6u532b

The titular the utopian metropolis that’s at the center of this movie is less a vision of the future than a peek into the past — the space age that only a mid-century society, drunk on wonder and new advances in transportation, could have envisioned. The anachronism is very much by design: Positing that the only way to move forward may be to go back, Tomorrowland aches for an era when people were still hopeful about where the world might be headed. It’s nostalgic for a future that never happened. The movie also makes one ache for Brad Bird of before. Before this, Bird had made both a share of great original animated films (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille) and a great live-action thriller ride (Mission:Impossible — Ghost Protocol) so the prospect of him making a great original live-action thrill ride seemed like an easy layup. Instead, though, the Disney-produced and vaguely Disney-inspired Tomorrowland wastes Bird’s talent and George Clooney’s gravitas on what struggles to be more than a feature-length prologue. This movie takes approximately forever to get going, marking the first time Bird’s whiz-bang set pieces haven’t set his movie’s pace. There are decent moments here and there — like a set piece involving an ordinary-looking house that turns out to have so many gizmos, pulleys, booby traps and escape pods it might have been designed by Wallace and Gromit. But if Tomorrowland struggles to find its way to its climax its because that particular set piece (if not the entire third act) is such a bust: an underpopulated and anticlimactic action scene that doesn’t come close to fulfilling the promise of the movie’s best moment, a mid-movie single-take tour of the Tomorrowland that once was. Not only does the uneven movie ultimately disappoint as a Brad Bird film, but also as a basic piece of escapist excitement.

Watched on Saturday June 7, 2025.

This in many ways feels like the endpoint of our long recent journey of eat-the-rich cinema, which has volleyed us from from Succession to Triangle of Sadness to The White Lotus to The Menu. All of those movies and series are in some way comedies that assure us the elite are miserable, whether they get what’s coming to them or not; they also allow us to enjoy secondhand experiences of the luxuries they bask in and the terribleness with which they treat other people. This blunt-force-trauma comedy, though, struggles to find much outside of its very clear skewering of the high-on-their-own supply megalomania. Despite some very astute performances, Jesse Armstrong’s movie invites us on this exclusive billionaire boys’ weekend yet leaves us very much on the emotional outside of these characters who, should they destroy society, will just retreat into their respective bunkers while assuring themselves it’ll work out for the better in the end. “Nothing’s that fucking serious — nothing means anything, and everything’s funny and cool,” one of them spits out at a certain point, a guiding philosophy from someone rich enough to believe that. In Mountainhead, the rich very much eat us, but it’s ultimately presented in a way that highlights comedy’s limitations as a critique of power, when its targets are already more awful and more ridiculous than any fictional version.

From the “Road to” series through buddy action movies and bromances, male friendship as comic fodder has been a constant pull, one that has increasingly favored immaturity as the catharsis. Smart plus stupid became stupid hates smarts, until dumb felt ubiquitous. And in fairness, it can be a little tiresome to watch grown men devolve for laughs, which makes Michael Angarano’s old-pals-in-crisis comedy Sacramento a bittersweet kick. The film explores what’s funny — and terrifyingly truthful — about being wrenched into adulthood. In its slim eightysomething minute runtime, the movie never aspires to be much more than an incisively rendered sketch, but its casual nature and outward lack of ambition belie how well it manages to convey the terror that change brings into our lives, the mania of trying to deny it, and the relief that comes from recognizing that someone else in your world is changing with you.

Watched on Friday June 6, 2025.

For her directorial debut, Hallie Meyers-Shyer, daughter of Nancy Meyers, essentially decided to make a shabby copy of one of her mother’s romantic comedies. If you’ve watched any of Nancy Meyers’ movies, the resemblance between influence and imitation will be readily apparent: A star plays a would-be charmer whose neuroses are as fabulously customized as her kitchen. She’s what the brand-conscious folk would call “a creative,” and while she does work, she spends much of her time on man troubles. Her life is as fluffed as a throw pillow and so drained of realism it’s best described as a lifestyle, which can make for a killer aspirational fantasy, at least in Nancy Meyers’s hands. Home Again, on the other hand, is wholly resistible, partly because it can’t fulfill the promise of that aspirational fantasy either on a craft level (it’s kind of incredible just how bad this is on a shot-to-shot level) or in of its emotional and psychological portraiture. The problems begin with the script, or perhaps just with the insulting idea that its protagonist, Alice, would be crying buckets into a mirror because she’s turning forty on the day this story opens. Yes, she’s newly separated from her husband, but Alice doesn’t seem too bent out of shape by the separation. She’s busy building a new career, and has moved with her two daughters into her childhood home, which she has redecorated to look like something out of a lower-budget Nancy Meyers movie. So why is she crying, exactly? Mostly in effort to jump-start a movie that, formulaic step by step, needs to confirm that a single woman can be happy. “You go, girl!” That’s more or less it, with accent pieces and yoga lessons, though there are plot complications, some involving three friends, a trio of twentysomethings all struggling to make it as Hollywood filmmakers. The three shack up in Alice’s guesthouse and soon they’re all one smiley family, which might sound odd because they’re strangers and she has young daughters — except that this isn’t reality, , it’s a bubble.

The jagged, double-edged nature of parental love — and the gory depths to which it cuts — is at the heart of Bring Her Back. And make no mistake: for all its ruthlessness as a horror movie, Bring Her Back is a film with a heart, one that bleeds for its characters and their various traumas. But it’s worst-case scenarios that are the Philippou brothers’ stock in trade. Talk to Me was an uncommonly brutal supernatural thriller filled with visceral, blunt-force shocks and squirmy metaphysical subtext. It was also a significant word-of-mouth hit. In that context, Bring Her Back feels like the work of filmmakers trying to top themselves. It’s bleaker than its predecessor, and vaguely stranger too, even though there’s a strong commonality between the two films. Specifically, the Philippous are good at building and sustaining dread, and also at puncturing it with well-placed jokes and little shivers of revelation. The problem is, in trying to slow-play their hand, they end up cultivating more dead air than necessary. The recurring visual motif of a circle conjures up images of occult rituals, but also of the directors spinning their wheels. The final act in particular is impressively grotesque, and yet one can still hear the plot machinery grinding away overtop of the cracking limbs and screaming. That Bring Her Back still manages to be affecting on an emotional level speaks to the deeply charged nature of the material. The brothers deserve credit for the moments when they “go for it,” even as the sort of generic nature of their movie becomes more clear through it.

Pulp this archetypal has the potential for a sort of poetry of cynicism and doom, but what it needs to unlock is a central figure, a tough guy with a suit and a J-frame revolver — a Lee Marvin type. Obviously, that isn’t Jamie Foxx; his character is purely a plot driver, neither stone-cold enough nor enough of a screwup to merit the label of antihero. The movies haven’t really known what to do with Foxx since 2004, when be had the one-two punch of Ray and Collateral. He’s a strong actor but not, as experience has shown, a natural-born action hero. That let him down in something like Django Unchained, where his tight-lipped lead turn was upstaged by his more garrulous costars. But Collateral, in which Foxx played an ordinary fellow caught up in extraordinary circumstances, exploited this ostensible shortcoming brilliantly; his utter lack of preparedness for the long night ahead of him made for a terrific rooting interest. Another long night awaits Foxx’s character in Sleepless, and though he goes through the knife-waving, pistol-whipping motions with committed intensity, the role is ultimately too blandly conceived for him to find any fresh edges or hit any deeper notes.

“We love fat women. They’re tight-fisted and unsympathetic”: An actual statement that Gene Hackman shouts.

Fits snugly into a wave of films that depicted New York City (specifically Manhattan) as at best wildly unpleasant and at worst an apocalyptic wasteland punctuated by random acts of potentially homicidal violence. Escalating from the comparatively inoffensive garbage-strike, dysfunctional nightmare of 1970’s The Out-Of-Towners to the heroin junkies appropriating public squares in 1971’s Panic In Needle Park and the corrupt cops of 1973’s Serpico. Death Wish repeats all that and then some to rather absurd, grimly toned lengths. It’s as ugly then as it is now; always a deranged fascist fantasy about a middle-aged “bleeding-heart liberal” brought around hard to the idea that the world is a cesspool in need of flushing. And while there a few flashes of self-awareness in the movie, here and there; it’s ugliness on the moral spectrum is matched by its sloppiness in form.

