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This movie is the tatty pink robe that Douglas wears in the film when he's writing. A warm, cozy comfort that lulls you with images of snowfall on college-town Victorians and Craftsmans and the bookish parties and tiny dramas happening inside—but one that's maybe also a bit frayed around the edges and uses too much voiceover. I can forgive it its faults because it makes me sentimental for the half of my life lived on or near campuses.

Hadn't seen it in many, many years, but was reminded of it while listening to the folks on The Big Picture podcast draft movies from the year 2000. Rewatching it made me miss the days when a story could be aimless. This thing meanders every which way, and it's great! Helped by good performances all around, too. Sometimes it's nice to just sit with interesting characters.

This movie is embarrassing now, a fictionalized retelling of how Bush-era bureaucrats conned us into the Iraq War with falsified claims of WMDs—but here presented largely from the perspective of a theoretical brave soldier (Matt Damon) who uncovers the truth with help from a CIA operative, and bravely stands up to reveal it all to major news organizations in the end. Feels like a Pentagon-approved bit of hand-waving to keep the blame and focus on the presidential istration, even though the military got plenty of blood on its hands during the war, too. The utter sanctimony of Damon grabbing Kinnear by the lapels in the final minutes and shouting, "The reasons we go to war always matter! It's all that matters! It fucking matters!" Just ... ugh.

And the frenetic, hand-held, quick-cutting style gets so distracting so fast. I know it's a Greengrass signature, but it works better in his docudramas like Bloody Sunday and United 93. Here, as in the Bourne movies, the action just becomes muddled from shot to shot, undercutting moments of tension rather than escalating them.

Incredibly solid physical performance from Jeanne Goursaud. Made the extended oners of hand-to-hand combat (maybe some of them were cheated oners, but whatever) a lot of fun to watch. I always prefer an action movie where the hero takes their body to the absolute limit over one where they dispatch everyone with ease.

The story's ludicrous, but it's appropriate that the bad guy is a bad guy because the US government treated him like shit for too long. The gaslighting subplot gets a bit tedious, though. We know she came with her kid. We know she'll eventually believe again that she came with her kid. Get back to the fights. We're here for the fights.
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EDIT: I went and started looking at other reviews after writing mine, and I just wanna say how delightful it is reading the translated reviews from Netflix viewers all around the globe. The big, red "N"! Bringing everyone together! Makes me want to work more international features into my rotation.

A tight, grim little thing. irable for what it tries to do with essentially one set, I suppose. Gordon-Levitt's effective as a pilot with no good options. Story-wise, it's a little convenient that the one hijacker has a change of heart, but otherwise the script plays fair.

Maybe almost too fair. It's all so matter-of-fact. Like one of Paul Greengrass's features based on true events, except this is a fictional —a seemingly accurate minute-by-minute speculative portrayal of the worst hour and a half in a pilot's life, presented with no score and minimal visual flair. If that's something you're interested in, then here's your movie.

The film never reaches greater heights, though. (I guess that's a bit of a pun, now that I think about it. Oops.)

Sat straight up when the opening credits revealed that this is a Michael Showalter t (and co-written by him and Jennifer Westfeldt!). I thought to myself, "Should I be expecting a very different movie?"

But no, this is what I expected: a gentle romance with some light comedy on the side. Never quite rises above being just fine and benign. Anne Hathaway elevates the whole thing by a full letter grade, if I were to give letter grades.

Very Succession-coded but leans even heavier into satire. Had some laughs. Felt like a play, given the single-location setting and all the fun repartee. The tech lingo was spot on and got funnier the more ridiculous the situation got. Loses a little bit of steam in the final twenty minutes, maybe. I could see some thinking it's just Succession lite, but I had a good time with it.

Was quite stressed! But also laughed! Great job, movie!

I feel like every director should have to make at least one feature like this. Emma Seligman's able to do more with a $200,000 budget and two sets than most do with 100 times that.

And it's also proof that not everything has to be a 2.75-hour epic. It packs so much into just 78 minutes! As always, it's about how the filmmaker uses the space, not about how much space they take up.

I love that you can plunk Sally Hawkins down in a horror movie and have her do her sometimes effervescent, sometimes tender Sally Hawkins thing and it effectively switches from charming to creepy. You need her here, too, for the emotional wallop at the end. (Props also to Billy Barratt and Sora Wong for keeping pace with her.)

