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I’m not sure there’s much wrong with this one that you can’t argue is a problem with the entire McQuarrie era, and the franchises transition from hiring interesting auteurs to bring their inconsistently stylized visual stamps to the more reliable and functional framework for the Tom Cruise stunt spectacular circus these turned into. McQuarrie’s primary contribution was in working so closely with Cruise in the pre-production process and deg a diverse array of escalating espionage sequences and dangerous-looking egomaniacal practical stunts and working their way backwards towards them in tandem through ridiculous Bond-esque serialized plotting that tried to make the history of these movies into a uniform mythology of Ethan (and Cruise) as not just a physical manifestation of human ingenuity and analog effort in an increasingly Godless, stateless, digital algorithm world but of fate itself, a center of the universe that collected a rotating bench of new character actor enemies and crew like a makeshift Fast & Furious family he puts his body and soul on the line for. McQuarrie’s skill for achieving the brawny spectacle of these increasingly extended, expensive setpieces and managing Cruise’s pursuit of a deity-like mankind-saving Mr. Movies image of himself and for the most part keeping the moving parts of a traditional spy-actioner satisfying enough despite the convoluted nature of what he was being tasked to manage was pretty evident in the last couple of entries, which is why it’s a bit sad to see him appear to finally buckle under the weight of it all.

I’m not sure there’s any filmmaker who could’ve survived a literal opening hour and change of not just mission exposition (which these movies have always had a ton of) but unnecessary franchise management retconning and Previously On flashbacks, not only attempting to resolve all the already hilariously overcomplicated plotting of Dead Reckoning and its world-dominating, nuclear-apocalypse desiring AI “entity” and its fleshy agent Gabriel, but also try to unnaturally and nonsensically force them into villains that have been around since the De Palma and Abrams entries. And perhaps moreso than even Fallout (which is when the movies started to suffer from this, they had no idea what to do with Ilsa after introducing her), every recent character pickup who was previously doing a fun antagonistic dance with Cruise (notably Atwell’s crime caper pickpocket and Pom’s maniacal assassin) is now written to either be another one of the anxious bystanders to Ethan’s addiction to impossible mission planning or an awestruck zealot who worships him like a Christlike selfless martyr that Pegg and Rhames have been largely reduced to for a while. Pegg and Rhames are good in those roles and have the screen history of aging alongside Cruise to lend it some legit gravitas in their moments, but for everyone else it’s a lot of elongated staring while music swells and they get put in the timeout corner to defuse a bomb while Tom has fun.

That being sad, fun he most certainly has! Despite being forced to show their hands and I think subsequently running out of the runway that Cruise and McQuarrie have been improvising for years, their clear t ion and pathological desire to activate the primitive part of your brain and show you something physically incredible for real with all the old-fashioned Hollywood resources they have still manages to carry the messier chunks of this over the finish line. The two major stunt setpieces are both hitters: 1. A wordless highly pressurized deep-sea dive and sunken flooded submarine heist that slowly rolls out of near-drowning control with rogue torpedoes flying around and feels like if you asked James Cameron to invent a show-stopping sequence for one of those 90s Cold War sub-thrillers (Hunt For Red October, Crimson Tide) and 2. An old-school biplane wing walking version of the airbourne helicopter v. helicopter chase from Fallout, featuring so much death (wish) defying clinging, twirling, hopping and crashing it’s as astonishing as anything they’ve achieved on screen together. As someone who has been on board with the idea that the McQuarrie era of these are better viewed as self-portraits of one our foremost obsessive, megalomaniacal industry showman’s, these moments of seeing Tom torture his body for my entertainment is enough for me to forgive the bloat, and is helpfully also a reading that makes the genuinely bad writing of having every ing character mostly serve as a vessel to bow down, monologue about and hype him up while Tom stares into the middle distance and accepts the praise/responsibility of being the lone good, trustworthy man (who should be allowed to have nukes?) more amusing than annoying.

For an hour or so this is just a series of aggressively somber and generic dirty cop/triad movie clichés delivered by actors doing a lot of macho scowling and exchanging convoluted heist-gone-wrong and mob boss vs. corrupt politician plot details rather than establishing any sort of character personality (Evans seriously needs to consider letting someone else write one of his movies at some point) and filmed in a lot of gloomy, grainy, blood-soaked urban decay. Luckily if you're patient enough the man behind the elaborately and exhaustingly hyper-violent Raid movies eventually shows up when those details escalate into an all-out ground war and he delivers on 40 minutes of Tom Hardy grunting and grimacing his way through Heroic Bloodshed action.

What he kind of misses about this sort of thing is that the maximalism was usually in service of heightening melodrama (which this doesn't spend enough time on character enough to achieve despite the clear intent in the finale) not just misery and sadism. Personally I don't care too much about that though, I'll still eat that garbage. The bigger issue for him moving forward is that this type of digitally-stiched handheld long-take sequencing has gotten a little overdone in the decade and change since he helped popularize it (especially ones set in pounding neon clubs) and I didn't love the look of any of the CG exterior car chase stuff either.

But other than that, Evans really does have an eye for the staging and stunt-craft and gnarly exploding meat sack killing blows. That entire stretch from the cabin shootout where every single member of the militia descending on them is riddled with excessive amounts of bullets in gory, spark-heavy slow-motion, followed by all the medium-wide dutch-angle close-quarters narrow hallway martial arts combat (where nearly every object and surface available is graphically used as a weapon) and the big Woo-esque final standoff, is exactly why I will continue to watch whatever he makes.

“Who’s winning?” “Nobody, one side’s just losing slower than the other.” or “Do you ask questions because you want to know the answers or is just something you think a detective should do?”

Pretty bleak and lethargic stuff even by Watergate-era neo-noir standards, in part due to Bonnie & Clyde director Arthur Penn whose credentials when it came to converting demythologizing Old Hollywood genre film shells with naturalistic New Hollywood style was already quite notable, but also Scottish novelist turned Hollywood screenwriter Alan Sharp who was equally reliable when it came to writing downbeat revisionist scripts for aging industry legends to lend their blunt and study craftsmanship to (Fleisher, Aldrich, Peckinpah, etc). Sharp providing this with the straightforward hard-boiled Chandler-esque detective movie format of an ex-football player turned P.I. Harry Moseby who is hired by a drunk aging Hollywood starlet to bring back her runaway sex-crazy hippie teen daughter and instead finds himself in a strange labyrinth of murderous and corrupt LA stuntmen/Florida smugglers, while Penn mines the plot and setting for maximum depressed and disillusioned shagginess/world-weariness.

Gene Hackman’s performance as Harry is an incredibly complex balancing act of being the charming, easygoing and curiosity-driven gravitational center wandering the mystery a detective story requires (not unlike Gould’s Marlowe in The Long Goodbye or Nicholson’s Gittes in Chinatown in the years leading up to this), but in a relaxed and regretful that makes his solitary moral code feel more like the act of a wounded and impotent middle-aged man whose best years are behind him. Playing Harry as a heroic archetype living in a much dirtier, duller, unglamorous era; one who operates out of a ramshackle office and beat up car and who likes the work simply because it keeps him busy and satisfies a part of brain that likes chess and sports (analyzing the pieces, making moves) but alienates him from having honest and open relationships with his loved ones because he instinctually treats everyone like a lying client keeping secrets from him.

The end result of this is him not solving the case as much as getting distracted by the various laid-back LA/New Mexico/Florida hangouts with the ladies (gorgeously photographed by Bruce Surtees, and wonderfully performed by Jennifer Warren and Susan Clark who give some really sad shading to their romantic subplots) and poking around the strange periphery case details he doesn’t manage decipher until it’s far too late and he’s already in the process of being a helpless witness to a lot of senseless and confusing carnage. You hear a lot about how 70s movies were just allowed to have the most miserable and haunting and often unresolved endings they could think up, and this one has to be up there with the very best of them—the image of his hand on the glass during the drowning obviously, but when I clued in that that last shot was him literally going in circles I was kind of in awe.

Full discussion coming soon on the podcast.

Watched on Tuesday May 20, 2025.

Hate to say it, but missing that Kurt Wimmer magic. Say what you will about the how technically "good" The Beekeeper was, its sense of humor about its own delightfully moronic premise of a former special ops guy trying to retire as a neighborly beekeeper only to be yanked back into being a sadistic slasher villain who exclusively haunts and kills predatory tech bros who are causing little old ladies to kill themselves (and the mercenary arms of the American deep state protecting them because one of them is Clinton Jr.) was well-served by Ayer doing borderline anonymous, DTV economy and brutality on a studio budget and the reliability of Statham doing his tough-guy sincerity despite the absurdity. They both treated it seriously enough that the violence still hit but never enough that you felt anyone was making anything other than something purely stupid, stilly and fun.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Stallone's script about a construction worker troop who takes down human trafficking sickos who kidnap his bosses daughter with his bare hands, which is about as generic and morose of an estranged conservative dad action fantasy as we've gotten since the Taken movies were doing numbers. One in which Ayer and Statham are more than happy to play in an ugly and boring of an undercover drug dealing procedural where he talks to a bunch of henchmen in funny outfits (and where the blue collar "working man" aspect doesn't come into play even remotely?) until the 1-yard line at which point the body count ridiculousness is finally indulged in an extended setpiece in what I think was supposed to be the Hostel version of Epstein island? But by then it's just far too little way too late.

Mildly enjoyed the Dropkick Murphys "The Boys Are Back" needle drop I guess, and the part where Statham threateningly pours another mans maple syrup for him.

Don't have much to add onto my original review, but they brought the 70mm IMAX print back for the holiday weekend here so went for another round. The big moments rocked a Sunday morning crowd weeks into its release just as hard as the opening night one. Someone wanted to see it so bad they brought their baby. This is a pretty special movie I think.

Weird animated comic-horror hybrid of tones and styles happening here that frequently made me imagine Sam Raimi, Tim Burton and Robert Zemeckis all teaming up to make a Ghostbusters sequel. Jackson is clearly having a lot of fun here with the gothic production design, the absurd (and kind of convoluted) doling out of its premise/mystery of a paranormal con artist who can actually see spirits and is being haunted by a Bonnie & Clyde serial killing duo from beyond the grave, and with all the new CG tech on display courtesy of WETA (some of which still looked really cool on a film print), but I do miss the analog FX work of Braindead and this felt about a half hour longer than it probably needed to be. That said, it walks the line between being zany and being mean in a really effective way, has some solid spooky-silly action setpieces as it ramps up, and has some fantastic performances amidst all the cartoon chaos including an all-timer Jeffrey Combs one as the slimy FBI agent obsessed with the paranormal and terrified of women.

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This review may contain spoilers.

