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This review may contain spoilers.

I watched this movie called The Guilty right before Sonic 3. Of the two movies that just so happen to threaten child-murder, I did not think Sonic would be the one to follow through.

I dunno what this guy’s beat was before getting demoted to 911 dispatch, but I bet it wasn’t hostage negotiation!

“Hey, Talk to Me was a pretty good time, I should check out what spooky yarn that team has in the chamber next—Oh Christ, holy shit, goddamn.”

This was a harrowing ride with a powerful, vulnerable, surprisingly chewy center. Masterful pacing of a plot that feels perfectly inevitable rather than predictable, like watching waters rise with a dread that sustains every second. And then when you least expect it, just a few pips of comedy to keep you breathing.

This one took me completely by surprise, and I loved it. One of the best horror movies I’ll see all year, and all the better for how it explores its tones beyond horror so sincerely and successfully. Big recommend if you can stomach a lot of rotting flesh.

Hell yeah, the train is back on the tracks. Tom Cruise finally started using his influence as a producer to show off his prowess as a stunt performer, beyond the occasional rock climbing and falling through wind tunnels on green screens.

In the spaces between its juiced-up action scenes, MI:4 embraces its cheesy roots like never before through the enthusiasm of Brad Bird. It's his first live-action feature, but Bird's cartoonish sense of timing and shot composition matches the needs of this specific world perfectly. Nobody drives this home like Simon Pegg's Benji, who seems to understand the tone of this movie better than anybody else. After a disposable cameo in MI:3 (an unfunny scene that would not give me faith in the future of Benji), Pegg steals this movie with every quip and stutter. He just wants to be a field agent! He just wants to wear a magical rubber mask. Renner and Cruise and company often play too cool for Bird's cute dialogue and unmistakable glee over impossible gadgets, keeping a balance the movie needs to succeed, but Benji keeps the audience where we need to be—hooting like howler monkeys at every new maneuver and scheme.

The last 2 films almost forgot that this an espionage series. The spy sections of the movie are not supposed to be dull exposition blocks where you wait for the action to pick back up. Mission Impossible needed a director and writer who loves and understands the joy of watching crafty people sneak around fancy buildings. There's not enough call for this talent, but it's one of Bird's best assets as a storyteller.

Even with more outside influence tempering his style than usual, this is in big bold letters a Brad Bird movie, so there are some faint downsides to the overall positive tide that would lift all boats in the franchise's future. Yes, it's very nerdy. To some extent, Ghost Protocol's acceptance of its own geekiness is what makes the movie cool again, but it'll still never quite be the same as that first film's aesthetic, (or the TV show's, if that's what you're longing for). The dialogue gets socratic without warning or payoff now and again. And Luther almost sits the movie out completely, a callous mistake that would be rectified in future films. We can have Luther and Benji! We can have both!

MI:3 probably saved the franchise financially, but MI:4 saved it spiritually. Here they come! The planes! Get ready, Tom, THE PLANES ARE COMING!

They were going to call this I Think You Should Leave, but that title was taken.

It’s always darkest before the dawn. I’ve reached the Bourne-ification chapter of Mission Impossible. If MI 2 was enthusiastic about being Mission Impossible but just didn’t know how to be cool enough, MI 3 is embarrassed to call Mission Impossible cool, and would rather try to pretend that Ethan Hunt is Jack Bauer like all the other cool kids in ‘06. It was a shortsighted mistake that resulted in a solid if surprisingly forgettable movie.

I think MI 3 gets more blowback today than when it came out for two reasons. For one thing, people really hated Mission Impossible 2. The clowning on that double motorcycle jump can not be understated. But the first film was still iconic, so people were desperate to see it work again, and it’s not like this movie doesn’t work, as something vaguely MI-adjacent. But the second problem that would take a few more years to set in is that this was a warning volley from a 3-headed dragon that would come to terrorize Hollywood with questionable scripts: Abrams, Kurtzman, and Orci. This is Mission Impossible by way of jock-brain over nerd-brain, and there’s something uniquely unpleasant about that.

If this was a contest between which of the two not-good MI movies I would rather put on a big TV on mute while doing other things, MI 2 would be the resounding victor. It’s not boring anymore if you’re just doing dishes and occasionally look up to see Thandie Newton being hot. I don’t wanna look up from my laundry to see any of the torture scenes in MI 3, but plot and character-wise, there is much less to dislike. (MI’s diversions into action are still restrained enough not to really be worth comment in light of what’s coming. I do not miss the shaky-cam-war-on-terror years in Hollywood.)

Of course, having less to dislike is not the same thing as offering more to like, and likability is the biggest problem for both of these lesser sequels. It’s a relief that the IMF crew got their rizz back through better scripts in future movies, because they are not the brightest crayons in the box when confronted with one PSH. So, how do you like your Dumb flavored? In theory I prefer MI 2’s goofiness to the grim interrogations of MI 3, but in execution? Neither movie feels fun, so the movie that knows it’s not supposed to feel fun squeaks out a win. And the late great PSH absolutely elevates all the performances around him. I could take or leave either sequel’s script depending on the day, but it’s gotta be the better acting that squeezes out a win for 3. 

