4v291o

Watched on Wednesday May 21, 2025.

so deftly constructed it made my jaw drop even watching it in chunks over the course of a week or two, weaving stories and characters in and out of each other in ways that create enlightening conclusions. burns depicts history not as a brick-stacking accumulation of events but as a living thing, interconnected in a composition so grand you start to think of it as intelligent design. every episode's opening theme is the national anthem, a choice that i found funny at first but which seemed more suitable every time i heard it. baseball, for burns, isn't the product of american society. it's the other way around.

after Talk To Me i thought these guys were rough but had potential. had i seen this first i probably would have just assumed they were hacks. you could probably edit this into something much better. let moments linger longer instead of rushing so much, make things more ambiguous so the tension really hits, stop overexplaining everything, but most importantly please please please cut that godawful score. these guys are not entirely untalented (there's some properly freaky shit in this) but they need to learn to let an image stand on its own. also they need to not spoil the movie in their cutesy little intro to the amc mystery movie night like what the hell were they thinking.

Watched on Friday May 16, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday May 14, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday May 14, 2025.

This review may contain spoilers.

Everyone seems to like at least one Mission: Impossible movie, and no one seems to agree on what makes them likable. Maybe you’re a snobbish aesthete who insists the only good one is Brian de Palma’s, maybe you think the series lost a step after it stopped being an auteur showcase, maybe you think it actually got better when Christopher McQuarrie took over full-time director duties. People love posting their series rankings on social media once a year. I’ve never seen two lists exactly alike.

So let me begin this review by laying out my priors. My favorite Mission: Impossible film is the fifth, Rogue Nation, McQuarrie’s first. The film is wall-to-wall spycraft, lies and masks and plots, getting its big splashy stunt out of the way in the cold open and growing smaller and smaller in scale as it goes on. It starts with Ethan Hunt clinging to the side of a massive airplane, and it ends with a footchase and a knife fight. Its pivotal opera sequence is a marvel of moving pieces and escalating complications and double-triple-quadruple crosses, outdoing (sorry not sorry) de Palma on his own turf. That opera sequence is Mission: Impossible to me. At their best, these films pivot around setpieces not of traditional action but of deception, not beating the bad guys in a fight but tricking them with clever misdirection. Ghost Protocol has a great one of these; while Ethan climbs the Burj Khalifa, the team uses trickery to make two targets believe they are meeting each other in the same room, when in fact each is meeting one half of the team on different floors of the hotel. Fallout has a fun one too, where the entire crew plus director Alec Baldwin put on a show for traitorous John Lark and trick him into confessing his secret identity. It’s why the second and third films fall flat for me despite their particular qualities. It doesn’t feel right for Ethan Hunt to solve problems with shootouts. At their best, these are zippy capers, more Ocean’s Eleven than John Wick. Villains have never mattered much to Mission: Impossible because the real villain is always the situation—a problem that must be solved or an item that must be retrieved, and the escalating complications that get in the way of that goal.

Dead Reckoning, the franchise’s last film and former Part One, was a letdown so crushing it stayed with me for hours afterwards. The bizarrely bleak tone, the plodding pace, the endless talky exposition scenes that only increased the space between action beats more sparse than ever….Dead Reckoning was a dead fish: flabby, mushy, unpleasant. You can’t win me over with Brian de Palma imitations. I don’t even like the real Brian de Palma very much. And as irrelevant as villains are to the series, the Entity and its right-hand man Gabriel were a major whiff. The Entity itself is only intermittently frightening, all its threats (to truth itself and the nature of reality) abstract and unexplored. One standout moment has the Entity imitate Benji’s voice on a radio directing a sprinting Ethan in exactly the wrong direction. An interesting notion for a series about lies, but the film never seemed interested in exploring it.

The Final Reckoning starts promisingly where this idea is concerned, though. Two months after the last film, the entire world has fallen apart due to the Entity spreading fake images and videos and ideas across the internet. No one is living in the same reality anymore, and the division this has caused has led to protests and riots and martial law. The Entity has also started a doomsday cult whose worshippers are seeded around the globe. When Ethan (who starts the film disavowed and on the run, of course) is spotted by agents at a party, he tries to throw them off: “Are you sure it’s really me?” For years the IMF has relied on targets being unaware of what’s real and what isn’t. Now, deception has gone global. That the Entity is Ethan’s fault is true in more ways than one (brace yourself for the looniest of the film’s several insane callbacks to previous entries; we’ll get to those in a bit) but it’s more interesting as an idea—the implication of a genie let out of a bottle—than as a literal fact.

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Watched on Sunday May 11, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 9, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 8, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday May 6, 2025.

