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lars lets us in on a little secret (mum's the word): dreadful things can only happen in musicals if we let them. and dancer in the dark makes the case that we should've been doing so all along. brilliant.

don't be fooled into thinking this is the movie where a group of talking dogs come together with a common purpose; instead it's a movie where humans stand around in solitude and don't say a goddamn word. thanks metrograph at home!

the sheer audacity of a movie to be over 4 hours long, offer virtually no resolution to its plot's numerous mysteries, and still be good.

should I ever find myself in a situation where I'm putting people's lives in jeopardy, ima just keep saying "we're moving right along, folks"

much stranger than most movies of its ilk. as light and funny as it is threatening - don't ask me how. unlike the novel which apparently centers the detective and his search, armitage focuses on the man he's after, junior (alec baldwin)—whose propped up by two great ing roles: one his lady, susie (jennifer jason leigh), and the other an adversary (fred ward)—all while sneakily making this susie's story. every time I was reminded that the entire shakedown ensued because of something that seemed like nothing more than an early notch on junior's belt to build a sense of menace around his character—breaking some random annoying guy's finger at the airport—I was forced to rethink everything I knew about filmmaking.

not me being the first person called on during the q&a and asking if the tunnel scenes were shot in basement and them looking at me like what the fuck are you even talking about. forget having friends, men shouldn't be allowed to speak.

This review may contain spoilers.

as much about what they got away with, as it is about what they did. although some form of comeuppance emerges via the inspired choice to set up a romance subplot only for it to end with an unemotional thud: "we just fucked twice, man" 😄

Guido (the main character) if this were made in 2025: "my life a movie fr"

airtight, gut-wrenchingly bleak (and not just for bleakness' sake) directorial debut from tim blake nelson. heaviness is A-OK, welcome even, when it's conveyed with this much restraint. something about 3-named character actors getting their first go in the director's chair right.

locking in for a 2-hour movie on the criterion 24/7 livestream late at night only to find out, 2 hours and 10 minutes in, that it's the 3-hour director's cut you didn't know existed 🧘
https://youtu.be/oVZH3EzVZtk?si=jV9_UiRvQGQevjmW

really speaks to this movie's strengths (its wacky sense of humor, the costumes, a great david bowie, a great rosanna arquette, a great eszter balint) that I almost went the whole time without realizing there isn't a single mention of linguini, let alone any actual pasta in the film. this fact only gets better and more stupefying when you know that one of the film's main posters is just the actors' faces entangled in a thick web of linguini.

Watched on Monday April 28, 2025.

kinda stunned by this one. started off with a bang and maintained that energy the whole way through. so good.

you've heard of sexting, but have you heard of saxxxing?? (telling a lover that you're wearing nothing by faxing over a blank sheet of paper)

aired on adult swim's toonami block

what if I told you that a 2006 romcom about bestiality is actually good? like not only stupid-good, but substance-good? yeah, I'd tell me to shut my lying ass up too. don't ask why but this has been on my watchlist for some time. did I go into it wanting anything other than irreverent schlock? absolutely not. did I come out charmed and maybe even a little moved, while chuckling pretty steadily at the generous helping of irreverence I was served in the process? you bet your furry tail I did. for starters, bobcat goldthwait's screenplay is sharper than the average late(ish)-2000s romcom's. difference is, this movie's plot hinges on an act so taboo that it makes what michelle flaherty did "one time at band camp" seem tame, and which, by some miracle, it deftly manages to apply to a story of one woman's relationships with the people in her life. things get unexpectedly serious for a stretch, but even when they do, you what got you there in the first place and just smile at the fuckery of it all. oh and the cast, especially the lead who plays amy, is acting their asses off??? I think I'll just leave it at that and leave the rest up to you. but I will add that the rush I got during the end credits, when I had the idea that it should say "no animals were harmed or pleasured in the making of this film" and seconds later those exact words appeared on the screen, had me feeling invincible.

"when the world blows up, I hope I go down dancing." I'm so gloria fr. one of the most underrated movies in the a24 catalogue (and a rare instance where the film's score kicks in before their logo appears on-screen). at only 30k viewers, it's one of the least watched a24 releases on letterboxd. the kiddies weren't ready. I being the youngest person in my theater (out of less than 10) by at least a quarter-century. it's a middle-aged-mom movie. it doesn't have a dark hook or try to make any major statements. it just is what it is. (I realize these things aren't exactly selling points and I'm perfectly okay with it not getting much love.) it's an english-language remake with foreign sensibilities, thanks to chilean director sebastian lelio who also directed the original (like what haneke did with funny games). it's mature. it has a great electronic score and an all-diegetic 70s/80s disco-centric soundtrack. love all the purple hues throughout, I always associate that color with this movie. I still haven't watched the chilean version which came out 5 years prior, and I'm sure I'll like it, but I can already tell you that it's lacking one vital thing: julianne moore dancing to "ring my bell." 🔔 in those times when it feels like the world is exploding—or your own personal world even—if you're anything like me and gloria, you'll still have the dancefloor. and lucky for everyone else the dancefloor will still have you!

