The Invite (Olivia Wilde, 2026): 4/5

Without mentioning any names, I know the nervous-energy decorator and the frustrated stoner musician characters pretty well. The film is bravura display of group dynamics and group acting in perfect rhythm—like a band playing together and off one another. Very fun and funny. 

 

Magellan, 2h44m (Lav Diaz, 2026): 3.5/5

A languorous but very beautiful movie. Stunning use of color and light on landscapes, in rooms, in the sky and sea, on sails, under trees. Interested in characters not so much for their interiority but for how they fit into their landscapes and their time. The great expanse of time is challenging, but there’s plenty of time to think about things like mutiny and homosexuality on ships or Gael Garcia Bernal rather minor career—or the dupe and destructiveness of Christianity in Asia (and Africa), where crosses replace ancient traditions that connect people to their ancestors and the landscape. 

 

Spider-Man: Brand New Day (Destin Daniel Cretton, 2026): 3.5/5

Like Disclosure Day, this features a candy-colored shell of expert and enjoyable action encasing a gooey center. 

 

It Ends (Alexander Ullom, 2026): 2/5

Think-pieces tie this one to Backrooms for its “horror of liminal spaces,” here an endless road trip. But the film this most resembles is The Long Walk in that the simple premise is established in the first 10 minutes, and thereafter there is no complication, elaboration or payoff. 

 

Night Movies, rw (Arthur Penn, 1975): 4.5/5

I underestimated this movie, which I last watched maybe 35 years ago. It’s a classic of the paranoid thriller genre. There are explicit references to the death of JFK and RFK, and the narrative plays a wonderfully paranoid trick. At the one-hour mark, the detective has performed the action he was hired for. Thereafter, the detective returns to the scene of his accomplishment (Florida) and the film offers three more solutions in 30 minutes: a bad guy, but behind him another, and behind him another—ultimately breaking through the frame to attack Hollywood itself. Features the same editor as Bonnie & Clyde and offers a beautiful, jazzy (and mostly rejected) take on moving from scene to scene. 

 

The Vast of Night, rw (Andrew Patterson, 2019): 4/5

Filmmaking at a very high level. A 5-minute one-er at the 20-minute mark connects two of the characters in the frame, the 10 minute one-er that follows that one sits on the protagonist’s face while a deep mystery unfolds, and the 4-minute one-er that follows that is a mind-bending traveling shot across, through and around to connect the two characters within a very specific geographic proximity. The second half is merely good. Looking forward to seeing Oklahoma-native Patterson’s second feature, The Rivals of Amziah King, in theater(s) now. 

 

Aventurera (Alberto Gout, 1950): 3.5/5

This almost feels like a Bollywood movie, with its fever-pitch melodrama, pathos-evoking limping mutes, and many elaborate musical numbers. Turns out it’s a particularly exuberant example of a popular Mexican genre, cine de rumberas or fallen-woman melodramas, swift and full of event. At one point our protagonist, the astounding Ninón Sevilla performs a dance that involves (brief) simulated masturbation while wearing pineapples on her head and an outfit that seems to simulate her pubic hair. Wowsers.

 

Pale Flower (Masahiro Shinoda, 1964): 3.5/5

Michael Mann put this on his S&S Top 10, and it’s easy to see why: a characteristically Mann-ish blend of romanticism and nihilism, with tons of cool and style. A tight lipped but competent gangster gets out of jail, meets a girl, hangs out, gambles, and eventually stoically accepts a suicide assignment to save the girl. Says stuff like: “I play cards. What else is there?” and “I’m the scum of the earth, but I forgive myself.” Shot in beautiful but harsh deep blacks and blown out whites. 

 

Ever Vanishing Present, 48m (Toshihiro Matsumoto, 2017): 3.5/5

Is it the present that is vanishing or the past? I find it fascinating how obsessed she is with remembering—like a person who has lost a leg reaching for it thousands of times a day and obsessively longing for it to be there. What does it mean that she needs to write to live? Certainly, her notes aren’t necessary for her to feel and enjoy the world around her—or to be the “she” that she is at any given moment. And they aren’t necessary for her own profound conclusions about her life: “If I could learn to enjoy myself just as I was, I thought I could be fulfilled. I think that is why I find myself laughing so much.” And: “Take good care of the people you meet, and enjoy every day.”

