Reviews

Yet again it feels like I watched a different movie. So many people read this as fetishizing and glorifying the US war machine. I see this as a movie about how all that fails and leaves only idiot meatbags who cannot save themselves.

I’ll grant that it has a few too many “people panickedly checking in on their loved ones” scenes, but the cast is so crazy good that even that mostly works.

The ending is a bit of a cheat, but then so would any other possible ending. There are no answers to this.

Beautifully shot. I want to go to whatever remote miserable place was used for the Alaska scenes and have my soul excoriated.

Came for the action which was great but too few and far between. But the friendship hangout vibes really got to me. I could have watched these two play Switch and watch YouTube all day.

The music direction proves that you can have too much of a good thing.

A three star rating and probably my favorite PTA. I have no taste, sorry!

Each scene with Benecio Del Toro was a five star scene though.

It could have been better, but that’s only because there are many, many scenes that do not have both Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick in them.

Chekov’s Drone, er, Gun was so heavily signaled throughout the movie that I’m shocked it was handled with such clumsiness at the end.

The Mission Impossible franchise was a major touchstone for how I run a tabletop RPG session. Final Reckoning reflected that in ways both predictable and unexpected:

• At its best when all the players are working together but divided, each having to focus on unique problems.
• At its worst when anyone goes solo
• A plot that ends up being too hard to follow and an antagonist who is mildly forgettable despite my best efforts
• Tremendous fun when it leans into that tone, but really struggles to find a somber tone that still entertains
• Grand finales that bring back a bunch of side characters for great moments but I have to remind the players really blatantly how they know this person.

Anyway, one of the lesser outings for the crew - too long and dirge‐like. Maybe better than MI2 still? I suppose I would have to rewatch that one to say for sure.

Sometimes all you need for a crime movie is a great cast and long shots. Every scene with Cheadle or Del Toro is a delight. I’d say they don’t make movies like this any more but clearly they do

A masterpiece. Bong Joon Ho has always done a terrific job of blending tones but this is perhaps his best job yet. Sweet and sad, hilaripus and heartfelt, insane and grounded. Perhaps my favorite from one of my favorite directors

Macaulay Culkin was the unexpected GOAT of this sweet and gentle pic. I wish it explored John Candy’s legacy and impact more though.

Thank you Colin and Conan for introducing me to the Yellowbelly sketch. I apologize to everyone in earshot on the plane.

There are worse ways to spend 110 minutes than watching Josh O’Connor anxiously observe situations to a chill jazz soundtrack.

There are also better ways, though.

While there are perhaps superior “spiritual successors” in other IPs, this is the best true sequel ever made.

The writing is fantastic - clean and efficient while also soulful and charming. Linda Hamilton finally gets a worthy role as Sarah Connor is infinitely more interesting in this installment. But of course this is an Arnold movie - he would never get another showcase of his talents as good as this.

The stunts and action are amazing, and the special effects are still well-designed even if they seem basic today.

Hard to choose who is the bigger creep between Reese with his major stalker energy or John Connor out there giving out pictures of his mom to randos.

Cringe dialogue and wooden deliveries along with a rough synth score and a loooooong third act made this one a pretty tough watch. Shocked because I love this era of Schwarzenegger and adore the sequel.

Kudos to Linda Hamilton and Lance Henriksson for punching above their weight in this.

The writing and especially the edit are not doing the main cast any favors, so it is really hard to tell if Benedict Cumberbatch was miscast in this. Probably?

Olivia Coleman and the supporting cast absolutely carry this though.

…

The movie goes so hard to telegraph all the Chekov’s guns when they are introduced. I’m surprised they didn’t have on-screen prompts for them, VH1 Pop-up Video style.

Audibly gasped when I saw Fiyero’s name spelled out in the movie for the first time and saw that “y” in there, doing alphabetic violence.

It’s fine! I cannot think of a stage musical where I left thinking “wow, Act 2 ruled!” so it is unsurprising that this has fundamental story and song problems.

Gorgeous, confident, fun film. Trades a little of Glass Onion’s fun or Knives Out’s mystery triumph for earnestness and heartfelt character arcs. It’s a worthy trade that helps this stand out in an absolutely terrific series of movies.

Too many great performances to recount. Daniel Craig is terrific and having the time of his life (as always), Josh O’Connor is a great choice to carry the main emotional weight of the story, and Josh Brolin’s casting is both a bold choice and yet a very Brolin-esque performance simultaneously.

Absolutely worth seeing in a theatre. It’s gorgeous on the big screen, even if the sound mix turned every on-screen cell phone vibration into the loudest, scariest, pants-fillingest sound you’ve ever heard.

For sure this is one to see in theaters or not at all. A throwback to a certain kind of action movie they don’t make any more in ways both good and bad. Does a lot with nonstop frenetic plotting, fun world building, and some terrific supporting performances.

The writing is pretty paper-thin which leaves the characters mostly disappointing and the morals tiresome. The action itself is nothing remarkable aside from a couple of extremely brief delights. It’s mostly just your typical “people with extremely automatic weapons who can’t hit anything.”

The end result is a fun time at the movies which is already rapidly fading from my memory.

…

I don’t want a show like Speed the Wheel to exist, but I’m shocked it doesn’t already.

How I would have loved this movie to follow Laughlin out there, living her audacious life to the max.

Also, between this and Phoenician Scheme, I think Michael Cera is quietly becoming one of the greatest actors of his generation????

Nominally this is about a president and his assassin, but really this is about a tortured clown vice president played brilliantly by Nick Offerman.

Mostly a paint by numbers production which is carried by a phenomenal cast.

Still the greatest Nolan for me by a mile. Come for the twists, stay for the brilliantly brooding slow burn. Great casting and direction, and easily one of the best scripts that Nolan wrote.

This was Christopher Nolan’s final collaboration with composer David Julyan. I miss the era of Nolan’s movies where Julyan’s music was a great fit for them. Julyan would be a poor fit for almost anything since, but that’s so much more about how Nolan’s movies have gotten louder and less delicate.

Between the script and the casting of the two lead roles, this movie was doomed before it started shooting. The dialogue is conceptually thin (mathematician only talks about science! the wife is just kinda sad about life for reasons! the scientist is always talking about variables and hypotheses!) and each line so alien that anyone would struggle with this. But wow, we see that struggle in Mark Wahlberg’s and Zooey Deschanel’s performances.

But this movie is so tonally inconsistent and so blissfully short that it’s still kind of fun to watch. It is definitely not the worst M. Night production.

My favorite moments:

• Wahlberg as the anti-science science teacher: “But whatever scientists decide is happening to bees will just be a story. Nobody can really know.” THANKS, TEACH!
• The Jeep that keeps honking for several minutes at John Leguizamo to hurry it up only to start slooooowly rolling away as he finally shows up.
• The line readings in the cafe. Man suddenly stands up and calmly announces to a strangely calm room: “We are all going to die if we stay here.” Another man, also calm and wooden: “Then we should all head west”
• Wahlberg interrupting a woman’s final call with her dying daughter to rewind the conversation back a couple of minutes: “Wait, this is happening there too?!”
• My involuntary shout “NOOOO! THE ONLY GOOD ACTOR IS LEAVING THIS MOVIE TOO EARLY” when REDACTED dies.
• I will go to my grave without knowing whether Jeremy Strong’s character was supposed to be a simpleton or whether the actor realized (correctly) that this was the only sane interpretation of the script for most characters.

“You wanna know another thing I hate? Senseless evil.”

It’s Pat: The Movie - It’s Fine: The Review

Well before Letterboxd existed, this already earned a reputation as the worst, most despicable SNL byproduct ever created. I forget why I put this on my watchlist forever ago, but I was pleasantly surprised by It’s Pat.

Its worst crimes are an awful original score and several long, boring stretches. But each time I’m getting bored, Dave Foley or Charles Rocket comes in with an amazing line reading and I’m back. Yes, the jokes about people trying to decode Pat’s gender get tiresome, but they’re also interesting as a verbal precursor to the Austin Powers sight gags that would be so memorable a decade later.

I’m not the right person to weigh in on the debate between Letterboxd reviewers who see this as aggressively anti-queer and those raising it as a proto-pride document. I would be horrified to even kinda identify with Pat since they have odious personal habits and are so deeply annoying. But then Chris, the other indeterminably-gendered person in the movie, kind of slays. I really don’t know. Perhaps It’s Pat is a representational Rorschach test for viewers.

On this recent rewatch I am reminded of SUNSHINE, the movie which is 2/3rds of a great, thoughtful scifi epic with a bolted-on, out-of-nowhere ending.

I was shocked at how much I enjoyed the buildup this time around. Sigourney is always great at carrying the emotional burden of this series, but the two Charles are every bit her equal. It’s a delight to watch them bounce off each other on Fury 161.

And what a setting! The previous two movies created claustrophobic oppressive environments from metal and iconic, lived-in technology. The prison colony of Fury 161 is a shock in some ways, full of vast environments with hardly a screen in sight. Yet it feels just as lived-in as the Nostromo or Hadley’s Hope, and is beautifully shot throughout.

I have to wonder if they already knew this would be a wobblier, more desperate entry in the franchise when they landed on Elliot Goldenthal for the soundtrack. Each time the script can’t deliver the emotional heft it wants, the score swells in with stark choral arrangements to help out. I would hate it in any of the other Alien movies but it’s a treat here.

But if the first third of the movie is a delight, the film falls apart even faster than the fragile harmony of the prison colony. Too many side characters are completely interchangeable and so much of the movie boils down to screaming in dark spaces about closed doors that need to be opened, or open doors that need to be closed. It’s simultaneously too simple and yet so confusing to know where any character is at any given time. It quickly becomes a chore.

I’m glad y’all enjoyed this one.

So many great raw ingredients that suffer from a terrible edit and aimless script. Feels like when they adapt killer Oscar-winning short films into feature-length but you can plainly see the creators are stuck at a single short film’s worth of ideas and content.

Less heart than Moonrise Kingdom and its predecessors, less fun than French Dispatch. It’s beautiful of course and some great performances including what might be a career best from Michael Cera. I wish it had more than a single role for women - a shame that Scarlett Johansson ended up with nothing to do.

It’s zany but so repetitively deadpan that it wears out its welcome well before it wraps. I’m still on Team Wes Anderson for life but I can’t imagine coming back to this one.

I feel like I watched a different movie than the rest of y’all. The movie’s only meaningful female role is a complete waste of Jodie Comer’s talents with a tired and helpless plotline. There are frequent baffling music and editing choices which distract the audience anytime they’re at risk of getting immersed. The script is full of unfired Chekov’s guns which may only pay off in the two(!) successors to this. Worst of all, it’s just repetitive, as if it was not a sequel to two other movies that already did fast zombies chasing after the main characters.

It’s redeemed somewhat by the arrival of Ralph Fiennes and the general unpredictability of the plot. The cast did respectable work. A few scenes were well-shot. They could have made a lazy, generic sequel but instead they made this. These are all the nice words I have for 28 Years Later.

It’s hard to choose the single funniest highlight of the movie. It’s probably either the train scene or the ending, neither of which I would dare spoil. Instead I’ll talk about when Jamie finally broke down and told his son the terrifying madness of the fire in the distance. The thing this man was afraid to tell his son? He once saw a guy burning bodies out in the forest!

Somehow this was the craziest and most unsettling thing that ever happened to a guy who, just moments earlier, was headshotting rubbery crawling zombies and casually rolling up to grisly torture scenes.

A rewatch, happy to say this definitely holds up. A fascinating rough draft that inspired so much culture to follow. Remix the melodrama and you get modern YA dystopia fiction. Remix the format and you get 1-2 genres of modern gaming.

Yet none of the larger successes this inspired have as much to say as this does. Society is rotten - the kids aren’t alright, but the adults aren’t either it seems.

