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On the heels of ‘Lilo & Stitch’ (2025) I can’t say I was prepared to watch a French woman have sex with a car and subsequently give birth to a car baby but that’s what I love about movies, is there’s so many different kinds

So there’s a moment toward the end where you think maybe Stitch isn’t going to make it (SPOILERS for a shot-for-shot remake of a 20-year-old children’s movie), and across the theater I could hear kids starting to cry. There was something so pure to this, a story delivering genuine stakes — genuine emotion! — to its intended audience, even if I couldn’t feel them. It’s not a good movie, but then I’m a 39-year-old without children, so what am I doing in this theater in the first place

It's a 3 hour long clip show that's way more 'Rise of Skywalker' than it would care to it, but also features two of the most impressive stunts I've ever seen committed to film and Tramell Tillman calling Ethan "Mister" with increasingly bold intonation. The gayest 'Mission'? Sure, fifteen minutes later the camera's lingering on Hayley Atwell's chest like they're smelling salts bringing Ethan back to life, but this scans very lady doth protest

What a dutiful student of world cinema I am to have bought this Criterion *DVD* almost twenty years ago and failed to watch it until just now. A+ cinephile work over here! 

But then again, I'm not sure I would have properly absorbed 'Yi Yi' in my teens. This is a MIDDLE-AGED movie through and through, animated by questions of mortality and regret and purpose, which would have been hard to process between keg stands. How do you be a good father, husband, person? How do you get up every morning and keep trying?

It's sweet, but not cloying; it's sad, but not maudlin. It is -- all together now! -- *human*, the ultimate magic trick of ‘Yi Yi’ how you stop thinking of it as a movie and start wondering if you maybe just watched a low-key documentary. There's beauty in the (seemingly) mundane.

A very solid movie — and that much richer now with ‘Andor’ at its back — but all I could focus on was how crazy it is that Vader still lives on the planet where he nearly burned to death. There’s facing your trauma and building a shrine to it

The only 'M:I' I'd never seen! I can't for my movie-going habits summer 2015, maybe I was too burned by 'Age of Ultron', but I'm happy to have caught it *now*, especially hearing that the new one is so lore-heavy. This one just zips along, probably best of the series for me alongside 'Fallout', neither of which really pretends to be much more than an expert assembly of cool stunts and Rebecca Ferguson successfully channeling Ingrid Bergman.

I was primed to hate this, especially after accidentally purchasing IMAX with Laser 3D©️ instead of just Filmed for IMAX©️ tickets. But..... I didn't.

Now, the MCU bar is as low as it's ever been, so "not hating" their latest isn't exactly high praise. And a lot of 'Thunderbolts*' still doesn't work even by those standards:

-- an overlong third act whose time could have been up-cycled into character arcs for at least two more people on the poster
-- overlong "funny" segments that scan Whedon-lite and I would have happily fast-forwarded through if you handed me the remote
-- re-introducing Bucky Barnes, a formerly brainwashed mercenary who killed JFK, as a junior congressman from Brooklyn who no one seems to care killed JFK

And yet Florence Pugh gives a *real performance*, one that genuinely moved me at crucial junctures. I didn't even see 'Black Widow'! Didn't matter, I felt what she was bringing to the table with no need to understand any of its larger MCU history, or ramifications.

That's the big stumble here. By now you're aware the asterisk after 'Thunderbolts*' is actually for *'The New Avengers', which this ragtag group will transform into (or more accurately, just be called) by the end of the movie. It's a weight around the neck of a story that didn't need it, and which retroactively suffers for comparisons to the very first 'Avengers' -- both movie and team. That had three characters hot off their own feature-length introductions (and a fourth who'd merely been recast), one previously introduced, and another self-explanatory (he shoots a bow). The math of 'Thunderbolts*' involves setup movies that are now four- and seven-years-old, plus multiple Marvel TV series. You're not solving the same equation!

