The Rivals of Amziah King (Andrew Patterson, 2026): 5/5
Moviemaking of the very highest order, novel both in structure and editing. As everyone mentions, this is a tale of two movies. The first half being the best hour of cinema of 2026 to date—a pure, eye-watering pleasure to watch and stuffed with emotion. And the second being only completely watchable and satisfying. McConaughey is on fire. As in Vast of Night, the characters—like an accomplice in a fast food place and a boy scout/marine co-thief—are enjoyably fast talking and competent.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun, 2026): 3.5/5
A wonderfully personal and idiosyncratic vision—and surprisingly entertaining. My take was that Schoenbrun made an uncanny movie about the scary, overwhelming, world-rending feeling of one’s first orgasm (enter: the Little Death). Later I listened to an interview where Schoenbrun referenced rather their first non-dysphoric sexual experience, and the penny really dropped.
Linda Linda Linda (Nobuhiro Yamashita, 2005): 3/5
A lackadaisical and discursive version of my beloved “Young person wants to start a band and does” plot. The characters are understated and endearing, but the film really could have been about a science fair or anything.
After Hours, rw (Martin Scorsese, 1985): 3.5/5
The same few locations, characters, images and scenarios—around and around in a paranoid and inescapable loop, like a circle of hell. Forty years after my first viewing in the theater, the bit that still hits me the hardest is the Kafkaesque bouncer who tells our protagonist, “I'll take your money 'cos I don't want you to feel you left anything untried.”
The Naked City, rw (Jules Dassin, 1948): 3/5
Exceptional for its head-of-its-time Weegee-inspired documentary look, colorful chatter from peripheral New York characters, and radical use of real NYC locations, including interiors of crowded apartments as well as an extended tour of the Williamsburg bridge in 1948. Plot-wise, it’s a rather pedestrian police procedural plot brightened only by Barry Fitzgerald’s ultra-Irish charm and hooey.
Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, 2001): 1/5
Dumb, ugly, self-serious, visually incoherent, and irrelevant. Subtract half a star because Tarantino cited this as his top film of this century.
KoKo’s Earth Control, 8m (Dave Fleischer, 1928): 3.5/5
A cartoon that is recognizably madcap and rule-breaking and that experiments with all kinds of combinations of live action and animation. Clearly a huge influence on Looney Tunes
The Haunted House, 7m (Walt Disney, 1929): 3/5
Mickey dances with skeletons
Please Speak Continuously and Describe Your Experiences as They Come to You, 10m (Brandon Cronenberg, 2019): 3.5/5
Wonderfully creepy. Mad doctors. Wires implanted in brains. Nightmares where loved ones are just a bit off.
Anthony Mann Westerns in the 1950s
Mann made 17 movies in the 50s, including 9 westerns. I didn’t rewatch The Naked Spur (1953) (4 stars), The Man from Laramie (1955) (3.5 stars), or Man of the West (1958)(4 stars). Korean-war movie Men in War (1957) is also worth your time. Mann made 41 movies over the course of his career, which only lasted the 30 years between 1939 and 1968. Mann died of a heart attack at 61.
The Furies, rw (Anthony Mann, 1959): 5/5
A rich Western-set melodrama that stands with Sirk in terms of intensity and batshit behavior. Barabara Stanwyck, fierce and complex, has Succession-like ambition to run her father’s ranch but loves/desires the wrong man/men. At one point, in a scene that must be seen to be believed, Stanwyck stabs a potential rival in the face with a pair of scissors. Walter Huston is also a force of nature as the Succession-like patriarch who isn’t sure whether he’s ready to give up control of his ranch. “New Female Romantic Rival: My name is Dallas Heart. I’m new here, honey.” “Stanwyck: Honey, you wouldn’t be new anyplace”
Winchester ’73, rw (Anthony Mann, 1950): 5/5
An episodic series of expert Tarantino-esque set pieces, including: Wyatt Earp demands your guns, a high-stakes shooting contest, a run-in with a guy who sells guns and liquor to “Injuns” who also cheats you out of all your money, an Apache attack on the cavalry at dawn including a chicken-hearted husband proving his bravery, and finally Cain and Abel confronting one another on a steep desert hillside. Plus, an epic amount of gun = dick stuff, including lots of rubbing and caressing.