 

Obsession (Edward Dmytryk, 1949): 3.5/5

Demonstrates that there are at least two movies called Obsession (along with Visconti’s take on The Postman Always Rings Twice from 1943) that are better than this year’s. In this droll and black-hearted noir, a jilted husband keeps the other man locked up in a basement for weeks. He doesn’t want to kill the guy until he’s sure he won’t get implicated and caught. Then a very clever police inspector shows up. The mystery’s solution hinges on something I also love about The Big Lebowski: the fact that language is passed from person to person. Lubowski sees George Bush Sr. say “this aggression will not stand.” And later the phrase just comes out of his mouth too: "This will not stand, ya know, this aggression will not stand, man."  Like William S. Burroughs says, language is a virus. 

 

Nighthawks (Bruce Malmuth, 1981): 3/5

You can feel the shag and ambiguity of 70s cinema make the turn to a more direct and black-and-white morality. Stallone sports Pacino’s beard and poofy hair (and he looks great when he’s running) but this is no Serpico. Cocky yet incompetent terrorist Rutger Hauer impresses with his intensity and sweatiness, the year before Blade Runner. The inevitable NYC subway chase is dynamic, but the conclusion, which presents a hostage situation in a cable car 250 feet above the East River is static and drawn out. There’s a good chance I would have been thrilled by this if I had seen it upon its original release when I was 14. They definitely jumped a real bus into the East River and filmed it sinking. Suck on it, Nolan. 

 

Eve’s Bayou (Kasi Lemmons, 1997): 2/5

A slow and awkward murderous melodrama set in a small community where the women feel all the feelings, and the men do what they want. As a result, the women devise to control the men through prophesy and superstition, to mixed results. This dystopian view is never truly acknowledged or criticized, however, and the women continue to think themselves superior.

 

BOOK NOOK

 

The Stars My Destination (Alfred Bester, 1956)

I’m reminded of Robert Silverberg’s dictum that a science fiction short story must have something new on every page. This is a sci-fi novel that keeps up this pace over 260 pages. At first this is exhilarating. Bester’s imagination is limitless, and the world is constantly shifting based on what you’re discovering about it. But over the course of the novel, it’s finally just dizzying and exhausting. And since the protagonist’s personality, outlook, attitudes, opinions and goals are also ever-evolving, there is finally a cipher at the center of the eventful narrative, and the experience is a hollow one. 

 

 The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026): 3/5

Saw it in 70MM IMAX down in Irvine, and I don’t think the film would have lost much if shot by a great cinematographer on "non" IMAX camera. Some amazing casting and performances. (Samantha Fucking Morton!!). Nolan’s shortcomings are still here (notably his women characters, Calypso strikes me as a missed opportunity), and the soullessness at the heart of his work will always keep him from realizing the outsized ambition he’s clearly driven by. And yet, the film has an undeniable appeal. It’s an interesting mix of modernist storytelling and old fashioned Hollywood epic making at a time when laziness and contempt for the audience has all but destroyed studio filmmaking.

Nolan’s obsession with smart men (but I have to say, his vision of Odysseus is pretty dumb-- this guy is the clever one, not a killing machine- and it underlines my old take once again that for a guy who clearly worships at the altar of intelligence, Nolan’s films aren’t all that smart) who unleash hell without meaning to is a worthy subject, but I’m curious if the current mess of the world will begin to change how he approaches that theme. Nolan likes us to think he’s questioning this patriarchal and brutal world he’s depicting but he always stops short of tarnishing his hero too much. He will show us Menelaus as a brute, but he avoids dealing with Odysseus obviously having a sexual relationship with Calypso while his wife has to remain chaste for decades. He's definitely improving as a filmmaker over time, maybe someday he'll get there.