All of which is to say... ‘Thunderbolts*’ works when it drills down on its characters as people, allows Yelena and Co. to just *breathe*, to share their wounds (however much I never need to see another "you know who the real villain is? Depression" movie ever again) and heal. The stuff that doesn't work is all there in the asterisk.

~~FULLER REVIEW ON MY SUBSTACK~~

Real Rorschach Test of a movie, this one:

If you already *love* Tim Robinson/'I Think You Should Leave', I can't imagine leaving the theater and NOT thinking you've just seen the best comedy in forever, a future cult classic you can deploy in "have you seen?" conversations for years to come.

If you *like* Tim Robinson/'ITYSL', you'll laugh enough times at what's effectively a 100 minute-long, single-bit sketch taken to the extreme. Funny! Narratively unsatisfying!

If you *don't like* Tim Robinson/'ITYSL', man, what are you even doing, there's nothing here for you

So happy my Irish-American grandmother died before I had to explain ‘Sinners’, a movie where a bunch of her kinfolk are killed just for the crime of wanting to enjoy some live music

Once I stopped looking at ‘The Wedding Banquet’ as a comedy (it’s not, not really) and more like, you know, an early 90s indie dramedy (which it is, like its 1993 predecessor, just loosely updated for the 2020s) I was able to settle in and appreciate this movie’s easy warmth.

Do its many plot machinations fall apart the moment you think about them? Yes! But it’s so nice to see Lily Gladstone in something light, and Kelly Marie Tran in… well, anything. I believe their relationship; if anything, I wish the screenplay gave that relationship more time to breathe. Bowen Yang… idk, ! Han Gi-Chan’s good in an underwritten part — it feels like he could have solved everyone’s problems with the snap of a finger?

I don’t want to poke holes, I just want to celebrate independent cinema!

What if I told you that six years before ‘Spider-Man 2’, Kirsten Dunst would lend her talents to another movie about a super-powered teen who:

- uses those powers to hold down a delivery job
- loses those powers due to internal stress and
- must rediscover those powers in time to save the person they love???

I’m not saying Sam Raimi & Co. are thieves but I am saying Kiki paved the way

Maybe the lightest Miyazaki I’ve watched (including ‘Totoro’) but as an excuse to show off some absolutely stunning animation, including water-work that makes Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave’ look straight-up dumb — you could do worse! Although I will say it is crazy to me that Ghibli designed an androgynous underwater king in the CLEAR likeness of Tilda Swinton and then got Liam Neeson to do the English dub.

Been on something of a Miyazaki kick since that “Ghiblification” AI trend and let me tell you, a thousand incels typing out a thousand ChatGPT prompts could never conjure the magic of Totoro and two little Japanese girls dancing a giant oak tree to life

S limy
P hantoms
I ngest
R eally
I ntricately 
T extured
E laborate
D rawings

A nd
W e
A ll
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Maybe it’s the unceasing hatred I feel toward our government, maybe it’s the fact I’m 50% Danish, but this movie hit my bloodstream like rocket fuel tonight. I will follow my campaign of vengeance into the mouth of a goddamn volcano if that’s what the situation demands

OpenAI can “Ghiblify” deez nuts

Saggy in ways ‘The Beekeeper’ wasn’t, nowhere near as knowingly funny, but it does honor the cardinal rule of this sort of movie when a drug dealer sub-boss turns to Statham and says “you ain’t police… no, you’re A WORKING MAN.” My audience hollered

Taut and surprising: Coens walking well-trod thematic terrain here (fate, coincidence, yada yada), but adapting Cormac McCarthy — if it’s possible, someone even less sentimental than them — produces this perfect friction they should absolutely revisit, just like PT Anderson’s doing with his second round of Pynchon. 

So happy this came out in 2007 and not today, where we’d be on month five of “Stop villainizing Anton Chigurh, he’s neurodivergent” discourse

Somehow I've watched two Jack Quaid ts in as many months. Recession indicator?

