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.

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??). 

 

 Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model (Mor Loushy, Daniel Sivan, 2026): 2/5

Holy FUCK I don’t have the emotional energy for this right now. Moral of the story being the 00’s and early 2010’s were awful to women from slut shaming (sexual assault) to body image (size 6 is obese).

"But the public wanted more!"

“The public” was 16 years old, Tyra.

Also, is Tyra Banks an evil genius/pathological expert at deflection and self victimizing OR a casualty of an uncaring industry, unknowingly perpetuating the same cycles of exploitation she herself once endured?

I don't know, and apparently neither do the filmmakers.

Ahed's Knee (Nadav Lapid, 2021): 3/5

This is a fine "I need to get out of the city and yell about how angry I am about Israel's politics" film. Nadav Lapid letting loose here; not the best film, kept me at a distance with some editing choices, but there are a few excellent speeches he unleashes about how dishonest everything is in Israel, how people are afraid of hearing the truth. All packed within a meta story about a filmmaker who wants to say things he can't say because he'll get in trouble for telling the truth.

rewatched Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, 2008): 4.5/5

"Martyrs are exceptional people. They survive pain, they survive total deprivation. They bear all the sins of the earth. They give themselves up. They transcend themselves...they are transfigured. [...] But there are only victims left."

First rewatch since 2011 and I completely forgot how the film doesn't let you ever catch a break, like at all.

Leigh's Hot Take: this is a love story.

The Assassin (Hou hsiao hsien, 2015): 2.5/5

Sustained on beauty for about half its runtime, until Hou's utter disinterest in compelling dramaturgy or depicting a fight scene clearly drained me. That opening title card though? Rapturous.

964 Pinocchio (Shozin Fukui, 1991): 1.5/5

Time to admit I'm not a fan of Japanese cyberpunk.

In My Skin (Marina de Van, 2002): 2/5

God forbid a girl has a hobby…

A softer side of the New French Extremity movement. Wouldn't rank it too highly either. (We just know so little about the character of Esther so it's hard to decipher her motivation or why she gets so obsessed with self-mutilation/cannibalism.)

Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke, 2024): 5/5

“If you love until it hurts, then you cannot hurt anymore. You can only love more.”

Thank you, Therapy Robot at the Shopping Mall.

Just stunning, immense, and poignant. This is not a film for decoding. It’s one you let wash over you, let it rearrange your molecules a bit. Jia has crafted something that feels genuinely unprecedented here, a decades-spanning meditation that functions less like traditional narrative and more like watching time itself learn how to work through its past to better dream of a future.

And Zhao Tao, man. Jesus Christ. Zhao Tao and her silent symphony as Qiao Qiao. She carries entire emotional universes in her silence, embodying the specific kind of hurt that comes from loving something - or someone - that keeps disappearing on you. Whether that’s her abandoning lover Guo Bin or China itself feels deliberately ambiguous. The way she processes being left behind mirrors how entire communities get left behind by rapid modernization. She’s dealing with the macro and micro simultaneously—the boyfriend who vanished and the homeland that keeps shape-shifting beneath her feet.

And that final moment when she finally speaks - shouting as she joins those mysterious nighttime joggers - hit me like a freight train. Throughout the film, her muteness felt almost mythical, like she was this silent witness to history. But that shout - whether it’s her rejecting Guo Bin for good or just asserting her right to exist on her own terms - feels like the sound of someone finally claiming their voice after decades of observation.

In the end, maybe it's about being a regular person, "caught by the tides" of history - just like everybody else. We cannot avoid the rising tides -- but at the very least, we can learn to swim.

BOOK NOOK (or is that too precious?)

The Painted Bird (Jerzy Kosinski, 1965)

"Against the background of bland colors he projected an unfadable blackness. In a world of men with harrowed faces, with smashed eyes, bloody, bruised and disfigured limbs, among the fetid, broken human bodies, of which I had already seen so many, he seemed an example of neat perfection that could not be sullied: the smooth, polished skin of his face, the bright golden hair showing under his peaked cap, his pure metal eyes. Every movement of his body seemed propelled by some tremendous internal force. The granite sound of his language was ideally suited to order the death of inferior, forlorn creatures. I was stung by a twinge of envy I had never experienced before, and I admired the glittering death's-head and crossbones that embellished his tall cap. I thought how good it would be to have such a gleaming and hairless skull instead of my Gypsy face which was so feared and disliked by decent people. The officer surveyed me sharply. I felt like a squashed caterpillar oozing in the dust, a creature that could not harm anyone yet aroused loathing and disgust. In the presence of such a resplendent being, armed in all the symbols of might and majesty, I was genuinely ashamed of my appearance. I had nothing against his killing me."

Unflinching work about a lesser told story of WWII with scenes of unimaginable horror and brutality. Prose was beautiful though and moving. Apparently this book was canned after scholars/literary circles realized Kosinski lied about it being autobiographical.