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2000s Dark Castle coded nonsense (complimentary)

The last thing I expected from a Mission: Impossible movie was franchise-brained, “ this” grandstanding. My critical consciousness knew that its first hour — a key-jingling clipshow designed to haphazardly connect the mythology of eight films — was feckless in its pandering. But here’s the rub: I didn’t really care. The Mission: Impossible movies are like my children — I love them all — and instead of seeing the endless montages of Missions past as the onset of incurable franchise-itis, I saw them as a swan song for a defender of the analog, a reminder for every time Tom Cruise has risked his life for our entertainment. Like Dead Reckoning before it, The Final Reckoning continues to blur the line between actor and role: both champions of the human touch, railing against out-of-control algorithms and the self-replicating miasma of ignoble tech.

Even through its first act’s unwieldy self-mythologizing and clunky, run-on exposition, there’s an earnest coat of finality that propels The Final Reckoning. I would be lying if I said I preferred whatever kind of meandering, expressionist paranoia McQuarrie has been cultivating with the Reckoning films to the airtight, crackerjack spycraft of the Rogue Nation era, but it’s almost magical when Hunt makes that mid-movie appeal, close to breaking the fourth wall: “I need you to trust me, one last time.” And if you do? The Final Reckoning’s back-half of sustained nail-biting is some of the most breathtaking “how did they do that” action you’ll ever see.

Forgot that Tony Todd had ed and that he was in these, so seeing him here felt like a kick to the solar plexus. Also, a new horror movie about “generational trauma” that didn’t make me want to immediately leave the theater.

Everything about Thunderbolts’ grating marketing blitz — from its tongue-in-cheek spouting of indie bona fides to its self-important, post-release title change — seems hell-bent on shoving a square peg into a round hole: a forced-entry manifestation of a kind of superhero movie that barely exists anymore. Right in the middle of the MCU’s nosedive, it’s a left-handed PR push that sets up its right hand for embarrassing failure, but against all odds, Thunderbolts works. Sure, its “trauma box” themes are still puddles and the third act dropping-of-the-ball hits like clockwork, but like the rarified bright spots of post-Endgame superheroics, Thunderbolts thrives off of emotional honesty and genuinely fun team dynamics. Florence Pugh breaks her back carrying this thing, and it’s actually wild to see Lewis Pullman breathe likability and dimension into one of the most annoying comics characters of the last two decades. Its marketing might be fake, astroturfed, and performative, but Thunderbolts itself is anything but.

Purposefully messy vampire metaphor just overflowing with ion and ideas, painted across a tapestry of folklore, diegetic blues, and epic horror. It’s why we go to the movies. The 70mm print stuns.

Imagine dozing off during the forgettable, anti-Beekeeper A Working Man when you’re ambushed by a giant cartoon moon lighting some of the crispiest, most gorgeous nighttime photography you’ve seen in an action movie.

Halfway through Black Bag, Marisa Abela’s barb-tongued satcom specialist, Clarissa, rhetorically interrogates an entire subgenre: “When you can lie about everything, when you can deny everything, how do you tell the truth about anything?” Steven Soderbergh, in a sexy, zero-fat, 94 minutes, answers the question in the most unexpected way. Black Bag sure is steamy — Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett playing married spooks certainly heightens its seductiveness — but its real heat lies in its surprising juxtaposition, honing in on a ionate kernel of loyalty and devotion within a sea of spy-versus-spy cynicism: the ultimate, lean expression of “couple goals.”

Watched on Tuesday March 11, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday March 11, 2025.

Watched on Monday March 10, 2025.

Watched on Monday March 10, 2025.

16mm stunner through a Tarot-inspired, heightened-reality Louisiana. It takes a wild amount of guts to namedrop John Waters and Gregg Araki in the Q&A for your first feature, but Annapurna Sriram’s really got it — what a gorgeous, assured debut.

Watched on Saturday March 8, 2025.

New entry in the “eat-the-rich for Cocomelon babies” subgenre

The speed-dating, line-dancing, dudes rock surprise of the year. Hope they make 20 more of these.

