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Among many other pleasures, I really appreciate how unafraid this is of just being a straightforward genre movie. The vampires aren't a metaphor for trauma and they're not even really a metaphor for racism; mostly they are scary monsters that will eat you. They're realized with goopy nasty special effects and they explode if you hit them with garlic. A damn good time at the movies, one I look forward to revisiting.

A beautifully-made work demonstrating Lewis' typical control of sound, composition, and his own body. As a comedy it's almost entirely bereft of laughs, but that's fine - if you've made The Bellboy, you've already banked up enough all-time great jokes that you can spend the rest of your career getting weird with it imo.

While the Dean Martin/Buddy Love connection is obviously there whether intended or not, I agree with Rosenbaum that it's both more plausible and more interesting to see this as autocritique - Jerry Lewis the screen presence facing off against Jerry Lewis the director. What's interesting to me is that the film seems to genuinely despise them both. It's that deep self-loathing (along with some wonky pacing) that puts a hard cap on the laughs, but as another angry Jewish guy who started telling jokes in elementary school to get the bullies off my back, I can't say I don't relate.

Baby Jerry is one of the most wretched combinations of sound and image ever put to screen. We need to improve abortion access in this country and we need to do it fast.

A beautiful, capital-c Cinematic movie - the way this uses the field itself as a canvas is so remarkable. Lots of beautiful faces and dialogue that feels like it was ripped straight out of conversations I've had in real life, and much like a real baseball game it gives you plenty of space to consider your own thoughts and memories. It almost makes me sad that people like Lund are still trying this hard for a dead medium that hates them, but in this case form matches function.

The arthouse I saw this at is usually empty, or only has a couple other people, but for whatever reason this 2:40pm matinee in the pouring rain was absolutely packed with seniors. I feel confident saying that I was the youngest person in the audience by at least 30 years. The crowd was very receptive to the humor, especially the pizza bit, and vocally resonated with characters' complaints of aches, pains, etc. I dearly wish I could have read some of their minds as the film came to its conclusion.

I'm often a little colder on Soderbergh than a lot of my cinephile pals - I really enjoyed this Eddie Averill piece from earlier this year about how so much of his recent work feels disposable - but every time I think it's safe to write him off he comes out with a truly great movie like Black Bag to remind you how unmatched he can be at combining heady material, thoughtful visuals, and crowd-pleasing thrills. As a sucker for almost any form of spy movie and a proud Wife Guy, this could hardly be more made for me.

Laughed more at the opening credits than I have at any animated movie since...I dunno, Storks maybe? Also makes a compelling argument that abandoning hand-drawn animation may have been the greatest mistake of the 21st century.

The wife and I got knocked out by a cold yesterday so we spent the afternoon sitting on the couch rewatching the Pirates movies (Verbinski trilogy only of course, those two pieces of fan fiction they put out after this are none of my business.) Above all else these are perfect sick day movies, full of funny jokes and compelling spectacle that is still rarely matched - or in the case of the final act here, still UNmatched at least in the American context.

That's surely why the first of these movies is still the most beloved; it's a lean, mean spectacle machine with every plot point slipped neatly into an easy-to-follow third act structure and only five characters you really need to keep track of. The second one is Verbinski fully in imagemaker mode, far less concerned with plot than showing you stuff like "sad octopus man plays the organ dramatically" or "wheel fight" or "unfortunate cannibal tribe setpiece, but the coolest-looking version of it". He and his team are just throwing balls in the air and hoping they can catch them next time.

For me, though, it's all about At World's End. Verbinski not only catches most of the balls and brings his most spectacular images yet, but also seemingly throws in every contradictory idea he's ever had about death, love, religion, capitalism, freedom, and myth. It's too long, overstuffed, and confusing enough that there have to be multiple scenes that exist only to reset the pieces on the gameboard so that we can keep playing for another thirty minutes. But that's what's kept me coming back to this franchise long after the cool factor has worn off. This movie is too bizarre, too complicated, too compelling to me to not keep turning over and over in my head.

