4v291o
I was surprised this was getting such bad reviews early on because I actually liked it quite a bit. Then came THE TURN that folks are discussing and it definitely screwed everything up for me, not so much because of the events afterwards but because I think it requires a level of manic energy that this doesn’t even attempt. As such, would’ve been better restricted to the final 10 minutes or so rather than the final 45.
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Watched on Sunday June 1, 2025.
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Watched on Sunday June 1, 2025.
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While it's true that Wes Anderson hasn't changed his style in nearly a quarter century at this point, it's unfair to say his films have stayed stagnant. He hasn't deviated much from the editing and camera placements that seemed so revelatory in Rushmore, but his best films since then have grown deeper and richer and he has taken risks in his own way. Some middling reviews of The Phoenician Scheme have dismissed it as more of the same, but I think it's his riskiest film in a very long time. While death is a constant presence in his work, there's a serious body count here: a man is blown in half in the very first shot, and there are murders, suicides, even a self-immolation. An even bigger departure is Del Toro's lead, which isn't exactly naturalistic, but is a clear departure from the intensely mannered, static performances that Anderson favors, and while most of his films revolve around a bad dad, this guy is a real son of a bitch, with much of the cutesiness of Steve Zissou or Royal Tenenbaum stripped away. Anyone who's hasn't liked Anderson since they were in high school won't change their minds here, and it might just be because I am way more into the inspirations here – WWII-era Korda/Powell & Pressburger, Duvivier, Dassin, etc – than I was the experimental theater stuff in Asteroid City or the sickly sweet live action New Yorker cartoons of The French Dispatch, but I think this is his best feature since Grand Budapest over a decade ago.
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Not really a movie here, is there?
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Really a classic special.
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Watched on Friday May 30, 2025.
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I don't really like Matt Reeves' vision for the Batman universe. It's way too self-serious and doubles down on the Nolan realism, which means lots of Mafia which has always been the least interesting part of Batlore (who cares about gangsters when you've got this deep of a rogue's gallery?). I found the first episode of this so dark and violent that I didn't bother finishing it initially but it definitely becomes more compelling as it goes on, and the credit is 1000% due to Cristin Milioti and Colin Farrell totally kicking ass and frankly investing this material with way more than it deserves. Still about twice as long as it needs to be.
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Watched on Wednesday May 28, 2025.
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Watched on Tuesday May 27, 2025.
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“I hope I die so this guy gets fired.”
The kill 2 birds with one stone bit is a mini masterpiece.
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Obviously underwent a bit of overhauling that leads to it not feeling as light on its feet as the very best entries. But some deftly handled bookending with the first film that feels unexpectedly emotional, particularly totally out of left field MVP Rolf Saxon who hasn’t really worked for a decade, and a full deck of ing scene chewing from greats new (O’Brien, Tillman), old (Klementieff, Whigham), and Divine (Czerny, just devouring).
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A totally engrossing Hollywood story of personal compromise and professional triumph with the still-enigmatic Reubens as our unreliable narrator. Sort of shortchanges his life post-Pee Wee (we find out later that's because he stopped talking to the filmmakers), but at its best this achieves a magical "Look I Made A Hat" quality in which the sweetest and saddest moments of his life converge to give birth to a creation that will long outlive him. After seeing this I can honestly say I don't think I'd be who I am without watching Pee Wee's Playhouse in my most formative years.
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Watched on Thursday May 22, 2025.
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Watched on Tuesday May 20, 2025.
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Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.
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Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.
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Some interesting stuff here, written as badly as you can possibly imagine, with awful aesthetics. Cannot BELIEVE that Zemeckis made Wright play Jennay again!!
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I wondered if anyone involved with this had ever seen footage of Margaret Thatcher before because she certainly wasn’t a kindly grandma but Coogan is surprisingly great at conveying her rise and fall, all with a fairly dogshit script.
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Wowww 16 years ago is very far away.
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"In addition to alcoholism I'm suffering from non-alcoholism."
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Terrifying, dangerous lunatics who endanger the world.
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Watched on Wednesday May 14, 2025.
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Watched on Sunday May 11, 2025.
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Watched on Saturday May 10, 2025.
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My mom has dementia. Paul Schrader’s wife has dementia. I get what he’s going for with this narrative full of confusion about time and place and who’s actually in the room, but he doesn’t really pull it off and most of it comes off as confounding instead of revelatory. We aren’t quite sure the extent of Gere’s character’s “confession” because he’s not sure either. May very well be Schrader’s intention, but not very compelling to watch.
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Watched on Saturday May 10, 2025.
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Steve Coogan + an antifa penguin = five bags of popcorn 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿
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Was not expecting Anna Kendrick to pick up the mantle of Zodiac and turn it into an exploration of how every interaction with a man has a nonzero chance of being brutally murdered.
