Palestine ‘36 (Annemarie Jacir, 2025): 5/5
A sweeping, horrifying, breathtaking - as in, I kept gasping - historical epic about the Great Palestine Revolt of 1936-1939 that shows, in living color, how the British and the Zionists schemed to steal the land and the lives in a poor farming community. To think that this film was being made in the midst of an ongoing genocide, to think that the story it tells is still ongoing nearly a century later, is heartbreaking and enraging and a call to action for every one of us.


Zodiac Killer Project (Charlie Shackleton, 2025): 2.5/5
Shackleton completes his uncompleted true crime documentary without all the necessary parts (a slyly appropriate approach, given that the subject is a famously unsolved mystery with no smoking gun) even as he uses the absence of those elements as an excuse to riff on the formulaic tropes and ethical lapses of true crime. But the real missing piece here, I'd argue, is any real attempt to reconcile his rather withering critique of the genre and the fact that he was apparently planning to indulge its every cliche.
Beyond one sheepish confession that he's drawn to the tactics of those films, however manipulative they may be, there's not much self-reflection here. Was it pure careerism or streaming-payout thirst motivating him to try to make a movie in a style he knows (and repeatedly, convincingly insists) is both limited and dubious in intention? Without any real reckoning with that contradiction, it's hard to take the movie's takedown of true crime that seriously. Had he gotten the authorization he wanted, his movie would embody every convention he points out with (petty?) amusement.

Also, really surprised that THE THIN BLUE LINE, the (brilliant) ground zero antecedent of so much streaming slop, doesn't get a mention. (And neither does Fincher's movie!)


The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold, 2025): 3.5/5
Once again, Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet have crafted a stirring film about a European visionary who comes to America (the last time it was America at the beginning of its superpower era, this time it’s at the birth of the nation itself) and does battle with the new country that is at once fertile soil and an unsafe space. Seyfried is fantastic and Celia Rowlson-Hall's choreography was the perfect balance of earthly carnality and religious ecstasy. The last act really touched me. I don’t want to say more.


Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere (Adrian Choa, 2026): 2.5/5

Oh, "bring down the system"??? who set the system up huh????? HUHHHH??!!!!!!

As infuriating as you'd expect and doesn't tell me anything I didn't know already. It really gets at how culturally and spiritually barren the world is for young male right wingers. They have no genuine love or appreciation for human connection whatsoever, everything is transactional and about obtaining power through vapid signifiers. A film populated by men who'd probably call you gay when you say you liked a novel, a movie made before the year 2005, a piece of music made with non-synthetic instruments, or a heartfelt conversation with a woman.

SMDH we need to make podcast equipment more expensive.


Send Help (Sam Raimi, 2026): 3/5
Sam Raimi going full Sam Raimi. In a better world, Rachel McAdams would be a contender for next year’s Oscar. This feels like another film that will explain to future generations what the Second Trump Era felt like. Also, Raimi has an affection for out-of-control female anti-heroes that one usually only sees in gay male directors. High praise, that.


BOOK NOOK

The Other (Thomas Tryon, 1971)

So it's 100% because NYRB re-published The Other that I picked this up. Otherwise, it simply wouldn't have been on my radar. Published in 1971 by Thomas Tryon (hunky actor-turned-writer), this is a creepy twin story. Creepy identical twin boys, one who seems good and one who seems bad. There's definitely a murkiness here, and the reader is left in a position to guess or interpret, kind of like at the end of The Turn of the Screw. Which boy is bad? Which boy is good? Is one of them a ghost? Is one of them possessed? Who is killing all these people? And, how stupid is the family, leaving an infant alone in a house where people are being hurt or killed every couple of days?

It's a gothic story, too. They're in the old family house. The mother is mentally disturbed, beautiful and fragile. The grandmother is a wise crone with gypsy blood. There are unexplained happenings. There is magic, trickery, secrets, incantation, a severed finger, and a stolen ring.

I adore gothic writing when it's really good. Huge fan of Flannery O'Connor, Daphne du Maurier, and Shirley Jackson, to name a few. I'm not convinced that Tryon is quite up to their snuff.

