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Watched on Thursday June 12, 2025.

Watched on Thursday June 12, 2025.

Complaints about Disney's recent fondness for live-action remakes are nothing new—I've certainly made many of them on this website and quite a few others. But watching Marc Webb's SNOW WHITE, I was overcome with such a feeling of "what are we doing here?" that it feels like we may have reached the nadir of this frustrating trend.

While the film may have been plagued with controversy from the start because of a bunch of pissant right-wing man-babies upset that star Rachel Zegler isn't white and is also a woman with opinions different from theirs, the real issue here isn't Zegler, who does her best with terrible source material, it's the fact that, from the ground up, SNOW WHITE is an incredibly weak attempt to both update and recapture the magic of Walt Disney's original feature-length animated masterpiece, SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS.

Stuffed to the gills with bland new songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (DEAR EVAN HANSEN, THE GREATEST SHOWMAN) that stick out like sore thumbs when paired with the originals, this reimagined SNOW WHITE attempts to pad out the original's 83-minute running time and give things a more feminist reframing by deleting "Someday My Prince Will Come." Yet, for some reason, it retains the romantic subplot (although with a handsome rouge instead of a prince) and the "true love's kiss" antidote for the Evil Queen's magic apple, but the love story is so underdeveloped you'll be forgiven for being shocked that the kiss actually works.

Speaking of the Evil Queen, a miscast Gal Gadot is as wooden as ever, and will make you long for Charlize Theron's more sinister take on the role from SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN, which was a far better update of this story than Disney's half-baked attempt to have their cake and eat it too. On the one hand, turning Snow White into a freedom fighter who leads her people to rebel against a tyrannical queen isn't a bad angle, especially for this moment in time, but on the other hand, the ugly animation of the dwarves and the instantly forgettable songs completely sink a script that seems to have no idea what to do with the darker elements of this tale. You can feel Webb wanting to go darker (the haunted forest sequence is especially harrowing), but the demands to make this children's tale less scary are at constant odds with the story's substance. Add that to the film's lifeless visual palette, which is typical of Disney's live-action output of the last 10 years or so, and you have a film that neither honors the original's innovation nor creates its own unique identity. I know I gave the relatively charming LILO & STITCH a , but Webb's reliance on shallow feints toward modernizing the narrative without deepening its substance feels disappointingly empty.

There's something almost indescribably moving about Terrence Davies' THE LONG DAY CLOSES, a certain all-encoming melancholy that feels impossible to adequately describe. An autobiographical portrait of a young boy's experiences growing up in Liverpool in the 1950s, the film is a kind of patchwork quilt of memories, impressions, and emotions, filtered through its protagonist's abiding love of the cinema.

The film explores young Bud's realization of his sexuality, represented by the shirtless laborers and brick layers whose glistening muscles first catch his eye outside the humble flat where he lives with his mum, a sad but loving woman whose love of music permeates every frame. At times, on-screen dialogue is wholly replaced by the soundtracks of other movies, overlaying the dialogue from films like Vincente Minnelli's MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS and Orson Welles' THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS to express thoughts he perhaps can't express, or make sense of a world to which he can't quite relate.

There's something so hauntingly familiar about it, the way Davies lovingly layers the artifice of Bud's inner life with the gossamer memories of holidays and languid days spent at the cinema. It's as if he's looking back on his childhood through the lens of the cinematic references that are as strong as any tangible memory. THE LONG DAY CLOSES is less a standard biographical text and more of a prismatic collection of impressions and feelings, flashes of half-ed snippets and sense memories that make up a life. It feels so tactile, so perfectly realized, a world built of dreams and heartbreak. Few films about growing up queer have ever felt as potent, set in a world where your closest friends are shadows on a screen, and movies are your greatest connection to a sometimes frightening and confusing world.

Watched on Sunday June 8, 2025.

Watched on Sunday June 8, 2025.

Much has been made over the years about Wes Anderson's instantly recognizable style, some seeing it as a hindrance to his work's substance while others revel in its quirkiness. For his part, Anderson has doubled down on his singular affectations, and there's something I find incredibly irable about his dedication to being himself.

His latest film, THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME, makes excellent use of his immaculately composed style, following an unscrupulous businessman named Zsa-zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) as he travels across the Middle East in an attempt to cover a budget shortfall for a new hydroelectric dam project destined to make him a wealthy man. While he dodges constant assassination attempts and deals with shady business partners and odd family , he is accompanied by his daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton), a novitiate nun to whom he plans on bequeathing his lucrative (if not particularly honest) business empire.

It is Anderson's most political film to date (although one could also make a good argument for THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL). Korda's national origins are kept intentionally opaque (he has houses scattered across the globe and considers himself a man with no country). Still, it's impossible not to see the implications of a wealthy businessman intent on carving up the Middle East for his own profit; locals be damned. He always comes bearing weapons ("help yourself to a hand grenade") and flattery, but his benevolence masks a deep self-interest that is only counteracted by the presence of his daughter, whose piety stands in direct conflict with his ethical nonchalance.

Yet the two ultimately find some semblance of happiness in neither God nor money; it's in each other—in family. Anderson's style enhances the alienation and distance between them, but it's also in those spaces and pregnant silences that the two find their greatest solace. The emotional weight of Anderson's films often sneak up on you, and THE PHOENICIAN SCHEME is no different. What he does here is a kind of cinematic sleight of hand, keeping the audience's eyes on his stylistic flourishes and the machinations of the plot, while crafting a disarmingly heartfelt family drama whose emotional undercurrents finally bubble up to the surface in the film's final stretch.

It may not be as strong as other recent Anderson films, such as THE FRENCH DISPATCH and ASTEROID CITY, but I have a feeling this one will continue to grow on me over time. The cinematography by new Anderson collaborator Bruno Delbonnel (replacing his longtime DP, Robert D. Yeoman) has a kind of vintage quality to it that brings a newfound vigor to the images, and the emotional layers of the father/daughter relationship intertwine with themes of religion, capitalism, and global politics to form a richer text than might initially meet the eye.

In the nearly 30 years since the release of the original MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE in 1996, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has saved the world from rogue nations, biological weapons, international crime syndicates, and nuclear annihilation. As the stakes have increased, so has Cruise's dedication to performing death-defying stunts, from base-jumping off cliffs to hanging on the sides of real airplanes to climbing the world's tallest building.

Cruise's love for this franchise and this character has resulted in some truly spectacular filmmaking over the years, and there's a certain old-school charm to the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE films that will be sorely missed as Hunt attempts his last mission in MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - THE FINAL RECKONING. Picking up where 2023's DEAD RECKONING left off, the latest installment finds Hunt's team facing their greatest foe yet: a sentient AI known only as "The Entity" that has infiltrated the world's computer systems and is on the brink of launching all the world's nuclear weapons to annihilate the human race.

Director Christopher McQuarrie, who has been with the series since 2015's ROGUE NATION, is trying to keep a lot of balls in the air here, not only wrapping up the story he began in DEAD RECKONING, but acting as a coda for the franchise as a whole. As such, THE FINAL RECKONING is a bit unwieldy, especially for the first hour or so, as it somewhat haphazardly tries to connect its plot to all the films that came before. Suddenly, events from MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE (1996) and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III (2006) are front and center giving the impression that the entire franchise has been building to this.

Since this is the eighth film in the series, McQuarrie gives us a lot of flashbacks to make sure we what happened, but it makes the film feel like a greatest hits compilation for a while, throwing off the rhythm and spinning its wheels to make sure the audience can connect all the dots, bringing back obscure characters and even old Macguffins for one final slam-bang send off to Hunt as his team. Once it gets going, however, McQuarrie and Cruise start firing on all cylinders, delivering some of the most breathtaking action sequences the series has ever seen.

The nearly wordless sequence on board the sunken Russian submarine seen in DEAD RECKONING, and the climactic showdown between Hunt and Gabriel (Esai Morales) on a pair of dueling biplanes are truly incredible and almost make up for sometimes scattershot exposition that makes up the film's opening act. It's as if once Cruise plunges beneath the Arctic Ocean, he and McQuarrie become laser-focused on the task at hand, taking the audience on the wildest thrill ride possible, ratcheting up the stakes to a fever pitch of dizzying stunt work and cinematic craftsmanship. That is why it mostly manages to overcome the self-conscious sentimentalism it reverts to in its first half. Once it gets going, the pedal hits the floor and it never looks back.

The MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE films have been a consistently reliable franchise throughout its 30-year run, and Cruise's star power has only grown. It's impressive how he keeps managing to top himself, but THE FINAL RECKONINING affords him the chance to give us some of his most thrilling escapades. It may not bring the franchise out on its highest note, but it's hard to resist its eye-popping charms.

Watched on Thursday June 5, 2025.

I wanted to love this, but SLEEPAWAY CAMP III: TEENAGE WASTELAND mostly just feels like a lesser reworking of the 2nd film, which was already a significant step down from the original. Pamela Springsteen seems to have really settled into her role here, but Angela's character feels more muddled than ever, murdering a camper so she can steal her identity and wreak more havoc at a summer camp. Gone is any reference to gender or sexuality - Angela's oversized bra is briefly made fun of, but the series has totally dismissed her origins at this point and are just driving in auto-pilot, having her kill indiscriminately without much motivation.

Iain Softley's adaptation of Henry James' THE WINGS OF THE DOVE is certainly beautiful, but it really needs to be messier and meaner to get at the heart of its tale of unrequited love, backstabbing, and casual cruelty among the Edwardian upper-class. Helena Bonham Carter is terrific as the ward of a wealthy aristocrat who falls in love with a man of lower social status she is forbidden to marry. Together, they launch a scheme for him to seduce a dying heiress for her money. Things become incredibly complicated as feelings become entangled in greed - and one can't help but wonder if this high-gloss soap opera needed sharper teeth than it has.

Cecil B. DeMille is a fascinating filmmaker. He was, by all s, an arch-conservative, participating in anti-communist activities in Hollywood during the Red Scare era, and even lobbying against unions. Many of his films centered around Biblical stories, from the original BEN-HUR to SAMSON AND DELILAH to perhaps his most famous work, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. Yet his films were also incredibly horny, often focusing on the sordid elements of these stories, and when there were none to be found, he made them up entirely.

THE KING OF KINGS (1927) is no different. Made at the end of the silent era, DeMille's take on the story of Jesus of Nazareth is cloaked in a thin veil of reverence and piety, but it's clear that the filmmaker is more interested in lurid depictions of vice and sin. The film opens with Mary Magdalene, here portrayed as a high-powered courtesan having an affair with Judas, flying into a rage when she discovers that her lover is off hanging out with some carpenter from Galilee rather than cavorting with her. That DeMille chose to open the film there rather the traditional birth of Jesus is telling, as an almost subconscious eroticism courses through much of the film, but it doesn't stop him from creating some indelible images. The first time we see Jesus is through the eyes of a blind boy who has just been healed, slowly revealing Christ bathed in a halo of heavenly light. It's a striking moment, to be sure. While H.B. Warner's blonde Jesus is perhaps one of the most egregiously whitewashed portrayals of the character in cinematic history, he has an undeniable gravity that anchors the film with his quiet authority and gentle countenance.

DeMille was never a great artist, but his talent as a spectacle-maker was nearly unparalleled in his day. The scale of THE KING OF KINGS is sometimes staggering - with massive sets for the Temple of Jerusalem (which was later reused as the Great Wall in KING KONG) and the palace of Pontius Pilate, and the great earthquake following Jesus' crucifixion is jaw-dropping, if a bit over-the-top. The bookending sequences filmed in early two-strip Technicolor are likewise gorgeous, and help give the film its sumptuously produced air.

Fully restored for this new Blu-Ray from Flicker Alley, THE KING OF KINGS is undoubtedly a sight to behold. It drags a bit in the second half of its epic 166-minute runtime, and a shorter 115-minute general release version, trimmed down from its more indulgent roadshow version, is also included in the set. Mileage with this film will certainly vary - those looking for Biblical accuracy will likely find lots to nitpick here, as DeMille takes many creative liberties for dramatic effect; but what an effect it is! It's hard not to be drawn in by its massive size and scope, and while DeMille's literalism doesn't often make for great cinema, it certainly makes for a terrific spectacle. It is one of the essential silent-era epics, a thrilling example of old Hollywood's extravagant excesses, missing the point of Jesus' unassuming nature, perhaps, but still an impressive work on its own . Flicker Alley's new Blu-Ray edition resurrects this classic film with a fresh sheen, restoring it to its former glory in a clear labor of love for a film that remains a gargantuan achievement even at nearly 100 years old.

Feels like a kind of cultural nadir, a weird case of cinematic necrophilia where a conquering studio returns to the scene of the crime to fuck in the ashes of the corpse of their one-time rivals. The self-aware humor feels less meta and more smarmy, poking fun at itself in studio-sanctioned ways as the studio continues to mine its IP for all its worth. Of course fans loved this, they're getting roughly jerked off by it. But it's hard not to feel numb from the sheer parade of nostalgia bait as if Disney is actively dangling baubles in your face, going, " this thing that you liked? Well, here's a worse version of it!" Absolute cinematic hell.

Comrade Pollyanna teaches the town about the power of collectivism and rescues it from the clutches of her oligarch aunt.

While I'm only half exaggerating, I adore this movie and its delectable cast of characters. It's just a bracing jolt of sunshine that never feels as cloying as its reputation might suggest. There's something incredibly inspiring, not just about Pollyanna's chipper outlook, but about its tale of workers realizing that together they have greater power than the few holding the purse strings. It may be wrapped in Walt Disney's irrepressible patriotic optimism and his ever-rose-colored nostalgia for turn-of-the-century Americana, but there's something almost radical about its belief in the power of the working class to stand against oligarchy to create a better, and yes, happier world. Pollyanna may have been related to Aunt Polly by blood - but she refused to be a class traitor, and for that we love her.

No one is as surprised as I am that I didn't hate the new LILO & STITCH. Perhaps it's because I have no real nostalgia for the original (I think the early 2000s was a pretty dire time for Disney animation) or that I took my 5-year-old and had a perfectly pleasant time at the movies. Yet, despite my general distaste for Disney's new obsession with live-action remakes of their animated classics, I found LILO & STITCH to be a mostly adequate adaptation of its source material.

Is it a great film? No. Does it have a strong reason to exist beyond than making money? Also no. However, under the direction of Dean Fleischer Camp (MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON), LILO & STITCH feels more like a real movie than these Disney live-action remakes have in a long time. Newcomer Maia Kealoha is a delight as Lilo, and Sydney Agudong's Nani brings a grounding to the character that allows us to appreciate her both as a surrogate parent to Lilo and as a young woman who isn't prepared for the responsibilities of parenthood and has dreams and goals of her own.

The plot is mostly the same, and the 2025 film follows the original almost beat-for-beat, save for a few tweaks here and there, especially regarding Jumba (Zach Galifianakis) and Pleakley (Billy Magnussen), the bumbling aliens tasked with capturing Stitch and returning him to his outer space prison. Galifianakis is somewhat surprisingly one of the film's weakest links, sleepwalking through a role that should have been squarely in his wheelhouse, while Magnussen is clearly having a blast.

Much has been made online about the changes to the film's ending, which (SPOILERS) finds Nani giving up custody of Lilo. It's a change I actually like because it deepens the story's theme of finding strength in unconventional family situations. Nani, as Lilo's older sister, is not much more than a kid herself and can pursue her own dreams of becoming a marine biologist while Lilo finds a safe and stable environment with close family friends. It's not exactly a fairy tale ending, but it feels right in the given context in a way that's almost more poignant. Sometimes families face hard decisions, sometimes families look different, sometimes they're broken, but as Stitch says, "they're still good."

I still think Disney's current penchant for strip mining its catalogue for parts to capitalize on millennial nostalgia is mostly crass and has resulted in some dire, bloated remakes like BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, ALADDIN, and THE LITTLE MERMAID, but LILO & STITCH is affable enough that it doesn't leave the same kind of bad taste in the mouth. Is that enough to call it good? Mileage will undoubtedly vary, but I found it to be fine, nothing more, nothing less; and when it comes to these live-action remakes, fine is already a vast improvement.