One thing I connected to this time: Jones' proclamation that "My freedom is already forfeit." To Jones, love is an onerous bond, a curse over which he has no control. That has shaped his entire worldview - even having lost his love, his heart, his body, and control of his own ship and crew, he sees no path except to keep doing what he's been doing. His status quo is pointless and miserable, but he still fights for it because he can no longer imagine anything else.

Conversely, to Will, love is a duty you devote yourself to. He loses his own freedom, in a sense, but turns Jones' magical ship against its oppressors, fearing not death, and gives himself over to the entwined responsibilities of marriage and sacred duty without mourning the cost of either. It's even heavily, hilariously implied that he eats Elizabeth out in one of 10,000 "how did Gore get that past Disney" moments. Anyway it definitely says a lot about where I am in life that I find that vision of freedom more moving and aspirational than Jack Sparrow just doing whatever he wants whenever he wants it, though I could certainly be bringing some Extra Textual Information to that reading.

So bad that I suspect Bong himself might have died and been replaced with an inferior copy.

A sci-fi comedy with no ideas and no jokes; my theater sat there in stony silence for the grueling two hours twenty. Characters and setting details make no sense, which great satire can get away with, but only if it keeps you entertained and/or thinking and/or feeling an emotion other than bored. Why does the script yadda yadda through such details as "the motivation of any of the main characters" or "and then they built flawless space communism and lived happily ever after"? Why does it act like "the cute cuddly aliens are actually friendly" is some kind of huge third act twist? Why does the villain allude to being a white supremacist one time and then never do anything white supremac-y?

Actually let's linger on the villain some more. Director Bong claims he didn't intend the Trump parallels but if so he forgot to inform the costume dept, makeup, or Mark Ruffalo himself (playing the character as a sub-Baldwin SNL impression.) This would be annoying enough if the movie had anything at all to say about the man but it's basically just 2.5 hours of "there's a dang space cheeto in the space white house!!!" Could have just stayed at home and scrolled bluesky if that's the level of class commentary we're bringing to this thing.

I didn't adore Parasite to the degree some people did, but at least it had real characters, genuinely surprising twists, and several good jokes. Mickey 17 has Robert Pattinson doing a silly voice. Which is delightful, but only gets you so far.

A movie that makes you realize Trump/Musk was inevitable, that our imagination and dreamscapes ("ours" meaning America's but also meaning yours and mine as fans of Halo, Star Wars, any other pop culture from the last 100 years etc) have already been colonized and conquered by fascism. Sci-fi like Avatar lets you dream of something greater than humanity finally overcoming our worst impulses; this movie tells you the truth: that they'll keep fighting, and they'll win.

Everything good about this - and there's not much - comes from the far superior musical and its largely untouchable songs. The costumes are also excellent. Everything else is DIRE. I know we've all decided to just accept this for some fucking reason but the choice to split a 2.5 hour musical into 6 hours of film really is the death knell here - this is grotesquely padded, with constant interruptions to the songs and needless additions that bloat the plot without adding anything of substance. John M. Chu's direction, choreography, and editing choices are all so bad that I honestly think he should be sent to real prison for it. Nightmarish anti-cinema. Hate hate hate.

Denise Richards and Eugene Levy both do the Madea voice in this, in separate scenes. I just thought that was interesting.

This is one of those modern studio comedies that has a fun premise, a likeable and charismatic cast, and about 30% of the joke content of any given Looney Tune, spread over 20x the runtime.

All of Crowe's post-Jerry Maguire movies are the product of a diseased and feeble mind. This one gets slightly more mileage out of literalizing that fact, but not enough. "Movie Jail" is not sufficient, we need to create some kind of Movie Gulag and Crowe needs to spend the rest of his days beneath it.

"Your way of thinking is how he rooks us! He makes you scared of his crazy."