Mission Impossible would wander lost in the ‘00s until it was willing to return to its true essence—nerdy, fun-loving, explosive globe-trotting around a plot just barely clever enough to not be ridiculous. But how do you get butts in seats for a wacky spy adventure in the 2010s? Time for Tom Cruise to start dangling off of real airplanes!

This was a genuinely heartwarming curtain call for Tony Todd, and one iconic logging vehicle. The opening disaster is exhilarating and there's at least one jaw-droppingly creative new death, which is all I can ask for from movie #6 in a horror franchise. If this is the FINAL final, it's a fine coda, middle of the pack in the sextet.

I still wonder whether all those prescient needle drops are signals from beyond trying to warn the victims about their impending doom, or just petty taunting from the grim reaper's personal playlist. Is Death or God a bigger fan of Creedence and Johnny Cash? Truly, these are the questions that give a concept like FD legs.

MI 1 was even better than I , and MI 2 was significantly worse. Even ing that this was the worst one (MI 3 is controversial for opposite reasons I think), truly in my head there were no bad Mission Impossible movies. I definitely had nostalgia for this one after growing up with it in frequent circulation on cable. On a rewatch, I'm shocked this movie didn't permanently terminate all future missions.

You can't deny the importance of that tight MI:I script. Without even cursory cleverness, MI: II collapses into a painful sleepwalk through beautiful coastlines and dumb dialogue. Ethan Hunt isn't really in this. He has been replaced with a new character, Lames Bond. Gone are his intellectual versatility and playful enthusiasm. All his plots and thoughts diminish into inconsolable horniness for Thandie Newton. There's a goofy downgrade to the aesthetic as well, an unmistakable shift from the suave spy '90s to the trench-coated dweeb vibes of the Matrix-choked '00s. Too many turnabouts are mask-based, so much so that they ruined the gimmick out of future movies for a while. We got future movies after this? Incredible. This should have killed any chances of "Mission Impossible" being cool and fun ever again.

John Woo just wasn't a good fit for this material, especially before it would become defined by more intense action set pieces. And even then, the action style of modern MI movies wouldn't suit Woo's meditative vibe. This movie gets pigeons instead of doves, which sums up his energy under Hollywood management pretty well. I'm curious to revisit MI:3 to see how it would end up overcorrecting, but no matter how rocky a sequel, it undeniably saved this whole reboot from being a one-hit wonder.

It ain’t right that this isn’t an official Disney Animation Studios picture or whatever, just because they made it in Florida. I do not accept any branding decision that excludes one of Disney’s best and most unique animated films. 

We can just replace Home on the Range with A Goofy Movie in the canon and no one would even care! Come on, what’s Dinosaur 2000 ever done for anybody? Get f***ed, Brother Bear! (Well ok, Brother Bear had a promising first 10 minutes, but we can’t talk about what happens after that.)

Anyway, put more respect on A Goofy Movie’s name. a GOATed movie.

This movie truly is great enough to deserve seven sequels. Obviously Tom Cruise is a natural born star. Obviously (to me) nothing will ever look as luscious as the film temperature on that last batch of pre-digital 35mm blockbusters we got in the late 90s. Less obvious maybe is the slickness of this script—tight as a drum, ever-present crystal clear stakes, and just smart enough without ever being serious.

Couple that with De Palma’s sharp shot composition and the engrossing momentum of his editing—yeah, it’s even better than I . And with very little action! Most of the intensity comes from espionage and negotiation! They don’t make em like this anymore. (MI movies or movies in general.)

Can’t wait to follow this gem up with the worst one! Let’s hope that motorcycle duel is also somehow better than I .

The heavily marketed Venom-horse is in one scene for about 30 seconds to Don’t Stop Me Now, heralding an onslaught of hacktacular non sequitur needle drops that continues every other scene for the rest of the movie, ending with a Venom trilogy clip show to Memories by Maroon 5. The first two of these movies weren’t good, but this one was real bad.

There is a profoundly funny shot in this movie during the boo-hoo-all-is-lost nadir before the 3rd act that sums up the tone pretty well. When Florence Pugh blubbers out a weepy "I suck!" in her thick Russian accent, some lady briskly marching by in the background gives her a cruel New Yorker stink-eye so withering, you can feel her disdain even though she's booking it past the camera out of focus.

It barely s as a joke, since the serious scene in the foreground never pauses to acknowledge this blurred consternation, but it got the biggest laugh out of me. It's a perfectly flat juxtaposition of opposite emotions, a throwaway gag that genuinely makes the intended sadness of the scene play much better. Thunderbolts is not the pinnacle of wit or ambition for the MCU, but it's definitely the most human script this enterprise has let through in years. It's never hilarious nor irritating, neither sappy nor devastating. It's low-key relatable characters sharing their feelings and sensible chuckles. There's a sincere warmth and naturalistic chemistry to the dialogue and performances in Thunderbolts that I haven't seen from any other Marvel movie, even if the story doesn't give them enough to leave an impact individually.