Can’t help but wonder what would have happened if this was just a little tighter. If the flashbacks and buildup were more focused and the edit a bit tighter for the few cutaways from the action, this goes from rough draft to finished product.

Easily one of the best short films I’ve watched on a fashion ecommerce website.

Complaining that a three-minute advertisement goes on too long would be the dumbest Letterboxd review I could leave, so I won’t.

Super uneven script but each time I was getting bored, there’s a moment that just slays. The coffee, Afghanistan, the Black Forest Ham sandwich, smelly money and T-Boy, Jimp, every other sentence the son says.

Kate Mara criminally underused but I suppose this is a movie about certain types of men.

Such a stacked cast, they should have just tossed the script and let them improvise and it would have turned out better.

Kind of the equal and opposite of MICKEY 17. That movie took a very slipshod book and vastly improved it. This script removed all the joy and quirk from a great book until there was nothing left.

I have showed up for other shows I would describe as…

• slow, boring murder mysteries
• clive owen
• anything shot in an interesting locale

I couldn’t do this one, though. Painful pacing and sloppy writing kill this.

Once John Early leaves, it is mostly the same joke on repeat. But super well done - I would love for everyone involved to try again after this.

Well okay, not quite everyone but it would be petty to single anyone out in this low budget passion project.

It’s like a rough draft of the greatest comedy of the 21st century. Long sequences that miss for me (Andy Samberg and Ian McShane are both all-time greats but I really hope I never see them on-screen together again) but the hits make it worthwhile.

Not quite a cult classic, but it holds up much better than some of the other early-stage “we’re still figuring out our shtick” comedies from this era.

A solid, if unremarkable, action comedy movie that can’t quite decide what it wants to be. This leaves each element - the action, the comedy, the character beats - a little underbaked and tonally inconsistent.

Too frequently it substitutes style for substance - Christopher Lloyd makes faces but isn’t given anything to do, Sharon Stone is asked to give a mega acting performance which seems great but from a different movie. No actor or sequence is bad, but you can’t help but imagine what could have been.

But this is awfully negative review for a not-bad movie! It had a shootout as someone went down a water slide! I could have watched Colin Hanks and Bob Odenkirk bounce off each other forever. Very often, someone decided to shoot the hell out of this and it showed - the early fight montage and the arcade fight both stand out.

“Hi, Dad. It’s me, Frank Jr. I want to be just like you, but at the same time be completely different and original.”

Nailed it. What a triumph. Not every bit works for me, but it’s so rapid-fire that I hardly noticed the misses. Great variety between big setpiece jokes and wonderful little throwaway jokes like the evil executives who can’t ride motorcycles. The SPOILER_REDACTED montage should be hung up in the Comedy Louvre - I nearly fainted from laughing at that.

Also realizes that the great action-comedies also need to be great action movies. Shot beautifully and with a crazy good score from Lorne Balfa that… well, it’s just like some of his classic all-timer scores while also being completely different and original.

Nobody does dread like Robert Eggers. The first half hour is a masterpiece as Nicholas Hoult descends further into oblivion. He’s the best he’s ever been as he shows so many different shades and flavors of fear and hesitation. They shoot the hell out of this sequence. I never wanted it to end.

If that that journey was electric and novel, the concurrent events in Germany are anything but. Lily-Rose Depp isn’t given much to do, but if Oscars are given to people who do the most acting rather than the best acting then she should have swept. It’s hard to form an opinion of her performance when the writing just moves from one tired trope to the next.

Thankfully Willem Defoe shows up and it gets more tolerable, but only just.

But then the movie shifts into something I’ve never seen, horror-as-disaster movie, and we’re back to the races! It’s electric from this point onwards even if we spend more time with a few side characters than I’d like.

The highs of Nosferatu are better than anything I can remember from Eggers, but it lacks the tightness of THE WITCH and so it was a tougher watch for me.

Tragic that there are only two Szymanski / Samberg… movies? specials? whatever they are?

I’ve never loved Kit Harrington more - he was perfect as a coddled, nearly mute doofus. Perhaps it runs out of gas a bit at the end, but it’s less than an hour and it’s actually immaculate, so haters can go wear some specialty Swedish underwear.

I heard it wasn’t great but it’s Channing Tatum and I’ll always show up for that guy sooner or later. No regrets even if I don’t recommend it. It’s extremely watchable but less than the sum of its parts.

A great cast is squandered in nearly every scene by either the script or directing. Great movies have scenes that serve multiple purposes at once like telling us something about the characters while moving the story forward. In Blink Twice each scene seems to only have one purpose - a scene about the two lead actress’ relationship to each other, then one about plot and foreshadowing, then one that’s just a pretty view.

Extremely workmanlike assembly that ends up wanting.

But great performances throughout and Adam Newport-Berra shot the hell out of this.

Perhaps it lost a little of its luster in this rewatch, but still a delight. In a talented roster of child actors, Kara Hayward absolutely shines as a proto femme fatale and the group scenes with Troop 55 are also just amazing.

I wish we got more from the adults in this, but I can’t complain too much when Edward Norton is GOING FOR IT with every scene and line reading. He makes this movie for me.

First and third hours are just so compelling, conversations staged so simply and starkly that the personal stakes for each character are enormously high, complemented by beautiful cinematography.

I knew what this show was about and yet was still so surprised by it. What a delight.

An amazing distillation and remix of the Godzilla formula that feels at once classic and modern, timeless and timely, luxe and low-budget. Perhaps it leans a bit too much on domestic drama in a slowish second act, but I can’t point to exactly what I’d cut.

It’s interesting to compare this to Top Gun: Maverick. Both are movies about wrestling with a country’s military history and identity, but they couldn’t be more dissimilar from there. Actions that are heroic in one movie are cowardly in the other, and vice-versa - neither hero’s story could even be told in the other format.

Gets a fourth star because…

• Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender were awesome
• That moody David Holmes soundtrack. God bless Soderbergh for keeping him busy, always a banger
• That first dinner scene was so gripping

One of the best movies of 2025. Great songs that are catchy, funny, and often have dual meanings to the plot. Animation is spectacular and the movie is very careful to make this clearly Korean (an initial meet-cute is so clearly kdrama coded that I cracked up) and yet also for the entire world. I was very touched by the character turns in the third act, a time when I feel like many PG movies are just going through the motions of resolving plot lines. Spectacular.

SODA POP 4 LIFE!!!

So many differences from the book, all improvements. A little much at times and not enough at others, but I will show up anytime this director and actor are doing their things.

Put Jonathan Feltre in more movies please, he was great.

Aside from Mady, this was pretty standard fare. I mostly didn’t mind it and there were a few surprising moments like seeing the hero work up the nerve to do something vicious or watching him take a cowardly way out. But for each of those moments, there’s a side character I don’t understand at all or bizarrely staged fight

We came so close to turning this off after the first 15 minutes. There’s a lot of jokes that don’t quite work and the character beats are too hamfisted to matter.

But then we got to their classroom and met their teacher Marshawn Lynch, and the kid who was inexplicably caged in the back, and the 90 second long class, and we decided to give this movie another shot.

Bottoms takes place in a bizarre heightened world and it works best when it leans into it. It has the confidence not to justify the craziness but instead just lets its characters live in it, and it’s a blast when that’s happening. Like many comedies it stumbles when it has to deal with its plot and characters towards the third act, but after a wobbly 15 minutes it recovers for an insane, stellar ending.

I want Bottoms 2 to exist and to see whatever insane college these two end up attending.

I was promised Andy Daly. I spent the whole movie excited to see Andy Daly. But alas, I’m pretty sure Andy Daly is not actually in this movie.

Anyway, the non-Andy Daly parts were solid. The first half was tense and grim. I’m not sure the second half really works for me, but this movie had to go somewhere and it isn’t like any of these techbros will ever have a crisis of conscience.

Always great to hear a Nicholas Britell score - while this movie is very Succession-adjacent, his soundtrack is a whole different vibe which I loved.

The casting is too great to make this a hate watch, but the script is all kinds of bad. Here’s a fun game to play while watching: anytime there’s a scene set at the police station, ask yourself “what question did the police just ask this suspect prior to this scene?” All possible answers are hilarious.

But like Pachinko, all shows are made 10% better when they open with a dance number.

What a great four-episode miniseries this could have been!

You know who would have been great in this series? Randall Park. They really should have cast him in a role that had lines and a character and stuff. But there just wasn’t time for that - we needed to cover the same five interactions for the millionth time.

I hoped for more from the creator of beloved Channel 101 series Gregory Shitcock. It was fine and fun, a bit miscast in roles and felt much longer than 97 minutes due to some third act issues.

Still, solid for a first feature length outing. Want to see what he does next

The funniest, most believable, and perhaps best time travel movie I have ever seen. Great cast, surprisngly well shot, and such a fun premise. What a surprise.

I was just getting into movies when Beethoven’s 2nd came out, so I am ashamed to admit that I’ve always thought of Charles Grodin as the guy from the awful dog comedies. But after hearing enough praise for this, I gave it a shot.

I am fully obsessed with Charles Grodin. I can’t say this is my favorite movie ever, but when this movie works it’s because Charles Grodin is carrying it. I’m amazed by how fluidly he changes from eccentric oddball to grounded, real moments. After a whole movie spent watching other characters play or impersonate FBI lawmen, seeing his turn was spellbinding.

I am so glad I checked this one out.

A somewhat lackluster ending to a very enjoyable trilogy. Anchored by an outstanding chase and fight sequence early in the movie, the remainder mostly resorts to driving straight ahead in the countryside. For some reason it needed 20 more minutes than either of the first two to do much less. The returning cast is mostly underutilized, but Quentin D’Hainaut puts in a great performance as a zealous second-in-command to the villain.

Still, an enjoyable time and proof that people are still making fun, creative action movies that aren’t pure CGI wirework. I can’t wait to see whatever this team does next (although please cast Nicolas Duvauchelle as the lead, he is so compelling on screen)

First half is a terribly fun nonstop ride through fun setups, great character work, and a delightful premise. Fully onboard for that.

Then the second episode hits and it gets real wobbly as the leads just kind of fumble about and all the momentum from the first episode just evaporates.

Fantastic cast from top to bottom. David Jonsson and Morfydd Clark are standouts but there isn’t a weak link anywhere to be seen.

I hated this. Obvious, tonally incoherent, shot to look like shit, and so little respect for the viewer that it overexplains every shallow, underdeveloped idea.

It reminds me of the guy at every college who says “Actually, everyone is at least a bit racist” like it’s an original and profound thought, the kind of person you can shame into silence just by saying “Interesting, tell me more.”

Great set design and practical effects that gave me serious The Thing vibes. It’s difficult to appreciate because of the consistently atrocious camerawork but every other element of the visual design is just fantastic.

I have a lot of questions about the old man who was taking THE SUBSTANCE so he could have an alter ego who was a nurse practitioner. But then it made as much sense as the rest of the movie so why bother picking it apart? The movie didn’t trust the audience to do any thinking on their own so I won’t.

Someday I will learn not to watch any movie that did well at Cannes.

Avoided this for an extremely long time since I’ve always heard it was terrible and I’m not one for the MCU.

But there are only so many Shane Black / Robert Downey Jr / Guy Pearce movies that will ever exist. So I had to show up for this eventually.

It was pretty great!

Yes, it set the standard for the MCU ironic detachment tone. In other MCU movies it reads as unhinged psychopathy. Here, it is clearly grounded in trauma, a need for avoidance. Much to my surprise it works.

RDJ, Guy Pearce, and Ben Kingsley all know what kind of movie they are making and have a great time doing so. We get to see Tony Stark be more than just a rich guy in a suit. The fights were perhaps uninteresting but were at least surprisingly clear by MCU standards.