It’s difficult to stomach the fact that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been around for more than half my life. Iron Man came out just a couple months before I turned 14. 14 is a dangerous age for a young cinephile. Just about every big movie is being made specifically to grab your attention, and if you’re not careful your taste can get cast in concrete. I saw The Dark Knight four times in theaters that summer. I might as well have been experimenting with heroin.

Thankfully, I survived my brush with disaster, and I’ve been a committed MCU hater for most of the franchise’s existence. I being let down by The Avengers, which seemed less epic in scope and scale than I was expecting, but it was Captain America: The Winter Soldier that really turned me off the enterprise. That was a dispiriting year for superhero cinema; everything from Winter Soldier to X-Men: Days of Future Past was being lauded as the genre’s pinnacle, but they were all starting to strike me as more brand management than actual entertainment. By the time Civil War came around, I was a committed contrarian.

In the time since my pan of Avengers: Endgame, most of the rest of society seems to have caught up with me. People are tired of Marvel now for the same reasons I was over a decade ago: the films are tedious branding exercises, they all have the same tired and cringe-inducing sense of humor that undercuts their emotional beats, they look hideously grey and drab….this is all now approaching popular consensus. I should be gloating and told-you-so-ing. Alas, I cannot. What I’m about to say may shock and appall you: I saw Thunderbolts* this weekend, and I thought it was pretty good.

While I don’t make it a habit to roll out to theaters for Marvel movies anymore, I do (to my shame) keep up with them, much in the same way you might “keep up with” a former enemy by checking their social media for any crumbs of schadenfreude. I went to Thunderbolts* as part of a deal with my wife, who likes Florence Pugh and thought that the film might rise to the level of “okay”. Her part of the deal was to see A Minecraft Movie with me, which I was similarly convinced might be a decent time. That bet paid off, so I entered Thunderbolts* with moderate hopes. Perhaps this would be the first MCU movie in a while that wouldn’t make me want to kill myself.

Sadly, it nearly had exactly that effect, for what other response could I have to genuinely enjoying a Marvel movie in 2025? Let alone a Marvel movie about (barf) found family and trauma. Is it a personal failing? After all, Thunderbolts* isn’t that far removed from the MCU formula I’ve found rancid for so long. And yet as I sat in that theater watching scene after scene by, I found myself unable to find fault with them. My normal rubric for assessing a Marvel movie felt irrelevant, not because Thunderbolts* was a reinvention, but because it was for once an execution that actually worked.

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Watched on Saturday May 3, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 27, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 27, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 27, 2025.

Watched on Saturday April 26, 2025.

Watched on Thursday April 24, 2025.

Watched on Thursday April 24, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 20, 2025.

Watched on Saturday April 19, 2025.

Watched on Thursday April 17, 2025.

Watched on Saturday April 12, 2025.

Watched on Thursday April 10, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday April 9, 2025.

wonderful film about how guns make people insane. keystone entry in male tearjerker cinema.

Watched on Sunday April 6, 2025.

Watched on Friday April 4, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday April 2, 2025.

Watched on Sunday March 30, 2025.

Watched on Saturday March 29, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 28, 2025.

Watched on Sunday March 23, 2025.

Watched on Sunday March 23, 2025.

Watched on Saturday March 22, 2025.

Watched on Sunday March 16, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday March 12, 2025.

Watched on Saturday March 15, 2025.

Watched on Friday March 14, 2025.

Watched on Sunday March 9, 2025.

hey! this is a promo post to let people know that the Roxy Cinema in NYC will be hosting a screening of this really great film on March 29th and i'll be moderating a q&a with the director. highly recommend coming to watch the film, which is riveting and upsetting and bleakly comic, and see our conversation! get tickets here!

PWSA is a poet of hideous CGI landscapes, the painter of soft, hazy light. Monster Hunter, for all its buddy-movie joys, got away from his talent for impressionist computery muck. the world of In the Lost Lands is inspiringly repugnant. this is not a George Miller-style post-apocalypse playground. you certainly wouldn't want to live here! not when every location on the map is called something like Evil Ridge or Scary Pit. it's very true to the spirit of GRRM narrative too, i think. the guy who brought us "what is Aragorn's tax policy" would of course be interested in getting inside the head of a witch who fulfills ironic backfiring wishes, not to mention all the religious zealotry and the evil queen who's basically a Cersei prototype. in general though it feels very George to tell a story about these kind of stock fantasy characters being punished for trying to be things that they're not.

Watched on Thursday March 6, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday March 5, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday March 4, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday March 4, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday March 4, 2025.

Watched on Sunday March 2, 2025.

Watched on Monday March 3, 2025.

Watched on Monday March 3, 2025.