My Top 10 of 2025

Sirāt (Oliver Laxe)

It Was Just an Accident (Jafar Panahi)

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)

Eddington (Ari Aster)

Marty Supreme (Josh Safdie)

Weapons (Zach Cregger)

Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos)

Companion (Drew Hancock)

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein)

Splitsville (Michael Angelo Covino)

 

And the Next Ten (and not too shabby)

Hamnet (Chloé Zha)

Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor)

Vulcanizadora (Joel Potrykus)

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier)

Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie)

Friendship (Andrew DeYoung)

The Ballad of Wallis Island (James Griffiths)

Eephus (Carson Lund)

Baby Invasion (Harmony Korine)

Presence (Steven Soderbergh)

 

Also really liked: 
The Shrouds

Warfare

Good Boy

F1

 

Good Year for Animation
Predator: Killer of Killers

Chainsaw Man

Demon Slayer

K-Pop Demon Hunters

* Hoppers (Daniel Chong, 2026): 3/5

Overstuffed but swift. At the end of a half hour, the conflict seems to come to the point where most movies end. But the movie keeps coming up with additional crises. 

 

Send Help (Sam Raimi, 2026): 3/5

Rachel McAdams killing a wild boar with a hand-carved stake is my fetish.

 

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice (BenDavid Grabinski, 2026): 3/5

A Tarantino knock-off, plus time travel. Likable and diverting, if paper thin.

 

Paul McCartney: Man on the Run (Morgan Neville, 2026): 3/5

The best part is in the first twenty minutes, where Paul McCartney is demonstrably unsure of how he should proceed. This is the person whose first solo single repeats the line, “Maybe I’m a lonely man in the middle of something he doesn’t really understand.” Once he gets back on his feet, the doc is a mad rush through the next ten years, justifying and smoothing all of his choices. For what it’s worth, I like these McCartney albums while also thinking that none of them are better than the worst Beatles album.

 

Pillion (Harry Lighton, 2026): 2.5/5

Surprisingly unengaging despite the titillation and intrigue of the gay BDSM milieu. It’s a bummer that our protagonist’s love interest doesn’t seem to care much for him—and I would feel the same no matter the gender. A bloodless affair. 

 

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (Nia DaCosta, 2026): 2.5/5

The zombie stuff goes all Day of the Dead, with trying to communicate with the zombies and revive their humanity and all. But most of the movie is about how horrible a Road Warrior-like band of humans are. The big set-piece involving Iron Maiden should have worked for me but didn’t.

 

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (Gore Verbinski, 2026): 2/5

Big-swing sci-fi satire, in the vein of Brazil but without its scale and romanticism or Everything Everywhere All at Oncebut without its volcanic spew of ideas.

 

 

The Outfit (John Flynn, 1973): 3.5/5

I watched this because it’s an adaptation of a book by Richard Stark (see below)—and indeed it nails Stark’s stripped down and ruthless tone. A good movie if you like to watch tough guys point revolvers at one another and transfer other people’s money from safes to bags. But then again I could watch Robert Duval, Joe Don Baker, Robert Ryan, Karen Black and Tim Carey read the phone book. 

 

Big City Blues (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932): 3.5/5

The plot of a young man moving to NYC from the sticks and getting bamboozled and over his head is a bit tiresome, but the film has a great, long party scene that takes up nearly half of the film’s running time, involves Humphrey Bogart himself, and ends in murder. Joan Blondel stands out: “that’s one girl I could recognize from behind.” Drunken debauchery, murder, suicide, a woman reading the then-scandalous lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, and a reference to cross-dressing establish the film’s pre-Code bona fides. 

 

Five Star Final (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931): 3/5

Edward G. Robinson plays a newspaper editor who digs up a long-forgotten story about a murderess, with tragic consequences—proving people have been complaining about the media for at least 95 years (to little effect). A couple of explicit references to boobs and two (!) suicides (just off screen) establish the film’s pre-Code bona fides. 

