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French splatterfest has ambition but clearly no money. Alpine locations are a nice change of pace for the zombie genre. Maybe the best idea they borrow from 28 Days Later is a rock score. It keeps things moving. I wanted more of it.

Simple Minds never occupied my teenage consciousness the way Bowie and Depeche Mode did, but of course I've been aware of them my whole life. As it happens, Dave from DM is in this amiable, fast paced doc, which spends some time on their years before they were a stadium band, which I liked a lot. 

Simple Minds fans seem like cool people. They lined up an hour before the screening. There was a kid, maybe 12, with a stack of vinyl to sign. I hope he was able to chase them down after the fairly anodyne Q&A.

I'm well familiar with these academic ideas from books but it's nice to have them laid out in an engaging and visual way. The doc is best when practicing filmmakers comment because they keep the subject grounded. But the movie clips really speak for themselves.

It's not every day you see a Kazakh movie streaming. This one kept me off balance, never quite knowing what's next, but at the expense of engaging with the characters. It's well shot. The dusty landscape evokes westerns and helps establish a cold dystopian world, but I found it numbing after a while. The antihero just slaughters people willy nilly. 

In wide shots, there is always dust or smoke blowing across the image. It's so consistent, there must a PA just out of frame with a bucket of sand and a fan.

Even to a secularist, there's something almost spiritual about mountains. The likeable folks in this short doc just take that idea a step or two further.

Very funny and relatable short about self image and finding motivation.

This is a movie with three car chases, easily 1,000 rounds of spent ammunition, several fistfights, and three of the most charismatic, scene-chewing leading men on the planet. And it's still a total, unredeemable piece of shit.

The chases have no sense of space or rhythm whatsoever. In one, the pursuit literally goes around the block. Scenes end with no payoff and suddenly the characters are halfway around the world shooting shotguns in the air, a sort of outback redneck New Year's.

Director Jack Hill came to this girl power classic after making two Pam Grier Blaxploitation movies. From Thriller to Machete, Kill Bill and Twin Peaks, women in eye patches are so freaking badass. Patch here turns out to be a conniving, wicked Iago character and just about runs away with the movie. She's so badass the other women call her a son of a bitch.

Cool sci fi done on a shoestring. A story like this could go all sorts of directions. A small stupid thing that could've easily been avoided is that the overhead shots of the car don't match the eye-level shots at all.

Highly stylized doc starts out about a woman forced to emigrate because of idiotic religious laws, but it expands to a wider point of view. Some provocative, haunting images.

Amusing Seinfeldian doc has a serious point to make and a satisfying conclusion.

I guessed the twist by the second minute but it's still good fun with dynamic camerawork by the main character. The final image is really gross.

Melancholy short about being in the closet in the 70s. It didn't really hit for me.

Genuinely sick idea, well done.

There would be many Blaxploitation parodies in the years ahead but this was one of the first. It came just as the genre wave was cresting. Ike Hayes has charisma and real chemistry with his costars, not least the cats. A fan of Morricone, he took ideas for the score from spaghetti westerns. 

The baby carriage full of bagels bit during the car chase is chef's kiss.

This rushed cheapo sequel gets a bad rap but I enjoyed it. It has Big Poppa, the geezer dad who builds a crime empire, grinning assassin maids, and Mario Puzo's son as a henchman on the beach. 

And it has the beautiful Gloria Hendry. She was the first Black Bond girl that same year. Odie Henderson in his terrific history of Blaxploitation calls her character in Live and Let Die "offensively incompetent." (Diana Ross was considered for the Jane Seymour role, Solitaire.) He hates Hell Up in Harlem with a ion, devoting a couple of pages to its many shortcomings. Good book.

Rise and fall of a gangster story owes a debt to James Cagney and Edward G Robinson pictures from two generations earlier. It's got its director's trademark guerrilla shooting, always fun for anyone who enjoys seeing New York City play itself. 

