One Battle After Another (PTA, 2025): 3.5/5

Very good! Not best of the year, and certainly not of Anderson, but a real good time. Fun, funny, exciting, the definition of propulsive. Doesn't feel a bit of its runtime.

Also: unbelievably good wardrobe choices for the Christmas men. A grown man in a Lacoste polo SHOULD be scary.

HIM (Justin Tipping, 2025): 2.5/5

A slick and punchy scratch at the sport industry's bourgeoisie excesses—packed within the confines of a tense and suspenseful horror film. While the film points in plenty of valid directions regarding the ridiculous brutality of football, these directions are never investigated and the potential for genuine thematic brilliance slips through the cracks. There's nothing going on here that isn't deducible from the trailer. Fortunately, a well-integrated soundtrack and a strong performance from Marlon Wayans anchor this confused clunker. Also Tim Heidecker for some reason?

Good Boy (Ben Leonberg, 2025): 2.5/5

Indy the Dog has more acting range than Gal Gadot.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (Rob Reiner, 2025): 2.5/5

Certainly not as revelatory as the original, which remains one of the greatest mockumentaries ever made. And much like an amp that only goes to 10...I feel like this wasn't nearly as great as it could have been.

Adjunct (Ron Najor, 2024): 3.5/5

Triggering! It’s insane that UCLA really did offer an adjunct position without pay.

The Naked Gun (Akiva Schaffer, 2025): 4/5

[V.O.] "She had a bottom that would make any toilet beg for the brown." I ALMOST CHOKED TO DEATH.

A modern miracle. Brilliantly blends the classic slapstick and deadpan humor of the original Naked Gun with a mix of modern comedy styles; everything from absurdism to meta-humor, visual gags, clever wordplays, and even some surreal moments. It’s not just copying the old formula; it’s updating it, remixing it, and trying new things. And mostly, it works like a gangbuster.

"And that's when it hit me. Like an idiot's completed jigsaw puzzle, I was being framed."

Oh, Hi! (Sophie Brooks, 2025): 2/5

I can fix her (I'm talking about the script)

Relay (Daivd MacKenzie, 2025): 3.5/5

“Hello, this is the Tri-state relay service.”

“Yes, hello?”

“A person is calling from the relay service. Have you received a relay call before?”

“I don’t think so…”

A broker/fixer of a lucrative payoffs between corrupt corporations and the whistleblowers who threaten them breaks his own rules when a new client seeks his protection to stay alive. RELAY's use of the relay telephone service—where city operators relay text-based conversations sent by people who are deaf and hard of hearing—is wildly brilliant. A solid throwback to 70's paranoia thrillers with an engaging story, compelling characters, and a unique hook to its concept.

Mars Express (Jeremie Perin, 2023): 4/5

French sci-fi animated film that feels like you're watching the adaptation of a bright, confident, brain-stimulating, fully mapped-out classic novella from someone like Clarke, Heinlein or Philip K. Dick, contemplating our trending tech topic of late, the integration of artificial intelligence into the human world and whether androids/robots deserve any independent rights.

A bit BLADE RUNNER and GHOST IN THE SHELL with the droids being hunted, the noir sensibility, and the labyrinthine convolutions of conspiratorial villain motives that propel the unfolding mystery narrative, but the greater thing about MARS EXPRESS is the teeming onslaught of intriguing, ingenious futuristic concepts all over the place that the movie expertly shows as part of this world during the course of this story without ever having to focus much on. Every few seconds there's another little device or setting or advancement in everyday life that makes you go "whoa, cool!"

Finer world-building efficiency and imagination than most big-budget live action sci-fi films out there. Plus a fitting techno score (what happened to movies using those?), 88 minutes of gimme-more brevity, and an ending with a cleverly/movingly binary interpretation.

The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent (Nebojsa Slijepcevic, 2024, 14 mins): 3.5/5

Paramilitary: Sit down and shut up, that's none of your business.

Tomo: It is. You’re treating honest folks like animals.

Paramilitary: Oh, you’re a Muslim-lover?

Tomo: Is there no law in this country?

Paramilitary: I told you to sit down!

Tomo: You’re not an army, you’re a bunch of criminals.

Bearing witness to one massacre from the systemic genocide of Bosnian Muslims carried out by Serbs in the early 1990s. What it takes to truly stand up for the victims. A powerful short film.

KPop Demon Hunters (Chris Appelhans, Maggie Kang, 2025): 2.5/5

sometimes it’s just you, your secret hot demon situationship, and his silly ass blue tiger and a sassy six-eyed magpie against the world

Masking Threshold (Johannes Grenzfurthner, 2021): 4/5

Beautifully shot, disturbingly inventive, and shockingly effective. MASKING THRESHOLD is a psychological horror film about a tinnitus sufferer's descent into madness. The entire 95 minutes takes place in one single location, focusing on a single character's mental illness in the framework of unfathomable cosmic horror contrasted by the use of macro cinematography and ASMR.

A unique and enthralling cinematic experience with a nice mix of Ron Fricke, Pi, Chuck Palahniuk, and Gaspar Noe. Kudos to the claustrophobic framing, sheer volume of footage shot, and gradual deterioration charted in the protagonist's wall of dialogue. Deeply unsettling. Very ingenious.

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025): 4/5

An enjoyable and wide-ranging action film. At first, I was disappointed that it wasn’t more PTAish. But it’s hard to be churlish about what is on-screen, which is expertly rendered, epic, and often fun and funny ("a few small beers"). As DeCaprio gets older, he’s figuring out how to drop the DeCaprio persona and step into others—it's one of his best performances. Packed with eerily 2025-relevant content such as immigration, racism, and out-of-control government forces. There’s been talk about how this is a call for more rebellious actions against politics we don’t agree with—but more meaningful to me was the idea that it’s PTA thinking about the present and future of his own partially black daughters. Will certainly improve with re-watch. 