Watched on Tuesday June 3, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday June 3, 2025.

There’s a scene about halfway through The Mountain where our young, torpid protagonist Andy, sitting alone, avoiding social interaction, fixates on a corner of the hospital hallway so ordinary it may be invisible, so dusty it may not even exist. No one usually notices seams like this — the literal borders where pieces come together, where we’re given spaces to live within. He stares at the corner; so do we, noting the molding and dust particles gone matte-green and bored symmetry. Until our attention’s suddenly broken by Andy taking a picture. At this moment in his journey, he’s been traveling alongside a rouge lobotomist going from town-to-town, hospital-to-hospital, documenting his exploits, usually taking pictures of the patients for the families pre-procedure. For a young man like Andy, who spends large portions of his day staring — at walls and floors and middle distances and nothing — observing and documenting seem like constructive uses of time. And yet we never see any of his photography, incidentally because here the act of photographing is much more important than the photo itself. That might sound needlessly abstract, and yet its by meticulous design. With each of its deliberate frames, Rick Alverson’s imagining of ‘50s America here is always pushing for subversion and contradiction. Rather than the rosy repository of nostalgia, the Norman Rockwell-hued sentiment about “the good old days,” here the past is syringed of joy. The wintry-hued images themselves have a particularly painterly quality: For all the sharp midcentury detail, there’s a certain vague unreality to them — appropriate for a film partially about the difference between the world and how it’s distorted through presentation and constructed mythology. Alverson often stages his scenes more as slide show than narrative, which in hand makes otherwise simple sequences subliminally unsettling, like a shot-reverse-shot conversation that takes place in a room that, after some time, we finally notice has no entrance. Production designer Jacqueline Abrahams is likewise an invaluable architect of mood here: Her unloved domestic interiors and barren hospital wards represent a take on midcentury modernism so aggressively stripped down, so free from any evidence of human use, that they almost take matters into the realm of science fiction. Either way, they also speak to the inexpressible loneliness that haunts this movie. Throughout, The Mountain insists that the aforementioned Andy is an unfortunate soul lost to the pastiche of history, his brain ground down to fertilizer for humanity’s more notable future, just another forgotten corner in the room. And yet, while Alverson could have very easily ended his character study right there, with an easy little bit of cynicism, he shows a striking willingness to persist further: Andy himself seems to know that he’s little more than a cog in the historical machine, and even so he still ascends the mountain to a conclusion that’s both oddly logical and unexpectedly touching. It’s there where Alverson reminds us that inside every lonely young man, there’s a shivering kid waiting to be picked up and brought in from the snow.

In Friendship, Tim Robinson plays Craig Waterman, a middle-aged suburbanite who works at a company that produces “habit-forming” apps. The only thing remotely interesting about Craig is the actor playing him; somehow, Robinson both typifies and transcends the role’s dumpy Everyman banality. The movie as a whole is sort of built around his unique, unnerving presence. Here, as in I Think You Should Leave, Robinson immediately s as a man who doesn’t quite understand how the world works so he’s doing his best to fake it. That the world of the film feels equally off compounds this queasy quality, almost bringing Craig full circle to the point where he starts to resemble an everyman. Plenty of bizarre happenings ensue: a tense break-in, a mysterious disappearance, many physical altercations, and a hallucinatory trip. If some of these individual scenes sometimes play like sketch ideas or don’t always logically follow another, they still often feel like a conscious choice; recurring gags and thematic consistency help keep it knit together. If Friendship is ultimately a series of variations on the same grim joke, the variations are clever and the joke’s a good one: Craig wants a little more out of life than he already has. The cosmos deems him unworthy and metes out one seemingly disproportionate punishment after another.

One of those movies where it feels like the life and drama on the set itself was almost certainly more interesting than the finished product; one that became far more entertaining once someone said “cut.”

For its first forty-five-ish minutes, engers actually sets up what could be a pretty interesting movie. Of course, it’s hamstrung by Morten Tyldum’s pedestrian direction, but what studio films create such an uncomfortable central conflict? It all starts with a guy, played by Chris Pratt, who’s traveling to a distant space colony on what’s supposed to be a one-hundred-and-twenty-year trip, except that his hibernation pod malfunctions, waking him up with about ninety years still left to go. This expository stretch — the guy alone on the spaceship, convinced that he’s weeks away from arriving on a new planet — is structured almost like an Albert Brooks comedy, with Brooks-ian gags involving coffee machines, orientation videos, and a bartending android. But the bar itself is one of several very obvious nods to The Shining. The guy wanders the spaceship (mostly gunmetal gray and Apple white, like all of the dull futures in contemporary Hollywood sci-fi movies), lives it up by playing holographic video games and eating robot-prepared sushi, and eventually sinks into suicidal despair, which is when he becomes obsessed with one of the 4,999 other engers still hibernating on the spaceship (Jennifer Lawrence) and decides to wake her up — thereby saving himself from loneliness, but screwing her out of her life forever. All the suspense — guilt, fear of discovery — of that scenario is very much from his point-of-view. And engers is very aware of how ugly all of this is; it isn’t throwing out those references to The Shining for nothing. 

But, look, there’s no way to get from there to a Hollywood happy ending. So instead, engers fabricates something of a “Laurence Fishburne ex machina” twist in the plot and turns into an inane, ticking-clock action movie with one hell of laughably bad ending. And yet, for its first third or so, it seems on the verge of finding something in the vacuum of speculative space. It toes close to stalker-rape fantasy, but that’s what makes it promising, however briefly. One can’t help but wonder what version of this story would work. Perhaps there is a engers that plays out from the Lawrence character’s point of view, but that would make identification too simple. If engers had any real guts, it might have pursued the idea to some genuinely uncomfortable places. But this is a big-budget sci-fi action romance starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, so instead, we get what amounts to a somewhat skeezy meet-cute in space. It’s a clever setup in search of an execution. A guy wakes up in space and is facing an eternity of loneliness; what does he do? That remains a captivating idea, and one worth exploring. But in order for a premise to become a film, something more needs to happen. Unfortunately for engers, that “something more” turns out to be a hodgepodge of familiar elements and clichés, seemingly strung together for no apparent reason other than to get us to feature length and give the movie stars something to do.

To ask why anything happens in this sludgy, hyper-stylized adaptation of a fabled comic book series may be an exercise in futility. The only halfway interesting question is why the thing exists at all. The most plausible answer lies in its pedigree, whether that be Will Eisner’s source material or Frank Miller’s own comic success. And yet it’s the latter’s bold visual style that’s not well served by his clumsiness as a cinematic storyteller. The movie seems to be trying to combine a knowing, winking sense of pop-culture history with an embrace of the more soulful aspects of that history, but the result is a relentlessly cartoonish, talky stew of film noir poses and crime-fighter clichés. Sam Jackson and Scarlett Johansson at least seem to enjoy themselves, which is their prerogative since they are the villains. Gabriel Macht, though, who plays the titular fedora-wearing, skirt-chasing, undead hero, works hard to give off an air of hard-boiled insouciance and yet any charisma he may have is completely drowned out by his hat, his mask and the murky shadows around him. What’s most striking about The Spirit is how little pleasure it affords, in spite of its efforts to be sly, sexy, heartfelt and clever all at once. Or perhaps the movie flounders because its multiple ambitions are fundamentally at odds, like the various femmes, fatale and otherwise, who do battle for the hero’s heart. A lot goes on in The Spirit, but none of it sticks — not the shopworn plotting nor the arch, stilted dialogue.

Often characterized as a minimalist, Chantel Akerman was fascinated with long takes, sparse spaces (hotel and apartment rooms being a favorite), meaningful repetition, and how everyday mundanity can mount into a sense of doom. That, however, doesn’t really encom the scope of her work. If there’s one film that shows how Akerman never allowed easy judgements or interpretations, this portrait of a tortured relationship is it. Pared down in the Bressonian manner, but inflected with an almost operatic intensity, The Captive transcends and eschews naturalism to create something closer to timelessness. Somber in tone but punctuated with hilariously absurd details, it has, from beginning to end, the quality and logic of a dream — or, maybe more aptly, that of a fantasy spun by the protagonist as he lies in bed, writing in his notebook à la Proust. Yet in her adaptation process, Ackerman jettisons Proust’s serpentine prose in favor of romantic images, stripped down dialogue, and overall pays tribute not to the literary source she adapts but to the cinematic genre she’s consistently employing; taking on the sumptuous settings and colors, the roiling mysteries and set pieces of pure cinematic suspense that recall none other than Alfred Hitchcock.

