Michael (Antoine Fuqua, 2026): 1.5/5
There was never a world in which a decades-spanning biopic of the King of Pop sanctioned by the Jackson clan was going to be anything other than hagiography, but the lack of any dramatic complexity is quite remarkable. There is the villainous father, the saintly mother, the brothers who might as well not even have names, and the haunting absence of Rebbie and Janet. And there is Michael. An unknowable enigma that the film doesn’t even try to render in anything but the most simple terms. Peter Pan is all we get, and the film assures us that’s all there is. Seeing Suzanne DePasse enter the story and almost immediately exit is bewildering (but not surprising in a film that cut out Diana Ross). So we get the generic Marvel movie of a music biopic with all the usual beats. Fuqua spends an inordinate amount of time recreating whole musical performances with Jaafar Jackson impressively mimicking his famous late uncle. One wishes they’d gone the Steve Jobs route and just told the whole film as a series of pivotal concert performances with backstage drama. They might as well have. They skip so many years and neglect so many relationships (only to spend so much time on MJ’s relationship with his attorney) that a more unconventional approach would have made the opaque relationships a feature rather than a bug. But none of that matters. The audience wants a nostalgia delivery system, and they got it. They are able to commune with a lost icon for two hours and the filmmakers know the public will be satisfied with that alone. But we could have had more.


Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 (Raoul Peck, 2025): 3/5
Today’s empires, tomorrow's ashes. Nothing like a nice optimistic documentary about how everything George Orwell predicted is coming true.


Decision to Leave (Chan Wook Park, 2022): 4/5
This film has everything I love: Mahler, sushi, CPAP machines, and self-destructive romantic obsession. I’m not a big Chan Wook Park fan but this is my favorite feature of his so far. Park’s directing is fun and kinetic but perhaps it doesn’t work quite as well in the film’s second half when the story takes a few turns. Also, few filmmakers have loved anything as much as Park loves the turquoise-teal-cerulean spectrum of color.

I Love Boosters (Boots Riley, 2026): 4/5
Some people watch movies and crave precision and economy. But I’ll take a chaotic joyride of a movie that bites off more than it can chew over a middlebrow Oscar bait fare any day of the week. And to think that the writer-director recently confessed in his Criterion Closet video that he does not know the films of Federico Fellini!!! Which means at this moment, Boots Riley might be watching Toby Dammit! Think of what could be in store for us then! Keke Palmer is a national treasure. Love her and the rest of the cast. Demi Moore is so good at playing a villain. Slow clap for the amazing costume designer Shirley Kurata and production designer Christopher Glass.

BOOK NOOK

Moby Dick (Herman Melville, 1851)
Just finished! (I'm a really slow reader by the way. The better the book, the slower I go. It's because I absorb. I marinate. ) What a tremendous voyage of a book, glorious, strange, a ship that should not be sea-worthy but that tossed and glided through. Some of the most beautiful sentences I’ve ever read. And different than I expected, more subtle in its story, especially toward the end. Not an easy book by any means. I tried three times before and never made it beyond a hundred pages. This read, however, was successful. Apparently, I was ready for the long journey.

Tuner (Daniel Roher, 2026): 4/5

Nothing weighty, but a well-told story and an impressive debut fiction film for the director—which I’ll take in this so-far meh year. Dustin Hoffman is hella charismatic in a supporting role, and low-key Leo Woodall is easy to watch and root for. Let’s get him in more stuff. Perfect final scene. 

 

* Disclosure Day (Steven Spielberg, 2026): 3.5/5

This is Spielberg in action/entertainer mode and displays ample evidence of his expertise at this, as he charges every scene with suspense and emotion. Unfortunately, the film also amply demonstrates the thinness of his ideas. The ending—where we learn what all this strife is for—is a wet fart. It’s as if Close Encounters ended right before the alien ship landed on (behind?) Devil’s Tower. I suppose we don’t get many thoughtful ideas in that film either, but at least there was awe. 

 

* Jackass: Best and Last (Jeff Tremaine, 2026): 3.5/5

Johnny Knoxville launches on a homemade rocket 60 feet in the air before tumbling off, ass over teakettle, and landing in a lake. Later he is flipped 420 degrees by a huge bull. This is the closest thing we have to Buster Keaton in this busted day and age. Pure fucking cinema. 