I think mild fare (complimentary) instead of mild fare (derogatory) may be completely new ground for Marvel. Usually if an MCU movie is slight, it's completely forgettable, but I will mildly liking this! It's a perfectly OK, low-stakes, heartwarming little adventure, and I enjoyed it way more than I expected as somebody who's been tired of the MCU for a decade. I'd be perfectly happy if they never made another Marvel movie ever again, but this really was (lowercase) good. All I really need is to spend time with characters that feel like people for two hours, you know? I don't get that from Ant-Man 4.

The biggest downside is that whatever leaps TBolts gained in character and dialogue, it completely lost in spectacle. Visually, this is by some distance one of Marvel's least exciting movies. I got really worried during the first act that they were gonna spend the whole movie in that dull warehouse, but even when they got out, the views were not spectacular. There is not one scene that gives you any reason to see this on the big screen, bizarre downside for a big superhero movie. So yeah, I could have waited to see this on TNT, but it's nice to know that the Marvel machine can still make me feel something, if I'm gonna be stuck seeing these movies for the rest of my life.

I can’t believe they put Meg Ryan in Blossom cosplay for that scene.

The ending is pretty soft, deflates what was a more engrossing second act. Maybe that worked better for concluding a novel than a movie. Far more fun than I expected before the end, though! Could have used even more scenes of Malek stumbling and bumbling through youtube tutorials during his assassinations.

I love A Goofy Movie, so I knew that I had to watch this and I’m glad I saw it, even if the tone of any given Disney+ documentary is guaranteed to make me bust out in hives. You’re not gonna get The Sweatbox ever again Jacob, take what you can get. Bizarre to still be spotlighting Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg that much.

I’ve started watching more Japanese-language movies to help me practice my Japanese. Naturally, my teacher recommended this movie, with a hermit protagonist who almost never speaks. Ah well, nevertheless!

I’ve only seen Wings of Desire, so there’s a big Wenders hole in my knowledge. I should watch more Wenders. Beautiful film.

(IDK about those cassette resellers though. I know Japan has more regard for physical media than most, but thousands of yen for audio tapes??? Audiophiles don’t even want those! What kind of weirdo is buying—ah well nevertheless)

I would not invite the riverdancers into my juke t either.

NOTE: This review is based on episodes 1-14.

Anime, particularly fantasy anime, and especially isekai anime (but FRIEREN is just fantasy and not isekai so we’ll leave that evil in Pandora’s box for now) often put too much stock into their worldbuilding. Entire scenes will be devoted to detailing a class system, or documenting the history of a dungeon and its fauna, and frankly we could all just do without.

I’m not just complaining about wasting screentime on too much extra information—most of these anime are book adaptations, and they already do a decent job excising the bits they’re not going to pay off onscreen. I’m not just complaining about a lack of efficiency in storytelling, i.e. exposition that could have been integrated into action better—these are adaptations of prose that often face tight time and budget limitations. No, I am complaining that these anime feel the need to explain anything about their world that is not rooted in character, plot, theme, but most of all, Character.

The characters, their relationships, and their decisions should motivate every piece of information you spend time communicating to an audience. You can (and should) fill up your fantastical story bible to the brim with extra details, but anything that doesn’t affect character doesn’t need to see the final cut. And if you’re a good enough writer to find character in every facet of your world, the stories your world holds can be infinite, even when no dragons are being defeated. FRIEREN is a hit because it understands this simple truth. (Don’t worry, they still fight a dragon.)

That was my biggest takeaway from the first half of this D&D-style fantasy anime’s first season. FRIEREN is a slow-burn travelogue of the titular millennia-old elf through a land emerging into peacetime, after her party slayed that ever-pesky Demon King. Isn’t there always a Demon King in these things?

Well, not in FRIEREN! At least not for now. The series explores the nuances of its magical setting by meditating on the minutiae of Frieren’s peaceful days, over the course of a few decades spent recovering from war (and maybe gearing up for the next one in a few centuries). However, there is still melodrama to be found in the mundane. Afternoons spent on a simple fetch quest may traverse hundreds of years and lost faces in Frieren’s own mind, as she comes to the crushing realization that the impact of one moment spent with others outweighs all her centuries spent alone. Struggling to pay some kind of penance for the time she’s lost, Frieren commits her life to learning more about short-lived human beings, their spells, and her deceased friend, Himmel the Hero, who she can’t deny meant more to her than she yet understands.

Frieren’s perpetual habit of flashing back to days spent with Himmel the Hero is very cute and funny, but it was oversold to me in memes to the point where it was basically the only thing I knew about this anime before I finally watched it. I expected a sappier mono no aware-drenched slice-of-life tone, where Frieren waxes poetic about a lost love she never knew she felt ~until now~, but thankfully, the real FRIEREN lives up to its hype with refreshing restraint. Each episode’s plot reads as barely incremental to inconsequential on paper, and yet the storytelling possibilities of the world feel endless. It’s a paradox made possible by the writer’s talent for drawing personality and emotion and perspective out of every diversion into lore, to make each fantasy detail relevant to the daily pain of life facing Frieren, Fern, or their friends.