Interesting choice to explain so little about the occult shit and how Hawkins's character found her way into it, but probably a wise decision in the end. Too much backstory would've bogged the whole thing down.

As it stands, the film successfully delivers creeps and squicks and has some interesting things to say about grief and loss, but it maybe feels a shade shaggier than Talk To Me.

What a waste of Katherine Waterston. What a waste of Lili Taylor. What a waste of so much of the talent here, really. After perusing Wikipedia, I guess I haven't seen India Fowler or Fina Strazza or Suzanna Son in anything before, but they're all doing what they can with the miserable material. I died of embarrassment for everyone involved when the dance-off started.

The script seems specifically tailored for second-screen viewing. Motivations are threadbare. Jokes are mild/mid. We're reminded over and over of the main character's dark family past because people keep bringing up. We get it! Her mom's rumored to have killed her dad! Is there a reason to keep mentioning it, other than that it's one of the only bits of development she's given?

Direction's also bland as hell. Nary an added thrill to be felt via the lighting, shot selection, and editing—and the kills are filmed perfunctorily, like the crew didn't want to bother with coverage and just wanted to wrap this thing up as quickly as possible.

Doesn't tell you much that you didn't already know if you were following the story at the time. Kinda interesting as a look at a significant instance of the public turning on the media in large numbers for reporting that they didn't like. Straight-down-the-middle direction from Barry Levinson.

A chore to sit through. Has the basic trappings of a movie without ever feeling like a real movie.

Nobody has chemistry with anybody. A full third of the dialogue is just reiterations of information we've already been given. Kraskinski plays a charmless Indiana Jones clone, but with none of the traits that make Indiana Jones fun to watch, and the third act is a straight rip-off of the Grail-selection scene in Last Crusade.

I can't imagine anybody did this for anything but the paycheck.

Spent the first 80 minutes begging this movie to pick a direction, then was unhappy with the direction it chose. So much tonal confusion. A lazy, half-baked version of Fargo-esque darkness hidden beneath Midwestern nice.

This was apparently produced from one of the top Blacklist scripts of 2013? Would be curious to read it, to see how we got from there to here. Sometimes a movie needs a few studio notes.

Look, is this mostly an excuse to put Clooney and Pitt together and let the banter fly? Yeah.

But I still had fun with it. Two fixers getting competitive—then getting collaborative—after ending up on the same job is a good conceit. I'm guessing I won't feel compelled to put it on again anytime soon, but it's a perfectly fine one-off.

This review may contain spoilers.

Got worried when the first half hour played out like a clip show, interspersing flashbacks and exposition so exhaustively that it didn’t just hold my hand through the summary but actively shackled me to it. Nothing for me to do but go, “Uh huh, uh huh, yes, I all this. Thank you. Can we please get this thing moving?” I understand it’s for all the people who didn’t do a full rewatch of the previous seven installments, but it’s still a lot.

And then they’ve gotta do even more exposition for another half hour to set the stakes of this movie, first in a talk with the Entity, then in a talk with the president, and it’s so much that they barely leave themselves room for the actual emotional beat with Luther.

Things don’t really start cooking till they’re on the aircraft carrier, to get to the sub, to make the dive to the sunken sub, and all the complications arising therefrom. And then the biplanes! The biplane sequence, intercut with the rest of the gang defusing everything in the vault, was pure M:I and worth the cost of ission on its own.

Is it possible this installment gave itself too big a canvas, though? Too many people and places to jump between? Every time it cut back to the president and her staff, and they would summarize where everything stood, with each person uttering one sentence of summary, I became very aware that I was watching a script being read.

Also still on the fence about AI, and specifically misinformation stemming from AI, as the big enemy here—Ethan Hunt and team up against Too Online™, right down to QAnon-style acolytes who’ve infiltrated the highest levels of government. I don’t hate it, but it felt awfully on the nose for the current moment sometimes. Absolutely lost it at “General Overton.”

Still, that whole sub sequence, that biplane stunt … these are the reasons we see these movies. And in those moments, it delivers.

Even though they leave the franchise open for more at the end, as they always do, I kinda hope this is the end of the line for Cruise and that he goes back to exploring some other fare. Even still ripped as he is in his sixties here, you can see gravity starting to do some work on his pecs when he’s jogging on that treill. He looks great, don’t get me wrong. We should all be so lucky. But time is doing its thing, and I want to see him in a few more dramatic roles before he’s out of the game.