Watched on Wednesday May 28, 2025.

From the jump, this loudly announces itself as a change of pace for Joachim Trier: a supernatural coming-of-age story that unfolds in mostly chronological order, albeit with a few flickers of flashback and a couple of dream sequences. As in his previous films, though, this remains sensitively attuned to the emotional wavelengths of its young characters; as a queer campus love story, this has the right temperament. And though it features little of the dazzling formal gymnastics that dominated the expressive dramas that come/came before and after it, Thelma still can be seductively staged and edited; containing at least two sequences, both of them flashbacks, that tap into a vividly primal sense of terror. It’s moments like those, though, that one almost wishes that Trier, rather than holding back, had simply gone for broke. But his first foray into the fantastical — this is essentially Carrie in Scandinavian deep freeze — gets stuck in an odd middle ground: It’s at once too metaphorically muddled and too dramatically straightforward. That the film seems less interested in harnessing the full extent of its titular character’s telekinetic abilities than in shaking her loose from her emotional repression is somehow more irable than satisfying. You could read Thelma as a saga of Sapphic liberation, a fiery critique of religious patriarchy or perhaps yet another superhero’s traumatic origin story; it’s graceful and ambiguous enough to each of these readings. But the more possibilities the movie seems to entertain, the more its cumulative power seems to dissipate.

Brian De Palma’s stylish original Mission: Impossible established this franchise as something of an auteur sandbox, with each film transforming as it was ed from one director to another. But these later entries, all capably helmed by Christopher McQuarrie, have turned it into a showcase for Cruise’s crowd-pleaser philosophy, a stunt-filled star text that appears to resist a serious ideological reading. The plots are all easy to confuse, not only because they tend to be filled with double-crosses and disguises, but because past a certain point they are all basically the same plot. It’s this recycled narrative framework that has allowed the Mission: Impossible movies to develop something like a thematic throughline. The villains of these films are arms dealers, double agents, Machiavellians, extremists who want to bring about the end times. They represent some kind of collective cynicism or nihilism that the series has, increasingly, connected to the idea of a technology-dependent civilization. What the IMF represents, as the opposing force, is some individualistic mix of ingenuity and foolhardiness, or whatever illogical drive has repeatedly led Cruise to perform his own stunts. They may have their own arsenal of high-tech, sci-fi gadgetry, but, as one of the series’ more reliable tropes dictates, the gadgets usually end up breaking down, necessitating some improvisation on the part of our heroes.

McQuarrie isn’t operating in ignorance here. They play with analog nostalgia (Ethan’s signature self-destructing briefing comes on a VHS tape this time around) and anxieties about digitization, and make some laborious attempts to connect the plot and characters of this film to earlier entries in the series, going all the way back to the first one. This inspires a little too much dialogue about self-actualization and destiny, which is mostly lost in a hectic pace and a script that comes to involve a lot of invented techno-babble, various governmental intrigues, and a doomsday vault that contains all of the world’s accumulated knowledge. Not that anyone is really watching these movies for the story particulars or simplistic subtexts. It’s the awesome set pieces that have made Mission: Impossible into something of an institution, and though The Final Reckoning doesn’t top any of the series’ highs, it does deliver its share of spectacle. Ethan Hunt’s trip into the lost Russian sub — a largely wordless sequence that involves some really elaborate rotating sets — is a standout, as is the over-the-top climax, which combines a ticking atomic bomb, improvised surgery, and sleight-of-hand with an extended biplane duel. There are, as before, gnarly brawls, suspenseful close calls, narrow escapes, death-defying leaps, shenanigans involving parachutes, and knife fights. Over and over, Ethan Hunt keeps asking for one more chance, a little more time, a little faith, like an addict whose fix is saving the world. Sure, it gets repetitive, and as one of the most expensive productions in history, it inevitably smacks of an imperial industry in decadent decline. But somewhere into the nearly three-hour runtime, the movie es that crucial point where one stops taking notes and decides to simply enjoy themselves. The end is nigh, and it’s mostly a good time.

A lot of people have pointed out how little-to-no-one has managed to make a good shark movie since Jaws. To the point that the fact nobody has made a classic archaeology movie since Spielberg’s original Indiana Jones trilogy goes comparatively unnoticed. As the definitive blockbuster auteur, it’s no surprise that any genre of adventure storytelling Spielberg tried his hand at during this untouchable early period has never been equalled by decades of imitators, and yet revisiting any of those early films, he makes the formula seem so simple it’s almost baffling nobody has managed to recreate the magic. But even the best films in this mold, from Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy to National Treasure, never quite shake off the Indy imitation tag. Watching Fountain of Youth is another reminder of why Spielberg is the ultimate master, leaving even name-brand directors who have their own distinct style like Guy Ritchie trailing far behind his work from over forty years ago. Part of the problem is the void at it’s center: John Krasinski doesn’t try to play his character Luke as rough-and-tumble as Harrison Ford or as goofily earnest as Nicolas Cage, instead aiming for something more confidently romantic about the fun of treasure-hunting. But that only means he’s miscast in a different key. It largely seems like a leading man self-image problem. Krasinski seems to want his character to be liked and thought of as a basically normal, decent guy. But the role begs for a classic Guy Ritchie motormouthed dervish ne’er-do-well weirdo, somebody so charming that you can’t resist him though you know he’s trouble. Maybe Krasinski’s miscasting is just indicative of another thing people are always chasing yet struggle to achieve: that of the old-fashioned, gruff leading-man and not that of Men’s Health Magazine variety.

At its heart, this whole film is really about the ing of batons, and the inexorable move from the past to the future. That even carries over to the film’s stars, too: seeing the hardwon leading man of Kevin Costner ing the proverbial stardom to… Ashton Kutcher. Naturally it made much more sense at the time of its release, but it’s also the core fatal flaw here; every time The Guardian threatens to be a decent drama of the Top Gun and An Officer and a Gentleman tradition, it grinds to a halt under the vapid presence of Kutcher and the groaning clichés from its various military-movie predecessors. Vaguely dreamy voiceover narration! Training montages set to rock music! A tough maverick who learns how to be part of a team! Inspiring “you are the elite” speeches! Stick-in-the-mud trainers who question Costner's teaching methods! Violent awakenings from flashback nightmares! A humanizing relationship with an emotionally guarded but beautiful civilian! The list, much like the movie, goes on and on and on.

Watched on Saturday May 24, 2025.

One of two John Hughes ts that never really found its place in the cultural landscape. That’s probably because, unlike the rest of his oeuvre, this muddled “mind of a married man” tale has no speechifying teens, no big laughs, no instantly quotable lines, and, outside of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, it’s the closest he ever got to making a film for grown-ups. Leaving teen movies behind, though, surprisingly seems to limit him, as it only further pushes his yuppie-ness into the spotlight and thus makes it feel all the more hollow and generic.

Watched on Saturday May 24, 2025.

Contains maybe the funniest milk-related death I’ve ever seen.

Andrew Niccol has a habit of letting his ideas outpace his storytelling to the point that they become reductive. Here, he treats most of his ing characters— a commanding officer played by Bruce Greenwood, a fellow drone pilot played by Zoë Kravitz — like mouthpieces, slipping talking points about their line of work into “conversation.” The movie as a whole is rather heavy on speeches and rather light on actual drama. Good Kill though is at least psychologically credible, exploring as it does the peculiar, specific coming-home adjustment issues facing modern soldiers. But Niccol handles this PTSD conflict with little subtly, having Ethan Hawke literally identify the absurdity of his dual lives to a convenience store clerk. Good Kill is the type of movie for which the faint praise “well-meaning” was coined.

Watched on Thursday May 22, 2025.

A hybrid of two different kinds of movies, one significantly more interesting than the other: At its best, it’s a great prototype for Bigelow heroines, showing the struggles and triumph of a strong woman making her way in a world dominated by men. At its worst, it’s part of a stretch of sexy thrillers in the late ’80s/early ’90s that had women scurrying from their psychotic partners or vice versa. Jamie Lee Curtis brings the right amount of vulnerability and resolve to her role, but, making a gluttonous buffet of every scene, Ron Silver plays the perpetrator who romances Curtis before tormenting her ruthlessly, and it’s his nearly constant antics that rob Blue Steel of any connection to plausible reality and consistently pushes this movie in the goofiest of directions, to the point that one starts questioning whether one’s laughing with or at the movie.