Because of the era the original trilogy of these came out in I'll always mourn the nu-metal filmic sheen and the chunky, squishy practical gore FX, but it speaks to the simple power of the high-concept cheating Death premonition/Rube Goldberg murder machine premise of this franchise that even being rebooted in the time of ugly digital legacy sequels it simply can’t be stopped. That’s due at least in part to the fact that there isn’t enough character or lore to pay nostalgic respect to beyond the basic idea of teens wrestling with their first experience of being conscious of their own mortality (and more broadly the philosophical idea of Death itself, and the inevitable predetermined design it has for us); the only history there is to acknowledge is the gruesome supernatural splatter kill compilation montage body count (arguably the image of logs make the 2nd biggest cameo outside of Tony Todd’s recurring weary mortician who gets a lovely RIP sendoff), and the only real star... the pure visceral thrill of staging and toying with the setup-and-payoff construction formula of an unseen malevolent force manipulating various everyday objects/locations into am absurdist workplace safety accident video meat grinder.

The way these movies have you observing through simple camera, editing and production design tricks the strange, ominous coincidences and feeling and hunches, psychologically thinking like someone with sight/prescience, weaponizing a feeling of anxious anticipation that something is “off,” watching the puzzle pieces reveal themselves and either lock into place or misdirect you, before finally delivering the shocking jolt. It's one of the ultimate journeyman horror franchises in this way, all you have to do to make a good one is realize ultimately that you are serving the formal design above all us. And to the credit of everyone involved here, they are having the exact right amount of playfully sadistic fun staging inventively goopy, comically mean-spirited sequences loosely strung together by the rules we all know and love, and few new wrinkles regarding its 23andMe ancestry tree development. I kinda love the idea of a survivalist bunker grandma alienating herself from her family with her anxious sight they interpret as conspiratorial mania and delaying the inevitable so long there are multiple generations of gory absurdist trauma to inflict, and honestly, I thought this did a pretty decent job at developing its family history and the personalities within (shoutout Richard Harmon specifically who is hilarious) while shuffling them along onto the various grisly rails you’ve come to expect from these.

And in of the extended death sequence stops along the way, this has basically nothing but hitters. Barring some wonky CG (not a first for this franchise) it has a solid period flashback nightmare prologue that reintroduces the satisfyingly tense accumulation of various details (a coin, an elevator, a dance floor, a grand piano lol) before seeing how each manages to turn everyone into an exploding sack of meat. And then after that rips its way through a series of sequences up there with the best the franchise has to offer: a post-funeral family BBQ (and the way it misdirects its lawnmower punchline with groan-inducing focus on the shard hidden in the glass of ice and the rusty rake underneath the trampoline), the garbage truck face-split (and its playful use of the characters starting to watch for the signs the way we do, calling out the leaf blower and soccer ball a minute before they become a literal background gag), and the most delightfully stupid use of an MRI magnetic field + piercings I’ve ever seen. Each of these scenes are as visually clever as they are hilariously cruel, consistently teasing and elongating its path to its gore gag and lingering on it for as long as possible when it finally arrives. At some point you'd think it'd get old but they're 6 movies deep and it just never does for me personally.

This has the same ending every single one of these movies has, but if it ain’t broke, etc. and the fact that they include a part in it for the real heads that essentially plays like “okay, the people have waited long enough… send in the logs”, yeah this is great stuff.

Always fun to watch a reference-heavy call-and-response meme machine like this and have literally zero of the background knowledge to make it even slightly comprehensible. I recognize that that is a me problem though, sorry, was too busy playing Gears of War so this shit just went right by me. That being said, this had a bit more of a strange, quirky and animated pep in its step in of some of the costumes and set designs and the non-stop cartoon gags courtesy of Hess than I had expected, and Jack Black and Jason Momoa appear to be having some genuine fun playing within all the artificial environments. I don't love the idea of baby movies designed in a lab to be half-watched on iPads or in 30 second TikTok clips that Twitch streamers and YouTubers will scream at each other, but if this is the way things are going there will likely be much worse movies than this in our future.

A forgotten and expensive 90s courtroom drama by Oscar-winning screenwriter Steven Zaillian, who beat both Mann’s The Insider and Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich to addressing a similar real-life situation of regular people suffering the legal consequences of simply resisting corporations deliberately poisoning them, in this case via an adaptation of Jonathan Harr’s best-selling exposé on the suspicious uptick of leukemia among residents of Woburn, Massachusetts due to chemicals being dumped into their drinking water. I love this specific subgenre of legal thriller (where there’s a focus on mundane procedure and the realization of corruption isn’t melodramatic but a slow-acting poison effect) that even just a fairly familiar and solid one like this works for me. Unfortunately, I don’t think Zaillian ever quite gets to the psychological depth or expressiveness of Mann, nor the moodier and bleaker places in visually/tonally depicting this environment that you’d see in things like Michael Clayton or Dark Waters, and I do think he gets a little cute with some of the eccentric character writing, especially of Travolta’s sleazy personal injury attorney whose arc of going from smirking heartless professional to sentimental believer in the cause is laid on a bit thick.

Otherwise though, all the scenes of character actors talking case minutia in lavish rooms (and plotting out their detective case-building moves/countermoves to bring justice to this working class community) is very handsomely photographed by legendary cinematographer Conrad Hall, it does feature some genuinely fantastic ing performances that help carry it along (Robert Duvall’s strangely behaved but surprisingly skilled rival lawyer, James Gandolfini’s angry and regretful blue collar whistleblower), and Zaillian’s slick, meat-and-potatoes directing style is suited just fine for turning all the script’s observations on the nature of navigating technical strategy in the flawed legal system (and how analysis of risk and manipulation is of more value than to a case than morality or truth) into something consistently engaging and watchable. “The perfect victim is a white male professional, 40 years old, at the height of his earning power, struck down in his prime. And the most imperfect? Well, in the calculus of personal injury law, a dead child is worth the least of all.” Unrelated to any of that, nearly died laughing at the Talking Heads credit song choice. 

Full discussion on ep 381 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

As far as the run of 90s Elmore Leonard adaptations go it’s hard to say I don’t prefer the soulful romantic weariness at the center of Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (Grier and Forster are both just so moving together) or the sexy suave excitement Soderbergh brought to Out Of Sight, but this is still a perfectly solid and effortlessly charming merging of Hollywood industry satire, gangster crime-thriller and laid-back hangout movie by former Coen brothers cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld and reliable novel adapting screenwriter Scott Frank. The Leonard premise itself of an Italian mob loan shark who spends his days violently hunting people down for the gambling debts might have transferable skills in negotiation and intimidation that would make him a good movie producer is an amusing one (“sometimes you do your best work with a gun to your head”), and it's largely fulfilled by the comically convoluted paperback plot of multiple sources of stolen cash being pursued and leveraged and murdered over in the most low-stakes fashion imaginable.

Part of that quality comes from the skill of Sonnenfeld who keeps his camera constantly roaming around the ensemble in a way that feels bouncy and slight, composer John Lurie who provides some very goofy and groovy jazz to the proceedings, but honestly mostly comes down to the freedom this gives the ridiculously stacked cast who are all clearly just having a blast. Travolta is firing on all reenergized post-Pulp Fiction movie star cylinders to make his “Chili Palmer” as easygoing and likeable of a cinephile criminal as you’d see in a Tarantino movie (he spends a good portion of the movie talking about how much he loves Touch of Evil and Rio Bravo), but he’s really there to inspire the ing cast around him to be sucked into his relaxed nonchalant way of navigating all this industry greed and violence.

ing him you’ve got: Gene Hackman as the Corman-esque B-movie producer trying to get his art film off the ground; Rene Russo as his aging Scream Queen with dreams of producing; Danny DeVito as the pretentious Oscar-winning actor they try to rope into their production (the scene of Travolta directing him is hilarious); Dennis Farina as the temperamental Miami gangster upset that Chili might be running away with his money and spending it in LA (arguably the highlight of the movie, died at “they say the fucking smog is the fucking reason you have such beautiful fucking sunsets”); Delroy Lindo and Jon Gries as limousine company bozo drug smugglers who are also trying to break into the industry; and of course, James Gandolfini as the bearded and ponytailed former stuntman/bodybuilder turned muscle who’s actually kind of a sweetie.

Full discussion on ep 381 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

Kind of funny that this guy made multiple demo reel auditions for the job of a new Scream movie (both Happy Death Day and Freaky took so much from Craven's eye for widescreen Steadicam setpiece construction and the campy pop comic-horror tone of Williamson's writing), actually managed to get hired to do it and had it fall apart on him, and instead retreated and settled for remaking Red Eye. Not only operating with a similarly preposterous murder plot conspiracy thriller in a claustrophobic yet public setting as a metaphor for overcoming abusive/controlling relationship, but straight up cribbing a number of its structural mechanics and details. (Arguably it's only unique contribution is the smartphone stuff, but the killer communicating through airdropped memes and texts that appear on the screen is not that different than how it's used in say Non-Stop.) Luckily I quite like Red Eye and was mostly pleasantly surprised to see someone have so much affection for it. Even if the B-movie cast here isn't quite operating at the level of Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy and Brian Cox, it's just a good premise for sustained logistical tension, playful camerawork, and a lead performance that navigates managing fear/stress by putting on a performance which Fahy does a perfectly fine job of. Shame about how bright and digital and ugly the big action climax looks, but otherwise a reasonably fun time.

Watched on Tuesday May 13, 2025.

I sympathize with those who are of the mind that the rigorously subjective authenticity of this is inherently lopsided and troubling since despite all the self-imposed Dogme-rules Garland laid out of himself that this needed to be an honest journalistic ing with no creative liberties cheated, choosing to only interrogate and prioritize one perspective in this conflict to be the one to recall the documentary details of it does put it closer to the respect the troops range of every other jingoistic military fantasy or liberal awards bait shoot-and-cry drama than it thinks it is. And it’s not like we haven’t had films in either of those genres also acknowledge that war is ugly and brutal and confusing and committed by dumb young kids who have no idea what they're doing and what point it serves, if any. (Could’ve done without the biopic "the brothers answered the call" slideshow bullshit at the end too.) 

However I do have to give Garland a little bit of credit, I don't really think his directorial approach here is a whole lot different than what he did in Civil War in of applying some modern technical gusto and bombast to a largely empty exercise, but whereas that one was built around making a somber indie art movie version of a Roland Emmerich or Has Fallen movie out of "they call it the United States of America but in reality, it's never been more divided” speculative fiction pablum (still can’t believe how stupid and dishonest that movie was), opting to scale down the same lens to something closer to Generation Kill if it was an experiment in pure process and sensory filmmaking is a much more interesting use of this mode.