This review may contain spoilers.

***Last Summer spoilers ahead***
using this review for both movies.

I'm surprised to see how faithful last summer, catherine breillat's remake of this film, stays to the source. this is especially true of last summer's first act, which is more or less a beat-by-beat repurposing of queen of hearts (albeit with more interesting actors and direction thanks to breillat's handiwork). there's a key difference right around the 45 minute mark in both films. QOH leaves no room for debate in framing the stepmom as the initiatior/"ab" when she plants a kiss at the bar, and the stepson as having no real inclination toward anything romantic with her before this moment; whereas in LS, it's the stepson who not only makes the first advance (in a different scene), but initiates each one that follows, even after the stepmom keeps suggesting—as questionable as her sincerity when doing so may be—that it needs to stop. I wonder if this one difference was breillat's driving motive for remaking QOH, because apart from that she only makes minor adjustments (not including the ending), and, by her standards at least, plays things relatively safe. a curious comeback film for a director of her reputation tbh. I did like last summer when I first saw it at nyff, but I think having now watched what it was modeled after has given me a more positive view of the film. she opens the door for moral ambiguity, yielding a more nuanced version of this story. to el-toukhy's credit, though, it's a lot easier to improve on something than to make it from scratch.

This review may contain spoilers.

***Queen of Hearts spoilers ahead***
using this review for both movies.

I'm surprised to see how faithful last summer, catherine breillat's remake of queen of hearts, stays to the source. this is especially true of last summer's first act, which is more or less a beat-by-beat repurposing (albeit with more interesting actors and direction thanks to breillat's handiwork). there's a key difference right around the 45 minute mark in both films. QOH leaves no room for debate in framing the stepmom as the initiatior/"ab" when she plants a kiss at the bar, and the stepson as having no real inclination toward anything romantic with her before this moment; whereas in LS, it's the stepson who not only makes the first advance (in a different scene), but initiates each one that follows, even after the stepmom keeps suggesting—as questionable as her sincerity when doing so may be—that it needs to stop. I wonder if this one difference was breillat's driving motive for remaking QOH, because apart from that she only makes minor adjustments (not including the ending), and, by her standards at least, plays things relatively safe. a curious comeback film for a director of her reputation tbh. I did like last summer when I first saw it at nyff, but I think having now watched what it was modeled after has given me a more positive view of the film. she opens the door for moral ambiguity, yielding a more nuanced version of this story. to el-toukhy's credit, though, it's a lot easier to improve on something than to make it from scratch.

an eastwood easter. washed in the blood of william munny's opps. god forgives, clint don't.

This review may contain spoilers.

Club Juke yelp review by BanjosAndNeckBites1932:

Extremely rude door staff, refused to invite me in. Was discriminated against because I had a tiny bloodstain on my shirt and red twinkle in my eye. Berghain is more welcoming. Go literally ANYWHERE ELSE to get your jig on!!!

fucking terrifying. couldn't wait for it to be over.

call me crazy but I was expecting more than like 1 scene on the on the subway

This review may contain spoilers.

"I made wrong change all day" gotta be the most romantic thing a pickle guy could say to a broad. but idk dawg this didn't really need the traditional happy ending, izzy's refusal to give in to her better judgment because it went against her stuck up ways should've eventually caught up to her

chilly scenes of winter is superior, kinda surprised they were made by the same person tbh. no surprise that flopped while delancey was a hit though

Watched on Thursday April 17, 2025.

This review may contain spoilers.

on most nights, I too would die for 2 bowls of noodles.

the perfect movie for anyone who loves titanic (1997) but wishes it were 1 hour longer and could do without all the ship-meets-iceberg jazz, and instead wants the scene where jack draws rose's nude portrait to have approximately 45x the amount of screen time—showing the artistic process in painstaking detail through long, static takes of sketching/posing (and continual redoing) as opposed to quick cuts between artist, subject, and canvas—and for this scene to be scoreless while dropping the romance angle, and they'd have preferred if james cameron dialed the general drama down from 10 to, say, 2 and made all his actors speak french in lieu of english!

edit: am a little spooked to discover that I watched this on the same date the actual titanic sank 😵

the chapters are a mixed bag—nutrition month (green), youth council (purple): not great / national language month (yellow+orange), prom (blue+pink): quite good—but something like a rainbow, the film is greater than the sum of its parts. oh and filipino emo music kinda slaps?!?!

great neck NY's car"mellow" anthony putting on a clinic with the rock in one hand, champagne of beers in the other 😮‍💨

original soundtrack is V for viiiiiiiiiiiibes

fucking lovely movie, despite the absence of any reference to the single hardest pitch to hit in baseball history: Curtis Jackson's eephus, thrown on May 27, 2014.