Holy shit that's Zack and Cody!

Netflix's 2021 Fear Street trilogy was a welcome surprise. It was a fresh take on a nostalgic series of Young Adult horror novels from the 1990s that managed to capture their essence while exploring different styles of horror films from various decades.

Four years later, the streaming service has dipped back into the Fear Street well, directly adapting one of R.L. Stine's original novels, 1992's "The Prom Queen." The story follows a group of high school seniors who are candidates to become Shadyside High's new prom queen. Competition is fierce, and teenage emotions are running high, but someone is killing them off one by one. As the big night gets closer, the competition for the crown becomes more deadly than ever.

It's a fairly standard teen horror plot - exactly what the Fear Street novels were. FEAR STREET: PROM QUEEN is not attempting to reinvent the wheel. It neither subverts its source material nor transcends it - it simply *is* its source material, and there's something irable about that. It's stylistically straightforward, and its period aesthetics are perfunctory at best, but one has to that is exactly what these books were. They're pulpy beach reads for teenagers, and PROM QUEEN is their cinematic equivalent.

I found that weirdly comforting, in a way. We've certainly seen better throwback slashers with retro aesthetics, but what I appreciated about PROM QUEEN is that it's somehow a perfect embodiment of what these books were. Whereas the FEAR STREET Trilogy captured the vibes and took them to a higher place by directly adapting one of Stine's novels, PROM QUEEN somehow captures their essence just as well as the trilogy, even if it's not nearly as good. That's the strange contradiction of this film - it's fairly sub-par fare, and if it didn't have the Fear Street label it might feel even more pedestrian, but this is exactly what I wanted out of this movie. I went in expecting a piece of throwback slasher pulp, and that's what I got. Could it have leaned more into that low-rent aesthetic? Certainly. No one is going to mistake this for a great film, but it is precisely what it needs to be, and I can't hold that against it. It might be fairly forgettable, but it's just goofy enough to work on its own .

The FINAL DESTINATION franchise has been one of the most consistent horror franchises throughout its now six-film run. While the fourth film, THE FINAL DESTINATION (2009), made at the height of Hollywood's early 2000s 3D craze, was a notable misstep, this franchise has remained surprisingly solid, given the usual roller coaster ride of quality that's common in other long-lived horror series.

FINAL DESTINATION BLOODLINES arrives 14 years after the release of FINAL DESTINATION 5 in 2011. Rather than go the route of typical legacy sequels, BLOODLINES isn't particularly interested in bringing back older characters (save for the ever-present Tony Todd in his final screen appearance), instead delving into a new story that connects it with the previous five entries in one overarching narrative. Our heroine this time is Stefanie (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), a college student plagued by terrifying dreams of a disaster that seems to have happened decades earlier involving her grandmother, Iris, as a young woman (Brec Bassinger). Stefanie tracks down Iris (Gabrielle Rose), long estranged from the family for her eccentricities and obsession with death, and discovers that she had prevented that disaster many years ago, causing a chain reaction that sent death after the survivors and their descendants to "correct" the timeline that Iris altered, not only involving much of Stefanie's family, but all the characters in all the films we've seen up to this point.

One thing the FINAL DESTINATION does so well is deliver the formula we've come to expect without over-complicating it. We know right from the start that death is going to come for these characters in increasingly complicated Rube Goldberg-esque chain reactions that cause gruesome, freak accident carnage. Its attempts to broaden its mythology have been relatively limited to making the lineage of death longer rather than trying to over-explain itself. The series has historically been at its best when its deaths feel uncomfortably plausible, no matter how outlandish, as we watch each piece fall together with deadly precision. BLOODLINES knows exactly what its audience wants and gives it to us: skin-crawling freak accidents,slow-building suspense, and gruesome payoffs.

Directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein aren't reinventing the wheel here, they take a well-worn formula and make it feel fresh and thrilling again. By centering a family dynamic, they ratchet up the emotional stakes, creating one of the franchise's most compelling stories and engaging casts of characters so that the deaths carry real weight. This thing is a mean, bloody mess from start to finish, a simultaneously playful and ruthless smorgasbord of carnage that might tread a familiar path; but it treads it so confidently that it manages to outdo all of its predecessors since the original FINAL DESTINATION 25 years ago.

Just the pits, honestly. It's sad to see Ke Huy Quan reduced to this so quickly after his stunning Oscar-winning comeback, and throwing him in the blandest possible "assassin tries to go straight but gets dragged back in for one last job" role feels almost criminal. Even worse - LOVE HURTS takes an essentially comedic premise and plays it 100% straight, and then throws Ariana DeBose in to do essentially nothing. Just a massive waste on all levels.

I first encountered Charles Burnett's 1978 masterpiece, KILLER OF SHEEP, in college during its triumphant 2007 theatrical release. Burnett's film, which had never received a proper theatrical due to issues with music rights, was restored by Milestone Films and has been rediscovered in the ensuing years as the seminal work that it is. However, in 2007, I it, my initial reaction was, "That was it?"

It wasn't until much later that I began to appreciate what Burnett was doing here. You'll often hear a lot of effusive praise for KILLER OF SHEEP, and it deserves every word, but it's much more unassuming than the hype suggests. This is a film of small moments - a man and wife reconnecting over a slow dance, a herd of sheep moving through a slaughterhouse, a group of children running through empty lots and jumping from roof to roof. Those small moments form a kind of kitchen sink look inside life in Watts, a predominantly black neighborhood in Los Angeles that had been the location of a series of riots a year before in reaction to abusive tactics by the LAPD.

KILLER OF SHEEP exists in that world - but it never explicitly acknowledges the unrest of the '60s. In many ways, it's a simple slice of life in an impoverished neighborhood, a film with a keen sense of time and place that exists very specifically in its own milieu. Yet it's impossible to look at the film outside of the context of the Watts riots. This is Watts 10 years later, still existing in a kind of stasis - where the drudgery of labor and the ennui of impoverished subsistence weigh heavy over the adults - cares that the children around them blithely ignore. But this is no tragedy, Burnett is not inviting pity for his working-class characters - it's a film filled with hope, small glimmers of beauty that shine even in the most unexpected places. That this was Burnett's senior thesis project at UCLA is stunning. It's so deeply rooted in its culture, a portrait of black life in Watts filmed without sentimentality or exoticism. The people who populate its frames aren't tragic figures, they're not nobly suffering through the ravages of poverty. They're just people trying to get by in the world they've been handed.

There's something uniquely beautiful about KILLER OF SHEEP, with its neo-realist examination of Watts and its people. It's as if Burnett was simply capturing the world around him, filming what he knows. The performances by the non-professional cast add a layer of authenticity, especially by the luminous Kaycee Moore (who is likewise incredible in Billy Woodberry's 1983 film, BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS, also scripted by Burnett). Like that film, KILLER OF SHEEP is a kind of poetry of the mundane that revels in the small moments, lingering glances, and moments of reflection that make up a life, weaving a tapestry of images that make up one of the most extraordinary films of the 1970s. It's a reflection not just of of Watts, but of the black working class that feels at once world-weary and celebratory, a small miracle of a film whose beauty shines brighter than ever in Criterion's new 4K release.

Watched on Thursday May 15, 2025.

A very marked step down from the subversive brilliance of SLEEPAWAY CAMP. Which is to be expected for this sort of thing, but SLEEPAWAY CAMP II changes the character of Angela so much that it almost feels like a completely different concept. Gone is genderfuckery and queer undertones - in its place is a kind of slasher movie parody with Angela as a prudish avenging angel determined to punish naughty campers who engage in premarital sex and drug use. On the one hand, it's frustrating seeing this our traumatized, gender-confused heroine turned into a deeply sex-negative cop, but on the other hand, maybe it makes some modicum of sense that someone with such a fraught relationship with her own body might turn against those who demonstrate a greater comfort with theirs.

I preferred this when Angela was killing bullies and sex pests rather than just run-of-the-mill horny teenagers, but there's a tongue-in-cheek matter-of-factness here that has its own appeal, even if it doesn't hold a candle to the original.