Ever Vanishing Present (Toshihiro Matsumoto, 2017, 48mins): 3.5/5

"Why do I write? To leave proof that I lived?"

"I think, in a sense, I am really fortunate... to have memories that I want to keep."

"There were so many memories I wanted to keep. They are your life, after all."

I am not OK.

Monterey Pop (D.A. Pennebaker, 1968): 4/5

The performances may not be photographed under optimal conditions, but what a lovely portrait of a moment. I especially appreciate how much Pennebaker spends time on the faces of the kids who showed up. It made me think of the beautiful impermanence of it all. It also showed me how fictional filmmaking can never come close to the power of actually capturing a moment before it disappears forever.

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (Baz Luhrmann, 2025): 3.5/5

A genuine ode to pure showmanship in its grandest tradition; Luhrmann's 2022 feature cleverly subverted its own spectacle by making Elvis the man transition into a cog in a wheel - a tool and creation of management, making the film as much about the birth of the modern entertainment industry as it was about Elvis as subject. This is far more straightforward when it comes to its subject though far more than a concert film, because Luhrmann intelligently intercuts interview footage and sound bites of Presley himself discussing his own life and history, so many of these songs take on a greater emotional resonance being juxtaposed with this material than they really would have by themselves. For this same reason it adds considerable substance to what a concert film can normally provide, and while it remains to be seen whether or not this becomes a benchmark for how concert films should be made, it absolutely should. Touching in other ways as well, because Luhrmann (is it reactionary to say this?) genuinely believes in celebrity and popular culture as something sincere, that people need icons to celebrate, that theater is as much carnival trick as it art, and that those things give people meaning.

BOOK NOOK

Compass (Mathias Enard, 2015)

This is the story of an academic’s sleepless night thinking about all the mistakes he’s made and…wait, where are you going? But seriously, it turns into a brilliant meditation on what western civilization even is without eastern civilization. 

Backrooms (Kane Parsons, 2026): 4/5

All the stuff in the backrooms works gangbusters. Lynchian sense of physical space being psychic space. (“You are your brain, dipshit!”) Very eerie, uncanny and disorienting, recalling (for me) the childhood feeling of being lost. An office space designed by a hallucinating AI—or by an alien, based on descriptions scrawled on a bar napkin. The scene where they finally go “down” definitively drove away Melissa and Jack— all with mere sound, peculiar space, recessed lighting, office furniture, and too much yellow. Despite the fact that there was not a monster in sight up to that point, Jack in fact later had a nightmare that robbed both of us of hours of sleep. Whoops! He wanted to see it! (since he is absolutely YouTube-pilled). Getting Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve to act all this out was a good idea. 

 

* The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026): 3.5/5

Saw it with Jack in IMAX in Century City. Like most Nolan movies, it displays the effort of a filmmaker attempting something extraordinary for three hours and occasionally achieving it. And like most Nolan movies it’s ponderous—but at least this time it’s justified by its quite formal and ceremonial source material. The Trojan Horse itself is used well physically, symbolically and (for Odysseus) psychologically. Despite what each side says, I find it ambiguous politically. On one hand it hand-wrings about today’s poor treatment of homeless travelers (immigrants?). On the other hand, it portrays a bunch of “guests” as overstaying their welcome and needing to be kicked out! 

 

Power Ballad (John Carney, 2026): 3.5/5

Here it is again: my favorite plot. A person dreams of being a musician, and (in his/her own way) achieves it. Usually this person is much younger (Sing Street, School of Rock, CODA, Michael), but it just as effective (on me) when it’s an old (Song Sung Blue). Of course, Paul Rudd overflows with charisma and good spirits. The ending really works despite how horrible the songs are. 

 

Obsession (Curry Barker, 2026): 3/5

“Consent, The Movie.” Also: “Gen Z Hand Wringing, The Movie.” Yes, the Gen Z (slash my own) sweetness, niceness and sensitivity is great/annoying. Yes, the positive and negative waves of need, insecurity and desire that you feel in any relationship is scary. Yes, having a person love and need you is scary. [Jesus, she loves me and now I’m responsible for her!] And yes, it’s nerve-wracking to have an effect on others and on the universe. Best just kill yourself. 

