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This doesn’t really work at all as a movie - like, if you showed it someone who had never seen the original PSYCHO and had never absorbed much of it through cultural osmosis, I think they’d find it very confusing - but as an experiment, which is what it really is, I’m kinda glad it exists. It is if nothing else fascinating to see a filmmaker and their cast go through a beloved classic beat-for-beat and shot-for-shot, down to using almost all the same dialogue and a rearranged version of the original soundtrack, and see what changes in both the art itself and in our perception of it. It’s unfair to just dismiss the film as crass remake and express bafflement over the project. Van Sant clearly isn’t trying to one-up Hitchcock, and the film isn’t hiding its intentions at all. You’ve got to come at it with the same sense of “experimentation” that birthed the project. 

And it’s an experiment worth sticking with, because it actually becomes pretty interesting in the second half, after Marion’s murder. Up to that point I found the whole thing pretty discordant, a retelling that sort of sleepwalks its way towards the inevitable; where Marion’s death feels genuinely transgressive in the original, a propulsive forward momentum suddenly interrupted by the death of the protagonist, Van Sant’s film mostly feels like it’s going through the motions, but with enough elements out of place that it’s just kind of odd.

But after Marion’s car goes into the swamp, the film suddenly has some energy. It clicks into place for me when Julianne Moore walks on screen, and you realize they’ve basically swapped Marion and Lila as archetypes. Moore feels like the much more natural fit for Marion, more similar to Janet Leigh in movie star/leading lady energy, more traditionally ‘femme,’ more outspoken. Whereas Anne Heche, who actually plays Marion, is quieter, more internal, with more of a ing actor/character actor energy, presenting more queer (as Heche was in real life) in her haircut and clothing. And a lot of different aspects of the film start clicking into place now that you’ve got a meaningful, productive contrast to start holding onto. 

See, while I obviously love Hitchcock’s original, I’ve always found the second half a lot less engaging than the first. The film reaches this point of major narrative transgression - interrupting the protagonist’s journey right in the middle, then erasing her from the film - only to then re-conform itself to a fairly standard structure by unwinding and explaining everything we’ve seen, complete with a sister for Marion who basically takes her place in the narrative. It feels a little rote to me. Van Sant’s film reverses that formulation in being rote through its first half, then layering in some more interesting takes on the material in the second. The way Moore feels so different from Heche is like we’re introducing the movie star halfway through, rather than killing off the movie star halfway through.

And I think Vince Vaughn is not only kinda great here - never doing anything like an Anthony Perkins impression - but the way he plays Norman as coming apart at the seams in the second half is really fascinating, as he swings from fragile hetero masculinity to camp queer coding (which makes his scenes opposite Viggo Mortensen, all casual hyper-straight western swagger, all the more interesting). This is where you feel he and Van Sant leaving an actual distinctive stamp on the material, taking the queer and trans coding of the original and actually doing something productive and provocative with it. There’s a moment where Mortensen blocks Vaughn in a doorway to distract him so Moore can go to the Bates house, and the way he swaggers seductively in the frame while Vaughn eyes him up and down is quietly thrilling (and that continues for the rest of their encounter, as Mortensen’s quiet swagger gradually prompts the violent masculinity to bubble up to Vaughn’s surface). You feel a little bit of danger there, a sense of queer transgression into a narrative space that, in its original form, had an aggressively straight point-of-view. 

There are plenty of things that flat-out don’t work, don’t get me wrong. The film feels totally dead when it’s slavishly recreating the original’s most iconic moments - both murder scenes are awful, the surreal cutaways feeling like first year film school pablum, the aggressively sterile, over-lit space of the bathroom for closing any interesting visual compositions - and even as Van Sant follows Hitchcock shot for shot, there are moments where he’s misidentified why Hitchcock chose certain pieces of blocking, or the logic behind switches in camera set-up, in ways that cut the legs out from under a scene. The cinematography is fine, but it’s workmanlike at best, mostly pretty flat and dull. You put these color images next to the black and white original and it makes you think color film was a mistake, the gap in visual power between the two is so stark. And the Bernard Hermann score, brilliant as it is, just feels deeply out of place atop the 1990s Mise-en-scene, an anachronism the movie doesn’t really know how to for. 

Ultimately I’m left kind of torn between respecting the experiment as an experiment - not all experiments have to succeed to be worth trying, of course - and wishing it was less married to its experimental boundaries, playing more loosely with Hitchcock and more frequently forging its own path through the story. Would this be able to stand on its own if it reimagined the murder scenes, for instance, and zagged where we expect it to zig? Or if it used the Hermann melodies but realized them with a totally different musical style? Could it still feel like it was challenging Hitchcock from a queer perspective if it recreated Hitchcock less, or could it stand to be more aggressive in that challenge, particularly where the problematic gender dynamics of the Norman/Mother twist are confirmed? (That said, Robert Forster is so reliably great that he at least sells that long final monologue, a dramaturgical dead end in the original, in more entertaining fashion). The film vacillates between frustrating and fascinating to me, in a way that makes me at least glad I gave it a shot.

For me, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning sticks the landing. It does not do so perfectly, and it is not always graceful on its way to the end, but within the giant, sprawling, undeniably messy creativity of this last chapter, I felt the kind of finality that tells me the artists making this series love and understand it in the same way I’ve long loved and understood it. It delivers the kind of ending that brings closure through a heartfelt, thoughtful attempt to crystallize the thematic and stylistic core of Mission: Impossible. When I walked out of the theater, heart still racing and breath still short from the truly next-level kineticism The Final Reckoning engages in, I felt the magic of this series in full force, recontextualized as a messily exhilarating goodbye……

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“I swear your life will always matter more to me than my own.”

“You don’t even know me.”

“What difference does that make?”

The big mountaintop stunt, central to the film’s marketing, points to one of the core ways Dead Reckoning feels like it has formally evolved over past installments: the way McQuarrie crafts and deploys mise-en-scene to create potent psychologically expressive spaces for the characters: an international airport as a dense space of comings and goings, full of complex branching paths and a tight web of surveillance that Ethan and company are ultimately unable to conquer; the Venetian nightclub as a digitally cavernous ‘belly of the beast’ for the Entity, a place of pure paranoia where it is impossible not to feel like one is being watched; the dark shadowy maze of Venice’s nighttime streets, where Ethan’s customary foot chase is interrupted by multiple misdirections as he is literally ‘kept in the dark’ by the Entity. That the film’s climax takes place on a train is no accident: the Entity claims domination over free will, and so it arranges the players to meet on a vehicle of mass transit that goes in one direction the engers do not control. McQuarrie achieves all this not just through good set design and vivid location work, but through the specific way he shoots these spaces and assembles the imagery, as in the arhythmic alternation of Dutch angles and evenly horizontal shots throughout the nightclub sequence. The dramatic motorcycle jump stunt absolutely exists within this framework: it isn’t just a great stunt for the sake of a great stunt, but the ultimate visually expressive test of Ethan’s promise that Grace’s life will always matter more to him than his own, a crucible by which he proves his refusal to break that bond of trust that is central to his heroic ethos……

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“Fate whispers to the warrior.”

“A storm is coming.”

“And the warrior whispers back?”

“I am the storm.”

After Ethan Hunt engages in this prophetic code-phrase exchange, he is handed his latest mission orders inside a copy of Homer’s Odyssey. It’s a statement of narrative and thematic intent that would come across as absurdly pretentious were it not followed by two-and-a-half hours of the most ambitious and virtuosic action filmmaking ever achieved. Mission: Impossible - Fallout is an action epic made by the world’s most talented crazy people, and in the context of the series at large, it truly is Ethan’s ‘Odyssey’: a journey that takes him all over the world and well outside his already considerable comfort zone, confronts him with just about every kind of challenge imaginable, and which ultimately brings him back ‘home,’ to a firmer sense of who he is and why he does what he does. In so doing, Fallout performs the same kind of Odyssey for the series itself, not just crafting the greatest and grandest adventure the Mission: Impossible movies had seen so far, but cutting to the heart of what makes this such a uniquely appealing 21st-century film franchise…….

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Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation is a film so goddamn good that it begins with the absolutely killer image of Tom Cruise hanging off the side of a freighter plane as it lifts off the runway, and it’s not even one of the first ten things that come to mind when I think about how much I love this movie.

Rogue Nation is easily one of the most confident, inventive, expertly made popcorn films to come out of Hollywood in the 2010s. To me, this is the moment Mission: Impossible fully clicks into place as a franchise, the only fifth-installment-in-a-series I know of where it not only feels like there’s plenty of energy left in the tank, but boldly announces that we’ve only started scratching the surface of what these films can do. Christopher McQuarrie and Tom Cruise had been circling each other for a while: McQuarrie co-wrote 2008’s Valkyrie, which Cruise starred in, did uncredited rewrites on Ghost Protocol, and then wrote and directed 2012’s Jack Reacher, an underrated gem of an action movie that any fan of these later Mission: Impossible movies should see (yes, Cruise is a foot shorter than Reacher is supposed to be; no, I don’t care). There was already a lot of trust and experience in that creative relationship by the time we got to Rogue Nation,and it results in a magnificent Mission: Impossible film combining a little bit of everything that made the series work up until now, in particular marrying the slow-burn espionage elements of the Brian De Palma original with the character- and team-driven dynamics of Brad Bird’s Ghost Protocol. You even get a giant motorcycle chase a la John Woo’s Mission: Impossible II, complete with Cruise’s hair flapping in the wind as he leans so low to the bike he practically merges with the vehicle. What’s not to love? ......

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Brad Bird was born to direct a Mission: Impossible movie.

That fact becomes readily apparent five minutes into Ghost Protocol, as soon as one realizes that Bird has, indeed, committed to scoring a violent prison break sequence to the sounds of Dean Martin. No other director could infuse such brutal fight choreography with such a ionate sense of fun. In his animated works – The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille – Bird proved he was willing to try just about anything to make each and every scene as engaging as possible, and what has made his filmography so consistently great is that his experiments nearly always work.

