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4K night

Steph:

Davis excels at portraying her dual role; I found her character witty and resourceful and entertaining to watch destroy shit, and I liked Jackson too, he was hilarious and endearing, a highlight of the film for me, not to mention that little girl almost making me sob in all her scenes, and while a ton of implausible plot points showed up, including the fact that none of the good guys seemed human—they couldn’t die, not after flying through car windows, being held underwater, shot, knifed in the gut—I didn’t mind because it all felt like a fantasy, and the final explosions were a welcome sendoff to some of the villains, but I wanted to know more, in general, about the the bad guys so that I could feel less ambivalent about their fate and more invested in the trajectory of the good guys, but I had fun.
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Josh:

Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson are both the kind of actors who enliven anything they’re in, and I can’t imagine this movie would be anything more than mindless, crudely directed fun without them, but here they are, making us care about Charly and Mitch, and Shane Black’s script has its moments, but Harlin definitely wasn’t a good choice for its more meta aspects, which he plays completely straight (a better director might have made Mitch’s near-constant state of humiliation seem more reflexive and less cruel, but I guess it’s feminist, because Charly really seems to be living her best life outside of the movie’s idealized domesticity, and it gets kind of sloppy toward the end, but it’s still a lot of fun. 
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Secret Movie Club—Josh’s pick

Josh:

I was kind of on the fence for a lot of this, with its very confident direction and maybe slightly less confident screenwriting, with a really strong, endearing lead performance from Melissa Barrera, and I guess maybe I expected Lindy to play up the horror elements more, or to create more ambiguity about Monster’s existence, but I think she wraps it up just perfectly, almost Immaculate-esque in the stunning, satisfying way the work reveals itself in its final moments, so you know, brava. 
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Steph:

Since I love all kinds of crazy shit, I loved this film—ridiculous, entertaining, ambitious, and inspired, and the lead performance completely blew me away, Melissa Barrera just fully committed to this over-the-top character who’s learning to overcome her own victimhood and embrace her rage, and isn’t Jacob that one dude in your class who won’t shut the fuck up, but what I loved most was the fucking musical within this already silly and dramatic Beauty and the Beast homage, like what, and I won’t pretend the final scene with the big song didn’t make me feel exhilarated, chills, all of it, because this film was coked up from the beginning (the crying while pie eating), and the ending worked, that shot of the audience, jaws dropped in astonishment, yes!
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Steph ambushed Josh 

Steph:

Whatever I just watched kept me engaged and freaked out, completely on edge, and worried for humanity, and there were many scenes that helped create that atmosphere, the only light in darkness burning from a lit cigarette, the way the camera slowly moved over the carpet from blood spatter to blood spatter, and the eeriness of the rundown drive-in juxtaposed with the eagerness of the moviegoers kept the film charged heading into the finale, and I almost always like when films use films within films, and the ending, with the real Byron and the movie Byron moving simultaneously (and threateningly) toward Bobby was one of the coolest film moments I’ve experienced in awhile, so kudos to Bogdanovich in 1968.
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Josh:

We showed this movie back at Bard, when I co-ran the film committee, and it looks a little better to me now—I’m more patient, and maybe have a better handle on the movie’s bleak-ass worldview these days, and I like the way it juxtaposes the more subtle and fantastic, formally composed, heavily scored spookiness of Orlok’s time with Bobby Thompson’s nerve-jangling chaotic madness, and I ire the way Bogdanovich gradually builds toward that chaos, and then he finally crosses those beams, and queasy tension gives way to revulsion and a more realistic, senseless horror, and Karloff is great, of course, and the movie gives him little moments, like scaring himself in the mirror and mistaking the fleeing crowd’s panic for a reaction to his work, and then he has that indelible moment when he… well, you know, and so while I still think it drags a bit, sorry, the climax retains its dramatic power, especially in our current gun-mad, toxic cultural moment. 
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RIP Val Kilmer

Josh:

Sometimes you watch these movies you loved in your youth, and you realize they weren’t as good as you once thought, and Real Genius has its pacing issues, sure, and maybe one too many training montages set to a disappointingly generic ‘80s synth score, and I can’t believe all those nerds would laugh at Kent’s cruel prank, but RG is prescient and on the side of the angels when it comes to what happens when you have “science but no philosophy,” it’s got a great cast, including Michelle Meyrink as Jordan, the type of fun and specific girl character who was far from a given in this type of movie, but mainly, it’s got Kilmer, beautiful Val, in only his second feature, after Top Secret!, and his seemingly effortless charisma and wit easily carry this movie, too, and he gleefully embodies the film’s celebration of the idea that being smart could be cool and fun and sexy, and even a dork like Mitch could find his people, and maybe it was a bit of a fantasy, but it was what young Josh needed to hear back then, and dammit, maybe it still is, in these oh so horrifically stupid times. 
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Steph:

What a fun film from my youth, and Kilmer always made me laugh in this and still does—I him from roles like Top Gun, but he gets to be funny here—and even though the third act is entirely implausible, its level of ridiculousness and humor saved it for me, and of course it has its little sexist moments and only one brainy woman in their group among the several random women who existed for sex, I guess, but I like the weirdness of this, the premise and existence of Kent, and some of the one-liners from even the jerks in the cast, and it doesn’t take itself all that seriously, which was exactly the kind of movie I needed tonight.
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Me, before watching X: I wonder if Ti West has read Sontag and Linda Williams on the connection between horror and pornography