Easy to goof on a parkour doc in 2025, but this is a near-perfect marriage between filmmaker and subject matter: exhilarating drones, sweeping kineticism, jaw-dropping blocking. Touched by its treatise on how little time we have to do the things we love.

If you’re going to beat me over the head with the metaphorror sledgehammer, you better do it in the funniest, nastiest way possible. Great gags, beautiful gags. Had the entire midnight crowd cackling.

Not even the lukewarm melange of Bong Joon-ho’s greatest hits can dilute another all-timer Robert Pattinson performance — another entry in his flawless “freaky little guy” canon. Naomi Ackie secret MVP.

Watched on Tuesday February 25, 2025.

The cutest little romance and the promise of something different, cut off at the knees by PlayStation 3 monster fighting.

“Hey there big guy, budget’s getting real low.”

80% annoying, tired polemic. 20% Sophie Thatcher owning the screen. Should’ve been the other way around.

Watched on Sunday January 19, 2025.

Watched on Thursday January 16, 2025.

Tender, dirtbag poetry fully in conversation with its predecessor, and not what I expected at all in a very good way.

Watched on Wednesday January 8, 2025.

I will eat up any new iteration of The Count of Monte Cristo, but Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patellière put a new layer of delicious stank on one of literature’s greatest haters and it is an utter joy to behold. Quintessential revenge movie and gorgeous to boot.

Watched on Wednesday January 1, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday December 31, 2024.

Always in the bag for Eggers, but this is the first time I felt his slavish devotion to detail obstruct imagination, and ironically, blood in the veins. My wife literally turned to me afterwards and said: “We should’ve just watched Coppola’s Dracula instead.” I agree.

Two-handed Christmas banger. Taron Egerton inching his way towards Tom Cruise levels of the cinematic running canon.

Are we just resigned to these kinds of legacy sequels now? Love my boy Ridley, but if Alien: Romulus doesn’t get a , this shouldn’t either.

Quite infectious and I liked this much more than I thought I would, mostly because Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo break their backs carrying it, but if you watched this back-to-back with Spielberg’s West Side Story you would go catatonic. Jon M. Chu just doesn’t have it.

Had a long, extensive discussion about this with my wife afterwards — the true sign of a movie that sticks to the ribs. Could we be as strong as Nicholas Hoult’s Justin Kemp in the face of such a stupefying moral puzzle box? Would we also be as weak? What parts of ourselves would we be willing to sacrifice at the altar of the American family ideal? What evil and rot would we allow? Even disregarding that this, like many are saying, is meat-and-potatoes filmmaking we don’t see that often anymore, Juror #2 is smart, gratifying cinema. And the ending makes the film: an expected terminus of thorny-yet-comfortable moral suspension shattered by a knock at the door.

A former teen pop star’s death sends a shuttle of freelancer paps to take photos while the body is still warm; within hours, images from TMZ have over a billion eyes on them. Ryan Murphy’s new Menendez Brothers series, the second season of Monster, mines the most salacious, tabloid untruths for sensationalist drama. “[The Menendez Brothers] should be sending me flowers,” gloats the showrunner. Postmodern capital has not only exploited our rubbernecking isolation, but crowded out our stimulation towards pernicious pathologies: a growing chasm of apathy and detachment matched only by our Internet bandwidth. When and where but now and in our feeds, behind our screens, can we find cam rips of Terrifier 3 side-by-side with real-life images of children being annihilated by war crimes? And are we so inured to ignore the difference? Our ever-flattening consumption has given us a new, default mode: one of a moral stasis ever-straddling the evaporating line between our hunger for spectacle and our ability to view violence as real and victims as humans. 