After a mysterious freighter rams and sinks a cruise ship, the survivors clamber onto the rusted hulk to discover that the ship is, in fact, a haunted Nazi ship that has possessed their captain and is trying to kill them all. It is a nifty concept but strictly low-rent - you can feel the filmmakers trying hard to cover for their limited budget with lots of shaky camerawork, bizarre editing choices, and strange angles. There are some fun moments here as the captain, played by George Kennedy, descends into madness, and the film maintains a spooky atmosphere that never tries to overexplain what's actually going on. Ultimately, however, it's just kind of dull.

You can't convince me that James Cameron didn't watch this and take some inspiration from this ship's churning engines for TITANIC.

I had a blast with this. A bunch of kids go into a spooky wax museum and find themselves sucked into the characters' tableaux in a mad scheme to resurrect the 18 most evil men who've ever lived. Each character represents a classic horror movie; you've got everyone from Dracula, the Wolf Man, and The Phantom of the Opera to Audrey II (!!) and the Marquis de Sade (a strange choice, but OK). Clever concept, fun execution, with a clear love for the movies it pays homage to.

Essentially an anti-German propaganda piece born out of Winsor Mackay's outrage at the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-Boat in 1915, THE SINKING OF THE LUSITANIA is a gorgeously animated recount of the disaster that is surprisingly dynamic given its penchant for melodramatic pronouncements of sorrow and outrage. It's very much wartime propaganda, with all the baggage and over-the-top xenophobia that comes with it, but the actual animation of the sinking is pretty incredible.

This was fine. Uncovered a lot of info about the hypocrisies and double standards of the MPAA ratings board, not to mention Jack Valenti's weird capitalist prudishness, which is all basically common knowledge at this point. The problem is that it gets bogged down in this faux-Michael Moore private investigator thing where they try to unmask all the ratings board , which seems like a mostly pointless stunt. Greater transparency in the ratings process is certainly a much-needed goal, but the movie's at its weakest when focusing on the quest to unmask them, and strongest when illustrating clear double standards in their mysterious process.

*It's really not possible to discuss my feelings about this movie without spoilers, so before reading any further - you've been warned.*

I can't speak to the original intent of the filmmakers behind SLEEPAWAY CAMP. It was 1983, and the gay representation in film was low enough to say nothing of transgender rep. From one perspective, its transgender villain (heroine?) could be seen as a monster, a freak held up to leave the audience with a sense of horror and revulsion. On the other hand...I never really felt that way about her. I found a strange kinship with her, even though her transness was not revealed until the film's final scene.

Angela (Felissa Rose) is constantly being picked on and bullied by her fellow campers. She is seen as too shy, too quiet, too awkward - a young girl on the brink of puberty whose seemingly late development is met with derision by other girls. Angela isn't "trans" necessarily in the way we would understand it today; her adoptive aunt forced her to transition because her aunt always wanted a daughter. It is the very definition of problematic trans representation: a murdering "trap" who stealthily blends in with the other girls to exact revenge on those who wronged her. But there is something instantly recognizable as a trans woman: the pain of being forced to live as a gender you are not.

That's what makes Angela and SLEEPAWAY CAMP so compelling. Whether intentionally or accidentally, it is a howl of transgender rage, a disarmingly perceptive tale of gender dysphoria as horror that hits harder than perhaps even the filmmakers realized. The targets are bullies, pedophilic staff , and cruel mean girls - each one in their own way "had it coming." Its protagonist, forced to live as the wrong gender, exacts her revenge as a kind of holy crusade, the trauma of the closet finally bursting from the seams. The film's final shot, of Angela naked, covered in blood, face frozen in a primal scream, is one of the most unnerving shots in the horror canon; made even more so by the fact that we can feel her pain. There is never any doubt about whose side the film is on, which makes it a remarkable outlier for its time.

Released a mere 3 years after FRIDAY THE 13th, it feels like a knockoff of a knockoff, yet it's queer-coded from the word go. Angela's domineering Aunt Martha is played by a cisgender woman (Desiree Gould) yet comes across as a drag caricature. Its over-the-top grotesqueries are pure camp, serving as a constant performance of gender and gender stereotypes in which Angela is hopelessly trapped so that the final moment of catharsis feels both heartbreaking and completely earned. Angela's transness isn't horrific - it is the structure of gender created around her, and for her, that is the real horror.

I can't believe that this was all by accident. By all s, Angela belongs in the company of Buffalo Bill from SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (although I have my own thoughts on that one as well) as a negative trans stereotype ultimately hurtful to the community. And yet SLEEPAWAY CAMP feels so perceptive about the terrors of the closet and gender dysphoria as trauma that it feels every bit as intentional as the queer horror of modern trans filmmakers such as Jane Schoenbrun or Alice Maio Mackay. This kind of messy representation feels more authentic than the respectable pity of films like TRANSAMERICA or THE DANISH GIRL because it gets at the inherent messiness of being queer. We don't fit into neat little boxes. We shouldn't have to perform gender or respectability in order to be treated with dignity. In SLEEPAWAY CAMP, Angela reaches her breaking point and dismantles the oppressive and abusive power structures around her in bloody fashion. It deserves a place in the canon of great queer films.

Watched on Saturday May 3, 2025.

A couple heads out for a seemingly idyllic weekend with friends at a house in the country. This couple, however, is not at all what they seem; the woman, Iris (Sophie Thatcher), is a robot, a companion tailored to the personality and desires of her boyfriend, Josh (Jack Quaid). Unbeknownst to her, she has been brought here as an unwitting cog in an elaborate plot to murder the house's wealthy owner and pin it on her.

COMPANION is a clever genre piece that questions human responsibility toward artificial intelligence and how men expect subservience and docility from women. Iris may be a robot, but Josh's treatment of her as an object goes much deeper than that as he programs her into what he considers a perfect companion: meek, not too intelligent, totally devoted to him. In other words - completely non-threatening. At least until she isn't.

Interestingly, the film also acknowledges the fact that gay men are not exempt from misogyny. The cishet ones, even (and maybe especially) "allies," will use gay people for their own ends and discard them when necessary so that participation in their misogyny is ultimately self-defeating. It's an interesting wrinkle in a fairly straightforward metaphor. But what sets this apart from something like DON'T WORRY DARLING is how much fun it is. First-time feature filmmaker Drew Hancock has assembled a terrific cast, providing an engaging science fiction backdrop that tackles real-world issues with a devious twist. There's never any doubt where this is going (Iris tells us in the opening narration exactly how it ends). Still, the journey is a fun-house maze of engaging twists and turns where the robot characters may be more human than their flesh-and-blood antagonists. It is hardly a new concept, I know, but COMPANION is a fresh enough take on it that it hardly matters as Sophie Thatcher goes full Rambo on a bunch of misogynist douchebags.

I found this incredibly deep, meaningful, and edgy when I was 16 years old.

I did not find this incredibly deep, meaningful, and edgy as an adult.

Pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the empty provocations of THE RULES OF ATTRACTION, although I don't think it's entirely without merit. Shannyn Sossamon is outstanding, Ian Somerhalder is hot, and Faye Freaking Dunaway is here for some reason. But Roger Avary's direction is all flash, no substance, a somewhat busy tale of ennui and sexual disaffection amongst privileged college kids, populated by deeply unlikable characters whose journeys never quite lead anywhere.

MRS. BROWN is entirely representative of a particular type of middlebrow Miramax "art house" cinema aimed at the blue-haired matinee crowd, which is absolutely the kind of thing I usually eat up. But this story of an unlikely friendship between Queen Victoria (Judi Dench) and a loyal servant (Billy Connolly) is so staight-down-the-middle that it feels almost anonymous.

John Madden was only one year away from his surprise Best Picture victory with SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, but MRS. BROWN feels somewhat dour in comparison. Dench is marvelous here, doing some of her most subtle work as the grieving queen, but there are many examples of this kind of film that are more memorable and entertaining.

Gareth Edwards' THE RAID and THE RAID 2 are perhaps some of the most well-regarded action films of the last 15 years, in some ways paving the way for similarly high-octane films like JOHN WICK and ATOMIC BLONDE. His latest film, HAVOC, attempts to recapture some of that relentlessly brutal energy as a washed-up cop (Tom Hardy) tries to keep a disgraced politician's son from being killed by drug dealers after a robbery gone wrong.