He's not bad, even if he's just playing a "Jack Quaid type." The bigger issue is, if you've seen the trailer (which every AMC A-Lister has, many times), you've already seen every compelling moment in 'Novocaine'. And what's left after that is a lot of rote plot stuff (hope you're ready to spend 20+ minutes with a thinly drawn pair of cops) and the unshakeable feeling that this movie's development began and ended with the tagline "Nathan Caine can't feel pain." Okay, but what else?

I could forgive the lack of depth if there were laughs, but there aren't. We're talking MCU-style funny-adjacent (was not surprised to see Jacob Batalon here as, surprise, the inexplicably confident sidekick), moving with the rhythm of a real comedy but none of the energy. Honestly, the whole thing left me sort of...............

numb

Is ‘Spring Breakers’… good? I honestly don’t know, even seeing it last night for a (random!) special IMAX release. There’s enough repetitive voiceover in here to make Terence Malick blush, propping up a story that’s no deeper than a kiddie pool. Girls wanna rob! They rob.

AND YET… there are moments in here that remain so iconic, honestly transcendental, that I think you kind of take the good with the bad. “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” opening? The “Everytime” scene? I levitate. Alien (James Franco) sucking on not one but two gundicks — hang it in the muthafuckin’ Louvre.

(Of course, the bad at this point also includes the ickiness of watching Franco interact with the same kind of younger women he’d go on to have sex with in his capacity as an acting instructor. But he’s also amazing here. I don’t know!)

Some movies are timeless; some movies are just records of their time. This might be the most 2013 movie ever made, to the point that I left the theater wondering if I should go stand in line to buy GTA V.

“It’s a time machine” - Don Draper

This and ‘Raising Arizona’ in one year… Holly Hunter was the Sebastian Stan of 1987

I wish Elon, Trump, and JD would all watch this movie about three terrible men trying to kill themselves

Sorry I mean Happy St. Patty’s!

Fully thirty minutes longer than it should be but the emotions ring true in a movie that manages to channel — please don’t laugh at this — the ‘Before’ trilogy, really making you feel time and absence in ways that are only possible because we’ve known Bridget for 25 years.

(Well, you’ve known her; insanely this is the first ‘Bridget Jones’ entry I’ve ever seen, watched only because I wanted to see Lady Gaga’s ‘SNL’ episode last week and now have a month of Peacock. In any case this should have been released in theaters!)

Most of the time all a movie really needs is a group of sexy people who can act. Bring that movie in around 90 minutes, with an efficient screenplay and cool, precise filmmaking that sets that group up for maximum sexiness? Baby... you got yourself a great night at your local AMC.

(Highly recommend Angelica Jade Bastien’s Vulture write-up — “pure star power, delicious without an ounce of anything superfluous”)

Have any of you heard about this movie before it’s sick

I knew this one was gonna be a rough ride for yours truly when every early reaction I saw on Twitter was some variation of "fun and quirky!" or "a little disted, but fun!" or "Bong is having fun!"

Maybe it's inherently unfair to compare a knowingly arch sci-fi romp like ‘Mickey’ to a tragicomic thriller like ‘Parasite’. But is it unreasonable to expect that a director who’s proven himself so adept at marrying sophisticated commentary with pulpy narrative might also utilize that skill in his follow-up?

'Mickey' starts strong! Pattinson's electric, as per usual, and Bong deploys his signature “I want to know about every random thing you’re showing me” world-building, suggesting a movie that could go anywhere. Which is where the problem lay: the movie truly goes *everywhere*, quickly abandoning one idea (say the shared consciousness of two people with one identity) for another (fascists colonizing an alien planet) and then another (threesome with yourself, bro) and another (aliens are goopy but also cuddly), none of them cohering into one story, let alone one tone.

I appreciated a lot of individual moments in 'Mickey'; certainly I respect it, and the blank check energy bringing it to life. But, outside the context of some future Bong Joon-ho retrospective, I would be *astonished* if we ever talk about this movie again.