Knew I liked this the first time I saw it but wasn't totally sure what to make of a Fury Road prequel that seemed to take more inspiration from Thunderdome, included zero happiness or hope and only has one major action setpiece. Second watch has cemented this as a masterpiece for sure. In some ways watching them back to back this one feels like the more honest film than Fury Road, the more bleak and oddly banal depiction of life in the Wasteland when you're a nobody instead of a living legend, though I can't say that without acknowledging that Furiosa also leans much harder into the spiritual elements hiding at the corners of its predecessors and is really less prequel than creation myth.

Furiosa's a great character and the actors who play her do fine work but to me the true standout here is Dementus, a self-mythologizing prick who's just clever enough to gain power but to stupid to wield it in even his own best interests. Hemsworth plays him so beautifully, threading this tiny needle between being goofy and horrifying, doing a bunch of weird tics but also letting you see into the eyes where he really wishes he could just go home - wherever that was - and stop doing weird Roman cosplay in the desert with all these BDSM mutants. I love the voice he puts on when he's "performing" for his horde and i's hilarious that they used that shit for 100% of the marketing. His final moments are as bold and invigorating as anything this franchise has ever done and some of his line deliveries will live with me forever. It really culminates in the moment where he tells Furiosa that she "makes [him] the Dark Dementus" which is simultaneously a genuine expression of pain and a total abdication of humanity and a hype line to please his braying fans who are hungry for spectacle and a really funny thing to say.

Now that last year's critical darlings are finally trickling out to those of us worthless peons who dare to live somewhere other than New York and LA, I've been catching up with a few and would describe most of what I've watched so far as "boiled ass". The last few ugly pimples on one of cinema's worst years (so far!) Given the extreme Ehrlichcore hype over Nickel Boys, its long runtime, and the mostly first-person perspective that seems like a hacky award season gimmick on paper, I have to it that I was going into the film with a lot of skepticism. I only half-jokingly told a friend last night that if the movie didn't deliver I was going to swear off contemporary cinema entirely.

I'm pleased to report that I was totally wrong. The movie is great. The runtime flies by. The story is worth telling and well-told. The POV visuals deeply enhance the experience, and I was happy to see that Ross and his collaborators are willing to break the strict rules of how the human head moves when it serves clarity or emotion. There's a real understanding of grammar here; it doesn't just all look like GoPro footage.

On a thematic level, this is a film very seriously concerned with images and perspectives - the director has cited the great Symbiopsychotaxiplasm as an influence, and I also thought of Open Doom Crescendo, another of 2024's few standout features. On an emotional level, it really does heighten the tension when the evil heaster of the racist "reform school", his eyes dragging across the classroom looking for someone to torture, suddenly snaps forward to look directly at YOU. A cheap trick, maybe, but that's the kind of magic the medium was based on. At its best, Nickel Boys is a timely reminder that there really is no us and them, no you and me - just a gestalt entity of solidarity, and the barbarism that threatens it.

This was my second or third attempt at watching this movie - all I is being impressed with the visuals but also getting so bored around the desert base business that I turned it off. In fairness this means that I missed basically all of the good stuff, which is crammed into the last 45 minutes. On the other hand...that suggests to me that maybe we simply don't need 2.5 hour movies about The Hulk.

No one is more ready to buy into the ittedly hack fraud concept of "Jason in space" than I am, but man this is boring, filled with long stretches of nothing and a grim helping of "so that just happened" quippery. I don't mind when these movies have jokes but it helps when those jokes are actually, y'know, funny. Cyborg Jason is cool but I needed way more of him!

If you like the other Mad Maxes but don't like this one you're stupid, it's really that simple.

Watching this story about a disabled man in his 70s struggling to find redemption for the first time on what should have been David Lynch's 79th birthday hits very, very different. RIP to the great one, who even managed to see something beautiful in fucking Iowa.

Followed up yesterday's Riverbeast screening with a marathon of Slingshot Cops, Magic Spot, Freaky Farley, and Metal Detector Maniac at the Spacy Microcinema. Huge thanks to Evan for programming a great lineup (in a great order, too) and to Charlie and Farley for coming to the Midwest and basically just hanging out with us all damn weekend.