 

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle (Haruo Sotozaki, 2025): 4/5

I found this movie’s inter-fight flashback structure audacious and rich. Inserting 45 minutes of backstory during a fight (!) to create empathy for the #3 baddie is incredible. Plus, really getting into what the opponents are experiencing and thinking over the course of a long fight (with stuff like flashbacks to something useful your dead father taught you while killing a huge bear)—this has never been done in American cinema to my knowledge. Very cool to look at too.

 

Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025): 4/5

Magnolia with horror elements, by which I mean it presents a wide range of emotions and tones. It’s also chaptered according to which character you are following, and there’s fun overlap as characters and timelines cross one another. After a great, eerie opening sequence (forever owning George Harrison’s Beware the Darkness) and an uneasy first hour, it’s not exactly frightening, but always entertaining. There are (perhaps too many) free-floating themes going on here, including school shootings and growing up too early with alcoholic parents. But the one that appeals to me the most is Boomers continuing to suck the vitality out of the next generation and the next generation after that. 

 

Splitsville (Michael Angelo Covino, 2025): 4/5

Chaotic and very funny. Reminded me, at times, of Rushmore. Romantic rivalry, jealousy, anger, retribution—all in a comic tone. And Coelho sounds and looks like Jason Schwartzman and has similar timing. Funniest movie of the year so far.

 

The Self Tape, 7m (Michael Angelo Covino, 2024): 3.5/5

A funny and painful preview of the Splitsville vibe. Loved how the script and reality makes a counterpoint. 

 

Freaky Tales (Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, 2025): 3/5

Low budget, lowbrow, funky and fun. 

 

28 Years Later (Danny Boyle, 2025): 3/5

I like that some of the zombies behaved like gorillas or lions, naked and in a small pack with an alpha. And I liked the more outre editing, rapid insert shots, play with color, jittering techniques—different and newish. The third act is disastrous on every level.  Based on The Beach, 28 Days Later, Annihilation, and this one, Garland is obsessed with Apocalypse Now—and its breach of the sacred and corrupt compound.

 

 

The Sea Horse, 15m (Jean Painlevé, 1935): 3/5

A beautifully lit and surprisingly informative presentation, using poetry, science—and what must surely be the most state-of-the-art underwater, microscope cameras of the day. Perhaps this film was even inspired by the new technology itself.

 

Silkwood, rw (Mike Nichols, 1983): 3/5

i saw this in the theater at 16 and found it kind of boring. 38 years later I thought: now I will have a better appreciation of Mike Nicols’ direction, Nora Ephron’s writing, Cher (pretty butch) and Kurt Russel (all-time snack), bit parts from Fred Ward and David Straithern, and Meryl Damn Streep in a haircut my mom definitely had. And I did! But I still found it kind of boring. It’s very lived in, there just not that much story there.

 

 

Leftover Altman Film Festival 

26 movies in, and we’re getting down to the endgame of Altman completionism here. Still, in this context, I enjoyed watching all of these, even the ones I didn’t like. Will I ever watch Health, Streamers, Fool for Love, Beyond Therapy, O.C. & Stiggs, Vincent & Theo, Cookie’s Fortune, Dr. T & the Women, and The Company? 

 

Countdown (Robert Altman, 1967): 2.5/5

Conventional drama following James Caan preparing for and on a solo mission to be the first man on the moon to beat the Russians. Fun to seen Caan and Robert Duval working together five years before The Godfather. Here the roles are reverse:  Duval plays the older-brother-energy hothead, and Caan the rational one. Ends in a singularly ineffective moon sequence. It was made with NASA’s cooperation, so there is a liberal display of authentic hardware, but Warner Brothers made Altman edit out his developing style of overlapping dialogue and loose rhythm. So the film is realistic but boring.

 

A Cold Day in the Park (Robert Altman, 1969): 3/5

A Bermanesque psychodrama involving an odd, mute young man who is rescued by an odd, lonely, suppressed, slightly-older woman. Sandy Dennis is excellent, and the films gets surprisingly perverse.

 

A Perfect Couple (Robert Altman, 1979): 2/5

Altman’s idea of a joke is a romance between two characters who remain completely incompatible throughout. Altman often supplemented his dramas with live musical performance, and here there is a Broadway-ish rock band plays lots of songs, which unfortunately are terrible.

 

Quintet (Robert Altman, 1979): 3.5/5

A rare sci fi movie from Altman (see Countdown, above), this one with more heavy Bergman vibes (and Bibi Anderson) but also a lugubrious and opaque Tarkovsky quality. The world building and imagery is terrific—and it’s made on what must have been a massive refrigerated sets, as vapor is often seen coming out of the actors’ mouths when speaking. It’s also shot with a crazy lens that distorts the edges—a complete artistic swing for the fences that I’ve only ever seen in Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko, Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux, and some passages of silent movies. Plot is nil, and it’s all set-bound, play-like and artificial. But after watching so many difficult international masterpiece messes from Muratova, Ackerman, Larisa Shepitko, Aleksei German, Sukarov, Pedro Costa, Guy Maddin, etc., this makes sense to me. High-wire filmmaking.

 

Popeye (Robert Altman, 1980): 2/5

Live from planet cocaine. Some good songs, some charmingly low-tech sight gags, and Shelley Duval is perfect. The rest of it’s a bust. 

 

Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (Robert Altman, 1982): 3/5

A meeting of two of the greatest weirdos of 70s Hollywood, Sandy Denny and Karen Black—and Denny is again brilliant here. Another of Altman’s Bergmanesque, women-centered dream plays (like Images, A Cold Day, and 3 Women). Full of slippery time and pasts revealed.

 

Secret Honor (Robert Altman, 1984): 3/5

A towering and very watchable performance. But the conspiracy theory (true, I’m sure) and Agnew jokes don’t hold as much water 50 years later.

 

 DEVO (Chris Smith, 2025): 4/5

“When the captain says the ship is sinking, you don’t call him ‘a pessimist’ if it is.”

