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Watched on Thursday June 5, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday June 4, 2025.

First hour is very much blowing it and, whether this is because parts were shot so long ago that COVID was a major factor or because of availability, the amount of scenes that are shot exclusively in close-ups and singles (more than usual!! I know the dialogue in all of these is probably shot to be modular for the edit to make information management easier) befits a movie needing to do less emotional work than this

Having said that, the submarine stunt is one of the most incredible events I’ve seen created in these (or generally??)

Watched on Monday May 26, 2025.

See it with a bud

Watched on Monday May 19, 2025.

Probably more interesting as a set of filmmaking decisions — to make something that looks like this, with this focus on federal surveillance, with multiple scenes of what the 21st century would call “enhanced interrogations” in the midst of the Bin Laden manhunt — than as a movie

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

The highs of this are incredible, but Smith’s charisma only really carries the public life sections while any scene away from the spotlight feels like he’s either searching or, worse, not searching. Although this would break almost any biopic (isn’t the reason we watch about these in-between moments, to get a little closer to the person behind the persona, to see a little bit more of the well from which we drink?), Mann and Smith do step up to the spectacle so well.

It doesn’t help too that Mario Van Peebles’s Malcolm X is probably the film’s worst performance. The script clearly needs that to serve A) as a proxy for Ali’s political thought before we get to the actual political action of the draft resistance and B) as a forerunner for the ambivalent relationship Ali will also have with the Nation of Islam.

Some of the images following the final fight are interesting in how they qualify the victorious tone (that music) of the finale. Just as the nominally triumphant end of The Insider (they did it! it made air!) is colored by the fact that it wasn’t reached for remotely noble reasons, I think Ali surrounded by American flags and massive portraits of Mobutu (which visually recall the Elijah Muhammad grand posters) after the leader has been made out to be as opportunistic and self-serving as any businessman is no less complicated as an ending — Ali’s palatable as long as his image is compatible with the existing powers that be — even if it’s much easier to read uncritically.

Manages to be An Important Movie without falling back on “now clap” moments. Even the arrival of the climax is overshadowed by the endless corporate-politics pussyfoot-ed tracks along the road that led there. Once everything is risk analyzed to death, the resulting decision can’t ever be said to be ~brave~. If Wallace was actually a bleeding heart, his later lines might read as celebratory seals on the result, but his 30 minutes before that are pretty spectacularly unheroic.

Honestly though, Mann’s fascination with cold-bloodedness objectified— that body-bag of a car trunk they try to stick Waingro in early in Heat is something I think about regularly — is maybe the film’s most gripping quality, whether it’s in literal objects (i.e. the red-screened message WE WILL KILL YOU. WE WILL KILL ALL OF YOU. SHUT THE FUCK UP.) or in the wide range of employees serving as soulless corporate instruments at CBS and B&W alike.

Watched on Sunday May 11, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday May 7, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 4, 2025.

This is what would happen if Don Draper was a detective instead… Will Graham figured out the carousel

Watched on Friday May 2, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday April 30, 2025.

Watched on Saturday April 26, 2025.

Watched on Monday April 21, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday April 1, 2025.

Watched on Saturday March 29, 2025.

Manages to sometimes achieve this anyway with a bunch of quicker sequences that are stylistic digressions or vignette-y gags, but the Tunes always work better for me in short-form rather than long

Also — and this may have more to do with seeing it contemporarily rather than 70 years after the fact — weird to see the reference points be part of living culture instead of ones old enough to read as generic (the invasion narrative could be a zillion different things, but the explicit Kaufman Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Jurassic Park nods still feel alive). I think of Looney Tunes almost as narrations of narrative History rather than something that’s aware of its peers or older siblings.

Watched on Friday March 21, 2025.

Wild at Heart:Sirk::Blue Velvet:Minnelli

Watched on Sunday March 16, 2025.

Lesser Bong sure, but he basically made a good, less grating, more ideologically coherent, though still overlong Gilliam movie. Pattinson great, Ackie fun as well — the pair definitely make the hour post-multiples-discovery an easier time than it should be on paper.

I know it’s literally Eraserhead, but I did make this more normal in my memory of it

Still great obviously…still very transparent while being contradictorily oblique too

Can’t decide if this lasting proves to me that something like Skinamarink will survive past the decade or if Eraserhead is bound to be every generation’s Eraserhead

[reversing my Third Man review] It’s so unconscious about depicting pity

Watched on Friday February 28, 2025.

This will be a quiet drama for 15 minutes and then pitch back up into “movie at the end of The Player” (Habeas Corpus?) territory. Hollywood is so back lmao. Cardinal Benítez never came to meet everybody before because traffic was a bitch.