I am far too tired to form any coherent thoughts at this time, but I will say that this is one of the movies that grew the most in my estimation with a crowd, as the delight of seeing the movie itself for a third time was sured by the joy of watching other people discover its pleasures for a FIRST time, its bizarre twists and turns and hysterical dialogue rhythms. I spent most of the last 20 minutes watching fellow letterboxd , good friend, and road trip companion Jo as their jaw dropped further and further down their face, laughing ecstatically at a movie where anything can happen (and does). Never let the money men tell you different: if there's one thing I'm taking away from this weekend, it's that the possibilities of cinema are still infinite.

At tonight's showing at the Texas Theatre, Charlie Roxburgh said that he and Farley shoot these movies for the big screen even knowing they'll almost never be seen there. Experiencing this movie in a cinema definitely revealed depths to the sound and visual design not immediately obvious in my previous 20 or so viewings on home video. But more than that, it was a chance to watch this celebration of community with a community; to hear people roar with laughter and confirm what all right-thinking cinephiles already suspected: that the statue joke at the end of this is one of the funniest visual gags in all of cinema, the equal of the Marx Bros' mirror or Chaplin's dancing potatoes.

Pretty good exploitation flick that suffers primarily from having four sequels that are all infinitely better than it in every way.

The rumors are true: Jason does not, in fact, take Manhattan. But then, this franchise also features two different movies called "The Final One" (neither is) because cynical marketing is as much a part of this series as the hockey mask is. The only truly bad Jason movies are the boring ones, which this is not - goofy, stupid, and cheap, certainly, but not boring.

Does everything right that last year's Chicken Run sequel did wrong. Nick Park Forever.

"Despite the ones who want that, people will give up on coming together."
"They'll learn."
"They'll die before."
"They'll die trying."

I kinda don't want to sully the experience of Open Doom Crescendo with words but I also know that writing reviews of smaller movies like this can really help them, so here goes.

The first thing you'll likely notice about this movie if you're hearing about it for the first time is that it's three hours long, something that's mentioned in almost every review on its site. Microbudget movies aren't supposed to be that long. It's a perversion of our capitalist film culture that we accept spending three godforsaken hours with the guy who dresses up as a bat or the big purple space alien but even we soldiers of lo-fi cinema do have a tendency to be wary of no-budget movies that go beyond 90 minutes. Having said that, you will feel the runtime here. Though there's plenty of humor to be had, the constant onslaught of cacophonous sound and visuals, the wordy philosophical dialogue, and the deliberate lack of catharsis becomes exhausting by the end of the runtime.

But there's different kinds of exhaustion just like there's different kinds of boredom, and this kind is definitely deliberate and productive. As Chiu says in the companion book PhODC: Philosophy of OPEN DOOM CRESCENDO, he was "encouraged...to try to do the cinematic equivalent of what I would feel with music, where you can't understand the words a lot of the time or it's really distorted or it just fully assumes its technological limitations but then empowerments out of that."

A line of text seen at the beginning of both the book and the film says "WE DARE YOU NOT TO FEEL", and I think if you're able to give yourself over to the movie even a little bit, you will fail that dare. While not all of the thousands of images and dozens of subplots at play are likely to grab you, at least some of them will. I was certainly moved by the plight of The Gertrude, a creature who even good people must find hideous, representing the limits of humanity's empathy. Unexpectedly, I was also very moved by the henchman who self-actualizes into a table.