 

* Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (Jon Favreau, 2026): 3.5/5

Packed with action and cool creatures, including a stop motion sequence that rivals Jason and the Argonauts’ skeleton battle. I, for one, welcome and embrace our new Star Wars corposlop-machine overlords. 

 

Hokum (Damian McCarthy, 2026): 2.5/5

I didn’t love Oddity but it did manage to string together a freaky assortment of stuff. Here we are presented with a super-creepy basement (and sub-basement!!), but the film is so damn logical and explained and causal and written that it just ends up on the I-don’t-give-a-shit-channel. 

 

* Masters of the Universe (Travis Knight, 2026): 1/5

I suppose Knight and the writers believed they were making the next Barbie, both embracing and satirizing beloved toys. But, man, tone is everything, and this movie comes off as embarrassed and apologetic for its (admittedly silly) IP—certainly a betrayal and insult if you ever actually liked the toys, which presumably describes most of the audience. Dull, flat, unfunny, and a ridiculous 141 minutes long. Nicholas Galitzine delivers the worst performance in the history of cinema. 

 

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, 2026): 1/5

An incompetent flapdoodle of a movie featuring characterless, colorful blobs desperately striving to scrape together a plot. I don’t expect to see a worse movie this year.

 

Euphoria, Season 3 (Sam Levinson, 2026): 3/5

A huge change of tone from the first two seasons—into a colorful, dumb, violent and (at times) funny exploitation film populated by Tarantino-esque drug dealers and strippers. Zendaya shines, but it seems that Jacob Elordi had perhaps five days to devote between better gigs. In one scene Sydney Sweeney grows 10 stories tall and her perfect naked breasts smash through a floor-to-ceiling window in a high-rise apartment to overwhelm its resident: absolute cinema!!

 

Our Friends and Neighbors, Season 2 (Jonathan Tropper, 2026): 3.5/5

A large cast of semi-interesting characters and swift storytelling. But most of the pleasure is derived from luxury-goods porn and Hamm’s ample charm—and that’s not nothing.

 

Widow’s Bay, Season 1 (Katie Dippold, 2026): 3.5/5

A fun mixture of (a little) funny and (a little) scary. As close to a Stephen King novel in tone and subject as any media I have seen, including adaptations of his own work. I like the 30-minute-episode format. 

 

A Married Woman (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964): 3/5

Full of clever and enigmatic fragments and glimpses in lovely and sharp black & white. And pretty risqué: we see most of this woman’s body, piece by piece—and most of her contradictory personality as well, as she move back and forth between her husband and her lover. 

 

Made in U.S.A. (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966): 2.5/5

Amazing to think that this movie’s connection to The Jugger by Richard Stark is what kept the film from being released in the U.S. for four decades. Amazing because the movie is merely glancing flirtatiously at the novel or any kind of noir. really. It strews signifiers like a four-year-old flower girl at a wedding—but connects nothing. Instead, we get Anna Karenina looking perfect against vivid primal colors, especially red, white, blue (made in U.S.A. indeed), plus yellow. The kind of meaningless and dull bauble that only a genius would be tempted to make.

 

The Image Book (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018): 3/5

A rich and nostalgic tribute and contemplation of images in cinema and real life. The last third (!) is an examination of Arabs on screen (which I’m here for), but it’s more random grumbling than real analysis. There are many videos on YouTube that do a better job of surveying whatever topics Goddard is interested in here. Still, it’s Goddard, innit?

 

Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947): 3.5/5

It looks and feels like a typical woman’s picture, where Joan Crawford is torn between two men, but there’s something off (in a good way). The two men are absolute narcissists and don’t seem to even care what she thinks. Whoever she chooses, everyone loses. Excellent script (notwithstanding the final scene) from David Hertz, who also wrote Jerry’s beloved The Devil is a Woman. The film reminds me of one of Bergman’s: a series of arguments where the characters always say the things that are on their minds, no matter how harsh. 

 

Graduation (Christian Mungiu, 2016): 3.5/5

Considering that it’s about corruption so engrained that justice can only be achieved by entering into it, the film has a surprising optimism about the future. Long takes of dialogue expose both the characters and the quality of the acting. 

 

Beyond the Hills (Christian Mungiu, 2012): 3/5

Shades of The Children’s Hour. A young woman visits her friend who is now living in a Romanian nunnery, presided over by a cock-of-the-block priest. We intimate that the relationship had formerly been more than just a friendship, and soon enough the priest and nuns are doing things like tying her down and performing exorcisms. 