I'm not a player I just chocolat

(sorry)

I'll see your s Ha and your Funny Ha Ha and raise you HA HA HA!!!! an intoxicating paradox – sharing a shot of alcohol per story from memory, inching toward hazier and hazier recollection of their present encounter, if not a total blackout. "strengthen our bond through a glass." drinking to , drinking to forget: a fine, not-so-straight line. oh, have I mentioned? green! bottle! galore! in the river of soju that runs through hong's oeuvre, I'd wager this is his heaviest pour.

children once again not beating the we-ruin-everything allegations

I had proper fun with the first half, which consists of jack lemmon and eventually catherine deneuve party hopping around new york together over the course of a single night. the rest is okay, but could've been a great movie if that eventful evening were stretched even further with a short epilogue revealing the lovebirds' destiny. (and greater still if the outcome were different...asking too much now?)

better than parasite

april fools 😝

Watched on Sunday March 30, 2025.

This review may contain spoilers.

mobbed up david cronenberg calling nick tortelli from cheers to confirm, in italian, that he's quite literally iced nicole kidman? stuff dreams are made of.

niles!!!!!!!!!!

belongs in the pantheon of great "slow burn" films, and it's only 76 mins! epic. fucking. payoff.

I'm always amazed when 2 completely unrelated movies I watch around the same time share something hyper specific (happens more often than you might expect), but this particular instance I think takes the cake - both this and the mack, which I watched on consecutive nights, contain a scene where a man who is ordering a group of other men around says "all I wanna see is assholes and elbows"

would just like to point out that someone is credited as "subject needing more lube"

screened on an extra scratchy 35mm print which was perfect for the movie, except for the fact that it didn't have the iconic willie hutch soundtrack 🤣 this came as a surprise to literally everyone including melissa of alfreda's cinema whose dream it was to screen this and who tracked down the print, receiving it on loan from the university of north carolina. instead it had some other soundtrack—still solid I guess—that was released ten years after the film came out. def gonna have to watch the OG someday but I'm still glad to have seen it in a theater on film for my first watch. very cool to grasp the reach of this movie's influence more and more as it played out - things I've seen/heard many times in the past and didn't know they were coming directly from this movie. to list a few examples ⬇️

music: asap rocky's "goldie"
• a nickname of ghostface killah Pretty Toney
• and one that needs no mentioning

TV: the sitcom martin on multiple. occasions.

film: this movie written by tarantino, who I've come to find out is leader of the mack fan club

I can't front, max julien's lead mack is slightly more forgettable than I wanted him to be, but he's just good enough, and is ed by a cast of characters that send this thing into another pimp-osphere. pryor's hilarious mack-confidant who delivers each quip while seemingly on the verge of tears (his base running at the "player's picnic" is utter chaos and maybe even a metaphor for one's ability to turn a measly single into a big score). the white cops and other "bad guys" are great at being complete scum too. overall a sneakily powerhouse script of dialogue that's less choppy and just has less throwaway material than in other blaxpoliatation films I've seen. some strong dramatic moments here as well. suffice to say, I can dig it baby.

leaving criterion: march 31
leaving my mind: no time soon

what a poster btw

Watched on Tuesday March 25, 2025.

it's no AGGRO, but anything that manages to squeeze out 80 minutes of new burial material deserves to be celebrated

Watched on Wednesday March 19, 2025.

she left that night. it'll be a year on march 19th

*checks date on phone* OH HELL YEAH (it was after midnight)

it's 2015 - I'm seated in a theater for it follows - the heaven knows what trailer plays and it bowls me the fuck over. at the time I had no knowledge whatsoever of the safdies, but the trailer was so goddamn arresting that all I could think while watching it was WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS MOVIE? and I NEED TO SEE IT. I regrettably didn't chase it down during its theatrical run, but I did rent it on demand when it became available the following year. I actually chose to watch it with my mom and the jury remains out as to whether that was a good or bad decision. in the mid-2010s it wasn't uncommon for her and I to fire up an indie relationship drama with a focus on addiction, but this was not quite that, and I'd soon find out the safdies refuse to play by any of the rules those other movies do. I'm not so sure *I* was ready for it 10 years ago either, but I did like it, and more importantly it had me anticipating everything safdie-related to follow with bated breath. watching heaven knows what now, though, after being all too acquainted with the brothers' ethos and their sensibilities, was an almost entirely different viewing experience. and watching it knowing buddy duress—someone who I'd run into from time to time on the street in queens—is no longer with us because he succumbed to the same fate that's implicated upon the characters in the film, made things more heartbreaking movie-wise than they needed to be. buddy's so fucking good in this, as is arielle. you'd think this would come as no surprise considering it's their actual lives they're portraying, but even still, I don't think just anybody from the streets could be given a script & have a camera shoved in their face and come off natural in the way that the they do. the sequence with the hardstyle song from the trailer...incredible. also incredible, and something I somehow didn't much of from my first watch, is the opening title sequence: a wordless yet chaotic, heavily electronic-scored long take which was shot in a dreary wing of bellevue hospital's psych ward. it's a completely engrossing uninterruped 5 minutes that, alone, could serve as the safdie mission statement—it's almost unfair how those two allow for bouts of filmmaking bravura to excite on a level of pure enjoyment even when the subject matter they're underlining is unmistakably bleak. but the coolest thing about heaven knows what, is how it centers its characters with such precision, that background players—the everyday, presumably well-adjusted citizens of new york city—are made to look so irrelevant, and in turn, uninteresting, while our leads weave around said faceless bodies traversing a city that seemingly belongs to them. it's magic, really, and makes the question of whether or not the undertaking of a project like this comes from an empathetic place a very easy one to answer.