I feel like Clint Eastwood's direction is the ball and chain keeping this movie from reaching the heights it aspires to. His approach is so flat and muted and only really works in the quieter scenes, like when Mandela and Pienaar talk leadership over afternoon tea and Pienaar is disarmed by Mandela's benevolent charm. Parts that should be livelier feel sapped of energy, and the big final rugby match just plays out kinda matter-of-factly. And other moments are bizarre and out of place, like the fake-out with the plane flying over the stadium. Completely unnecessary.

Maybe still worth seeing to see Freeman as Nelson Mandela, and to think about the careful, considered political games Mandela had to play between factions of white and black South Africa at such a tumultuous and fraught time. This movie had the potential to explore those politics deeply and richly through the lens of sport, but in Eastwood's hands, the result is uneven and at best just okay.

Gasping, limping, crawling (like Ethan Hunt himself) to the end of my non-chronological rewatch of all the Missions: Impossible ahead of seeing The Final Reckoning on Sunday.

I'm only realizing on this latest rewatch how front-heavy this installment is. Opens with the big plane stunt, then the gorgeous opera sequence, then the underwater madness in Casablanca (I didn't realize that was real until this viewing! Cruise is insane! He should be dead!), then the chase through Casablanca, and then it's mainly scenes of people talking for nearly an hour. And yet it still mostly works.

Ghost Protocol almost gets there, but I think McQuarrie's the best at capturing the desperate physicality of the franchise's various chases/fights/shoot-outs/escapes. In his hands—and with Cruise's unending capacity to appropriately convey nerves under constant pressure—the stakes of every set piece are elevated. You can feel the last burning capillaries in Cruise's lungs when he's underwater, and every shudder of the car as he drives it down a set of stairs in pursuit of a motorcycle while still shaking the defibrillator shocks from his brain.

It's action that feels alive (and that's largely shot in real locations!), so even though Hunt's "the living manifestation of destiny," as Baldwin puts it, there's still legitimate tension to the whole thing, a wonderment at how it's gonna play out.

This review may contain spoilers.

OK, jumping back to 4 and 5 on my own. The franchise firmly enters the modern era here. Kremlin sequence is still fun as hell. Burj Khalifa sequence is still fun as hell. Not enough Ving. Hated when Ethan shouted "Mission ... accomplished!" before mashing the button to deactivate the nuke. Booooo, tomato, tomato, etc.

That moment aside, though, this is a significant jump up from M:I—III, and it's so many leaps above M:I—II that it might as well be in orbit. Glad the series was able to find its footing again.

Possibly my first rewatch since theaters? Forgot about so much: the death of [redacted], the doubling of Kirby, the return of Kittridge (!!!), the complete and utter cool of Klementieff. I could have watched a whole damn movie of Klementieff. She's having such a good time.

Mostly ed the chase scene with the tiny car, which is still good, and the final stunt over the cliff, which, after Fallout's skydive with the cameraman, is still a great stunt, but feels like the series coming back down to earth (heh). The better thrills come with Cruise and Atwell's final climb up the multiple train cars, which I'd forgotten about entirely and which once again had my full attention.

Atwell's such a welcome new addition here. Can't wait for more of her in part two. Seen a lot of people talking about how Whigham carried, but as much as I love him, he's just being Whigham here to me. (Is there a taller head of hair in Hollywood?)

Movie's maybe a shade too long, could maybe have gotten to the point a little faster in those first minutes leading up to the opening credits, but once it gets going, it just goes, man. It does not feel almost three hours long.

6 = 1 > 4 = 5 = 7 > 3 > 2 (Not a final determination, just where my heart's at right this moment)

Just a little unassuming, by-the-book, boomer-coded feel-good cinema. Pretty damn hollow, but it probably still would've done numbers in theaters in, like, 2003.

Watched The Enemy Within (the HBO remake of this) a week or so ago and figured I should probably check out the original. This movie winds up being better by keeping things simpler. No subplot with Russian agents, no chase scenes. It explores what an attempted coup would look like from the top, not the ground, its principal players engaged in the cerebral games of political, reputational, and legal chess that might or might not lead to a public showdown, depending on their outcome. Rod Serling's screenplay is credible, if a little heavy at times on Sorkin-esque speechifying. Thankfully Burt Lancaster and company are up to the task of monologuing with appropriate ion.