 

I Love Boosters (Boots Riley, 2026): 3/5

Without a doubt overflowing with colorful and amusing imaginative leaps. It never coalesces into anything like a satisfying dramatic situation or coherent worldview, but there is more to life (and film) than these aspects. Keke Palmer and Taylour Paige are both a revelation. More of them, please. 

 

The Sheep Detectives (Kyle Balda, 2026): 3/5

A perfectly cromulent movie, paying as much attention to the relationship between the characters as to the neat mystery. Sort of a non-ironic Knives Out for the tween set. In every way inferior to the two-minute-long bit in the latest Jackassmovie where a live ram is let loose in a small room full of cringing men. Those fuckers really do butt, sending grown men flying like bowling pins. 

 

The Furious (Kenji Tanigaki, 2026): 3/5

Despite (or because of) its action-packed nature, this movie is not for me. But it’s easy to admire its swift, witty and balletic action sequences. Fight as dance: choreographed, contrapuntal movement of bodies in space. 

 

Buffet infinity (Simon Glassman, 2026): 3/5

An alien invasion story completely told through late-night-style television ads. The premise and execution are so good you wish the story evolved more quickly and more coherently.

 

Iron Lung (Mark Fischbach, 2026): 2/5

Another tell-tale sign of the film industry in 2026. One tiny location (a 15-ft-long diving bell) and some complex context/lore results in an audiobook of a movie. YouTuber Mark Fischbach financed the film himself for a reported budget of $3 million, and served as writer, director, editor, and star. His online audience requested local screenings, and the film earned $18 million domestically during its opening weekend and ultimately surpassed $50 million worldwide.

 

* Minions & Monsters (Pierre Coffin): 2/5

I have no memory of this. 

The Bear, Season 4 (Christopher Storer, 2026): 2.5/5

I reviewed season 2 of this show back in 2023 thusly: “New season, new tone: kinder, gentler, more heartfelt. It’s the Ted Lassification of The Bear, and I’m here for it.” And damned if Season 4 didn’t follow Ted Lasso’s lead as well, as in: I could barely finish it. The decision to make the whole season one day and evening is utterly disastrous. Only the penultimate and final episodes seem anything other than water-treading. Still, the last episode works really well and got me, so help me.

 

 

Criterion Murderous Melodramas

A fun collection, and more than the sum of its parts.

 

Bigger than Life, rw (Nicholas Ray, 1956): 5/5

Stylishly bonkers in the best and most Sirkian of ways: DeLuxe saturated colors, looming shadows, surging music cues, and extreme angles expressing internal states, in glorious CinemaScope. All to recreate what it sometimes felt like (to me) in my house growing up, for there is perhaps no better depiction in cinema of my dad at his worst. (Other possibilities include Whiplash and The Great Santini). Self-loathing and self-aggrandizement. Sobbing on the couch. Punishment for wrongdoings, by hand, belt, wooden panel or slat. Wanting only to control and improve his boy. Such as one incident where he read over my page-long, hand-written essay (in maybe 4^th grade) and required me to recopy it over again because of some grammatical errors. But I showed him (or he showed me) because I grew up with those grammatical rules so firmly in mind that it got me my first job (as an editor). So…thanks dad? 

 

Some Came Running, rw (Vincente Minnelli, 1958): 5/5

Grumpy, washed out, drunken, lonely Frank Sinatra charges into town, knocking down smalltown provincialism,repression, and respectability using the huge chip on his shoulder. As a result, he frees some and further locks up others, mostly righteously (with one massive exception). The last 15 minutes are an all-timer, putting Minnelli’s mastery of wide-screen color and movement on glorious display. Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Shirley MacLaine are all excellent. 

 

Home from the Hill (Vincente Minnelli, 1960): 3.5/5

A story of a father and his two sons—one illegitimate (and good) and the other legitimate (and some of each). Epic and full of parallels, turns and ironies. Comparable (favorably) to East of Eden. George Hamilton and George Peppard (certainly two of the blandest actors in film history) underwhelm as the brothers, but Minnelli succeeds in elevating their story to a mythic realm. 