Even my least favorite part of this first 14 episodes, the Aura the Guillotine arc, manages to take a deeply problematic fantasy trope (the intrinsically evil demon race) and recontextualize it with compelling versatility. This was still my least favorite arc because despite its relative thoughtfulness and entertaining action, this was the closest FRIEREN ever got to resembling the butt-numbingly predictable overpowered protagonist isekai that still plague our planet. But I ultimately had a good time and zero complaints about the pacing, apart from the endless scenes of those scales we instantly know are going to tip in Frieren’s favor.

I’ll have more to say about specific moments or themes in a later review when I’ve finished the season, but this is a good if unchallenging anime that I’m really glad I saw. FRIEREN is in no hurry to get anywhere, but if every episode is emotionally satisfying for new surprising little reasons each week, the journey is always the destination. Besides, four characters taking a journey across a magically dangerous world to find paradise is also the premise of Wolf’s Rain, one of my favorite anime of all time, so it’s safe to say I’m locked in for the long haul with FRIEREN. I just hope I don’t have to keep watching for a thousand years!

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I when The Wind Rises was going to be Hayao Miyazaki’s last film. That was a confusing time. Every film before it received obligate acclaim after Spirited Away’s Oscar win, but now critics were burdened with this new weight of expectation to adequately praise the master’s final word as a filmmaker.

Was Miyazaki really ending a career defined by high-flying fantasy with a historical biopic? (ittedly, it was still about airplanes.) This was going to be hard to evaluate, but we had to get it right. Sure, Miyazaki had come in and out of retirement before, but he wasn’t getting any younger, and these hand-drawn movies take a long time to finish. Even the most conflicted reviews of the movie were fairly rapturous and decisive—it’s not Miyazaki’s absolute best, but that still makes it perfect! Why it was even better than Ponyo, if such a thing could be imagined! (Ponyo haters, who out here?)

But man, I was not feeling The Wind Rises as a final statement from Hayao Miyazaki. I would never say that it’s not a good movie, but I didn’t find it to be a vulnerable movie, even strangely weak as a statement of retirement, if that was the initial intent and not a decision made after production wrapped. Nausicaa (1984) beams more insight into the heart of its creator than The Wind Rises (2013). I didn’t sense much profound connection between the lives of Miyazaki and Jiro Horikoshi beyond their shared special interest. And it hurts the movie that Hideaki Anno isn’t an actor. I seeing that BTS footage of Miya-san negging Anno for his bad voiceover (then why cast him in the lead?) and wondering if Miyazaki’s best work was further behind him than it would be polite in most critical circles to say.

10 years later, I got a more profound statement of closure from Miyazaki through a more incredible animated film than I ever could have imagined from him in my more acerbic 20s. From Martin Scorsese to George Miller to Hayao Miyazaki, it seems the elderly are out to vault our expectations by making some of their greatest shit ever in their seventies. After repeating himself in cycles over the course of many films, it’s finally true again that Miyazaki has never made a movie like this before.

Of course, that’s odd to say considering that The Boy and the Heron could not exist without every other Studio Ghibli movie paving its somber path, a fact so integral to its being that this meta-reality becomes part of the story. I don’t know how this movie plays if you don’t know much about Miyazaki’s life or work. It’s impossible for me to separate The Boy and the Heron from the mountains of context I had on the many motifs of Studio Ghibli, or Miyazaki’s relationship with the late Isao Takahata. I can’t imagine how you would feel about this story or characters if it was your first Ghibli movie, any more than I can imagine what it’s like to hear English and not understand it. I’d be very curious to hear those perspectives! (And if you do find yourself wanting context, I can’t recommend the making-of documentary enough.)

But it’s impossible for me to fathom because in my brain, The Boy and the Heron is exactly as much a self-reflective statement on the history of Ghibli and Miyazaki’s life, as it is a fantasy fable about death, grief, rebuilding, then ultimately tearing down and moving away to face the days that remain with people you love. It is both hyperreal and surreal, obvious and obtuse, its heavy metaphors and cheeky whims blending perfectly to create unique meaning from its creator’s lived experience and imagination in equal measure, and so seamlessly through the magic that only animation can visually achieve. “What is real and what is fantasy?” Mahito’s pivotal head injury gives more skeptical viewers a plausible excuse for the puzzling plot ahead, but the more adventurous sickos among us know that the question doesn’t matter—none of this ever happened, yet all of it is true.

This blend of the real, imagined, perceived, and ed into animation to create a story and meta-story is my favorite genre (type? species?) of storytelling, frequented by visionaries like Satoshi Kon or Kunihiko Ikuhara. Hayao Miyazaki, however, had never made an anime of this kind before. Barring the occasional sprinkle of magical realism (Porco Rosso if you even count that as magical realism), what you see is what you get with even the most otherworldly Miyazaki plots. But wouldn’t you know it, he got it in One.