The joy of Ghost Protocol lies in just how creative, playful, and light on its feet Bird’s direction is. There is such an immense spring in this movie’s step, seen in moments like Ethan going back to bonk the payphone after the IMF message fails to self-destruct; or watching Ethan and Benji trick the Kremlin security guard with a big portable screen; or the bit where Ethan leaves the Kremlin and immediately turns his costume inside out to look like an American tourist, complete with a vintage 80s Bruce Springsteen tee; or Ethan trying to do a retinal scan on the outside of a moving train as he continually dodges oncoming rail posts .......

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Damn, this was awesome. So relentlessly entertaining and immaculately well-acted that I didn’t care at all about how little of the plot I understood. 

Watched the 1946 theatrical cut to start. But the disc I own also has the “pre release” version from 1945 and I’m definitely excited to watch it and compare.

If one goes by the metric that the quality of a Mission: Impossible movie is directly proportional to how much Tom Cruise furiously runs in it, then Mission: Impossible III is quite possibly the best of the best. There is some top-tier, Grade-A, uncut Tom-Cruise-running-like-a-maniac action in this one, particularly at the climax. And it is, as always, extremely fun to watch.

Sadly, this metric is imperfect, and I don't think Mission: Impossible III is anywhere near the series’ best. In fact, revisiting it now, I feel pretty confident in declaring the film my least favorite in the series.

That’s a big change from how I initially felt, 19 years ago, when I liked the film so much I kept going back to see it in theaters throughout the summer. And it’s an opinion at odds with the film’s reputation today, where it is popularly ed as a turning point in the series, the film that brought Mission: Impossible back to life and got it up and running as an ongoing concern with actual character and cast continuity.

While there is some truth to that, I think it’s underappreciated just how creaky and generic this feels in comparison to every other Mission: Impossible film. It’s certainly a cut above many 21st-century Hollywood actioners (Cruise’s strengths as a producer give this series a floor of energy and competence far above what most studio franchise pictures are capable of). But the simple fact of the matter is that J.J. Abrams is far and away the most insubstantial director to ever work on this series, and while this is easily the best film he’s ever made, it’s also the Mission: Impossible movie with the biggest deficiencies in action and visual style, the one that feels least exceptional as a piece of cinematic construction......

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God I love this stupid movie.

Mission: Impossible II is an amazing film, one that transcends petty squabbles over ‘good’ versus ‘bad.’ It goes about as hard as it is possible for a movie to go, and is ‘extra’ in a way few movies are ever truly ‘extra.’ Watching it feels, at times, like an out-of-body fever dream, and if I am being perfectly honest, I love every second of it.

Because Mission: Impossible II is, top to bottom, a John Woo movie, and so much of his utterly singular style developed in Hong Kong ‘heroic bloodshed’ actioners like A Better Tomorrow and Hard Boiled survives the journey to Hollywood fully intact: heroes and villains alike dual-wield handguns, a single white dove accompanies the hero as he walks through literal fire, set pieces are punctuated by lovingly indulgent bursts of slow-motion acrobatics, and absolutely no one, at any point in the movie, ever reloads their guns, no matter how many bullets they have fired....

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Revisiting Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible is surreal: a film absolutely connected to an ongoing, active series, and yet one that also feels like stepping into a time machine. Cruise looks like an actual baby in this movie, and in one scene, while searching for info on a spy named Max, his first instinct is to type “Max dot com” into a computer and see what comes up. I’m pretty sure Ethan Hunt never once wields a gun as large as the mobile phones featured in this movie. This film is quite literally from another era: there is no way in hell such a relatively slow, cerebral thriller like this would ever get made as a major Hollywood tentpole today – even within this very franchise – let alone gross nearly half a billion dollars (just behind Twisters and Independence Day for the year) and be something of a sensation.

To be clear, none of that is a bad thing. The newer films, particularly once Christopher McQuarrie got involved, have more vivid characters and more bold, inventive action, but I really appreciate the slow-burn style of this first one. It has a somewhat thin script – or, at least, a script that prioritizes mood and movement over clearly comprehensible plot or deep character conflict – but the writing perfectly tees De Palma up to make a meal out of the material, and he threw his entire book of tricks at it: Dutch angles, reverse zooms, first-person POV shots, and performances that go from muted to melodramatic in mere minutes, etc. It’s expertly tense, but also wonderfully eccentric. A lot of it went over my head as a kid, when I first getting into this series around the time of the third film, but there’s good reason for that: This is a spy movie and popcorn flick for adults. It’s not necessarily ‘subtle’ – again, see the list of offbeat stylistic choices De Palma employs – but it’s very smart and methodical, and assumes the viewer is intelligent and patient too, inviting the audience to play along with the intricate spy mechanics and clues, to enjoy and get wrapped up in the tension, and to sometimes just enjoy the globetrotting vibes, which are consistently striking......

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My first film in this series, and it’s a ton of fun. The kill sequences are great cartoon fun, and the family-based premise of this one is particularly juicy. I did find myself wondering if the “death always wins” ethos was ultimately at odds with the reasonably effective attempts to make us care about these characters and their relationships, and that makes the ending of this one feel especially nihilistic. But it also got a giant laugh out of me. So if the main goal of these films is to be transgressive - to be slasher films that break the fundamental rule of slasher films wherein *somebody* has to be safe - then it works like gangbusters. 

Very fun use of IMAX too.

Got to see the new 4K restoration of the Director’s Cut in theaters tonight, 20 years after I saw the butchered theatrical cut opening weekend as a teenager. I’ve always loved this film, especially in its proper longer form, and seeing it on the big screen again, in a truly gorgeous and impeccably done restoration, just reconfirmed for me how great it is. 

This is very much a post-9/11 movie, in that it’s a reflection on the conflict between Christians and Muslims, but it’s one of - if not the best - post 9/11 Hollywood texts. In its sheer degree of thoughtfulness and nuance, the level to which it really wants to grapple with these ideas, it’s working on a different level than almost all other American media from the time. So much of the film is concerned with questions of how we treat our enemies, and that the film was made at the height of the Iraq War and America’s brutal international torture regime is no accident. 

And seeing it today, after the October 7th attacks in Israel and the subsequent destruction of Gaza, I think it still has a lot to say. KINGDOM OF HEAVEN frames the conflict as intractable on a historical scale, but it doesn’t then do the thing so much Western media then does and throw its hands up in despair, implicitly excusing everyone’s actions because the problem is too “complicated.” It’s still very much invested in the morality of individual actors, in the way people do or do not live up to their faith, in contrasting leaders who act primarily on prejudice versus those who act for their people. I don’t walk away from this movie feeling like it’s telling me “welp, this sure is complicated, nothing to do but throw up our hands.” I walk away thinking about the kinds of values and moral orientations that would actually move us away from cycles of oppression and genocide. In 2005, that’s something we needed to think about. In 2025, that’s something we need to think about. What is “intractable” is our refusal to do so.

This is one of my 4 favorite films, and I finally got to see on the big screen today, at the Denver Film Center. Seeing this in all its wall-to-wall widescreen glory is a little like achieving nirvana itself. 

A truly singular masterpiece. A wuxia film that is also a haunted house horror picture, but is ultimately a spiritual parable, effectuating a gradual but wholesale shift in protagonist and perspective over the course of its three hours, with some of the absolute best cinematography and editing ever committed to film. 

King Hu is unparalleled.

This is one of the most thoroughly unique, indescribable, and singular movies I’ve ever seen. 

It doesn’t really feel like a Dirty Pair movie so much as it does an 80-minute long music video starring Kei and Yuri from Dirty Pair. It isn’t a Dirty Pair story played out at feature length, but a pretty narratively minimal experience that focuses overwhelmingly on the marriage of music and visuals, of a totalizing Mise-en-bande interacting with an equally totalizing Mise-en-scene, and the result is a synesthesic kaleidoscope with few obvious analogue. The 3 things it reminded me of most were a pretty diverse set of references:

1. The Miyazaki Hayao short film On Your Mark, from 1995, an animated music video for the song of the same name by Chage and Aska

2. The 2003 anime film Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, a feature length music video for the Daft Punk album Discovery 

3. The 1984 Giorgio Moroder cut of Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, which recut and restored Lang’s silent classic using music by contemporary pop acts like Freddie Mercury, Bonnie Tyler, and Pat Benatar. 

If you take the oblique approach to storytelling and hyper concentrated, slightly discontinuous action stylings of Miyazaki’s short, pair it with the many flashing lights and sci-fi environs of Interstella, and then add music that is every bit as 1980s as the tracks Moroder commissioned for Metropolis, you’re close to describing Project Eden. Not all the way there, but close. 

Music videos are clearly the biggest formal inspiration for the film, more so than other films or tv shows or any of the work done on the Dirty Pair TV series. It generally doesn’t have dialogue or sound effects when music is playing, and the edit (or, in the case of animation, the storyboarding) is less concerned with traditional “continuity” or fully coherent visual rhythms then it is with dynamically combining with the music. Sequences are driven by the songs, and their overall flow and style is determined much more by how they express or interplay with that musicality than how they transmit narrative information. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Moroder’s Metropolis, released 2 years earlier, had a significant influence on the film, both in revitalizing Lang’s aesthetic sensibilities (some of which you can see here in the towering city-scapes), and in the way the film is built on an alternation of generally short, to the point story sequences and long musical numbers that are all about kinetic movement. 

Lest it go unsaid, this all works because Project Eden is very possibly the most accomplished single piece of animation to ever come out of Sunrise, which is saying something. It’s a visual marvel in of production, character, and costume design, and the sheer amount of motion going on in every single shot absolutely boggles the mind. The film is overwhelmingly fluid in a way few works of animation - or film in general - actually are, and its sense of weight, momentum, and speed in character animation is more or less unparalleled. It is definitely an “animator first” production, prioritizing visuals and complex artistic challenges over story or character, in a way that reminds me a little of Lupin the 3rd: The Fuma Conspiracy, but where that film still falls a bit flat in just how big the gap is between story/character and animation prowess, Project Eden finds a better balance, I think. 