**more thoughts here at my — sorry — Substack**

A Wes Anderson debate in the group chat inspired me to revisit my least favorite of his movies, one that left me utterly cold in 2021 but maybe, with the benefit of time, I might find a warmer, more rewarding experience three years later.

I did not!

Are there tiny shoots of life in here, grasping for oxygen? Yes! Jeffrey Wright might be the best thing to happen to Wes this decade. And maybe the cutaway aesthetic he’s come to employ more and more really works here, in a story that literalizes the experience of reading a magazine. But somehow he made the movie his most bad-faith critics have always accused him of making: self-satisfied, emotionally inert, and too twee by half.

….3.5 stars

Rewatched this last night with 300 of my closest sex worker friends and they all loved it

Putting aside the believability of a 30-year-old, famously gay Caleb Hearon playing a closeted teen, ‘Sweethearts’ really worked on me!

A little wordy in spots but buoyed by charming performances from Kiernan Shipka (a pro) and Nico Hiraga (great comic timing), who like their Millennial forebears Jack Quaid and Maya Erskine should also be in a lot more rom-coms. I laughed more than I was expecting and can guarantee it’s better than you assume a movie dumped on Max last fall with zero fanfare could be

It’s true that ‘Paddington 2’ is a movie about many things: the unsung value of kindness, the necessity of community, the scourge of the performing arts. But ‘Paddington 2’ is primarily a movie about prison reform

I happen to believe that you can judge a movie by its quotability, so by that metric ‘Jerry Maguire’’s already a bona fide classic. But the lines only work because they’re informed by such incredible depth of character: Jerry clear-eyed on the destination but having lost the map, Dorothy forced to be the most mature 26-year-old of all time, Rod learning the true meaning of Quan, Marcee trying to hold the family together but this family does not work without him, Jerry (😭)

Every actor delivers. Every moment lands. Probably one of the best studio movies of the 90s, and a sturdy character-based model we’d be wise to employ again. Call it a mission statement

“I’ve had a rough year, dad.”
“I know you have, Chazzie.”

Whatever defenses I put up, however actively I may or may not be watching (pretty sure this is at least the 20th time I’ve seen ‘Tenenbaums’), I’m rendered putty every time by this simple exchange — two lines that tell, and sell, the entire movie

RIP Gene Hackman, who died tragically rescuing his family from the wreckage of a destroyed sinking battleship

Never thought I’d agree with Roger Stone about anything but… Jeremy Strong may just deserve Best ing Actor

(Stan is great, too, but better in ‘A Different Man’!)

I mean it as high praise when I say this thing looks, moves, and feels like the PS3 classic ‘Journey’. Haunting and — ironic for a movie with none of them — human experience I won’t soon forget

You all WILDLY overhyped this thing last fall but it’s okay, it was September and we were all just trying to feel something. I get it! Aaron Pierre announces himself in a big way, the little girl from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory proves herself a credible adult performer — solid all around, a perfect plane movie

I know a cold winter beach hates to see Saoirse Ronan’s ass coming

More like six to midnight with these two hotties

(Time shackles all of us to fear and regret but may also be the only thing that truly lends our lives definition)

Demi’s going to win but Fernanda Torres gives the superior performance here: few if any big moments, just utter believability as a mother trying to keep her family going as everything around them collapses in ways that definitely shouldn’t make you think about the state of America right now, that’s crazy

Cut the last five minutes — cheap trick when until this point the movie had been utterly confident in its own storytelling! — and this gets another .5 ⭐️

I’m not saying a movie can’t juggle imaginative kills with trenchant social commentary, but I am saying ‘Companion’ can’t, or anyway struggles to. Every time it starts to cook (oh shit, she just maxed her intelligence function to 100%!), it turns the heat all the way off (characters discuss what it means for her intelligence function to be maxed at 100%). Great lead performance from Sophie Thatcher can’t mask the fact you’ve already seen some version of this movie four times in the last two years.