Seen a lot of reviews dinging this for having no narrative focus, but it lacks narrative focus the same way Dazed and Confused does. One of its primary aims is not to hit a series of plot points but to carefully capture the specific vibe of a time and place. In this I think it succeeds, and I'd welcome the return of more vibes-based indies in general. Not everything should have to follow a structure.

The skate shops, parking lots, and parents' bungalows where the film takes place feel lived in, and the nervous, unsure, lonely, hoping-to-impress energy of the kid at its center is palpable. Either you're ready to follow Stevie (aka Sunburn) as his pains and abuses harden him (in many ways for worse), or you're not. I think for me it felt personal. Jonah Hill and I were born the same year, less than three months apart, so even though I never touched a skateboard and was terrified of cigs/alcohol/weed at age thirteen, I could still recognize Stevie's anxieties in the cultural moment we shared, and I couldn't help but be invested in his story.

This review may contain spoilers.

Enjoyed how clever and knowing this installment is, how it feints and subverts our expectations from the jump. Instigating violent calamity on the train tracks? Nope. In the elevator? Nope. Ah, we're in a restaurant on a spire. Now the stage is big enough. Now we're talking. And then it delivers! Was so satisfying to see that piano land on that kid.

The bloodlines extension is a legitimately good conceit to kick-start the franchise back up again. Lots of new directions they can go with it. I just hope any future installments to have this much fun.

Kinda boring, honestly. The plot meanders. The actors say a whole lot of nothing in low, serious tones. The titular brood is more silly than scary.

The movie's so obviously about Cronenberg's divorce (he's even said as much) that it's all a bit sad and pathetic. Feels like he put it out raw, while still working through things, without any pause for revision.

There's a fun sequence in the middle of this where we follow the Frankensteining of the Bradley Armored Vehicle from 1968 into the '80s, with different generals demanding additional capabilities. One wants a larger gun turret for scouting. Another wants it to be amphibious. A third wants portholes for the troops to shoot their rifles out of—and then later doesn't. And on and on the alterations go, until the troop carrier can only carry half as many troops as it once could, and can't protect them worth a damn because of added aluminum plating that emits a poisonous gas when ignited by explosive rounds.

I have no idea how accurate the segment actually is, but it's effectively skewering, at least. The rest of the movie? Not so much, and at times it's just goofy for goofiness's sake, in a way that's kinda annoying.

Kelsey Grammar has some good moments, though, in his overconfidence, and while she's not given great material to work with, I was delighted when a fresh-faced Viola Davis showed up and then stuck around. Wild to see her so young—and in such TV-movie doldrums. But everyone's gotta start somewhere.

Skipped ahead a couple because I'm rewatching with my wife, and she was getting exhausted by all the action. Figured we should just jump right to the best of the best.

This really is the perfect distillation of everything fun about the M:I films. Great set pieces, great heists, great twists, great action, great fights. I when it came out someone tweeting that it was about Ethan Hunt becoming washed, but that's what elevates it! Each heaved punch, each exhausted leap is a small raging against the dying of the light. There's a reason Henry Cavill shouts "Why won't you just die???" at him at the end.

And the fight choreography is the strongest it's ever been here, both in the bathroom brawl and the final cliffside duel. And Cruise's main stunt—jumping out of the plane with the camera operator and managing to hit all his marks in midair—can probably never be topped. The Burj Khalifa climb, the hanging on the side of the plane, the motorcycle over the cliff—they're all cool, don't get me wrong, but none comes even close to the live skydive.

McQuarrie really did bring this franchise to a whole new level, and this is his masterpiece.

Damn, this is Steve Zaillian's first script? Talk about coming out swinging. So many great small details here. The drinks in the RTX office, mixed in the shredder 'cuz fuck it, who cares; the many pools, tennis courts, and oceanside homes that surround these young men from well-to-do families; etc.

This is basically a New Yorker article about a curious true story, turned to film. I feel like you could hire talented screenwriters and directors to crank out a dozen of these a year from other unusual true stories, and they'd all be at the very least decent, but this one's quite good. It's fun to see an espionage movie not about competent spies but instead total amateurs who don't know what the fuck they're doing and who get in way over their heads.

This might be an all-time Sean Penn performance for me. I almost didn't recognize him at first, with the nasally voice and little mustache. The way the Soviets merely tolerate him until they have no use for him is developed so well.