Enter Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms, perhaps 2024’s most essential reading of our parasocial obsessions within the social media simulacra. The sinister figure at the center of the film is notorious serial killer Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos); nicknamed “The Demon of Rosemont,” Chevalier is on trial for his slow, sadistic murders of teenage girls, broadcast and streamed for profit on the dark web in the titular “red rooms.” However, to call Red Rooms a serial killer thriller would be a misnomer: Plante is interested not in murderers and their psychology, but rather in those infatuated with them. The movie finds a dark, frightening mirror to reality with Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), a blank, statuesque model-by-day whose fixation on Chevalier begins every morning at dawn as she lines up outside the courthouse for the trial gallery. Crashing out of the gate carrying a brazen display of Plante’s controlled formalism, Red Rooms begins with long takes of the prosecution’s opening statement in a sterile Quebecois courtroom. A slow pan of the camera lingers on barristers, the judge, and the jury as Chevalier’s alleged crimes are expounded in grisly detail, but it’s Kelly-Anne’s vacant expression - a reflection of modern unreadability and stone-faced fascination - that draws the most attention. Is she an irer? Is she repulsed? Red Rooms ultimately doesn’t really care; Kelly-Anne wants more.

In a stroke of brilliance, Red Rooms pairs Kelly-Anne with another Chevalier obsessive, Clémentine (Laurie Babin): a conspiracy peddler that finds “kindness” in the murderer’s eyes, utterly convinced that he is innocent of his crimes. Gregarious and scrutable in every way Kelly-Anne is not, Clémentine at first fills the role as a different breed of serial killer groupie, but quickly transmutes into something different entirely: a symbol of the lines that Kelly-Anne is willing to not only cross, but obliterate. Hacking personal information from grieving parents, old-fashioned breaking and entering, and bidding in dark web auctions for a fabled missing “red room” video, Kelly-Anne falls deeper down the rabbit hole of her own consumption, graduating from sideline enthusiast to insidious interloper. It’s here that Red Rooms’ neat facade - much like its protagonist’s iron-willed steeliness - begins to crumble: reality bleeds, formal control slips, and Dominique Plante’s baroque score destabilizes into discordant soundscapes, all climaxing with a jaw-dropping cosplay jaunt that is perhaps one of the most sickening acts of non-physical violence ever committed to film. By design, Red Rooms’ restraint never allows it to fall into complicity of the apparatus it’s trying to critique; for a movie about gruesome murders captured on video for gawking pleasure, there’s almost no gore present. Instead, Plante finds the most unsettling excavations of our unfeeling voyeur culture, and for every temptation to wag the finger at our terminally-online zeitgeist, the movie stays surprisingly true to its turbulent, impenetrable interiority.

Red Rooms immediately reminds me of the real-life Ken & Barbie murders of the early 90s in Canada: a series of rapes and killings that were sensationalized partially because of the videos of the victims filmed by the perpetrators. What made the case so interesting, however, was that the footage was so heinous that it was incinerated by the courts, even amidst appeal, for the sake of the families. Red Rooms is a warped - but hardly exaggerated - mirror to our present where this kind of civility has all but fallen away, replaced by digital numbness and hollow hearts. When Kelly-Anne sits on a victim’s bed to snap a selfie, the picture that eventually develops isn’t of her empty, rictus smile, but of our own insatiable, consumerist maw. 

READ THE FULL REVIEW ON STRANGE HARBORS

Oscars talk for this is very funny because this is a goofed up B-movie through and through. An outrageously silly, yet wildly entertaining papal conspiracy thriller with an overwrought score, a completely manufactured gravitas, and bitchy cardinals scheming — a three-star banger.

An upgrade over Smile in almost every way, Smile 2 features below-the-belt jump scares and mean-spirited gags so well-crafted that you can almost forget its complete disinterest in taking the concept any further than the first movie and the fact that it’s 40 minutes too long. Naomi Scott is great in this.

Watched on Tuesday October 29, 2024.

Watched on Saturday October 26, 2024.

Watched on Friday October 18, 2024.

I loved The Substance, but it's pretty clear now that Aaron Schimberg's A Different Man is the essential 2024 text on self-hatred and the self-wounding blade of wish fulfillment. Effortlessly smart without an ounce of ostentatious force, this is a movie with a million layers underneath its cruel, nasty joke of getting exactly what you want: the human body as the canvas for our most vulnerable artistic expression. Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson are unbelievable.