The beginning is so indecisively overlong, then the middle being exactly what you expect the movie to be, leaving only a little space for a series of endings — each of which is actually maybe the most important work that the movie is doing — that feel like multiple endings because of the imbalance elsewhere

Love to hear Lynch talk and be this open about what has excited him, disappointed him, upset him, etc., but the filmmaking often feels like active interference over him rather than being a way of delivering him to us.

Really wish people — especially if they’re not engaging with his work for the first time — would treat Lynch like he’s just another filmmaker going about his work rather than like he’s Kal-El crashing into picket-fence America only his otherworldly superpower is being a ^;*~{weird filmmaker}~*;^. I don’t really know of a Lynch movie that doesn’t feel like it’s speaking to things that implicate myself or people I know/knew or something else familiar.

Watched on Monday February 24, 2025.

Watched on Friday February 21, 2025.

Watched on Friday February 7, 2025.

Praise for Culkin (who’s ~~only~~ doing a more concentrated version of his great post-not-picked stretch on Succession) has overshadowed that Eisenberg’s acting here is very strong. And honestly the movie is more dependent on the strength of the latter(?)

At times the film feels like it could be summed up in just two or three of its scenes, but then I was surprised by the tour guide’s goodbye, in which he extensively thanks Culkin for his — as much of an event as Culkin had made it, he reacts as if he hardly re the episode he’s being thanked for — and then Eisenberg being met with a polite “Thanks, Dave.” Politeness having begotten more politeness and only that.

Very good at laying out the stakeholders for any event, enough so that it’s annoying when the film’s climax plays only marginally more interesting than a crosscut of 😎😡😎😡😎😡😎

Still not fully in love with it, but I can feel it growing on me. I like that it’s not a film whose inciting incident is merely a discovery; the fallout of the first crash doesn’t introduce a new possibility to the characters as much as it verifies (while perhaps reorienting) the feelings that we glimpse in the first few scenes.

The utility of the car as medium here is not limited to its status-cum-sex-cum-death connotation. The matter of a crash is synonymous for a car with some deal of ruin. And the conservative narrative of sex (which, for many, is a baseline) is filled with metaphors of ruin: abstinence is encouraged because otherwise one might wear oneself (more scoldingly, herself) out before marriage, masturbate and you’ll go blind eventually, the entire notion that a person can become “damaged goods.” I think even progressive narratives have become shaped by the notion of ruin; the progressive notion of sex has little positive content to offer that isn’t presumed, only a kind of crash avoidance in clarifications of consent (though, to be clear, the naming of sexual trauma is obviously important).

There are highlight scenes that are perhaps better viewed through other/additional lenses (i.e. the James Dean re-enactment), but in the aftermath of the opening crash, the characters are forced to make it a site of meaning (which can then be variously be revisited, ironized, or made into an object of play) rather than one of ruin — the latter is only briefly entertained as a possibility with Hunter’s initial incredulity over Spader’s willingness to drive again.

Having said this, I wouldn’t call the film celebratory. There’s some class stuff that I want to unpack eventually, though I’m still gathering my thoughts gradually across viewings.

Watched on Saturday February 1, 2025.

For all the noise about this being among the great tear-jerkers — the best moments of which come at Ouspenskaya’s home, whereas Dunne’s performance gives the last act a credibility that I’m not sure it wholly deserves — I find it amusing the lengths this goes through to emphasize at the beginning that Boyer is absolutely ran through

Watched on Wednesday January 29, 2025.

Watched on Monday January 27, 2025.

Watched on Sunday January 26, 2025.

Watched on Sunday January 26, 2025.

Not usually a big “movie ending” person, but I feel like it’s doing some heavy-lifting here in keeping this from being memorable just for the tone(s)

A surprisingly functional double feature with Wanda (1970) (which, at Anthology, kicked off their “Wandering Women” series)

Watched on Friday January 24, 2025.

Eggers’ camera style feels more or less virtual at this point, where the actors stand in as points of comparison and symbolic interaction more than having a real physical presence within a space. In that sense, the story of Nosferatu should be a more apt match than The Northman, but the final product results in the same indifferent “yep, they did that” as his previous effort. Some of this is because of LRD’s disastrous performance. Even in scenes where she’s not wildly writhing (which, along with her overabundant eye rolls, might have been fun in a differently toned film), her urge to reach for such a provocatively loud performance of hysterics contrasted with — get this — giving absolutely nothing, creates an emotional vacancy in a part that needs an actor to give a depth to an abstractly shallow role. Hoult is doing better work, except he’s first treated as a pawn until he disappears, then he’s got little space to recover much on the film’s behalf by the time he’s returned. Ultimately though, there’s a lot that falls on Eggers. The images his camera lands on are rarely doing much work to help position the performances of his actors. There are many scenes where the camera pans to a character and expectantly waits for them to make the scene single-handedly.