Larry Cohen says on the commentary he liked to shoot at his house because it made feeding the crew easier. Sam Fuller used to live in that house.

I haven't seen all 200-odd Blaxploitation movies but of the ones I have this one stands out. It's got energy, dynamic sound that isn't afraid of silence, a sense of real world politics, its choices constantly surprise, and it has the legitimacy that only comes from shooting on real city locations. 

Every character has a chip on their shoulder, like they're not getting their fair shake and they've had it. They feel their age. It's a movie about being tired of life. 

At about the 29 minute mark, one of the thieves, the super of a rundown building, gets a phone call and the handheld camera reveals the entire staircase above him. Those tenants are tired, too. Tiny moments like that make it a memorable movie.

A warm and very funny portrait of an inspirational leader. 

A lot of the reactions to the doc seem to be through an American lens, that she's a counterpoint to Trumpism. That's in the movie a little bit, too. CNN helped fund it, after all. I think there's a lot more to Ardern and what she represents, but if that's the price of getting this wonderful movie in front of audiences then that's ok. 

As I was watching it with a small audience of Kiwi expats in the east village, I kept thinking about Star Trek. It wasn't just the peculiar architecture of the New Zealand parliament. It was the Star Trek idea of a united earth. That future seems further and further away in our nativist present, but if we ever get there, rational, empathetic figures like Ardern will make good leaders.

A lot going on in this doc, maybe too much. As a piece of New York City and rock history it's pretty great. Bruce and Bon Jovi and Patti Smith sit down and reminisce. So do Simon and Garfunkel. Separately.

As a character study of a guy who loves music and musicians, and can't let go of the past, it's all right. And as a business story about the corporatization of rock, it's pretty thin. That frustrates me because that's maybe the most interesting angle.

I didn't the see the play on Broadway, can't afford to, but can applaud its ideas about speaking truth to power and its experiment of trying to broaden its audience. 

CNN tried something new. It took a provocative stand. "All the reasonable people took a plane to Europe and left us behind." But this was not great television. Full of pauses and dead space, faces in shadow or shot from a block away. It's an alright proof of concept.

Lipsynching a pop song about lady wood with another woman's fingers in your mouth looks awkward but, ittedly, kinda fun.

Imaginatively expands the lore, and the animation allows for wide-screen spectacle that few live action movies could afford. The franchise, which looked dead for a while, is in good hands.

Best Picture material.

I had the read the novella a couple years ago but it didn't affect me as much. Something about the bodies ' movement, and the music, and the old mortician's soulful face, and Luke's broom of a mustache gave the story scale and brought it all together.

Maybe the best thing about the script is how funny it is. They ask the drunk girl - a fantastic character actor turn, by the way - if she has a concealed carry permit. She thinks they're asking about concealer. 

As good as those character moments are, the story doesn't generate a lot of heat.

When I read the premise a few months ago, I was like, why did it take 50 years for somebody to come up with this? I'm happy to say they pretty much deliver. 

Shudder's strategy of giving its movies a short theatrical run is a good one. The movies have a chance to prove themselves even if their main value isn't from the box office. The flip side is, if they don't put it in cinemas maybe it's not very good.

Wenders finds a fascinating way to make history relevant. The way it's cut, his gaze in 2025 is looking directly at events in 1945 in the same space.

This review may contain spoilers.

At the heart of the movie is an insight that is no less profound for being simple. It's that at their core, every person has a ion. They can change their look, their attitude, their relationships, the place they live, whatever, but they can't change their ion.

 The characters each have a ion; for a killer, it's a particular soccer team; for the hero, it's writing, a process of understanding mysteries and putting memories in sequence; for the girl, it's the hero; for a key character whose history is not filled in until the final minutes, it's vengeance for his wife's murder. That one insight solves the mystery and allows the story to fit together like a multi-dimensional puzzle.

More a collection of cool moments strung together like Christmas lights than a satisfying whole. But what moments.