1. Eephus
2. The Shrouds
3. Sinners
4. The Life of Chuck
5. Final Destination Bloodlines
6. Black Bag
7. Presence
8. In the Lost Lands
9. Ne Zha 2
10. Den of Thieves 2: Pantera

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Belfast, Maine
2. Welfare
3. Aspen
4. Near Death
5. Central Park
6. Blind
7. Deaf
8. High School II
9. La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet
10. Ex Libris: The New York Public Library

...plus 37 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

includes stuff from my 2023 list that got distribution this year

1. Caught by the Tides
2. I Saw the TV Glow
3. Trap
4. Cloud
5. Evil Does Not Exist
6. Afternoons of Solitude
7. Chime
8. Eephus
9. The Beast
10. Better Man

...plus 58 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. His Motorbike, Her Island
2. The Blair Witch Project
3. Welfare
4. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
5. Alita: Battle Angel
6. Cemetery of Splendor
7. F for Fake
8. Tarnation
9. The Visit
10. Goodbye, Dragon Inn

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

1. His Motorbike, Her Island
2. The Blair Witch Project
3. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
4. F for Fake
5. Alita: Battle Angel
6. Welfare
7. Cemetery of Splendor
8. Tarnation
9. All That Jazz
10. Lake Mungo

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

1. The Zone of Interest
2. Menus-Plaisirs, les Troisgros
3. May December
4. Asteroid City
5. Killers of the Flower Moon
6. Knock at the Cabin
7. Oppenheimer
8. Evil Does Not Exist
9. Skinamarink
10. The Boy and the Heron

...plus 59 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Alita: Battle Angel
2. The Irishman
3. Deadwood: The Movie
4. Glass
5. Uncut Gems
6. Parasite
7. Mister America
8. Gemini Man
9. High Life
10. Escape Room

...plus 45 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Saint Omer
2. Crimes of the Future
3. Nope
4. The Fabelmans
5. We're All Going to the World's Fair
6. Skinamarink
7. Inu-Oh
8. Benediction
9. RRR
10. Jackass Forever

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

1. His Motorbike, Her Island
2. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
3. The Blair Witch Project
4. F for Fake
5. Alita: Battle Angel
6. Tarnation
7. Cloverfield
8. Little Shop of Horrors
9. All That Jazz
10. The Ring

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

1. Blue
2. Welfare
3. Messiah of Evil
4. The Last Temptation of Christ
5. A Touch of Zen
6. All That Jazz
7. Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
8. Orlando
9. Lost Highway
10. Syndromes and a Century

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

1. Twin Peaks: The Return
2. Cemetery of Splendor
3. Blackhat
4. Alita: Battle Angel
5. Phoenix
6. Resident Evil: Retribution
7. Hanagatami
8. Goodbye to Language
9. The Visit
10. 88:88

...plus 34 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. First Cow
2. Wife of a Spy
3. The History of the Seattle Mariners
4. The Empty Man
5. Monster Hunter
6. The Father
7. The Invisible Man
8. The Last Dance
9. Soul
10. Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)

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

by u.s. release date or also just whenever i saw them. no rules who cares

1. Memoria
2. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
3. Old
4. The Matrix Resurrections
5. We're All Going to the World's Fair
6. Days
7. Drive My Car
8. Annette
9. Zack Snyder's Justice League
10. Venom: Let There Be Carnage

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

• American Psycho
• As Tears Go By
• Better Luck Tomorrow
• Bound
• Chess of the Wind
• Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
• Cure
• Death Note
• Dragon Inn
• Ghostwatch

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Immemory
• Switching – Goodbye Me
• Sungazer
• The Lovers
• Seven Weeks
• I, the Worst of All
• The Midnight Swim
• The Discarnates
• And God Said to Cain
• Muscle

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

1. His Motorbike, Her Island
2. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
3. The Blair Witch Project
4. F for Fake
5. Alita: Battle Angel
6. Tarnation
7. Cloverfield
8. Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
9. Little Shop of Horrors
10. Resident Evil: Retribution

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

1. His Motorbike, Her Island
2. The Blair Witch Project
3. F for Fake
4. A Woman Under the Influence
5. Resident Evil: Retribution
6. Cloverfield
7. Little Shop of Horrors
8. Lake Mungo
9. Alita: Battle Angel
10. The Ring

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

this is a ranked list of my favorite films of all time as of 2019

1. His Motorbike, Her Island
2. F for Fake
3. Resident Evil: Retribution
4. Blackhat
5. Cloverfield
6. Little Shop of Horrors
7. Prince of Darkness
8. Phoenix
9. The Ring
10. Alita: Battle Angel

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Dark Waters
• Foxcatcher

1. Prince of Darkness
2. Lake Mungo
3. Klute
4. Sada
5. Green Snake
6. Mikey and Nicky
7. Halloween II
8. Unfriended: Dark Web
9. The Trial
10. In the Mouth of Madness

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

movies designed to be sagely nodded along with

• Jojo Rabbit
• Knives Out
• Booksmart
• Captain Marvel
• Vice
• Halloween
• Boy Erased
• Roma
• Capernaum
• Love, Simon

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

• The Innkeepers
• The Intouchables
• Blue Jasmine
• Elysium
• Escape from Tomorrow
• The Raid 2
• The Imitation Game
• Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
• Room
• Swiss Army Man

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

all these films are trans. i don't make the rules.