A needed reintroduction to the great Ohio art-punks Devo: Kent State students radicalized-as-artists in 1970 when they witnessed the National Guard open fire on unarmed protestors, killing 4. (It’s a chilling reminder of what we’re seeing today: The normalization of the federal government turning on its own people.) They saw the dehumanization of the factory workers around them and embraced the anger they saw in Dadaism and the multimedia subversion in Pop Art. Their Brian Eno-produced Q: Are We Not Men? remains an astounding debut, and their first several albums are all good-to-great, but their 1 pop hit was a blessing and a curse. For a few years they had a much bigger audience, but in the ‘80s their anti-conformity message baffled their interviewers, who kept asking if they were serious. Because mocking President Reagan's phony-macho conservatism—and having a good time doing it!—was unfathomable to them.

Director by Chris Smith gets great interviews from the guys, and rightly keeps the focus on them and the music to show how much the politics was always there in plain sight. “We were seeing a world that was the antitheses of the idealized, promised future ginned up in the ’50s and ’60s.” The devolution they started seeing in the ‘70s was willfully ignored in the ‘80s and only seems worse now. “We didn’t want to be right,” they say towards the end. But they left a great soundtrack for dancing while the ship goes down.

Thanks to this widely available and entertaining doc, we can all get a glimpse into the right context to appreciate Devo. Synth pop provocateurs that were designed to be too ahead of their time. I mean, that was the point. Right?

It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley (Amy J. Berg, 2025): 3.5/5

Damn that white boy can sing!

Stans (Steven Leckart, 2025): 2.5/5

“Eat a dick.” Thank you, Marshall, truly inspiring.

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (Christopher McQuarrie, 2025): 2/5

and

F1 (Joseph Kosinski, 2025): 2/5

I was never entirely comfortable with or even able to comprehend "brat summer" but it beats the hell out of "aging white men with messiah complex" summer.

Superman (James Gunn, 2025): 2/5

Good casting for Superman himself. I hope Guy With The Worst Last Name I Ever Heard gets better Superman movies. But Hoult was a terrible choice. He's great in FURY ROAD and absolutely nothing else. He's the definition of mid and has zero charisma, which would have been necessary to this and most Lexes.

Eddington (Ari Aster, 2025): 3/5

Can someone take Joaquin Phoenix’s dick and balls out of Ari’s peripherals so he can go back to making monumental horror movies

The Thursday Murder Club (Chris Columbus, 2025): 1/5

Chris Columbus has always been a company hack. So basic and televisual. Legitimately an ugly movie, simultaneously too bright and too hazy at the same time, everything lathered in this nauseatingly digitized uncanny valley that makes everyone look like they've been digitally de-aged, even though this is specifically a movie about pensioners! (And the script is an absolute joke.)

I remember some news story about the Netflix algorithm dictating that no new movie should be over two hours, since apparently that's the limit for when people decide not to bother (I'd argue a much bigger hurdle for audience retention is that all their movies are dogshit like this, but that's just me).

Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025): 4.5/5

IMO not as much Magnolia as it is 23 Short Films about Springfield.

Tightly constructed and thoroughly gripping. Cements Zack Cregger as one of the most exciting voices working in horror right now. No notes!

Together (Michael Shanks, 2025): 3.5/5

You ever love someone so much you become non binary

Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor, 2025): 4/5

"I’m sorry that bad things are gonna happen to you. But sometimes bad stuff just happens. That's why I feel bad for you, in a way. That you're alive and you don't know that yet. "

An exceptionally assured tonal tightrope, and a stirring, exciting debut. Naomi Ackie has the greatest face in cinema today.

War of the Worlds (Rich Lee, 2025): 0.5/5

Data, you understand, is the aliens’ food. They eat it up like spaghetti.

“Mmmm data!” They cry as they nosh on your smartphone.

To them, a thumb drive is but a Snickers bar and a 5G network is a Michelin star restaurant.

(Slop in its sloppiest form.)

I May Destroy You (Sam Miller, Michaela Coel, 2020): 3.5/5

Impressive stuff by Michaela Coel, both writing-wise and acting-wise. There are some ups and downs along the way (particularly the flashback episode and the handling of Kwame's arc), but it's made with love and handled with care throughout, and the finale is terrific. Thematically, it bears some similarities to Fleabag in a way that it is a fresh, sharp and original British dramedy that doesn’t go for traditional closures or happy endings at any point. Plus it comes with a powerhouse lead performance. For the most part, brimming with creativity, pain, and self deprecation. I doubt I’ll forget it any time soon.

 

Eddington (Ari Aster, 2025): 4.5/5

We’re all being pulled in separate directions according to who we find online, and in the end, it’s big tech that wins. That’s a fairly cogent look at today—although admittedly there is tons of static in the storytelling. Privileged young white kids chanting Black Lives Matter and ACAB. The self-righteousness of victimhood. Who else is grappling with these sacred cows? For that and for its anxiousness, it’s a difficult watch but a bracing one. Half the time I’m rooting for our protagonist and half of the time not, and all the characters make sense sometimes. “I wanted to make a movie about what it feels like to live in a world where no one can agree about what is happening.” Phoenix is perfect.

 

Vulcanizadora (Joel Potrykus, 2025): 4/5

A character in the film describes hell not as pain and heat but as sad and nervous. Everything that you figure is going to happen in the first act is only half the story. Funny and dark. Effective use of one-ers in both very long shots and close-ups. 

 

Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor, 2025): 3.5/5

Well written and acted, although I didn’t love the subject matter. Lucas Hedges is excellent and should be in all movies.  

 

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni, 2025): 3/5

The situation is similar to a different modern classic (not saying which), but the setting, characters and style make it worth watching. A fascinating look at what life Is like in Zambia, with great attention on morays and rituals of behavior, and the feel of village and family life and the nearby areas is vividly rendered. The younger generation all speak English (Zambia being an English colony until 1964.) which makes it significant what language is being spoken (and it’s often a blend).