 

Mandabi (Ousmane Sembène, 1968): 3/5

A cruelly funny portrait of a neighborhood in Dakar, Senegal. A man (with two wives, parenthetically) receives a money order from a relative who now lives in Paris. Surrounded as he is by poverty, debt, mendacity and plain old greed, he’s fucked. 

 

Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997): 2/5

Jejune and soporific. Apparently having perfectly designed genes renders us all tall, white, cut, monotoned and dull. Count me out.

 

The Last Detail, rw (Hal Ashby, 1973): 5/5

Features novel and historically rejected editing techniques and rhythms involving many fades between incredible acting moments garnered through free improvisation. So: a movie with a rough exterior but a fuck-load of heart (embodied in Nicholson’s character). Nicholson is never better—or shorter (Nicolson is 5’9ish”, but they pair him with 6’2” Otis E. Young and 6’5” Randy Quaid). Between this movie and Cuckoo’s Nest, Nicholson was very influential on my youthful idea of a realistic yet aspirational manhood (not to mention Hawkeye Pierce). Manhood meant: getting your kicks and doing the right thing. 

 

PlayTime, rw (Jacques Tati, 1967): 5/5

A completely unique sense of mise en scene, unprecedented and unsurpassed. Massive sets in 70mm, eliminating dialogue and the color red (mostly). A whole film in wide shot, full of contrapuntal movement, where four or five things can be happening all over the screen, with little playoffs all over the place. If there are four quarter-funny things happening at the same time, that’s one whole funny thing, right? A gods-eye view, where everything is funny and everything forgiven. 

 

 

Book Nook

The Night and the Music (Lawrence Block, 2011)

Collects all of the short stories and novellas featuring Block’s charismatic detective Mathew Scudder. The three longer pieces here are absolute bangers, and the rest are a waste. I’m an enormous fan of Six Million Ways to Die and especially When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, yet there are still a few Scudder novels I have not read. I will rectify that moving forward.

 

Angel Down (Daniel Kraus, 2026)

I was disappointed with this novel, which just won the Pulitzer Prize. In the middle of WWI, five soldiers stumble across a literal angel, and a chaotic moral play ensues. I didn’t find the result very impressive, but perhaps I missed out, having engaged it as an audiobook. The actual text has no periods (I believe) and is instead a long string of sentence-like things connected by “ands” and broken into chunks separated by white space (that serve as paragraph breaks or periods). The result is a tumult of language that would have been more fun if the narrative had been. Kraus’ previous book, Whalefall, is a “scientifically accurate” thriller about a man swallowed by a whale, and is coming soon to a screen near you.  

 Ella McCay (James L. Brooks, 2025): 2/5

This is why I never trust adult male blondes. They are suspicious and almost always evil.

Is God Is (Alesha Harris, 2026): 3.5/5

Deeply spiritual, stylish, charming southern gothic about vengeance and its demons. Can someone bring William Faulkner back from the dead so he can see this film?

Backrooms (Kane Parsons, 2026): 4/5

Fractured, demolished homes, inside and out. It is the American Dream which is dead. It was buried before you got here. No amount of self-reflection, in those plunges to the depths of your psyche, or Sisyphean attempts to break your personal patterns, will save you. Materialism will not fill that void. Instead, we will find ourselves trapped in the abstract pointlessness of a place where comfort can kill you under a blinding fluorescent light. The best that we can do now is book the window seat and hope that the blue sky is really there.

Mother Mary (David Lowery, 2026): 3/5

Great chemistry from Michaela Coel and Anne Hathaway as their characters revisit lost time. Lowery lends his great eye for visual poetry to complement a supernatural concept. With Lowery though, I keep having the gripe of not completely connecting to what he goes for. In my view, he writes his screenplays, and they seem to go in circles, to the point of getting muddled. By the time he arrives at his point, you feel lost. It was my same issue with The Green Knight. Full command of visual language, hit-or-miss with story execution.

Obsession (Curry Baker, 2026): 3.5/5

Oh my oh my, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions.

Quite good! An unexpected relief, really. We need more of these films - anything to stop the Star Wars corposlop machine.

Sentimental Value (Joachim Trier, 2025): 3.5/5

After not being a big Worst Person in the World fan, I was trepidatious, but this quietly shook me. Might have rated it higher if there hadn't been so many folk songs.

Faces of Death (Daniel Goldhaber, 2026): 2/5

Weird shit going down in Florida? Groundbreaking.