I didn’t have the issues with Act 3 that everyone else here seems to have. Perhaps because I was very tired of the Mandarin’s vaguely creepy ramblings and was ready for a vibe shift. Instead, I felt the movie shared the flaw of many other superhero movies – it was weakest when the heroes were piecing together the mystery of what’s going on. It’s incredibly basic and Tony basically unravels a giant conspiracy within 30 seconds of accessing a government computer, making his whole travelogue rather pointless.

But no one is here for that so the movie quickly loses interest in it too. They know the real reason everyone is watching - to see Tony Stark enter and exit an Iron Man suit roughly 500 times. Sometimes in pieces, sometimes the whole thing at once, really just about every variation on “guy puts on / takes off armor” that you can imagine.

This is a little offcolor for my reviews but it is an undeniable truth - for a kung fu movie, this is pretty horny and coded for all kinds of sexualities. Everyone is fabulous and throwing off their cloaks dramatically, there’s some kind of fishnet-esque bodycon outfit, and there are some NINJA LOOKS.

I was not expecting that.

The movie opens with a title card about how all the weapons are grounded in historical texts. It didn’t register until about 15 minutes in when the wild ideas kick in and I realized it was the creators’ way of saying “I know this @&%# is wild, but some of this actually happened, maybe, kinda.”

The fights themselves are not as great as some of the other Shaw movies I’ve seen, but the audacity hooked me. It’s difficult to pick a favorite Ninja Element, but if forced I’d choose Water for a fight both ridiculous and awesome at the same time.

I benefitted immensely from coming to this movie late and with few expectations. I suspect at its release, many people wanted Get Out 2: Get Outta Dodge and were pretty disappointed, but I had a great time

Yeah, there’s some bits from the start I would cut. And some bits from the end, and actually the middle too. In particular I wish Steven Yeun’s backstory mattered more than it ultimately did since we spent so much time on it.

But what a cast. What a great premise, executed so well. As we entered the third act with plans and diagrams and an elite team assembled, I was so hyped! And the movie largely delivered on that hype aside from some confusing logical leaps.

The full “Friday night encounter” sequence will stick with me for quite some time. A perfect 15 minutes of film.

The Predator franchise has never been my jam, but I’ve heard only good things about this installment and gave it a go.

The cast is fantastic. Amber Midthunder is particularly compelling and I was shocked to learn it was Dakota Beavers’ first film credit. Well shot throughout and the opening where it’s kind of a First Nations Revenant is great.

Then the big fella shows up in mostly very dark scenes and is defeated by misunderstanding how his own equipment works, which is not the most fun or satisfying.

Granted, if I was basically invulnerable and had a million different lethal devices on me I’d also forget a few. I’d be out there muttering in Predatorese “Uhhh… maybe this one would be good right now? Looks like it beeps and shreds and stuff… ” <presses button, accidentally kills 3 people>

But did I mention the great cast?

15 minutes into the movie, I almost thought Tony Scott, of all people, had managed to make a more restrained take on Beverly Hills Cop. But I was so mistaken.

A constant exhausting barrage of Eddie Murphy conning people with silly backstories for no reason. The theme song starts playing every 8 minutes and doesn’t let up. The plot devolves into complete nonsense.

About an hour in, the movie finally gives us a break. The cinematography is more beautiful than a Beverly Hills Cop sequel should merit. We get to see Eddie Murphy just be great and charming without the manic, pathological lying. We get some great “show, don’t tell” moments about how strange Judge Reinholdt’s character is. We get to see the two of them bounce off each other, each clearly having a blast, in what feels like a rough draft of a premise that the excellent 21 Jump Street movies would later perfect.

It doesn’t quite make up for the intolerable opening hour, though.

I don’t know what to think about the fact that Rosewood straight up kills 6-12 people who were running away and/or surrendering.

Also, this makes me wish Paul Reiser had never blown up with Mad About You and just kept popping up in odd supporting roles.

Welp… um… so this… was…

…I guess?

Me, 15 min in: Boy, they are doing a lot of mediocre setup for this Predator tie-in. Kinda cool that they set it in Africa though; it will be fun to watch a Predator rip through so many unlikeable privileged white dudes.

25 min: Oh no, this is definitely the wrong PREY movie. But this is kind of okay and I generally enjoy wilderness survival flicks.

50 min: No, nevermind, this completely sucks. Nothing happens and yet it is also super confusing, but somehow it’s already almost over.

60 min: C’mon, you make a movie in 2024 that is set in Africa and you choose these two to be the last two survivors?

70 min: Man, that character turn makes zero sense even for this movie… unless… oh no…

75 min: Dammit, yeah, it’s one of those movies. I could have guessed at minute 60.

If JJ Abrams made an Alien movie, it’d be a lot like this. True, JJ would have had fewer inventive scenes in favor of much more lens flare, but otherwise it is very The Xenomorph Awakens. They rehashed every quotable line and moment from the first two movies but for a power loader and a “game over man.”

Great design and more coherent than Prometheus / Covenant, but I’ll always prefer flawed movies that go for it and have something to say. If you really want a great back-to-basics Alien movie that still manages to be original and about something, play the videogame Alien: Isolation.

That David Jonsson tho. Cinema magic.

Giving a very deceased actor a major role, like 3rd / 4th on the call sheet, via CGI necromancy is the most Weyland-Yutani move in the franchise.

Outstanding. Takes a simple premise - what if a husband displayed cowardice in a moment of peril - and examines it from every possible angle. The movie is confident to let this breathe, to let us watch these people slowly process what this means to them, trying and mostly failing to deal with this.

Outstanding performances across the board (perhaps none moreso than Lisa Loven Kongsli) and lovely cinematography that manages to create a grim brightnesses and comforting darknesses.

I wish it had a more confident ending. It felt like the movie had said all it had to say, but kept going for another 20 minutes to reach some kind of arch conclusion.

Easily my favorite Ruben Östlund movie. Shocked see this from the same person who made The Square.

Lovely to look at and excellent first act. Felt a lot of vibes - about loving weird TV shows too much, about finding Dad really intense and scary even though you can’t point to anything sinister he does, and about feeling like the only thing you are sure of is how wrong you feel in the world and in your skin.

But then it’s like someone cast early Nathan Fielder in a feature-length adaptation of a single Godspeed You! Black Emperor song.

This just sucks.

I mean, of COURSE it hasn’t aged well - the women’s dialogue and their roles, the ongoing subplot about the two main characters being mistaken for gay men.

But rewatching it now in 2025, it’s so painfully boring. Poor Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. They are capable of so much but are forced to slowly wring every possible comedic moment from each scene, struggling to turn small gags into extended, time-filling bits.

Martin Lawrence is nauseated by corpses? That’s a good 2 minutes of screentime. A dog makes a mess on Will Smith’s carpets? Definitely worthy of minutes AND a callback later.

Were they struggling to fill the runtime? Did they have zero trust in the audience to get a joke without signposting and repetition?

The action sequences are surprisingly few and poorly edited & produced, even relative to Michael Bay’s later movies. If anyone was triggered by Greedo missing Han Solo at point blank range, they will be enraged by the handful of gunfire exchanges in Bad Boys that were shot well enough to understand.

At least it’s often a looker, and Michael Bay can shoot the hell out of Will Smith. It’s easy to forget that he wasn’t a hollywood megastar before this.

I recall liking this when it came out but I can’t say why. I was right on the cusp of my film snob era and was already turning up my nose at much better genre movies. Did I just have no idea then of what a good action thriller could be? Was it just the novelty of seeing two very solid lead performances from black men in a mass market genre movie?

Strangely eager to rewatch Bad Boys II now - it has a very good chance of being the sequel that most improves upon the original.

A brief, pleasant time. While I’m on the fence about Jesse Eisenberg as a director, I’d love to see what he writes next.

My favorite moment is real brief, the farewell between the boys and their tour guide. So much truth in what is remembered and what is forgotten by all parties.

It’s peak Marvel ironic detachment to see Captain America, the Marvel epitome of decency and rightness, making jokes during a hostage rescue about how everyone he used to know and care about is dead.

• The fights where it was just people punching and kicking each other were fantastic. Exciting moves, clearly shot long takes - thrilling stuff
• The other fights were kind of drab and overwhelming in that typical Marvel way
• Nothing about this plot will surprise you. For a spy thriller, it is short on thrills
• But it has some moments - I could have watched Captain America talk to 50’s era AI Arnim Zola forever, and Anthony Mackie stole every scene he was in
• The bodycount of this one is exceptional. Hundreds for sure, perhaps north of a thousand?

I honestly think I could take a power loader in a fight

One of the all-time greats for sure. Great characters who can be richly realized in just a few lines, superb design that thoughtfully builds on the aesthetic vibe masterpiece that is ALIEN, and too many memorable sequences to count.

Guiding us through this is Sigourney Weaver who somehow tops her performance in the original, giving us someone who is believably broken and bombastic in turns. Watching her watch the chaos unfold is a delight.

I love the franchise and I’ve long debated internally which is the best between this and the original. I think I’ve finally decided that ALIENS is ever so slightly lesser. There are too many sequences where I’m left wondering why everyone acts like they do. It takes several hours of decimation and disaster before someone asks how they might get off the planet. Aliens show up in places where I struggle to understand how it could have happened, and there’s just a few too many action sequences that boil down to edits of aggressive screaming intermixed with random xenomorph explosions.

Don’t get me wrong - this is still one of the all-time greats and I’m finding faults only out of nitpicky fandom.

Great acting and astounding cinematography keep me from getting too upset about the ending. Once that character was introduced I thought “it would be too much of a dumb hollywood thing to make them the new pope” and that was before the strange, almost non-sequitor final twist.

It occasionally had things to say about the role of faith in our lives, and I appreciated that. Would have loved more but I will take what I can get. Usually the discourse is either just “faith is for idiots, ah ha hah. I say!” or “THIS IS PROOF THAT GOD IS REAL AND HE LOVES WHAT I LOVE AND HATES WHAT I HATE but also he hates good writing and acting I guess”

It feels like an Argo kind of year at the Oscars.

People are true to themselves. Some will not make the journey, some will stop early, some will suffer misfortune, and some will choose misfortune.

A sweeping epic full of great, understated performances. It perhaps lacks a bit of drama, but then again I was never bored so perhaps not.

I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder for 40 minutes straight. Maybe they go a little too hard on their actual cycling guest star, but it’s not even an hour - there’s no bit that overstays its welcome. Great casting, great writing, just great.

Joyful, great cast of new and familiar voices alike, friendly characters throughout, and killer soundtrack. What’s not to love? (Okay, it goes on a little too long and drags it feet getting to an inciting event)

This is a movie that knows what it is about - Channing Tatum dancing. It has the good sense to never go too long between dance scenes and to keep them all fresh and fantastic through varied choreography and locales.

Yeah, the side characters are weak and yet have too much screentime, and the writing for the lead actress gives her no agency whatsoever (her only hard choice, the one foreshadowed by almost all of the movie, is made for her by circumstances). But those are small complaints in a delightful, danceful movie.

Driftless and struggles to fill its runtime. Doesn’t find a plot until the last 20 minutes of the movie. Great performances from Roddy Piper and Keith David though.

Wobbly writing early on but a great cast keeps it going until the writing catches up a couple episodes in and the show becomes superb. Zosia Mamet has never been better, Tony Hale is electric in showcasing a much wider range than he usually gets, and each supporting character threatens to steal their scene.

There’s a few extremely tiresome plot points early on, but this is a show about the upheaval caused by the Black Death - things change pretty quickly.

Worth tracking down for McDonagh fans. Now with the benefit of seeing the rest of his work this feels a little uneven and strangely paced, but there’s so much to love in this short film that complaints seem petty.