 

Together (Michael Shanks, 2025): 2/5

Paper-thin body horror for Zillennials. These actors are bad. 

 

The Man Who Wasn’t There, rw (Joel Coen, 2001): 3/5

Maybe the hardest Coens movie to watch. It’s true that it’s filled with comically exaggerated characters and good roles for some of our favorite character actors, but the tone and protagonist are somnambulant, the Citizen Kane dramatic lighting is stultifying, the pace is glacial, and the worldview is grim. 

 

He Who Gets Slapped, rw (Victor Sjöström, 1924): 4/5

A clown fetishizes his moment of greatest degradation and reenacts it for laughs over and over. Smiley-face emoji. 

 

They Shoot Horses Don’t They (Sydney Pollack, 1969): 3/5

A lot of human suffering, a static drama, and no catharsis. Like Beckett without the laughs. 

 

The Wings of Eagles (John Ford, 1957): 3/5

A little bit of everything wrapped up in one corny but watchable autobio-pic swiftly covering 40 years. A slap and tickle tale of the rivalry between Navy airman and Army airman with plenty of drinkin’ and brawlin’. A domestic drama. An accident and hard-won medical triumph. A portrait of a writer. And finally a war drama with some very authentic footage. John Wayne plays Frank Wead, who wrote They Were Expendable and 20 other mostly military-themed films throughout the 30s and 40s. Maureen O’Hara is his impossibly forbearing wife, profiting from the familiarity built from their work together on The Quiet Man five years earlier. (They would work together twice more, in 1963’s McClintock! and 1971’s Big Jake.

 

Kanehsatake , 270 Years of Resistance (Alanis Obomsawin, 1993): 3/5

The town of Oka, near Montreal, wishes to create a 9-hole golf course (!) on land that belongs to the Mohawk Nation, so the Mohawks create an encampment on the land, leading to a stand-off with the Canadian army. A portrait of the state and society of Original People in Montreal and across Canada at a crux point with White politicians, the army, and the general community (all hostile). In truth, I don’t really think occupying an area of land in defiance of the government is a great strategy. Think the Occupy Wall Street folks, the Branch Davidians in Waco, the Malheur Standoff in Oregon, or the Pro Palestine encampment at UCLA. Without debating the relative righteousness of the different groups, real discussions happen in court, for better or worse. 

 

Toute la mémoire du monde, 21m (Alain Resnais, 1956): 3/5

A multi-focused portrait of the Bibliothèque Nationale of France. Part homage to the those who document and catalogue art works, part a marveling at this great brain, the closest thing there was to the internet in 1956. Plus a Wiseman-like portrait of Kafkaesque or Brazil-like bureaucracy—the shoveling of books like coal. Arty and boring (if it had Ed Wood’s name on it).

 

The Blood Spattered Bride (Vicente Aranda, 1972): 3/5

I just read Carmilla, the short novel that this erotic horror Eurotrash film is based on, about a young female vampire (15ish years old) and her relationship with her newest victim, another young girl. (Written 25 years before Dracula). The film literalizes the novel’s lesbian anxieties. But unlike the book, our female protagonist is not a victim but a villain (for not wanting to have sex with the male but instead with the woman) that must be eliminated. And even this lurid movie didn’t dare touch the very young/underage “vampire,” and instead they made Carmilla’s mother the vampire—although the girl character (here with an unnervingly adult face) is still there, mooning about without much to do.

 

 

Joel Potrykus Film Fest

 

Unemployees, 27m (Joel Potrykus, 2023): 3/5

Two free spirited/ dispirited young women trip messily through a series of surreal Michigan tableaux. Think Daisies and Roy Andersson. Funny!

 

Joel Calls Indie Film Type Dudes, 12 (Joel Potrykus, 2020): 3.5/5

Highlights the high quality of Potrykus’ sense of humor and Rolodex. The second-best film I’ve seen about the pandemic-times (after Eddington).

 

The Alchemist Cookbook (Joel Potrykus, 2016): 2.5/5

The acting is good, which reminds me that the acting also always good in Poltrykus’ productions. This one does not star Joshua Burge and is really a monster movie, and as such comes with certain genre expectations, which unfortunately are not met. 

 

Buzzard, rw (Joel Potrykus, 2014): 3.5/5

Wherein we follow the increasingly desperate actions of a squirrely, sweaty young scammer. Joshua Burge is obviously an enormous discovery, and it’s shocking that no one has figured how to use his naturalism and deeply hurt eyes. I imagine a future for him like that of Martin Donovan, who I see everywhere these days just the way I wanted to when he was Hal Hartley’s go-to protagonist in movies like Trust and Amateur. 

 

Ape (Joel Potrykus, 2012): 3/5

Worth watching for “fans” of Buzzard and Vulcanizadora. An origin story for Joshua Burge’s character, showing him somewhat unformed. You actually see moments where he is joyful, and it’s kind of amazing to see Burge’s face light up. Vital and alive in a Cassavetes way (although way less gravity, obv).

 

Coyote, 22m (Joel Potrykus, 2010): 3/5

Poltrykus often flirts with horror as a metaphor for the disgusting, disheveled nature of living. A bit of a spoiler to say exactly how here. 

Gordon, 15 (Joel Potrykus, 2007): 3/5

A droll take on a zombie film. A family man tries to make it work. 

 

 

Kira Muratova Film Fest

Seven critics or filmmakers put the first two of these movies on their 2022 Sight and Sound top ten lists, and six put the third on theirs. I’m fine with that. 

 

The Asthenic Syndrome (Kira Muratova, 1989): 3/5

The most difficult of Muratova’s films here. Moves from person to person in a litany of random complaints and miseries. Anger, frustration, unhappiness. Pushing, hitting, broken glass. Tears, grudges, disgust, shame, cruelty, hatred, “You have to educate the soul…and cut off some hands.” A director character lists important Russian directors: Aleksei German, Sokurov, and Muratova (herself!), and yeah this movie has the same pretentions to great, ineffable, puzzling, defiant art that that those other two directors’ films have.  