There’s an easy argument to be made for cinema as an act of time travel, as a magical little device that, with a snap of the finger, disintegrates the boundaries between here and there, then and now. In a less flowery way, it’s the easiest (and probably cheapest) act of transportation around. Throughout Grand Tour, we hop aboard a Ferris wheel, a train, then a steamboat, a taxi, a motorcycle, and an aerial tram, only to realize that each of these vehicles has been a sort of time machine. The movie itself takes place in 1918 — but then again that isn’t quite right. Can a film really be said to take place in 1918 if nearly half its material constitutes a nonfiction collage of twenty-first-century life? Miguel Gomes is a bit of a skilled trickster whose films often delight in blurring formal and temporal boundaries. In Grand Tour, we’re flung into a kind of giddy maelstrom in which geography is the only constant. We flee from Mandalay to Rangoon to Singapore to Bangkok to Saigon to Manila to Osaka to Shanghai to Chongqing, surrounded with a rich trove of quotidian contemporary snapshots — of boat rides, car treks, markets, a cockfight, a karaoke performance, a mah–jongg game — that are grafted onto the fanciful story of two lovers, Edward and Molly, as they journey separately through early twentieth-century East and Southeast Asia. Edward and Molly’s moods, thoughts, and decisions are notably explained in steady snippets of voice-over, but the narrators themselves keep changing — and switching languages — as the characters’ journey continues apace. The film slips between colonial past and post-colonial present with hilarious ease; the camera might follow a feverish Molly into a wilderness, only to emerge in roughly the same spot more than a century later. At one point, Edward flees a dance in Bangkok; after we lose him in a flurry of waltzing bodies, Gomes, caught up in the moment, suddenly deposits us into another plane of elaborately choreographed movement: a modern-day traffic circle in Saigon, full of drivers and motorcyclists.

Notably, Gomes makes no effort to conceal the clashing of his two distinct time periods; in fact, he revels in the blatant Old Hollywood artifice of his 1918 setting; taking pride in the creaking obviousness of the sets; the occasional old-fashioned iris shot; the sound of Molly responding to almost every comment with a gawky spit-laugh, in the vein of a classic screwball heroine. The contrast between these moments and the present-day footage might appear jarring on paper, and not merely because of the differences between period stylization and documentary realism. The 1918 segments are largely a romp of outdated privilege, in which two well-to-do white Europeans hop from country to country, many of them still in the grip of British rule. In contrast, the Asian locals we see in the contemporary footage — Burmese farmers, Thai motorists, Filipino singers, Japanese diners — eschew from such whimsy entirely. Remarkably, though, Grand Tour never buckles under the strain, or suggests any strain to begin with. It moves between cities and centuries, and teasingly undermines the relationship between sound and image, with a sly and miraculous fluidity. Amidst all that unrestrained play, it’s the recurring images that start to stand out. One of the most significant motifs in Grand Tour is that of puppetry: In one scene, animal marionettes dance on strings; in another, shadow puppets act out a bawdy folk tale. These moments are beautiful in their own right, but they also lay bare the ravishing simplicity of Gomes’ methods. The puppet shows derive their power, in part, from the conspicuous presence of the puppeteers; the more we see of them and their exertions, the more transfixing the illusion. The same could be said of Grand Tour, which, in refusing to hide its formal seams and intricate associations, becomes all the easier to get lost in. If Molly is the more sympathetic of the protagonists, it is nonetheless easy enough to identify with Edward when, asked by a guide if he cares where he’s headed, responds, “I’ll go wherever you take me.”

This exists somewhere between romantic-comedy and horror, skewering the structure of the meet-cute with the inclusion of a serial killer hunting the boy who’s just met the girl. Such genre cocktails are a specialty of writers Christopher Landon and Michael Kennedy, whose respective filmographies include stabby spins on Groundhog Day, Freaky Friday, and It’s a Wonderful Life. In its crudely cheeky way, Heart Eyes commits to the sappy side of its cinematic recipe; checking off all the hallmarks of a Hallmark Channel meet-cute. The problem is the script here isn’t smart or witty enough to do much more than just recycle clichés and flagrantly point at them. Its idea of wit is having the broad best friend character cram a half-dozen rom-com titles into a single sentence. And while a movie like Scream actually got your heart pounding — the key to that movie’s success was that it mocked thriller conventions while giving them a genuinely thrilling workout — Heart Eyes ultimately is scary in the largest of scare quotes and only scantly funny.

The pleasure of hard-boiled, meet-and-interrogate movies like this lies in the flavor they put into characters and milieu; aside from the one unsettling interlude involving a cemetery groundskeeper and his rooftop pigeon coop, none of the people or places that our imposing, gravelly-voiced hero visits here would seem out of place in a middling episode of Law & Order: SVU. Which is to say that this murky potboiler struggles to distinguish itself from any number of procedural mysteries. That is in exception of Scott Frank and Liam Neeson’s handling of their protagonist’s commitment to sobriety with credible understatement. His daily attendance of AA meetings is integrated into both his work process and into the plot; it’s a frame for the story, rather than mere window dressing. In fact, A Walk Among The Tombstones is a movie that’s easier to appreciate for its frames — both visual and narrative — than what it puts in them. Visually, the movie is sparing with closeups and rich with negative space, purposeful overhead shots, and one-point perspectives where the diagonal lines formed by streets, hallways, and stairways converge into a vanishing point. Periodically, Frank pulls out one of those resourceful tricks of design and direction that, decades ago, were the stock-in-trade of B-filmmakers. These moments — too economical and workmanlike to as flourishes — aren’t enough to turn A Walk Among the Tombstones into a good movie, but they give it a sense of confidence and form that’s all too rare in today’s thrillers.

There’s an awkward clash here between realist drama and fanciful-ish, larger-than-life allegory that, ittedly, feels like it almost suffocates the film. Most of that clash seems to stem from this film’s origins as a stage play. Throughout, moments of pure reality are punctured by moments of hyper-written dialogue and other palpably theatrical devices (including a lengthy monologue in the middle of the film and occasional flashes of color so pointed that you can practically hear a stage manager cueing the lights). All the booming choral music and a set piece set in a flooded kitchen makes it clear that Alonso Ruizpalacios is more interested in epic symbolism than vérité portraiture, but his tendency to flip between allegory and real life frequently unbalances a film that’s most successful when it commits to both at the same time. Certain aspects of La Cocina feel as siloed away from each other as the back of house is from the front, and while it’s fitting that the discrete parts of Ruizpalacios’ film should belong to different worlds, the dream-like artifice of its design eats away at the urgency of its drama and make it feel all the more strained. Perhaps part of that’s intentional — maybe Ruizpalacios’ overall aesthetic mirrors the systemic assault waging against its characters’ dwindling sense of hope. But if the tragic and full-throated La Cocina only tightens its grip as it goes along, that’s only because it’s characters refuse to surrender the last shreds of their humanity to a machine that doesn’t care about what it costs to keep humming.

One might presume that this movie only exists as a thin pretense to promote The Weeknd’s new album. And yet Hurry Up Tomorrow promotes very little. It’s set up is simple: two broken individuals (one superstar, the other a superfan) suddenly find each other at their lowest points and promptly run off with one another, sharing a blissful evening, away from pop-star obligations, doing exactly what you’d expect — walking around carnivals, going to warmly lit bars that serve drinks with sparklers, sitting close together in the backseat of a car as the shining (perhaps even blinding) lights of the city by its windows. All that aforementioned plot might sound like a description of the first thirty or forty minutes of the movie. In reality, though, that’s nearly the whole movie, or at least until the last twenty or so minutes when all of a sudden Hurry Up Tomorrow decides get plotty. Before that though, Trey Edward Shults and Abel Tesfaye (AKA The Weeknd) clearly desire this to be more approached as something experiential; with Shults bringing out all his loud, dreamy, at times melodramatic and overwrought aesthetic flourishes, while Tesfaye, Daniel Loptain and Johnnie Burn push the film to robust sonic extremes. It’s all hampered though by how deeply thin the movie is conceptually, always struggling to retain any wisp of mystery. It desperately, and at times vapidly, riffs on everything from Misery to Raging Bull to Vanilla Sky to even American Psycho. But it increasingly feels like shtick. Shults changes aspect ratios and halfheartedly revives some of his 360-degree pans in driving cars. Tesfaye grapples self-pityingly with his weaknesses. Everyone sheds elegant tears when recalling the vague traumas of their backstory. But as a deeply personal howl from the depths of a soul in agony, it’s bland and indistinct. The movie may be one-hundred minutes long, but it would feel stretched thin even if cut down to the cutscene bookends of a music video.

Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 16, 2025.

Small details can make a meal or a movie, and at times this movie deserves at least a little credit for getting some of the details right. Playing a therapist to Catherine Zeta-Jones’ uptight, perfectionist chef, Bob Balaban has a scene in which he expertly balances professional dignity with a near-drooling desire to tear into one of her exquisitely prepared dishes. As Zeta-Jones’ free-spirited sous chef/possible romantic partner, Aaron Eckhart scores a delightful introduction, infectiously singing opera in the kitchen while stomping around in a pair of Crocs. But sometimes the details offset what’s missing, like a fancy piece of garnish next to a mundane meal. And No Reservations is pretty much the dramatic equivalent of a burger and fries, however pretty the presentation. Even viewers unfamiliar with the source material will likely feel a shudder of recognition once the plot clicks into place. There’s never a question how No Reservations will end, which would be just fine if the film made getting there more pleasurable. Sadly, the way Scott Hicks loving ways be shoots his star doesn’t hide the fact that her character’s little more than a collection of predictable tics. But at least she’s a character. Eckhart is winning as usual, but he can only do so much with a character that’s essentially the male version of the manic pixie dream girl. He has no real life of his own, just a need to heal others. If only his magic worked on the film, we might have been spared groaningly hokey lines like “I wish there was a cookbook for life.”

For its first forty-five or so minutes, this plays like a creaky, made-for-TV domestic drama, until a barely foreshadowed twist turns the film into a lurid adolescent-wish-fulfillment potboiler. Its imagery is filled with symbolic house fires, secret medical procedures, hidden children, and all sorts of things that should sustain interest on their own, and yet they struggle to keep viewers’ attention from drifting elsewhere — namely, to stuff like the wallpaper, the sweaters, and the film’s inexplicable obsession with baseball. It might be that just about everyone involved here is both overqualified for the material and doesn’t seem to know what to make of it. John McNaughton has long shown a flair for trashy, heightened camp. Here, however, he plays it safe and anonymous, giving only a faint whiff of the dark comic sensibility that has always distinguished his work. The exception is Michael Shannon, who makes his character all the more creepier by playing him as an ordinary human being. The result is a movie with no shortage of the potentially macabre and no sense of perspective on it. The film operates on the auto-pilot setting of thoroughly competent film style, concerned in large part with getting from plot point A to plot point B in the least disruptive way possible. The few exceptions only hint at how much more there could have been, if Stephen Lancellotti’s script were only given a touch of the strange. Without it, boredom sets in, and the eye can’t help but wander — to the armless red accent chairs that the characters never sit in and the blue wallpaper of the family’s hallways.

It’s a little surprising that this is David Mamet’s first prison picture, especially given that his filmography is filled with the stripped-down rules of the machismo jungle, a world filled with hustlers and marks; where you’re either playing an angle or you’re being played. Henry Johnson is also probably the filmmakers’ bluntest expression of these themes yet, one of those late period works in which artists of a certain age stop smuggling their ideas underneath the drama and just come out and say what they mean. Such bluntness paired with Mamet’s specific dialogue structure and his sense of directing it, though, sort of renders this kind of monotonous. The reason that James Foley’s 1992 adaptation of Glengarry Glen Ross is still the greatest Mamet adaptation is because he let broadly theatrical hams like Al Pacino and Alec Baldwin shout the lines in their own time signatures, which in hand allowed the movie to soar. It also doesn’t help that the titular hero here is a bit rudderless, often swept away by the currents of the confident cynics and macho grifters making up his scene partners. And so the whole movie sort of drifts away like him, rootless and soft. Even with Mamet working in his comfort zone of contained, stagey sets and rat-a-tat ranting, all that’s left are a set of monologues that ultimately act more and more like disconnected philosophical essays than evocative theater.

To call April an abortion drama is an accurate statement and yet that description only barely brushes against this movie’s constant blending and subverting. Its initial setup — an OBGYN being investigated after a stillbirth and accusations of under-the-table abortions — suggests the potential for a thriller, but Dea Kulumbegashvili is after something much more slipperier. A lot of that starts with her conception of her protagonist, Nina, whose inner life she refuses to illuminate. Often shown on-screen in the middle distance or the background, her expressions always muted, she remains at arm’s length, her actions inscrutable as she drifts through this slow-burn crisis without any palpable urgency or alarm. Kulumbegashvili handles all this material in ways that are by turns coolly diagnostic and furiously exploratory, a dichotomy that manifests itself in the compositional extremes of her and Arseni Khachaturan’s images. Interior spaces, like an empty hospital corridor for example, tend to be statically and symmetrically framed, an aesthetic decision that, especially in this type of environment, might evoke a sterile, clinical detachment. But, in actuality, Nina’s manner with her patients isn’t sterile, and her concern for their well-being is the opposite of detached. In the outside world, Kulumbegashvili goes the complete opposite direction: whenever the camera heads outdoors, it seemingly becomes enraptured by the natural world; seen in both in the rare deployments of a knock-you-down stunning crane-movement and in the sudden bursts of wild, handheld subjectivity. Whether it’s taking in the beauty of spring flowers or in the slow arrival of a thunderstorm in the distance, most of these exterior moments come from Nina’s vantage. And with these point-of-view shots accompanied by the sound of what we soon recognize as her breathing; a striking choice that weaponizes even April’s most tranquil interludes, creating a sense of unpredictability and anxiety.

Which is a way of saying that April manages to be both a work of deeply controlled formal rigor and one of often overwhelming human feeling. In her eschewing of any possible genre conventions, Kulumbegashvili has her film jump from utter naturalism into the realm of radical subjectivity, and even the uncanny. Her previous film, Beginning, notably ended with the sight of a man’s body disintegrating into dust — an Old Testament allusion (“to dust you shall return”), as well as a haunting leap into abstraction. April, methodical though it may be, brazenly pursues the inexplicable throughout. That’s seen especially in the scattered appearances of a naked, hulking figure, recognizably a woman but never identified, with drooping breasts, wrinkled skin, and a featureless void of a face. Early on, she shuffles mournfully through what appears to be another dimension, a zone of utter darkness and yet still appears in the real world as well. She says nothing; she doesn’t seem to have a mouth, though that doesn’t keep her from breathing and wheezing as heavily as Nina does. By the end, Kulumbegashvili, drawing now on New Testament imagery, offers up another possibility: this creature, for all her fearsome unloveliness, might be a kind of redemptive miracle, a woman’s worst fears mobilized into meaningful action. No longer suspended in darkness, she presses slowly onward, into the light. And like such a creature, April is loath to explain itself, inviting us instead to watch, listen and, most importantly, feel our way through it — a work marked, like the benevolent but unreachable woman at its center, by immense empathy and isolated, inconsolable despair.

At it’s simplest, this movie operates off of a fun little hypothetical: What if Q from James Bond has to leave his desk and assume the mantle of 007. And if that sounds like its setting up a meek-beta-into-a-macho-alpha sort of transformation, Death Wish style, The Amateur is surprisingly not that. The fun of the movie lies in how un-stereotypically its all-brains-no-brawn protagonist mans up: Rather than going full action hero, he remains his squirrelly, vaguely neurodivergent self. Occasionally, this results in some mordant humor, as when he cues up a YouTube explainer on lock-picking right at the door he means to enter. Other times, he’s less clueless than downright diabolical, rigging a skyscraper swimming pool into a death trap worthy of Jigsaw. As this man, though, Rami Malek leans on all his old affectations of antisocial oddity: the bug eyes darting around, the face puckering so much you’d swear he was chomping on a lemon during every encounter. Is he our weirdest working movie star? There’s not an A-lister with a clammier, more awkward brand. It helps that he’s surrounded by a uniformly overqualified collection of performers: Laurence Fishburne putting a harsher, realpolitik spin on his Morpheus mentor routine; Holt McCallany being exquisitely salty as a bastard bigwig; Jon Bernthal swaggering in for what’s essentially a cameo as a swinging-dick secret agent; and Michael Stuhlbarg delivering showing up briefly as well to deliver a surprisingly sympathetic monologue, like the most understated Bond villain ever. In short, the movie around them all is the kind of disposable airport spy thriller that Hollywood rarely makes anymore, and which generally plays fine, maybe best, on cable over a lazy Saturday afternoon. The source material dates back to the Cold War, and only the technology meaningfully situates us in a more modern world. In fact, there’s even something rather retro about that element, too. The slow crawl of progress bars, the insect skitter of lines of codes, the jittery surveillance footage begging to be enhanced: If you’ve seen a Bourne movie or a Tony Scott techno-thriller, you know the enjoyable paranoid drill. Just don’t mistake the film’s vision of cloak and dagger for any kind of contemporary reality. The Amateur is a Cold War throwback in more ways than one: It reflects the spy movies, and the spycraft, of a very different era.