My two favorites are a hilarious fight where Eve has to set off grenades and shield herself from them in the same fluid motion. Another is a remote control used as a weapon. The impact changes channels to Airplane! and to Steamboat Bill Jr. The filmmakers expressing their own fandom.

A finale with duelling flamethrowers would make Rick Dalton jealous.

This review may contain spoilers.

This is a much stronger and better movie than I ed. It's cold and vicious and the handheld shooting style by the guy who shot Safe and Wanted Dead or Alive makes this world tangible and real. It's a small cheap movie that feels big. The cops are as disposable as the crooks and the twist is a doozy. 

There's a small nod to the French Connection when they rip apart an old car that made me chuckle. 

Carnahan has had some duds lately but I'm looking forward to his Netflix movie The RIP in January. Damon, Affleck, Scott Adkins. Sweet.

I tried to watch it on its own but found the movie schematic and writerly and not even a little bit funny. This goes here. That goes there. Writer's block is about the most uncinematic subject imaginable. 

The great Frederick Wiseman shows up in the last scene, offering Yoda wisdom.

Another Donnie Yen movie whose nationalism and xenophobia are wholly redeemed by the quality of its fight scenes. The final showdown has Yen taking on an entire Japanese battalion, before facing off with its general; it's well-shot, visceral and a few of the stunts look like they hurt.

Fascinating glimpse into a world completely alien to mine, but as a film it felt a little rushed. That leads to missed opportunities. A young man with long hair comes up and hugs the woman pastor and thanks her for her work. Why not interview him? He's the counterpoint. 

The crux of the doc is that the Southern Baptists are gradually making themselves irrelevant by refusing to modernize, which sounds alright, really.

It's a historical curio, coming roughly halfway between Serpico and other Lumet movies and Woo's A Better Tomorrow, or Lam's City on Fire and their ilk. It's less stylized than those, more grounded in street life and more paranoid. A short car chase is very much indebted to American movies.

The hero's name is Ah Chiu, which sounds a little funny the first few times. If there were a Zucker parody of such movies, that's a name they'd go with. 

It's worth seeking out the blu ray with its informative booklet. It explains, for example, how none of Cheung's later movies were a fit for his sensibilities. This film was more or less remade in 1994 as To Live and Die in Tsimshatsui.

It brings back memories of watching it ad nauseam on HBO, reading Famous Monsters of Filmland and Fangoria, and only slowly realizing around 1982 that other people were into this stuff, too. 

For a cheap creature feature, the practical effects still look great. Even now, anyone talking about the best werewolf movies ever would quickly gravitate to their early 80s heyday. 

"Not all of us got enough money for a Mazda, some of us have to work for a living," is some peculiar product placement.

Inessential making-of.

Inspiring. Its story of asserting political power to defend civil rights in 1988 couldn't be more relevant in 2025. 

The movie has such a dynamic soundscape, I'm curious how deaf viewers experience it.

It's got this loose carefree vibe, like it's summer and you're young and you're just fucking around. Only young people could've made this.

The drawings themselves have those sketchy lined faces like in a Jeff Lemire comic. Their incompleteness is part of the character.

Beautiful cinematography like in ad campaigns, infrared makes the sky black in some shots, but what does it add up to? I love the director's earlier work. This one didn't do it for me. 

It's one of those movies where you take from it what you bring to it. What I took was a feeling of time ing or maybe time being wasted, that the world around us requires our attention. Maybe that's banal.

Five times more engaging than Tar, at one-fifth the length.

Acidic short film gets a lot of cringe humor out of the clash of liberal ideals with commercial imperatives.

Creepy non-narrative short effectively conveys a feeling of living in a surveillance state.

Amazing short film about finding your identity in high school. The way they keep the protagonist at the edge of the frame replaces pages of exposition. Just superb filmmaking.

Tony Jaa is a goddamn freight train in this movie, crossing the width of the frame in the air to land a knee on somebody's jaw, at one point with both legs on fire. In some shots his ts actually move in a different direction than the rest of his body. He may be spinning north but the elbow arrives from the east.