An ambitious sci-fi romance that's kind of like 'Cloud Atlas' x 'Maniac' x , tons of BIG ideas that wind up undone somewhat by my disbelief in George MacKay as a generations-spanning romantic foil. Good actor! He is maybe Harris Dickinson's Waluigi

Have loved PTA’s PDL since I rented it from
Blockbuster in 2002, zero romantic experience under my belt save crushes on Meredith DePietro and Ali Katsigiannis, both of whom I was too scared to communicate those feelings to. I probably felt at the time like the feeling was its own reward.

It’s not! Action is! When Barry takes a crowbar to that dude’s dome — fueled by a love that makes him “stronger than anything you can imagine” — you might as well be showing me a 30+ Avengers Thanos beatdown. Love brings us to life.

Premiering the same day as ‘Babygirl’ was just a coincidence of distribution but they do make a compelling double feature: two stories about women hiding their base desires under a veneer of respectability (girlbossing; bodices), desperate for someone to match their freak, whether an intern in yellow Adidas Gazelles or an ageless Romanian demon.

‘Babygirl’’s is the more hopeful ending, suggesting that whatever wacky shit calls to you doesn’t have to define you. You can be a businesswoman, a wife, mother, and yes — also a Babygirl. In ‘Nosferatu’, you have to die. Unfortunately! But maybe, surrounded by lilacs and crushed beneath the weight of your now dead but formerly undead lover’s sun-baked chicken legs, you’ve also made some level of peace with your own insatiable desires. On the whole, your widowed husband seems to get it?

Everybody talking about how “bad” this movie is when what we should be talking about is how it “makes no sense.” Thank you, Karla Sofia Gascon, for kneecapping this movie’s Best Picture chances so we never have to talk about either again!

Needed to be a lot funnier or a lot scarier. Cute! Well-performed. But rarely even acknowledges its own conceit after about 20 minutes, which leaves you with a functional rom-com and not much else

After everything that happened to her in this movie I totally understand why Isabella Rossellini decided to become a nun

Near-perfect indie movie. Sensitive to the subject of facial deformity without contorting itself to make a morality play about it; far more interested in the lengths we go to try and kill our best selves. (To that end — great double feature with ‘The Substance’.)

I’ve been largely ambivalent on Sebastian Stan for… god, ten years, but this finally solidifies him for me as one of our top-flight current actors. There’s no vanity here, there’s no posturing — just a guy weaponizing his talents (and looks) to fully embody the deforming effects of self-hatred. He should be the fifth Best Actor slot this year!

(A crime that Adam Pearson, magnetic, seems shut out of his category, too.)

It’s possible I respect ‘Nickel Boys’ more than I like it, that it worked on my brain better than it did my heart. But there are also moments in here that absolutely destroyed me because of its rigorous formality, that could only exist in a movie where POV is both style and story. It’s rare that something makes me say “oh shit, you can do that?” For that reason alone this is worth your time.

Believe me when I tell you Pedro Pascal’s voice work here as Fink the Fox is the most committed performance he’s given since ‘Game of Thrones’

It’s become de rigueur in certain film circles to lambast Sean Baker for telling sex workers’ stories that “aren’t his to tell” — which maybe to some extent I get? I wouldn’t mind him moving off the subject after five straight movies. But filmmakers have themes, even obsessions, and especially when they’re able to mine them for work that 1) resonates and 2) thoroughly entertains, who are we to tell them where to focus their attention, or if they’re allowed to in the first place?

Thank god ‘Anora’ is as funny as it is, because if it weren’t funny it would (just) be deliriously sad — an impossible world, the deck absolutely stacked against strivers, however pugnacious they might be. Anora will always exist on the fringes, Anora will never know real comfort or ease, and the Ivans of the world will never need to even consider their role in this, let alone apologize.

Man tries to buy town. Town tells man to chill for a sec. Man grows to love town. Man chills out. Town tells man to come back anytime.