Caper comedies stress twists and misdirection. Ironically, this usually makes them quite predictable. They work like close-up magic, jazzing viewers with comic banter and small turns so that they don’t see the big reveal coming. But, as with magic, everyone knows there’ll be a big reveal; it’s the trick, the reason they’re watching in the first place. And, like magicians, caper comedies tend to lean back on tried-and-true gimmicks for the buildup, intercutting heists with scenes of the thieves planning, and coloring their paint-by-numbers structures (the team is assembled, the heist is planned and tensely executed, the getaway is accompanied by some kind of twist) with freeze-frames, explanatory titles, multiple narrators, flashback reveals, and semi-ironic needle drops. All of these are present and ed for in The Art of the Steal. And yet, despite how awfully familiar this movie might feel, there’s actually something more sophisticated going on inside it. Considering that part of the pleasure of the caper genre comes from over-explanation — characters detailing plans as they’re being carried out, or telling the viewer just how they managed to get away with it — this central theme, which forms the basis for the ending twist here, seems uncharacteristically well hidden. There are specifically a few moments where the movie comes close to itting that it’s about the notion of choosing to believe in something false because it conforms to one’s desires. The big one though comes in the form of a monologue delivered by Terence Stamp’s not-quite-antagonist, an art thief who’s gone to the other side in exchange for a reduced sentence. Winter’s character spends most of the movie acting like the authority’s peeved butler, but for a few minutes in this one scene, he drops his façade in order to relate to our protagonist how, as a child, he became obsessed with museums because art seemed to suggest a world that was more perfect than the one he knew as the son of a working-class single mother in post-war London. Buried underneath this movie’s many layers of pulp fluff and knucklehead comedy is a compelling take on why people are drawn to familiar, generic pleasures — self-aware caper comedies, for instance. Perhaps it’s buried too deeply for its own good, but the sense of its discovery is all the same.

Watched on Monday May 12, 2025.

Very much a throwback to the sort of military-grade revenge pictures Stallone churned out throughout the ‘80s. And it’s every bit as straightforward as it sounds, which does serve Jason Statham’s no-nonsense screen persona just fine. Some of the nonsense does come through David Ayer’s aggressive style, which likes to reach for some figuratively striking images, even if they’re often quite silly. The climax of A Working Man, for example, plays out under a full moon so absurdly gigantic that it threatens to turn into a werewolf movie or the closing moments of Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia. In short, Ayer isn’t afraid to court ridiculousness. And yet, A Working Man certainly would have benefitted from being even more ridiculousness. There’s nothing in the film that approaches the already mixed-bag pleasure of Statham in The Beekeeper pulling up to the scam call center with a couple of canisters of gasoline in his pickup truck, intending to burn the whole building to the ground. Watching stoic dudes bust their way through waves of foreign mob henchmen is about as basic as vigilante action movies get — Liam Neeson made a second career out of it — and Ayer never finds enough goofiness to add color.

The original A Simple Favor offered so many ludicrous twists and reveals that its silly mystery could’ve ended any number of ways. That sort of sets up its sequel to have all the freedom in deciding where to take this deeply melodramatic story. And yet, even though it jumps to an Italian setting and becomes a much bloodier, more bitter affair throughout, Another Simple Favor strains itself to a be romp — like a stick-in-the-mud parent downing a couple stiff martinis in order to loosen up. In short, it feels like it’s just another chance to play the hits. Deeply both referential and reverential of the first film, this movie constructs whole scenes around rehashing throwback jokes, visual gags, or old twists. The major problem of the movie, though, is that the sexy cat-and-mouse dance between its two leads is no more: Anna Kendrick’s Stephanie, once a prudish, charming, doting everymom, is now just as hardened and snarky as Blake Lively’s Emily’s femme fatale. The two characters have been flattened by their experiences in the first movie into banter-bots that mostly sound the same. Their arcs are done; they live only to quip now. The only thing that seems to have advanced is the work of costume designer Renée Ehrlich Kalfus. Like the first film, Another Simple Favor is a generally ugly movie that’s still exceptionally well-dressed, and one with the good sense to make its statement outfits part of the film’s humor as well as its aesthetic. In a film running a little dry on decadence, the fashion still goes enjoyably over the top. But the flipside of this is that the clothes of Another Simple Favor outshine the mystery, the characters, the cast, the humor — you know, the rest of the damn movie that goes on for two full hours. It’s a little long and dull for a runway show. Though the simplest pleasures of the original film remain — catty chemistry between Kendrick and Lively, loopy twists, bravura statement outfits — the heat powering the concept has cooled to the extent that, despite the increased body count, this sequel feels as perfunctory as its title. It’s just Another one.

Ever since the hugely profitable one-two punch of Ice Age and Finding Nemo in ‘02 and ‘03, the “group of wacky animals voiced by celebrities” category of animated kids’ movies has become a massive cliché, as much a theater-clogging same-old same-old genre as romantic comedies about sad-sack emo boys who need someone quirky to perk them up. What makes Surf’s Up to this day exciting is how the movie seems to recognize a need for innovation and found it conceptually: the animated mockumentary. Pitched as a documentary about a wannabe penguin surf-champ, Surf’s Up spends as much time aping and mocking docs as it does telling its wispy wuss-to-winner sports story. The conceit makes this loose-limbed charmer just a hair unpredictable, even though the movie’s plot and wholesome messaging is identical to the likes of Cars. Chris Buck and Ash Brannon lay out that story, though, amid every possible documentary touchstone, from traditional methods (historical montages, talking-head interviews, questions from an off-camera filmmaker, interview segments inserted to inform action sequences) to notable flaws (out-of-focus footage, sudden pans to barely caught action, gunk on the lens, characters interacting with the offscreen film crew, etc.). All the kids that the film is aimed at probably didn’t/still don’t get most of these gags, but it doesn’t stop them from being diverting to the knowing eye during all the otherwise standard-issue animal cutups and the mildly touching story.

On paper, this seems like another case of a notable filmmaker, late into their career, taking yet another stab at their set of pet themes. For Cronenberg, it’s the deterioration of the flesh, the instability of the image, the paranoia-inducing incursions of technology into every aspect of life. This time though those are all imbued with a more nakedly personal dimension for the director, who has spoken openly of the pain of losing his wife several years ago. Unfortunately, The Shrouds, for all the many ideas floating around in it, feels more like a series of interesting notes for a film than an actual feature. Theres’s conspiracy galore: talks of industrial espionage, talks of surveillance; there’s adultery and cuckoldry and suspicions of adultery and cuckoldry and doubles and all the other good Cronenbergian ideas. And yet a fair amount of it is disted and turgid. Part of that feels like it stems from Cronenberg’s austere-to-the-point-of-stiff approach, while another part feels like it stems from the fact that all those ideas feel like just talk, delivered with such obviousness that the artistry is absent. The parts that do resonate feel like physical metaphors ripped out of real life; like all the flashback scenes that enlighten on a romance doomed by a deeply physical illness. When we talk of love, we like to talk of tenderness; Cronenberg, ever the master of spiritual wordplay, is clearly trying to interrogate that idea — the notion that adoration and fragility are so intertwined — and takes it to its logical, symbolic, and physical extremes. He does so, one suspects, because aging and illness (in ourselves and our loved ones) will eventually force most of us into that dark nexus. Cronenberg is transmitting to us from the borders of death, behind the enemy lines of inconsolable grief. And the man’s mind is still so alive that it seems churlish to ding this movie for being so, dare I say, lifeless. Yet, sadly, that inertia eventually becoming too encoming.