Me, after watching X: I wonder if Ti West knows how to read

Secret Movie Club: Steph’s pick

Steph:

It was so derivative that it got boring after a while because we already know the formula and can easily anticipate all the plot points, and even though there were some good and gory kill scenes and I enjoyed a couple of the intentionally funny moments, I just didn’t care about anything happening, not the fake first kiss or the accompanying fallout, but I’m sure I would’ve had a different experience watching this in a crowded theater on opening night or something—I’m not saying it isn’t fun—I just don’t think it’s enough anymore to take a script from any 80s slasher film, throw in a carousel and create some clichéd meet-cute involving coffee and blood, and then try to find the film’s originality within a silly holiday romance plot, but like I said about the kill scenes: A+.
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Josh:

Ya know, people complain a lot about elevated horror, and “it’s really about grief” or whatever, but I don’t even know what to make of this, it’s so flimsy and uninvolving, with such incredibly thin characterizations, with some original Nickelodeon sitcom, pitched to the back row acting, I mean, I guess Olivia Holt is okay; I liked her in Totally Killer, but she has even less to play here (her heartfelt story about her mom and dad and how oh sorry I dozed off (not literally, Steph!)) and I mean, don’t real humans have more interesting and detailed backstories, and Mason Gooding mainly comes off as smarmy, and it’s garish and loud and has “kills” but also maybe the worst, least frightening horror movie villain in history, and I didn’t find it funny, let alone scary or romantic, and it’s an affront to His Girl Friday, and Michaela Watkins deserves better, but the mask was kinda creepy and neat. 
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Family Movie Club

Josh:

I reading (I think) Georgia Brown in the Voice on Goodfellas, and she described it as a “hot movie,” and that’s certainly true of Taxi Driver, as well, because this might sound like a joke, linguistically, but what I ed best about this movie was its vividness, and its garishness, and that comes through in all the movie’s simmering rage and resentment, which feel viscerally raw and genuine, despite how impeccably crafted the movie is, by Scorsese and a crew at the top of their game, with its authentic NYC texture (I don’t know that I’ve seen so many seemingly candid crowd shots in another major narrative film, and I loved all of it, this (again) vivid depiction of the city from before I could it), and Herrmann’s almost gratingly insinuous score, and Schrader’s bleak, blunt script, and it feels like young Scorsese had nothing to prove, which is kind of thrilling in a film this accomplished. 
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Steph:

It’s a classic for a reason, and there’s a lot to love here: DeNiro is spectacular, just unhinged enough to still feel like a real person, and almost tender in the beginning, seemingly harmless, until the diary entry voiceover and the lightweight stalker behavior create tension, with the score contributing significantly to the atmosphere, over the top, loud, with gongs crashing during the most mundane moments, and politically, the film is dark, hopeless in a way, because this Travis from 50 years ago is most definitely giving incel straight outta MAGA vibes, and the Iris situation goes from icky to way too easily resolved, with Travis, at best, thinking of her as a fellow lonely misanthrope who needs saving, or, at worst, she’s merely a plot point that serves to push forward his redemption arc, but I kind of don’t care because the film is just grimy and garbage filled and NYC and I miss it.
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Secret Movie Club: Steph’s pick

Steph:

Once it got moving in the second act, I got invested, not just in the characters (who I didn’t know anything about but still rooted for) but also in the structure of the narrative, or at least in the puzzle of it all, but the film felt convoluted, overly stuffed, without much driving it forward aside from the lake loop, and even that got repetitive and boring (and I like horror/sci-fi), but the film created a dreary atmosphere, rainy and muddy and mysterious, that I thought worked well, matched the mood and tragedy of the story, so while I didn’t love this, I can see why someone might find it challenging and poignant, especially in its portrayal of complicated family dynamics.
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Josh:

Dylan O’Brien and the reliably excellent Eliza Scanlen, and the cast, generally, do an excellent job of bringing some gravitas to this movie, and I think the filmmakers are resourceful, even inventive, in telling a story like this on a low budget, but it takes a loooooong time to get going, and it’s so convoluted for so long, despite not all that much happening, that I sort of lost interest in trying to figure out the plot or the point, and if you like this more than I did, fine, because if you’re able to find a way into this on an emotional level, I’m sure it’s a rewarding watch, and maybe my perennial exhaustion (the world is crumbling around us, and work has been the worst lately) is partly to blame, but I just couldn’t. 
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Quarantine Movie Binge—Sports Movies

Josh:

This was such a childhood favorite of mine, I can’t tell you, and probably had an impact on my love of baseball, my respect for girl athletes, my worldview in general, for better or worse, and there’s so much that’s meanspirited in it (Tanner’s racism, the persistent homophobia) (very true to my own personal experience), and of course the film takes part in making fun of Engelberg for being fat, but what I like about that character is how defiant he is in just accepting and not apologizing for who he is, and of course he turns out to be one of the team’s best players, and the unspoken thing here is that no one wanted these kids in the league, not because they were bad players, but (and the lawsuit is mentioned but they don’t spell it out) because they were Black, Mexican, Jewish, fat, a girl, and a juvenile delinquent, and I love the use of Carmen, and the perfect ending—screw the damn Yankees of the world. 
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Steph:

I expected baseball and losing streaks and pissy coaches, and the film portrayed all of that, but I wasn’t expecting an exploration of toxic masculinity, which the two coaches exemplified with their battle to beat each other, all ego, while getting the kids mixed up in their mind games, so I welcomed seeing a vulnerable side to Buttermaker, especially after all his name calling and general emotional abuse of the players, and I’ll say that the fat jokes (eating a bucket of fried chicken, biting into a candy bar with the wrapper still on) were essentially the same fat jokes I hear in TV and film now (The Whale), so it’s amazing to see how far we’ve come in 50 years (LOL), but regardless, the film excelled at showing a group of misfits working together, and I liked how they did it, without clichés or sentimentality.
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Family Movie Club

Steph:

This was a funny and sweet coming-of-age film about going for it, and the performances killed, the songs were catchy and believable, and the film started to go deeper once the bandmates and the brothers connected over music, so this was another film about the importance of art in our lives, particularly during troubled times but also for love and celebration, and I think I needed that reminder, but I would’ve liked to have known more about Raphina—I liked her and wanted the whole well-developed character package for her, too, but other than that, the film made me feel happy and reflective.
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Josh:

This was so fun and sweet, and the songs are really good, and derivative (of Duran Duran, Hall and Oates, The Cure, et al) in a way that allows us to suspend disbelief that a couple of talented high schoolers wrote them, and the school stuff is appropriately terrifying, and I love Conor’s bold fit (haha) and its adaptability, and maybe one criticism could be that if they say they’re inviting a Black kid to the band so they’ll look cool, you really need to give Ngig a little more to do beyond making them look cool, but it’s fun and funny and poppy and silly romantic, and even in the end times, it made me feel hopeful, because I don’t like Phil Collins, and who tf knows these days, I might need Steph to be ready to escape to another country with me. 
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Documentary Night

Josh:

Well, it has been a long time and this movie’s not pretty, it’s kinda ramshackle, but it’s cleverly edited and still a very engaging and surprising doc, and of course, you look at Billy Mitchell (a terrific villain, and Gordon was lucky to find him) and you think of Musk faking his Diablo scores and Trump’s phony patriotism, and this very entertaining movie makes you see how profoundly pathetic they are, though my two favorite moments in the doc both involve Steve Wiebe’s shortcomings as a dad: his daughter nonchalantly suggesting of the Guinness Book, “Some people sorta… ruin their lives to get in it,” and when that motherfucker took his family to the beach hahaha
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Steph:

I’m not a big arcade game person, I mean maybe I’ve played Donkey Kong a couple of times, but I enjoyed this film anyway because it was like the most high-school drama of all time, the world record holder unwilling to defend his title in person while simultaneously spending the entire documentary raging against people, like himself, who send in tapes of their supposed record-breaking games, and it was fascinating to see this world of gaming and how seriously people take it (there are referees!) and how much of it played into the identities and egos of these guys, and yes, I definitely laughed (and cringed).
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Secret Movie Club—Josh’s pick

Steph:

“The days of you controlling me are over” is something I think many women right now would love to scream to anyone willing to listen, and I like that this film was all about that, consciousness and where it begins of course, but about agency and consent and
female rage, and the film’s strength is that it wants us on the side of Iris, with Josh behaving like a sociopath slash the next big MAGA podcaster (sorry, Josh), and I liked a lot what the film was toying with here, the questions it asked and its progressive ideas.
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Josh:

Slick, and well-cast (though I prefer my Lukas Gage roles a little peppier), and okay, I was going to write something about how it’s not as clever as it thinks it is (these arrogant movies, amirite??!) and ya know, it’s metaphorical anvil qualities, and they make Josh so despicable (which tracks) and Iris’s torment seems to go on forever, and her payback will never seem enough, but it moved, and there were some good sexbot jokes, and it really makes you think (not really) so I’m giving it a . 
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Magical Movie Mug

Josh:

Hadn’t seen this in a long time, and you know, you think of it as this aesthetically stunning movie, but then you’re watching it, it’s just breathtaking, like my own memories of it are “as though looking through a dusty windowpane,” and this has to be the most gorgeous film I’ve ever seen, and of course a lot of credit goes to Chris Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-Bing, but they didn’t design the sets, the costumes, the hair and makeup, or compose “Yumeji’s Theme,” or sing “Quizas, Quizas, Quizas,” and they didn’t star in it as the most sadly beautiful couple in film history, and so much of the film is gestural, is about slight changes in emotion over time, about slow realizations and immediate regrets, often captured without words, about all the beauty we aren’t even aware of, until Wong shows us that a cigarette butt, or a torn bulletin peeling off a wall, or a clump of mud stuffed into a hole is the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen, just ravishing, endlessly revelatory, and I’m glad Steph’s finally seen it. 
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Steph:

This gave me many feels: disorientation (with the nonlinear way the story was structured), goosebumps (because of the glorious score and how effectively it was used), and awe (at the use of color [red omg], mirrors, light, camerawork, the slowing and speeding up of certain moments, the rain and cigarettes and cigarette smoke), and I loved the story about whispering secrets, the subtlety of the small interactions between minor characters, and the trust the filmmaker put in the viewer, and the film reminded me of reading a poem—it washed over me in a similar way because every detail mattered, from the noodles to the glimmer of wedding rings, and that’s the way brilliant art always makes me feel.
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Steph ambushes Josh

Steph:

It’s easy to adore Elle Woods because she’s completely sincere in everything she says and does, the total opposite of the self-satisfied, aloof law students who shun her at first, and her earnestness is endearing, charming, and I’ll forever praise this film for interrogating stereotypes and for allowing a friendship to develop between Elle and Vivian, which proved to be more important than either of them fighting over some mediocre guy, and the film is fun, easily digestible, and unapologetic about celebrating smart women, so yeah!
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Josh:

I this being pretty fun, and it sure is that—fun and touching and generally as good-natured as a celebration of wealth and heteronormativity and white privilege could possibly be, and I’m only partly joking, but I was fully laughing and even getting choked up over these great performances (Witherspoon, of course, but also Selma Blair and Luke Wilson and Victor Garber, and Linda Cardellini’s perm and Jennifer Coolidge are hilarious) and the movie’s basic human decency— basic human decency?—and, despite its flaws, its undeniable cuteness. 
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It’s baseball season! LFGM!

Josh:

I mean, I’m not exactly struggling to find positive things to say about this crowd-pleaser—Snipes is totally charming, Sheen was reliable when he was cast in the right role, and it’s great to see both of them, young actors on the rise, egos not quite to the point yet where they overshadowed whatever character they were playing, and Dennis Haysbert survived this debacle and has had a fine career, and Uecker brings some comic energy, despite every other word he says being some kind of slur, and the baseball is kinda fun, in a cartoonish way—but the women, the poor women; there’s no reason for a movie to depict women in such degrading , not even in 1989—I mean, that’s the same year Heathers and Sex Lies and Videotape and The Fabulous Baker Boys came out, so I don’t know, what was my point again, that it’s fun?
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Steph:

Once you get past all the racism and sexism and sports movie clichés, it’s a fun baseball movie, with some witty one-liners (Are you saying Jesus Christ can’t hit a curveball?) that I chuckled out loud at a couple times (One hit? That’s all we got? One goddamn hit?), and even Charlie Sheen seemed normal-ish, but damn if the women didn’t make some poor life decisions, for no other reason than to give the boys something to either rebel against or fuck, and while I’ve told myself not to be so hard on problematic films from the 80s, here I am.
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Family Movie Club (week 1)

Miyazaki’s the most fun for me when he gets weird, and his swan song, his heron song has plenty of weird, wild stuff (that heron, the warawara, those hilarious ladies) and also some visceral, terrifying fire imagery and a lot of mean birds, and I’m not a superfan or anything, and I was hoping the dad would at least learn a lesson or something but this worked for me, and it hit that strange, disturbing, hilarious, moving sweet spot dude pretty much owns all to himself. 
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Steph:

Visually stunning and imaginative, this film is the definition of inventive, and I’ve always liked how animated films often use metaphor to illustrate underlying messages, with this film being no exception (the importance of creating a diversity of friendships, how to handle and channel grief), and it used the juxtaposed worlds of life and death, daydreams and nightmares, to unnerve the viewer (this film didn’t shy away from weirdness and frightening scenes), but I’ll say the pacing felt off (yes, I was tired), like it may have gone on a little longer than necessary, but honestly, who cares.
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Josh ambushed Steph

Steph:

This film wasn’t on my radar at all, and I told Josh I didn’t want to watch anything high brow or art house, so this struck a good balance, and Posey is always fun to watch, playing Mary perfectly unmoored, with no trajectory, and a social life that made her borderline miserable, but her intelligence and resourcefulness shone through, even when those around her didn’t believe in her capacity for ambition, and I’m always here for a film about a woman defining her life on her own (and one that makes the male characters sidekicks or love interests or peripheral in general), so I appreciated its feminist message and its focus, but the film didn’t handle race very well (the middle-eastern themed party), and that was an unfortunate stumble.
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Josh:

I can’t believe this thing is 30 years old, just a buzzy, silly, vibey, grainy, lower east side broke white girl figuring her shit out 1990s movie, centered on Posey, doing her best to share the spotlight with an appropriately diverse ing cast, even as she appropriates their various cultures but then you also have Liev Schreiber playing an English asshole named Nigel and attempted SA, and it certainly captures a kind of feckless youthful freedom, a carefree energy that young people living on their own and just getting by probably can’t afford anymore, so it’s not super funny, and Mary is practically Mr Bean with all the unnecessary scrapes she gets into, but this is another one that brings me back, and you know, they were trying. 
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Secret Movie Club—Steph’s pick

Josh:

I am sure there are movies out there that I could have stayed awake for, but they are a rare breed (I dozed off the first time I watched Through the Olive Trees, so I guess Babygirl is in good company), and it looked good, from what I saw, though—it seemed very slick, and I guess it was cool the way it started with something fake, and ended with something real, but I think the Squid Game score kinda took me out of it a little (too insistent on its importance), but who am I kidding here, maybe I’ll watch it again when I’m feeling less stressed and exhausted, so I’ll forgo a clock rating at this juncture. 