HAVOC features two rousing action set pieces, but the biggest issue is that they're so unrelenting that they become numbing. Gunshots become white noise, and punches, kicks, and stabbings with all sorts of improvised implements are treated like window dressing for a plot that's just not that interesting. Hardy's character becomes increasingly sidelined as the film progresses, but everyone feels lost amid the hail of bullets. The film is only 107 minutes long but feels longer than JEANNE DIELMAN. It's just such an impenetrable wall of kineticism and noise that the actual symphonic choreography of the whole thing disappears into the din. There's a gracefulness to something like JOHN WICK, where HAVOC feels lumbering and undisciplined - a never-ending series of "isn't this cool" moments that never add up to anything truly engaging.

The short that launched a thousand discourses. Aimee Armstrong's debut short film follows a transgender woman named Bella (played by Armstrong herself) who discovers her boyfriend is an "autogynephile," a cisgender man who's turned on by the thought of being a woman. Forced to reckon with his bumbling attempts at femininity and insistence that he's the same as she and her trans friends, Bella realizes her relationship may be in jeopardy.

While I do think there are issues, especially in the kink community, with cishet crossdressers and sissies being lumped in (or lumping themselves in) with trans women, an association often drawn by pornography. It has long been a source of frustration for me because there is a clear difference between men who are turned on by being feminized (a fetish historically rooted in misogyny) and someone who is transgender. In this climate of baseless attacks on trans people, I think that distinction is important.

HOWEVER, it's a tricky line to walk in order not to condemn gender non-conformity or police gender expression. The biggest issue here is how aggressively ENVY/DESIRE lampoons its crossdresser's masculine appearance. It feels mean-spirited in a deeply uncomfortable way. Both Bella and her friend Natasha (Miles Yardley) are traditionally feminine trans women. "Two's company, three's a clock" they sniff at being associated with Bella's transvestite boyfriend, who obnoxiously corrects their waiter that he is a "ma'am" not a "sir." There's something there that reeks of self-loathing as they dismiss him as merely a "man in a dress." It feels as though the film is hitting clocky trans girls with strays; that if you aren't stealth like them, you're somehow harming the entire trans community.

There are interesting ideas to explore here, but they require a level of finesse and thought that Armstrong doesn't display. Placing a distinction between cross-dressing and transness is good, showing that transness is not a fetish is also essential. These discussions are good for the community to have - but free from the cruelty that ENVY/DESIRE's misplaced satire seems to revel in.

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

As potent a deconstruction of American myth-making as Ford ever made, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE is a late-period masterpiece that feels almost cynical in the way it takes of his own complicity in mythologizing the American West. There's something autumnal and elegiac about it. LIBERTY VALANCE stands apart from the Westerns that distinguished Ford - there are no vast sprawling landscapes here, and most of the action takes place in small rooms and narrow soundstage streets. But there's a world-weariness to it that crackles with that unmistakable Ford energy.

The real West wasn't the grand adventure depicted by Hollywood; it was rough-hewn and, like much of America, built on half-truths, lies, and tall tales. The legend did indeed become fact, and Ford helped write it. In a world of legends - what is truth? Does it even matter? It's one of Ford's most sobering works.

Not exactly John Ford's finest hour - and while he publicly disowned the film, it isn't entirely without merit. It just doesn't have that trademark Ford spark. THE PLOUGH AND THE STARS is a chronicle of the 1916 Irish Rebellion, by all s a ion project for Ford, but the hour-long film feels strangely truncated, with Barbara Stanwyck given little to do but stand on the sidelines and fret about her husband fighting for Ireland. It's poorly scripted, and RKO took over the editing after Ford stormed off-set, which s for the film's uneven nature. There's a fascinating "what if" here, with traces of an Irish LES MISERABLES hidden amongst RKO's leftovers, but it's a pretty clear studio hatchet job.

"Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good an' they die out. But we keep a'comin'. We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out; they can't lick us. We'll go on forever, Pa, 'cause we're the people."

What a picture.

In 1931, F.W. Murnau made his final film, TABU: A STORY OF THE SOUTH SEAS, on the island of Bora Bora. It was partly inspired by Robert Flaherty's 1926 documentary, MOANA (no relation to the Disney film). TABU would ultimately be Murnau's final film, he died in a car crash before the film was released. Both TABU and MOANA were examples of ethnographic films that sought to bring exotic locales to life for audiences of the silent era. I found myself thinking about both of these films as I watched Miguel Gomes' latest film, GRAND TOUR.

It should come as no surprise that Gomes has mentioned Murnau's film as an inspiration for GRAND TOUR, given that his 2012 film TABU drew clear inspiration from Murnau's swan song. In GRAND TOUR, Gomes looks to the silent era yet again to create something both evocative and hilarious, a tragicomic romp across southeast Asia taken from a age by Guy de Mauant about a man running from his fiancee across the continent, trying to outrun his commitments as she stays in hot pursuit. Along the way, they encounter train wrecks, shipwrecks, harsh jungles, and locals, both friendly and malign, who both help and hinder their respective journeys.

Gomes first follows the story of Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), a handsome British diplomat who's in over his head. Halfway through the film, he switches focus to Edward's lovely fiancee, Molly (Crista Alfaiate), who finds a telegram from Edward at each stop telling her where he's going next as if to meet her up the road, only to flee once again, a scenario that repeats itself to the point of absurdity, always punctuated by Molly's unusual sputtering laugh. As we travel from Burma (now Myanmar) to Singapore, Thailand to Vietnam, and beyond, Gomes peppers in modern, color footage of the respective locals in contrast to the black-and-white fictional story set in 1917, creating a century-spanning portrait of Southeast Asia. This travelogue style blends contemporary and classical styles, providing a fascinating cultural backdrop for the unusual romantic comedy played by two fish out of the water. Constantly separated by literal borders, these two erstwhile lovers are forced to reckon with whether or not they are right for each other, or if they've been headed down the wrong path all along.

Gomes' films can feel languid and often meandering, but that's part of their beauty. GRAND TOUR is a slow burn that pays off beautifully as it lulls us into its particular rhythm and gorgeously textured images. As disarmingly funny as it is hauntingly beautiful, it gazes into our cinematic past while blazing a bold path to its future, uniting cultures, lovers, and languages across space and time in a breathtaking globe-trotting reverie.

When was the last time you sat in a movie theater and felt like you were watching something so new and exciting that you wanted to levitate out of the theater when it was over? For me, that moment was this past weekend at a screening of Ryan Coogler's extraordinary new film, SINNERS.

Those moments feel exceedingly rare for me these days. The cinematic landscape has changed so much in my 20+ years as a film critic that sometimes it feels like the greatest discoveries left for me are in the past. Coogler has long been a filmmaker I've respected and ired. FRUITVALE STATION was a barnburner of a debut. CREED is perhaps the finest example of a legacy sequel we've ever seen. And BLACK PANTHER remains the high point of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, one of the few with a point of view all its own. Still, nothing could have really prepared me for what he's achieved with SINNERS, a truly unique blend of horror, western, and musical genres that is unlike anything I've seen at a multiplex before.

Set in Mississippi during the 1930s, SINNERS' world is one of humidity, blues, and institutionalized racism. Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) are twin brothers who just returned home from Chicago, where it is heavily suggested they worked for the mob. The brothers are back in town to open up a juke t, a place where the black folk of their tiny town can come together and dance the night away to the blues and hopefully forget their troubles.

Their plans are derailed, however, when they are visited by a trio of vampires on opening night who begin picking off the guests one by one. But they're not just out for blood - these vampires want much more than that, and soon Smoke and Stack are fighting for their lives as they try to protect not only their lives, but their very identities from a deal with the devil that may be too good to refuse.