Simplicity veering on bedtime storytelling but when you’ve got a lovely Scottish town festooned in Northern Lights, you don’t need much more. Watch it and these charmed ranks!

1. Sinners
2. Black Bag
3. Thunderbolts*
4. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
5. Friendship
6. The Wedding Banquet
7. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
8. Companion
9. Mickey 17
10. Lilo & Stitch

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

Don’t shoot me, it’s just how I feel

1. The Royal Tenenbaums
2. The Darjeeling Limited
3. Rushmore
4. The Grand Budapest Hotel
5. Bottle Rocket
6. Asteroid City
7. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
8. Moonrise Kingdom
9. Fantastic Mr. Fox
10. Isle of Dogs

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

1. Perfect Days
2. Nickel Boys
3. I Saw the TV Glow
4. The Substance
5. Anora
6. Challengers
7. Love Lies Bleeding
8. A Different Man
9. Dune: Part Two
10. Babygirl

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

You guys know how this works

1. The Zone of Interest
2. May December
3. Stop Making Sense
4. Killers of the Flower Moon
5. Oppenheimer
6. All of Us Strangers
7. Poor Things
8. The Holdovers
9. Bottoms
10. The Iron Claw

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

Inspired by the excellent and under-sung 2021 Nicolas Cage banger 'Pig', here are all the movies I can whose titles include an animal species.

**NOTE**
Movies like 'Air Bud' or 'Lassie' or 'Flipper' may have animals in their titles, yes, but are excluded for being about SPECIFIC animals. I don't make the rules!

**SECOND NOTE**
I have decided to allow homonyms like ‘Flee’ (“flea”)

• Anaconda
• Ant-Man
• Ant-Man and the Wasp
• Antz
• Batman
• Batman Returns
• Batman Forever
• Batman & Robin
• Batman Begins
• The Batman

...plus 83 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

The title says it all: 2022’s best movies followed by its worst movies, down the line. These are not my opinions, just an objective ranking!

1. TÁR
2. Nope
3. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
4. Jackass Forever
5. Top Gun: Maverick
6. Aftersun
7. The Banshees of Inisherin
8. Everything Everywhere All at Once
9. Avatar: The Way of Water
10. Babylon

...plus 42 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Parents are away/we graduate tomorrow/the apocalypse is coming/I’m getting on a plane/I’m going to jail/I’m dying

• House Party
• Dazed and Confused
• Before Sunrise
• Before Sunset
• Before Midnight
• Superbad
• Plan B
• Can't Hardly Wait
• 25th Hour
• Clerks

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

1. West Side Story
2. The Green Knight
3. Licorice Pizza
4. The Matrix Resurrections
5. Pig
6. Red Rocket
7. Drive My Car
8. Encanto
9. The Power of the Dog
10. C'mon C'mon

...plus 44 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Plz @ me

• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
• Black Panther
• Iron Man
• Thor: Ragnarok
• Spider-Man: Far From Home
• Avengers: Endgame
• Iron Man 3
• Captain America: The Winter Soldier
• Captain America: The First Avenger
• The Avengers

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

1. David Byrne's American Utopia
2. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
3. Palm Springs
4. Dick Johnson Is Dead
5. Promising Young Woman
6. Da 5 Bloods
7. Boys State
8. Emma.
9. Never Rarely Sometimes Always
10. Soul

...plus 36 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. A Ghost Story
2. Get Out
3. Faces Places
4. Columbus
5. Phantom Thread
6. Lady Bird
7. The Florida Project
8. mother!
9. Dunkirk
10. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

...plus 19 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Parasite
2. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
3. Uncut Gems
4. Little Women
5. Western Stars
6. Us
7. Marriage Story
8. Jojo Rabbit
9. Hustlers
10. The Irishman

...plus 30 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Minding the Gap
2. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
3. Thunder Road
4. Sorry to Bother You
5. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
6. Black Panther
7. Paddington 2
8. A Star Is Born
9. Free Solo
10. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.