Steph:

Babygirl explores female desire and power imbalances and kink and how they all intertwine, and, as if that weren’t enough to please me, the film goes hard by throwing “Father Figure” in there in an entirely serious way (thank you!), and I’ve never seen Kidman in such a vulnerable role (that she absolutely killed), a beautiful performance (all raw and ugly-crying), not to mention the crackling chemistry she had with Dickinson, and I can’t think of anything I didn’t like about this, to be honest—loved the milk, loved the tie, loved the safe word.
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Secret Movie Club—Josh’s pick

Steph:

This didn’t grab me right away but what unraveled packed an emotional punch that surprised me—I can’t believe how much I went from disliking a major character to really wanting everything to work out for him—and my god, the daughter, just no, what an incredible jerk she was, ungrateful, mean, and completely self absorbed in typical teen fashion, and Watkins played Suze just at the edge of emotionally unstable, keeping it together enough to change Gage’s entire life trajectory and give her own kid a much-needed wake-up call, and I loved the perimenopause references and the film’s humor—without that, it could’ve been a depressing mess instead of the hopeful and resonant film it ended up becoming.
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Josh:

Before I say anything, if my phone autocorrects the title of this movie to “Size” (great title btw) one more time, this will be my last review, but anyway, I was in the mood for something well-observed and unsentimentally good-natured (like Diane), and I love to see a talented actor like Michaela Watkins get a nice lead role like this after decades of good work (like Mary Kay Place in Diane), and she’s great and the movie is nice (mostly), and that’s pretty much what I was looking for (though it’s not as good as Diane), though I wish Alan had been something slightly more than just a piece of shit because she really seemed to miss him, and I have to say a similar thing happened to me when I called my mom from Berkeley during my second quarter there, 60 years ago, and so it was hard for me to see Diane say “no” like that, and I don’t know the answer but I do wonder how my life might have been different if my mom had said “no” to me that day. 
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Bad Movie Night—Steph’s pick

Josh:

Ridiculous, and sporadic fun, but never when Kidman is on the screen, because they done her dirty writing her a role like this (humorless scold whose only thoughts are of what Cole might be thinking), AND introducing her to Tom Cruise (Claire and Cole’s real first scene together is a “meet disgusting”), and it’s a great cast, actors who could play these archetypes in their sleep (Reilly endearingly goofy, Rooker mean, Elwes a dick), though Duvall has a nice human moment or two, but it’s Cruise’s show, and this is one of his worst performances, all about looking like a badass, as opposed to playing a character, and you say Robert Towne wrote this, hmmm. 
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Steph:

Two words: Cole Trickle—the best film character name I’ve ever heard, and this film, while ridiculous, contains a brief monologue directed at a race car (amazing), two characters racing each other in wheelchairs through a hospital (what, just go with it), and most importantly, goddess Nicole Kidman screaming, “Let me out of the caaa Cole,” four times in her adorable Australian accent, and it’s pretty clear from this film from 1990 that she was destined for stardom and likely deserved to appear in this film’s epic freeze-frame ending, but I guess we can’t have everything.
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Steph:

I had high expectations for this and thought it was kind of a mess, to be honest, all over the place, with decisions like interrupting the most climactic song of the show fifteen times (whether you liked it or not, it was definitely A Choice), but it was ambitious, looked okay (although the colors were faded or something), and the two lead performances deserve all the buzz, but I could’ve done without Goldblum at all, which feels like such a travesty to say, but he came across as cheesy and too comedic for the tone of the film at that point, and, worst of all, I found my attention drifting at times, and I don’t know how you make an iconic musical like this feel boring, but I felt it, I’m sorry.
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Josh:

There’s certainly a lot to like here, and some stuff I love, like the show’s understanding of how fascism works, how easy it is to when they make it seem like you have no other options (but you do!), and a couple of the songs, and the actors did a good job, but it feels stretched out with too much fan service for me, a civilian, to really appreciate, like that Chenoweth/Menzel song, which I think only feels necessary if you’re one of those Wicked fans, and I love you, but come on this could have been one movie, or maybe two normal length movies. 
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Josh:

This is a disappointingly standard sports biopic for much of its running time, well shot (partly on location in Flint, Michigan) with good performances from Brian Tyree Henry and Ryan Destiny, and I guess I heard at some point that Barry Jenkins had written the script, but it still surprised me somehow when his credit came up at the end, because I appreciate that the movie diverges from standard sports uplift (hey there’s a training montage!) in the second half, realistically tracking Claressa Shields’ struggle to gain the recognition she earned in the Olympics, largely because she didn’t fit the racist, sexist mold of a star female athlete, but the movie just begins to feel repetitive once she’s out of the ring, with one setback after another, so it defies those narrative expectations while still hewing too closely to formula to ever really break through. 
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Steph:

This was filled to the brim with sports movie cliches, just an endless barrage, but I loved the way it looked, all that rundown Flint, Michigan atmosphere, and Brian Tyree Henry nailed it as Claressa’s boxing coach, carried the movie, though Ryan Destiny was also good, and who doesn’t begrudgingly enjoy an underdog film complete with training montages, and I’m glad the world of women’s boxing fixed their pay inequity with men thanks to Claressa, but I just felt like I’d seen this all before in of sports movie dramas, so while I rooted for Claressa at every turn, I wanted more originality in the screenplay.
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Steph:

It surprised me that a film made pre-social media engaged with similar concepts of reality as a construct and favorable public perception as the ultimate benchmark of success, and it was funny, fabulously unserious, but compelling, and I enjoyed the intense weirdnesses thrown in for flavor, the horse, the clown suit, the alien head cameras, and I found the film sad too, maybe because Brooks does self-deprecating so well, but his unhinged behavior heading into the finale was what ultimately kept me glued and invested, and the ending was superb.
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Josh:

Inspired by the phenomenon that was the PBS documentary series, An American Family, comedian Albert Brooks made this, his first feature, and it’s clever and prescient, sure, but it also feels very unstructured, weightless, and it’s not really as funny as I it being, and Grodin really isn’t given enough to do, but really, it’s Brooks’s show, and it’s best when skewering his showbiz pomposity and phoniness, his simultaneous self-importance and refusal to do any real work, and his interactions with Dr Cleary (J.A. Preston) are great, among the more scathing dissections of white liberalism I’ve seen, and there are a bunch of very funny moments and scenes (the moment Brooks recognizes the vet and the studio exec on the phone with his casting suggestions are personal favorites) but the two movies he made after this, Modern Romance (probably my favorite comedy ever) and Lost in America, are consistently brilliant in a way this movie doesn’t quite approach—I mean, it’s still great, but not essential in the way some of his subsequent work is. 
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Josh:

I’ll never love QT as much as some of y’all but we can stand in agreement that this is his best film, and not just that—it’s a great film, period—and he has always been an extremely talented and clever but undisciplined and immature artist, so all of his movies have their moments, but most of them, that’s all they have, and I think that immaturity, that obsession with his own coolness, has led to some racism and misogyny, and the unfortunate casting of Eli Roth and himself, but this movie (where he confines his own role to an answering machine), thanks in large part to a phenomenal cast (and Tarantino deserves enormous credit for reviving the careers of Pam Grier and Robert Forster), Sally Menkes’ deft cutting, and the structure imposed by Elmore Leonard’s writing, even with the silly foot obsession and the overuse of a certain racial epithet, is perhaps the only one in his career to date that feels like more than the sum of its parts. 
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Steph:

The Delfonics driving scenes made this film—Jackson and Forster stoically listening to “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” was epic cinema, and also Pam Grier, yeesh she was amazing, strong yet vulnerable, a badass with a brain, and the fact that De Niro played such a loser had me cracking up, perfect casting opposite Fonda, who also killed it as the stoner “little surfer girl,” and I loved how everyone in this was The Worst at being a criminal, and people getting shot dead out of nowhere was very Tarantino-esque—it jump-scared me more than once—so it feels strange to call this film a delight, but there you have it.
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Steph:

A little all over the place, Mickey 17 bashes capitalism and Trump, played somewhat annoyingly but convincingly by Ruffalo, and Pattinson nailed his part, over and over again (haha, get it), and you could easily see the hierarchies and class structures playing out, and the fear of the creepers that gripped those in charge, so of course their response was death to all creepers—when have differences among populations ever been considered an asset by people like Trump—so with metaphors firing everywhere, I sat there, thoroughly entertained and experiencing symptoms of the Woke Mind Virus, watching people seeking to challenge their oppressors and working together to create change, and I’m grateful to Bong for writing this politically charged material and turning it into an entertaining spectacle. 
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Josh:

I’m not sure why they thought this was going to be a box office hit (it was playing in the 2 biggest theaters in the multiplex in Middle TN where we saw it, and more people came out when they showed Cats) but it’s gloriously anti-fascist, anti-Trump, anti-prosperity theology (to put it mildly) and also wonderfully clever and entertaining, and I loved how I was never quite sure where it was going until the climactic setpiece, which was gratifying anyway, and of course Ruffalo and Collette are over the top—I mean, everyone is—but the discourse is so cartoonish these days that it all feels apt, and Pattinson kills it, as does Ackie, and Khondji, and Crombie, and it’s exciting and funny and gross but humane like Bong’s best films, which I think it is one of!
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Under 40 Night (movie has to have <40% on Rotten Tomatoes)—Josh’s pick

Josh:

This is Bad Movie Night, and this is a bad movie, and maybe it was always going to be a bad movie but there’s a potential for absurd genius here, along the lines of Jerry Lewis in Cracking Up, with the absurdity of Kevin and Marcus’s ridiculous getups tricking anyone into thinking they’re blond, white women reaching its apotheosis when the real Wilson sisters turn back up, and everyone is so confused, and that shit IS funny, and the dance competition was fun, and gently subversive, and the Wayans brothers are right to let the rote kidnapping plot mainly fall to the wayside, but then they spend 20-30 minutes on a romantic subplot that just sucks the air out of the room, and then you have a bunch of retrograde humor like gay panic jokes, but it’s not like the movie doesn’t evince empathy (even for white girls—casting Busy Philipps always helps), in fact, I would describe it as surprisingly good natured, but it mocks but doesn’t critique the gender roles it adheres to so rigidly, and it would have been nice if Karen had punched Heath herself. 
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Steph:

The dance-off ruled, and the film had its funny moments, but it mostly worked when something unexpected happened, but unfortunately, this film reveled in clichés, the opposite of unexpected, just trite commentary about race and gender stereotypes, accompanied by ditzy blonde jokes, and some of this could’ve been subversive if it weren’t all so obvious—the dinner scene with the hangnail and the chicken wings made me laugh, but the dressing room self-hatred meltdown? not so much—why? because one was out of the ordinary and beyond silly while the other played into stereotypes about women hating themselves, which was beyond boring (and lazy), but I found myself caught up in this dumbass story at one point, so something in the narrative captured me; I just wish the satire had been stranger and less grounded in generalizations.
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Secret Movie Club—Steph’s pick