The best moments are the quieter, unexpected ones - placing the photo next to his wife, the mirrored conversations with the attendant played by a future Weasley, and the understated horror of the first bit of violence.

I was pretty worried when these characters broke the fourth wall to allude to third-act problems with their movie-within-a-movie-but-also-this-movie. The first and second acts were wobbly so the thought of a worse third act almost caused me to bail.

I’m glad I didn’t! This movie finally figures out that it wants to be a fun, slightly campy escapade that leans hard into being a movie about a stuntman. It stops making a lot of sense but I was never here for that anyway.

A great time as long as you are committed to getting through the first half hour or so. If you make it to the Sydney Opera House, you’re golden for the rest of the movie.

This gets an extra star for being exactly what I needed after a grueling and disheartening day.

It perhaps peaks with the absolutely unhinged Ruprecht sequence, but everyone was so consistently great throughout that I still had a good time in its quieter moments. God bless Michael Caine and Glenne Headly who deliver great performances in serious and insane moments alike.

I want to enjoy any job as much as Robert enjoys working at the Home Mart

Okay, five stars for a movie that could easily be mistaken for a generic low-rent DTV is a hot take. But this is extremely well done and challenged my views on cinema.

In my other reviews, I often complain about predictable plots. The Equalizer has expanded my mind. Yes, you could write out the plot of this movie after about 10 minutes, and that’s even before you know Russian mobsters show up (but of course they do!). But the moments of this movie are such an unexpected delight.

A fantastic performance from Denzel Washington, a great supporting cast, clear & well-shot action sequences - this movie rocks. Furthermore, I’d love for everyone making superhero movies to watch this as it is a subtle origin story that doesn’t waste our time with the usual tropes of origin stories.

Everyone has a lit cigarette, no one smokes.

In my summers of my teens, I’d stay up as late as possible just for the sake of doing it. I’d be awake just to be awake. My life stopped having any narrative or purpose beyond just being.

This movie and these characters just are. It has its moments, but those are bookended by bizarre shooting styles and narrative deadends that were pretty brutal.

It’s telling that the cover here is a still from the very last scene of the movie. It spoils nothing at all because what is there to spoil?

Easily my favorite by Park Chan-wook. A hypnotic tale of broken people finding and breaking each other. Outstanding performances across the board - the two leads are fantastic and there are many smaller roles who steal each scene they’re in. The movie is just consistently gorgeous whether it’s stunning outdoor panoramas or foot chases through Korean back alleys.

I suspect we’re seeing the full Director’s Cut and boy this would have benefitted from a tighter theatrical cut, but that’s my only complaint

Some random notes:

• anyone who orders a cheese sandwich and then asks for ketchup deserves to be chased by a vengeful semitruck

• wow cars in the 70s just totally sucked. Going 65 in one of those is a terrifying experience worthy of cinema.

Some great moments that presage what Spielberg would become and very inventive with the many ways a semi could terrorize a lone driver. There’s also a lot of repetition though, narrative fat that the director would learn to trim from his all-time masterpiece JAWS.

I struggle with this one.

I really want to like it! I applaud a sequel that’s bold enough to open with “everything in the first one didn’t matter and all the survivors are probably dead, here’s a brand new vibe and premise.” It’s well acted and the first 45 minutes are terrifically fun. I definitely did not have “desperate mercenaries fighting zombies with guns while plucky kids ‘Home Alone’ them” on my Train to Busan 2 bingo card.

But after that, it kinda runs out of ideas and plays a mashup of “Zombie cinema’s greatest hits” combined with “Oops, we forgot this was a sequel so here’s a bunch of melodramatic allusions to the first one.” The action gets a bit stale and there’s a lot of frantic running and crying.

Why on earth is Humphrey Bogart in this movie? The rest of the cast manages to breathe life into their one dimensional characters but then Humphrey shows up and… well whatever the opposite of stealing a scene is, he does that.

Great cast and design make for a fun time despite a languid final 45 minutes that gradually loses interest in being a musical.

I learned afterwards that they extended several of the songs and boy was that unsurprising.

I wrote a personal essay in college that was extremely, intensely personal and sincere. It was essentially a raw first draft and was all over the place to the point of incoherence. It had jokey asides that didn’t work and random anger at misdirected targets that I wasn’t expressing well or uniquely. In retrospect I feel bad for the reader, but boy I sure didn’t at the time.

The professor simply wrote “very heartfelt” before giving me a D.

She was right. What else was there to say?

Ooof. I’m guessing 40-50 pages of this script were just “the main character continues running and/or crying.” The few decisions she makes are all groaners.

This movie definitely has Things To Say about homelessness and class in Korea, but it does not have Characters To Say Them.

You got me with that plot twist though! It further undermined the characters but I can’t deny my surprise. (not an endorsement of that hamfisted turn, though)

What a bummer! The first two entries of the latest Halloween entries punched above their weight - great production, great casting, and a unique point of view.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t live up to the legacy of Halloween and Halloween Kills. It flirts with some interesting ideas about how we’ve lost a shared sense of reality and truth, but then the plot feels like a retread of the themes of Halloween Kills. You could pause the movie 25 minutes in and accurately sketch out every major & minor story beat remaining in the movie, but it’s in no hurry to get there.

Still, it’s a treat to see Jamie Lee Curtis in the spotlight and I enjoyed my time with the rest of the cast too.

I’m glad this trilogy exists - it reminds me a bit of Restoration Games from the boardgaming world, a company that does remakes of old boardgames that aren’t faithful to the mechanics but instead the feel. They remember the IDEA of playing Fireball Island! and made a game to capture that idea.

These people loved the idea of Halloween and they did great by it.

How it started: OMG YOU GUYS WE ARE WATCHING HOT FROSTY! LOLOLOL

How it ended, about 25 minutes later: … okay though for real why are we still watching hot frosty?

Sometimes it is enough to watch Denzel Washington have an amazing time for a couple of hours.

Boy, Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix sure did a great job in the last one, right?

Came for the Pistol Shrimps, stayed for the Municipal Dance Squad. They are pure magic.

Great performances can’t hold this mess together. I couldn’t tell you anything about the characters. Edited like they just had a bingo card of every technique & shot in cinema. Insane overuse of a techno score that made me think I owned some weird music-only remote whose unmute button I sat on. Scene transitions are 3x longer than necessary for no clear reason, except the slo-mo zoomins which are instead 6x longer.

But those performances!

Also why is Art a torrential downpour of sweat at the end when he has been standing motionless for like eight serves. Gotta be some CG sweat.

Despite everyone talking about how bad this is, I watched this because sooner or later I’ll always show up for Ma Dong-seok.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t worth it.

It lives down to the hype - miscast leads, several languid dark muddy action sequences, endless exposition which only answers questions I didn’t have, excessive runtime, very low stakes. I had a bad time but also, it doesn’t seem much different from the other late-era Marvel movies I’ve stumbled into. I’m left wondering what was so much worse about this?

But enough negativity, let’s talk about why I gave it two stars instead of one. Of course, Barry Keoghan is crazy good but every other review mentions him too so let’s talk about the valet Karun, played by Harish Patel. Absolutely steals the scene with every moment his small part is given. His character is just delighted to be here but also provides the only grounding in reality for this movie.

I have been an M Night apologist but I have some soul searching to do after this. A fun, fast-paced first act is tragically followed by the rest of this movie. God bless Josh Hartnett though.

The only reason to show up for this is if you’re excited for Guy Pearce and Damian Lewis to talk to each other for awhile.

If you’re into that, it’s great! You’ll find some other fabulous performances, too.

But it doesn’t work as a drama. The miniseries hinges on two central mysteries. Halfway through the first episode you’ll have a very good guess on the first. The second is only introduced near the end and the stakes for it could not be lower.

It’s a snooze, but sometimes a good nap is exactly what you need.

Watching BlackBerry is like walking into one of those hole-in-the-wall restaurants where they take a dish no one has strong feelings about either way like meatloaf, but then they just make the hell out of it. You are left asking not just how this is so good, but why - what inspired this gifted team to take on this particular subject?

From the outside it’s easy to assume this is midgrade made-for-TV fare about the rise and fall of a company that many may not even remember. However, this is great and surprising from start to finish. The writers clearly figured out the most important story and character beats and waste little time between them. The movie is anchored by three performances that are somehow both simultaneously wild and exaggerated but also easy to miss, understated in a kind of classically Canadian way.

It struggles occasionally with side characters that come and go without much purpose, but even then the performances are great so it’s hard to get too bothered by it.

Lately, business tales have been locked into a Sorkin-esque form of storytelling which are entertaining but unsurprising. This is a delightful, gentle alternative. A great time and a great surprise.

This might be the most faithful sequel I’ve ever watched, so I’ll just use the same review I wrote for the original Extraction.

Fantastic action scenes and great performances make up for the lackluster writing. The plot is a snooze, the actors aren't given much to work with, and the movie is so monochromatic that it would look like a lowbudget VOD production if the action scenes themselves weren't so well-done.

Now I need to watch everything Golshifteh Farahani has ever done.

Okay, that’s probably not totally fair. The movie is more of a looker, but that’s at the expense of an even worse script.

Fantastic action scenes and great performances make up for the lackluster writing. The plot is a snooze, the actors aren’t given much to work with, and the movie is so monochromatic that it would look like a lowbudget VOD production if the action scenes themselves weren’t so well-done.

Now I need to watch everything Golshifteh Farahani has ever done.

I’m not sure I get Get Carter. The gritty cinematography and Michael Caine’s fantastic performance were worth the price of admission, but it was hindered by frequent detours and a plot that seems like it should be simple but was quite hard to follow at times.

I wanted to feel more tension, either for Carter himself or for his foes/victims. The movie didn’t establish major stakes for either side. I ended up watching this with an idly curious detachment.

Definitely want to know more about those ore carts that just dump things into the sea, though. And I have questions about that restaurant development at the top of what looked like a perpetually empty parking garage.

For a movie called “Gilda,” this needed way more Gilda. The opening focus on Johnny seems interminable – an unlikable, dull character in a hammy, overdone performance.

This makes Rita Hayworth’s arrival and performance all the more exciting as the movie finally becomes something. As great as her performance is though, it is still a performance in this movie .

The pacing and plotting is bizarre, at times incredibly languid only to then barrel through crazy offscreen plot developments with strange exposition.

And then she just forgives him for years of psychological abuse and everyone lives happily ever after, I guess. Gilda, you truly are a mystery.

It feels criminal to say this was merely solid when there are so many fantastic elements.

Of course Jamie Lee Curtis is amazing and deserved to become a star, but the rest of the supporting cast is full of actors making the most of smaller parts. I could have just watched the three women talk for the entire movie and been perfectly contented.

Likewise, the movie is a low-budget looker - Midwestern suburbia feels equally cozy and terrifying. There’s the iconic synth score which is used well without being overdone – compare to Beverly Hills Cop, a movie with another iconic, simple electronic score that can’t help but play it every three minutes.

But so much of this movie is buildup, a process that didn’t work for me. The movie seems interminable when Laurie is babysitting or when we’re watching Dr. Loomis wander around.

It also suffers in comparison to one of the all-time horror classics, John Carpenter’s THE THING a few years later. The foreshadowing and buildup is so well executed there that it made this feel more like a prototype or warmup.

A movie in two halves that was less than the sum of its parts. Frequently beautiful and often confusing. Long stretches where I sat thinking “I don’t know what’s happening but I hope whatever it is ends.”

What a peculiar, fascinating movie. Many other movies since have reused and remixed many of its plot elements, but the strong performances and occasional detours into a Lynch-esque surreality make this stand out even 60 years later.

We’ve seen serial killers and learned about their tragic origin stories many times since, but Karlheinz Böhm’s understated and endearing performance makes this character still stand out. The movie is simultaneously rooted in a real-world griminess but also makes room for dance sequences and bizarre side characters to shine.

