturbing. Can't help but feel like Sally Hawkins is playing the same character from Happy Go Lucky

First and only Wes Anderson movie to use the n-word? So interesting to see his style before it evolved into its current form, the shagginess and emotional sincerity feel like relics he occasionally taps into, but the precision seems to smother those instincts these days. Great Bill Murray.

Watched on Sunday June 1, 2025.

Michael Cera in top form. Also Bruno Delbonnel brings an interesting earthiness to the lighting and closeups, it's subtle but I can definitely see the difference from Robert Yeoman

No film has held me in a vice grip of tension and terror for as sustained a period as this one. I've never wanted to leave a theater and scream so bad. There's a brief shot of an epidural being istered; that's what this movie was like for two hours, an injection bewteen the vertebrae, every squirm felt like the needle inside would poke something vital.

Ugh I continue to feel so conflicted about Jerrod's therapeutic over dumping approach to stand up, but the D'Angelo story is a terrifying accurate description of my childhood and adolescence.

I still love this, mostly for the nostalgia of it being my first and the focus on shoe leather spy craft like lip reading and the 3D mask printing. But upon rewatch it's such a sloppy repackaging of the Tony Scott Michael Bay style with none of the flair or precision. Also the characters feel even more like sketches than usual, but Philip Seymour Hoffman elevated this more than it deserves.

Tiktok and urban development and not letting these fuck boys ghost you, oh and a whopping dollop of Chinese youth dance music ethnographic documentary. Can't describe the feeling of being dropped into this movie with little to no context, but based on other reviews this is like the Avengers Endgame for this filmmaker, a culmination of multiple decades of work in a whirlwind epic. I liked this a bit more.

Watched on Sunday May 25, 2025.

Bring back children doing voodoo with pickle jars

So damn longgg.

I will say, ole boy from Severance breathtaking, put him on the poster.

P.S. the letterbox tie in is cute

I don't think it's a coincidence Paul Rudd is styled as a 70s father for basically the entire movie...also Kate Mara is giving the most chilling performance of the decade, theres a side eye in a sewer that was so sharp it basically decapitated every man in the screening

Holy shit! This might be the best shot movie I've seen this year. It might also be the most hilarious and terrifying movie too, like a demented treatise on masculinity, or in short acid Step Brothers / I love you Man.

This is stealthily a metro Detroit movie, I know a bland Midwestern suburb when I see one.

Good

Watched on Friday April 25, 2025.

Watched on Friday April 25, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 20, 2025.

Delroy Lindo is a national treasure, also as a notorious Michael B skeptic, I think this is his best performance. The 90's have never been more back. (Full review coming on second watch)

Sometimes a film transcends reality.

Sometimes it's so close, depicting a place and a people so well that every new image on screen feels like a memory. Every person in this movie feels familiar, and not like a forgotten or fuzzy memory but something primordial, tattooed on your bones from birth.

The gulfs of time and place don't matter, these people are my family, these characters are me, this film is an ocean of collective black consciousness, a pyschic portal so potent that every time I see it I'm sure it's the first film I've ever seen.

Subtle and astonishing.

Watched on Saturday April 12, 2025.

Jesus! Has the color green ever greened better than this??

Normani, Ben Mendelsohn, and the Scanners homage really saved this for me

Watched on Sunday March 30, 2025.

Watched on Thursday March 27, 2025.

Watched on Thursday March 27, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 28, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday March 19, 2025.

The final montage is so good it's giving Nickel Boys a run for it's money in the most impactful ending department

He makes directing look easy

Real Time with Hugh Grant

Finally got to see this in a proper theater, and the sound design is unreal. There have been many films about the black South, but few about black country folks, small towns, dirt roads, and days spent fishing in the muddy banks of a landscape that feels drenched in atmosphere and an always coming storm. Raven Jackson and Jomo Fray get the color palette of the south so right, just exceptional work. I hope they make 10 more movies together.

I have questions, all of them good

Pattinson and Naomi making their own cosmic kama sutra should be in every movie

Interesting, and intense. For all the kudos I want to give the direction, and production design, and the cinematography something is holding me back. I think it's the unrelenting bleakness, and that the movie stops short of really diving into the character dynamic at its most perplexing/murky...also sorry to the composer but they need to send Mica Levi and the Under the Skin production team a check for blatant score plagiarism.