• Alita: Battle Angel
• Personal Shopper
• Split
• 10 Cloverfield Lane
• The Visit
• Phoenix
• Under the Skin
• Inside Llewyn Davis
• Resident Evil: Afterlife
• Jennifer's Body

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

By U.S. release date only.

1. Hanagatami
2. The Other Side of the Wind
3. Shirkers
4. Claire's Camera
5. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
6. BlacKkKlansman
7. Mirai
8. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
9. the Girls
10. If Beale Street Could Talk

...plus 47 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Twin Peaks: The Return
2. Phantom Thread
3. Lady Bird
4. Call Me by Your Name
5. Good Time
6. John Wick: Chapter 2
7. A Cure for Wellness
8. Get Out
9. Split
10. Mudbound

...plus 28 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Saw some of these in 2015, but they're getting official releases this year, so on the list they go.

1. Silence
2. Moonlight
3. Shin Godzilla
4. O.J.: Made in America
5. 10 Cloverfield Lane
6. Hail, Caesar!
7. 88:88
8. The Nice Guys
9. Kate Plays Christine
10. Lemonade

...plus 38 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Every film released in 2015 that I've seen, ranked from best to worst. An ongoing list.

1. Carol
2. Blackhat
3. Phoenix
4. The Duke of Burgundy
5. Experimenter
6. The Visit
7. Magic Mike XXL
8. Tangerine
9. Entertainment
10. Appropriate Behavior

...plus 63 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

First-time watches only. An ongoing list. Best to worst.

1. Persona
2. Rashomon
3. House
4. Mulholland Drive
5. Close-Up
6. The Sting
7. Rebel Without a Cause
8. Before Sunset
9. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
10. The Night of the Hunter

...plus 64 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

These are the top 5 films I watched in each month of 2014. Each row is a month, starting with January (duh).

• The Act of Killing
• Her
• Philomena
• In Bruges
• The Square
• The Lego Movie
• Tokyo Story
• The Double Life of Véronique
• La Haine
• RoboCop

...plus 50 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Every 2014 release I've seen, ranked from best to worst.

1. Under the Skin
2. Goodbye to Language
3. Inherent Vice
4. Nymphomaniac
5. Listen Up Philip
6. The Babadook
7. Selma
8. Over the Garden Wall
9. Why Don't You Play in Hell?
10. The Tale of The Princess Kaguya

...plus 70 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Woof, talk about an unwieldy title. Gotta work on something cleaner. Anyway, these are the top 5 films I watched in each month of 2015. Each row is a month, starting with January (duh).

• Selma
• Breathless
• Appropriate Behavior
• They Came Together
• Pompeii
• I, the Worst of All
• Song of the Sea
• Sullivan's Travels
• Jupiter Ascending
• Flashdance

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

First-time watches only. An ongoing list. Oldest-to-newest.

Closer to the end of the year, I'll probably rank my favorites.

• How They Rob Men in Chicago
• The Black Hand
• The Dancing Pig
• A Corner in Wheat
• The Land Beyond the Sunset
• Where Are My Children?
• Modern Times
• Sullivan's Travels
• The Battle of San Pietro
• Viva Zapata!

...plus 32 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I'll be coming back to this from time to time to see how much my opinions change.

1. Inside Llewyn Davis

   "Tell him, 'Llewyn has the cat.'"

   "'Llewyn is the cat,' got it."

2. The Act of Killing

   "War crimes are defined by the winners. I'm a winner."

3. Upstream Color

   "I have to apologize. I was born with a disfigurement where my head is made of the same material as the sun."

4. 12 Years a Slave

   "I don't want to survive. I want to live."

5. Blue Is the Warmest Color

   "I have infinite tenderness for you, and I will my whole life."

6. s Ha

   "It's just this apartment is very... aware of itself."

7. Short Term 12

   "There is no way not to tell this right. It is a storyteller's wet dream."

8. Enough Said
9. All Is Lost

   "All is lost here, except for soul and body - that is, what's left of them - and a half-day's ration."

10. Computer Chess

    "Computers are gonna start dating each other?"

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

The worst films that I saw, anyway.

1. Saving Mr. Banks
2. Elysium
3. Salinger
4. Now You See Me
5. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
6. Escape from Tomorrow
7. Lovelace
8. Oz the Great and Powerful
9. The ABCs of Death
10. Despicable Me 2

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