 

No Down Payment (Martin Ritt, 1957): 3.5/5

A fairly early look at the California suburbs and its discontents, contrasted with the beauty and placidity of the setting. Conformity, alcoholism, racism, and (most startlingly) seething sexuality (although to say more would be a spoiler). Lots of terrific parties. Joanne Woodward is fine! Penned by blacklisted writer Ben Maddow. Stands with (and below) other films addressing this topic, including The Reckless Moment (1949), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), The Desperate Hours (1955), There’s Always Tomorrow (1956), and the aforementioned Bigger Than Life(1956).

 

Desert Fury (Lewis Allen, 1947): 3/5

Grounds itself not so much in psychological verisimilitude but in hard-boiled teenage emotional intensity. There are only a few characters and past vortexes of the unknown (a deadly bridge incident), so the conclusion is not hard to guess. There are also classic gunzel homo overtones, but I wonder if the director is even aware. Lizabeth Scott is pretty, with a rectangular face, a mid-Atlantic accent and flat and dead-eyed delivery.

 

The Long, Hot Summer (Martin Ritt, 1958): 2.5/5

Three Faulkner stories twisted into Tennessee William porn, including sexual repression, fading patriarchs, a drop of homosexuality, and a sweaty, sweaty Paul Newman, whose eyes were created to be seen in Technicolor. Presumably Newman and Joanne Woodward (again!)   were falling in love here, but it’s not on screen. Raised a half-star for this shot: 

 

The Girl in the Velvet Swing (Richard Fleischer, 1955): 2/5

Script: Stiff, although co-written by Charles Brackett no less. 

Acting: Joan Collins. 

Direction: Fleischer is surprisingly good (Narrow Margin, 10 Rillington Place, See No Evil, Mandingo (!!!)) but he misuses the large proscenium of CinemaScope and presents much of the drama in disastrous medium shots that, watching on TV at least, keep the emotions at a distance. His use of DeLuxe Color is also garish and horrible.

However: Fleischer and  Brackett  hit upon one sublime image of sublimation, and it’s right there  in the name of the movie: a red swing built in a large domed room by our protagonist, aging married architect Ray Miland. The sequences with Miland pushing nubile Collins in the swing (“You can’t make me your wife, so you make me your daughter.”), spill deliriously over with Hitchcockian and Lynchian fetishism and kink. It’s the only orgasm Miland, Collins, and the movie will have.

 

 

John Carter (Andrew Stanton, 2012): 2/5

EWB’s first Mars novel was published serially in 1912 in a quarterly pulp magazine. As a result, it is focused on short-term goals, intense clashes, and small victories that roll into a big picture à la Raiders of the Lost Ark. Instead, here, the ultra-complicated “big picture” drowns much of the joy and liveliness, produced with cartoonish CGI. The ultimate bounced blank check for Stanton after Finding Nemo and WALL-E.

 

Postcards from the Edge (Mike Nichols, 1990): 3/5

An accomplished screenplay (for someone who played Princess Leia). Strangely, I didn’t love Streep’s performance, but Shirley MacLaine is very good as always, especially in a scene where she’s been in an accident and is “without” make-up and her wig. Very vulnerable and expressive. 

 

The Human Voice, 30m (Pedro Almodóvar, 2020): 3/5

The composition and art direction (all pretty great) does all the heavy lifting of storytelling here. Emotional connection is a different thing. 

A Strange Way of Life (Pedro Almodóvar, 2023): 3.5/5

Deliciously Sirkian. Overheated and swift melodrama that also exposes societal repression. Hawke Is excellent. Why should there be only one gay cowboy movie? (Setting aside all those starring Randall Scott). 

 

Laura, rw (Otto Preminger, 1944): 4/5

A perfectly satisfying murder mystery. Just a small cast of characters and yet even with so few suspects, the solution is both unexpected and inevitable. Gene Tierney is gorgeous. Her face reminds me of Zendaya’s—wide, with high cheekbones and an upside-down mouth. Screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr, who also wrote MASH. 