Part of this is the music video quality. The film is so clearly a major stylistic break with existing Dirty Pair media that you don’t hold it to that standard for long; and it excels so fantastically at the specific thing it is doing that you don’t have much time to miss what you maybe expected it to be. If I were to critique this film and its narrative the way I would an episode of the Dirty Pair show, I’d say that it leaves Kei and Yuri in too purely a reactive stance for most of the movie, buffeted by outside forces, when my favorite stories in this world tend to show them executing a plan or creatively playing whatever hand they’ve been dealt. And I’d also say the Kei/Yuri dynamic is maybe a touch too de-emphasized in favor of the dynamic between Kei and Carson D. Carson, a very entertaining character who gets the film’s most resonant narrative material, but who also maybe distracts from the more important relationship between the leads. 

But the thing is, Project Eden doesn’t leave me wanting to make the kind of critique I would for a one-off Dirty Pair story. When you’re doing a movie version of a story that’s inherently episodic, you have two basic options: do a much bigger version of the kind of story you’d tell on TV, or do something completely different. Dirty Pair does something different. This is recognizably the world of the show, and these are the same lead characters we know and love, but the way it tells its story, and the sheer degree of formal and aesthetic experimentation and playfulness it engages in, is something you could never do on a tv budget, or in a 22-minute episode. It uses the cinematic canvas to essentially re-imagine what an “anime movie” of an existing property can be, a pure exercise in style and audiovisual impact.

A stupid person might levy the “style over substance” falsehood at this film, but of course, substance is imbedded in style, and Project Eden drips at its outermost edges with more style than most films can muster in entire run times. And that means there’s plenty of substance to go around, plenty of material here to break down, discuss, and celebrate. But I also think it’s fair to say the film pushes itself to a realm beyond words, towards a place of pure experiential entertainment, where it’s hard to verbalize and discuss what you’ve seen. In how tightly it marries images and music, it byes our verbal or narrative thought process, wiring right into the image centers of our brain like the Professor wiring himself into his computer. And that alone is a mind-boggling achievement.

About 95% of this movie is pure unwatchable garbage, a really bad, really cheap ALIEN/ALIENS knock-off that is painfully slow, incident-free, and structureless. The characters couldn’t be flatter, the plot ranges from threadbare to incomprehensible, and other than a few quick name drops, it’s got less than nothing to do with its nominal source material. DOOM is the ultimate fast paced FPS, where you run around maps frantically shooting and searching, the experience so focused that the game doesn’t even feature reloading. The film is the opposite of all of that. 

But then you do get that first-person sequence near the end, and while it isn’t necessarily amazing, it is an honest to god attempt at translating the language of video games to the language of cinema. The movie suddenly has a pulse. It’s trying things. It’s exciting to watch. And while it still has a weird focus on things like scopes and reloading - elements famously eschewed in the games - it actually does kind of feel like DOOM. It’s COMPLETELY separate from the rest of the film, stylistically and tonally and qualitatively - the DVD bonus features even reveal that it had a completely different director (the film’s overall VFX supervisor) and crew, as it was done totally by the second unit. You’re essentially getting a separate DOOM short film - what feels like a pretty decent DOOM fan film, honestly - in the middle of a movie that has nothing whatsoever to do with DOOM. 

That means you have to sit through 90 minutes of bullshit to get that little taste of DOOM goodness (and then you go back to bullshit when that’s over, because a Karl Urban/The Rock fist fight is exactly what the people want when they hear there’s gonna be a DOOM movie). Absolutely not worth the investment - you can just watch the fan film section on YouTube - but it means the film is frustratingly impossible to *fully* dismiss. It has a place in film history. A small, minuscule, 3-point-don’t asterisk sized place in film history, probably as a footnote on the film Hardcore Henry that is itself an aside in an essay about something else entirely, but still. A place.

Love it or hate it, I think it’s pretty much undeniable that MOULIN ROUGE! is the film Baz Luhrmann was put on this earth to make. Every strength he’s ever exhibited is concentrated in this movie, and every weakness you could accuse him of elsewhere becomes a strength in the narrative and thematic context of this film. I don’t think he’s ever quite pulled it all together again, before or after, and I don’t think he ever will. This is the movie he was born to make. And I’m really glad he did. 

There’s so many fascinating tensions at work here. The way it threads this needle between executing at a ridiculously high level of technical competence - and if you argue the opposite, you simply do not, to be frank, know what the fuck you are talking about - while also feeling loose, adventurous, even charmingly amateurish at times, like a child playing with a camera and making movies with friends in the backyard. And that kind of duality scaffolds across the movie, most notably in how its unabashed artifice and sense of fantasy - “all you need is love” - clashes with its thematic interest in all the ways love is so easily challenged in this world, by economics and social status and the simple, brutal reality of mortality. It’s a movie about very complicated, thorny things illustrated with a childlike sense of wonder and whimsy. Which makes it all quite a bit wiser and richer than its critics give it credit for, I think. 

MOULIN ROUGE! is almost single-handedly responsible for reviving the Hollywood movie musical in the 21st century, and it is also infinite leagues better than nearly every Hollywood movie musical that followed in its wake. Luhrmann and company understand music and musicality in a way none of the other musical directors of this era do. He is the anti-Rob Marshall or Tom Hooper. Not just in the evident love for music, but the skill with which it is all woven together (the love medley that climaxes in David Bowie’s HEROES is one of the great movie scenes of the century, period). The extremely musical rhythms with which it is edited. The energy and excess of the choreography and set design. It is all of a piece.

I was particularly taken with Jill Bilcock’s editing on this viewing, to the point that I may think about teaching this for editing in a future film studies class. It’s often a very rapidly edited movie, but it is done with such startling clarity, always with a sense of rhythm and momentum: the shot lengths exist in a larger context of tempo and rhythm, and the graphic relations are extremely clear, with motion continuing across shots so fluidly. This doesn’t just happen in the editing room, of course. You can tell Luhrmann wasn’t just shooting massive amounts of coverage and asking Bilcock to figure it out later: shots that cut rapidly have very clear centers of action, where our eye can find the shot’s weight even in just a few frames, while shots that last longer are often more complex and built on dynamic geometry. The film breathes when it needs to, and is breathless when it wants to make you breathless. It is much more adept at timing and momentum than most movies made today; even editorially celebrated recent works, like the films of Christopher Nolan, could learn a lot from the way Luhrmann skillfully modulates here, his editing never falling into one pattern or a single forceful rhythm; I find something like OPPENHEIMER technically impressive, but also fairly exhausting for just how much it’s cutting all of the time. MOULIN ROUGE! flies by, and it takes you through its emotional and tonal peaks and valleys with the same skill as a great song. 

Anyway. Whether it’s “for you” or not, I don’t think it’s possible to be a truly informed film viewer and dismiss MOULIN ROUGE! And I say that having been a young punk who thought he knew everything and dismissed this film loudly in the past. I was wrong! I didn’t know as much about film as I thought. Today, while I can easily imagine not being on this movie’s wavelength - nothing wrong with that, it’s going for something very specific! - I would roll my eyes hard at anyone trying to argue Luhrmann isn’t executing at an extremely high level at the thing he’s setting out to do.

This movie is frustrating because of how much of it is genuinely good. 

It’s really well-directed. It looks shockingly good for Marvel. The action works. It has several great characters in Yelena, Bucky, Red Guardian, and a bunch of good performances from Pugh, Stan, Harbour, plus Julia-Louis Dreyfuss and Lewis Pullman. It actually invests in trying to build up a team of new heroes, which Marvel should have been doing 5 years ago. And it builds to one of the very best third acts Marvel has ever had, eschewing the usual glowing doodad on the roof chase for a visually adventurous, very internalized fight with the actual themes of the movie, about depression and loneliness and trauma. I thought this was going to be awful, but there’s a lot of stuff I like here. 

And yet. 

Marvel needs to crack open their introductory screenwriting textbooks again. This movie’s pacing is so borked it astonishes me. The first act is a whopping 70 minutes long, in a film that’s under 2 hours sans credits. The team isn’t all together until the halfway point, and they don’t switch from a reactive stance to pursuing a proactive goal - the moment you’d roughly define as taking us from act 1 into act 2 - until that 70 minute mark. Those first 70 minutes are *rough*, most of it spent with the characters stuck in a vault, the film moving in total herky-jerk fashion with no sense of forward momentum. The script is truly pretty terrible for most of that stretch, and while the direction and actors do their best, I honestly considered just cutting my losses and walking out after the 17th cut back into the vault where the characters were still just reacting to shit and not doing anything. The three-act-structure isn’t an automatic guide for making good movies, and it doesn’t apply to all kinds of films, but if there’s *one* genre that truly needs it, it’s the superhero film, because superheroes need to be active and goal oriented. The film stretching that 1st act out like you’re watching the earliest assembly cut doesn’t just kill momentum, but eats up all the time the 2nd act - which the movie blows through in another 11 minutes - needs to show the characters striving for something and ultimately failing. As good as the third act, it has its legs cut out from under it by not having a strong second act to push the characters into a real sense of dejection based on the actual plot of the movie. It also kills the Ghost character, who has no development or role in the story, and makes Walker feel like an afterthought too. 

So yeah. I don’t know. There’s stuff about this that’s well above average for latter day Marvel. And then there’s stuff that’s just as broken as everything else. It feels like there’s no meaningful system going on over there anymore, no one looking at these scripts and giving an honest informed opinion before they roll cameras. Wouldn’t surprise me if this one had some significant reshoot issues too, since you have weird stuff like Olga Kurylenko being prominently listed in the cast as Taskmaster, but only appearing in the Final Cut for - I shit you not - a handful of frames. It’s weird.

These people just can’t put a movie together with any degree of holistic competence anymore. I want to be excited for Fantastic Four, but goddamn am I worried.