The way this limits the usual camaraderie and brotherhood to a brief prologue of all of them watching the “Call On Me” music video like a performative hype ritual, and then immediately hauntingly cutting to them committing their inciting act of imperialist takeover (“I like this house”) and experiencing the tense boredom of their procedure before devolving into the senseless blood and smoke “show of force” destruction, drawn in immersive close-proximity texture and sound showmanship above all else is quite effective. And I really do respect that there’s no attempt made to dramatically heighten this scenario or excuse it. At a certain point this is almost a non-stop horrifying sea of shellshock, screaming, muffled pops, radio chaos, and all matter of IED maimed/dismembered gore in a hazy dirt and vomit colored blur. Highlighting a grueling, arduous and pointlessly self-inflicted survival process that ultimately, deliberately and ambiguously lingers on a very simple question that bears repeating: “Why? Why? Why? Why?”

Watched on Saturday May 10, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 10, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 9, 2025.

Talked about in full alongside Final Destination (2000) on the latest patron-exclusive, bonus episode of my genre/exploitation film podcast SLEAZOIDS, which you can access over on our Patreon by clicking here.

Subscribing to our Patreon gains you access to this episode, all previous bonus eps (188!! You can see all the films covered so far here) and all future bonus eps (2 more every single month!!). You can listen to all of our 192 free episodes over on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

I'm not always in the mood for Hanake's often deliberately grueling brand of blunt novelistic psychological/metaphorical writing or pretentiously miserable and clinical "beauty has to suffer" observational style, but it felt right to wait this one out and clear up my biggest Palme d'Or-winning blindspot of his in a theater, which ended up being the right setting to really concentrate on some the specific off-putting textures and rhythms of how he translates his strict religious upbringing in Austria to an upsetting 1910s German village period drama. One that plays out a fable-like microcosm/test-run of an authoritarian hierarchy (filled with patriarchal abuse, religious fundamentalism, sexual repression and class-based suffering) that slowly bleeds into a strange and somber reflection on the broader atmosphere of “malice, envy, apathy, and brutality" it helped develop. Quietly meditating on the private domestic households of the village doctor, pastor, baron and steward, whose flaws and corruptions and teachings of power and control via disciplinary abuse trickles down to the rest of the Protestant farming community like a planted seed. Especially their children, who are gradually poisoned by simply watching how their strict and punishing political/social structure is organized and the rotten behaviors it covers up, and shaped by it more than anything the kind schoolteacher can instill in them as he becomes a helpless first-hand witness to the raising of a generation of resentful and manipulative sadists. As the mysterious crimes that confuse and terrify the village begin to escalate, and various acts of vandalism, arson and cruel pranks turn into crucified pets, tortured/molested children, suicidal farmers, etc. it starts to almost feel like watching an ambiguous Austrian arthouse Children of the Corn or an evil dread-including version of a Bergman/Dreyer/Bresson film; every haunting use of narration and still, austere and obscured black-and-white frame loaded with your troubling knowledge as a distant observer of what these kids went on to participate in decades later.

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Talked about in full alongside Final Destination 2 (2003) on the latest patron-exclusive, bonus episode of my genre/exploitation film podcast SLEAZOIDS, which you can access over on our Patreon by clicking here.

Subscribing to our Patreon gains you access to this episode, all previous bonus eps (188!! You can see all the films covered so far here) and all future bonus eps (2 more every single month!!). You can listen to all of our 192 free episodes over on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Hot dogs will always be here.

I make a vow to each and every one of you that I will rewatch this every time the Toronto Maple Leafs win a playoff series. "I love hockey!!"

Godzilla is just like my cat: large, clumsy, angry, innocent, destructive, big tail, constantly yelling, getting distracted by birds. Anyway, one of the best Dr. Pepper propaganda movies of all time? 

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Had always heard about this one primarily as a Vietnam War PTSD drama, which I guess in of premise is true but was a bit surprised by how much more of a coming-of-age male friendship movie it was.

The war sequences are entirely left to brief, brutal impressionistic flashes and the psychiatric hospital scenes of a heavily disfigured/bandaged Nicolas Cage trying to coax his former childhood friend Matthew Modine out of his naked, perched, birdlike catatonic state are effectively organized around and informed by a series of moving nonlinear flashbacks detailing the history of their odd couple relationship. Parker deploying fluid camera/editing tricks in order to make the strange episodic exploits of the two teenage Philly boys (one your typical cool horny jock, the other an eccentric introverted outsider) feel nostalgic and tender; their attempt to start a carrier pigeon business, their purchase and fix-up of a junkyard car, their stray dog round-up (and freeing when they realize the dark place they're meant to be taking them), all while going on failed double dates and helping navigate each other's parents who don't understand them for different reasons.

There's a lot of solid technical craft here but what Parker does the best job with is the two lead performances. The way Modine locates a serious and sensual vulnerability within his character's bird obsessiveness which could've been treated as a joke is impressive. Tracking it from the carrier pigeon capturing/training (in a pigeon costume at one point) to attempts at building flying machines, to literal flights of fantasy (incredible bird POV flying camerawork scored to crazy Peter Gabriel synths and drums) he has while in the process of caging himself. While Cage gets the more traditional role of slowly breaking down his macho posturing to something more sensitive and loving as he goes from being weirded out and amused by Birdy's project to turn himself into a bird to iring his strength, commitment and self-confidence. "I guess it's kinda hard to be good at something nobody wants, huh?"

Also credit to whoever came up with it but for a movie so achingly, nakedly melodramatic as this one is during its hugging and monologuing climax to end on a joke (and a good one!) feels pretty special.

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A completely absurd old-school romantic-comedy that broadly operates from what sounds like the misogynistic premise of a picture-perfect gynecologist (and husband and man, played with effortless charm by Richard Gere) Dr. T, who loves and respects women so much that he has surrounded himself with them at all times both personally and professionally and is endlessly punished for it by being slowly driven to a madness-induced breaking point due to being in such close proximity to their farcical problems and hysteria. However, as written by Anne Rapp and directed by Robert Altman, it's a legitimate farce that contains a level of knowing satire and sweetness that defies the ugly perspective someone else might have made it with. I could see why it might not work for some, but I was genuinely surprised by how much I liked this one.

Part of its appeal is it being made by maybe the only filmmaker who could’ve pulled off the level of easygoing anarchy that this sustains for almost its entire runtime: the level of clear technical skill that would’ve had to go into blocking and staging all these long takes in his office waiting room as his patients and daughters and lovers all flood in and scream at each other in lavish outfits, as well as the constant use of cross-cutting in order to accumulate/escalate all of the conflicts and stresses in his life is astounding, all while leaving room for eccentric improvised character beats that make even the most annoying character feel likeable and warm. There are a lot of wonderful visual gags (every time Gere pokes his head up or has a sudden realization/conversation while his head is between two legs), a strange but kind of effective score by country singer-songwriter Lyle Lowett (that swaps between romantic guitar licks and uneasy baselines on a moments notice), but the real kicker is the time spent developing such great ing performances from all the actresses in Dr. T’s periphery.

Farrah Fawcett as his wife suffering from an institutionalized mental illness caused by having too perfect a husband who just loves her and respect her too much (explicitly said in dialogue, alongside many more scenes of Gere espousing how much he loves and respects all women, and how beautiful and special each one is), Helen Hunt as the independent golf instructor he reluctantly has an affair with due to his wife’s condition, Laura Dern as his recently divorced sister-in-law acting as a surrogate mother for Tara Reid and Kate Hudson as his two overwhelming daughters (one a conspiracy theorist who gives tours on the JFK assassination, the other a University cheerleader who is also a closeted lesbian—because of course his daughter also loves women!), Liv Tyler as his daughters lover that she wants to run away with instead of her dorky fiancé, and Shelley Long as his assistant who is secretly in love with him. The stressful overlapping office sequence where every single one of these characters (and various other employees and clients getting impatient in his waiting room) at some point walks in and out of his office, dropping reveals and complications and overwhelming the screen and sound design as he simply tries to hide in his office for a moment of peace and solitude (wishing he was golfing or hunting with his boys instead) is really well done.

And yet, how delightful and lowkey the is left me blindsided by one of the most insane endings I think I’ve ever seen in a movie. Where Dr. T escapes all the noise and craziness of his daughters disastrous stormy wedding by driving himself directly into a tornado and is transported Wizard of Oz style to Mexico where he is found somehow alive by three little girls who ask him to perform a graphic Miracle of Life delivery of a baby boy; which he of course does because he lives only to love and respect and women, but does so while shouting "a boy!" to the heavens as the camera cranes away. A completely surreal and symbolic moment of cathartic rebirth that is also just a fantastically realized, deliberately ridiculous punch line. Literally could not believe my eyes.

Full discussion on ep 379 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

Due to that unique time in the 1990s when stacked-cast ensembles going through the overlong, expository motions of a convoluted airport paperback paranoia plot (frequently about a Southern lawyer discovering a murder conspiracy) with some handsome middlebrow carpentry behind the camera was a genuine blockbuster affair, we have been gifted with this bizarre creative collaboration between late-period for-hire Robert Altman and courtroom drama/legal thriller maestro John Grisham.

I’m not entirely sure either figure’s style really compliments the other, with Altman trying to apply his improvised character work and relaxed old-school shooting method to material that might’ve been better served by some hothouse neo-noir theatrics (think Scorsese cosplaying as De Palma with his Cape Fear remake), and yet Grisham’s strict formula is so difficult to overpower it is still largely played as a straight mystery that you can guess the twists from a mile away. That being said, if you can accept that this is not particularly exciting as a thriller and often plays like more of a Southern Gothic melodrama, there’s a number of things to like about what Altman gets out of his actors and his camerawork; Branagh, Davidtz, Hannah, Duvall, Berenger and Downey Jr. all having fun with the accents/eccentric details of their characters, and being well-blocked/choreographed within the elegant old-school panning & zooming and voyeuristic frame-within-frame compositions courtesy of Chinese cinematographer Gu Changwei.

The resolutions of the violent, horny mystery of a morally corrupt and divorced “snake oil salesman” lawyer trying to protect a sexy woman he has a one night stand with and thinks needs his help (but of course ends up manipulating him into a larger conspiracy to murder her abusive, white trash dad femme fatale style) are all fairly obvious and of course it climaxes with a literal hurricane, but I had a reasonably good time sifting through the push-and-pull between what was Altman's personal vision and what was Grisham's pulpy, trendy bullshit.

Full discussion on ep 379 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

Functionally indistinguishable from a stressful episode of Bar Rescue, just for the massive and elaborate Mexican restaurant theme park in Colorado. But regardless, cool to have a document of artists with more money than they know what to do with burning of tens of millions of dollars in such a funny and honestly kind of irable way. Trey and Matt are naturally funny so there are a couple of good bits interspersed throughout ("you kids seen Deliverance?"), but mostly just convinced me I need to go to Denver at some point.