In retrospect, the Thai action wave crested quickly, lasting not even a decade, but when it was good it was fire.

I'm really souring on 35mm after several bad experiences. This whole movie looked coffee colored, the reds, the yellows, it was all coffee.

Smart, creative people can synthesize the stuff around them into something fresh, and that's where good pop culture comes from. Reubens took ideas from Fellini and Warhol.

The insight that he loved animals cracks the character for me, makes him relatable and irable. The doc is forthright and self-aware and playful in the right ways.

This review may contain spoilers.

Fucking superb moviemaking. It reminds me of The Babadook, the way it first makes you care about the characters before it fills your head with grotesque images and even more macabre ideas. 

Two movies in, I feel like we're gonna be talking about these guys twenty years from now. And I don't think that's true for many current in-vogue filmmakers.

If it's not a five-star movie it's because it flirts with supernatural elements towards the end in a way that has the horror purist in me go, pick your damn lane.

Its criticism of rich world priorities is teasing rather than harsh, and the moviemakers cheat a little by making both of their rich-world babies urban and both of the poor ones rural. It's similar to The Gods Must Be Crazy, or to Koyaanisqatsi and its sequels, which poked fun at rich, hectic urban centers while also recognizing their beauty.

I enjoyed it a lot better than I thought I would. Not just the fantasy of intergalactic friendship, but also the one about a resourceful, benevolent government that offers a social safety net and access to affordable education. Those Disney imagineers are onto something!

This review may contain spoilers.

The DVD box, to its credit, doesn't give away the show's surprises. What's kind of awesome, if you're not expecting it, is that suddenly the Sesame Street muppets show up and make friends with the Muppet Show muppets. The Swedish Chef spots Big Bird and sees a golden opportunity for a grand Christmas meal. He starts salting the bird before he/she/it charms him and convinces him to make a vegetarian meal.

I love the small, arch ways the movie breaks the fourth wall: when Amy Adams says it will be a short movie if the Muppets don't get together; when Segel calls for a montage to get things moving, and we get a montage; when extras collapse from exhaustion after a massive production number. No joke overstays its welcome. A fictitious TV show in which teachers are put in a stockade and kids punch them, Punch Teacher, appears just long enough to , then it's on to the next thing.

Best of all is traveling by map. Traveling by map is what characters do in movies when they have a long distance to go and it would be boring to show the journey. A map appears, and a thick line connects one location to another. Indiana Jones travels by map, he just never calls it that. Brilliant.

• The Bride
• Detention
• The Sadness
• Incantation
• Soul
• The Heirloom
• The Tag-Along
• The Tag-Along 2
• The Tag-Along: Devil Fish
• Silk

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

• Infinity According to Florian
• Stop-Zemlia
• Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
• The Color of Pomegranates
• Earth
• Defying Everybody
• The White Bird Marked with Black
• A Story of the Forest: Mavka
• A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa
• Homeward

...plus 51 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Arna's Children
• Murderball
• Good Night, and Good Luck.
• North Country
• Syriana
• American Gun
• The World According to Sesame Street
• An Inconvenient Truth
• Fast Food Nation
• Angels in the Dust

...plus 131 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Unknown Soldier
• The Road of War
• Ryhmy ja Romppainen
• From the Dictated Border to the Svir River
• Jees ja just
• Aseveljeyden sankarit
• Kirkastettu sydän
• A Day Will Dawn
• The Unknown Soldier
• Rintamalotta

...plus 152 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Steel Dawn
• 1990: The Bronx Warriors
• Escape from the Bronx
• Warlords of the 21st Century
• 2019: After the Fall of New York
• Warriors of the Year 2072
• Warriors of the Apocalypse
• Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn
• A Man Called Rage
• Equalizer 2000