Like many movies of this era, it has some pacing problems and it was always interesting but rarely gripping. But these are minor complaints against such a memorable, unique movie.

A difficult movie to like, especially viewing it only after many movies it later inspired. The violence shocks a little less these 20 years later, but without that shock value there’s not a lot left to this movie. It’s just slowly escalating violence between two rather amoral and unmoving characters.

If The Foot Fist Way is your first encounter Danny McBride or Jody Hill, this is probably a four-star movie. It’s great fun and exciting to see how they made this movie with such a limited budget.

My issue is that I came to this after watching all of Eastbound & Down. Twice. I adore that filthy, unhinged show and The Foot Fist Way feels more like a dress rehearsal for that. So many of the same ideas are repeated between the two, but with Eastbound & Down the showmakers had more time, experience, and budget to do it well.

I’m on Team McBride & Hill for life and I’m so glad this movie got made, but I couldn’t quite enjoy it.

Feels like it takes about 3 hours for this movie to decide to be about something more than just miscellaneous spooky vibes, but by then it was too late. The ending reminds me of the nonsequitor declaration at the end of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie.

Toni Collette was great but there was no saving this mess.

There’s a number of movies that I liked but I didn’t enjoy watching. This was kind of the opposite, a significantly flawed movie that was great fun because of its pacing and ambition.

I really dug the early Lynch vibes from when he still cared about plot. Solid performances throughout even though the cast didn’t have much to work with.

I would love to see a reunion of all the creative folks involved in making this. This movie feels like an unfinished rough draft of something I’d really enjoy.

I usually loathe movies & shows that substitute “fun” for “funny,” as if smiling and breaking character can take the place of actual jokes and punchlines. So I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this fun, if not funny, movie. Sometimes Jon Hamm having a blast is all you need.

Glad I watched this with quality headphones so I could catch the all-time slayer joke “Hi, I’m calling about your listing on OnlyVans…” I laughed so hard I needed a little breather.

This was a hard watch for me, something I admired without loving.

I came to this already a big Jackie Chan fan so I have seen him do many crazy and thrilling things. This felt more like a prototype of what was to come and seemed so very repetitive.

There were some fantastic fights - the match against his aunt, the restaurant melee, or the first Thunderleg fight where he gets humiliated. But that’s maybe 15% of the action in this?

You could make a 85 minute cut of this movie that would make film buffs weep but that I would love.

Why did they have to put an amazing Steven Yuen performance into this otherwise very mid movie? It isn’t fair.

I should have bailed when I realized it was a Murakami adaptation. I know this means I have no taste but this very slow and ponderous movie has stripped me bare, free to be the toxicly masculine monster I am.

There is a seed of a fascinating thoughtful movie here, the idea of white rage, provoked by feeling cast aside by society and a mixture of injustices real and imagined, that believes itself to be righteous and good when it clearly isn’t.

But this seed bore such bitter fruit. This movie is much more racist than it thinks it is and seems to hate women pretty thoroughly. Michael Douglas’ performance is great but the movie is a real chore to get through.

No one in their right mind would remake this, but I would love such a thing to exist anyway.

Debi, you make some terrible life choices. You can get it! You can and will do better than Martin.

I can’t stop imagining a version of this movie where they cast Joan Cusack as the lead. Her performance is incredible and she steals every scene she’s in, despite spending the movie in a room by herself.

Keep everything else the same and it just works, but 1000x better. She falls in love with Debi! She has anti-union conflicts with Dan Aykroyd! She and Jeremy Piven dispose of a corpse together!

Joan, you are a treasure and we don’t deserve you, but I’m glad you were in this.

One of the greatest supporting / small-role casts of all time. I found great joy in spotting Jon Bernthal and Gal Gadot in these small blink-and-you-miss-it moments.

There are a few moments of this that got me but they were mostly asides. Steve Carell’s reading of “Okay, see you later!” when his passenger dove from a moving car absolutely killed me.

But everything they set up as a major bit was pretty by-the-numbers. Tina Fey has been so poorly served by Hollywood.

A thrilling car chase, a somber sniper-vs-shotgun battle with Clive Owen that’s unlike anything I’ve seen before or since, and a grounded performance from Matt Damon make this movie.

I don’t want to watch other movies now.

The amazing set design! The incredible performances! The fabulous dialogue where each line was more zingy than the last! THAT DANCE SEQUENCE YOU GUYS!

Point: The movie was 30 minutes too long and the lack of subtlety was monotonically increasing throughout.

Counterpoint: Are you kidding me with those complaints? Who cares when a movie is this good.

Alright, I’m officially on the Accident Man hype train now. Compared to the first one, this is much more character-driven and fun. Mike’s character is more nuanced and Scott Adkins proves his leading man bona fides in his performance. The cast of supporting characters is just outstanding and really brought this crazy little world to life. Some of the fights still leave me a little wanting but the movie was too fun to care.

I want a full oral history of how this DTV project ended up with an original song about the joy of bromances. Incredible.

A movie that underscores how difficult it is to make a spinoff about the funny side character. Still had plenty of chuckles.

I knew which characters were voiced by Conan and Mantzoukas and I still managed to completely miss them.

There should be an award for making a movie watchable and Michelle Rodriguez should win it.

um according to the rules, the tiefling must be a level 20 archdruid which is epic tier; she should be out there slaying gods and not mucking about with lowly red wizards that are threats merely to a few nation states

It’s a shame they couldn’t fit in another dozen near-identical characters that I couldn’t tell apart. Feels like they weren’t really trying with this small cast.

The hour a half before the murder is bewildering. I really struggled to tell any characters apart between the rapid cuts and seemingly interchangeable melodrama. I honestly can’t remember if there were two characters is financial distress or just one. Some other new guests arrive a half hour in and I am unsure if we ever saw them again.

And then the murder happens and the movie radically changes! Nah, just kidding - it isn’t too interested in being a murder mystery and neither are the characters. It kind of gets solved by half-hearted accident.

Of course this is really a commentary on class structure. Maybe that would have hit harder if I watched this before a couple of Downton Abbey seasons, but Gosford Park ended up just feeling like a lecture on well-trod topics.

Sometimes we’ll say we love an actor so much that we could watch them read a phone book. This was kind of true for this movie - the cast was crazy stacked and I enjoyed watching them even if I couldn’t tell who was who most of time, so their words just ended up as a kind of noise. But it was a pleasant noise to enjoy for a couple of hours.

Denis Villeneuve is perhaps my favorite director working today and I am a sadist who enjoyed the old Lynch take on DUNE, so I remain bummed that I didn’t like this. An absolutely gorgeous movie which is devoid of soul or plot and hamstrung by a monotonous lead performance. Just dreadfully dull whenever there wasn’t a Harkonnen on-screen. Instead of emotions or an ending, they just had Hans Zimmer on the keys doing generic electro-swoons when we’re supposed to feel something. An incredible non-ending even when judged against other “Part I” movies.

A great dual performance from Jake Gyllenhaal anchors this subdued, puzzling mystery. I don’t think Toronto has ever looked more hellish or dystopian - a preview of the even more unsettling cinematography from Villeneuve’s Sicario a few years later.

I would have loved this if it was a little more paranoid and tense, a mashup of Villeneuve’s style and Pi-era Aronofsky. As it was, it was a little too languid to be more than a curiosity for me.

Sidenote - how do I keep choosing films for our film club that feature bizarre, uncomfortable sex clubs? I’m tempted to pick a guaranteed normal movie next, but I’m afraid I’m cursed and I’ll pick something like Zootopia 2 only to find it has one weird scene in an underground S&M dungeon.

Rewatched this recently after seeing it in theaters 20 years ago in college. It mostly holds up thanks to an incredible lead performance and fabulous cinematography.

Now in my forties, it’s hard to overlook the portrayal of women in this as mostly helpless and ignorant. This causes the dramatic twist ending to whiff with me when before it was a gut punch. It’s just hard to suddenly find more sympathy for the main character when they have treated women as disposable and interchangeable for the entire movie.

However, the bleak, relentless pursuit of the mystery up until that ending is still a great journey and makes me eager to finally finish the Vengeance Trilogy soon.

The biggest mystery of this neo noir is how this mumbling, skunk-sprayed near-homeless man has such incredible pull with the ladies.

Both subdued and incredibly unsubtle, I had a good time looking at this movie even if I didn’t often enjoy its writing or score. But I chuckled at a scene of a grown man assaulting some tween miscreants and shoving eggs in their mouths, and I’m pretty sure that’s a sentence I’ve never written before. And I appreciate any movie that has the confidence to end without overexplaining everything to the audience

A quieter, more subdued journey into the wasteland this time out. I came in expecting that it couldn’t compete with Fury Road on spectacle, but I think I expected more from the cast and performances to compensate. The character arcs were meaty & fascinating but the moments that comprised them often didn’t interest me. I would have loved more from Chris Hemsworth, and Anya Taylor-Joy had too few opportunities to step out of the shadow of Charlize Theron’s all-time great performance in this role.

It was occasionally great, rarely bad, and mostly okay. Both quite unique and yet something I am not sure will stick with me.

Fury Road could inspire a sequel like Furiosa, but it is hard to imagine this inspiring any kind of successor with how little it sparks the imagination.

That “sex” scene is incredible and worth the price of admission. Otherwise, this movie is tonally fragmented with a real mean streak towards its own characters. It was awfully difficult to understand most characters’ motivations.

But it just reinforced how awesome it was to work at a video store back in the day. I’m glad I had a chance while that was a thing.

Not the most fun watch. In some ways incredibly ahead of its time in predicting just how weird the internet was going to make everything, but it was too unrelentingly bleak to appreciate.

I think I would have been crazy about this if I had seen it in my 20’s, but in my 40’s I’d love a little more nuance and depth.

But that CHAM! song about just wearing sweatpants and laying around because of a broken heart deserves to be a #1 global sensation. I am Team CHAM! for life.

The strange thing about this movie is that I didn’t laugh much during it, but it has a dozen quotable, memorable scenes that make me smile. Like many 90’s comedies, it’s the best when it’s disregarding the plot and letting us spend time with this earnest, dimwitted husband played so well by Michael Caton.

The moments where the movie’s focus drifts from him are its weakest and the buildup to a triumphant ending in court seemed hamfisted and rushed.

But who cares? If someone wants this movie to be more than it is, well, tell him he’s dreamin’

I would have adored an alternate cut of this movie that compressed Act 1 and Act 3 into 10 mimutes each, giving that time to the delightful second act on the boat.

But that isn’t the movie I watched. This one opens slowly and disjointed and has a prolonged ending which overstays its welcome.

Still, a tremendous improvement from The Square.

What a joy. Jack Burton is the hero we deserve, hilarious and mostly useless without becoming an over-the-top parody ala Naked Gun. A plot that moves and terrific supporting cast.

I wish the women had more to do, but moreso I just wish there were more Carpenter/Russell movies being made.

Great premise and fabulous acting, but the plot is a real let-down. No one believes the main character until the last 20 minutes, which means we don’t really get any drama or action until far too late into the movie.

I believe women, doubly so if it means we get to see them do awesome stunts.

A super okay movie, right at the peak of okay-ness.

The correspondence had many moments that tugged at my heartstrings. Some were perhaps a little too on-the-nose but I can’t begrudge a sweet movie for its sweetness.

But the gaps between the correspondence were narratively drab, visually off-putting, and lacked any subtlety or nuance.

A mystery about a detective who doesn’t actually detect all that much. It’s gentle and slow-paced, perhaps even dry, and yet the final 15 minutes left me confused. I guess we didn’t need a detective for this after all?

But I enjoyed the small town setting and the performances were on-point.

“Please let this be the last flashback” I said about 30 minutes into the movie.

It was not.