Can't believe these things are actually back, and that I'm still here catching up with them like an old friend, months after anyone could possibly care. Anyway, didn't hate this as much or find it as incomprehensible as I expected based on the brutal production troubles it went through, but there is a notable stench of desperation all over it in its attempt to remind you of the marginally successful attempt a decade ago by Winter Soldier to drop the morally rigid WWII-era American icon into a bleaker, thornier Bourne action-thriller, and cynically remind you of old-school political conspiracy movies by virtue of antagonist casting; that film with Robert Redford (Three Days of the Condor, All the President's Men), this one with Harrison Ford (his run from Patriot Games to Air Force One). They even put an unconvincing softness and grain filter over it to try and trick your brain into thinking there was a film camera anywhere near one of these productions. Not gonna happen!

But similarly to Winter Soldier, it can't commit to saying anything even remotely political about any of the subjects it tacitly brings up (in this case, how the public would respond to a black Captain America, what it means for him to be working with a hawkish military president with a history of abuse, various foreign policy/resource extraction/brain-washing assassination shenanigans) because that would mean alienating part of the billion dollar base of audience they're courting. So despite this receiving a slight benefit from scaling itself down from the recent fan-service multiverse bullshit, and going back to a couple of friends investigating a conspiracy and getting into mediocre lowlight martial arts scenes in real rooms, etc. This ultimately still fails in the way they used to which is in spending most of its runtime on expository "previously on" brand management writing that relies on you having a working knowledge of/caring even remotely about Eternals and The Incredible Hulk and at least one or two streaming TV shows, and in garish-looking CGI action climax that feels divorced from any character writing whichever young indie director was hired to oversee.

Honestly, having Falcon engage in a Top Gun jet fight and then having president RAGE MODE start destroying the White House are not even bad ideas for action scenes but they just feel so shallow and weightless while you're watching them due to the animation pipeline of having them conceived/pre-vis'd before the director is even hired, which is then confirmed when immediately after president right-wing war criminal turns out to be a sad dad reckoning with his mortality and immediately regrets being a violent warmonger and turns himself in to atone, and earns the respect of even those who politically might disagree with his methods. If you're gonna do a cop out like that at least be as absurd about it as the twist in Winter Soldier that all ugly, morally compromised decisions Cap's thinks his military friends are making were all manipulation by secret Nazis in the istration. Anyway, shoutout to Carl Lumbly and Harrison Ford who were slightly more engaged than I was expecting them to be, and for the as funny as reported choice of credit song.

Two leads are relatively charming together and Quaid gives a pretty good physical performance as slightly less annoying more grounded Deadpool (highlight: his exaggerated play-acting during the torture scene), but it's kinda crazy how little the "pain don't hurt" premise, and the few decent gore gags it gets out of it, do for what's honestly just sort of a bland bank robbery crime thriller plot and some murky-looking Upgrade revenge-action sequences if they hade more epic bacon humor. Was honestly into it more in the early-going when it was a rom-com about a lonely dork who considers his powers an affliction he simply needs to manage/live with.

A reasonably solid slice of post-Easy Rider/Five Easy Pieces New Hollywood hangout-drifter aimlessness centered around a washed up rocker who falls down the path of drug dealing in West LA.

Bill L. Norton has good feel for the authentic, easygoing Venice Beach texture of this period and subculture (decent low-budget guerilla photography by Corman cinematographer Vilis Lapenieks combined with a fun folk-rock soundtrack), made an effective casting choice in Kris Kristofferson whose debut leading role as a depressed dreamer turned hippie shitkicker is well-suited to his look and background (and voice!), and maybe most importantly gets a solid assist from Chinatown scribe Robert Towne (uncredited) who helps make sure the episodic encounters between all the dealing montages and financially precarious listlessness have some personality. So much of the film being Kristofferson strutting and driving around LA selling keys of dirt weed out of his guitar case and shooting the shit with the various stoners and record label guys occasionally makes this feel like a precursor to Inherent Vice or maybe one of the more laid back episodes of Miami Vice, just on a smaller, dirtier and sadder 70s character study scale.

Also featuring brief but notable turns by Gene Hackman as the "honestly crooked" narcotics cop breaking bad, Karen Black as the most understanding and ive girlfriend in the history of movies, Harry Dean Stanton as the former bandmate turned too-old-for-this-shit junkie, and Andy Warhol girl Viva as a pregnant stoner who is actually incredibly resourceful. Not sure about a few of the decisions this makes down the stretch, including an awkward and heavily telegraphed overdose scene and an attempt at a climactic chase/shootout that ends up being a bit murky and confusing, but otherwise this was a very easy watch if you like movies about cool losers cruising around to music.

[35mm]

Intermittently fun whenever this guy who made his name shooting "extreme" skiing stunt films (and later went on to make pornos?) gets to shoot fast and furious cars ripping around Arizona locations to Ozzy and Billy Idol while doing high-speed drag races until they crash and flip into giant fireball explosions (one of these stunts apparently killed a camera man!), or whenever Clint Howard, David Sherrill and Jamie Bozian are on screen doing their Three Stooges as Mad Max goons routine. Otherwise though, this is one of the more poorly written and paced (and miscast) genre-benders I've seen in awhile. One that attempts to merge 80s teen sex comedy tone with a violent juvenile delinquent biker gang revenge movie and sci-fi horror monster movie.

The premise itself of a local boy getting brutally murdered by a psycho abusive gang leader played by Nick Cassavetes and coming back from the dead as a spectral racecar driver attired like Daft Punk wearing a Predator suit and driving a spaceship-looking Interceptor seems like a no-brainer for some stunt-heavy suspense sequences and grisly slasher movie deaths, but most of this movie is baffling and tension-less ensemble hangouts around garages and burger ts, structured around the bizarre choice to slowly dole out what exactly the premise is for most of the movie and try and make it a "twist" who the supernatural driver killing all the gang is. You will know it is Charlie Sheen's dirtbiking drifter the first time you see him, but in order to hide this from pre-Twin Peaks Sherilyn Fenn (awooga) for the entire runtime they make him a shapeshifting version of her dead boyfriend with no explanation but also have her not notice he's covered in all the obvious knife scars from when they were assaulted? Randy Quaid also appears every few minutes as the sheriff investigating all this and serving as a microcosm for this movie's sense of mood and mystery, spends a lot of time doing a goofy macho cop voice through low-energy investigation/interrogation scenes that amount to nothing.

Anyway, not without some period charm if you like this era of moviemaking and soundtracks, but surprisingly boring and confusing considering the premise, the runtime and that, again, it's largely an excuse to stage some murderous drag races on desert highways.

Talked about in full alongside The Loveless (1981) on the latest patron-exclusive, bonus episode of my genre/exploitation film podcast SLEAZOIDS, which you can access over on our Patreon by clicking here.

Subscribing to our Patreon gains you access to this episode, all previous bonus eps (187!! You can see all the films covered so far here) and all future bonus eps (2 more every single month!!). You can listen to all of our 191 free episodes over on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Talked about in full alongside Cry-Baby (1990) on the latest patron-exclusive, bonus episode of my genre/exploitation film podcast SLEAZOIDS, which you can access over on our Patreon by clicking here.

Subscribing to our Patreon gains you access to this episode, all previous bonus eps (187!! You can see all the films covered so far here) and all future bonus eps (2 more every single month!!). You can listen to all of our 191 free episodes over on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Watched on Sunday April 20, 2025.

Another Dan O'Bannon Philip K. Dick science-fiction conspiracy script from around the time he wrote Total Recall about a new Cold War being fought on a mining colony planet by little sawblade-wielding (and... screaming) robots that have gained sentience and started to disguise themselves as humans. A project that was stuck in development hell for so long it was eventually made into this incredibly cheap and derivative Canadian production by Scanners II/III director Christian Duguay, whose only real interest in it appears to have been to have some fun creating stop-motion FX (love the cute little type 1 guy), vast planetary military base matte paintings and a variety of dirty, desolate post-apocalyptic sets covered in sand, snow and rust for the cast to wander around.

I'm not really sure I was able to follow all the lore or world-building the characters spend a lot of the runtime sitting around and talking about, but I did largely enjoy this lo-fi knockoff of Aliens/Terminator (with a little bit of Tremors in the early-going) and spending time with Peter Weller's perpetually annoyed and tired mining base commander whose odyssey across the planet to partake in peace negotiations is mostly him telling people to shut up and getting into absurd escalating action sequences where every person around him turns out to be a cyborg. A few major scenes of note include: the army of adorable robot children (and their teddy bears) getting murked/flamethrowered; French-Canadian legend Roy Dupois as the cartoonishly macho army bro getting split in half at the waist (love the bit where he takes off his Oakey's to reveal his tear tattoos); the hilariously rushed and unconvincing romantic subplot with Jennifer Rubin and the absolutely insane climax of Weller leaning into kiss her and instead hurling her across the room, her getting into a bizarrely shot kick-boxing fight with her own clone, and dying via a 90s CG rocketship thruster melting her??

Anyway, a pretty crude and silly B-movie you could easily slot alongside Stargate, Fortress, Nemesis or Soldier if that's your beat.

[35mm]

This review may contain spoilers.

Ryan Coogler has for awhile now had a real eye for sneaking real history, political symbolism and personal heartache into the demands of pop filmmaking myth, generating one of Marvel’s only memorably complex and scene-chewing villains in Black Panther’s Killmonger and one of the best, most formally elegant and emotionally intimate franchise legacy sequels in Creed. Up until now he’s been pretty satisfied lending his skill for authentic and natural feeling character melodrama (and ion for luxuriating in the details of people’s relationships, family histories and environments/locales) to pre-existing worlds and iconography, but the pleasures of his latest film Sinners are that of an artist having already proved himself capable of being allowed to play with big canvas tools and finally deciding to let loose and put them to work on every weird, specific interest that’s ever come into his head. The result is a sometimes messy but often ambitious and effective blending of Depression/Jim Crow-era Southern period drama, sociological/cultural studies Blues-musical, Gothic erotic vampire-horror, and full-on siege-survival action-thriller.

One of the most impressive parts being how confident and patient Coogler is about his set-up and character work, taking what would seem like a fairly simple vampire exploitation movie premise that combines From Dusk Till Dawn’s criminal hangout movie/vampire-actioner mid-film genre-flipping structure with Near Dark’s coming-of-age western, and expanding on it with so much obvious ion and history. The broad shape being organized around the two entrepreneurial twin brothers Smoke and Stack (Coogler's regular collaborator Michael B. Jordan swapping between two forms of swaggering movie star magnetism: charming hustler and somber soldier), who cut their teeth in WWI European trenches and Chicago Prohibition gangster underworld in their own Great Migration search of somewhere in the world where their lives wouldn’t be defined by racism, only to find more of the same and return back home to Mississippi to use their newfound skills and resources to open up a "devil’s music" juke t inside a local sawmill that gets the attention of violent predatory outside forces (Irish vampires and Klan militias) who descend upon them for a righteous bloodbath.