Watched on Monday October 14, 2024.

Immense. The propulsive, unfeeling wake of China’s progress hand-in-hand with Jia’s entire career. Unprecedented formal daring wrapped in a singular, quiet Zhao Tao performance. Instant best of the year territory.

Steve McQueen, EastEnders, and Oliver Twist mangled through an algorithm to spit out syrup. There’s a huge laundry list of things I love about McQueen as a filmmaker and storyteller, and almost none of it is here. First, last, and only miss of NYFF for me.

Around 30 minutes of pretty great thrills smothered and padded out by ostentatious architecture. All of Strange Darling’s nonlinear gimmickry is in service of its one twist, and the twist can really only be one thing. Would have benefitted immensely from playing it straight because Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner are actually pretty great here.

Watched on Sunday October 6, 2024.

Watched on Friday October 4, 2024.

David Cronenberg handles his own grief the only he can: through a talky, corpse voyeur, techno-conspiracy non-thriller. Way ahead of its time, strangely comforting, and wildly funny. Loved it.

Can’t help but ire Joker 2, a movie that purposefully turns an at least three-star layup — a Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn musical — into a one-star turd. Fighting tooth and nail at every turn to avoid doing anything interesting, Folie à Deux is a bad movie miracle: a defiant middle finger to fans and haters of the first movie alike. Natural Born Killers for Cocomelon babies. The first Joker was pretty bad, but it was never boring.

Not sure what non-Schraderheads will get out of this, but I was quite taken by this new interpretation of “man and a journal.” The gulf between myth and reality, the haze of memory. Gentle, but also a brutally self-flagellating confessional.

1. The Beast
2. Red Rooms
3. Caught by the Tides
4. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
5. Nickel Boys
6. Chime
7. A Different Man
8. Juror #2
9. Cloud
10. Hard Truths

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

2023: a tumultuous, but also exciting year for cinema that saw the bottoms fall out of once unstoppable franchises and the rise of new and old masters. Characterized by surprise blockbusters, stinging excavations of the human condition, and a few bold oddities, this year was a cornucopia of great film. So much so that for the first time ever, I’m expanding the usual top 10 to a top 20. Here are my favorite movies of the year.

1. The Killer
2. The Zone of Interest
3. Ferrari
4. Killers of the Flower Moon
5. Oppenheimer
6. May December
7. Godzilla Minus One
8. De Humani Corporis Fabrica
9. Hidden Blade
10. Huesera: The Bone Woman

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

My personal list of the top ten films of 2022, finalized on December 31st.

1. The Banshees of Inisherin
2. Decision to Leave
3. TÁR
4. Nope
5. Crimes of the Future
6. The Fabelmans
7. Avatar: The Way of Water
8. After Yang
9. Resurrection
10. Everything Everywhere All at Once

My personal list of the top ten films of 2021, finalized on December 31st.

• Titane
• The Green Knight
• Pig
• Licorice Pizza
• The Power of the Dog
• Spencer
• The Last Duel
• The Matrix Resurrections
• Benedetta
• Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror

My personal list of the top ten films of 2020, finalized on December 31st.

1. Minari
2. Sound of Metal
3. Nomadland
4. Mangrove
5. Relic
6. One Night in Miami...
7. Possessor
8. She Dies Tomorrow
9. Da 5 Bloods
10. The Invisible Man

My personal list of the top ten films of 2019, finalized on December 31st.

1. Parasite
2. Uncut Gems
3. The Farewell
4. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
5. Marriage Story
6. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
7. The Nightingale
8. Midsommar
9. Knives Out
10. Ad Astra

1. The Social Network
2. Mad Max: Fury Road
3. The Tree of Life
4. Holy Motors
5. Parasite
6. The Master
7. Manchester by the Sea
8. Arrival
9. Hereditary
10. First Reformed

...plus 16 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.