Finally, a note on the score: it's a fine bit of smooth, synth-y jazz, I guess, but it feels like it's in the wrong movie. Completely undercuts the tension at times. I need a new sound edit with a different score in the mix.

Was bodied by the line "I'll leave you with this. We absolutely should still be in Afghanistan." Just doubled over, sides hurting.

Trying and failing to think of two people who could have brought a better energy to this than Robinson and Rudd. And the score and cinematography did a curiously strong amount of work to heighten both the tension and the comedy. The fact that the journey through the sewers is effectively creepy, for example, only makes the payoff that much funnier.

Viewing experience was heightened seeing this in the Music Box's main theater with a packed crowd. The peals of laughter that would through every few minutes felt like a warm hug. Comedies are meant to be watched with other people! Not streamed at home in silence!

Imagining the 2025 issue of Rolling Stone within the universe of the movie that comes out with an oral history of the Sleez Sisters and DJ LaGuardia. Pamela Pearl's living a quiet life with her partner, raising chickens in upstate New York, Nicky Marotta's nowhere to be found, Johnny LaGuardia's pushing eighty and skirting questions about his history of meeting minors alone with alcohol. A fan who was there for the concert on the marquee rooftop has fond recollections, but is now uncomfortable with the lyrics to "Your Daughter Is One."

Jokes aside, it's weird that this made me feel such strong nostalgia for a moment just before my time—a nineties kid from the Midwest watching proto-eighties kids bumming around a Times Square still soaked in dingy neon and plastered with ads for porno theaters. They're music obsessives clinging to the radio one year before the launch of MTV, still hanging on to the words of the local DJ. I at least could identify with that, having spent hours in my teenage bedroom gleaning what I could of what was cool from the local college station.

All this to say, the movie's more evocative than it is coherent. My understanding is it started as a much more overtly gay romance but was cut to hell by the studio. That's too bad. Wish I could experience the original vision.

As it is, there are some fun sequences, and the two leads exude an infectious level of energy and joy, and I could watch Tim Curry pretend to be a cool New York DJ for several more hours, but I don't think it all gels strongly enough to become a personal favorite. I understand, though, why it's a cult classic for others.

Some excellent (and completely unsettling/upsetting) performances here from Branagh, Tucci, Firth, et al. And directorial flare is wisely minimized. Lets the horrific dialogue speak for itself. Felt a substantial pit in my stomach as they outlined their plan for the Holocaust with such clinical, obfuscated, indirect language. Even those offering the weakest of objections still come off clearly as monsters.

And then you get to the epilogue and learn that some of these guys just walked away after the war and lived full, free lives for decades, and you're angry in whole new ways.

My third '90s-era HBO original movie in a row. The streaming service keeps recommending them to me!

This one's the weakest yet. Some endearing B-movie aspects, if I'm being generous (was amused when the Russian government showed up to help Whitaker out), but it lacks a lot of the requisite tension and urgency of a good thriller. Forest Whitaker and Jason Robards deserved better.

I should probably watch the original Seven Days in May soon to see how this stacks up.

Finished one '90s-era HBO original (Indictment), then just rolled right into another, suggested to me under the credits of the first.

Got psyched when I saw John Frankenheimer's name, then more psyched when I saw Samuel L. Jackson and Kyle MacLachlan's names. These three, for a film about the Attica prison riot? Sign me up. More big-name directors should do the occasional TV movie. Its interesting to see what they're capable of within the constraints.

All three bring what they can to the material, which ranges from memorably over the top (Clarence Williams III yelling "Hot soup, motherfucker! Hot soup!") to annoyingly melodramatic (young Anne Heche, as Kyle MacLachlan's wife, yelling at him that he's becoming just like his father), but unfortunately a lot of it's just plain underwritten. The cautious understanding that MacLachlan as the rookie prison guard and Jackson as a prisoner reach over the course of the film feels rushed. You want the movie to slow down and sit with these guys for a bit longer as they sit with each other.

The script's more effective when making persuasive points about the dehumanizing material conditions of prison life—and about how those conditions laid the groundwork for the uprising.

Has anybody written a longer thing about the through line from this trial and the '80s Satanic Panic to PizzaGate and everything that's followed it up to the present? Feels ripe for some deeper analysis.