Steph:

The two leads had great chemistry, and I loved seeing SZA in an acting role because she brought humor and attitude, and Palmer matched that energy perfectly, and the struggles were real, the rent money, the shady moocher boyfriend, going after that better job, and the art party was a high note, even if things worked out a bit too easily in the end, and I adored the bloodbath and the soundtrack, found the film funny, engaging, a celebration of Black women as best friends and sisters, and a joyful 90-minute interruption of the horror-show news cycle.
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Josh:

Amusing enough, and though it has its male-gazey moments, and mainly sticks to the raunchy girlfriend comedy formula (I personally find that the broader and more cartoonish the comedy, the less inclined I am to appreciate any sentimentality, so this flirted with an eyeroll or two), it at least does so with a brisk pace, a few genuine laughs, a stingingly honest assessment of neofeudalist late capitalism, and two very charismatic leads: Palmer, reliably excellent, and SZA doing a star comedic turn in her first narrative feature.
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Quarantine Movie Binge—From Childhood

Josh:

I seeing this as a kid and being surprised at how horny and bloody it was (this was rated PG) and I loved it then, but I think that might have been partly because I felt like I was getting away with something just to be watching it, and I still kind of love it for its boldly stylized imagery, its combination of grittiness and grandeur (Wagner helps), and I’d never seen a film that really conveyed how heavy and unwieldy a suit of armor must have been, but I suspect Steph will point out its failings in of representation, and of course, she has a point (and I didn’t the whole Gabriel Byrne pretending to be Corin Redgrave part of the tale), but I’m not sure the teenage boy I was necessarily agrees. 
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Steph:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a young Hellen Mirren in anything, so that was cool because she was magical, and even though this was a movie about knights and shit, I still managed to stay invested in the story, and damn there were some questionable moments involving the women characters, but I overlooked them because it was mostly a movie about knights and shit, and the action carried the film, with the accompanying score playing nicely against the constant stampede of horses, and it was funny, maybe even intentionally at times.
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Awards Season

Steph:

Expansive and thought-provoking and enraging, the film grabbed me from the beginning, and it’s a film about architecture and art and making meaning from art and how those elements are juxtaposed with human suffering, and there’s an emphasis on struggle, on how to make it stop, and the new people we become once we’re entirely broken, and the performances held the film together for me—I’m giving it a for centering the lead woman character as the moral com because there’s some complexity to Jones’ role—and I loved her willingness to confront conflict head on, and even though I thought Brody embodied his role, the film truly soared once Jones finally hit the screen.
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Josh:

We watched The Nightingale last night and I was jokingly saying that movie was “the brutal-est” but now I’ve finally seen The Brutalist and it was pretty brutal, too, and compelling (didn’t feel long to me at all) and ill need weeks and perhaps repeat viewings to sort out what I think about it, but it was fascinating the way they didn’t really explain Laszlo’s obsession with that project until the epilogue, and then it all made sense, and I’d also like to flee this awful country lately, and Erszabet was right, they don’t want us here, and it’s clear now that “us” means nearly all of us, so maybe they’re the ones who should leave.
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Magical Movie Mug*

Josh:

Unbelievably brutal, except, you know, 100% completely believable, and Kent makes you feel every moment of its white male supremacist terror, makes it feel real and true, and present, and it’s the best Western I’ve seen since Meek’s Cutoff, or maybe Unforgiven, and Franciosi and Ganambarr play their roles perfectly—I can’t praise them enough—and yes, yet again, this is the future that MAGA wants. 
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Steph:

Brutal, over and over again, and I wondered if it needed to go so hard on the brutality, with multiple depictions of sexual assault against two different women, and I know the cruelty may be the point, to show these officers committing depraved acts, violent acts, repeatedly with no consequences, with images of lynchings and plenty of murder-in-cold-blood scenes of Aboriginal people, but while I was rooting for Clare, her anger and rage drove her toward a metaphorical cliff, so part of me felt let down by the revenge plot because, well, what revenge plot? and that left me unsure of the point of all that horrific violence.
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Steph ambushed Josh

Steph:

I didn’t like this the first time I saw it and wanted to give it another shot, and I’m glad I did because I found the film honest, funny, and moving this time around (with a perfect soundtrack), and I was thinking about Hackman’s ing and hadn’t ed how great he was in this, playing a real jerk with a believable redemption arc, and the whole cast had chemistry and personality, and while I think my initial impression of this film was annoyance at weirdness for the sake of weirdness, this time around the choices felt intentional and unique to each character, and I’m not the biggest Wes Anderson fan, but I’ll add this to the top of the list of my favorite films by him.
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Josh:

Gene Hackman is so good in this—I mean, the whole cast is wonderful, really, even Alec Baldwin (“Immediately after making this statement, Royal realized it was true” is my favorite) because Royal is a son of a bitch, mainly, but he’s so many other things, and this is certainly Hackman’s best work as a comic actor—every gesture, every line reading comes with a surprising comedic charge—and meanwhile you have Anderson, with his third feature, giving a master class on framing, production design, color, editing, the use of slow motion, and soundtrack selection, all with a tricky comic tone, and with the lead constantly threatening to become irredeemable, and yes, there are a few too many dead wives, I guess in Anderson’s oeuvre as a whole, but every quirk feels sincere, like genuine self-expression, and I just love it. 
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Magical Movie Mug