This is the perfect movie about a little boy made by an old man—who may still be that little boy on the inside. With incredible patience and conviction, The Boy and the Heron somehow soothes us in its promise of Studio Ghibli’s end. The sadness of living is not only that all things must die, but that everything which dies will disappear before someone that remains is ready to let it go. But Miyazaki will be OK, and we will be OK if this really is the last film he ever makes. And wow, it’s surprisingly funny! The horrible little parrot people are my favorite new Miyazaki creations in decades. I could never get the smile off my face whenever they appeared.

This shot up to the top of my Miyazaki ranking from the first time I saw it, and 3 more times later, I’m still finding new things to love. If this is Miyazaki’s last movie, and you never know with that guy, it’s a peerless way to conclude a lifetime of storytelling. We’ll just have to wait and see if “Nausicaa 2” is written on the bottom of that single stone Mahito took home.

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Did you know there was already a live-action, English-language Mobile Suit Gundam movie? Did you know it was made in Canada??? I’ve only seen about 4 or 5 Gundam anime of the fifty-eleven-some-odd produced so far, so this strange slice of trivia escaped my notice, but it’s true. While Hollywood has bat around the Gundam rights like Haro on a string for the better part of a decade, Vancouver B.C. had already answered the call from Sunrise way back in the ‘90s to produce their first feature-length live-action Gundam film—for television.

OK, G-Saviour was technically released into theaters in Japan as part of Gundam’s 20th anniversary celebration, but this is still the caliber of made-for-TV movie that would’ve slot snugly into a Sci Fi Channel original programming block just a few years later when that became the norm for 7-figure pictures. The first live-action Gundam movie may have been forgotten due to bad timing. It was born too late to be a direct-to-VHS B-movie, and born too early to hold space between ads on deep cable. It’s the first of its kind, but its cheapness and safeness leaves too faint a fingerprint. There were too many financial sacrifices necessary just to be The First. Sunrise was in an arms race to make sure the first big CGI mobile suit movie was a Japanese achievement, before Hollywood could beat them to the punch. (That is, according to the production history laid out here on the Zeonic Republic blog.)

The Sunrise staff that greenlit G-Saviour were inspired like so many others by the jaw-dropping advances made in visual effects for Jurassic Park, but they underestimated how long it takes things to get made in Hollywood, or how averse the industry was to taking chances on foreign IP of any kind. In any case, Sunrise spent far more money on G-Saviour’s CGI sequences than the live-action bulk of its runtime, creating a vast cognitive gap between the movie’s once-able, now-ancient CG war machines, and the baffled actors trading bland lines from plywood cockpits on their wee sound stages. Technological advancements can depreciate quickly, and boring storytelling is boring forever.

It's a shame nobody shouts “IT’S A GUNDAM!” in this movie. Nobody says the word “Gundam” at all, because Sunrise was worried the jargon would scare off American audiences. (No one told them that Canadian made-for-TV movies would scare off American audiences.) It was over an hour into G-Saviour before I even heard anyone say “mobile suits”. There was no Char-alike to be seen, no villain in a mask. I’m no Gundam expert, but I’d hoped to see a little more original-recipe Gundam flavor from a movie produced by Sunrise themselves. I just wanted to Leo-point at the screen more.

Alas, the producers chose to hide their nerd power levels in their futile quest for international success. Without any anime idiosyncrasies, G-Saviour is an unremarkable B-movie with unremarkable B-movie problems—each scene plays out like a fainter photocopy of something from a more famous movie, cough cough Star Wars. How many times have I seen the 3rd act of A New Hope reheated in a budget space movie, with flat placeholder dialogue for funny lines that were never written, and low-poly pre-vis for effects that never got upgraded? G-Saviour makes one more. Just trade out those Lucasfilm wipes for 4-second dissolves—big fan of dissolves, this director!

G-Saviour is not completely bereft of joy and silliness. There’s my favorite throwaway line in the not-Cantina (can’tina?) scene where we learn that the Illuminati, which formed only 5 years ago, invented the G-Saviour because they were mildly dissatisfied with Congress. The hero’s combat uniform is an incredible achievement in bad taste: a suede fleece flight jacket merged into a football uniform, gripped by pauldrons of some unholy texture. And the villain’s space shuttle makes a dinosaur noise when it explodes. It’s still not enough to leave much of an impression. It took many more years for Gundam to find its audience in America, but now gunpla is sold at our bookstores and new Gundam anime premiere in our movie theaters. We never needed a G-Saviour after all.

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If your kids like Spider-Man, they’ll love the adventures of Kraven, an (ex?) poacher who frowns deeply over the bodies of mutilated CGI animals in one dishwater dull scene after the next. (Oh wait it’s rated R never mind why did they make this.) Russell Crowe simply can not be stopped from playing patriarchs in the worst superhero movies you’ve ever seen.