Project Hail Mary (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, 2026): 2.5/5

The endpoint of Spielberg admirers making their own films. Sentimentality through brute force because Lord and Miller are nowhere near capable enough filmmakers to handle those emotional stakes. They must undercut themselves constantly in the name of not being too serious or pretentious. Also, it is downright embarrassing just how much the filmmaking approximates Interstellar. A man on a mission to save the Earth, but this time he’s free of Earthly ties. What if he didn’t matter? Well, you’d have a film that’s profoundly empty.

Lee Cronin's The Mummy (Lee Cronin, 2026): 1.5/5

This included an eight year time jump and STILL came in at 2hrs 15.

The Drama (Kristoffer Borgli, 2026): 4/5

When I found out what the drama was I paused the movie and texted three people “do you know what the titular drama is in The Drama??”

The Wizard of the Kremlin (Olivier Assayas, 2026): 2/5

Putin became Putin because a very resentful guy got cheated on, is that what you are telling me?

In the Heat of the Night (Norman Jewison, 1967): 3.5/5

Yep this is a beauty. Poitier and Steiger are both phenomenal, the supporting cast is buzzing with raw talent, and every frame is a sweaty, saturated work of art.

We used to make FILMS, dammit.

They Will Kill You (Kirill Sokolov, 2026): 1.5/5

They Will Kill You? more like I Will Kill Myself. how about that?

Hokum (Damian McCarthy, 2026): 3/5

Hey you know how I know horrible things are going to happen to you here? There is a functional dumbwaiter.

rewatched The Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, 1987): 3/5

Peak Schumacher - no question. And a great example of 80s homoeroticism and queer-coding. And Leigh and I saw it with an excellent crowd!

Also: when I saw this for the first time as a teenager I was drooling over Jami Gertz and now as a 40 year old I’m like “hello there 39 year old Dianne Wiest.”

Growth. Maturity.

Mother of Flies (John & Zelda Adams, Toby Poser, 2026): 3/5

From the “Adams Family,” the independent husband/wife/daughter team who made Hellbender a couple of years ago (I was a fan). They write their movies, shoot them, star in them, and compose the music. This is another witch movie, but this time in the key of dread. Powerful and visceral. So much of horror is just about cheap thrills. For example, I turned off the eventful but frankly boring Ready or Not 2 after a half hour. By contrast, this is about as heavy as a black hole. 

 

* Michael (Antoine Fuqua, 2026): 2/5

So help me, Jack dragged me to see this. And the first hour is undeniably entertaining, since it follows my beloved young-person-who-successfully-becomes-a-musician plot beats. The strange thing is that, over and over, the film goes out of its way to normalize Michael—answering objections that no one on-screen is articulating (but that the audience can be counted on to have in their head). Oh yes, see: Michael really does have vitiligo. And see: he saves Bubbles from an abusive situation analogous his own. And see: after his time in the burn ward he realized he related to and liked hanging out with young kids. 

 

The Baker’s Wife (Marcel Pagnol, 1938): 5/5

A superbly droll and warm screwball comedy of remarriage, where the re-establishment of the relationship also knits together a whole community as they join forces to heal the rift. Full of forgiveness and love for all the characters. It knits Sturges’ “acting troupe full of characters” energy, Ford’s sense of getting to know a whole town, and Kaurismäki’s lovely sadness and drunkenness. 

 

Pagnol’s Marseille Trilogy

Pagnol provided the scripts (based on his popular plays), but he didn’t feel he had the directorial experience to bring them to screen himself until the third. These are an excellent example of something I’m always looking for: the “novelistic” film. Which in this case means a film (or here a series of films) where things happen to the characters that fundamentally change them, and then we continue on to see how they will change next. Films where time itself is part of the drama: people age, values shift, families fracture, fortunes rise and fall.

 

Marius (Alexander Korda, 1931): 4/5

A film about a large community, their youthful dreams, their conformity, their pride, their contradictory desires—all told with maximum understanding and forgiveness, where disagreements flare up and are reconciled with Pagnol’s great forgiving and loving eye. All is topped with a highly emotional climax, as our title character chooses (incorrectly) between Fanny and the life at sea he has always dreamed of. 