The first hour largely spent observing their coming home tour melodrama where we meet a pretty wonderful ensemble including: Miles Caton as their younger “Preacher Boy” Blues-playing cousin Sammie whose singing voice betrays years well beyond his age, Hailee Steinfeld as Stack’s fiery biracial ex hurt by his abandonment/fear of how they would be treated as an interracial couple, Wunmi Mosaku as Smoke’s former lover/voodoo expert Annie who feels the similarly to Mary but has the added grown-up pain of also losing a child, Delroy Lindo as a drunk elderly Blues musician whose been around long enough to see some of the worst of the reconstruction period America. Whose painful shared histories serve as the inspiration for this new club; a collective dream of a space where their old friends and loved ones and the rest of their poor farming community can be safe, can “sweat and dance” while playing and listening to these wonderful extended musical sequences, can make love and rekindle old flames in all the backrooms (not like there isn't precedent in the world of vampire movies but this gets way hornier than expected) ... A dream expressed in a pretty magical pure cinema moment of lyrical generational time-travelling as a soulful performance by Sammie becomes a celebration of artistic expression and Black history/music in a single roaming oner. A moment of temporary cinematic bliss and joy where all sense of time and space (and music style, Ludwig Göransson’s anachronistic genre and era-bending soundtrack is wild) are lost and collapsing and flowing, briefly losing track of and escaping the bleak outside world entirely.

One that is then of course crushed by the following hour, where they are visited by Jack O’Connell’s Remmick, a comically and deceptively charming Irish folk vampire whose pitch of a perverted form of equality and assimilation through violent sacrifice of individual identity (and gory bloodsucker consumption obviously) has more complex shades to it than I was expecting, as he technically unites bigots and victim alike into immortal harmony but one that appropriates or waters down what it absorbs almost Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style, and is wonderfully logistically sustained by inventive use of the trope that vampires have to be politely invited in. (The eventual rage-induced manipulative way he gets around this to deliver on the goods is great too.) The rejection of this offer and the attempt at infiltration and seduction marking the explosion into vampire survival-horror siege film, where Coogler’s willingness to play the long game and indulge in the lush film photography/period setting texture (and once again, Ruth E. Carter costumes!) and patiently build tension through character, cross-cutting and sweaty atmosphere, is only sured by how willing he is to also go big and silly with gushing practical gore FX (some straight up Fright Night make-up in the finale!), goofball group dynamics under pressure and claustrophobically staged action that recalls Carpenter, only less in Precinct 13/The Thing mode than it does Ernest R. Dickerson cartoonishly quoting him in Demon Knight with maybe a dash of a blaxploitation version of Vampires.

Anyway, it's a purely unpretentious and cathartic bloodletting spectacle finale that clearly delights in being a piece of gross-out R-rated pop entertainment and isn’t above having Delroy Lindo slice into his own wrist and scream “last call” before getting feasted on or having MBJ smoking in a bloody tanktop and unloading a sea of Tommy gun squibs into some Klansmen. Yet also tries to locate ways to inform this genre-bending movie myth with emotional family history and what feels like the perspective of a mortal artist trying to reckon with his place in and responsibility to a broader history of generational storytelling at the intersection of slavery, religion and music; refusing to forget who these characters are, where they come from, and how they would feel about seeing their loved ones turned into spurting meatsacks, even as it is realized by a vivid and energetic showman who appreciates how a story gets ed down. Can't imagine there will be many images this year as hard as young Black man gripping a bloody wooden stake guitar neck in a white Southern church.

[70mm IMAX]

Full discussion on my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

“Men constantly destroy each other with the machines they create: weapons, cars and many other things they both own and are owned by... There’s no reason why the images humanity feeds itself shouldn’t do the same to us."

A pretty cool merging of single-location murder mystery, Italian TV police procedural and supernatural meta-horror written by regular Luchino Visconti screenwriter Nicola Badalucco (The Damned, Death in Venice and Sacco & Vanzetti director (and former Elio Petri + Gillo Pontecorvo assistant director) Giuliano Montaldo. Setting up a post-Exterminating Angel/proto-Anguish premise where a matinee screening of a Spaghetti Western results in one of the patrons in the audience being shot and killed at the exact same time that the tense climactic cowboy gunfight in the film occurs, resulting in a full panicked venue shutdown and a series of Agatha Christie/Sherlock Holmes style investigations and interrogations into who the lone gunman-assassin among them might be.

Montaldo makes fantastic and comical use of how the characters who think of themselves as in a dry and literal procedural keep refusing to comprehend the more complex sociological/technological situation they are in (compounded by the fact that every personality they speak to is suspicious and has something to hide unrelated to the crime at hand), and uses their bullheaded perspective to construct these suspenseful sequences around them that tell us what's really happening as they run the film again and stage re-enactments trying to figure out where the shot came from. Tensely and slowly moving the camera around the claustrophobic setting and calling attention to the artificiality of what we're watching and the reality-bending/infiltrating power of the relationship between image and spectator; building to a fantastic supernatural climax worth not spoiling.

Loved the section where detectives briefly leave and speak to the first victim's landlady and she describes his death as shocking because the guy was an adorable and kind loner who had no friends or enemies because he watched 2-3 films a day, and even rewatched films/studied the biographical details of filmmakers he liked. Bro would've loved Letterboxd.

Full discussion on ep377 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

Liked this despite having a few reservations about how this material goes about trying to make a depressing drama about suicidal ideation and parental anxiety work within the confines of a high-concept Blumhouse spooky setpiece exercise. Danielle Deadwyler finds a number of complex and moving shades to the harrowing emotional experience she is going through but the situation itself of a crumbling and devastated family unit living in a half-finished home and being literally haunted by the dark thoughts occurring in her mind is so thin and obvious it has trouble sustaining it even at the 80-minute runtime. That being said, the newly reinvigorated behind the camera Jaume Collet-Serra returning back to his days of confidently formally tuning up action-thrillers and studio horror films has been nice to see recently, and his visual collaboration here with Ari Aster's cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski is frequently pretty astonishing to look at. This features, sometimes simultaneously (via CG assistance), some genuinely insane and unique use of: intense shallow focus, spinning dutch angles, uncanny wide angle lens close-ups, ominous negative space, well-framed mirror/window reflections, sudden lurching pans, psychologically subjective editing, etc. The central heavily marketed image of a Gothic funeral veil patiently waiting for you in the middle of a sunlit Georgia farm, and how it expands into sequences of supernaturally exaggerated daylight casting malevolent shadows capable of physical harm, is honestly quite fantastic (the entire section of them figuring out what's happening and closing blinds/hiding in the attic is great); and I think if you like Shyamalan or Flanagan there's a lot to like here about how it blends expressive sensory and memory experience with sad and upsetting horror imagery down the final stretch.

Full discussion on my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

A very strange and spooky slow-burn work of “hallucinema” in which the troubled and heroin-addicted Spanish filmmaker Iván Zulueta (who many might know better for the poster designs he contributed to fellow liberated post-Franco underground contemporary Pedro Almodóvar when his addiction stalled his career) turns his own personal experiences and obsessive relationship with film into an abstract arthouse meta-horror dream.

One where Eusebio Poncela’s low budget horror filmmaker protagonist is used as a loose analog for the filmmaker himself (Almodóvar also used him this way in Law of Desire), as his tumultuous relationships begin to overlap and crumble when his usual routine of a days-long insular sex-and-drugs stupor with his girlfriend Ana is interrupted by receiving and playing a mysterious film reel/audio tape from his ex-girlfriend Marta’s eccentric loner experimental time lapse interval filmmaker cousin Pedro, whose seductive and self-destructive desire to locate the “hidden” (and possibly forbidden?) rhythms of the world and transcend into a deeper plane beyond reality through his artistic craft consumes all of them.

A genuinely hypnotic, erotic and unnerving vision of obsession and addiction at the intersection of heroin and home movies, with Zulueta quite effectively deploying some crude and lo-fi no-budget filmmaking style/texture (a lot of this apparently filmed in his and his friends drug-den malelivingspace apartments), surreal syncopated editing patterns, an abrasive droning score, and (in the finale especially) some of the unsettling and haunting formal vocabulary of possession horror cinema. The camera itself going from unreliable tool/weapon to bend time and reality and generate “ecstasy", to blood-sucking vampire turning those entranced by it into pale, sickly, bed-ridden weirdos, to an active ghostly specter-spectator photographing and panning on its own , capable of making people disappear in revenge and beckoning you to it on the other side.

Impressive to watch a film made on such limited resources manage to evoke images that had me thinking about things like Videodrome, Cruising, The Addiction, and Lost Highway.

Full discussion on ep377 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

Outside of the third episode which has a more conceptually sound reason to take advantage of a claustrophobic therapy session I'm not sure how much this really benefits from the one-take real-time device/gimmick; if anything that section might have had even more power if they had saved it for that particular conversational sequence. And there's a lot of awkward staging and somber, sentimental music choices made to kinda cover for the clear dramatic limitations of this overall choice. That being said, I do kind of appreciate the commitment to keeping this harrowing subject matter to a relatively low-key and realistic . Trying to start a mass household conversation about incels and bullying and the invisible online spaces these things are happening in/internet algorithms that are raising your children (and how this bleeds over into real life violence) is already naturally upsetting and depressing and would've been quite easy tip too far into extreme parent-teacher anxiety nightmare, like a BBC thinkpiece/PSA playing HBO mini-series dress-up. I wouldn't say this broaches Alan Clarke territory or anything but I do think it resists a number of the more obvious clichés and easy shocks it could've gone for, has engaged and lived-in performances (even the brief single-episode ones), and makes fairly good use of the ambitious narrative device of switching between community perspectives (and almost genres) every episode like The Wire did in between seasons. My mom pitched this to me as the scariest thing she's watched recently, and I can see why she felt that way, there's a lot of discussion of what certain Instagram emojis mean. I also want to be 100% clear: I didn't know any of this information about him when I started a podcast with Jamie Miller.

"It's like looking in a mirror... only not."
"...we can blow shit up, it's more fun!!"

The best movie ever made? Yes. Every time I get to experience something like this on an original theatrical print with a packed rowdy audience in awe being played like an orchestra it feels like a magical act of time travel. Hard to believe people used to just go to the movies and they looked and sounded like this.

[35mm]

Full discussion on ep 285 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

Talked about in full alongside Hard Times (1975) on the latest patron-exclusive, bonus episode of my genre/exploitation film podcast SLEAZOIDS, which you can access over on our Patreon by clicking here.

Subscribing to our Patreon gains you access to this episode, all previous bonus eps (186!! You can see all the films covered so far here) and all future bonus eps (2 more every single month!!). You can listen to all of our 190 free episodes over on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Talked about in full alongside Breakheart (1975) on the latest patron-exclusive, bonus episode of my genre/exploitation film podcast SLEAZOIDS, which you can access over on our Patreon by clicking here.