Once I grew bored of this, instead of counting the minutes to the end, I started to think about what Eggers truly wants to show us. The one interest that always seems to shine through is his interest in esoteric rituals/routines lost to the past (along with the reactions from unprepared witnesses to these events). One might think that the past two films — with their greater scope and greater distance traveled — would take advantage of this, but they’ve instead remained focused on characters about whom the scripts have little to say. That or plotting that’s only moving the football down the field. Imagine transferring Demme’s ability to get sidetracked in Something Wild or Melvin and Howard into these distant reaches into the grimy past Eggers tends to explore, letting the postcard humanism of it be supplanted by the bewilderment of strange encounters.

Watched on Tuesday January 21, 2025.

Watched on Sunday January 19, 2025.

Watched on Saturday January 18, 2025.

Watched on Thursday January 16, 2025.

1. Hard Truths
2. Trap
3. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
4. I Saw the TV Glow
5. The Room Next Door
6. Friendship
7. All We Imagine as Light
8. Queer
9. Dune: Part Two
10. Juror #2

1. Heat
2. Miami Vice
3. Manhunter
4. Collateral
5. Thief
6. Ferrari
7. The Insider
8. The Keep
9. Blackhat
10. Ali

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

1. Ocean's Eleven
2. sex, lies, and videotape
3. Logan Lucky
4. Solaris
5. Out of Sight
6. Erin Brockovich
7. The Limey
8. Schizopolis
9. Black Bag
10. High Flying Bird

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

1. Parasite
2. The Host
3. Memories of Murder
4. Okja
5. Snowpiercer
6. Mother
7. Mickey 17
8. Barking Dogs Never Bite

One of a handful of directors where I just stare at the list, looking at its end and thinking “fuuuuck, that’s in the bottom half?”

1. Boogie Nights
2. Licorice Pizza
3. The Master
4. Phantom Thread
5. Punch-Drunk Love
6. Inherent Vice
7. Hard Eight
8. There Will Be Blood
9. Magnolia

Favorite new-to-me watch from each month of 2024

• The Holdovers

  January

• The Talented Mr. Ripley

  February

• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

  March

• Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

  April

• Evil Does Not Exist

  May

• Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

  June

• What a Way to Go!

  July

• Trap

  August

• The Deer Hunter

  September

• The Blair Witch Project

  October

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

No clue when I’ll see the ones that don’t really have defenders or Glass (which I’m not looking forward to after being frustrated by Split)

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

Giving up on fully ranked year lists because things always start to feel ridiculous because A) there ends up being 40+ movies on the list, which is at least 30% things I saw and didn't really think about much past its release, so a ranking feels weird with those B) enough time has ed that I start to question enough of the list that the whole exercise feels defeating C) if I end up watching something in 2024, it will probably feel like homework to be like "mmmmm, yes, I think this lands probably around 22nd on my 2021 list 😎." Also, idk, positivity!

1. Licorice Pizza
2. Memoria
3. Drive My Car
4. The Matrix Resurrections
5. West Side Story
6. The Worst Person in the World
7. Dune
8. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
9. Petite Maman
10. The Tragedy of Macbeth

still waiting on a few (mostly La Chimera), but this feels set otherwise

1. Evil Does Not Exist
2. Asteroid City
3. Killers of the Flower Moon
4. Priscilla
5. Fallen Leaves
6. Ferrari
7. Maestro
8. Oppenheimer
9. Afire
10. Knock at the Cabin

1. The Irishman
2. Parasite
3. Uncut Gems
4. Midsommar
5. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
6. Little Women
7. Knives Out
8. Us
9. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
10. Monos

Started making on April 8th, finished April 11th

1. After Hours
2. The Red Shoes
3. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
4. Bonnie and Clyde
5. Malcolm X
6. Only Angels Have Wings
7. The Third Man
8. Céline and Julie Go Boating
9. The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek
10. Inland Empire

...plus 61 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

They don't need to be fun, they just need to play with (in this case, not a synonym for "mess with") the audience. Rear Window is close, as is Knock at the Cabin, but I don't think either is enough of a yo-yo.

• The Thing
• The Handmaiden
• There's Always Tomorrow
• Total Recall
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Favorite new-to-me watch from each month of 2023

• Saint Omer

  January

• Wild Strawberries

  February

• Chocolat

  March

• The Doom Generation

  April

• Céline and Julie Go Boating

  May

• The Green Ray

  June

• The Magnificent Ambersons

  July

• Miami Vice

  August

• Lola Montès

  September

• Killers of the Flower Moon

  October

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

1. Crimes of the Future
2. The Fabelmans
3. TÁR
4. Nope
5. Decision to Leave
6. Showing Up
7. Saint Omer
8. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
9. The Woman King
10. Three Thousand Years of Longing