The vampires of SINNERS aren't just nocturnal bloodsuckers, they absorb your memories and your identities. Each new convert represents an expansion of the vampires' knowledge and endurance. Here, Coogler imagines cultural appropriation as a kind of vampirism, as capitalism steals culture to commodify and ultimately corrupt it. In that regard, it's as much a film about music as it is about vampires; how music can be intrinsic to identity and culture, and most importantly, how it transcends and connects generations across time. There's a moment in SINNERS that illustrates this beautifully, and it's one of the most audacious things I've seen in a major motion picture in recent memory. In one fluid shot, Coogler brings past, present, and future crashing together through music, uniting as one as the literal and figurative vampires draw closer, hoping to steal it from themselves. It's a moment so powerful I found myself overwhelmed with emotion out of sheer awe for the craft on display.

There's never been a horror film quite like this one. While it will likely draw comparisons to Jordan Peele's work for its brand of black-centric social consciousness, SINNERS is its own unique animal. Coogler wildly careens between genres, gradually easing us into this world but never staying in the same gear for too long. The result is endlessly thrilling, keeping the audience on its toes by constantly changing the game in bold new ways.

Clint Eastwood's debut behind the camera is interesting, considering the notorious economy of his late-period style, because PLAY MISTY FOR ME is strangely indulgent in comparison. There are long sequences of Eastwood driving, walking around, even making love, that seem to go on forever. On the one hand, you have to ire a thriller that takes time to smell the roses, but Eastwood hadn't quite got the hang of pacing yet, and some of these beats come across more like filler rather than storytelling techniques.

Still, PLAY MISTY FOR ME is an often unnerving thriller about a radio DJ whose one-night stand with an obsessed fan turns into a nightmare he can't seem to wake up from. It's a kind of proto-FATAL ATTRACTION or BABY REINDEER with Jessica Walter as the deranged fan who goes from damaged to damaging in the blink of an eye.

It's fascinating to me how often movies like this play off the male fear of commitment - being tied down to a woman they slept with once who perhaps catches feelings too quickly. That anxiety courses through PLAY MISTY FOR ME - a man constantly haunted by his own womanizing who catches hell just when he's finally ready to settle down.

A found footage horror movie that delves beneath the usual tropes to seek a deeper kind of emotional honesty. LAKE MUNGO, which chronicles the aftermath of a teenage girl's drowning, plays out like a documentary in which her family becomes plagued by images of their dead daughter haunting their home. But the source of that haunting may be less supernatural than they think.

Often chilling, often mournful, LAKE MUNGO examines the way in which tragedy can tear families apart, bringing traumas old and new bubbling to the surface in unexpected ways as the family and the community struggle to come to grips with the unimaginable.

Watched on Thursday April 17, 2025.

A horror film set on New Year's Eve 1999 has great potential, but while Kyle Mooney fills Y2K with 90s references and pop songs, it's not goofy enough, scary enough, or stylish enough to make much of an impact. The anxiety of that time was very real, and Mooney mostly missed the mark in capturing it because the layers of sardonic humor don't really allow it to grapple with anything interesting.

I would love to see a version of this featuring a queer cast directed by Alice Maio Mackay.

Not exactly Clint's finest hour, although the final mountain climbing set piece and the location cinematography are often breathtaking. Eastwood doesn't give himself much to do here other than drop some casual misogyny and racism (sometimes simultaneously) while chasing tail in service of a fairly bland plot that's basically one giant red herring. One of his many love interests is a black woman named Jemima, a detail the film mines for comic relief if that tells you anything about what this movie feels like now.

Great score by John Williams (composed the same year as his breakout hit, JAWS), and some bizarre touches occasionally wake up the sleepy narrative (Thayer David's albino villain, always bathed in garish red light for his constant blood transplants, is a wild addition). Still, the final reveal that the MacGuffin was a pointless setup pretty much undermines the stakes of the whole affair. Clint has rarely been less likable on screen than he is here.

There's a certain set of expectations that come with movies about dogs. They tend to be fairly saccharine affairs, if not particularly deep. W.C. Fields once said, "Never work with children or animals," and while he likely had a different idea in mind when he said that - both tend to be used as shortcuts and crutches by filmmakers because they are who audiences will likely sympathize with the most.

Giving credit where credit is due, THE FRIEND, the new film by David Siegel and Scott McGehee (THE DEEP END), is not your average maudlin tearjerker. It's very much about a life-changing relationship with a dog, but Siegel and McGehee, adapting the novel of the same name by Sigrid Nunez (THE ROOM NEXT DOOR), are at least attempting to do something interesting with the concept.

The dog in question is a massive Great Dane named Apollo, bequeathed to university professor Iris (Naomi Watts) after the death of her dear friend and former lover, Walter (Bill Murray). Walter's suicide left his friends and family reeling, his reasons for ending his life unknown. Now forced to contend with this oversized dog in her rent-controlled apartment, Iris faces the question of what to do with the animal in the long term. While she grapples with losing her best friend, Apollo is likewise grieving the loss of his owner. The "whys" of the situation make her question everything - and soon realizes that her frustration with the dog is in fact unresolved anger directed at her dead friend. A close friend feeling abandoned by someone she loved and a former stray once abandoned by his former owners now alone in the world, it turns out that she and Apollo are exactly what each other needs to process a profound loss and find the healing they each so desperately need.

THE FRIEND has a tendency to meander a bit. The dog is charming, and Watts' fraught relationship with him makes for a pleasant viewing experience, but it isn't until the film starts its flashback structure and explores her relationship with Murray that the film really gets going, and even then, it constantly feels on wobbly ground. Late in the game, she seeks to have him licensed as an emotional animal in a last-ditch attempt to prevent her from being evicted from her home for having an unauthorized pet in the building. At that point, Siegel and McGehee spend an unnecessarily long time explaining the themes of the movie in an extended therapy session that feels all too on the nose. Once it gets that out of its system, though, THE FRIEND finally finds its footing in allowing Apollo to be an avatar for Walter, a chance for Iris to process her grief, let go, and say goodbye.

That elegiac nature goes beyond a mere story about a mismatched girl and her dog, and it touches on some interesting and often moving themes of grief and the sometimes bewildering aftermath of an unexpected loss. It also feels like it leaves much unexplored, and its uneven structure often hinders its emotional impact as it struggles to build a connection between its protagonist and her lost friend. Still, its final stretch finally allows the audience in, and it comes to a graceful conclusion in a powerfully honest exploration of the camaraderie of shared pain. Notably, Nunez also wrote the novel on which Pedro Almodovar's THE ROOM NEXT DOOR was based. While I think both films have their shortcomings, they would make an interesting double feature in how they both confront the inevitability of death and its impact on those left behind. Siegel and McGehee are certainly not Almodovar, but they take THE FRIEND to places films of its ilk rarely go, and it's all the better for it. Dog people - bring your tissues.

Fresh off his stint as Sergio Leone's Man with No Name, Clint Eastwood began shifting gears to Hollywood fare, in his first partnership with frequent collaborator Don Siegel, who would go on to helm DIRTY HARRY just a few years later. COOGAN'S BLUFF is an interesting animal, one foot in Eastwood's western past and one foot in his DIRTY HARRY future, a kind of western/crime drama hybrid about an Arizona deputy (Eastwood) who travels to NYC to collect a prisoner, and doesn't much cop to their big city ways.

The funny thing about COOGAN'S BLUFF is that Coogan is actually kind of a terrible cop. His hotheaded cowboy nature (always the butt of the joke for the local NYC folk) gets him into trouble up at every turn. He's constantly being foiled by criminals and NYC cops alike, and seems far more interested in sleeping with every woman he lays eyes on than catching the bad guy (which he fails and fails and fails at...until he doesn't). The casual misogyny here is off the charts, but at least he gets to throw a pool ball in a guy's face at one point - so you win some, you lose some. There's something inherently appealing about the way it transitions Eastwood from one iconic part of his career to another, but he and Siegel would go on to make much stronger films than this - an oddly paced and often quite dull cop drama that would have worked better as a fish out of water comedy.

A fairly standard-issue early 2000s indie coming-of-age drama, filled with quirky characters and dark humor, centering around a disaffected teenager (Kieran Culkin) who's grown up far more mature and wise about the world than his emotionally stunted mother (Susan Sarandon), philandering stepfather (Jeff Goldblum), and Republican brother (Ryan Phillipe). IGBY GOES DOWN makes some feints toward exploring its protagonist's rebellion against his privileged, insular upbringing, but feels frustratingly schematic, never really digging particularly deep. Great cast though, and bonus points for its use of Coldplay's "Don't Panic" a full two years before it became ingrained in the GARDEN STATE soundtrack.