 

Brief Encounters (Kira Muratova, 1967): 3/5

“When I watch a movie or I read a book, the women and men are so beautiful, their feelings and actions are so sensible and complete. Also in suffering, everything is logical and correct, there is cause and effect, the beginning and the end. Here everything is so vague….” A kind of love triangle, but this. Time is jumbled and feelings are uncertain, even to the characters, one of whom never even realizes she is in a triangle, I believe.

 

Getting to Know the Big, Wide World (Kira Muratova, 1978): 3.5/5

A triangle of young people with time to kill and their lives ahead of them—light, free and improvisational in a Band of Outsiders mode. Find a large shard of a mirror? Goofing around with that’s worth a minute of screen time. Find a harmonica? That’s worth a couple of minutes—with first the girl blowing and then the boy, it’s almost like kissing, you see. Beautiful soft colors, and a perfectly romantic final passage.

 

 

Jess Franco Film Fest

Franco (like Ozu, Hong Sang-soo, Wes Anderson (and Bach)), creates his own cosmology of style and theme, where repetition and variation are part of the point. For a director who made about 200 movies, the films here are surprisingly competent, fun, enjoyable, idiosyncratic—and with the same surface pleasures and stillness (or let’s say boredom) of Antonioni. It’s fortuitous that I am just reading Sontag’s On Interpretation, which argues for dealing with a work of art not by analyzing its content (which replaces the art object) but its form. “In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art.” By which I mean I’m pretty sure these Jess Franco films don’t have meaning, but they are at times beautiful and strange. (Although, gee, come to think of it, many were made by a Spanish director whose country is ruled by a different Franco).

 

The Diabolical Dr Z (Jesús Franco, 1966): 3.5/5

A Man Scientist (here female) and her Igor. Facial disfigurement and replacement. Cabaret and cool orchestral jazz. Keeping a gorgeous blonde in a see-through cat-suit at bay with a chair like a lion. Revenge. Mind control. Girls in prison/cages. Long nails. Asphyxiation and strangulation. A spiral staircase. Franco himself plays a fun character. Skinny dipping. 

 

Venus in Furs (Jesús Franco, 1969): 4/5

A fun, sexy, drifty, singular and very of-its-time revenge ghost story. Beautiful girls (actually really beautiful), slo-mo, wavey lens effects, ample but not gratuitous nudity, a blonde stripped to the waist and whipped, exotic locations (here Rio and Istanbul and (beautiful) Black Sea beaches). And of course zooms. Reminds me that there are almost no depictions of sex in media these days—or even people being in their private spaces without clothes on—something that happens in every house and apartment every day. Such images have been isolated into their own shameful “porn and soft core” ghetto.

 

Vampyros Lesbos (Jesús Franco, 1971): 3.5/5

Languid, sensual, and filled with Franco’s stylish signatures. Atonal yet groovy music. cabaret (diegetic, staged productions of arty nudie dancing and music)—and often the genesis of a character’s obsession with the artist. A palatial estate in an exotic location, here Istanbul. Zooms. Arty and free pillow sequences and unmotivated abstract sequences. A spiral staircase. Franco himself playing a fun character. Skinny dipping. Recurrent images: here a kite, a scorpion, a white moth, blood running down a window. 

 

Bloody Moon (Jesús Franco, 1981): 3.5/5

The most giallo of the Franco I’ve seen, complete with murder mystery and some effective scenes of tension, and ample and welcome nudity. Features really pretty blondes and a psycho with a horribly scarred face interacting on a palatial estate. Killer POV. Incest. Disco music and color. And of course zoooooooooms. 

 

 

Ed Wood Film Fest

To state the obvious, Ed Wood’s films are not the worst movies of all time. In fact, there is no way that any low-budget genre picture by someone with passion, however misguided, uneducated and unfounded—could be the worst. Only a soulless, lazy and uninteresting piece of product could be. These movies feel like cover songs by a sincere and naive amateur band. And within the amateur nature of the acting there are performances and moments that are as direct as in any movie you might name. 

 

Plan Nine from Outer Space (Edward D. Wood Jr., 1957): 3/5

Combines horror tropes and sci-fi tropes, and manages some moments of actual tension. The scenes in the graveyard appear to be shot in a room about as big as my living room, and are in the tradition of similar shots in (say) The Night of the Hunter, Black Narcissus that use artificiality as an aesthetic. 

 

Bride of the Monster (Edward D. Wood Jr., 1955): 3/5

There is a “let’s make a movie” quality here that lays bare the requirements of a film: actors, a script, sets, lighting, music, costumes. “The Monster” is represented by (1) beautiful scientific stock footage of a pretty cool octopus and (2) a large rubber one. This doesn’t work dramatically, but from a certain angle it’s charming. I like the way Tor Johanson’s Igor character, Lobo, suddenly leaps to the center of sympathy and attention at the end. 

 

Final Curtain, 22m (Edward D. Wood Jr., 1957): 3/5

Wood’s Goodbye Dragon In (although I see that the great Will Sloan makes the same observation in his Letterboxd review). A theater is empty except for one man and undead ghouls, although there’s more attention to the theater than the ghouls. “This blackness that permits a new world to appear, a new world of the spirit and unseen.” Explains why Duke Moore, is dressed in a tuxedo in Night of Ghouls—Wood was able to use footage shot for this film in that one.

 

Night of the Ghouls/Revenge of the Dead (Edward D. Wood Jr., 1959): 3.5/5

The most accomplished of Wood’s genre movies. Some scenes in “a car” that have more dynamic blocking than anything in his other films. Lobo makes a reappearance, and there’s a character named Dr. Acula, which is so dumb that it’s brilliant. 