Devil’s Doorway (Anthony Mann, 1950): 2.5/5
I suppose it’s to be celebrated, but it’s hard to stomach this movie’s didacticism. Robert Taylor (dull) plays the tragic Native American. His family has worked the land in a verdant valley forever, but the law says white homesteaders can claim the land as their own. It doesn’t go well. For all the people who think revisionist Westerns just started to be made in the 70s.
The Tall Target (Anthony Mann, 1951): 2.5/5
I though this might be a Western, but it’s actually a thriller-on-a-train. Dick Powell (dull) is a detective enroute to Washington and trying to smoke out a conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln (!!!) at his inauguration.
A Bend in the River (Anthony Mann, 1952): 3.5/5
Like Winchester 78, this serves up Western genre greatest hits, here in Technicolor and broadly entertaining. We’ve got a wagon train, including James Stewart going out into the bush to kill some Injuns hand-to-hand. We have homesteader pure-land passages. We have the corrupting power of civilization and especially of gold, seeing Portland turn rapidly from a podunk town full of kindly characters to a den of iniquity. There’s a cattle drive, and some wonderfully ambiguously moral characters trying to outrun their pasts and achieve redemption. Will Arthur Kennedy turn out to be bad? Will Rock Hudson? Like all of these Mann Westerns, it contains some soundstage scenes, but plenty of the great outdoors including a working riverboat. Suck it, Nolan.
The Far Country (Anthony Mann, 1954): 4/5
One of the most cynical of these Mann westerns, though shot in VistaVision and Technicolor. James Stewart is the righteous rugged individualist who comes into an Alaskan town and quickly realizes that the sheriff/government is a corrupt thief and there’s nothing he can do about it. He contrives to get his own property back, but he doesn’t’ believe it’s up to him to save the whole town (and by extension the civilized world itself). Only in the end is he forced to take a stand, and violence is the only thing for it.
The Tin Star (Anthony Mann, 1957): 3/5
As in The Far Country, a righteous rugged Individualist (here Henry Fonda) is unwillingly pulled into defending the stability of a wobbly civilization, but this version is far warmer. The film has a strong emotional and character-driven throughline in Fonda’s growing relationship with greenhorn sheriff and mentee Anthony Perkins, a wise old doctor, as well as an eligible widow and her half-native son. Black and white.
BOOK NOOK
Stoner (John Williams, 1965)
The best reading experience I had since The Recognitions, and it couldn’t be more different. A 19th century-feeling novel of a perfectly ordinary life rendered with great truth and empathy. Born on farm, our protagonist’s parents send him to college, where he falls in love with literature (creating an un-bridgeable gulf between him and his parents) and becomes a professor at the same college. He gets married, has a daughter, navigates internal politics on campus, has an affair, gets sick. Just an absolutely normal life, with all of its hopes, turning points, disappointments and resiliencies—vividly and honestly rendered. Ignored in 1965, it experienced an international resurgence in the 2000s. “Lust and learning. That’s all there is.”
The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton, 1920)
A short novel that packs a punch, especially in its final chapter. This helped me to understand the Scorsese’s adaptation much better. I always considered that the drama was that the external forces of society were keeping the lovers apart, and I just wanted the characters to throw off society’s yoke, move somewhere else, and live. But with the interiority of the novel form, I now understand that our protagonist actually loves the order and rules of society—and thoroughly enjoys all the advantages that he comes by so easily by being a member. Subsequently, it’s really a self-imposed denial. He wants her but…not really enough to change or deny his own tidy little world. The tragedy is internal not external.
Louis L’Amour Short Stories
The Killer from Pecos, Mistakes Can Kill, Trap of Gold, Dutchman’s Flat
A pleasant surprise to find the prose here so compelling and modern, not that far off from (my beloved) Elmore Leonard. Fully of tight-lipped and competent men placed in the middle of compelling situations. Trap of Gold especially—about a prospector who finds a vein of gold in a dangerous place and tries to figure out how far to push his luck—is worthy of Jack London in its economy and vividness.