On a blindingly hot summer day, one little cat boy named Nyatta plays with his toy car in a shallow pool outside. Nyatta seems blissfully unaware that his big cat sister Nyako is dying of a serious illness at home, sweating out her last fever alone in bed. When his toy car fails to float despite the best efforts of Nyatta’s vivid imagination, the little cat follows his toy all the way down to the bottom of the pool, struggling to lift the both of them back to fresh air until he can struggle no more.

When Nyatta suddenly reawakens, he’s no longer in the same world he once shared with his sister. Her spirit has been taken by a Jizo statue, en route to the next life. In his haste to get Nyako back, Nyatta tears her soul in two, leaving the Jizo statue to plant only one half in the world beyond. Nyako is still able to resurrect with only half of her soul, but reality seems to have permanently changed for both kittens. How far will Nyatta have to go to get things back to the way they were? Can anyone turn back time, after their whole world has changed?

If I was tasked to write promotional copy for Cat Soup as if it was a normal anime with a plot and character arcs and such, I’d probably toss out something like that. But truthfully, this is a capital-A Art Movie, a series of provocative vignettes linked loosely by context or tone, but not so much by narrative continuity. Since the characters speak in high-pitched squibbles only rarely translated in speech bubbles, there’s almost no dialogue at all. (And if you can’t read Japanese, there IS no dialogue at all.)

Cat Soup is a half-hour direct-to-video homage to the morbid, surreal, cat-centric art of the late Nekojiru, who took her life a few years before this short film was produced. I’m unfamiliar with any of the manga she made over her tragically short career, but if Wikipedia is to be believed, her comics were pervaded by themes of cruelty and nostalgia. However, the “story” of this OVA is mostly original, a chimera of confounding ideas from director Tatsuo Sato and animation producer Masaaki Yuasa.

Nyatta’s mission to retrieve Nyako’s soul is not the “plot” of Cat Soup exactly—it’s more like a graham cracker foundation that’s been crumbled into place, for Masaaki Yuasa to dump every chocolate and marshmallow he’s got over it and set it ablaze. Yuasa’s official directorial debut would be the equally hypnagogic Mind Game a few years later, but according to the proper director Sato, who mostly focused on keeping the production’s ship afloat after drafting the scenario, Cat Soup was overwhelmingly anchored by Yuasa’s storyboards and animation, on every sequence but one. (The Robot Man sequence was animated by Ghibli’s own Osamu Tanabe.)

It's a strange little short film with a grim origin story and no hope for mass appeal, but the accolades that Cat Soup received propelled Yuasa to his first credited directing job and expanded his new digital animation style to a massive online generation of fans in the years to come. You could very well see Cat Soup as the primordial ooze that Yuasa evolved from. That was mostly what I got from my viewing experience—I felt joy at seeing Yuasa’s techniques in their nascency, knowing how his style would evolve and become iconic as Science Saru’s house look today. Otherwise, Cat Soup is emotionally opaque most times, and at others too blunt in its messaging, to follow in the footsteps of aesthetically similar allegorical masterpieces like Night on the Galactic Railroad or The Little Prince, but I don’t think it was ever trying to march in that company.

Cat Soup is an exhibition of art over matter, indulging in exciting experimental visual executions of purely poetic ideas like: “A bird who swallowed the sky is now forced to perform meteorological tricks in God’s circus.” There’s surely meaning in the concept if you root around for a few minutes, but there’s no time for that. This OVA needs to rush you straight to its next animated poem, the next painting on our museum tour, before any of its emotional volleys can crystallize. It’s a fast-moving river of disturbing, beautiful, or even humorous imagery until mortality and the irreversible flow of time finally come for Nyatta, whether he drowned in the opening sequence or he indeed got his sister back and lived to a ripe old age—but things were just…never quite…the same…

Makes you think! But not too much. I think Cat Soup would have become more than an artistically impressive curiosity to the world if its meditations on the short gap between life and death came with a little more cohesion or sentimentality, but there’s no sense forcing this nifty piece of art to dance in someone else’s shoes. I thoroughly enjoyed my 30 minutes in Creepypasta Adventure Time. At the very least, it’s a must-see for Yuasa fans—you must plumb the depths from whence he came!

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40 minutes in, and it looks like these gals are havin’ a real swell time on vacation. Good for them. Hope they can come back every year!

In the same week that OpenAI takes bold new strides toward ruining everything by coming for Hayao Miyazaki specifically, GKIDS and audiences all over the US honored Studio Ghibli this weekend with a successful IMAX run of his greatest cinematic accomplishment. Since Miya-san is a man of many masterpieces, maybe it's in a 4 or 5-way tie for his greatest that we could debate forever, but Princess Mononoke stands its ground confidently at the center of that center podium.

The first Ghibli movie I ever saw was Spirited Away, another of his gold medal masterpieces. It's perfect in its own way, but Chihiro's Adventures in Onsenland, with its more approachable, whimsical, and surrealistic vibe, didn't really turn me on to what made anime so uniquely special at a time when I was transitioning from collectible monster cartoons to Adult Swim. I mentioned Miyazaki to a much cooler friend of mine who lent me the bare-bones MIRAMAX DVD (oof, ha ha) with the excellent dub written by Neil Gaiman (OOF, well the world sure is full of monsters), and it altered my brain chemistry overnight. Anime was now destined to wreck my life.