Subscribing to our Patreon gains you access to this episode, all previous bonus eps (186!! You can see all the films covered so far here) and all future bonus eps (2 more every single month!!). You can listen to all of our 190 free episodes over on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Kind of ire that Perkins was willing to follow-up the carefully, artfully stylized dread of Longlegs with something as dumb and ugly and unpretentious as this. Maybe the fact that he's no longer seemingly pre-canonizing himself into the echelons of a subgenre as stacked as the horror-procedural with this primed me to have some affection for it, but I would argue he's aiming for something equally difficult and specific here: a darkly comic tonal tightrope walk somewhere between the annoying and corny parts of King and the openly and gleefully irreverent cartoon cruelty of Raimi, and I'd say he gets about halfway there. I don't think it all works but there's enough in here that made me fondly recall the gross prankster qualities of Creepshow and Drag Me To Hell that I kind of found myself warming up to it even when its pacing got clunky and a joke or performance fell flat, which happens fairly often to be honest. Also, I will say there's an odd and kind of rewarding tension to the fact that such amusingly stupid and ridiculous Final Destination-esque gore gags are clearly being staged by someone who has himself dealt with the tragic and absurd randomness of death. There are few people who would've so thoroughly emotionally connected with the bizarre lingering undercurrent of confusion, sadness, and acceptance baked into the story of a toy monkey who teaches you that "everybody dies" by turning the people around you into exploding meat sacks for fun, and yet didn't feel the need to force that traumatic idea into another somber slow-burn horror drama.

Full discussion on my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

"I can feel when you're watching me." "Sorry." "No, I like it."

There’s a long and storied history of merging Hollywood romance with the bleak and convoluted world of espionage that goes all the way back to things like Joseph Von Sternberg’s Dishonoured and Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, so it was probably only a matter of time before the recent collaboration between veteran screenwriter David Koepp and post-“retirement” Steven Soderbergh landed on it as one of their tautly scripted genre experiments they use as an excuse to playfully move the camera around for 90 minutes. In comparison to the paranoia tech thrills of Kimi and the haunted house family dramatics of Presence, an old-school spy movie as marriage melodrama/deadpan comedy of manners lends itself far more to Sodey’s career-long interests and stylistic wheelhouse; the hypnotic control and thorny (and horny) ensemble relationship dynamics of Sex, Lies and Videotape, the deliberately convoluted competing plans-within-plans (and the sleek location/music transitions) of Ocean's 12, and the efficient lo-fi digitally-shot “people talking in rooms” conspiracy intrigue of Haywire.

According to Koepp, the origin for this premise came from his research into the work-life routines of spies while writing Mission Impossible, where he realized that even more interesting than the actual job itself was how the people who worked it psychologically balanced it with their domestic lives, a number of them itting to him that their mission-trained skills for voyeurism and cover-ups made any sort of long term romantic trust next to impossible. It’s a great hook we’ve loosely seen in sexy rom-com form before in Mr. and Mrs. Smith where the focus was on locating lustful remarriage excitement within the genres action thrills, however what makes Black Bag special is how despite casting two Bond alumni in ing roles (Brosnan’s hammed up contribution is brief but great) it instead scales down those spy thrills to the more cutthroat and mundane view of tradecraft you’d see from John le Carré. Fassbender and Blanchett have especially strong reptilian poker faces perfectly suited to their middle-aged agent couple who are in a constant state of loyalty-driven surveillance of (and for) each other and pillow talk as they conduct a Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy style mole hunt within their crew of office dinner party colleagues, an act of uncomfortably probing the compartmentalized boundaries between professional/personal.

Koepp tactically weaponizing the chicly attired ensemble’s incestuous dirty laundry while Soderbergh stylishly controls their mess of moves and countermoves through rigorous framing/cutting and what feels like an attempt at a digital recreation of a soft 70s low-light glow, where everything is just a little muted and hidden even in the plain sight of office fluorescents. Maintaining a consistent ambiguous hum as workplace observation, murder plots and bedroom ion (Marisa Abela’s delivery of “my god, that’s so hot” and her polygraph scene… so good) all bleed into one another, spiral out and eventually build to a fantastic mystery-(re)solving finale where the complex web of secrecy is exposed with a perverse satisfaction that plays as if Columbo was in George Smiley’s line of work and was given the Brian de Palma origin story.

Full discussion on my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

Once again, shoutout to UofT’s Cinema Studies Student Union for being such freaks and doing a follow up to their free film print screening of Secretary last year with David Cronenberg's masterful adaptation of JG Ballard into one of the all-time works of fetishist futurist art, of which I don't have much to add on my previous review beyond I often forget that this is one of the rare films outside of actual porn to feature nearly every top-billed cast member at some point fucking each and every other one. Also not exactly sure how he did but Howard Shore's wailing guitar sounds exactly like skin making with metal. Was fun to hear the real-world version of the Vince McMahon progressively getting more and more excited meme during the opening credits as "David Cronenberg", "James Spader" and "Holly Hunter" went by, building to the loudest crescendo with "Elias Koteas", followed by some notes of confusion and repulsion as people shuffled out. Canadian pride!

[35mm]

Full discussion on ep 228 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

Damn, really thought this was going to be the first A24 movie where the cult compound was nice and normal and had good vibes. Love Ayo and kind of appreciate that this was made by someone familiar with the absurd industry process of writing celebrity profiles and has at least a little bit of a sense of humor about the idea of journalists being gruesomely murdered by pop star sycophants. But man, for the love of god, I am begging some of these new filmmakers to watch literally 1 horror movie that isn't Midsommar or Get Out. Hilarious ending. Malkovich seems to be having some fun here (especially with the songs) but I would love to see him one day again work with director capable of challenging him to go beyond the self-referential cartoon phoning in he's been doing for so long now.

A pretty effective slow-burn adaptation of journalist John Keel's non-fiction investigation into alleged claims of paranormal run-ins with a large, winged "mothlike" creature in Point Pleasant, West Virginia that locals at the time blamed for the collapse of an Ohio river bridge that claimed dozens of lives.

I understand some of the frustration with this that it takes the premise of these folklore legend reports completely seriously and literally, but refuses to realize them in any sort of traditionally exciting sci-fi/horror pulp fashion. Imagine Communion but they refused to show you the alien abduction/probing stuff I guess. Instead focusing almost entirely on the subjective (and collective) psychological experience of coming to with the vast random chaos that surrounds us at all times, indulging in a similar rational vs. supernatural belief of the X-Files where finding and solving or explaining the monster is a lot less important than simply learning to accept the mystery. Which is not to say it's entirely without bursts of supernatural dreaminess (love the scene where he talks on the motel phone with the "being"), just that it's more interested in how those moments serve the depressed perspective of its confused, grief-stricken characters and the cold, lonely and unreal mood of what it feels like to try and make sense of the senselessly tragic forces at work in our daily lives. Let's just say I could see how if you are a middle-aged journalist this could be your Donnie Darko.

And, in fairness, despite turning such a silly premise into a somber 2-hour drama, Gere and Linney both do a good job of simply reacting to the strangeness of their world and have good chemistry for when they eventually make the cathartic decision to connect with one another in the face of it, and Pellington does a perfectly reasonable job of delivering on the occasional creepy and manic style choice that you might expect in the aesthetic toolbelt of a 90s music video director who hired the cinematographer of Freddy vs. Jason and the editor of Natural Born Killers. The bridge collapse set piece this ends on is also genuinely great, and conjured up images in my mind of Shyamalan doing a Final Destination movie.

Full discussion on ep 375 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

Rolled out for Matt Barney's 3-hour wordless experimental art museum installation film knowing next to nothing about the guy or the rest of his Cremaster Cycle beyond a cursory Google search where I learned he was a football player turned catalog model turned visual/video art Jodorowsky-esque provocateur who has a kid with Björk, and that the project is named after a testicular muscle. So I went into this with the expectation and anticipation that my favorite part was going to be how much motherfucking sense it all made... And lo and behold!

Anyway, this is filled with essentially nonstop vivid surrealist imagery cross-cut together with a meditative rhythm and hypnotic soundscape that weaves together fashion, myth, anatomy, geometry and seems to a draw a line between the architectural/sculptural act of creation with the existential reality of our world as one big gruesome and strange digestive system. The broad "story" if I had to guess seems to be about some sort Freemason's apprentice (played by Barney himself) who attempts to climb and contribute to the building process of Chrysler building in a way that symbolically relates to the artist-immigrant experience, and a larger sense of cultural assimilation/transformation where American traditions are made physical, tangible, biological, athletic... Early images of Irish landscapes and ancient giants giving way to an old-timey car demolition derby loaded with a corpse enger, an extended sequence of elevator's being used to create music to a slapstick bartender trying to pour glasses of Guinness and a model trying to chop potatoes with her heels and some 1930s gangster meet-up at a foggy horse-race track with zombie horses.

And that's before going to intermission (where there had to have been at least a dozen or two walk-outs during), after which he turns it up a notch with a dentistry body horror sequence where Barney has his teeth smashed in and asshole prolapsed (the cut from the crumpled car part being shoved in his bloody mouth to the close-up of his butthole generated a legit gasp), a gargantuanly-scaled Maypole ribbon dance atop the Chrysler building, and a final hour that he describes as a video game rendition of the entire Cremaster Cycle called The Order. Where you see Barney himself dripped out with the performance art look you see here on the poster, literally climbing the multi-level Guggenheim spiral ramp rotunda trying to complete obstacle course tasks around bunny-eared tap-dancing chorus girls and Nazi punk mosh pits and Paralympic athlete Aimee Mullins as a full-on prosthetic creature cat woman, eventually making his way to abstract sculpture artist Richard Serra's "The Architect" throwing Vaseline around in a gas mask?? Quite literally never seen anything else remotely like this, and I'm not even 100% sure if I'm saying that as a positive or negative thing but I can honestly say I was never bored or unstimulated.

[35mm]

Talked about in full alongside The Mothman Prophecies (2002) on episode 375 of my genre and exploitation film podcast SLEAZOIDS with special guest Adam Nayman, you can listen to the episode for free on Soundcloud by clicking here.