There are many themes at play here, some of which are explicitly stated in the book, some of which are left to the viewer to discover. What struck me hardest on this first viewing is Chiu's vision of the Wasteland, a series of vacant lots filmed unsentimentally on often rainy or overcast days. The sort of thing one expects from a lo-fi film to be sure, but the work's ultimate conclusion is that it's better to live here, in the post-apocalyptic cacophony of these ugly lots, struggling against yourself, than it is to live in our current colonialist/capitalist/racist present. Turning again to the book: "The Wasteland of Angst is the declarative protest that I would rather spend existence in a void of post-urban-desolation than a Heaven-the-real-Hell-on-Earth where the places I cherish most are swallowed by whites & their bitches...On grounds vapidly 'bought' to build soulless property: to film on the grounds while they are desolate is to empower and photographically immortalize the transience of the land while nature or transgressive philosophers can reclaim it."

As someone who myself often struggles to find a reason to live in an unreasoning world, I appreciate any film that declares the ultimate superiority of even a nightmarish life over any kind of death, especially when it also acknowledges just how difficult that choice can actually be. Making that notion part of the literal landscape of the work is one of the unique and, I think, profound connections that ODC's everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to art can create in the viewer. I look forward to rewatching in the future and finding more such connections.

This is not the easiest or most pleasurable movie I've watched this year, nor the most "perfect", but it's the one I'm most excited to champion, the one I'm most excited to wrestle with, the one that I think reflects the most positive vision for the cinema of the future and the cinema of the present. Much love to Terry and his Operators for making it; much love to everyone who worked to get it released.

Had the distinct privilege tonight of watching what we're tentatively calling "The Original Cut", an early but essentially finished version that director Albert Pyun carried around in film cans for his entire life, hoping that it could someday be released. This was its first and probably last public screening, although I would love to be proven wrong on that point.

This cut takes the character much more seriously, which I was concerned about, because the main thing I like about the theatrical version is what most people hate about it: it portrays Captain America as a shitty loser. I needn't have worried. The primary change here is that instead of telling the story chronologically, it starts with Cap waking up lost and confused in the 80s (in a scene that deliberately evokes The Thing) and we flash back to his 40s origins out of order as the scenes become relevant, or as he re them. The take here is very much that Captain America is a loser - a "4F nobody" who failed to stop the Red Skull and wakes up to find that all his friends are dying. This is really underlined when Cap visits his old commanding officer, who in this version is suffering from dementia, and who gives a speech about the pointless cruelty of America's post-WWII efforts which ends "Now [war] is just a g-ddamn business."

Weirder still is the choice to make Red Skull sympathetic, which fits in well with the film's thesis, but apparently infuriated the notably Jewish Golan and Globus. I get it. But when you have imagery like Red Skull attempting to play piano on the top of his castle at sunset, his serum-ruined hands struggling to find the right keys as he flashes back to his pre-Nazification childhood...at the risk of stating the obvious, let's just say that this is not imagery that the MCU would dare to traffic in.

Other pleasures: a more sparse, downbeat score; a thrillingly-edited final confrontation; a lot more texture to the Matt Salinger performance than is apparent in the theatrical cut. It's heartbreaking that Pyun wanted to make this movie about a lifelong failure finally getting a win and it got turned into the flop that would define his career forever, seemingly his greatest regret and one of the biggest reasons he struggled to get meaningful work in the decades that followed. With that in mind, I was unexpectedly moved by this late exchange between Cap and the Skull:

"You remain a clownish symbol that no one cares about."
"I care."

Deeply moving tone poem about the beauty and terror of nature. Feels like it was made by cats in a way and not people, cats who very briefly gained the sentience to along to us some important truth that only cats know.

Extremely cool-looking Italian cyberpunk movie where Christopher Lambert plays a computer programmer whose point-and-click adventure game's protagonist becomes sentient and starts begging for death. Vague and dissociative adventures ensue. The nominal Christmas setting doesn't amount to much but it's novel to see Johnny Mnemonic tech in the snow. This gets my highest praise which is that I was actively on my way to bed, this came on Justin Decloux's Twitch marathon, and on strength of vibes alone I stayed up bleary-eyed to watch the whole thing.

Really lame talking head documentary my Mom and Grandma put on in the background on Thanksgiving, as the "filmmakers" clearly intended.

No offense to the subject himself, of course, who deserves all the hagiography and more.