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.