A quick look at post-COVID box office returns might suggest that the R-rated comedy is dead. There have been a couple of exceptions (2023's NO HARD FEELINGS springs to mind ), but it's notable that two of this year's best R-rated comedies, YOU'RE CORDIALLY INVITED and BRIDGET JONES: MAD ABOUT THE BOY, movies that once upon a time would have been surefire theatrical hits, went straight to streaming in the United States. The days of WEDDING CRASHERS (2005), THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN (2005), and SUPERBAD (2007) seem well behind us, not to mention more recent hits like BLOCKERS (2018) and GAME NIGHT (2018).

Enter ONE OF THEM DAYS, a January release that has quietly become the fifth highest-grossing film of the year so far. It is a moderate-sized success that stands out amongst the splashier films with built-in audiences that have outperformed it, like CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD, A MINECRAFT MOVIE, and SNOW WHITE. Its $50,000,000 gross on a $15,000,000 budget is nothing to sneeze at, but it's hard to escape the feeling that this would have done much bigger numbers 10, 15, or even 20 years ago.

The film stars Keke Palmer and SZA as roommates Dreux (Palmer) and Alyssa (SZA). Dreux is working as a waitress but dreams of owning her own restaurant, and has an interview booked to a prestigious program that could help her achieve her dream. Alyssa is an unemployed artist whose taste in men is questionable at best. When she gives her loutish boyfriend Keshawn (Joshua David Neal) their rent money to drop off with the landlord, he runs off with his other side chick instead, leaving Dreux and SZA in a desperate rush to get the money back, or figure out a way to make $1,300, or face eviction in eight hours.

It truly is "one of them days," as director Lawrence Lamont constantly levels up the desperation and the stakes of Dreux and Alyssa's seemingly Sisyphean task. By giving us engaging characters with strong motivations and increasingly dire stakes, ONE OF THEM DAYS draws the audience in and keeps us invested in their story. While Palmer and SZA's dynamic may be completely different, I was often reminded of the comedies of Laurel and Hardy, in which the road of good intentions is often paved with escalating mishaps and kooky side characters who both help and hinder our heroes.

Along the way, they have to contend with predatory payday lenders, uncaring landlords, encroaching gentrification (as represented by Maude Apatow's very white new girl on the block), expensive ambulance rides, Facebook Marketplace deals gone wrong, and rampaging gangsters. It all works so well because it's indelibly grounded in the film's milieu. ONE OF THEM DAYS is consistently hilarious because it's relatable; its characters are faced with the near-constant threat of very real, everyday struggles that, while certainly exaggerated, mostly ring true.

It feels like a throwback, calling to mind other Black-centric comedies of the past like FRIDAY and BARBERSHOP, while charting its own path through the struggles of life in 2025. Palmer and SZA are both excellent here, bringing an energy and charm that's difficult to resist. They give us characters worth rooting for in a sticky situation spiraling wildly out of control. Its relative success at the box office is also cause for optimism. Movies like this deserve the chance to find their audience in theaters. While YOU'RE CORDIALLY INVITED and the 4th BRIDGET JONES, both solid films in their own right, skipped theaters and all but disappeared on Prime Video and Peacock, respectively, ONE OF THEM DAYS making a box office splash is enough to give hope that comedies like this can survive and even thrive at the box office. Now that it's available to stream, its strong word of mouth should carry it far.

In her 2008 essay "CHUNGKING EXPRESS: Electric Youth" (included as an extra in the booklet of the Criterion Blu-Ray), critic Amy Taubin compares Wong Kar Wai's CHUNKGKING EXPRESS to Jean-Luc Godard's seminal 1966 film, MASCULIN FEMININ. It's a perceptive parallel, acknowledging both films as quintessential products of their time in depicting youthful romance and disaffection.

I'd argue that CHUNGKING EXPRESS emulates other Godard films like BAND OF OUTSIDERS just as much. There's an effortless sense of cool to what Wong is doing here - as his characters drift in and out of the film and in and out of love. His repetitive use of music recalls early Godard as well, turning classics like The Mamas and the Papas' "California Dreamin'" and Dinah Washington's "What Diff'rence a Day Made" along with newer Cantonese covers of songs like The Cranberries' "Dreams" into the stuff of wistful romantic daydreams.

At its heart, however, CHUNGKING EXPRESS is a modern film noir. You have two cops, each recovering from a breakup, each enamored with a mysterious and unattainable woman. Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) is pining for a former love, setting the arbitrary deadline of May 1 for her to come back to him. He collects cans of pineapple that expire on that date as a countdown to remind himself that the time to let go is fast approaching. Meanwhile, he begins to fall in love with a gangster in a blond wig (Brigitte Lin) as May 1 quickly approaches. Cop 663 (Tony Leung) is likewise infatuated with a flight attendant (Valerie Chow). Still, he soon meets Faye (Faye Wong), an enigmatic server at a local take-out restaurant, whose return infatuation leads her to take an unconventionally central role in his life.

Wong directs the film like a modern noir, a fact made more palpable by the somewhat controversial 4K restoration, which darkens the images and warms the color palette. And while crime elements are present in the film's first half, a palpable sense of melancholy and ennui drives it forward. These are essentially lost souls bumping up against one another at a dingy take-out. Wong isn't particularly interested in creating a conventional plot, but CHUNGKING EXPRESS is more than just vibes. There's an undercurrent of anxiety at work here - disparate people looking for connections, for belonging. They feel unsettled in the world as it is - the future unknown and heavy. For a film made in Hong Kong in the last days of the British mandate before being turned over to China - there's certainly a wider sense of uncertainty in which it exists. Yet the lonely lovelorn characters persist, cops and their proto manic pixie dream girls, always fixated on something unattainable and missing the beauty before their eyes. Thankfully, that beauty is not lost on audiences, and CHUNGKING EXPRESS continues to beguile and enchant some 30 years later, a haunting portrait of timely and timeless longing.

In Đặng Nhật Minh's somber war drama, WHEN THE TENTH MONTH COMES, a Vietnamese woman gets word that her husband was killed in the war, and enlists a friend to continue writing letters home in his name so that his father and son are spared the heartbreak of his death. Her ruse, however, only delays the inevitable,

Films about the war in Vietnam made by Vietnamese filmmakers are often overlooked by Western audiences, and while this film focuses less on the warfare and more on the home front, its impact is no less visceral. WHEN THE TENTH MONTH COMES may not be particularly violent, but the effects of violence are keenly felt, as its protagonist, Duyên (Lê Vân), struggles to maintain normalcy in the absence of her husband, concocting a vivid fantasy world in which he is still alive. It's a poetic, often striking film, a magical realist fable about resilience in wartime that deftly blurs the line between reality and Duyên's carefully composed fiction. While it is in dire need of a restoration (the print now streaming on The Criterion Channel is the best we've got), it offers a poignant look at the effects of the war on the Vietnamese people. While the United States is never mentioned by name - the impact of the imperialist intervention is show in stark emotional detail, a side of the war never shown in American media.

Aggressively fine in the way so many Netflix docs are. It presents an often harrowing tale of survival in the face of an extreme disaster from those who were right in the middle of it, but it's often so self-consciously somber that it borders on parodic. A last-minute post-script about global warming also feels like an afterthought considering that's not something the film had touched on previously. It gets the job done, but feels so perfunctory and lackluster that it's hard to escape the feeling that this is the kind of thing you watch because there's nothing else to on.