In many ways, this is your prototypical rising-star directorial debut: a wrestling-themed period piece set in ‘40s New York that opens with Stallone warbling a maudlin piano ballad over the credits. However, unlike Sylvester Stallone’s subsequent directorial efforts — all but two of which aren’t Rocky or Rambo movies — it wasn’t produced to satisfy franchise fans or meet genre expectations; when Paradise Alley was initially greenlit, Stallone was considered a bankable Oscar-nominated screenwriter and actor, rather than a bankable action star. It helps explain how eccentric and feverish this movie can be. Like Martin Scorsese’s films from the same period, Paradise Alley melds intense ’70s acting styles with Expressionist formal effects. Its climax, a twelve-minute wrestling match set under a leaky roof during a thunderstorm, plays like the finale of a silent film, transforming characters into archetypal figures struggling against elemental forces. The film’s expressive visual design — which really stresses the Hell in Hell’s Kitchen — always seems to evokes a dangerous, doomed world. The result is striking in the way it evokes fears of abandonment — children’s worries blown up to grown-up scale — and is completely unlike any film Stallone has put his name on since.

With now over thirty-five films under its belt, it’s perfectly understandable for one to be tired of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And yet that sort of works because in this latest entry, so too are most of the characters. The MCU of Thunderbolts is, in what plays like a self-aware touch, a post-heroic age of faded glories. It’s the best MCU film in a while, in part because it often plays like an anti-MCU film. There are no Avengers around to save the world and there doesn’t seem to be many threats requiring superheroes, either. Its ragtag group of characters spend their days operating in morally dubious gray areas as a mix of rouges and other publicly disgraced figures. The movie around them sets itself apart from other MCU ventures almost immediately by following a grippingly choreographed fight scene with a wittily scripted exchange that takes the story in an unexpected direction, a pattern the rest of the film sustains. That it doesn’t lose focus of its characters’ inner turmoil (specifically Florence Pugh’s Yelena’s) confirms that the film wants to be about more than jokes and superhero action. That also mostly works out. Since David Gordon Green’s Halloween, it’s become easy to scoff at genre films making superficial gestures at addressing the damage done to their central characters, especially since so many make it an afterthought. Thunderbolts never gets more complicated than a pop psychology paperback in considering its characters’ inner lives, but the emphasis carves out room for thoughtful performances (David Harbour and Lewis Pullman being other obvious standouts, but everyone has their moments) and a visually inventive climactic conflict that puts aside the usual explosions. It gets those out of the way earlier. Even a misfit film about misfit heroes has to play by some of the rules.

Honorable Mentions: Climax, The Current War: Director’s Cut, Diane, An Elephant Sitting Still, The King, Knives Out, Luce, Mary Magdalene, Pain & Glory, The Sound of Silence

1. The Mountain
2. A Hidden Life
3. The Lighthouse
4. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
5. Marriage Story
6. The Irishman
7. Uncut Gems
8. High Life
9. Ad Astra
10. Transit

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. First Reformed
2. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
3. Light Sleeper
4. Blue Collar
5. Affliction
6. American Gigolo
7. The Comfort of Strangers
8. Oh, Canada
9. Master Gardener
10. The Card Counter

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Captain America: The First Avenger
2. Guardians of the Galaxy
3. Iron Man
4. Avengers: Endgame
5. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
6. Thor: Ragnarok
7. The Avengers
8. Spider-Man: Homecoming
9. Black Panther
10. Thunderbolts*

...plus 26 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Jaws
2. Raiders of the Lost Ark
3. Schindler's List
4. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
5. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
6. Jurassic Park
7. West Side Story
8. Lincoln
9. Munich
10. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

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

Honorable Mentions: Anora, Asphalt City, Conclave, Cuckoo, Maria, Music, National Anthem, A Piece of Sky, Spermworld, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl 

1. Nickel Boys
2. Here
3. Janet Planet
4. I Saw the TV Glow
5. The Order
6. Small Things Like These
7. Civil War
8. The Bikeriders
9. Oh, Canada
10. The Beast

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. sex, lies, and videotape
2. Out of Sight
3. Solaris
4. The Informant!
5. Ocean's Twelve
6. The Limey
7. No Sudden Move
8. Che: Part One
9. Che: Part Two
10. King of the Hill

...plus 25 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Ratatouille
2. Toy Story 3
3. Toy Story
4. WALL·E
5. Toy Story 2
6. Monsters, Inc.
7. Finding Nemo
8. Inside Out
9. The Incredibles
10. Luca

...plus 18 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Honorable Mentions: BlacKkKlansman, The Death of Stalin, The Favourite, Final Portrait, The House That Jack Built, Leave No Trace, Mandy, Possum, The Rider, The Sisters Brothers, A Star is Born, Western & Zama

1. First Reformed
2. The Banishment
3. Burning
4. You Were Never Really Here
5. First Man
6. If Beale Street Could Talk
7. Roma
8. Wildlife
9. Annihilation
10. Hereditary

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Honorable Mentions: Endless Poetry, Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, Faces Places, Ghost in the Shell, It Comes at Night, Molly's Game, mother!, Porto, A Quiet ion, Super Dark Times, Wakefield, War for the Planet of the Apes & Wind River

1. Columbus
2. Call Me by Your Name
3. The Lost City of Z
4. Phantom Thread
5. Blade Runner 2049
6. Dunkirk
7. Violet
8. A Ghost Story
9. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
10. Good Time

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Honorable Mentions: Anatomy of a Fall, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Ferrari,  Fingernails, The Five Devils, The Killer, ages, Poor Things, Showing Up, Sick of Myself, The Taste of Things, & The Teachers’ Lounge

1. Falcon Lake
2. Maestro
3. All of Us Strangers
4. Godland
5. Beau Is Afraid
6. Asteroid City
7. Oppenheimer
8. Afire
9. Monica
10. May December

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Honorable Mentions: Drive My Car, Enemies of the State, Funny Face, The Killing of Two Lovers, The Metamorphosis of Birds, Nightmare Alley, No Sudden Move, Procession, Quo Adis, Vaida?, Some Kind of Heaven, & The Tragedy of Macbeth

1. The Worst Person in the World
2. Spencer
3. Beginning
4. Memoria
5. West Side Story
6. Azor
7. ing
8. The Power of the Dog
9. The Green Knight
10. Titane

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Unforgiven
2. The Bridges of Madison County
3. A Perfect World
4. Mystic River
5. Bird
6. Million Dollar Baby
7. Changeling
8. White Hunter, Black Heart
9. Letters from Iwo Jima
10. The Outlaw Josey Wales

...plus 30 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Honorable Mentions: Another Round, Boys State, The Devil All the Time, Dick Johnson Is Dead, Driveways, Gunda, Lovers Rock, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, She Dies Tomorrow, Shirley, Tesla, Waiting for the Barbarians & The Way Back

1. I'm Thinking of Ending Things
2. Beanpole
3. The Nest
4. Martin Eden
5. A White, White Day
6. First Cow
7. I Was at Home, But . . .
8. Song Without a Name
9. Nomadland
10. The Assistant

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Ice Storm
2. Brokeback Mountain
3. Eat Drink Man Woman
4. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
5. Lust, Caution
6. Sense and Sensibility
7. Hulk
8. Ride with the Devil
9. The Wedding Banquet
10. Pushing Hands

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Honorable Mentions: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, The Double, Edge of Tomorrow, Finding Vivian Maier, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Godzilla, Interstellar, Jimmy P., The Lego Movie, Leviathan, Magic in the Moonlight, Only Lovers Left Alive, The Rover, & Timbuktu

1. The Immigrant
2. Under the Skin
3. Whiplash
4. Inherent Vice
5. Ida
6. Foxcatcher
7. Enemy
8. Boyhood
9. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
10. Two Days, One Night

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Honorable Mentions: Alps, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Beyond the Black Rainbow, The Cabin in the Woods, Cosmopolis, Haywire, The Hunter, Ted, & This Is Not a Film

1. The Master
2. Oslo, August 31st
3. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
4. Holy Motors
5. Amour
6. Rust and Bone
7. The Turin Horse
8. Barbara
9. Lincoln
10. The Loneliest Planet