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I found this embarrassingly underwritten and lackadaisically directed. I always wonder when you encounter something like this that seems written as a first draft by an angry 13 year old boy, how did this get made? Elijah Bynum probably thought he was making a new Taxi Driver but it's indistinguishable from a calling card movie that gets nominated for Best First Film at the Independent Spirit Awards or something. That being said, obviously Jonathan Majors acts the hell out of it, but this was never getting any major awards attention.
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Probably built this one up a bit too much for myself over the years because this kind of thing is usually 100% my jam. I was surprised to find myself left a little cold by it though, I think because Kirsten Johnson imposes a bit too much narrative to make this feel free-flowing like a Samsara or Koyaanisqatsi, and then overstuffs it in a way that felt very disted and jerked me back and forth between too many stories. Would've worked better for me either with no dialogue and 30 minutes shorter, or at this same length with maybe 30-40% less going on. Leaving this so episodic means some episodes work and some don't; for me the most successful one was the one that imposed the least amount of storytelling: the sites of atrocities that are now peaceful and serene.
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Mostly standard issue melodrama but a very complex and restrained Walken performance here.
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Honestly had a lot of trouble telling the young whites apart in this one.
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Watched on Wednesday April 30, 2025.
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A real treasure trove for Late Night early adopters.
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Crowd wasn’t into it and neither was I.
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Big fan of the Evans filmography but this is sometimes shockingly generic, and his usually unparalleled fight choreography is marred by shitty camera work and muddy cinematography.
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Watched on Friday May 2, 2025.
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A24 in full-blown flop era.
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Such a rich, metaphorical study of its period featuring such beautifully-detailed characters that it’s a real bummer when it becomes a fairly routine vampire movie, with those fantastic characters behaving in increasingly illogical ways and those metaphors getting mixed and diluted once they start flirting with more controversial territory (the church being imposed on enslaved people at the expense of their own cultures, and distrust of people who “”).
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Watched on Tuesday April 22, 2025.
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Watched on Saturday April 26, 2025.
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Watched on Wednesday April 23, 2025.
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Watched on Friday April 25, 2025.
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Watched on Thursday April 24, 2025.
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Watched on Tuesday April 22, 2025.
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Weird that there’s a movie where Mads Mikkelsen sings a Lin-Manuel Miranda song named “Bye Bye” in character as an aryan lion and no one told me about it before now.
Really no need to exist but could be much worse. Used this to test my mom's new TV, we enjoyed ourselves.
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Watched on Monday April 21, 2025.
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Watched on Sunday April 20, 2025.
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Watched on Friday April 18, 2025.
]]>- My Family
- Can't Get You Out of My Head
- Marketa Lazarová
- The Sapphires
- World's Greatest Dad
- Shadowlands
- Pandora and the Flying Dutchman
- The Sorrow and the Pity
- Dogfight
- Red White & Blue
...plus 48 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.
]]>Every director who saw Cuaron's Roma decided they needed to make their own highly detailed evocation of their childhood worlds.
(ranked in my order of preference)
]]>- Killers of the Flower Moon
- Dear Mama
- Beau Is Afraid
- Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
- Oppenheimer
- May December
- The Holdovers
- The Iron Claw
- Barbie
- Maestro
...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.
]]>- TÁR
- Avatar: The Way of Water
- Aftersun
- Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone
- Benediction
- All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
- Elvis
- Armageddon Time
- Look at Me: XXXTENTACION
- The Banshees of Inisherin
...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.
]]>(I wasn't asked but this is what I'd vote for)
- Citizen Kane
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- The Bridge on the River Kwai
- Au Hasard Balthazar
- Stalker
- Suspiria
- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
- The Godfather Part II
- The Wizard of Oz
- Sunset Boulevard
...plus 60 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.
]]>- Can't Get You Out of My Head
- Dune
IMAX VERSION (no idea how I'd feel about this on TV but in true IMAX was one of the greatest movie experiences of my life)
- The Velvet Underground
- In the Heights
- ing
- Nightmare Alley
- Benedetta
- The Worst Person in the World
- Pig
- Licorice Pizza
...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.
]]>- Midsommar
- Parasite
- Uncut Gems
- A Hidden Life
- The Irishman
- Marriage Story
- Us
- Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
- Diego Maradona
- Dragged Across Concrete
...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.
]]>- Margaret
- The Tree of Life
- Young Adult
- First Reformed
- O.J.: Made in America
- Mandy
- The Place Beyond the Pines
- The Grand Budapest Hotel
- Coco
- Phantom Thread
...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.
]]>- First Reformed
- Mandy
- Roma
- The Death of Stalin
- A Star Is Born
- Widows
- Burning
- The Favourite
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
- Vice
...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.
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