The score is just so damn good, also the scene where he can't get the presidential assassin right is hilarious.

Andre Holland in IMAX was a revelation

It's impossible to ignore the art house film snob street cred you accrue when you like one of Apichatpong's movies, but this right here is an all timer.

Sonic time travel through our deepest most treasured and traumatic memories, set against a backdrop of light mysticism in the South American landscape. By situating the story in an urbane city like Medellin, he highlights how it feels simultaneously banal and like a shining jewel of a metropolis plopped into the most stunning nature you can witness. The movie is constantly wrong footing you, or bringing you deeper into its enigma. There's talk of curses, people disappearing, people reappearing, people feeling as though they're melting into nature. Then there are these brilliant sequences of the sublime, whether that's two people dancing in a small town plaza, or a band letting loose in a small studio as a crowd begins to form.

There's also something deeply tied to the filmmaking process itself, and how it stands in for this process of memory exchange. Of spiritual experiential transference between different artist. When Jessica has to describe her experience of the sound to young Herman, it's like watching someone reach within to wrap their arms around a shapeshifting ghost, but then he finds it, he uses his skills and craft to make tangible what minutes ago felt like something locked in hers and our heads, its a magical process to behold.

This process is repeated or inverted, or completely reconfigured in the finale, and I don't mean the ship, but the eccho-temporal-telepathy between Jessica and older Hernan feels like a magic trick but also something more beautiful, building on the experience she had with the young Herman, but this time a more fundamental primordial exchange between people, time, and nature.

Perhaps, and that's a strong perhaps, a masterpiece.

Everytime I drifted off, as one is bound to do during a film streamed at home, there was a shot so extraordinary, or a sequence so singular in its strange documentary-esque surrealism, I melted right back into the picture. I'm going to steal so much from this movie.

Watched on Friday February 21, 2025.

I will die on the hill that this captures LA better than any movie in the last 20 years

A camp masterpiece

There's a scene about halfway through when Malcolm is preaching on a stoop and the camera drifts over to all of these other sidewalk preachers, it's a simple sequence covered in one fluid movement but it captures so much about the time, the dueling polemics, and the people trying to make sense of a moment that I'm sure felt full of possibility. Spike, Denzel, and Ernest Dickerson were floating on another plane with this one.

Watched on Thursday February 13, 2025.

Incredible final shot

So glad we invented texting

Dreamy

Love this as a showcase for Luther's personality, wit, charm, his unbelievable yet tender talent, and his undeniably queer pettiness. But this movie fails Luther as much as it highlights him. The film can't fathom talking about his queerness or his body without falling into the shame centered framing of the fat and homophobic postures of his time.

Between this doc, the Alvin Ailey, and Andre Leon Talley movie, we keep getting these films about clearly queer Black geniuses too afraid to acknowledge that whatever shame they felt about their identity was clearly the fault of the broader society and not them dealing with that pressure. Also that using the movie to reproduce that societal and personal shame is an indictment of queerness itself, the movies tacitly say that it's something that should be whispered about, never discussed openly or interrogated.

My only but, and as always its a big one, is that this movie like all of the paint-by-numbers VH1 behind-the-music style docs is working with the most alchemical and divine artform humans have made: music. Even a C+ movie about a genius musician can't help but be a damn good time. Plus, when he brings the KFC bucket on stage my theater of 8 people erupted like we were all friends.

1. Challengers
2. Dahomey
3. Nickel Boys
4. Hard Truths
5. All We Imagine as Light
6. La Chimera
7. A Different Man
8. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
9. Hundreds of Beavers
10. Dune: Part Two

...plus 16 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Feeling nostalgic about the Arclight, and the incredible experience I was able to have in the CINERAMA DOME in the late twenty teens....sigh, I didn't know how I good I had it. This is a list of every movie I saw in the CINERAMA DOME between 2018-2020.

• Kill Bill: Vol. 1
• First Man
• If Beale Street Could Talk
• Uncut Gems
• Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
• Avengers: Endgame