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Back to the Future
2. Who Framed Roger Rabbit
3. Death Becomes Her
4. Cast Away
5. Allied
6. Back to the Future Part III
7. Used Cars
8. Back to the Future Part II
9. Romancing the Stone
10. I Wanna Hold Your Hand

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Beetlejuice
2. Pee-wee's Big Adventure
3. Batman Returns
4. Mars Attacks!
5. Batman
6. Big Fish
7. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
8. Ed Wood
9. Sleepy Hollow
10. Edward Scissorhands

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

1. Unbreakable
2. The Sixth Sense
3. The Village
4. Knock at the Cabin
5. Split
6. Old
7. Signs
8. Glass
9. Trap
10. The Happening

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Manhattan
2. Crimes and Misdemeanors
3. The Purple Rose of Cairo
4. Interiors
5. Hannah and Her Sisters
6. Annie Hall
7. Broadway Danny Rose
8. Husbands and Wives
9. Stardust Memories
10. Take the Money and Run

...plus 41 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Honorable Mentions: 13th, Aquarius, Born to be Blue, Cameraperson, Christine, The Club, Everybody Wants Some!!, Hail, Caesar!, Hell or High Water, The Neon Demon, The Red Turtle, Toni Erdmann, & Weiner

1. Moonlight
2. Manchester by the Sea
3. La La Land
4. Indignation
5. Louder Than Bombs
6. O.J.: Made in America
7. Midnight Special
8. Silence
9. Arrival
10. 20th Century Women

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Honorable Mentions: Bridesmaids, Captain America: The First Avenger, Contagion, The Descendants, The Ides of March, Jane Eyre, Midnight in Paris, The Myth of the American Sleepover, Pariah, Poetry, Rango, The Skin I Live In, & Terri

1. The Tree of Life
2. Margaret
3. Shame
4. Certified Copy
5. A Separation
6. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
7. Melancholia
8. We Need to Talk About Kevin
9. Take Shelter
10. Beginners

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Honorable Mentions: Captain Phillips, The Great Beauty, The Hunt, Lenny Cooke, Leviathan, ion, Simon Killer, The Spectacular Now, & Stories We Tell

1. Inside Llewyn Davis
2. Her
3. Before Midnight
4. To the Wonder
5. The Wolf of Wall Street
6. s Ha
7. Berberian Sound Studio
8. Prisoners
9. The Act of Killing
10. The Place Beyond the Pines

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Die Hard
2. Predator
3. Die Hard With a Vengeance
4. The Hunt for Red October
5. The Thomas Crown Affair
6. Last Action Hero
7. The 13th Warrior
8. Basic
9. Medicine Man
10. Nomads

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

Honorable Mentions: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Armageddon Time, The Batman, Bardo, Blonde, The Cathedral, Causeway, The Fabelmans, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Resurrection & Watcher

1. Aftersun
2. TÁR
3. Nope
4. After Yang
5. Nitram
6. One Fine Morning
7. The Wonder
8. The Quiet Girl
9. Both Sides of the Blade
10. Athena

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Blade Runner
2. Alien
3. The Counselor
4. Kingdom of Heaven
5. Prometheus
6. Matchstick Men
7. Gladiator
8. The Duellists
9. American Gangster
10. Thelma & Louise

...plus 18 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Sorry, no Docs here.

1. Raging Bull
2. Taxi Driver
3. GoodFellas
4. The Last Temptation of Christ
5. The King of Comedy
6. The Irishman
7. The Wolf of Wall Street
8. Shutter Island
9. Silence
10. The Departed

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

Honorable Mentions: The Assassin, Brooklyn, Cemetery of Splendor, Experimenter, Field N*****, The Forbidden Room, In Jackson Heights, It Follows, Lost River, Love & Mercy, Mistress America, Mission: Impossible - Rouge Nation, The Revenant, Tangerine, & What We Do in the Shadows

1. Anomalisa
2. Sicario
3. Spotlight
4. Son of Saul
5. Carol
6. Phoenix
7. The End of the Tour
8. Steve Jobs
9. 45 Years
10. Ex Machina

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Honorable Mentions: The American, Another Year, Black Swan, The Ghost Writer, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, Jack Goes Boating, Life During Wartime, Never Let Me Go, The Other Guys, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Valhalla Rising, & Winter's Bone 

1. Dogtooth
2. The Social Network
3. Secret Sunshine
4. Shutter Island
5. White Material
6. Toy Story 3
7. Carlos
8. A Prophet
9. Daddy Longlegs
10. Blue Valentine

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Steve Jobs
2. Sunshine
3. Trainspotting
4. 28 Days Later
5. 127 Hours
6. Trance
7. T2 Trainspotting
8. Shallow Grave
9. Millions
10. Slumdog Millionaire

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Honorable Mentions: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Bright Star, Coraline, Duplicity, Everlasting Moments, Funny People, Gomorrah, The House of the Devil, The Hurt Locker, In the Loop, Jerichow, Medicine for Melancholy, Polytechnique, The Road & Thirst

1. A Serious Man
2. Two Lovers
3. Silent Light
4. The Headless Woman
5. Revanche
6. Inglourious Basterds
7. 35 Shots of Rum
8. The White Ribbon
9. The Man from London
10. The Brothers Bloom

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Gerry
2. My Own Private Idaho
3. Elephant
4. Last Days
5. Paranoid Park
6. Drugstore Cowboy
7. To Die For
8. Milk
9. Mala Noche
10. Good Will Hunting

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Honorable Mentions: Changeling, A Christmas Tale, The Duchess of Langeais, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Iron Man, Milk, Rachel Getting Married, and Timecrimes

1. Synecdoche, New York
2. Hunger
3. Revolutionary Road
4. Funny Games
5. Burn After Reading
6. In the City of Sylvia
7. Paranoid Park
8. Reprise
9. WALL·E
10. The Dark Knight

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Crimson Tide
2. Unstoppable
3. The Hunger
4. True Romance
5. Days of Thunder
6. Déjà Vu
7. Enemy of the State
8. The Last Boy Scout
9. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
10. Top Gun

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Full Article: https://griffspicks.blog/2020/12/07/every-david-fincher-film-ranked/

1. Zodiac
2. The Social Network
3. Se7en
4. Fight Club
5. Gone Girl
6. The Game
7. Mank
8. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
9. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
10. Panic Room

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

1. The Thing
2. Halloween
3. Starman
4. They Live
5. In the Mouth of Madness
6. Prince of Darkness
7. Assault on Precinct 13
8. Christine
9. Big Trouble in Little China
10. The Fog

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

1. Dunkirk
2. Memento
3. The Prestige
4. The Dark Knight
5. Inception
6. Insomnia
7. Tenet
8. Interstellar
9. Batman Begins
10. Following

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

1. Apocalypse Now
2. The Godfather Part II
3. The Godfather
4. The Conversation
5. Rumble Fish
6. Tucker: The Man and His Dream
7. The Outsiders
8. One from the Heart
9. The Cotton Club
10. Bram Stoker's Dracula

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Sorry, no docs.

1. JFK
2. Nixon
3. Talk Radio
4. Born on the Fourth of July
5. Platoon
6. Salvador
7. U Turn
8. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
9. Natural Born Killers
10. The Doors

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

Honorable Mentions: 45 Years, Arrival, Birdman, Carlos, First Man, Get Out, The Lighthouse, The Loneliest Planet, The Lost City of Z, Marriage Story, Parasite, A Touch of Sin, Toy Story 3, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, & Uncut Gems

1. The Tree of Life
2. Moonlight
3. Inside Llewyn Davis
4. The Master
5. Whiplash
6. Anomalisa
7. The Social Network
8. Dogtooth
9. Manchester by the Sea
10. Margaret

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Tree of Life
2. The Thin Red Line
3. A Hidden Life
4. Badlands
5. The New World
6. Days of Heaven
7. To the Wonder
8. Knight of Cups
9. Voyage of Time: Life's Journey
10. Song to Song

Sorry, no docs, concert films or filmed theater.
Full Article: https://griffspicks.blog/2020/06/17/every-spike-lee-film-ranked/

1. Do the Right Thing
2. Malcolm X
3. 25th Hour
4. Bamboozled
5. Da 5 Bloods
6. Crooklyn
7. Inside Man
8. BlacKkKlansman
9. Clockers
10. Mo' Better Blues

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.