Josh:

Kassovitz’s engagingly stylized troubled youth drama zips along with an authentic and boisterous urban energy, bolstered by energetic performances from the three leads, with Cassel’s Tim-Roth-in-Made-in-Britain coiled insecurity and rage becoming a focal point, and however heavily Kassovitz wears his influences (Spike Lee and Scorsese being the most obvious), he comes up with a pretty unique amalgamation that packs its own unique broken glass punch. 
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Steph:

Of course this film made me think about the problem with the police in the United States because it’s about police brutality, and it’s a brutal watch at times but resonant; the dialogue sometimes feels improvised, mainly because the performances are fluid, seamlessly integrated with one another, and I felt for these kids, who clearly didn’t know what actions to take or how to channel their grief, and the ending really got me, everyone on edge and then that final shot.
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Steph ambushed Josh

Steph:

Norma certainly seemed deranged by the end, and I felt bad for her, the unfairness of aging out of Hollywood, of being a woman who believes the best is behind her, and who can blame her for wanting a companion, someone to share it all with, even someone who’s being paid to stick around—when aren’t relationships transactional in one way or another—and the mirror scene was amazing, along with the finale, which I guess is pretty famous because I knew that line of dialogue somehow, and I just loved Norma’s self obsession and eccentricities, be my mom.
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Josh:

Only my second time seeing this, Steph, and it’s a cynical, hardhearted Hollywood noir, obviously looks great in all its deep blacks, with a huge Franz Waxman score that drops out at just the right moments, also featuring a deliriously over-the-top performance from Gloria Swanson, a wonderfully melancholy ing turn from Von Stroheim, and fun cameos from the likes of Cecil B. DeMille and Buster Keaton, plus Hedda Hopper hilariously shedding a tear, and Holden, aside from his reliably stolid performance, really makes that acid-tinged voiceover sing, and it’s funny to think of all the filmmakers that this in particular, and Wilder’s in general work inspired.
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Awards season

Josh:

A wild one, but I got lost, not such a bad thing really, practically DEMANDS a rewatch, and Seydoux’s performance kept me engaged, for the most part, pacing issues (I know that makes me sound like a philistine but I have trouble staying awake for almost anything these days) and then it got so creepy and then even creepier, so that was gripping, and I kind of dug the QR code bonus scene, and all I read was Lynch Lynch Lynch on Letterboxd, and I get it—it’s weird and ambitious and disturbing and somewhat unpleasant and opaque—but no one is mentioning Harmony Korine and the most disturbing part for me was the infected laptop playing clips of Trash Humpers. 
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Steph:

There was a five-second closeup of hands touching at the beginning, and at the end, there was the same five-second closeup of hands touching, fine, but I wanted this to unravel at a quicker pace because everything thrown at the canvas was fascinating and ambitious, with a focus on symbolism and letting the viewer do the work of unpacking it, and it’s rare for me to not know what the fuck is going on in a film until the absolute very last scene (I haven’t read the novella), and you know, it made that final scene devastating, and since that’s what I’m left with, a gaping hole in the pit of my stomach, it would be a disservice to this slow-ass, convoluted at times, messy but challenging film to give it any fewer than four clocks.
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Bad Movie Night (under 40% on RT)—Steph’s pick

Steph: 

I love cats, and this film illustrated the importance of cats—whether for comfort or for protection—by showing them in various states of badassery, and the shapeshifters were murderous, evil beings, fascinating creatures but no match for cats, and I found the film funny, mostly, with an incompetent local police force and some questionable parenting on display, especially from the mother-lover shapeshifter, but I think I most loved Clovis the Cat (“quit lookin at me you fucking cat”) leading the charge because everyone else was dead, either murdered by a corn cob or body slammed into a wooden fence. 
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Josh:

I kind of loved this, though it’s certainly got some of the worst dialogue I’ve ever heard in a movie (“No vegetables: no dessert: Those are the rules”), and a misguided notion of when such awful quips “work,” but it’s also got incestuous shapeshifters who turn into Sleestaks when they get really hungry, amazing cat crowd scenes, cat reaction shots, vigilante cats, Clovis (one of cinema’s greatest cat heroes), useless cameos not just from King but from John Carpenter, Joe Dante, Tobe Hooper, Clive Barker, and (ugh) John Landis, and just a 100% committed, all-in performance by Alice Krige; what a legend. 
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Josh ambushed Steph

Josh:

Right from the beginning, Farhadi makes you think he’s telling you, you be the judge, and right off, of course I’m on Simin’s side because A) it’s freaking Leila Hatami and B) I empathize with Simin’s desire to take her daughter away, and of course although the actual judges all sound very circumspect and reasonable, their biases are fully evident, and the whole absorbingly intricate, morally complex drama demonstrates the way an extremely patriarchal culture and religious orthodoxy ensnare people, so it’s pretty clear to me what’s going to happen after the screen fades to black, or at least I hope our girl made the right choice, and that way I can see it all as only a partial tragedy. 
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Steph:

It’s hard to capture my experience with a film like this in a single sentence, but I’ll just say I liked that the small story held space for larger themes of religion, motherhood, class, and caretaking, and the script flowed so easily from scene to scene, seamless dialogue on top of more dialogue, and I’m always impressed when a film like this can keep me on edge because not much happens, but I felt the tension from start to finish.
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