 

Fanny (Marc Allégret, 1932): 3.5/5

Picks up just where Marius left off, but in a more melodramatic tone. The highlights of the film are two long scenes that demonstrate that a film’s stage origins can be to its advantage, as a single location brings emotional intensity. A 27-minute scene in the middle of the film has three characters put through wide swings of emotion as they move from one opinion to its opposite and they come to reconciliation (though not with Marius). Simply beautiful writing and acting. Then the last 25 minutes are also composed of a single, complex scene where emotions flow and the characters change as viewpoints are exchanged. Not a Superman-style punch in sight. 

 

César (Marcel Pagnol, 1936): 3/5

Jumps ahead 20 years to examine how the events of the previous two films affected the characters’ lives—and sets up a long-promised reconciliation with Marius. As with The Baker’s Wife, it’s a pleasure to hang out with the powerful lead actors and colorful side characters in Pagnol’s troupe. 

 

These Three (William Wyler, 1936): 3/5

Wyler’s first attempt at adapting The Children’s Hour, which unfortunately makes no mention of lesbianism (the Hays code didn’t allow it). Instead, the women are simply accused of being in a love triangle. And who could blame them? As a cool doctor here, Joel McCrea is a fucking snack.

 

The Children’s Hour (William Wyler, 1961): 4/5

The coming out scene is the heart of the film, and Shirley MacLaine secures a spot in my acting pantheon. In this version, the accusation is a catalyst for MacLaine’s character accepting who she is for the first time. The suicide is a powerful catharsis, but it sucks—since it makes being a lesbian a terminal case. And I just don’t understand the final shots of Audrey Hepburn marching determinedly down a road. What is she thinking? Why does she look triumphant or even hopeful about the future?

 

The Collector (William Wyler, 1965): 3/5

Wyler endeavors to adapt to the new psychological and sexual anxieties/complexities of the 1960s. He reportedly turned down The Sound of Music to make this perverse and disturbing thriller, just six years after making Ben-Hur. Using his suit and tie as emotional armor, Terrence Stamp’s title character is Bateman-esque—and the film is Hitchcockian in its erotic compulsion to control a woman. 

 

Violence at Noon (Nagisa Oshima, 1966): 3.5/5

Violently radical editing and mise en scene—as well as fragmented and elliptical storytelling—animate this sweaty tale of willful love, sex, murder, rape and suicide. The most disturbing thing isn’t the behavior of the murdering rapist but the fact that two different women are in love with him despite this fact. 

 

Death by Hanging (Nagisa Oshima, 1968): 3/5

A satiric condemnation of the death penalty. A man is executed by hanging, but his body refuses to die. They bring him down, but now he doesn’t remember the crimes he is accused of. The priest says his soul is already in heaven and that now he is a different person. Soon the prison officials are acting out his crimes out in front of him, trying to jog his memory—until they seem to empathize to his thoughts and deeds to the extent that they perform them themselves. Thereafter follows another argument against him being executed—that he was poor and Korean: mistreated and living largely within his own imagination until the reality and imagination mixed. Dreamlike and cosmic.

 

Boy (Nagisa Oshima, 1969): 3/5

A brutal and pitiless portrait of a couple of scammers and their 10-year-old son who has seen it all. The wife and boy take turns being grazed by passing cars to extort money. Comparable to my beloved Maurice Pialat in its unflinching portrait of a child in a bad situation (and indeed L’Enfance Nue came out the year before). Our title character tries to run away or think of himself as an alien, but his mother and father are the only ones he has. 

 

Adoption (Márta Mészáros, 1975): 3/5

Forty-year-old Kata decides she wants a child, but her lover has a wife and children and doesn’t want more. When she strikes up a relationship with a (ravishingly beautiful) 18-year-old from a local orphanage, she realizes there are other options. A simple story told with an emphasis on Kata’s emotions and inner life. Since it’s Hungary in 1975, everyone is a little sad and depressed, naturally. 

 

 

Book Nook

42nd Parallel, part one of The U.S.A. Trilogy (John Dos Passos, 1930)

Broad rather than deep. Presents the biographies of about 12 regular people between about 1890 and 1910, giving a panorama of the country at that time. Often it sets out the whole story of their lives, so there is plenty of event. But the prose is sort of emotionless—like something you would read in an obit. There is much talk about socialism, the pervasiveness of which is startling compared to today’s environment, where it is only spit out as the worst kind of insult.