Saw this recommended recently by another reviewer I like, and I have a deep, abiding fondness for the flattened aesthetic and cheaper lighting packages of '90s-era HBO original movies, so I made a note and put it on. It's wild to watch James Woods as the star, making grand statements against galaxy-brain conspiracy thinking run amok, knowing that he himself has fallen down such a deep, dark hole of fevered paranoia in the years since. Twitter has truly warped some brains, I tell you what.

He sells the hell out of this movie, though, despite its script's overly heavy hand. The courtroom scenes are the best part. Long live the courtroom drama! It's begging for a comeback, I say. Begging.

Surprisingly brutal for a Hays Code-era picture! Enjoyed this as a moral tale about power and control—about how cruel, small men should be careful when they find themselves in charge, lest they push the population they're overseeing to the breaking point.

That Captain Munsey is a real son of a bitch. I'd seen Hume Cronyn before, in The Postman Always Rings Twice, but he plays a slippery lawyer there. Didn't realize he had such a sadistic side to tap into, too.

Burt Lancaster's at peak handsomeness. His character's motivation to escape the prison (because his wife doesn't want to go through with her cancer treatment without him) is a little flimsy, though. In fact, in general, it's a bit annoying how the screenplay tries to give all the prisoners noble backstories to justify their desperate, violent escape attempt. The pressure and persecution they're under from Captain Munsey is justification enough.

Antoine Fuqua's Magnolia??? (Mostly just in the way the screenplay threads multiple stories together, with the three main characters crisscrossing paths fleetingly on their way to their individual fates.)

Always wild when I watch something and then hop on here to find that none of the people I follow have seen it. Truly the most under-the-radar of late '00s crime dramas, it seems. For me as well—I only put it on today because it popped up as a suggestion on Prime Video.

There's a fun reunion of some folks from The Wire here, and Ethan Hawke and Don Cheadle are doing more with the material than it deserves. Richard Gere's more out of place. Too slick to read as an alcoholic beat cop leaning pathetically on a sex worker for emotional . He's also just a week away from retirement, one of the many cliches the film leans on throughout.

There are some effective individual scenes, but the movie never really builds to anything larger, and the climax, last shot, and freeze frame fall flat.

"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall."

I've seen this movie a number of times, and that line baffles me every time. Is it meant to be cool? Is it meant to be a status update he's speaking into his earpiece to the other of the extraction team? Why is he looking at the camera?

Anyway, they're still figuring things out here. A step up from M:I–2, but it wears its Abrams influences on its sleeve. The director's whole gang gets involved: Kurtzman and Orci as screenwriters, Giacchino as composer of the score, etc. And the plot honestly feels lifted straight out of Alias. It's still fun, and we're back to a little more teamwork than in M:I2, but I know there're greater thrills to reach in what's to come.

I liked it when the big lizard destroyed the city and then decided he hadn't destroyed it enough—and so brought out the heat ray. Very cool heat ray.

Great idea setting the story in the rubble of post-WWII Japan. So much more fun to watch them problem-solve Godzilla with period-specific tech rather than just hurling missile after missile at him, and it also brings some interesting pathos to the characters—disgraced and broken former soldiers and citizen survivors of the war's bombing raids, who now find themselves threatened anew.

Some characters are more annoying than others. Got a little tired of the plucky younger guy of the bomb-hunting squad who's hungry for a war of his own, given that he didn't get to fight in the big one. I guess he wound up serving his place in this story, though.

The movie also has to slow way down to explain their plan for defeating Godzilla, complete with models and chalkboard illustrations and a monologue from the scientist leading the secret team, then debate over whether the plan will work or not. Seemed like some of that could've been trimmed.

But all in all, this movie's a damn good time.

Was always avoiding this 'cuz it looked like a drear fest. It did not beat those allegations, I'm sorry to report. Some powerful images, though. Closing scene's a banger, figuratively and I guess literally. And Dunst and Gainsbourg do play off each other well.

Also, I feel like Sutherland maybe deserved more of a look from big-name directors in the 2010s. He really sidelined himself with all those seasons of 24 in the '00s. But I guess they probably paid well.

This review may contain spoilers.

This is the sort of film where I start dissociating as it runs beat by beat through the plot it outlined so thoroughly in the trailer. There's Brosnahan getting taken hostage and killed (criminal underuse of Brosnahan, by the way—she's about to be Lois Lane, and they're bringing her in here just to get fridged), there's Malik finding out, there's him training with Fishburne, there's him doing the pool assassination, there's him blowing the other guy up in the abandoned building.