1. Schindler's List
2. The Silence of the Lambs
3. Titanic
4. The Thin Red Line
5. Taste of Cherry
6. All About My Mother
7. The Long Day Closes
8. Three Colours: Blue
9. Black Is… Black Ain’t
10. Pulp Fiction

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

1. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
2. The Ring
3. The Weather Man
4. MouseHunt
5. The Lone Ranger
6. Rango
7. A Cure for Wellness
8. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
9. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
10. The Mexican

• Tropical Malady
• Call Me by Your Name
• Moonlight
• Carol
• The Power of the Dog
• Hedwig and the Angry Inch
• The Hours
• Brokeback Mountain
• Shortbus
• God's Own Country

...plus 44 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
2. Days of Heaven
3. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
4. The Godfather
5. Harlan County U.S.A.
6. Nashville
7. News from Home
8. The Ascent
9. Stalker
10. Killer of Sheep

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

1. Final Destination
2. Final Destination Bloodlines
3. Final Destination 2
4. Final Destination 3
5. Final Destination 5
6. The Final Destination

1. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
2. Mission: Impossible
3. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
4. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
5. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
6. Mission: Impossible II
7. Mission: Impossible III

• Still Life
• I Wish I Knew
• Mountains May Depart
• A Touch of Sin
• 24 City
• Ash Is Purest White

1. Citizen Kane
2. The Red Shoes
3. Late Spring
4. Casablanca
5. Meshes of the Afternoon
6. Black Narcissus
7. The Magnificent Ambersons
8. Bicycle Thieves
9. It's a Wonderful Life
10. The Best Years of Our Lives

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

Working my way through the film's of John Ford. This is going to take a while...

1. The Searchers
2. How Green Was My Valley
3. The Informer
4. The Grapes of Wrath
5. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
6. Young Mr. Lincoln
7. My Darling Clementine
8. Drums Along the Mohawk
9. Stagecoach
10. The Quiet Man

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

Not seen: ALL THIS AND HEAVEN TOO, FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, KITTY FOYLE, THE LONG VOYAGE HOME, OUR TOWN.

1. The Grapes of Wrath
2. The Great Dictator
3. The Letter
4. Rebecca
5. The Philadelphia Story

1. Unforgiven
2. Flags of Our Fathers
3. The Bridges of Madison County
4. Pale Rider
5. Letters from Iwo Jima
6. A Perfect World
7. The Outlaw Josey Wales
8. Gran Torino
9. Juror #2
10. American Sniper

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

1. Sinners
2. Creed
3. Black Panther
4. Fruitvale Station
5. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

1. Spirited Away
2. The Hours
3. Blissfully Yours
4. Far from Heaven
5. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
6. On the Occasion of ing the Turning Gate
7. The Pianist
8. Talk to Her
9. What Time Is It There?
10. Catch Me If You Can

...plus 94 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Blue Velvet
• The Sacrifice
• The Fly
• Manhunter

1. The Pelican Brief
2. A Time to Kill
3. The Firm
4. Runaway Jury
5. The Client

1. Modern Times
2. City Lights
3. Limelight
4. The Great Dictator
5. The Kid
6. The Gold Rush
7. The Circus
8. A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate

1. Casablanca
2. Mildred Pierce
3. Angels with Dirty Faces
4. Yankee Doodle Dandy
5. White Christmas
6. The Sea Wolf
7. Mystery of the Wax Museum
8. Dodge City
9. The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
10. Doctor X

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

1. Man on Fire
2. Unstoppable
3. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
4. Top Gun
5. Déjà Vu
6. Domino

1. Band of Outsiders
2. Weekend
3. King Lear
4. Breathless
5. Origins of the 21st Century
6. A Woman Is a Woman
7. Goodbye to Language
8. The Image Book
9. Vivre Sa Vie
10. Masculin Féminin

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

1. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
3. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
4. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
5. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
6. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

1. T Blockers
2. Carnage for Christmas
3. Satranic Panic
4. So Vam
5. The Serpent's Nest
6. Bad Girl Boogey
7. Howl of the Werewolf

The long list of every 2021 film I've seen, ranked.

1. This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection
2. Memoria
3. The Power of the Dog
4. The Worst Person in the World
5. Days
6. Petite Maman
7. The French Dispatch
8. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
9. Titane
10. Her Socialist Smile

...plus 100 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Window Water Baby Moving
2. Mothlight
3. Wedlock House: An Intercourse
4. The Garden of Earthly Delights
5. Desistfilm
6. The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes
7. Cat's Cradle
8. The Wold-Shadow
9. Eye Myth
10. Kindering

1. Drive My Car
2. Evil Does Not Exist
3. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
4. Asako I & II

1. No Other Land
2. Pictures of Ghosts
3. Dahomey
4. Witches
5. Will & Harper

1. The Room Next Door
2. Challengers
3. The Brutalist
4. Evil Does Not Exist
5. Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1
6. All We Imagine as Light
7. Queer
8. Here
9. Nosferatu
10. Conclave

1. I Saw the TV Glow
2. All We Imagine as Light
3. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
4. Megalopolis
5. No Other Land
6. Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1
7. The Brutalist
8. Pictures of Ghosts
9. The People's Joker
10. Evil Does Not Exist

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

1. Two Tars
2. The Finishing Touch
3. From Soup to Nuts
4. Habeas Corpus
5. Should Married Men Go Home?
6. You're Darn Tootin'
7. We Faw Down
8. Leave 'Em Laughing
9. Their Purple Moment
10. Early to Bed

1. Mildred Pierce
2. The Lost Weekend
3. The Bells of St. Mary's

1. Carry-On
2. The Commuter
3. Jungle Cruise
4. Non-Stop
5. Unknown
6. Orphan
7. The Shallows
8. Black Adam

Ranking all the Palme d'Or winners I've seen.

1. The Tree of Life
2. The Leopard
3. The Cranes Are Flying
4. Apocalypse Now
5. Taxi Driver
6. Dancer in the Dark
7. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
8. The Piano
9. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
10. Taste of Cherry

...plus 36 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Alien
2. Blade Runner
3. Gladiator
4. Black Hawk Down
5. The Last Duel
6. Hannibal
7. All the Money in the World
8. The Counselor
9. The Martian
10. American Gangster

...plus 9 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. All About My Mother
2. Live Flesh
3. Talk to Her
4. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
5. Pain and Glory
6. Volver
7. Matador
8. Parallel Mothers
9. Bad Education
10. Law of Desire

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. In This Our Life
2. White Heat
3. The Roaring Twenties
4. High Sierra
5. Objective, Burma!
6. Me and My Gal
7. Gun Fury

1. Back to the Future
2. Here
3. Back to the Future Part II
4. Death Becomes Her
6. Used Cars
7. What Lies Beneath
8. Cast Away
9. Flight
10. Allied

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

• The Blue Angel
• Underworld
• The Docks of New York
• The Last Command
• Morocco
• Anatahan

1. Armageddon
2. Ambulance
3. Transformers
4. Pain & Gain
5. Bad Boys
6. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
7. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
8. Pearl Harbor
9. Transformers: The Last Knight
10. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

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

• Ruggles of Red Gap
• Duck Soup
• The Awful Truth
• Going My Way
• Love Affair

• Blood and Black Lace
• A Bay of Blood
• Kill, Baby... Kill!
• Five Dolls for an August Moon
• Hercules in the Haunted World

• Ed Wood
• Batman Returns
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
• Batman
• Beetlejuice
• Vincent
• Edward Scissorhands
• Big Fish
• Frankenweenie
• Corpse Bride

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Halloween II
2. The Lords of Salem
3. House of 1000 Corpses
4. The Devil's Rejects
5. Halloween
6. The Haunted World of El Superbeasto

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

Not seen: NINOTCHKA, OF MICE AND MEN, WUTHERING HEIGHTS

1. The Wizard of Oz
2. Stagecoach
3. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
4. Gone with the Wind
5. Goodbye, Mr. Chips
6. Love Affair
7. Dark Victory

1. Clerks
2. Dogma
3. Clerks II
4. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
5. Mallrats
6. Zack and Miri Make a Porno
7. Red State

1. Rumba
2. Lost in Paris
3. The Falling Star
4. The Fairy

1. Mulholland Drive
2. Gosford Park
3. There Will Be Blood
4. Dogville
5. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
6. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
7. Tropical Malady
8. Spirited Away
9. Silent Light
10. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

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

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
2. The Firm
3. The Interpreter
4. Random Hearts
5. Out of Africa

1. The Graduate
2. Angels in America
3. Closer
4. Silkwood
5. Primary Colors
6. Charlie Wilson's War

• Mandabi
• Emitaï
• Outsiders
• Xala
• Black Girl
• The Wagoner