You can also listen to this episode (and all previous free episodes) over on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Official list of all films covered on the podcast. This list used to be ranked by rating but due to volume of films it has been updated to chronological episode order. Hit "read notes" for links to individual episodes for films below as well as official ratings for each… 

www.sleazoidspodcast.com/

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• The Hills Have Eyes

  talked about on ep 1 which you can find here on soundcloud or itunes

  josh's rating: 4/5*
  jamie's rating: 4/5*

• Spider Baby

  talked about on ep 1 which you can find here on soundcloud or itunes

  josh's rating: 4/5*
  jamie's rating: 4/5*

• Dirty Harry

  talked about on ep 2 which you can find here on soundcloud or itunes

  josh's rating: 4/5*
  jamie's rating: 4/5*

• Raw Deal

  talked about on ep2 which you can find here on soundcloud or itunes

  josh's rating: 3/5*
  jamie's rating: 3/5*

• Female Prisoner Scorpion: #701

  talked about on ep 3 which you can find here on soundcloud or itunes

  josh's rating: 5/5*
  jamie's rating: 4/5*

• Kill Bill: Vol. 1

  talked about on ep 3 which you can find here on soundcloud or itunes

  josh's rating: 5/5*
  jamie's rating: 5/5*

• Long Weekend

  talked about on ep 4 which you can find here on soundcloud or itunes

  josh's rating: 4/5*
  jamie's rating: 4/5*
  andrew's rating: 3.5/5

• Razorback

  talked about on ep 4 which you can find here on soundcloud or itunes

  josh's rating: 4/5*
  jamie's rating: 3/5*
  andrew's rating: 4/5

• Death Wish

  talked about on ep 5 which you can find here on soundcloud or itunes

  josh's rating: 3/5*
  jamie's rating: 3/5*

• Death Wish II

  talked about on ep 5 which you can find here on soundcloud or itunes

  josh's rating: 2/5*
  jamie's rating: 3/5*

...plus 746 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

(70mm, 35mm, 16mm)

• Interstellar
• Inherent Vice
• Heat
• The Hateful Eight
• Jaws
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Planet Terror
• Death Proof
• Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
• The Silence of the Lambs

...plus 238 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
• The Golem: How He Came Into the World
• Nosferatu
• Häxan
• Three Ages
• The Last Laugh
• The Gold Rush
• The Mystic
• Battleship Potemkin
• Faust

...plus 1488 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movies I saw in my childhood, high school and college days (or just before I started actually logging everything I watched; I was inconsistent in 2013-2015) that I’ve made it my mission to rewatch/log and see if my old opinions hold up. Will add titles to this as I continue to go along.

• The Act of Killing
• The Tree of Life
• My Winnipeg
• The Prestige
• Caché
• Yi Yi
• American Psycho
• Strange Days
• Exotica
• Naked

...plus 360 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

It's Hollywood's biggest night! And as is tradition, time for me to finally drop this.

Notable blind spots (adjustments may be issued once seen): The Room Next Door, Universal Language, Nickel Boys, Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, All We Imagine as Light, No Other Land, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

Titles carried over into 2025 when they actually get released: Seven Veils, The Shrouds, Friendship, The Life of Chuck

1. The Beast
2. Hundreds of Beavers
3. Challengers
4. I Saw the TV Glow
5. Cloud
6. Chime
7. Anora
8. Trap
9. Red Rooms
10. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

One day removed from the blur that was watching and writing about as many movies a day as I could for 10 days, here is a loosely, fired-from-the-hip ranked list of all the features I saw at TIFF this year. Basically reviewed everything I saw, and all my writing can be found here: letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/thejoshl/tag/tiff24/reviews/

1. Queer
2. Cloud
3. The Brutalist
4. The Substance
5. Anora
6. The Shadow Strays
7. The Order
8. Oh, Canada
9. Rap World
10. The Life of Chuck

...plus 25 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Apes

1. Planet of the Apes
2. Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
3. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
4. Escape from the Planet of the Apes
5. Beneath the Planet of the Apes
6. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
7. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
8. War for the Planet of the Apes
9. Battle for the Planet of the Apes
10. Planet of the Apes

It's Hollywood's biggest night! And as is tradition, time for me to finally drop this.

Notable blind spots (adjustments may be issued once seen): Monster, ages, Society of Snow, Fallen Leaves, Perfect Days, All of us Strangers, Showing Up, Mad Fate

titles carried over into 2024 when they actually get released: The Beast, Hundreds of Beavers, Hit Man, Seven Veils, Evil Does Not Exist, Aggro Dr1ft

1. Oppenheimer
2. The Zone of Interest
3. The Killer
4. May December
5. Ferrari
6. John Wick: Chapter 4
7. Godzilla Minus One
8. Knock at the Cabin
9. The Holdovers
10. Killers of the Flower Moon

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Some (not all) westerns I like.

1. The Great Silence
2. My Darling Clementine
3. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
4. Once Upon a Time in the West
5. The Searchers
6. The Wild Bunch
7. Rio Bravo
8. Unforgiven
9. The Ox-Bow Incident
10. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

complete list of b-noirs from the epilogue of the book

• Let Us Live
• Blind Alley
• Rio
• Stranger on the Third Floor
• Angels Over Broadway
• Out of the Fog
• Ladies in Retirement
• Among the Living
• Moontide
• Street of Chance

...plus 380 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Miami Vice
2. Heat
3. Thief
4. Blackhat
5. Manhunter
6. The Insider
7. Collateral
8. Public Enemies
9. Ferrari
10. The Last of the Mohicans

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in this year's greatest films of all time poll; this is the list I started with and had to eventually cut down to only 10. Not an easy thing to do. Not ranked. You can see my final ballot here.

• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• The 8 Diagram Pole Fighter
• A.I. Artificial Intelligence
• All That Jazz
• Army of Shadows
• The Battle of Algiers
• Beau Travail
• The Beyond
• The Black Cat
• Blood and Black Lace

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Blow Out
2. Body Double
3. Carlito's Way
4. Hi, Mom!
5. Femme Fatale
6. Carrie
7. Phantom of the Paradise
8. Snake Eyes
9. Casualties of War
10. Scarface

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

One day removed from the blur that was watching and writing about as many movies a day as I could for 10 days, here is a loosely, fired-from-the-hip ranked list of all the features I saw at TIFF this year. Basically reviewed everything I saw, and all my writing can be found here: letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/thejoshl/tag/tiff23/reviews/

1. The Zone of Interest
2. The Beast
3. Hundreds of Beavers
4. Evil Does Not Exist
5. Hit Man
6. The Boy and the Heron
7. Seven Veils
8. The Holdovers
9. Dream Scenario
10. When Evil Lurks

...plus 25 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Videodrome
2. Crash
3. The Fly
4. Eastern Promises
5. Dead Ringers
6. Crimes of the Future
7. Naked Lunch
8. A History of Violence
9. The Brood
10. Cosmopolis

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. God Told Me To
2. Black Caesar
3. Special Effects
4. Bone
5. Q
6. The Ambulance
7. It's Alive
8. It's Alive III: Island of the Alive
9. The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover
10. The Stuff

...plus 11 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Death Proof
2. Inglourious Basterds
3. Jackie Brown
4. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
5. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
6. Pulp Fiction
7. The Hateful Eight
8. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
9. Reservoir Dogs
10. Django Unchained

Honorable mentions: The Lighthouse, John Wick 3, Amazing Grace, Dolemite is my Name, The Farewell, Toy Story 4, Luce, 3 Faces, Dragged Across Concrete, Avengement, Her Smell

Notable blindspots (adjustments may be issued once seen): Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Atlantics, Pain & Glory

Saved for 2020 list: Bacurau (would be an easy top 5 contender otherwise), Wild Goose Lake, Color Out of Space, Sound of Metal

1. The Irishman
2. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
3. High Life
4. An Elephant Sitting Still
5. Uncut Gems
6. Too Old to Die Young
7. Parasite
8. Dark Waters
9. Long Day's Journey into Night
10. Under the Silver Lake

...plus 25 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Rocky
2. Creed
3. Rocky IV
4. Creed III
5. Rocky III
6. Rocky Balboa
7. Rocky II
8. Creed II
9. Rocky V

i keep forgetting to drop this list at the end of the year so i guess i'll just keep dropping it on hollywood's biggest night!

notable blindspots (adjustments may be issued once seen): Magic Spot, Both Sides of the Blade, Athena, Return to Seoul, The Novelist's Film, Vikram, Apollo 10½

titles carried over into 2023 when they actually get released: Pacifiction, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Godland, Sick, Sanctuary

1. Nope
2. Crimes of the Future
3. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
4. TÁR
5. Decision to Leave
6. Ambulance
7. Avatar: The Way of Water
8. EO
9. Aftersun
10. The Fabelmans

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Bad Boys II
2. Ambulance
3. Pain & Gain
4. Armageddon
5. 6 Underground
6. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
7. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
8. The Rock
9. Transformers
10. The Island

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

1. Scream
2. A Nightmare on Elm Street
3. The People Under the Stairs
4. Shocker
5. Scream 4
6. New Nightmare
7. The Hills Have Eyes
8. Scream 2
9. The Last House on the Left
10. Red Eye

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Malcolm X
2. 25th Hour
3. Do the Right Thing
4. Bamboozled
5. School Daze
6. Clockers
7. Da 5 Bloods
8. He Got Game
9. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
10. Inside Man

...plus 11 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. King of New York
2. Ms .45
3. Bad Lieutenant
4. New Rose Hotel
5. The Addiction
6. The Funeral
7. Welcome to New York
8. The Driller Killer
9. Dangerous Game
10. 4:44 Last Day on Earth

...plus 11 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Hit "read notes" for the blurbs

Notable Blindspots: The Handmaiden, Toni Erdmann, Cameraperson, 20th Century Woman, the Love Witch, Fire at Sea, Loving

Honorable Mentions: The Nice Guys, Miles Ahead, No Home Movie, Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party, 13 Hours, A Bigger Splash, Knight of Cups, Cemetery of Splendour, The Witch, The Edge of Seventeen, 13th, Love & Friendship, Everybody Wants Some, Rogue One

1. Silence

   I’m not even sure what to say about this one other than I already see myself wrestling with it for years to come. Shūsaku Endō’s book itself is a masterpiece, a book about reconciling belief and inquiry, love and cruelty, calm and brutality (spoiler: you can’t), and out of it Scorsese has stayed faithful to it and sculpted it into an extraordinarily empathetic portrait of arrogance and endurance. Many have already compared it to Scorsese’s previous spiritual works Last Temptation and Kundun, but it’s closest relative for me is his criminally underrated Bringing Out The Dead, the story of a paramedic addicted to the high of saving life, but unable to endure the pain of death—late in the film, after pitying himself for 2 hours, he’s confronted by the daughter of a man he couldn’t save with a simple “no one asked you to suffer.” It’s a powerful realization, that nothing but his own arrogant need to get his fix has brought this pain on him, and it’s a very similar realization that Garfield’s Father Rodrigues is forced to deal with as well. Imbedded into his missionary work is the inherent arrogance of colonialism, of martyrdom, of “true” faith, and the only real consequences of it are felt not by him, but by the already disenfranchised Japanese. Rodrigues’ realization comes just as late, as the Japanese local that betrayed him, Kichijiro (the most important figure in the story), returns to him for the umpteenth time to confess his sins, long after Rodrigues has already failed his mission and renounced: having your faith affirmed in tangible practices and expressions is unnecessary when real divinity can be found in the simplest expression of comion.