steve buscemi single-handedly putting valley stream on the map!!! kinda crazy to think that this was only chloe sevigny's second film role, with her first being kids. ol' billy best character by far. I could've used more time in the bar and less on the ice cream truck.

Watched on Wednesday February 26, 2025.

These are the 78 films—of his 9.6k logged at the time of this writing—that my favorite film critic, Mike D'Angelo, has given 5 stars on Letterboxd (based on his 100-point rating scale; films scored 91 or higher get converted to 5 stars). Anyone familiar with Mike knows that 4 stars from him is like 5 from the average reviewer (not an exact science but you get the idea). Basically he's sort of a hard-ass, which only makes the films he does love that much more noteworthy. So the purpose of this list is to highlight every film he's actually given a whole 5 stars. I like to think that I can form my own opinions at the end of the day, but chances are, if Mike D loves a movie, I'll at the very least like it (though it's not uncommon for us to disagree the opposite way—me loving something he strongly dislikes).

List is ordered from his highest-rated 5s (100/100 scored films; his absolute favorites) to lowest (91/100). The final 16 films on the list, starting with Red Dust, are his 5-star films that have no written Letterboxd review attached, ergo no numbered score. 

Before putting this together, a process which required lots of phone/computer back-and-forth + navigating between multiple microsoft word windows, I searched the list pool on Letterboxd and found that a number of people have already had this idea, but I still wanted to compile the list on my own so as to better familiarize myself with it. Lastly, Mike's work is much more than just a numbers game; it's how he writes about movies that makes people value his opinion to the point of wanting to even do shit like this. If seeing this list is your introduction to him, do yourself a favor and tap in! You will be enlightened—and sometimes enraged—but he'll introduce you to great films you've never heard of and enrich your view of ones you've seen, and possibly your view of film criticism itself.

Mike's links:
Letterboxd
Patreon
His personal site (the most comprehensive record of movie-watching you'll ever see on the interwebs)

• Only Angels Have Wings

  100/100

• Manhattan

  100/100

• Double Indemnity

  100/100

• Exotica

  100/100

• Brief Encounter

  100/100

• A Star Is Born

  100/100

• Blood Simple
• Seven Chances
• The Lady Eve
• Daisy Kenyon

...plus 68 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I could literally watch paint dry if it were scored by Mica Levi.

• Under the Skin
• Delete Beach
• Jackie
• Marjorie Prime
• Ceremony: The Return of Friedrich Engels
• INNA
• Sirens
• Monos
• The Fall
• Strasbourg 1518

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

vAMP . LoV3 . i love u 💋

• A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
• Sinners
• Nosferatu
• Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person
• Norway
• What We Do in the Shadows
• Only Lovers Left Alive
• Vamps
• Byzantium
• Vampire

...plus 66 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Anora
• Red Rooms
• Challengers
• Nickel Boys
• I Saw the TV Glow
• Hard Truths
• The Substance
• Good One
• Oddity
• The Brutalist

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

1. The Zone of Interest
2. AGGRO DR1FT
3. Falcon Lake
4. May December
5. The Taste of Things
6. Barbie
7. Past Lives
8. Anatomy of a Fall
9. The Holdovers
10. Talk to Me

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

1. TÁR
2. RRR
3. The Banshees of Inisherin
4. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
5. Aftersun
6. Barbarian
7. EO
8. X
9. Pearl
10. We're All Going to the World's Fair

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

A peek into Josh and Benny's personal collection of movie posters. As displayed at NYC's Posteritati (curated by Josh himself). These are just the films that were represented in the gallery, not the specific posters on display.

• Good Time
• Broadway Danny Rose
• The Executioner's Song
• Christiane F.
• The Postman Always Rings Twice
• Gloria
• Camera Buff
• An Unmarried Woman
• Straight Time
• Capricorn One

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.