Screened this for my Intro to Film students today on a 35mm print the university owns, in pretty darn good condition. Amazing experience. Seeing the bamboo forest scene on the big screen, on film, was a practically religious experience. Hearing the soundtrack at that scale was just as impactful. You don’t realize how deep the drums in Tan Dun’s score resonate until you hear them from those original optical tracks in big surround sound. Something so earthy and deep and rich about it. 

Incredible movie. If I get to class tomorrow and my students didn’t love it I am going to make a wish and jump off a very tall mountain like Zhang Ziyi.

The grim historical poetry of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith celebrating its 20th anniversary now, in 2025, with American democracy crumbling before our eyes, is sobering. Its re-release to theaters this week, coinciding with the grim milestone of the second Trump istration’s ‘first 100 days’ marker – 100 of the darkest and most lawless days in the history of this country – confirms, if it needed confirming, that in this film, George Lucas crafted the single most terrifyingly prophetic blockbuster of the century.

Two decades later, the scorn Revenge of the Sith and the preceding Star Wars Prequels were greeted with has, if not entirely dried up, dramatically reduced in size. There are several possible reasons for this: Because the children who saw the film in 2005 and grew up loving it are now articulate enough to defend it; because Disney has so thoroughly proven how crushingly hollow Star Wars films can be when shorn of Lucas’ auteur influence; and because the movie is genuinely quite good, as Sean Chapman and I discussed at length on The Weekly Stuff Podcast back in 2018, and as I wrote about last year.

But let us be frank: in the main, Revenge of the Sith and its cinematic brethren have been rehabilitated by the United States’ own awful political choices these past 20 years: by our own embrace of fascism, our own widespread denial of reality, our own willing submission to fear and hatred. Revenge of the Sith looks wiser and more accomplished to us now because we willingly walked down the path it told us to avoid......

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Last week, in my “Animation and Identification” class at CU Boulder, I showed my students Robert Altman’s Popeye (1980). I considered it one of the bigger ‘risks’ on my syllabus, because it is, objectively, a weird movie, one that was not well-received in its day, and which has only recently started receiving a concerted rehabilitation effort. I figured my students would either love it or hate it, but of course, there’s only ever one way to find out. What I was sure about was that I had found the proper context in which to introduce the film: as part of a larger conversation on live-action remakes of animated material, a trend that is both impossible to ignore and, for the most part, absolutely soul-crushing. And Popeye is the right film to show for this topic both because it has been historically ignored, at least by the mainstream, and because it is the exact opposite of soul-crushing. Whether one winds up on Altman’s wavelength or not, you could never accuse Popeye of lacking a soul.

Thankfully, that screening went over like gangbusters – one of those magical evenings where everybody was laughing in all the right places, and I felt myself seeing more of the film than I’d ever glimpsed before because of all the good energy being exchanged between screen and audience. It’s one thing to show students a well-established classic and have them nod along approvingly; what’s really magical is sharing a film most of them didn’t know existed – “Robin Williams was in a Popeye movie? WHAT?” – and seeing them fall in love with it. I felt slightly self-conscious earlier in the week when I realized that the first Robert Altman movie I’d decided to teach as an actual Ph.D. was Popeye (in the same room where I’d once been introduced to the director through Nashville, no less); after hearing the students talk about the film, I wouldn’t have it any other way......

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I first saw Battle Royale right at the age director Kinji Fukasaku would have wanted: fourteen, just before entering high school. The film was not commercially available in the US back then, but I wanted it desperately. According to ‘the Internet,’ (what seemed like a mystical amalgamation at the time), it was one of the Holy Grails of 21st-century filmmaking, a controversial classic so violent and terrifying it had been ‘banned’ in the US (this wasn’t quite true – movies can’t technically be ‘banned’ in the US because of our first amendment, and Battle Royale simply had never been picked up for distribution by an American company). I had to have it, but it was hard to get, so I started with the English translation of the novel, which had been published by Viz Media in 2003. That only made me want to see the movie more. So I saved up some money and somehow convinced my Mom to help order a bootleg DVD on eBay (in lieu of official distribution, the bootlegs of Battle Royale were actually quite good and easy to find). After a few long weeks of waiting, the disc finally came, and I waited a little longer until my family was out of the house. I eagerly put the disc in the tray, sat down on the couch, and got ready for what I had been assured would be a life-changing experience….

…And you know what? For once, ‘the internet’ was right. After I saw Battle Royale, my existing concepts of the parameters of film were shattered, and I never looked back. My eyes were opened to so many things: how violence can be used not just to thrill, but to educate, to make a point in visceral fashion; that when it takes an active, interpretive mind to find the message in the madness – rather than having it all spoon-fed to you – the results are so much more powerful; that other countries have different styles of acting than America, and contemporary Japanese performances brought emotions to the surface in ways different than I was used to; the role music can play in accentuating themes, feelings, and story points; how much a little tonal creativity and playfulness can amplify the impact of the work; and, of course, that international cinemas can do things and go places that American cinema can’t or won’t. Battle Royale changed everything. I’ve taken it with me on my critical journey through the hundreds of films I’ve reviewed over the years......

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby may be one of the Great American Novels, but it has produced, several times over, distinctly not-Great American Films, if ‘films’ they can even be called.

The 1974 production, directed by Jack Clayton and starring Robert Redford, is particularly contemptible. My overwhelming impression, suffering through this endurance challenge of a ‘movie,’ was a strong and irrepressible memory of rainy days in Elementary School; we would all have to go to the gymnasium instead of playing outside, and the teachers would turn on an assortment of awful videotapes, like the old BBC TV adaptations of The Chronicles of Narnia. That’s the thing about the film versions of books one is made to watch in school; they have to be ‘appropriate,’ which is another way of saying they have to be devoid enough of style that they could not possibly leave a real impression, let alone offend. It felt wrong to be watching this Gatsby film as an adult, on my nice OLED TV via a Blu-ray disc, in the apartment I pay to live in of my own volition, rather than in a school building I was legally required to attend. This film does not make sense in any format other than VHS-tape-attached-to-a-barely-functioning-tube-TV-wheeled-into-the-classroom-on-a-rainy-day.

Clayton’s The Great Gatsby might be the single dullest movie I have ever seen. There is no ion to any of it. Not just in the completely heatless romance between Jay and Daisy, all of it shot, written, and acted like a bad perfume commercial whose commissioning client would demand the production costs back from the supposed filmmakers; neither is there ion to the friendships, the jealousy, the anger, or any of the other emotions found in Fitzgerald’s enduringly rich text. It is a cheap TV movie dressed up in the skin suit of Hollywood glamor, which just makes the lack of formal substance all the more insulting.......

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Watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail for the...well, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen it, actually, having fallen in love with the film so long ago, at an age too young to fully understand it, but fully capable of being inspired by its boundless, lunatic imagination.

In any case, watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail for the however-many-times-I’ve-seen-it time, I am struck by the sheer amount of transcendent, classic comedy it contains. A succession of individual comedic miracles – bits large or small that are universally inspired in their wit, creativity, and devilish devotion to silliness – that combine to create a literally non-stop hilarious whole, the film is that rarest of beasts: A comedy in which every joke lands, each bit is flawlessly written and performed, and nearly every scene, line, and even vocal inflection has become wildly iconic. It is like an album composed entirely of incredible songs, one right after the other – you look at it and wonder how such sustained greatness can exist in a single artistic package (or you would wonder this, it might be more accurate to say, if you weren’t too busy laughing).....

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Alien: Resurrection is insane.

It is bananas.

It is unhinged.

It is absolutely cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

I think I love it.

I treasure the Alien movies, as you’ll know if you read my long piece celebrating Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant, or my review of Alien: Romulus from last year, in which I wrote that “the Alien films stand toe-to-toe with Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible movies as Hollywood’s best, most interesting, and most reliable long-running franchise … I adore these movies, and I love just how malleable and protean they have continually proven themselves to be.” I think that is 100% true of Alien: Resurrection, too, but it was the installment it took me the longest time to come around on.

To be fair, I don’t think I was alone in that sense of dismissal, and while I now find myself amongst Resurrection’s defenders, I will it it remains a pretty small island. I finally came back to the film when working through the series once more ahead of Romulus; as I found myself again appreciating the sheer diversity of tone, genre, and ideas in the Alien movies – that transformative quality that makes the series so uniquely compelling – I decided to give Resurrection another shot, knowing it would be weird and goofy and not at all like the other films, but finally allowing myself to go into it know that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

And what Alien: Resurrection actually is fucking rocks.....

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I find The Tree of Life to be a different movie every time. Sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller. There are things I always love unreservedly: namely the entire first hour, up through the Creation set-piece and the initial sequences of childhood. Sometimes I bristle more at the darker second half, sometimes I vibe with it entirely. At my most lucid, I can it that there are so many uncomfortable truths bouncing around that last half, in everything with the darkness of the father and the darkness rising in the son, that I bristle at them because they are true, and I relate to them profoundly, and I cannot help but want to look away. And the end always moves me immensely.

Today, The Tree of Life is, indeed, one of my very favorite movies. I can watch it in whole or in parts and feel like I am having a cleansing spiritual experience, one that centers and stabilizes me, and in which the film always feels like a slightly different entity than the one I encountered before. Not all movies make themselves easy to love; having to work for it – or, more precisely, to work with it – sometimes makes the love all the more profound.

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You wanna read the weirdest review I've ever written? It's in 4 separate parts, it's written in epistolary style to a fictional 'Dr. Winterbottom,' and it's basically a parody of Freudian writing. And it's all about VARIETE. I don't really know how to describe it.

Here's a link to the 4th part, which has links to parts 1-3. It's weird.