 

Heat Lightning (Mervyn LeRoy, 1934): 3.5/5

A dozen strangers—including a couple of bank robbers, some rich girls, a sheriff, a huge Mexican family, and the two tough women who run the place and do a bunch of things the men don’t think women can or should do—collect in a diner in the middle of the desert. Like Five Star Final, this has a large and colorful cast. The two women who own the diner are strong and complex women who very much have sex with two obviously bad men, establishing the film’s pre-Code bona fides. A guy dies in closeup; last words: “Who cares” (!!)

 

Breathless, rw (Jim McBride, 1983): 4.5/5

Today (as opposed to when I saw, and quite loved, it in the theater when I was 16) I can see that Richard Gere’s Jesse is an adolescent/childish vision of a man. But I still find Gere and the film endlessly sexy, romantic and watchable. The less said about Valérie Kaprisky, the better, but Gere is a goddamn wonder: thrillingly handsome, charismatic, and always in motion physically and emotionally. 

 

Andor, Season 1 (Tony Gilroy, et al, 2022): 2/5

Touted by many as the best TV of the year, but I don’t get it. The drama involves among other things breaking into a fortress and then out of a high-tech prison—but never really manages to ratchet up much tension. And all the Star Warsfan-service is pure distraction. 

 

How to Shoot a Ghost, 27m (Charlie Kaufman, 2025): 1.5/5

Jackals & Fireflies, 20m (Charlie Kaufman, 2023): 1.5

Two poetic bores. The poet/screenwriter, Eva H.D., appears in Jackals, and is pretty cute. I sincerely hope she’s Kaufman’s girlfriend (alas, there is no public affirmation).

 

C’est la Vie, 8m (Ari Aster, 2016): 2/5

A self-lacerating (and generally lacerating) direct address monologue by a homeless person over a couple dozen tableau. Funny (ish) and caustic (ish). 

The Turtle’s Head, 12m (Ari Aster, 2014): 3/5

An eventually-funny parody of detective fiction where the investigation of the case becomes overwhelmed by the detective’s obsession that his dick is shrinking. 

Basically, 15m (Ari Aster, 2014): 2/5

A self-lacerating (and generally lacerating) direct address monologue by a would-be actress over a couple dozen tableau. Funny (ish) and caustic (ish). 

Munchausen, 17m (Ari Aster, 2013): 3/5

Bonnie Bedelia (!) plays a monstrously overbearing and narcissistic mother, an Aster signature.

The Strange Thing about the Johnsons, 30m (Ari Aster, 2011): 3.5/5

A terrifically fucked-up story of a son sexually abusing his father (!!). You can’t say that Aster doesn’t have balls. 

Beau, 7m (Ari Aster, 2011): 3/5

The source of the stolen suitcase bit—and the general air of anxiety and homicide—from Beau is Afraid.

Herman’s Cure-All Tonic (Ari Aster, 2008): 2.5/5

Harold collects the green goo being excreted by his dying father and sells it to people as a cure-all medicine. 

 

Arnulf Rainer, 7m (Peter Kubelka, 1960): 2/5

Snapping rapidly back-and-forth between all-black and all-white at different cadences, with either white noise or silence on the soundtrack. Primal!

 

 

BOOK NOOK (too too precious!!)

 

Howl’s Moving Castle (Diana Wynne Jones, 1986)

Jack read this for his English class at school, so I read it too. It was published after a couple of Miyazaki’s masterpieces, but it still could plausibly be the origin of so much of the director’s sensibility—where everything is peacefully mutable and a projection of the (child) protagonist’s anxious and changing subconscious. (Or at least I THINK that’s partly what’s going on in Totoro, Spirited Away, Ponyo, and The Boy and the Heron.)

 

The Seventh (Richard Stark, 1966)

The very definition of lean and mean. Tightlipped Parker just participated in a heist at a football stadium and is holding the money. After a couple of days of holing up in an apartment with a girl, he walks to the corner store for some cigarettes and when he comes back, the girl is dead and the money is gone. Stark’s 24 Parker novels were adapted into Boorman’s Point Blank, John Flynn’s The Outfit (see above), as well as Goddard’s Made in U.S.A. (from 1968. How have I not seen this??).