I end up twiddling my thumbs, just waiting to see the final 20–30 minutes not explicitly bullet-pointed in the preview. The final act here doesn't add much, either. The big, anticlimactic reveal is "HaHA, I'm suddenly above cold-blooded revenge, and I've cunningly lured you to waters controlled by the Finnish government, to ensure you pay for your crimes."

Wondered at first whether maybe the Coen brothers ed this script to Clooney 'cuz they couldn't figure the tone. Then I read on Wikipedia that Clooney combined the Coen's old script (written in the 1980s) with a historical script he'd been working on about the struggles of the first black family to move to Levittown, PA. I feel like that explains a lot of what happened here. The movie can't decide whether it wants to be a madcap satire or something a little more solemn.

I can say that Oscar Isaac gets to have some fun, though. His insurance investigator spitting out Coenisms might've been my favorite part of the whole thing.

Scratching my head after this one. Can't say it's uninteresting, though!

Liked the grainy, sweaty, pulpy way this was shot. Could sense the Florida heat so well that my mind grew desperate for AC, even watching in a living room in Chicago in the cool of spring.

Still thinking about the piss scene, and the scene of Cusack jizzing in his pants, and the scene of McConaughey bound and naked. The cast here puts a ton of trust in Daniels that everything he's asking them to do is gonna amount to something in the end.

Whether it amounts to enough, I'm still debating. The story just kinda meanders in lurid murk after an engaging setup. Left me wanting.

If you remove the slow-motion shots from this movie, what's the runtime? Forty minutes, max?

Continuing my rewatch of the entire M:I franchise, and this one remains the nadir for me—with the most boring mission to boot. They hadn't yet stumbled on how to repeat the formula that made the first film and so many of the later ones so good: namely, giving Ethan Hunt an impossible mission and a ragtag, wisecracking team to hop the globe completing it with and just ... letting that be the movie. Here they try to make him look cool and suave and sultry, and he carries out so much of the action alone—a James Bond knock-off, basically.

The script's got other problems, too. Overuse of the M:I mask technology, for one. (How did Hunt just happen to have masks of himself and the head henchman at the end?) Also, you've never heard so many people say the word chimera so many times in such a short amount of time.

I also think there's a time and place for the John Woo style, but I find it tedious here. Every action sequence is extended to interminable length—even some non-action sequences. There's a moment where Thandie Newton walks up a short pier to meet someone, and it's drawn out for nearly two minutes.

I was glad when the movie was over.

Curveball from Marvel, comin' out with a halfway decent one for the first time in a while, keepin' everybody guessing. Though after Captain America: Brave New World, maybe anything seems like a breath of fresh air.

Felt like less of a greenscreen fest than usual (thumbs up), and felt like they did a good job of keeping the story contained and entertaining, with some legit laugh lines. Julia Louis-Dreyfus's line read of "Well, you know I love promoting women." Perfect.

Liked that the villain's "threat" wound up being more psychic than mortal, and that confronting him involved confronting some of the inner demons the team itself didn't want to face. It's Screenwriting 101 shit, but it does keep things neat and tidy, and even that Marvel's been struggling with lately.

So ... yeah, maybe another MCU film that'll ultimately be forgettable, but it's at least doing the work to be entertaining.

Commencing (along with my wife, who's never seen any of them!) a rewatch of all the Missions Impossible before the final one arrives later this month. This one remains close to my heart. Completely badass when I first saw it at age thirteen, still badass now, some dozen or so viewings later.

It's wild how deliberately paced this one is, compared to what's to come. I think a lot of that's thanks to De Palma, who's in top form here but enjoys quite moments as much as he enjoys tension and action. The CIA heist and bullet train sequences still slap. "Is that Chekhov's sweat?" my wife asked, when they showed the condensation on the cup setting off the alarm. Wanted to high-five her for calling that one.

Anyway, it'll be interesting observing the evolution of both the action sequences and the pacing as we work through the movies.

Imagining Cronenberg made this after waking in a cold sweat, panicked that he hadn't fetishized bodily disfigurement/modification ENOUGH.

Though also this is a film about compulsion, about our inability to help ourselves when encountering something that turns us on. Just watch the way Holly Hunter's character furiously scrabbles for the remote when the test-crash videotape they're all slowly masturbating to gets caught in the VCR. These are desperate, hungry, driven (pardon the pun) people in this film. They just happen to be hungry for something no one in reality would understand.