...plus 48 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Satantango
• Antichrist
• mother!
• Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
• Werckmeister Harmonies
• Hard to Be a God
• The Turin Horse
• An Elephant Sitting Still
• Come and See
• Damnation

...plus 990 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The Darkside
• The Cars That Ate Paris
• The Devil's Playground
• The Tunnel
• Talk to Me
• Celia
• Ghosts... of the Civil Dead
• The Babadook
• Late Night with the Devil
• 100 Bloody Acres

...plus 123 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Purple Noon
• Underworld U.S.A.
• Salvatore Giuliano
• Cape Fear
• Contempt
• The Killers
• Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
• The Chase
• Point Blank
• Targets

...plus 71 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Ashes and Diamonds
• Blind Chance
• Clergy
• Cold War
• Corpus Christi
• Day of the Wacko
• Disco Polo
• The Double Life of Véronique
• Europa Europa
• Gods

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

• Age of Consent
• Ned Kelly
• The Naked Bunyip
• Wake in Fright
• Stork
• Walkabout
• The Adventures of Barry McKenzie
• Alvin Purple
• Libido
• Barry McKenzie Holds His Own

...plus 46 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Little Thing
• White Lily
• A Date in 2025
• Iteration 1
• Orbit Ever After
• Good Business
• The Candidate
• The Black Hole
• Wire Cutters
• Tears of Steel

...plus 54 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The House by the Lake
• Terror Train
• Siege
• Videodrome
• My Bloody Valentine
• Deadly Harvest
• Happy Birthday to Me
• Black Christmas
• Highpoint
• Cannibal Girls

...plus 57 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Waltz with Bashir
2. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
3. Foxtrot
4. The Band's Visit
5. Paradise Now
6. Zero Motivation
7. In Between
8. Seret Efes
9. Legend of Destruction
10. Late Marriage

...plus 540 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Portrait of God
• Other Side of the Box
• O.I.
• Fragile.com
• Standing Woman
• My House
• Box Fort
• Audio Guide
• This Must Be The Place
• Don't Look Away

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

• Little Thing
• White Lily
• A Date in 2025
• Iteration 1
• Orbit Ever After
• Good Business
• The Candidate
• The Black Hole
• Wire Cutters
• Tears of Steel

...plus 54 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Age of Consent
• Ned Kelly
• The Naked Bunyip
• Wake in Fright
• Stork
• Walkabout
• The Adventures of Barry McKenzie
• Alvin Purple
• Libido
• Barry McKenzie Holds His Own

...plus 46 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Belongings
• Splendour
• Dagger
• Ensouled
• Faith
• Dovecotes of Kyiv
• Aria
• Jackals & Fireflies
• Behold
• The Hiker

...plus 1188 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Gone in 60 Seconds
• Vanishing Point
• Mad Max 2
• Dirty Mary Crazy Larry
• Drive
• Smokey and the Bandit
• The Gauntlet
• Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
• The Chase
• The Italian Job

...plus 110 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• As Above, So Below
• Creep
• Creep 2
• Quarantine
• Grave Encounters
• The Blair Witch Project
• Cannibal Holocaust
• The Last Exorcism
• Unfriended
• Hell House LLC

...plus 117 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Fauve
• Mouse
• Caroline
• Red Hot Riding Hood
• The Phone Call
• The Strange Thing About the Johnsons
• Two Cars, One Night
• Peel
• The Perfect Human
• The Great Train Robbery

...plus 532 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Scenes from the Suburbs
• Generation
• Joy Street
• Australian Psycho
• Stutterer
• HAIM / Valentine
• Possibly in Michigan
• Kitty
• Hotel Chevalier
• He Took His Skin Off for Me

...plus 287 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G
• From Dreams - Making "The Last of Us: Left Behind"
• Peep Show
• Don't Go Tellin' Your Momma
• Metamorphosis
• Firefighter
• Eager
• Só Sei Que Foi Assim
• Diamanda Galas: The Litanies of Satan
• Wow! A Talking Fish!

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