While I’m tired of origin stories, this is one of the better ones in the MCU that I’ve seen. Once he’s done originating though, there’s not much left to this.

Lovely and charming. I think it runs short of points to make in places, but that’s to be expected with a documentary made of footage that was never intended to make this particular movie.

Still, a lovely and gentle movie that I enjoyed spending some time with, even if I don’t get quite all the hype.

A masterpiece of action comedy. The opening section in the faux-favela is incredible as it seamlessly transitions from martial arts action to chases to outrunning a car to that all-time great bus stunt spectacular.

The movie drags a little here and there before it reaches its epic conclusion at the mall, but even when it drags, it does so with a lovable charm that you just don’t see in movies any longer.

PLUS JACKIE CHAN SINGS ON THE SOUNDTRACK!!!

This movie really has it all.

Sad Poirot isn’t an especially compelling Poirot, and while I adore Tina Fey, she seemed far more out of place than in Only Murders.

Still, it’s a well-made murder mystery and beggars can’t be choosers

A movie that can’t quite decide whether it’s a parody or somewhat serious romance / coming-of-age movie. One element routinely undermined the other and made me question whether it was committed to the bit.

It had moments though, mostly due to the great cast.

The costumes and set design doing a lot of work here.

Charming and elevated by fantastic supporting performances. Maybe a little too melancholic or dawdling in places, but who cares when Hugh Grant is having this much fun?

A pleasant, gentle movie. I think I enjoyed Agnes’ photography more than her films (including this one), but it was frequently sweet and I didn’t mind it very much.

I loved Ezra Miller in Justice League and almost everything I’ve seen Michael Keaton do, so I was surprisingly eager to watch this.

It’s not good. Once you see the instigating event, The Flash follows the standard time travel script relentlessly. Michael Keaton’s screentime is mostly CGI, stunt doubles, or straight-ahead takes to the camera while operating Bat-machinery. Meanwhile, we’re saddled with a second Flash who is so scatterbrained and annoying that it hindered everything I loved about Ezra’s performance in Justice League.

The action sequences are either too dark to appreciate or set in a featureless… desert? plain? I couldn’t tell.

Kudos to all involved for the final scene though. I laughed very hard.

This movie was mostly just okay. Kurt Russell is much of the reason why this is watchable.

But my goodness, Val Kilmer’s amazing, committed performance is incredible. Pure joy. I’ve never seen a character like this on screen before or since.

Proof that the Speed Force is real, because The Flash steals each of his scenes before you even know what happened.

I find the idea that superheroes are the shared myths of our new age to be a bit underbaked, but this movie is the first superhero film to do justice to that idea. Rather than follow the Marvel cookie cutter approach of wisecracking heroes who seem to know they are in a movie with inconsequential stakes, the heroes of the Justice League are ponderous and much larger than life. They are removed from our reality not because they can’t take it seriously, but perhaps because they take it SO seriously.

I’ve never seen a superhero movie like this and I liked that. It probably didn’t need to be four+ hours long, but then again that just makes it stand out more. I don’t want more of this, wish a number of scenes were cut, and really found the epilogues needless… but I kind of enjoyed the rest of it?

If we are consigned to a future where action adventure movies are only allowed to be endless low-stakes CGI action sequences with aloof wisecracking throughout, then please make mine Aquaman.

Seahorse knights! Crazy underwater CGI fantasias! An incredibly charismatic lead performance! A kaiju voiced by Julie Andrews! Magic fish powers! Light on origin story and interleaves it throughout the movie instead of frontloading it.

Perhaps most importantly, I didn’t have to watch five other interconnected movies first in order to understand what was happening.

AQUAMAN!

Three heroic lead performances carry this odd movie past some clunky editing and horrible musical score

DNF

I love the aunties but I didn’t love this. The first book was akin to Die Hard - the right person finds herself at the wrong place at the wrong time and has to persevere. The second book is very similar to Die Hard 2 in structure and quality - it strains belief to find this same person at the epicenter of a far more elaborate and hamfisted assassination plot before it devolves into just inexplicable hijinx.

Great style and amazing choreography more than make up for the boring bits that stray too far from Barbie. Someone should make a supercut that doesn’t feature any Mattel or Allan and only gives Kens about 10 lines total.

Relentless animation that starts out remarkable but becomes repetitive and punishing. This is paired with classics from the Marvel plotline bingo card: it’s hard to have a secret identity, tragedy can define a hero, and multiverses.

The only time the plot surprised me was when it revealed itself as only a Part I. It has so little to say that it’s hard to believe they couldn’t find room for the excess.

Great soundtrack though and the Mumbattan sequence was delightful in every way.

A fun and exciting 4-way chase through Rome elevates an otherwise turgid installment for the franchise. The IMF team is reduced to the Keystone Kops while poor Ving Rhames only gets to repeat what other characters are saying.

A sweet, gentle breeze of a movie. A few moments and phrases will stay with me, but most were fading away as the credits rolled. Restrained and understated, perhaps to a fault.

Easily the fourth-greatest Batman movie behind the two Burton installments (yes, Batman Returns is great) and The Dark Knight. The design and cast elevate a fizzling, overlong Batman story. It is flawed and original in equal measures – the best kind of three-star movie.

Gotham is once again a stylized central character. The city is a cramped, choking, brooding amalgam of America. It as if a glorious art deco utopia was left to rot for fifty years as it transitioned from beacon to prison. Every shot is beautiful and decrepit.

Each member of the stellar cast inhabits this hellscape in their own way. Zoë Kravitz prowls, Pattinson broods & lurks, Paul Dano is everywhere and nowhere, Colin Farrell is barely able to move, and John Turturro is the only person to walk with ease. It’s a detective mystery you might solve just from body language.

However, the movie started losing me just as Batman, who was already a mediocre-at-best detective, inexplicably spraypainted some very basic facts about the case on the floor. For the remaining hour, the movie flails about in search of an ending. Villains abandon motives in favor of unhinged violence while Batman goes from punching his way through the city… to punching his way through the city. At the end, Batman has basically lost but both he and the movie seem unaware of this. Meanwhile the Riddler basically won but is personally devastated by what seems like only a marginally lower bodycount.

It’s both anti-climactic and confusing.

While the plotting is the major issue, the movie is also weighed down by a original score that was all of four different notes and editing that left 30 needless seconds in each scene. All are fixable issues for Batman’s next outing with this crew - I hope they nail it.

The opening 40 minutes is perhaps the best short film ever made - amazing practical camera effects, fantastic acting, and an immediately gripping plot.

The rest of the movie loses its way and becomes a real slog of speeches and dark, drab shots. Yes, the ending that everyone hates is very hateable, but I’d already started doing the dishes and half-watching by that point so I wasn’t very bothered by it.

But who cares about those flaws when the first half is so astonishing? I sure don’t.

Ryan Gosling finally makes sense to me. I never understood the appeal outside of when he played an emotionless robot in Blade Runner 2049.

But what a gem this was! In the first act his woodenness totally makes sense, and then watching him come alive was a true joy. I can’t imagine many other actors who could really shine when acting opposite a love doll.

This was a revelation. I need to revisit his performances that I didn’t connect with (Drive, Nice Guys, La La Land) now that my eyes have been opened to the Gosling magic.

In college, a major history paper asked me to defend an opinion on a subject that I had no opinions about whatsoever. I couldn’t disguise that fact so I tried to compensate by making it the most extensively researched and footnoted paper in the history of history. My professor gave me a middling grade and simply wrote “workmanlike.” Fair.

The performances and production of The Punisher are mostly workmanlike. Not inspired, but mostly unobjectionable once you get past the torpid opening. I found the two most memorable and outstanding choices are the ones that other folks on here seem to loathe:

1. I have no idea why they set this story in Tampa, but what an interesting choice. While the Punisher will always feel to me like the personification of the “tough on crime” era of New York, it was so refreshing to see an action movie set in an unexpected locale.

2. You know whose work wasn’t boring and workmanlike? JOHN TRAVOLTA. I think I would have loved a version of the movie from his perspective, a frightened and bizarre crime weirdo being stalked on the periphery by a vengeful force of nature.

It’s an interesting artifact from a time that’s hard to imagine now. We didn’t know what to do with Marvel heroes and weren’t sure what a blockbuster action movie was supposed to be.

I can’t say I understood it, but it was lovely and featured an exceptional cast.

I normally hate sequels and sci-fi/fantasy “series,” instead preferring works that can stand alone. I’m terribly glad I made an exception for A Deepness in the Sky, however. While set in the same universe as A Fire Upon the Deep, this book explores very different topics and themes. What are the acceptable human costs of progress? What are the implications of technologies we cease to be able to understand? This is classic high-concept science fiction, a work that makes us question our present-day reality by presenting it as an unknown future instead. My only complaint, and it’s a minor one, is that in places the narrative drags. Not to worry, as the bevy of interesting ideas throughout the book kept my interest nonetheless.

DNF

I find most fantasy books are very slow starts as there is an ironclad rule that they must frontload their setting’s new terminology and lore. Usually if I can just endure the first 40 pages, the author will have gotten it out of their system and the fun can begin.

I didn’t find that to be true here. On the other side of that wall of jargon (this world can reuse our curse words, but it needs a whole aside about its special term for “dusk” ?) is a slight, slow story. It doesn’t offend but I kept waiting for the characters to be more than “the big one who eats” or “the twins who are twins.” I gave up about a fourth of the way through. I’m sure from all my friends’ glowing reviews that it gets better, but I lack the constitution to find out.

The story is centered in a dark, rich setting that gave me great vibes of Duskvol or Dunwall but after so much care in building it, I just wanted it to be put to better use.

While it isn’t the scariest horror movie ever, this sure punched above it’s weight and surprised me. An interestingly flawed lead character, two great performances, and a surprising amount of humor made it a fun watch.

It doesn’t reach quite the same geights as History of the Seattle Mariners, but still a very enjoyable miniseries. I wish it could fine more of the unexpected humor I have loved in other Jon Bois documentaries, but who can resist falling in love with Bud Grant, Fran Tarkenton, and all these other great Vikings?

An outstanding documentary miniseries, amazing given that it was a subject I believed I had no interest in.

Jon Bois’ style is such a fresh take on documentary storytelling. It’s both high-concept and deliberately lo-fi. The series can be reduced to 4-5 hours of zooming in and out of a single calendar, but this approach heightens the storytelling, making a documentary style unlike anything I’ve ever seen. A single still image of a player’s glove can become thrilling foreshadowing.

Bois’ storytelling is phenomenal. This series alternates between hilarious details and moving sports stories. Both gripped me, and I’m not sure whether I’ll remember Ichiro or the triple blurp more.

This kind of ruins other documentaries for me.

Because I am foolish, I needed to have this book recommended to me a zillion times. My problems with it were many. It looked too long, I prefer one-off stories over the first books of series, and I immediately fell into a deep, dreamless sleep when someone described half the book as an evolutionary tale about spiders.

I finally knuckled down and read it and now I am angry. Angry at myself for waiting this long and angry at Adrian Tchaikovsky for perhaps ruining all other space operas. This is one of the best books I’ve read in ages.

This is a book about so many things that it’s hard to summarize how I feel about it. Instead, here’s just a short, random list of things I appreciate about it:

• Let’s talk about those spiders. I struggle with aliens in sci-fi as I find there’s a tension between relatability and believability. Usually aliens are either too human, being relatable but not at all believable, or too alien, becoming quite believable but without any way for me to care about them. Tchaikovsky neatly avoids both traps. Chapters focusing on the spiders allow us to see the world through their eyes, becoming at once both believable and relatable.

• I loved how this book plays with time. Without going into details, this book goes beyond “relativistic time is wacky” and deals with some very interesting ramifications of the extreme time lengths of deep space travel. We share the characters’ confusion at times, trying to piece together what has happened and why.