Princess Mononoke wasn't my first Ghibli movie, but it's the one I've worn out the most. It always will be. I will rewatch this movie at any time of day or night and feel at peace. My IMAX screening this weekend was at 10:30 PM, and being 30 or 40 years old, I wasn't sure I was gonna make it, but I was so electrified during and after my 5 millionth viewing of Princess Mononoke that I got back and couldn't fall asleep until 3.

Goddamn. I love this fucking movie. I love the texture on the hand-painted cels, ed faintly by the necessary digital effects on masses of plants or worms. I love Joe Hisaishi's soundtrack, his lushest and darkest. This is hopelessly '90s of me, but a string section with that specific resonance and intensity you hear in the opening credits will always bring me to my knees. I hear a real long note on a double bass and I think WE COME TO THIS PLACE FOR MAGIC, THAT INDESCRIBABLE FEELING...I'm hopeless.

I really love Ashitaka—he's a hero in my favorite mold of bleeding-heart stoicism, somehow sensitive and astute without being emotionally expressive. Key close-ups of Ashitaka's face during pivotal edits convey his thoughts without a word being said--ah, of course he's falling in love with San--oh no, he's losing the battle with his own righteous anger. You feel for him, and you feel like him. He's a completely realized character and an audience surrogate all rolled into one. The scene where he rescues San from Iron Town is legendary, what a badass.

Ashitaka doesn't get enough credit for his pivotal role in making this a perfect film. This is probably Miyazaki's angriest movie, and Ashitaka's rage is just, as the leader of an exiled minority who becomes fatally cursed by a tragic victim of atrocities--more land-grabbing genocides caused by the same people who drove his tribe into the east to begin with. The demon Ashitaka must defeat from within is not greed like his apathetic opponent Jiko, but hatred.

Ashitaka initially chooses a path of love and understanding because the hatred is literally killing him. His mission is only to find some crumb of closure for his dwindling life without allowing his curse to hurt anyone else, and he fails at this almost immediately. He keeps being forced to kill anyway. He keeps getting involved without getting involved. For every life he saves, another is taken. The movie never stops hammering home that no one can escape the horrible causality of this war--people are so powerless that they can’t keep themselves from spreading even more suffering.

As Osa the leper says, "The world and its people are cursed, but you must find reasons to keep living." Ashitaka is not seeking his salvation when he finds it. He was rescuing a stranger from the river when he found the love that would give him a new life, in another bloody face with no place to belong. He had to keep living through seemingly pointless suffering, without retaliating at the unjust world in some wild way that would only destroy himself, in order to find a new path forward. Even if there are never clean victories, and people will never be free from the cycle of greed and hatred, you just keep fighting until the day that fresh buds bloom again from the blood-stained soil.

OK that was a little intense. The way I bloviate, you'd think this was an epic tale of Good Vs Evil to save the Planet, but my favorite thing about Princess Mononoke, out of all the thousands of things I love about it--(there are big puppies! big puppies, yay!)--my favorite thing about Princess Mononoke is that its full-throated environmentalism exists so powerfully beyond good and evil. The earth is not worth protecting just because “animals good, human technology evil.” Nature is savage and hierarchical and unpredictable. Man's relationship with nature has always been fraught with suffering, and Lady Eboshi is pointedly irable in her care for her people, outcasts of society, cursed too by nature.

There is right and wrong in Princess Mononoke--it wouldn't be so powerful without its fervent ion for the natural world and disdain for cruel men--but there are no right or wrong sides or even characters. No one is a noble savage or a heartless goon. The earth must be protected because we are all part of it, and all our lives and deaths and the suffering we endure is connected. In all our diversity and seeming incompatibility, we must strive to share our burdens until we come to blows, and when that does happen, we must strive to spare others suffering even if it separates us by a great distance once again. 

It sounds platitudinal in bare text like that, but Princess Mononoke conveys the nuances of this struggle for life through violent circumstances better than any fantasy war film I've ever seen, not to mention many non-fantasy war movies. Its relative moral complexity is something I now associate heavily with anime in contrast to American cartoons, even the ones made for adults. Hell, anime made for children is still often more morally complex than American cartoons for the same age demographic. It's an underrated weeb perk.

Letterboxd only lets you list 4 Faves but Princess Mononoke is in my all-time faves in spirit. (Maybe I will log a Like on only my GOAT movies on this site, since I've only been using Like for reviews and lists otherwise.) It's one of the greatest animated movies ever made, maybe one of the best movies period. This shit is religion. Put it in theaters on rotation, and I'd be back every single year.

It’s still biting John Wick like most vigilante pictures these days, but I gotta hand it to this real dumb movie for getting increasingly more ‘80s as its runtime went on. The villains are a cartoon reimagining of call center scammers as tech bro Wall Street lizards embroiled in an impossibly silly national conspiracy. We meet another beekeeper straight out of the Cyberpunk 2077 character creator. The president of the United States is improbably involved by the end.