Special shout-out to Elias Koteas for maybe being the hungriest of all and really holding nothing back, performance-wise. Shout-out, too, Deborah Kara Unger, who's maybe asked to do the most and who's also somehow able to deliver the line "It must smell of semen" with a straight face. Between this, The Game, and The Hurricane, I feel like her career should have taken off in a way it didn't.

Way more of an exploitation flick than I was expecting, having never seen anything by Abel Ferrara before. The movie luxuriates in its imagery (extended shots of bodies, of slow-motion deaths, of various scenes of decadence, etc.) and is elevated by captivating performances from Christopher Walken and Laurence Fishburne. They make the so-so script sing, and when they're not on camera, you're waiting for them to come back.

What this film does is continue the story of the ant ... from the film The ant.

Script here's a mess. Why is the ant (Affleck) being brought in on this case? Just to parse a few 1040s? What is the case exactly? To find the missing family? Why was JK Simmons's character investigating that family in the first place? Why are multiple assassins trying to kill the woman from the family who's been turned into a killing machine due to "acquired savant syndrome"??? I have more questions, but the point is there are plenty of threads you don't have to tug at too hard before it all starts to fall apart.

Will any of this matter to the people most likely to go see The ant 2? I feel like probably not. They're gonna enjoy the good natural chemistry between Affleck and Bernthal, which the movie's basically built around. I'd rather see them together in some new movie than in whatever this is, though.

Also, sidenote: Affleck puts on a heavily affected voice and cadence here to accentuate his character's social awkwardness and buttoned-up comportment, but it's a voice he definitely did not have in the first film! I went back to rewatch several scenes from the first film to be sure. It's like he's doing a parody of his prior performance. A bizarre choice.

First rewatch since I saw this back in theaters, at the tail end of grad school. Was reminded afresh how surprisingly comfortable Scorsese is with pulp—and how comfortably he can turn it and deepen it toward bigger ideas.

Love the mood established from the first shot, with the ship coming right out of the fog. Robert Richardson's cinematography's doing a lot of work here.

Perfect ensemble, too. Fun to watch Mark Ruffalo absolutely ham it up. He got me good saying, "Pardon me, doc, the what between what and what?"

It's a different film on rewatch, 'cuz you're looking more closely at the reactions to DiCaprio from everyone else, given what you know will be revealed in the end. But even knowing what was coming, I was still moved again. Michelle William's slow smile as she says "My school is ..." is still so chilling.

The designers of the robots within the reality of this movie are absolute psychos. Why make the surgeon bots human-like, with natural eyes, but then give them no mouths? Imagine rousing early from the anesthesia to this face.

They're also horny as hell, deg a nanny bot with long, pointy acrylic nails and a minidress that stops just short of being completely indecent.

The elevator pitch here is Fatal Attraction crossed with a by-the-numbers killer AI story, but the movie's never enough of anything to be either a campy cult classic or a legitimately good erotic thriller. It mostly just plays it straight and then ends, but not without setting up the possibility of a sequel. I can't imagine who'd be excited for it, though.

There's just no way they would've been able to find anyone else for Chris Tucker's part. It remains, singularly, the best deployment of and spin on the fast-talking, maximally agitated persona he's brought to so many of his movies. And the way Besson shoots and edits him only adds to the fever dream.

Hadn't seen this film in at least a decade. The script is so loose! It feels like a European's take on an American sci-fi/action film—heavy on the visuals, light on story. And it was goofier even than I ed, and felt anime-inspired in a lot of respects.

Got sad thinking about how Willis is doing these days. I miss him.

Goddamn it, Diaz. That betrayal was an extra punch to the gut. What a brutal movie. Deeply effective screenplay; deeply effective performances. Penn is particularly good, but also he's playing an absolute fucking monster, so the more convincing he was, the more sick to my stomach I felt.

Had mixed feelings seeing De Palma's usual tricks deployed to these ends—the long-lens pans and zooms, the split-focus shots, the Hitchcock nods, the sneaking first-person POV, all of it. There were times when it worked and other times when it felt wrong. This is a grim story that doesn't require sensationalizing, that I'd argue in fact demands a lack of sensationalizing, and De Palma's primary impulse is to sensationalize. It leads to moments of awkward tension in the film's tone.