• The pacing is fantastic. I really wasn’t expecting to say that of a near-infinitely long book about evolutionary science fiction, but it was a real page turner that I couldn’t put down.

• While it’s the first in a series, it does a great job of wrapping up with a great, satisfying conclusion. I didn’t feel like I was merely reading a prolonged Act I.

The book has a few minor flaws - I wasn’t invested in the spiders’ story until about a third of the way through the book, and a number of the human characters seemed a little thin. But there’s so much wonder in this book that I can’t be bothered to care.

An odd, mostly unsatisfying movie that gradually unravels as it progresses. The story of a strange cowboy and a definitely-underage teen girl is filled with so many curious details that the movie is content not to explore. What happened to the parents? Why do people pray to antennas? How did cops turn up so much information so quickly? What is going through the kid’s head in the third act that causes him to behave that way?

Instead of exploring these ideas, we have time for long shots of highways and to watch Edward Norton smush a donut hole into the center of a donut. That is its own kind of cinematic gold, but it doesn’t make for a coherent whole (hole?)

I have to admit that I really wasn’t looking forward to watching this. The poster is a snooze and the short description makes it sound like the kind of aimless slow burn that is entirely not my vibe.

I WAS WRONG! TEAM LONE STAR FOR LIFE!

Lone Star uses a murder mystery as the backdrop to explore the connections and contradictions of a small town struggling with multiculturalism, with history, and with progress. For a movie with so many characters, I was surprised at how much depth each is given. Hardly a line or a scene goes to waste without revealing something new about the people of this small town.

There’s not a bad performance in the whole thing, but Chris Cooper shines as the Sheriff in an understated but rich performance.

That ending though! Good endings resolve the plot or character threads in an unexpected but satisfying way. A great ending does both, and Lone Star has a great ending.

If I had to complain, the two montages in this movie are pretty dull. The first, a montage of Sheriff Deeds taking notes, is particularly exhausting. You almost sense the filmmakers knew this as they use these montages to experiment with strange new edits and scores, none of which feel at home in this otherwise perfect movie.

Boy these vampires sure make life difficult for themselves. They routinely seemed shocked by the arrival of sunrise, desperately trying to outrun its rays day after day.

Bill Paxton steals the show with a mega performance, the kind of performance that Nicolas Cage would later refine to an art.

Aside from that, it’s hard to say much about this movie. The story is so slight and main characters so thin that it doesn’t leave much of an impression. It was occasionally well shot - the motel shootout and the sensual biting scenes stand out in my memory. Aside from that, it just was.

What an unexpected joy. A father and daughter are living a hard-scrabble life out on the frontier when their plans go astray.

Pedro Pascal steals the show with his performance with a character that speaks as if Shakespeare had written a spaghetti western. The set design was phenomenal as well. This carves out a new lane of scifi, imagining the Apollo 11 era of spaceflight mixed with the lived-in aesthetic of the Alien franchise. The result is a believably crap futurism unlike anything I’ve seen before.

My only complaint is that the plot itself is overly familiar and won’t hold many surprises after the first act. But who cares when it’s this fun and lovely?

I started my review of Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet with “Usually I bounce right off of stories that are almost entirely without plot…”

So I couldn’t recall why I put this one on my reading list when I saw it recently. I wondered that again, book in hand, reading the dust jacket and thinking “man, this really doesn’t sound like anything I’m going to enjoy.”

Well here I am on the other side, still confused why I put this on my to-read list. But that’s entirely on me. This book is incredibly clear about what it is and isn’t. I’m sure folks who just want a cozy cup of tea in a new place will dig the heck out of it.

My two-star review is more a review of my book-selecting skills than a commentary on this. This was fine; I’m the problem.

Usually I bounce right off of stories that are almost entirely without plot, but I really dug this one. I appreciated just getting to spend some time with these spacefarers, seeing how their lives were shaped by the minor details of their daily routines and co-habitation. The characters were charming, if a bit one-dimensional (especially the alien characters - I wish they had any flaws at all or something that made them more than unbelievably enlightened beings to help our flawed humans ascend).

Not exactly a page-turner or the kind of thing I want to read often, but I had a fun and very cozy trip.

The best of the post-Walker era of Fast & Furious.

Humans tend to remember endings more than beginnings, so this movie is wise to frontload all the bad, boring parts. It opens with a retcon and replay of the ending of Fast Five, a much better action sequence than you’ll see in this movie’s first 45 minutes. It then cuts to an interminable action sequence in Rome that features many characters doing nothing, a seemingly endless chase, and a really clumsy introduction of Momoa as the villain.

I love this series but I started doing the dishes at this point.

But! After some wobbly exposition (too many Nobodies to count), it finally starts turning around! Someone remembered that John Cena is a great comedic actor and put him to much better use than last time around. Instead of going bigger, the movie highlights some thrilling and smaller action sequences that really sing (the Han/Shaw fight, the Cipher/Letty grudge match). Momoa’s villain was given space to breathe as a character, and Alan Ritchson turns in one of the series’ best supporting performances. They even gave Roman an extremely brief break from nonstop comic relief, although they still hold up their tradition of really overdoing how stupid Roman suddenly became after part II.

I still have my complaints (why cast Charlize Theron but never let her do anything!), but I’m excited to see this wrap up in the next installment.

I need to rewatch this in order to decide whether BLADE or BLADE II is the best Marvel movie of all time, but that’s my review for now. It’s amazing, Snipes has never been better, and they better approach the remake VERY THOUGHTFULLY.

A solidly enjoyable documentary about a mountain climbing expedition that goes horribly wrong. The story is told in two contrasting styles - interviews with the people who lived the experience, and recreations of key events with actors/mountain climbers. This makes for plenty of thrilling shots where you wonder “how on earth did they film this” as well as very human moments in the interviews.

However, it’s clear that the movie had to cast climbers first and actors second. The sequences that rely more on the actor’s emotions instead of mountainous derring-do lose my interest. Since a good portion of the final third takes place more or less on land without climbing, it becomes a real chore to get through.

While one climber’s experience is definitely more harrowing than the other, I would have loved our time to be spent a little more evenly. We even get a postscript at the movie’s end to explain how one soon got back to mountain climbing; the PTSD and abandonment of the sport by the other goes unmentioned. I think the story loses a little richness as a result.

Still, it’s a great, unique documentary and the first half is an amazing, tense ride.

I struggled with the review a bit. This movie made a major impression on me when I first watched in 2003. Twenty years later, it’s not as good as I remember it being but that could simply be my memory playing tricks on me.

I couldn’t finish this, gave up about a third of the way through. I love video games and have even tried my hand at building them (no). Several people whose taste I generally vibe with have recommended this to me. I was sure I was going to like this.

I just couldn’t. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to feel about these characters - they felt flat and one-dimensional. I persevered through the development of their first big game, hoping at least that the plot would capture me, the characters would evolve in some exciting direction, or the detailed minutiae of game development would resonate with me. It didn’t.

It’s probably just as much a commentary on me as it is the book. I don’t often read coming-of-age stories or works set in the modern day, so I’m probably not the target audience.

OKAY, MY TERRIBLE, INCOMPLETE REVIEW IS DONE, WHEW! NOW HERE’S A DIGRESSION I KEPT WONDERING ABOUT THROUGH THE BOOK:

I kept trying to place Ichigo somewhere in the history of video games and failing. I vaguely recall they built it sometime in the late 90’s - Nintendo 64 is mentioned (late `96) but not Dreamcast (late ‘98, a groovy console which these auteurs would have been super duper into). So let’s say sometime between 1997 - 1999.

It was a challenge to suspend disbelief that a 2D, art-inspired game would be a breakout hit around that time. This was the peak of our early obsession with 3D visuals at all costs, even when it resulted in 85% of N64/PS1 games being jagged brown messes. Jump forward a decade and sure, you’re starting to see the resurgence of 2D indie darlings that Ichigo resembles (the Ori games definitely bear a resemblance), but I had trouble figuring out how Ichigo would have been a hit in its contemporary gaming landscape.

There are some earlier artsy 3D games that kinda feel like Ichigo if you squint - Jet Set Radio’s super stylized skating hit in 2000 and Parappa in 1996 has some charming cartoon vibes. But I cannot think of much from this timeframe that is anything like Ichigo. Is it based on something I’m not thinking of or never played?

What an incredibly silly thing to get hung up on! Trying to place a fictional work in fictional history is factually stupid - history is made by unexpected breakout hits and I have no problem with this book being set in an alternate reality where Ichigo bucked the prevailing PS1-era 3D hellscape trends and was a breakout 2D hit.

Anyway, if someone sees this and is thinking “Oh, Ichigo is clearly inspired by insert-game-I’m-forgetting-here”, holler!

A story about a hike that goes very wrong. So very little happens that I’m surprised to see three people share the writing credit - did they each write two pages of script and then decide to start rolling film?

I was mostly bored and relieved that someone else’s pick for our film club was as bad as my own. It wasn’t absolutely terrible though. Here’s some random things I liked:

• The Gerrys (Gerries?) have a peculiar way with language, seeming to impart instant meaning to strange phrases on-the-spot so casually, as if they have always been saying them to each other. They suddenly talk about “mating grounds” or”dirt mattresses” or “succumbing” as if they were Scientologists immersed in their own custom vocabulary.
• Sorry Matt Damon, but you weren’t the best actor in this. While ideally the camera would never linger on anyone’s unmoving face for 3-5 minutes at a time, I much preferred it when the camera chose Casey Affleck instead of Matt Damon. He brought as much dimension and nuance as one could to this sterile, stark script.
• I loved the final, surreal early morning walking scene at first (until it went on 4x longer than it ought to have, of course). It had some strong experimental 70s film vibes.
• While none of the few other humans were credited, Luke Wilson was in this, right? RIGHT?! The internet has nothing to say on this matter, perhaps I too am delusional after this long walk in the desert.

Also, I wanted to exclaim “Blue Screen of Death!” at the movie’s end but no one would have appreciated that joke so instead I’m telling it here. Was that joke worth reading or writing? No, not at all, but then that’s GERRY for you.

A friend in college loved the movie Reindeer Games, and the only rationale he could provide was “Man, you can NOT beat a triple-cross!”

I was thinking of that friend when I landed on a four-star review for this.

Yes, Lost Bullet 2 probably hews too close to the first one. The original had a bananas melee with a bunch of cops? This one does too! What about those crazy just-this-side-of-post-apocalyptic car mods? This one ups the ante!

What’s amazing about Lost Bullet 2 is the number of factions in this movie and how they weave in and out. There’s 4-6 groups with competing agendas, and every few minutes we’re treated to a new combination of 2-3 of these groups facing off against one another. This makes the action scenes dynamic; even if we’ve seen some of these stunts before, we have no idea what the outcome will be. It’s triple-crosses all the way down.

That a movie can do all this clearly, simply, and in just over 90 minutes is remarkable.

This movie was both too much and too little all at once. There were magical moments unlike anything else I’ve seen in movies, confusing moments that had me in uneasy laughter (that pond scene), and parts of this will stick with me forever.

However, all of that is found within a movie that is extremely slow and doesn’t seem to have a lot to say. Many of the movie’s scenes are homages to earlier forms of cinema, meaning that it takes beautiful locales and shoots them in boxy, static, straight-on shots with deliberately wooden acting and pacing.

There’s a journey through the jungle into a cave. I was spellbound by this sequence, and was ready to talk to my wife about how I came around on this movie and kind of liked it. What an amazing ending for this movie!

Except the perfect ending wasn’t the ending. Instead it kept going for a slow and surreal ending that returned to static, boxy shots.

I appreciate the vibes of mid-career David Lynch, around the time he started getting real weird but before he seemed to lose all interest in coherent narratives.

I regret picking this for our film club.