 

The Warped Ones (Koreyoshi Kurahara, 1960): 3.5/5

Released the same year as Breathless, but this is an even more twitchy, wiry, jazzy, ravenous, exploratory, feral, and impulsive. Also fairly rape-y. Reminds one how much Godard’s movie(s) have such quotations around them—whereas this protagonist refers to and points to nothing and is just really an aimless scumbag—a man trying to tear through the reality he is in. The final scene, involving two abortions, is an all-timer of nihilism. I watched this because one of my favorite critics, David Ehrlich, had it in his Letterboxd top four of all time along with Marie Antoinette and Close Up.

 

Borom Sarret, 18m (Ousmane Sembène, 1963): 4/5

A portrait of two Dakars. The title translates to The Wagoner, and indeed our protagonist drives a horse-drawn taxi that connects and binds a community (the “native quarter”), taking poor people from their wooden hovels down dirt streets to their jobs, the hospital, the cemetery and church—never making enough money to feed his own family. But until he gets an unexpected fare, he never, never goes to the plateau: where the rich and modern people exist in their office buildings, sports cars, paved streets, parks, and high-rise apartment buildings—like beings in a different galaxy. 

 

Eno (Gary Hustwit, 2024): 3.5/5

Great to hang out with this brilliant and creative idol of mine. (I love especially his 70s “rock” albums and of course ambient music.) Parenthetically, the idea that this was a modular movie that could be watched in any order (“film that’s different every time it’s shown!”) is uninteresting and dumb—and in fact completely fudged for this locked-down version. 

 

V/H/S Halloween (Alex Ross Perry & 6 others, 2025): 2/5

Disappointing batch, over-reliant on degraded and glitchy video. However, the Alex Ross Perry’s entry rocks. So grotty, horrible and upsetting it almost breaks this pop format. 

 

 

Book Nook

 

A Princess of Mars (Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1912)

Written in an oddly stilted and formal tone that isn’t completely explained by the era of its creation. Still, it’s packed with event, action, violence, daring do, and romance—so it’s easy to see why it was so popular. There’s a strong anthropological bent to his vision, as he takes long passages to describe societal norms and machines of the various warring factions of the planet. First serialized in the pulp magazine All-Story Magazine from February to July of 1912, this is ERB’s first novel, and the first (of 11) of his John Carter Mars novels. He began writing at the age of 31 and wrote 91 books in all, including 24 Tarzan novels, 7 Pellucidar (Prehistoric, hollow earth) novels, 5 Venus novels, 3 Lost World novels, 3 Moon novels, 3 Mucker (street brawler) novels, and 2 Apache novels. Of course, Burroughs eventually lived and died on a massive ranch in the San Fernando Valley, now called Tarzana. 

 

Ice (Anna Kavan, 1967)

A neurotic return over and over of a girl, her arm, ruins and forest, war, a cruel and repressive man (who is possibly the protagonist himself), and of course ice and snow. “In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.” It’s a tone poem, so I wonder how she decided it should be its current length. Why not twice as long or half as long? William S. Burroughs and Ballard are comps. 

 

Bluebeard (Kurt Vonnegut, 1987)

Takes on subjects as disparate as the American Abstract Expressionist movement (he’s pro) and the Armenian Genocide by the Turks of 1915-1916 (he’s anti), and ultimately circles back to WWII. Early in my reading life, I blew through all of Vonnegut’s novels, but no memory of this one remained (nor of Hocus Pocus). I appreciated today the same quality as I did in my teens and 20s: Vonnegut’s voice and tone that sees everything with an ironic and cock-eyed grin, conflating the horrific and the ridiculous—forgetting nothing and, If not forgiving, at least accepting everything. Joins the list of works (I’m thinking primarily of Michel Houellebecq’s extraordinary The Map and the Territory) that contain descriptions of other works of art that don’t actually exist, something I’m told is called notional ekphrasis.

 

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.