Michael Mann’s Miami Vice is one of the most sensorially powerful films ever made. Overwhelmingly sensual in every frame, it is a movie of textures and surfaces and colors one feels as much as one sees. There is a great deal of plot, and it doesn’t matter at all. The film is a 2.5-hour mood piece, using the noisy, burnished look of early high-definition digital cameras to create a hauntingly dense atmosphere of darkness and light. There are no more beautiful shots of city skylines in movie history than in this film, and its only serious competition is 2004’s Collateral, the previous film directed by Michael Mann and shot by Dion Beebe. Every light source in both of these movies is entirely intoxicating. Every single one.

If this review is all over the map, well, so is the movie. That’s what makes it so fascinating, so arresting, so intoxicating. Miami Vice cost $130 million, and has to be the least commercially-inclined Hollywood film to ever bear such a price tag. Michael Mann could not have given fewer fucks about making this thing popular. It is daring you to engage with it on its own weird, singular from start to finish. Every distinctive director has that one movie that feels like a window into their unfiltered id, and for Michael Mann, I think that’s Miami Vice. The setting, the music, the cinematography, the writing – it’s every one of his tics dialed up to eleven, the purest expression of his duality between weary defeatism and hyper-sincere emotional extremity, all of it drunk on synesthesia, animated by the marriage of image and music in ways few filmmakers even attempt. It’s truly singular......

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Had the immense pleasure of seeing this on 35mm tonight. I think the 3rd reel of this film might be the best 20 minutes of color cinematography in the history of cinema.

This has the single best 9/11 joke I've ever heard. Easy 5 stars.

Damn, that was wild. 

SINNERS is the kind of wide-ranging, ambitious, unwieldy auteur piece you only get when a director has a massive success- as Ryan Coogler did twice with Black Panther - and then cashes all their chips in on one giant risk. There’s a go-for-broke sensibility to movies like this, where you can feel the director thinking they may never again get to paint so freely on such a big canvas, so they paint as much as they can. SINNERS is at least 2 or 3 different movies, with at least 2 or 3 different endings, and after 1 viewing, I’m not at all sure they all coalesce cleanly or perfectly.

I’m also sure I don’t care. I give a lecture on Coogler’s Black Panther film every year at CU Boulder, for which I’ve read and re-read a lot of interviews with Coogler, and you can tell how much SINNERS is all him. All his fascinations and thematic preoccupations in one place, a mash up of periods and genres and tones. It’s always been clear he’s a prodigiously talented filmmaker, and SINNERS is immaculately well-made. It’s a tremendous IMAX experience, with the bulk of the movie shot at the ultra wide Panavision ratio of 2.76:1, and it uses that spaces spectacularly well. The film has a sequence shot in the middle, where a single blues song summons the past and the future of multiple races and lineages and legacies together under one roof, and I think that one shot is the best thing he’s ever done as an artist. And a shot that in and of itself his a little bit of everything else he’s ever done inside it. 

Music is really the main thing on the film’s mind, stylistically and thematically, and never has Coogler and Ludwig Goransson’s partnership born such sweet fruit, because this is an incredible musical experience, engaging with over a century’s worth of history of American music and its antecedents. These guys have to make a true musical together one day. They’re too good at this not to. 

Again, do all the pieces - the vampire movie, the musical story, the introspective work about race and hope and freedom - all fit together seamlessly? I don’t think so. But god, I love to see a swing this big. And I’m absolutely open to the possibility that this film will only open up and fully reveal itself after a few extra viewings, when you know what’s coming and you can fully engage on Coogler’s wavelength.

The other day I got pretty severely depressed about the state of the world - in particular the Trump ’s criminal detaining of innocent men in a foreign concentration camp. I wondered what the purpose of any of my daily activities were worth, when this was happening, when you have an evil aspiring dictator causing so much pain, taking aim at every freedom we hold dear, every freedom that allows us to live. I sat in my car in the parking lot waiting to go into work, trying to build up the will to go talk about movies to college students. It all felt pointless. I vented on social media. “What is the point of trying?” 

Today I showed my Intro students MAN ON WIRE. And it proved something I’ve long believed about film, which is that sometimes movies come to us - or in this case, come back to us - when we most need them. This is a film about laughing in the face of that existential quandary. “What is the point?” What a silly question! If Phillippe Petit ever sat down to force an answer on that, he never would have walked on the top of the world. He and his friends would never have had the adventure of a lifetime. We wouldn’t all be sitting together watching this wonderful movie. “What is the point?” Because a wacky Frenchman dreamt it, and he decided to live his dream. What a wonderful thing. A pure, beautiful, inspiring, wonderful thing. 

It reminded me of this essential truth: they cannot take their joy from you. We do not as humans need permission to do the things we love, to explore our ions and enjoy our time on this earth. As long as nobody is hurt, the core of our “freedom” is the freedom to ignore that question. “What is the point?” The point is to live, and to go on living, and thumb your nose at the fascists and their death cult by refusing to let them destroy what is inside of you. There are many forms of rebellion and pushback and perhaps even revolution that will be necessary to make it through this moment. But the smallest foundation of all of that is to refuse the emotional desolation these villains so desperately crave. Nothing else is possible without that. 

We need more dreams. And we need more wires with men on them, beckoning our eyes to the sky.

This was shockingly good. 

Not a revolutionary new breakthrough in filmmaking or anything, but after all the fucking awful horror comedies I sat through so far this year, it was SO refreshing to see a movie that actually knows what it’s doing. It knows how to pull the strings and twist the screws. When to put spin on the ball and when to pitch straight. Why and how you deploy a Dutch angle. Where you can naturally work in humor, and where you need to be straight faced and sincere so that the sense of danger and pathos survives. It even does some awesome things with lighting, doing these stage light effects where they drop the studio lights for dramatic effect. It’s really good! Just resolutely well made from start to finish, with great acting, a good sense of pace, and a sense that the dynamics are constantly evolving and changing. 

It also helps that first dates are the most anxiety inducing thing in the world, so as a setting for this kind of movie, that definitely helps up the ante. 

Good stuff.

Well that was pretty dire. 

I actually kind of liked the first 20 minutes. The Jack Black-narrated opening is a fun intro to the world, and the stuff in “reality” lets Jared Hess’ quirky voice come through loud and clear. It’s charming. 

But then they get to the Minecraft world and the movie gets so unbelievably loud and hyperactive and directionless. It’s occasionally funny, but it’s mostly just grating, a giant dose of weapons-grade cinematic sugar with no complex calories. The kids in the audience seemed to be enjoying it, but there were a lot more applause lines and laughs in the first half than the second - you could definitely feel the energy going down the further the movie went. 

The biggest problem for me, honestly, is that it just doesn’t evoke “Minecraft” for me much at all. Accepting that I’m a first-gen Minecraft player from the Xbox 360 days, and not someone who’s played a ton of it lately, my memories of Minecraft are calm and serene. It’s a quiet game with chill lo-fi beats. You move slowly. You build slowly. You explore and find unexpected caves and surprises. You gradually build something cool and test it out. If you’re playing with friends, it’s a casual hang out game. None of that is here. They can’t even use much of the actual Minecraft music because it’s so tonally out of whack with the hyperactive always-at-an-11 movie they’ve made. My favorite Minecraft memories are the calm moments of casual beauty you’d encounter. Riding a rail around the world and looking at the horizon, or climbing over a mountain. None of that is evoked here. It’s much more an adaptation of Minecraft Let’s Plays, YouTube videos, and Twitch streams than it is an adaptation of Minecraft the video game. And if that’s what the kids are into, that’s fine, I guess. But I like Minecraft the video game, and this did less than nothing to evoke the things that I hold dear about the game itself. 

One other thing that kept taking me out of the movie: while the CGI animation itself is fine - it’s bright and colorful, at least - the green screen compositing is TERRIBLE. Probably the worst I’ve ever seen in a Hollywood movie, of any budget or scale. It’s just obviously unfinished a lot of the time, with a hazy outline around bodies and hair resolving into a glowing mess. It often looks no different than a bad portrait mode cutout on iPhone, or when you use the magic eraser in Google Photos. It looks like a haphazard application of free consumer tools, not a polished, finished product with the money and tech Hollywood VFX artists have access to. It’s probably an issue of time crunch - almost every frame of the film is on green screens, which is an insane amount of rotoscoping to have to do - but that’s not a good excuse. If you couldn’t make it look good this way, then find another way to film it. This is just breathtakingly cheap and ugly looking at times, more akin to a YouTube fan film than a professional production.

Shared this with my animation students tonight. It’s long been one of my very favorite Ghibli movies, and movies in general. I think the ending is among my Top 10 favorite endings to any film, ever. It’s a movie about many things, but primarily the little existential disappointments that pile on us as we grow up, that cause us to auction off parts of ourselves that are essential, until one day we’re living somebody else’s life, sad for reasons we cannot understand. And then it’s about the absolute euphoric ecstasy of realizing, in a flash of a moment, that we don’t have to do that. That we can make this life what we want it to be. And that taking that step, although wrenching in the introspection required, is an act of liberation.

Saw the new 4K restoration on IMAX. Looks fantastic, though not necessarily a revelation - but only because the existing 2K master was already so good. This is, to my understanding, the same scan of the negative, just presented in a higher native resolution, and with a new on the colors for HDR. So it’s the same underlying image, with all the grain and filmic elements in tact, just with even more detail and deeper, richer colors. It’s definitely the best the film has ever looked in a digital master (though nothing beats seeing an actual 35mm print, which I’ve gotten to do a few times). And it holds up stupendously on a giant IMAX screen with laser projection, in a way the previous 2K master probably wouldn’t. There are still imperfections due to the hybrid production methods (shots with digital assists are still quite a bit softer than the all-analogue material, but that’s ALWAYS been baked in), but I did find that the revised color grade and higher resolution helped everything blend a little more fluidly than on the 2K version. 

And of course it’s still PRINCESS MONONOKE. The main reason to see it is it’s a masterpiece. Now it’s a masterpiece that’s fit for IMAX and looks about as good as it can digitally. So that’s pretty cool.

Holy hell, what a fucking movie. 