2. Paterson

   In retrospect, a soft, quiet film dedicated to the ion and value of working class people, and the inherent bravery of getting out of bed every morning was a shoo-in for my best of the year list but Jim Jarmusch’s lovely, relaxing ode to finding your own avenues of creativity, love and in a world that doesn’t hand you any still blew me away. It’s practically radical in its insistence on a quiet, warm existence where everyone is striving, creating, loving, that your first and last piece of art is the life you live, and after the year as tumultuous as it feels like it’s come from another planet. I haven’t had the opportunity to see it since TIFF so I’m not sure it’s absolutely the best film of 2016, but it absolutely made me the happiest while I watched it unfold, and I’m willing to go with my gut on this one.

3. O.J.: Made in America

   Leaving the tv/film debate at the door, probably the only obviously full blown masterwork of the year. (My personal preference aside, as you can see by its placement on the list.) Simultaneously a rumination on the images we construct of ourselves/project into the world, our relationship with those images—our own and each other’s—and the way we collectively inform and latch onto them, Ezra Edelman’s 8-hour OJ documentary seamlessly weaves American race relations, institutional failures and media/celebrity erosion into an epic, deconstructive tapestry. A total triumph of longform journalism and storytelling.

4. Mountains May Depart

   This was the first film I’d seen by Jia Zhangke, so I was absolutely blown away when I eventually caught up with this, totally blind to anything about it, and found myself watching poignant painting of eroding pasts and, subsequently, futures in the name of "progress." Mountains May Depart is filled with all kinds of gorgeous and subtle complimentary compositions, as any story that deals with the cyclical is bound to do (the opening & closing ones, in particular), but the matching shots of planes—one carrying seeds to replant a local forest, the other tao's estranged son—signaling the helplessness and agony of an irreparable stasis absolutely floored me. History (emotional and otherwise) informs our future, so we better learn to reconcile the two.

5. Manchester by the Sea

   More than any other recent filmmaker, writer/director Kenneth Lonergan tackles grief as the incredibly internal, strange and difficult thing to define that it is. Repositioning and repurposing themes expressed in his previous features—including the inner workings of small town america (from the frightening claustrophobia to the ultimately gentle vulnerability), and the world's larger indifference to our personal struggles—Manchester by the Sea is a series of intricately detailed, occasionally surreal, human moments that we only experience in times of deep pain, Lonergan asking us to simply take solace in these since moments, and the brief relief there is to be felt in not being alone in them.

6. Green Room

   Saw this at TIFF way back in September 2015 but as the year unfolded it kept wiggling its way back into my brain, getting richer and richer in of how casually thematically dense it is what for what is ostensibly a chamber thriller… A movie about how Nazism thrives by subtly and not unintelligibly infecting the spaces we operate in, our basic desire for civility convincing us confrontation is unnecessary meanwhile they’re already shoving us into their meat grinder? Timely, I’d say.

7. The Club

   “God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness”

   This is how Pablo Larraín’s angry, difficult, quietly shattering The Club opens, a well-known age from Genesis that directly mirrors the separation of these monstrous priests—that each in their own way used their status of power in the community to abuse, sexually and otherwise, children and others in their church—from the world at large, but the quote continues to hover over and permeate as Larraín and cinematographer Sergio Armstrong use unique lenses and framing to surround the films events in a faded haze, obscuring any moral truth there is to be found in them. That this was largely unseen in favor of Jackie is a crime.

8. Arrival

   Juxtaposing a clinical, Nolan-esque blockbuster realism milieu with Ted Chiang’s powerful undercurrent of ephemeral humanity, Arrival is the only film in 2016 I cried watching twice. Though it saw many comparisons to cerebral sci-fi ventures before it, like Close Encounters, or Interstellar, ultimately it’s far more in line with the likes of M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, sharing with both a deeply emotional core about how we react to fear and tragedy, both personally and collectively, and how the former might inform the latter—ultimately finding not value, but optimism, and beauty, in the human condition.

9. Moonlight

   Excellent for so many reasons way better writers have covered numerous times, I’m sure, but I was so absorbed by the momentary details of this—Jenkins, confident enough to let eyes, skin and silence do the heavy lifting, finds the fleeting touches, feeling and details of everyday interactions and the monumental power they have to create and destroy us. Final chapter of this in particular is overwhelming in its retrospective regret and hope.

10. High-Rise

    Perhaps the most unpleasant film of 2016, Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard, true to the author, is a horrifying, exquisitely styled mental breakdown of society. An excessive and brutal portrait of capitalism as literal class warfare that the only way to come out of victorious is to regress, the tenants eventually returning to primitive savagery as a means of “equality.” Having recently picked up Adam Nayman’s excellent book on Wheatley (Confusion and Carnage), there’s a line in it that sums up this story and Wheatley’s take on it quite succinctly: “In the wreckage, the post-apocalyptic merges with the pre-historic, and time and civilization fold in on themselves.”

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Honorable Mentions: Meyerowitz Stories, Godless, The Great Wall, Baby Driver, Lady Bird

Notable Blindspots: On the Beach at Night Alone, Blade of the Immortal, A Quiet ion, Phantom Thread, The Work

Saved for 2018: First Reformed, Zama, Let the Corpses Tan, Bodied, Mom and Dad

1. Twin Peaks: The Return
2. Nocturama
3. Good Time
4. John Wick: Chapter 2
5. Phantom Thread
6. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
7. Brawl in Cell Block 99
8. Blade Runner 2049
9. Split
10. Marjorie Prime

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Honorable mentions: The Commuter, Halloween, You Were Never Really Here, Bodied, Annihilation, Black Panther, Haunting of Hill House, Game Night, Old Man & the Gun, Eighth Grade, Vox Lux

Notable blindspots (adjustments may be issued once seen): The Favorite, Spider-Verse, Roma, Creed II, Wildlife, The Other Side of the Wind, Madeline’s Madeline, Minding the Gap, The Tale, Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Saved for 2019 list: High Life (would be #1 otherwise), An Elephant Sitting Still, Shadow, Long Day's Journey Into Night

1. First Reformed
2. Burning
3. The House That Jack Built
4. First Man
5. the Girls
6. Transit
7. Suspiria
8. A Star Is Born
9. Killing
10. If Beale Street Could Talk

...plus 25 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

i keep forgetting to drop this list at the end of the year so i guess i'll just keep dropping it on hollywood's biggest night!

notable blindspots (adjustments may be issued once seen): Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, , Souvenir Part II, Cmon Cmon, Bergman Island, The Worst Person in the World

1. The Card Counter
2. Licorice Pizza
3. Dune
4. Memoria
5. Red Rocket
6. Titane
7. Old
8. The Power of the Dog
9. Cliff Walkers
10. Zeros and Ones

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

ranked list of everything i saw at TIFF this year, i basically reviewed everything i saw and all my writing can be found here: letterboxd.sitesdebloques.org/thejoshl/tag/tiff22/reviews/

• All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
• Decision to Leave
• The Fabelmans
• How to Blow Up a Pipeline
• The Kingdom: Exodus
• Pacifiction
• Godland
• The Banshees of Inisherin
• Sanctuary
• Sick

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

I forgot to drop this list at the end of the year like I usually do so what better moment than Hollywood's biggest night!

Notable blindspots (adjustments may be issued once seen): Martin Eden, Minari, City Hall, Undine, Tomasso, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, I'm Thinking of Endings Things, Malmkrog, Days.

• The Empty Man
• Bacurau
• The Wild Goose Lake
• Da 5 Bloods
• A White, White Day
• Sound of Metal
• Possessor
• The Assistant
• Tenet
• Another Round

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

• The Curse of the Cat People
• Dead of Night
• Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?
• Home for the Holidays
• Night of the Dark Full Moon
• Tales from the Crypt
• Black Christmas
• Late Night Trains
• Deep Red
• To All a Goodnight

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

non-new release films i watched for the first time while we were all locked indoors

• The Great Train Robbery
• Frankenstein
• Falling Leaves
• The Cameraman's Revenge
• The Musketeers of Pig Alley
• Suspense.
• Gertie the Dinosaur
• One A.M.
• The Rink
• Easy Street

...plus 962 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

this is a list of 150 horror films

• Häxan
• Freaks
• Vampyr
• King Kong
• The Invisible Man
• The Black Cat
• Cat People
• Dementia
• A Bucket of Blood
• Peeping Tom

...plus 140 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

films found/restored and made available to watch for free at bynwr.com (some titles have not been added to the service yet but will be in the coming months)

• The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds
• Hot Thrills and Warm Chills
• Shanty Tramp
• Night Tide
• If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?
• The Burning Hell
• Spring Night, Summer Night
• Cottonpickin' Chickenpickers
• Wild Guitar
• House on Bare Mountain

...plus 23 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

not ranked. the initial draft of this list a few months ago was 250 movies so if you think i missed something it was likely on the cutting room floor (or i didn't like it lol)

• Blackhat
• Cosmopolis
• Creed
• First Reformed
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• Burning
• Godzilla
• Hard to Be a God
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
• The Immigrant

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

movies that prominently feature a train or have a significant/memorable scene involving a train.

twitter.com/thejoshl/status/1245919656109461504

• The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat
• The Great Train Robbery
• La Roue
• Our Hospitality
• The Signal Tower
• The Iron Horse
• The Lost Express
• Go West
• The Tragedy of Virilla River
• The Great K&A Train Robbery

...plus 302 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

feel free to suggest ones i've missed!

• Dark of the Sun
• The Wizard of Gore
• The Last House on the Left
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
• Bloodsucking Freaks
• Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia
• The Toolbox Murders
• The Driller Killer
• City of the Living Dead
• Motel Hell

...plus 34 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

for those who watched Beyond the Black Rainbow and Mandy and wanted to extend their viewing catalog or maybe dive into these kinds of movies for the first time; here's a list of some of the things i personally feel he was inspired by, are overtly referenced in the films, he has cited during interviews or others have compared his work to.

if anyone has anything im missing feel free to suggest additions in the comments--and maybe provide your reasoning.

• Altered States
• Cyborg
• Crimes of the Future
• Manhunter
• Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
• Lucifer Rising
• Hellraiser
• THX 1138
• Nightbeast
• The Beyond

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

• Halloween
• Halloween II
• Halloween III: Season of the Witch
• Halloween
• Halloween II
• Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
• Halloween
• Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers
• Halloween H20: 20 Years Later
• Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers

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

• Captain Phillips
• Bridge of Spies
• Sully

This list of personal favourites was assembled by myself in July 2016. Films are in chronological order.

1. George of the Jungle