 

Glen or Glenda (Edward D. Wood Jr., 1953): 3.5/5

I don’t quite understand why this is not celebrated as an early trans text. I have only really heard about it in a tone of ridicule—and it does reflect some out-of-date beliefs— but it stands among the most pro-trans movies I have seen, and certainly of its era. It’s coming from a baldly autobiographical place, and it’s a laudably sincere confession and plea. Wood himself plays the title character, flying his trans flag, expressing all his shame but also all his lust. He uses stock footage of D-Day (for example) but Wood was in fact present at D-Day. (He claimed that during combat he wore women’s underwear under his uniform, and he said that he would have preferred to die than to be injured because if injured he would have been exposed.) Contains some psychologically intense high-contrast fantasy sequences worthy of Lynch and Anger. Begins with Bella Lugosi, skulls and skeletons, and a laboratory just like all of Wood’s movies, but here he’s playing I guess God, looking down at the humanity that he created, laughing at the humans who can’t help being what they are.

 

 

rewatched Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011): 4.5/5

Extended, three-hour cut, of which the first 150-minutes constitutes a messy masterpiece. Simultaneously personal and sweeping. It's almost oxymoronic, the way it can identify as an "intimate epic." Last half hour comes a bit unspooled -- even in the context of the film's slovenly disposition -- and is far too dense and sprawling for such a short amount of time. However, whereas my normal critique would be to "cut this" or "cut that," Margaret is so effortlessly compelling that I'd be happy had it run an additional hour or two.

Materialists (Celine Song, 2025): 2.5/5

My note to Celine if I were her producer/studio exec: "1. Pick a fucking tone. 2. Make it hornier."

The Surfer (Lorcan Finnegan, 2024): 2.5/5

Are Australian people really that mean?? Because between this movie and The Royal Hotel, I’m kind of concerned.

I don’t know what frustrated me more: watching everyone be mean to Nicolas Cage or the fact that he could have just left at any time but didn’t.

Dangerous Animals (Sean Byrne, 2025): 2.5/5

terrible year of film for the Australian surfer community

rewatched In the Mood For Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000): 4.5/5

A film about love, or a film about time? Perhaps a film about the way that love can seem to render time stagnant for those tangled within its extensive web—jammed into a forbidden, emotional stymie, paralyzed at the crossroads of passion and integrity—only for them to blink and realize how much time has actually passed, how many opportunities have been missed, and are reduced to looking backwards over their shoulder, lingering indefinitely on What Could Have Been and What Will Never Be, every subsequent minute elapsing faster than those before it now that the apex is behind them.

In the Mood For Love isn't particularly sentimental in the traditional sense—in fact, it's actually quite clinical in its approach, and almost mannequinesque in its characterization—but its emissions of Virtue trumping Affection (and therein Settling trumping True Happiness) sting like vinegar in a fresh wound, able to conjure up a particular envy for something we may never even have known.

I don't think I need to expound upon this formally at all: what else is left to say? So many brilliant things about the way Wong Kar-wai shoots this—from the way that the main duo's adulterous spouses are never given a face, to the cramped frame-within-a-frame shots that always enclose a singular Su or Chow, putting their emotional isolation on explicit display, to the overarching theme of Red that inhibits almost every shot—but my favorite is the way that Su and Chow's "reenactments" of their respective spouses are interpolated without warning and eschew any discernible caveat. Is it therapeutic? Is it a vicarious smokescreen for their own feelings of each other? (And does it feel less unscrupulous if so?) Or maybe it's just an attempt to make light of each other's situational duress and avoid facing the scathing truth head-on?

I'll admit that I think this commits a minor violation by extending itself past an ending that would've otherwise been perfect i.e., when Chow's leaving after a visit to his old apartment years later, he hesitantly stops and smiles outside the door of where Su "used to" live—obviously unaware that she's actually back there now—then walks away, never realizing how close he was to brushing against serendipity. Cut to black right there and it's cinematic perfection. Everything after feels a bit adjuncty and the acting out of the "whisper into a hole and cover with mud" ritual was slightly too forthright for a movie so cleverly underpinned everywhere else.

But nevertheless, this film is pretty damn great. (Also: "Yumeji's Theme" for most internally erupting score of the new millennium?)

Bring Her Back (Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou, 2025): 2.5/5

Awww, little tiny blind Asian girl

The Ladykillers (Ethan Cohen, Joel Cohen, 2004): 2/5

I've now seen all the Coen Brothers films. And that's the only real upside of seeing Ladykillers.

Being Maria (Jessica Palud, 2024): 3/5

This uneven film is a welcome opportunity to give voice to the experience of Maria Schneider and her role in Last Tango in Paris. The film is strongest in its portrayal of the film's production and the betrayal and humiliation dealt her by Brando and Bertolucci. The fallout of the film's reception and its impact on Maria's life and career is not as focused though. Still, there's no denying that Anamaria Vartolomei is a revelation as Maria. She's got a very bright future ahead of her.

Trainwreck: Poop Cruise (James Ross, 2025): 2/5

Unessential and disgusting.

The people in that bridesmaid party are complete anathema to me. Really crap people.

I’d make a joke about heading to the poop deck but I’m beyond caring at this point.

Sovereign (Christian Swegal, 2025): 3/5

If you've ever watched bodycam or courtroom footage of a sovereign citizen, you can probably skip this movie.

 

The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2025): 3.5/5

“I’m a non-observant atheist.” I was surprised how satisfying this was in terms of sci-fi, near-future, world building. Classic Cronenberg, where one’s ex-lover’s rotting corpse could, through the intimacy of images, become an erotic experience. Considering this film with Crash and Videodrome (etc.), it seems that, to Cronenberg, focusing one’s attention on an intense experience (including pain, fear, dismemberment, and now putrefaction) is the very source of pleasure. Although this takes place in the (near) future, it’s the one movie that somehow feels most 2025—with its silent, gliding Teslas and phone-based AI assistants. The “plot,” which involves Chinese and Russian politics and surveillance, generated zero interest.