Interesting watching this right after McCabe and Mrs. Miller, since both are picking apart the Western in such thorough and powerful ways. Obviously Eastwood comes at it from a very different angle than Altman, both stylistically and in of career experience. What most took me aback, honestly, is *just* how thoroughly Eastwood de-romanticizes the Western here. Just how much guilt and sadness pours through this movie. Just how personal the regret feels. The film’s project is to take a set of character and narrative archetypes and make them feel very small and sad and human, to strip out anything aspirational associated with this genre. And it does so powerfully. You get the feeling Clint isn’t just reflecting on the literal Westerns he made, but on movies like Dirty Harry too - any films with these kinds of lone gunmen heroes through whom violence becomes righteous. Some of Clint’s dialogue here, about how his wife set him straight, is very on the nose - but it also feels achingly heartfelt, like this is an actual moral dilemma Eastwood is exorcising through the act of filmmaking. It’s honestly pretty startling at times. If there are three names the American public broadly associates with the Western, it’s probably John Ford, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood - and seeing Eastwood leave the genre behind with a goodbye this melancholy and reflective and regretful is absolutely fascinating.

Picked the 4K disc up in the Criterion flash sale last week and it now might be one of my most treasured possessions. This is about as good as it is possible for a movie to be, I think. A masterpiece of mise-en-scene in the way only Altman could make; his movies feel like immersive trips to other times and places more than they do films, whether it’s Nashville or Sweethaven, and I think that’s never more true than here. Two hours, but it could be years, it could be seconds, it’s like a portal outside your world into another, and I came back to earth dazed. Absolutely floored by this one.

Completely sumptuous. Like a fine desert at a very expensive restaurant. Not particularly deep or nutritious, but so unbelievably rich and delicious that you do not care one iota. 

This might be the very best script David Koepp has ever written. And Soderbergh directs with a joyously deft hand (and some extremely aggressive anamorphic lenses). 

That jazz score by David Holmes? It’s to die for. 

Fassbender and Blanchett are two of the best to ever do it. Both so casually brilliant here. It’s absurd. 

I love it.

Loved it. 

It’s almost inconceivably shameful that WB didn’t proudly release this themselves, since it’s the culmination of what Warner Animation has been trying to make for many many decades: an honest to god feature length Looney Tunes cartoon. This team really cracked the code, focusing on the right set of characters - Porky and Daffy - and telling just enough story, with just enough characterization, without ever letting it overwhelm the key goal, which is zany comedy. Every time it threatens to get a little too conventional, it takes a crazy zag and does a big silly joke and I was back on board. 

And there’s so much love and care put into every frame of this thing. The animation is gorgeous - I got to see it with laser projection, and the colors are kinda jaw dropping. The music is a big sweeping orchestral ode to a century of Looney Tunes music history. And there’s isn’t one single ounce of irony or cynicism to any of it. But neither is it just pandering to existing Looney Tunes fans or adult cartoon aficionados. It’s very much for children. This could be a 5 year old’s intro to Porky and Daffy, and they could love it as much as a Looney Tunes vet. That’s a real magic trick. 

I still don’t think a feature film is the *best* shape for Looney Tunes, but this team cut their teeth on the new Looney Tunes cartoons, which revived the original shorts format after decades of the characters being irrelevant. So they know that too, and this only works, I think, because this team understands the language of the short films so well. As a capper to that journey, this is is pretty damn perfect. 

Fuck Zaslav.

It is, indeed, very short.

Not a lost masterpiece, but a MUCH better anime than its reputation as the forgotten/buried Yu-Gi-Oh would suggest. If nothing else, it has one of the best voice casts ever assembled for an anime, both in the main ensemble and the episodic guest stars. Totally worth it for fans of the franchise.

I’d kinda rolled my eyes through the trailers for this, but I enjoyed the movie itself a lot. Its secret weapon is Jack Quaid and Amber Midthunder - the fact that they’re both so gosh darn charming, and that the movie takes a good chunk of time up front selling us on their attraction. The mayhem that follows is good - although the trailers do spoil a lot of the major beats - but it works less because of the gnarly violence than because we like these characters. Nathan’s cool, and you don’t want him to get hurt; even if he can’t feel it, you feel for him. And that’s why it works. It’s not rocket science; it’s just good meat and potatoes storytelling. But a lot of movies get it wrong. NOVOCAINE is dialed in just right. It’s frequently very funny, but it’s not one of these Marvel-style irony-poisoned “lol nothing matters” movies. It all matters a lot! The movie is endearingly earnest. The comedy comes from the absurdity of Nathan’s situation, and never from selling his character or motivations short. It’s honestly super refreshing to see a movie get that right - to ask us to laugh, but also to wince and to lean forward in our seats, because we genuinely like these characters and want to see them happy. That’s all it takes; but it eludes a lot of films these days. 

Anyway. Good stuff. Throw Quaid and Midthunder into the growing group of deserving new movie stars who aren’t touching superhero movies with a ten foot pole, and are building solid interesting careers as a result.

I think you could correctly accuse this movie of being kind of messy, and I could honestly reder that I just don’t care. The opportunity to spend 2 hours in the totally singular mind of Bong Joon-Ho is a hell of a gift, and even if MICKEY 17 is a bit unwieldy in the amount of ideas on its mind, I love watching those ideas play out. It’s a much stranger and sadder and more complicated movie than you’d think from the trailers. You could describe it of being SNOWPIERCER meets OKJA, but it’s also more complicated than just that. It’s zany in places, deeply introspective in others. Bombastic at times, painfully intimate elsewhere. Does social commentary with zero subtlety sometimes, and a lot of complexity and challenge elsewhere. Whenever you think you’ve got it pinned down, it has something else to say. And if it is “messy” - well, maybe figuring out how we live under capitalism with joy and purpose and without guilt is also a messy process. It’s an honest mess. Powerfully so at times. 

The point is that no one else living or dead would make a movie quite like this. And no one but Robert Pattinson would give the specific performance(s) he gives here. This film is just singular, an expression of immense thought and personality realized on a giant canvas with big studio resources. I love that. I love that I got to spend two hours watching this. I want to see it again. Thank god for Bong - we’re never going to be able to print out a copy of him. He’s one of a kind.

Well that was fucking spectacular. 

If you haven’t been following the news, this is now the highest grossing Chinese film, non-American film, and animated film of all time, and has basically shattered the idea of Hollywood global hegemony at the box office. And for good reason. It’s a spectacle in a way Hollywood is mostly too sclerotic to muster, in live-action or animation. The excess and intensity of this thing is frequently off the charts, and it visualizes the impossible scale of mythology in a way I’ve rarely seen depicted on screen. It’s not hard to understand why this caused a box office frenzy, in the same way TITANIC or AVATAR once did - it’s showing you things you haven’t seen before, wrapped in a package everyone can enjoy.  

Which is to say that, like NE ZHA 1, it’s also a family film very much in the model of a DreamWorks movie, with a lot of toilet humor and silly gags for the kids. Your mileage will vary on that - as in the first film, I think it’s hit or miss, though some jokes are pretty good - but it’s worth it for the spectacle, which is pretty singular. 

And as with that first film, I’m totally convinced this movie could be making absolute bank here in the States if the Chinese distributor partnered with an American studio, cast some big name talent for the dub, and gave it a big wide release. There’s nothing here that would be alienating for American audiences; it’s very much in the model of our animated blockbusters, just done on a much bigger scale. When China really wants to go in for the kill on Hollywood, they will be able to - they’ve basically mastered the big four-quadrant Hollywood tentpole model, in a way Hollywood itself can’t manage much anymore, and animated films like this would play no differently than a DreamWorks or Pixar film if given the right release. 

Anyway. I dug it. Not a great movie, necessarily, but a spectacular theatrical experience. And a big step up over the first film, too. This one ends by teeing up a third film, which I assume will be 5 hours long, absolutely melt everyone’s brain, and make $10 billion. It’s gonna be a trip.

This review may contain spoilers.

Holy fucking shit. 

I went into this totally blind, purposefully avoiding any details beyond the basic staff info. So I was floored from the opening moments when this turned out to not only be a Universal Century story, but an insane what if story that quickly starts branching out in wild ways, before settling into its new status quo for a truly bonkers story. I have no idea where this is going long term, but I know I loved every goddamn second of this. This is definitely what you get when you give a Gundam mega-otaku as talented and crazy as Hideaki Anno the reigns over the story. 

And what you get when you give Kazuya Tsurumaki the director’s chair. Amazing production that starts out relatively constrained, mimicking the original Gundam ‘79 aesthetic and style, before evolving into something that’s unmistakably Studio Khara, kaleidoscopic and chaotic and bursting with unwieldy personality (this 80 minute film has 3 full insert songs). Tremendous animation so far (and it should be - just about every anime studio in Japan is credited here as subcontractors). 

And an amazing IMAX experience. A shame it won’t be playing this way all weekend, not just for the animation, but for the SOUND, which is *incredible.* All the First Gundam music they use in the first half, reorchestrated and newly recorded, sounds amazing in full IMAX surround sound.

 But the whole thing is a trip. And unlike a lot of these tv anime premiere films, which package a few episodes but then end in the middle of the action, there is a full arc here. Lots more story to tell, obviously - this is, as it says, the Beginning - but it doesn’t end mid thought, and has a proper climax.

I wish this was 4 hours long. 

I mean, watching and listening to these Dylan performances is good enough all on its own. Such extraordinary, transcendent concert work. If anyone could ever turn me into a born again Christian, it would be Bob Dylan in the 1980s. 

But then this film goes totally God tier by hiring Michael fucking Shannon to give interstitial fire and brimstone preacher sermons. Holy shit. I didn’t know how much I needed this in my life, but I did. My god. I want to go to Michael Shannon’s church. 

One of the best concert films ever made.

It’s a crime - a violent, terrible crime - that this isn’t out on Blu-ray yet. Streaming bitrates can’t keep up. It’s such a cool image, such a weird and fun and evocative way to stage a cinematic concert. Give this a 4K disc with Dolby Vision and it would be demo material. 