If it didn’t take its thin worldbuilding and ludicrous plot so seriously, it might be worth recommending, but there’s not enough action to fill in all the blanks between stupid ideas. Anyway, they should’ve called him the Bombkeeper, he sure uses way more bombs than bees to get shit done.

Look, there are zero universes where a live-action Disney’s Snow White in 2025 is anything more than uncanny nonsense, but this was pretty terrible. All those dear evan hansen songs sound the same. “Someday My Prince Will Come” is not in the movie, because Snow’s true love is a flynn rider bandit type who wears an H&M hoodie for truly the entire movie. (There’s a big white party at the end, and they just give him a white hoodie.) Hated lookin at the polar express progeria Dopey. Slop.

Somebody decided we should watch this at work, which is real bad when you don’t want to cry at work!

It doesn't seem right that this is the actual for real no-foolin' Very First feature-length Looney Tunes movie ever made.* That's crazy, right? I thought that was crazy when I saw it in early screenings last year, so I wanted to see this thing one more time when it released Wide. How many animators have the highly specialized talent or references to successfully emulate this 80-year old legacy Clampett style on paper anymore? And then once you find those people and make the thing, how do you get a 2D animated movie into theaters in 2025? It's crazy that this is the First Looney Tunes movie, but we're probably not getting another one.

Putting it like that really creates impossible expectations for a movie that we should just be happy exists at all. So yeah--TDTEBU is not going to explode your house from space. It excels as a heartfelt endeavor to fulfill that little kid's dream of seeing Porky and Daffy on a big-screen adventure. It was slight by necessity, and at its best, it’s slight by design. In a better world, Warner Brothers could have tossed us a little Looney Tunes movie like this every 4-8 years! Alas. We got Space Jam instead. (There is a little Moron Mountain vibe in TDTEBU's alien character too, I stg.)

The production design is the star overall--they did it! They found all the right people to recapture that nostalgic Merrie Melodies palette and posing on the limited budget they had. Visually, it's wonderful. Under the hood, the gags could be sharper or denser, but it's never unfunny. This movie needs to compete for the attention of babies watching shit on their phones in the theater at the same time. That's no mean feat! The kids and I both love explosion humor, so what am I gonna complain about the softer jokes and top 40 needledrops like an asshole?

In a better world, maybe WB could have tossed us a little Looney Tunes movie like this every several years and kept the characters alive beyond ironic t-shirts into the new millennium. Under Zaslav, WB has already flushed the Looney Tunes from its streaming library, getting ready to sell Porky and Daffy off by the pound, I'd reckon.

*No, the live-action hybrids like Space Jam and Back in Action do not count. Those are live-action movies that contain animated characters, not a feature-length traditionally animated cartoon. Watching Space Jam feels like watching a feature-length cookie crisp commercial.

I will never stop thinking about how perfectly Furiosa dovetails into Fury Road. The pitfalls of the prequel are well known to any genre fan still slogging through years of franchise fatigue from the same four IPs. But unlike the sequel, the prequel is almost a bad idea right there on paper. Why spend long hours struggling to build up suspense or mystery around the logline from a more famous story? We know the better tale has already been told first, but there’s nothing more Hollywood than rushing backward to push forward. Pull those golden eggs right out through the goose’s mouth, yeah, that’ll work.

But George Miller is simply one of the best to ever do it—has been from Day Dot as the Aussies say. It’s one of the most meditative and hypnotic action marathons you’ll ever experience, pure adrenaline and morphine rolling with impossible harmony in Furiosa’s unblinking hunter’s eye. After hissing through a long and ragged breath of righteous rage for two full hours, an empty void swallows up all your energy in the film’s last act. It’s a revenge film like no other—by embracing both the futility and the necessity of vengeance in equal measure, Furiosa fades out with both exultance and emptiness. You feel like you can’t endure any more of it. But…

But you do need more, and you need more right away. You need to believe that there is a life for Furiosa on the other side of vengeance. You need Fury Road so much that it detonates under you, blasting your ass to new heights of catharsis. After all that seething we are suddenly running, full tilt, toward a future for Furiosa, and Max, whose story is so much like hers in ways you never realized until you saw them literally collide. 

It’s a perfect double feature, executed in reverse. The cohesion of themes and tones is so flawless, you’d swear Furiosa was written first. Maybe in George Miller’s mind it was, idk. He’s a fucking master. If you saw Babe Pig in the City and didn’t immediately think “this man was born to make movies”, what are you even doing on here? Fucking five stars.

consuming any of these at 2 am may open your third eye. caution: results vary wildly. find the weird cartoon that changes YOU!

• Akira
• Berserk
• Cowboy Bebop
• Devilman Crybaby
• Fullmetal Alchemist
• Gankutsuou
• Ghost in the Shell
• Gurren Lagann
• Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!
• Kill la Kill

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.