 

Pavements (Alex Ross Perry, 2025): 3.5/5

I stan Pavement, so seeing old live footage and people talking about their music was a great pleasure. The tongue in cheek biopic, museum show, and off-Broadway musical aspects allowed the introduction of some biographical information in a characteristically smart-alecy and non-cliché way (but were not the main attraction).

 

Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie, 2025): 3.5/5

Like a James M. Cain story except every character is sexually attracted to every other character, man or woman, young or old. 

 

* Superman (James Gunn, 2025): 3.5/5

Lots of laughs and bright colors. Superdog rules. Certainly the best Superman movie.

 

KPop Demon Hunters (Chris Appelhans, Maggie Kang, 2025): 3.5/5

Fun and entertaining, with catchy tunes. 

 

The Life of Chuck (Mike Flanagan, 2025): 3.5/5

Your reaction to this movie entirely depends on your capacity to appreciate sincerity and naked emotion. Mine is pretty high! Godlevel Matthew Lillard monologue (!)

 

A Minecraft Movie (Jared Hess 2025): 2.5/5

Jumanji: The Next Level (Jake Kasdan, 2019): 3/5

Swift, effects-heavy and a bit better than they strictly have to be. Jack likes these but even he seems to realize how weightless they are. Jack Black is cleanin’ up, man.

 

Bring Her Back (Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou, 2025): 2.5/5

I related to the protagonist’s predicament: a big, judgmental eye forcing him to behave in a way that is antithetical to his desires and personhood. But it takes too long to get to the plot, time that is filled with authentic and agonizing human suffering.

 

The Assessment (Fleur Fortuné, 2025): 2.5/5

Describes a concrete-bunker future that reminds me Ex Machina (also featuring Alicia Vikander, here deciding whether a couple can have a baby). When her judgement came down, I had a tremendous, job-hunting panic attack and started hating the film. I concede that this is not (necessarily) the film’s fault.

 

Materialists (Celine Song, 2025): 2.5/5

On its surface, this reads like a classic Austin-ish love triangle, with the protagonist deciding whether she will marry for love or money. But the movie lacks passion, and is instead chock full of overwritten monologues—clinical and not quite incisive or bravura—about the nature of modern love blah blah blah. A surprise, since my review for Past Lives called it “vibrating with feeling.”

 

A Desert (Joshua Erkman, 2025): 2.5/5

A naïve photographer runs into a couple he shouldn’t have, out in the desert. Then the private investigator looking into his disappearance, then the photographer’s wife run into the same couple. A grotty, nihilistic exercise. The director’s feature debut.

 

* The Naked Gun (Akiva Schaffer, 2025): 2/5

Hell is watching sporatically amusing movie in a theatre with two guys who find every joke hilarious. 

 

 

Girlfriends (Claudia Weill, 1978): 4/5

A tremendously likable protagonist: smart and self-aware, smiley and awkward, but also very sure of herself and an artist. Quick with a joke. Open to new things. Proudly Jewish. Makes mistakes.  An ur-text for stories of smart and neurotic modern young women trying to make it in New York, and in a precarious and shifting emotional landscape, regarding friendship, partners, career, and artistic ambition. Dunham paid off her debt of influence by giving Weill some episodes of Girls to direct.

 

Welfare, 2h47m (Frederick Wiseman, 1975): 4/5

Stories, stories, stories: Divorce, sickness, death, pregnancy, domestic abuse, homicide, racism, anger, prayer, hopelessness, having an apartment you like but that is $10 more than the $150 a month limit for housing support, patience and forbearance, frustration, and just doing the best you fucking can. The crux of the problem is that each individual has a complex story full of unique circumstances. Ideally, there would be a rule for each of them, but in the event the social workers try over and over to understand what rule applies to each person—frustrating to everyone. Full of empathy (or at least a lack of blame) for everyone involved. 

 

Belfast, Maine, 4h8m (Frederick Wiseman, 1999): 3/5

A good long, benedictory look at the industry (fish cannery, mashed potato factory, bakery), institutions (court, church, social services), and hobbies (painting, bowhunting, drum circles, ceramics, flower arranging, taxidermy) of the people of Belfast, Maine. 

 

An Occurrence at Owl Creek, 28m, rw (Robert Enrico, 1961): 5/5

A gem, very interested in expressing subjective experience. Full of anxious hyper-focus as well as dreams and reveries. The last minute is incredibly recognizable as one of my recurrent dreams: always almost approaching, over and over and over, a desired goal. Scorsese remakes this movie in 1988—watch it on Vimeo before you look that up. 

 

Love and Anarchy (Lina Wertmüller, 1973): 2/5

A country bumpkin travels to Rome to assassinate Mussolini. Dramatically, the whole movie is just waiting around for Mussolini to show up in a certain square to give a speech, and In meantime our protagonist has plenty of time to fall in love with a prostitute. The movie concludes that fascism demands the degradation and destruction of the innocent as its lifeblood. 

 

Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmüller, 1975): 4/5

I started out kind of hating this phantasmagorical, confused, and satiric presentation of ideas about women (good, bad, and what they are good for), the holocaust, the Italian’s role in WWII, etc.—for its grotesqueness and bad taste. One scene has our handsome protagonist in a concentration camp, complete with the ghastly iconic striped clothing, (comically) seducing the obese German woman who runs the camp. Later he very much sexually assaults a woman tied to a bed in a mental institution. Fernando Rey literally throws himself into a pool of shit. It’s funny, you see! But in the last 20 minutes of the movies I sort of came around and decided that if this was directed by John Waters I would have thought it a genius-level satiric provocation. In the end, it has a lot to say about the way fascism works: one must harm others and throw out one’s most central values and beliefs simply to survive. Wertmüller was the first woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for directing.

 

Cisco Pike (Bill L. Norton, 1971): 3/5

Driving around L.A. selling pot with Kris Kristofferson (doing a lot of hair acting), Gene Hackman, Harry Dean Stanton, and Karen Black. Cool views of Venice, Malibu, Hollywood, the Valley and all over. The Troubadour has tables and chairs! 