The performances of course are amazing. I’d listened to the soundtrack several times without watching the film, and love it deeply. One of the things that makes Dylan so special is how often he reinterprets his songs, and this gives you a little taste of how creative he can be with his catalogue in concert.

I kinda enjoyed my time with this despite thinking it is actually a remarkably bad film. Like, damn near holistically bad. Bad in a bunch of ways that are interesting both on their own and in the ways they intermingle.

The biggest problem, as is the problem with most modern films trying to be 'horror comedies,' is that the film is so irony-poisoned, so caustic and cynical, that it is impossible for any single moment to feel even a little bit earnest. And 'earnest' is an essential ingredient for both horror AND comedy as genres - moreso than for many other genres, I think. You have to believe characters are human to want to see them survive, just as you do to find them and their circumstances funny. But if everybody is so completely 'over it,' seems so detached from life itself that their reaction to gruesome, grisly deaths is ALWAYS, at most, a shrug - well, then, these people can't be recognizably human, can they?

Oz Perkins wanted to be David Lynch in LONGLEGS, and he was too coolly detached to properly ape the style of the most singularly earnest filmmaker in cinema history. Here, he wants to be Sam Raimi, making an outrageous Looney Tunes-flavored horror comedy. But guess what? Sam Raimi is ALSO one of the most deeply earnest filmmakers alive today, and EVIL DEAD 2 is as good as it is in part because Ash, while a prick, is a loveable human prick who actually wants to preserve his own life.

What's extra weird about THE MONKEY though is that for all its ironic detachment, it's also trying to tell a story about fathers and sons and inherited trauma. It tells us so, directly, in its dialogue, several times. And there isn't a single second in the movie that actually develops that idea meaningfully in the characters or what they do. Hal's son is one of the most singularly underdeveloped screen figures I have ever seen. It's kind of amazing.

The cinematography is also terrible. It's shot at 2.00:1, "The Coward's Ratio," but every single composition has a ton of dead space at the top and bottom, like it was shot for cinemascope and then opened up in post (sort of like the IMAX version of a Marvel movie). It just looks bad. Every frame has so much wasted space. There's no visual dynamism to it. If I'd seen this on 35mm, I would have assumed the projectionist forgot to apply the matte. But that's obviously not a thing anymore.

The only thing that stops this from being 'holistically bad' is that Theo James is pretty good, and Tatiana Maslany - criminally underused - comes very close to squaring the circle between total irony and actual human investment and warmth. But that's because she's a genius.

Oz Perkins? Not so much.

When Andy Panda puts that adorable dog into a full on fucking SAW trap, I think my soul left my body for a moment. Total insanity.

Revisited this tonight for the first time in a few years. It’s been my favorite Coens movie since it came out (with the asterisk that I think NO COUNTRY is their best movie, but it also doesn’t really feel like a Coens movie - this is all them). 

And yet - coming back to the film a few years older, the movie struck me anew in so many ways. At 32, I find this movie so much more profoundly sad than I did at 20. Just devastatingly sad. That moment where he drives by Akron, where he knows he has a kid he’s never met, and ultimately chooses to quite literally not go down that road - only for the cat he abandoned to suddenly leap out of the darkness like a ghost? God damn. That part cut me to the core this time around. 

And that’s all true even though it also struck me much harder, at 32, what a colossal piece of shit Llewyn Davis is (the scene where he tries to get Jean’s husband to lend him money for an abortion, which is actually for Jean because Llewyn has been sleeping with her behind his back, is one of the greatest dirtbag moves in the history of the cinema). Self destructive, selfish, myopic. Unable to deal with his own emotions in anything resembling a healthy way. He absolutely deserves the beating he starts and ends the film receiving. 

And yet…we also can’t dismiss him out of hand, because there’s an awful lot of recognizable humanity in all of Llewyn’s many failures. Only natural for our hearts to break a little bit watching this guy so thoroughly fail to get his life even a little bit together. 

It sure says a lot about the Oscars (none of it good) that this got 2 nods while A COMPLETE UNKNOWN got 8. I don’t hate Mangold’s film, but boy, INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS has Bob Dylan on screen for about 10 seconds and has more to say about him than that entire biopic did. We spend all of the Coens’ film watching a guy who has talent, but lacks something essential to really make that leap to cultural relevancy; and then as he says Farewell, Bob Dylan takes the stage, and the distance Dylan had from this whole scene feels terrifyingly cavernous. There is no musical biopic nearly as good as this creative, infinitely soulful treatment of history.

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

An ongoing series of classic, obscure, or otherwise interesting movies reviewed at JonathanLack.Com for paid subscribers! A new review every week, and I'll keep updating all the films here on Letterboxd for the ongoing repertoire.

Visit JonathanLack.Com to sign up and read all my work!

• Purple Rain
• Under the Cherry Moon
• Batman
• Prometheus
• Alien: Covenant
• Manhunter
• Scarface
• Beetlejuice
• The Godfather
• The Godfather Part II

...plus 31 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

All the films on the syllabus for my "Intro to Cinema Studies" course (CINE 1502) at the University of Colorado Boulder, for the Spring 2025 semester.

• Sherlock Jr.
• Pompo the Cinephile
• The Life and Death of 9413, A Hollywood Extra
• Citizen Kane
• You've Got Beautiful Stairs, You Know...
• La Jetée
• Cléo from 5 to 7
• Eaux d'artifice
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
• Blanket Statement #1: Home Is Where the Heart Is

...plus 27 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The Great Gatsby
• Nineteen Eighty-Four

Everything on the syllabus for my Spring 2025 course "Animation and Identification" (CINE 4043) at the University of Colorado Boulder!

• Duck Amuck
• Fantasmagorie
• Gertie the Dinosaur
• The Artist's Dreams
• Bubbles
• Trolley Troubles
• Smile, Darn Ya, Smile!
• Hold the Wire
• Porky Pig's Feat
• The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics

...plus 82 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

List of all the films shown at the 2025 Brakhage Center Symposium at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Also exhibited, but not listed on Letterboxd, were Shambhavi Kaul's installation piece "Modes of Faltering" (2016) and a screen presentation of her pamphlet "In-Flight" (2017), along with Mike Hoolboom's "5 Walks" (2024) and in-progress work "How Deep Is Your Love?" (2025), and Lei Lei's "Moon Landing Plan (Remix)" (2011).

• Mothlight
• Cat's Cradle
• Loving
• Thigh Line Lyre Triangular
• Dog Star Man: Part II
• Two: Creeley/McClure
• Hymn to Her
• The Dante Quartet
• 21 Chitrakoot
• Mount Song

...plus 27 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Star Trek: The Motion Picture
2. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
3. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
4. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
5. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
6. Star Trek Beyond
7. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
8. Star Trek: Nemesis
9. Star Trek Into Darkness
10. Star Trek

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

Sept. 27-29 2024 at the Sie Film Center. I bought a to spend the whole weekend watching silent classics with live scores as a little celebration of finishing my dissertation. This list compiles everything screened at the fest with my brief notes on each.

• Beggars of Life
• The Sea Hawk
• The Organist at St. Vitus Cathedral
• The Symbol of the Unconquered
• Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze
• Annabelle Serpentine Dance
• The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots
• The Kiss
• Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory
• The Great Train Robbery

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

1. Halloween
2. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
3. Alien
4. The Thing
5. The Silence of the Lambs
6. The Shining
7. Halloween II
8. A Nightmare on Elm Street
9. The Evil Dead
10. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Just the theatrically-released Batman motion pictures

1. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
2. Batman Returns
3. The Batman
4. Batman
5. Batman
6. The Lego Batman Movie
7. Batman Begins
8. The Dark Knight
9. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
10. The Dark Knight Rises

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

Made in honor of the new Sight & Sound poll, these are what I would call the 'best' 100 films ever made, in my 'professional' critical opinion. Take that for what you will. 'Best' is different than 'favorite.' These are unranked and sorted in alphabetical order.

• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• All Quiet on the Western Front
• All That Jazz
• Amazing Grace
• The Battle of Algiers
• Battle Royale
• Beau Travail
• A Better Tomorrow
• Blade Runner
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

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

1. Violet Evergarden: The Movie
2. Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel III. Spring Song
3. Nomadland
4. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
5. Da 5 Bloods
6. Bill & Ted Face the Music
7. Hamilton
8. 8:46
9. Shiva Baby
10. Tenet

1. The Tree of Life
2. Melancholia
3. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
4. Shame
5. Moneyball
6. Tyrannosaur
7. Drive
8. K-On! The Movie
9. The Muppets
10. Beginners

God damn what a year for movies this was

1. Inherent Vice
2. Under the Skin
3. The Grand Budapest Hotel
4. Tamako Love Story
5. Whiplash
6. The Tribe
7. The Look of Silence
8. Nightcrawler
9. Calvary
10. How to Train Your Dragon 2

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

1. The Tree of Life
2. Mad Max: Fury Road
3. Inherent Vice
4. The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
5. A Silent Voice: The Movie
6. I Am Not Your Negro
7. PERSONA3 THE MOVIE #4 Winter of Rebirth
8. Under the Skin
9. Personal Shopper
10. Lemonade

1. Amazing Grace
2. Liz and the Blue Bird
3. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
4. Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms
5. Shoplifters
6. Dragon Ball Super: Broly
7. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
8. The Favourite
9. First Man
10. Suspiria

• The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
• Inherent Vice
• Mad Max: Fury Road
• A Silent Voice: The Movie
• Personal Shopper
• Amazing Grace
• Parasite
• Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel III. Spring Song
• Drive My Car
• In Front of Your Face

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

1. A Silent Voice: The Movie
2. I Am Not Your Negro
3. Lemonade
4. PERSONA3 THE MOVIE #4 Winter of Rebirth
5. Shin Godzilla
6. Silence
7. Your Name.
8. Certain Women
9. Jackie
10. Moonlight

Mathematically accurate ranking of Tarantino films. Pretend Kill Bill 1 and 2 are one ranking, I don't consider them separate films.