 

The Odyssey, books 1-4, 9-12, 15, 22-24 (Homer, ~700 BC)

A re-read, and this is pretty much all the good stuff. The Lotus-Eaters, the Cyclops, the bag of winds, Cerce, Odysseus’ trip to the underworld, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, and Odysseus slaughtering all the suitors in the palace upon his return. Despite all this event, I can’t help thinking Nolan’s version is going to be a self-serious slog.

 

Animal Farm (George Orwell, 1945)

Truly sickening how closely Thump adheres to Napolean the Pig’s strategies. Arbitrarily demonize former allies (here Snowball) and blame outsiders to distract and unite your followers. Cultivate a personality cult and gradually erode checks on your power. Demand personal loyalty rather than loyalty to any ideology (which is circumstantial at best). Attack independent sources of information and encourage supporters to accept your version of events over objective facts. Rise to power by attacking elites, then gradually become indistinguishable from the power structure you once claimed to oppose. 

Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World (Radu Jude, 2023): 3/5

The act of being alive as some grotesque curse. A world post-apathy, post-creativity, post-everything. That uneasy realization that we’re in the darkest timeline 2020. Vulgar, despairing, and incongruously humorous.


Psycho Killer (Gavin Palone, 2026): 1/5

Hey ChatGPT: generate me a movie where there is a satanist that murders people. Also include a nuclear power plant (????) as a major plot point.

Trite, tired, spicy as ketchup.


Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie (Matt Johnson, 2025): 3.5/5
Growing old is inevitable, and scary, but growing up is realizing you wouldn't change a thing. Because what good is a dream without someone you love to share it with? And how could you accomplish the plan without someone to push you, even if sometimes they push you all the way over the edge? Your life starts at the limit of your comfort zone; play the Rivoli!

The right amount of stupid, endearing, and genuine, and best of all, it made me want to watch the show. You’ve got crazy stunts, time travel shenanigans, loads of clever use of footage and half the time I’m still not even sure what I’m watching in terms of how they did it. Is that old footage? Is it new? Is it stitched together? Whatever it is, it works.


Outcome (Jonah Hill, 2026): 1/5
Apple let Martin Scorsese make Killers of the Flower Moon and now his ass is being forced to show up in every one of their projects.


My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 - Last Air in Moscow (Julia Loktev, 2024): 4.5/5
A stunning work, both monumental and intimate. Armed only with an iPhone, the director, a Soviet-born American citizen visiting Putin’s Russia, documents the lead up to the invasion of Ukraine and the last stand of a band of independent TV/Internet journalists as their dictator cracks down on the last shreds of a free press. These are mostly young women, many of them Gen Z, and the film manages to be not just a stirring tribute to high risk journalism but also female camaraderie which stands in contrast to the regime’s swaggering machismo. I was also struck by the recurring motif of Harry Potter, a saga many of the doc’s journalists grew up on and now find themselves living a similar struggle. More and more, I think defying authoritarianism is one of the central pillars of humanity. This shows what it looks like and the toll it takes on the brave few willing to remain true to what it means to be human. Loktev has immortalized their struggle, and I believe this film will come to be viewed as a monument and an inspiration to countless generations around the world.

BOOK NOOK

Ice (Anna Kavan, 1967)
Such an intense, surreally vivid book. Eco-horror way ahead of its time but also the most staggering metaphor of addiction I have ever read. 

Bonus: as I finished this at the bar where I was waiting for a friend, some guy asked what I was reading. I said (oversimplifying) it’s apocalyptic fiction about ice covering the whole earth. He was lit up and asked if I'd read Parable of the Sower. I went oh hell yeah, if you like that, try this. Readers stay winning.

Undertone (Ian Tuason, 2026): 4/5

Unnerving in the most pleasurable of ways, although I can’t really disagree with my brother’s assertion that it makes no sense and amounts to little. Although there is plenty of event, I would still call its pleasures ambient in the Skinamarink sense. At one point the protagonist is listening to a spooky audio file through headphones in her house at night and she hears a gonk sound; she nervously rips her headphones off and peers around the dark room wondering if the sound was in her headphones or in the room—and I fucking swear I simultaneously did exactly the same thing in my own dark living room.

 

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (Matt Johnson, 2026): 3/5

A hand-made take on Back to the Future. Likeable and funny.

 

The Testament of Ann Lee (Mona Fastvold, 2025): 4/5

Narratively compelling and vibrating with beauty. In its best moments (and there are multiple) the acting, music and choreography raise raise raise the movie into a hypnotic religious paroxysm. An achievement equal to the excellent and equally odd The Brutalist. I’m a fan of Amanda Seyfried (indelible in a minor role in Lynch’s third season of Twin Peaks), and she leaves it all out on the table here. 