 

Jane Eyre (Robert Stevenson, 1942): 3/5

Orson Welles plays brooding Rochester (with a false nose, of course) and reportedly contributed to the direction, including plenty of lovely, long, gothic candle-lit corridors. Joan Fontaine is a bit reserved as an eyes-downcast Eyre, and whoever designed her hair should be caged. Stevenson went on to direct The Shaggy D.A., (Herbie) The Love Bug, and That Darn Cat.

 

The Moon Has Risen (Kinuyo Tanaka, 1955): 3/5

Tanaka is a regular in many Ozu films as well as many of Mizoguchi’s (with whom it’s rumored she had a longstanding affair)—not to mention films by Naruse and Kurosawa. This film is also written by Ozu, features several more of his usual cast, and uses characteristic Ozu shots such as pillow shots, people speaking directly to the camera, and ground-level camera placement. Still, it has a different tone from Ozu—more romantic and even rom-com-like, with hints of Austin’s Emma.

 

The Eternal Breasts (Kinuyo Tanaka, 1955): 3.5/5

In the first act, a rural wife and mother of two (and poet) divorces her drug addicted husband who is having an affair. Soon she is diagnosed with breast cancer. Pretty deep stuff for 1955, much less in repressed post-war Japan. In its simplicity and directness, as well as its sepia color and boxy aspect ratio, it seems like a product of the 30s. Although one can also see how the domestic weepy melodrama qualities as coming right out of the 50s. 

 

Dracula: Dead and Loving It (Mel Brooks, 1995): 2.5/5

Part of Brooks’ precipitous decline, but even so has a handful of killer bits. 

 

 

Jacques Rozier Mini-Fest

An underrated French New Wave figure.

 

Rentrée des classes, 20m (Jacques Rozier, 1956): 3/5

All the kids are back to school after a long summer, except for our protagonist who throws his homework off a bridge and then, with remorse, sets out downriver to retrieve it. There follows a lovely reverie in nature before a comic resolution. Displays a great preference for the relaxed, spontaneous, and natural over order at any level. 

Blue Jeans, 22m (Jacques Rozier, 1958): 3/5

There are worse things than hanging out in Cannes with a couple of young lads trying to pick up girls. But there’s not much going on here beyond a great freedom of camera, two year before Breathless and four before Jules and Jim.

 

Adieu Philippine (Jacques Rozier, 1962): 3.5/5

Interested in both young boys and young girls. Youth culture. buying cars, picking each other up, music they like (Elvis and Mario Lanza), their morays, television, advertising, crap jobs. Not that far from Girlfriends, Francis Ha, or Girls. Lots of shots on the Paris streets. A shot down two escalators in a 1960s Paris department store would still be noteworthy if done today. Our protagonist will be shipped off to Algeria in two months. 

 

 

Apichatpong Weerasethakul put these three on his 2022 Sight and Sound Top 10

Le Nez, 11m (Claire Parker, Alexandre Alexeieff, 1963): 

An adaptation on Gogol’s novella about a man whose nose leaves him and starts running around town. Animation, surrealism, with Asian sounding percussion score, sounding like the music in The Puppetmaster.

Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, 14m (Timothy Quay, Stephen Quay, 1988): 2.5/5

Precise camera movements within very abstract tableaux, sometimes with human dolls in an undefined heady emotional state and sometimes just balls and stairs—or discs with twine. 

Quick Billy, 50m (Bruce Baillie, 1971): 4/5

A suite of abstract phases. Some pure color field stuff of great reds and oranges, also blues and purples. Lots of aqueous imagery and sounds on soundtrack. Can easily see Weerasethakul inserting 5-minute reveries of this beautiful and abstract stuff to connotate a drifty dream state—complete with tiger imagery. The second half starts with a (pretty sexy) sex scene/dream. Thoughtful and emotional soundtrack throughout, with meadowlarks, music, voices, in synch and out with the images. “Deep blue as emeralds would be if they were blue” The thanks at the end to “friends, family, animals, teachers, dear ladies, other critters” describes well the warmth and grab-bag quality of the piece. Baillie was the co-founder of the San Francisco Cinematheque.

 

Castro Street, 10m (Bruce Baillie, 1971): 4/5

A masterclass in using audio to create intensity and then reverie. Baillie is completely in control of tone and eager to use every aspect of cinema. Uniquely beautiful and overflowing with effects and feeling. Full of little triple-exposure eddies of image, sound, memory and emotion. Watched it twice. 

 

The Dentist, 21m (Leslie Pearce, 1932): 3/5

W.C. Fields, playing an uncharacteristically high-status dunderhead, works with Max Senett to produce a comedy of frustration and pain. Frederick Wiseman (!) put it in his Sight and Sound Top Ten in 2022, saying “The Dentist is a great porno film because it leaves everything to the imagination of the viewer,” and I have absolutely no idea what he means by this.

 

Adebar, 2m (Peter Kubelka,1957): 3/5

A primitive, silhouette version of people dancing (to rock music?). Reminds me of the opening dance contest sequence of Mulholland Drive.

Allures, 8m (Jordan Belson, 1961): 4/5

A sizzle reel, well-mined by Hollywood. It looked cool in their movies and it looks good here. Plus some stuff and Nolan and Villeneuve (those hacks) should get up on ASAP. Remember: slow is the new fast. 

 

9/11 Simulation in Roblox Environment, 7m (James Ferraro, 2017): 3/5

Subversive. The title says it all. Jack plays Roblox all the time, but this brings out a new tone, to say the least.

 

Les Maitres fous, 27m (Jean Rouch, 1955): 2/5

A dozen residents of Accra go a bit wild out into the jungle during a ceremony parodying the English governors of the country, complete with farcical outfits, eye-bulging, mouth-foaming, and a bit of dog sacrifice and eating. As with Pasolini’s Notes Towards an African Orestes, it’s wise (and easy) to be skeptical of these French takes on Africans.