1. Jackie Brown
2. Pulp Fiction
3. Death Proof
4. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
5. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
6. Django Unchained
7. Inglourious Basterds
8. Reservoir Dogs
9. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
10. The Hateful Eight

My picks for the best Christmas movies. Scientifically accurate, guaranteed.

1. A Christmas Carol
2. The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya
3. The Muppet Christmas Carol
4. The Holdovers
5. It's a Wonderful Life
6. Mickey's Christmas Carol
7. Elf
8. Gremlins
9. Batman Returns
10. A Charlie Brown Christmas

Ongoing list. By "2023" I mean "commercially released in the United States in 2023," which doesn't always line up with how Letterboxd classifies release date. Unranked...for now!

• Anatomy of a Fall
• Asteroid City
• Barbie
• BlackBerry
• Bottoms
• The Boy and the Heron
• Evil Dead Rise
• Godzilla Minus One
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
• The Holdovers

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

1. Saw
2. Saw VI
3. Saw X
4. Saw III
5. Saw II
6. Spiral: From the Book of Saw
7. Saw IV
8. Saw 3D
9. Saw V
10. Jigsaw

1. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
2. Porco Rosso
3. Malcolm X
4. The Muppet Christmas Carol
5. Batman Returns
6. Hard Boiled
7. Police Story 3: Super Cop
8. Orlando
9. Reservoir Dogs
10. Aladdin

1. Princess Mononoke
2. Fireworks
3. Lost Highway
4. Happy Together
5. Eve's Bayou
6. Jackie Brown
7. Titanic
8. Mother and Son
9. Level Five
10. Perfect Blue

1. Fallen Angels
2. Heat
3. Whisper of the Heart
4. Ghost in the Shell
5. A Close Shave
6. Sense and Sensibility
7. Clueless
8. Toy Story
9. Babe
10. When It Rains

1. Sonatine
2. Three Colours: Blue
3. The Piano
4. Blue
5. Groundhog Day
6. Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
7. Patlabor 2: The Movie
8. The Nightmare Before Christmas
9. The Wrong Tros
10. Farewell My Concubine

1. Chungking Express
2. Three Colours: Red
3. Pom Poko
4. Vive L'Amour
5. Pulp Fiction
6. Three Colours: White
7. Speed
8. The Lion King
9. Bottle Rocket
10. Getting Any?

1. Kids Return
2. Bottle Rocket
3. Mission: Impossible
4. Fargo
5. That Thing You Do!
6. Muppet Treasure Island
7. Dragon Ball: The Path to Power
8. Lupin the Third: Dead or Alive
9. The Watermelon Woman
10. Jerry Maguire

1. Rushmore
2. The Thin Red Line
3. The Mask of Zorro
4. The Big Lebowski
5. Babe: Pig in the City
6. Saving Private Ryan
7. Following
8. Mulan
9. Gundam Wing: The Endless Waltz
10. A Bug's Life

1. The Straight Story
2. The Matrix
3. My Neighbors the Yamadas
4. Eyes Wide Shut
5. Beau Travail
6. Kikujiro
7. Galaxy Quest
8. Being John Malkovich
9. The Iron Giant
10. Toy Story 2

1. Howl's Moving Castle
2. Spider-Man 2
3. Collateral
4. The Hand
5. Tropical Malady
6. The Bourne Supremacy
7. Shaun of the Dead
8. House of Flying Daggers
9. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
10. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

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

1. Punch-Drunk Love
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
3. Hero
4. Catch Me If You Can
5. Lilo & Stitch
6. City of God
7. Voices of a Distant Star
8. Godzilla Against MechaGodzilla
9. The Bourne Identity
10. Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones

Matrix Reloaded/Matrix Revolutions count as one entry, hence Top 15. Holy cow this was a packed year for movies.

1. Goodbye, Dragon Inn
2. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
3. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
4. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
5. Lost in Translation
6. Memories of Murder
7. The Matrix Reloaded
8. The Matrix Revolutions
9. Oldboy
10. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

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

1. Battle Royale
2. In the Mood for Love
3. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
4. Mysterious Object at Noon
5. The Gleaners and I
6. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
7. Chicken Run
8. Cast Away
9. Memento
10. Brother

1. The New World
2. Kingdom of Heaven
3. One Piece: Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island
4. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith
5. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
6. A History of Violence
7. Lady Vengeance
8. Pride & Prejudice
9. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
10. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan

What a year for movies this was. Yes, I've got both Darjeeling Limited and Hotel Chevalier on here, They're really one big movie, but I've put them next to each other lacking any better way to sort them.

1. There Will Be Blood
2. No Country for Old Men
3. The Darjeeling Limited
4. Hotel Chevalier
5. Eastern Promises
6. The Garden of Sinners: Overlooking View
7. Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone
8. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
9. Michael Clayton
10. The Bourne Ultimatum

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

This was, in retrospect, a terrible year for film, with a lot of movie I would have listed at the time having aged like milk (The Social Network, Scott Pilgrim, etc.). Oof. Love a lot of these, though my feelings on Inception and Black Swan are more complicated than they were back then. Top 3 rock. Good year for animation around the world. Shutter Island has an ending I've literally never been able to shake.

1. The Secret World of Arrietty
2. How to Train Your Dragon
3. Toy Story 3
4. Black Swan
5. The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town
6. Inception
7. True Grit
8. Shutter Island
9. Mobile Suit Gundam 00 The Movie: -A Wakening of the Trailblazer-
10. Let Me In

A big, weird, wonderful year for movies. This was the year my dad died and I haven't gone back to a lot of these, because they're wrapped up in a lot of heavy memories. Some of them were important in how I processed that - Cloud Atlas especially.

1. Moonrise Kingdom
2. Stories We Tell
3. Cloud Atlas
4. Wolf Children
5. The Master
6. One Piece Film: Z
7. Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo
8. The Grey
9. Lincoln
10. s Ha

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

1. Mad Max: Fury Road
2. Knight of Cups
3. Creed
4. Steve Jobs
5. Anomalisa
6. PERSONA3 THE MOVIE #3 Falling Down
7. Brooklyn
8. Blackhat
9. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
10. Carol

Legendary year. The big 3 at the top all in my inner circle of all-time faves. Wow.

1. Spirited Away
2. Mulholland Drive
3. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
4. The Royal Tenenbaums
5. Gosford Park
6. Y Tu Mamá También
7. Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack
8. Ocean's Eleven
9. Monsters, Inc.
10. Monsoon Wedding

• Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
• Spider-Man 2
• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
• Superman

These are all the films I showed my students for INTRO TO FILM THEORY in Spring of 2023 at the University of Iowa!

• A Trip to the Moon
• Battleship Potemkin
• Modern Times
• The Novelist's Film
• Good Morning
• Sambizanga
• Dragon Inn
• Goodbye, Dragon Inn
• Blue Velvet
• Portrait of a Lady on Fire

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

My ranking of all the Fast & Furious films. Each of these has a review too, so here's all my Fast & Furious hot takes all in one place!

1. Furious 7
2. Fast Five
3. The Fast and the Furious
4. Fast & Furious
5. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
6. 2 Fast 2 Furious
7. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
8. Fast & Furious 6
9. The Fate of the Furious
10. F9

Mathematically correct and unimpeachable ranking of the theatrically released Star Wars films

1. The Empire Strikes Back
2. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith
3. Star Wars
4. Return of the Jedi
5. Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
6. Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones
7. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
8. Solo: A Star Wars Story
9. Star Wars: The Clone Wars
10. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

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

It says what it says

1. Weathering with You
2. Your Name.
3. Suzume
4. The Garden of Words
5. Voices of a Distant Star
6. 5 Centimeters per Second
7. She and Her Cat
8. The Place Promised in Our Early Days
9. Children Who Chase Lost Voices

Wow this was actually a pretty rich year for cinema, looking back now.

1. The New World

   All three versions would rank as the best film of 2005 (it's one of the greatest films ever made) but the 3-hour extended cut is the best version of this masterpiece

2. Kingdom of Heaven

   Director's Cut specifically, obviously. Theatrical cut probably wouldn't place here at all!

3. One Piece: Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island

   The most fascinating auteur-driven anime franchise film since THE CASTLE OF CAGLIOSTRO

4. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
5. A History of Violence
6. Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith

   The best Star Wars movie after Empire and the original. Don't at me.

7. Lady Vengeance
8. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
9. Pride & Prejudice
10. No Direction Home: Bob Dylan

You can read the full list at weeklystuff.substack.com/p/the-top-10-films-of-2022

1. In Front of Your Face
2. Women Talking
3. The Novelist's Film
4. Everything Everywhere All at Once
5. Pearl
6. Inu-Oh
7. One Piece Film Red
8. Top Gun: Maverick
9. Broker
10. Glass Onion

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

2006 was the first year I ever made a top 10 list. I was 14. It did not look much like this at all, though Rocky Balboa and Casino Royale were there. But man, this was a cool year for movies.

1. Miami Vice
2. Casino Royale
3. Inland Empire
4. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
5. Rocky Balboa
6. Inside Man
7. Children of Men
8. Curse of the Golden Flower
9. The Prestige
10. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

This is an extremely weird top 10 list and absolutely nothing like the one I actually made at the time but goddamn, those Top 4 and particularly those top 2 are all-timers.

1. The Garden of Sinners: Paradox Spiral
2. Ponyo
3. Man on Wire
4. Wendy and Lucy
5. 25th Anniversary Studio Ghibli Concert
6. Speed Racer
7. In Bruges
8. The Garden of Sinners: The Hollow Shrine
9. Rachel Getting Married
10. Dragon Ball: Yo! Son Goku and His Friends Return!!

What a crazy year for animation this was.

1. Summer Wars
2. Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance
3. Fantastic Mr. Fox
4. Coraline
5. The Garden of Sinners: A Study in Murder (Part 2)
6. One Piece Film: Strong World
7. A Serious Man
8. Halloween II
9. Where the Wild Things Are
10. Up in the Air