 

Marie Antoinette, rw (Sofia Coppola, 2006): 5/5

The apotheosis of Sophie Coppola’s one character (not a criticism): the innocent woman held captive by her privilege. Some of the most perfect frames of the 21st century. Kirsten Dunst (my Queen) manages to achieve her mission of being the most sweetly beautiful person in the world here, but she is also expertly expressive. 

 

World’s Greatest Sinner (Timothy Carey, 1962): 3.5/5

Naïve and truly nutty folk art. Middle aged insurance salesman has a midlife crisis slash  nervous breakdown, dons a stick-on soul patch, and re-fashions himself as a political figure who calls himself God. Part commentary on charlatanism, part genuinely searching religious psychodrama, all bananas. Considering this is the purest glimpse we have into one of the great Hollywood eccentrics, I would consider it essential. 

 

Berlin Express (Jacques Tourneur, 1948): 3.5/5

American, English, French and Russian ex-GIs take a twisty tour through a bombed-out Frankfurt and Berlin. Like Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero and Wilder’s A Foreign Affair, this film grounds its worldview in the literal rubble of Berlin in 1946. This gravity deepens a fun espionage plot where distrust and suspicion reigns. At least four people — good guys and bad guys— turn out to be something different than who they say they are. Robert Ryan is perfect as the loose-limbed insouciant American, but Merle Oberson frankly sucks.  

 

Resurrection (Bi Gan, 2025): 3/5

A ravishing and mysterious set of short films, overflowing with visual ideas and reverent references to cinema, analogous to Holy Motors. (I especially appreciated the recreation of the hose gag from the Lumieres’ L’Arroseur Arose, one of the first examples of a staged gag in cinema, as well as The Lady of Shanghai mirror bit.) Unfortunately, it’s also ponderous, feeling every minute of its 2 hour 40 minute runtime. Compared to Bi Gan’s other work, this uses a lot of artifice, which is not really my flavor. I liked the silent section the best, followed by the unbroken take (although somehow Bi Gan’s signature move seems a bit less interesting with each film). It's a little disappointing that here Bi Gan uses a dwarf to enhance the uncanny, but then again so does Herzog in….

 

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog, 2009): 3/5

“I hate that the sun always comes up in the East,” non-sequiturs Michael Shannon while ushering two live flamingos out his front door at the conclusion of an airless hostage drama. Also features Chloë Sevigny, Willem Dafoe, Brad Dourif, Udo Kier, Grace Zabrinskie, and Michael Peña. Executive produced by David Lynch, and it shows.

 

DTF St. Louis, 7 episodes (Steve Conrad, 2026): 3/5

A literate, funny and sex-positive first episode, but the series gets increasingly less fun—right up to the ending, which is zero fun at all. David Harbour is a national treasure.

 

 

Book Nook

 

The Mill on the Floss (George Eliot, 1860)

Twenty years in the lives of the Tullivers (who own a mill on the river Floss), focusing on the headstrong Maggie, who we meet at the age of maybe five and who it’s very easy to love and care for. Will she marry the kind, intelligent, and steadfast hunchback over the objections of her father and brother? Or will she betray the hunchback and follow her growing feelings for the handsome and brash fiancé of her best friend? Weighs all kinds of obligations and love-feelings. Like all of Eliot, it’s narratively driving and packed with insightful and witty observations.

 

Mischief (Ed McBain, 1993)

A police procedural that Interweaves three cases being investigated by three teams of detectives. A mere three hours on audio and absolutely pared to the bone. Fascinatingly, the only flourishes are multiple passages that veer into the detective’s dirty thoughts and sexual encounters—weird and welcome. Part of a series of 87th Precinct novels that stretch back to 1956. Although this is obviously during the books’ decline, it still provides the cheapest of thrills.

 

The Burnt Orange Heresy (Charles Willeford, 1971)

Willeford wrote the novels that served as the basis of George Armitage’s Miami Blues (classic banger) and Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter (managed to avoid it so far). My brother has been urging me to see the movie made of this one (featuring Elizabeth Debicki) too, but I don’t think I will soon. Compared to Mischief (which, mind you, was a very minor achievement), I found this verbose and lacking in both event and irony.  

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.