A comic, frantic take on crime sagas in the vein early Coen brothers movies. I cannot say I totally understood all of the plot’s innumerable turns or got many of the jokes, but nonetheless this was a blast to watch.

A gangster comes to town posing as the new governor only to run into the local crime lord. Except that he may not be a gangster, or may not be posing as the new govenor, or may not be up against a local crime lord.

The movie is carried by solid cinematography, great pacing, and too many outstanding performances to list, but especially Chow Yun Fat and and Jiang Wen. This made it easy to overlook the fact that I stopped following who was doublecrossing who for the last 30 minutes.

Ways in which Magic Mike’s Last Dance is like So You Think You Can Dance:

• Great dancing and choreography
• The dancing is rarely very sexy
• Occasionally boring solo dances and audition scenes that don’t seem to end
• Success is often determined by some old crotchety Brit
• In-between dances, there is no overarching plot
• Too many aimless montages that just seem to kill the time between dances
• British host who isn’t super essential to the proceedings but we love her energy anyway

This works for SYTYCD, but it is a real drag here. Channing Tatum and Salma Hayek are amazing and it’s beautiful to watch, but it’s my least favorite of the Magic Mike-iverse. It just doesn’t make much sense, but it’s largely a character drama. The lack of coherence becomes a much bigger problem than when XXL’s lighthearted funtimes road trip also didn’t hold together.

I have no idea what the cats intermission was about, but I want that retroactively edited into all previous Soderbergh movies.

What a triumph! The choreography of the fights was stunning - crazy acrobatics, long takes, and practical effects. The heroes are a delight to watch with Lo Meng stealing the show with an incredible physical performance as the mute and deaf blacksmith.

The plot is a trip - we start with the origin story of the villain who returns home to find his wife slain and son maimed. Not allowing himself to kill, instead he takes out his revenge by maiming the villagers unfortunate enough to cross him. In time, four of these maimed villagers team up, turning their disabilities into strengths. However, our “heroes” have a bloody single-mindedness, having no qualms killing anyone who stands in the way of their quest for revenge.

I thought the training montages were spectacular - Chiang Shang’s particularly impressive stunts were a thrill. I thought this couldn’t be topped and indeed a few of the subsequent battles were lackluster in comparison. Stick with it and be rewarded though - the movie very consciously tops it’s own highs in the final 20 minutes.

Every Scott Adkins movie demonstrates his fighting abilities, but few also highlight his acting chops. To the extent this movie succeeds, it does so on his performance and narration. He does an admirable job, playing a assassin anti-hero who has to fight his way to the truth of his ex-girlfriend’s demise.

I can’t say I loved the movie though. Of the many fights, only those between Adkins and Michael Jai White held my interest, and that made the last 30 minutes really drag. Amy Johnston seemed either saddled with clunky dialogue or had little idea how to deliver it. As the Accident Man regains some of his humanity, the movie loses its fun and steam.

Still, some great fights and a fun first 40 minutes! Recommended to any action fans, probably a pass for others though.

Stoked to know it has a sequel, eager to dip back into this world.

Spectacular set design and a great performance from Florence Pugh weren’t enough to salvage an otherwise languid and repetitive movie. I felt no dramatic tension - the characters seemingly lacked any desires or fears and spent most of the movie waiting for things to happen, just like the audience. It’s hard for me to care about events that no characters care about, especially when anything horrifying happens far offscreen.

I think a lot of Taken-alikes don’t get what made that movie awesome. It wasn’t the general plot or action, it was that phone call with Liam Neeson where you learn just what kind of person he is. It foreshadows in a way that builds our excitement and gives a unique context to his actions.

Furie’s main character has an interesting background that’s revealed slowly over time, but unfortunately that’s all it is - things that happened before the movie started and don’t have much bearing on what’s to come. It’s such a waste when Veronica Ngô did such a great job with what little she was given.

It still had its moments - the opening 30 minutes are great and had me excited to see a Taken-alike in a unique setting, rural Vietnam. (Then the action moves to Saigon, everything becomes incredibly dark, and the movie loses much of its charm). The first fight between protagonist and main villain has an amazing “just how badass is this villain” moment that I won’t dare spoil and the few moments of the final fight that you can actually see are fun.

Bookended by great action sequences and supported by fantastic performances, this thriller punched above its weight. The main character is a little generic and the middle of this movie sags, but I happily overlooked that when I got to see such clear, inventive action sequences. Bonus points for not overstaying its welcome.

“I would like to tell another story about my horses”

This movie feels like someone made a play out of their junior-year Women’s Studies class and then adapted that play into a movie. Forced dialogue and thin characterization throughout a nonsensical plot that oscillates between urgency and languid detours.

An important topic deserves a better movie than this.

A princess and a wizard go on a quest to defeat demons, except that every word of that is wrong in some sense. The delight of reading this is seeing the different ways in which this is wrong and for whom.

What a joy to read, perhaps the best book I’ve read so far this year. It’s so many things all at once:

• An classic fantasy tale of unlikely comrades on a perilous journey and quest
• A commentary on how unrealistic stories like that can be without being painfully “meta” or breaking the fourth wall
• A galaxy-spanning space saga coming to a bittersweet end
• A delightful series of misunderstandings caused by entirely different viewpoints and contexts

This novella has so much more to say than so many other ponderous lengthy books, it seems like magic (or at least, it’s indistinguishable from magic, whatever it is)

A very okay example of very okay indie movies. It’s gentle and not unpleasant, but it doesn’t have much to say. Some parts seem very stretched out to give it a 90 minute runtime; other portions feel like a rush of exposition they couldn’t fit in anywhere else.

Bill Hader says he couldn’t have made Barry without people seeing this first. Thank you Skeleton Twins, please have an extra star.

A game of Pixar bingo played while watching this would only last about 10 minutes. It’s so full of the familiar tropes and flourishes that you’ll quickly fill up your card.

It’s a shame though - I didn’t have “giant kaiju attack” on my bingo card! That woke me out of my slumber for a few minutes towards the end!

A lush, classically romantic, imaginative set of stories. Each was a sumptuous visual feast and I never wanted it to end. I especially never wanted it to go to boring old London, but that was brief and I’ll forgive it for the somewhat fizzle of an ending.

Man, narratology seems like a lucrative field! Tilda lives a life of comparable luxury! I was a fool to get into tech.

An amazing premise and a terrific performance from Ma Dong-seok make this very uneven crime thriller a lot of fun. The first and third acts don’t really make a lot of sense, but I still had a great time just watching the physicality of the lead performance.

I guess now I need to watch everything else Ma Dong-seok has ever done

I’ve left so many negative reviews on here lately that I feared that I either didn’t like books any more or had become the world’s biggest grump.

So I was delighted to stumble across this! It’s got the look and feel of a half-remembered dream. It’s about the world’s greatest detective except when it’s about the star of a soap opera. It’s about this detective’s greatest case yet except when it’s about the challenges of memory. It’s set in Paris except when it’s suddenly in New York or the Mediterranean. Maybe it’s set in the modern day, or maybe 50 years ago? It’s hard to say.

It’s awash in lovely illustrations that drew me in while also leaving me unsure where I was at any time. It reminds me of Dark City in the way that it creates a setting that is full of familiar elements while being completely alien in its totality.

But now I’m getting haughty. It’s good and I dug its vibes. There are perhaps a few too many parts that were obtuse for the sake of being obtuse, but who cares when it’s this well done?

Most of the book is line-for-line repeats from the show. If you’d like show transcripts with great graphic design, or if you’re a huge Bob Ducca or Fourvel fan (who are both repeatedly featured throughout the book), then this is for you!

Neither describes me so I didn’t really connect with this. There are a few notable exceptions though that hit me so hard that I still must give this a three-star review:

• Harris Wittels’ Foam Corner in print is worth the price of admission alone. I was really happy to see these silly jokes one more time.

• The “Hollywood Facts” song is… not my favorite bit from the podcast. I think I audibly groaned when I saw it made the CBB book. So it’s amazing that it turned into one of my favorite sections. The Hollywood facts collected herein are hilarious. I’m now a believer and 100% on Team Hollywood Facts.

• A few bits expand their characters’ weird universes in unexpected directions which I really dug. I could have read an entire book of Werner Herzog’s Yelp reviews, Margery Kershaw’s earnest park diaries, or Memphis Kansas Breeze’s bizarre tour schedule.

• Of the book’s many forewards and prefaces, Weird Al’s is just so good – I had to immediately re-read when I finished the book.

Mickey7 is a clone who is bred to die, and die, and die. When Mickey7 accidentally ends up coexisting with Mickey8, mild shenanigans eventually ensue.

I don’t understand the buzz for this book. Mickey is a bland character, seemingly without character traits or any particular desires except to find his next meal. I could overlook that except the book is mostly plotless as well, with a dramatic conflict only surfacing in the last few chapters of the book. He inexplicably has friends and a romantic interest – I’d love for the next entry to be from their perspectives so we can learn what they found interesting or noteworthy about this guy.

What would it be like to actually be the main character of something like Murder, She Wrote – someone who is constantly surrounded by murder & mayhem through no fault of their own? Oh, and also they go into space and meet aliens and stuff.

That combination is a very ambitious premise so I am willing to forgive the book for not doing much with it when you have to fit it in alongside a murder mystery, an overview of a milieu of spacefaring species, the story of mankind’s first contact, and a frankly overwhelming amount of backstories. There’s enough going on that, even when many of those plotlines weren’t working for me, there was usually something to keep my interest.

After an underwhelming first half though, the book moves from staid exposition into mystery, and I enjoyed it much more. The seemingly pedestrian alien archetypes (rock people! insect people!) found depth and the plot found momentum.

I hope that a number of the side characters don’t return for the next installment, but I’ll be looking forward to reading it regardless as now the universe is established and the author can (hopefully!) spend less time establishing.

Every Scalzi book has that character, the fun smart-aleck whose interjections and jokes keep the plot fun and whimsical.

This book has a lot of characters, but really it has only that character. It’s very hard to tell characters apart since it’s all interjections and cracking jokes at each other. I think one was a little tougher and another was a little more egotistical?

It was a lot.

The rest of the book is primarily worldbuilding as the characters observe giant creatures going about their business. Many chapters focus on telling the reader about the fictional science that allows these kaiju to exist - I didn’t need help suspending my disbelief so they fell flat for me.

The actual plot of the book is late, brief, and quickly resolved.

I wanted to like this, but I just couldn’t. Maybe I was in a terrible mood, maybe it’s just because I’m not that into Godzilla, or maybe I have rotten taste.

A lovely, grim, desolate story. Folks have described this as “post-apocalyptic” but it’s more that humanity seems to have given up on civilization, and perhaps even given up on humanity itself.

Two outstanding, very physical performances from Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson carry a simple story of the dogged pursuit of what seems like doom. Along the way, questions are asked but rarely answered amidst an incredible, bleak landscape that reflects the people surviving in it.

It’s like a coherent, non-verbal take on The Counselor.

This movie wasn’t my favorite, but it was also fascinating and hypnotic to watch at times. The movie feels frequently languid and unfocused, so there are lots of scenes that go on too long or aren’t super related to anything else in the movie.

But James Dean really is something else. His performance is almost alien to the rest of the cast. While everyone else has perfect, just-barely-English diction, he mutters and growls half of his lines. Everyone else is statically facing the camera while Dean prowls like an animal and can’t seem to focus his vision on any single place too long.

I’ve seen movies that pre-date method acting and those that come afterwards - I’ve never seen one squarely in-between, where one actor is almost from the future while everyone else is from the past. It makes an already great performance really stand out.

I spent the first 30 minutes of this movie thinking that it was a lovely, well-intentioned mess. An amusement without direction or purpose.

Then it comes together! By somehow getting stranger! I loved it. What seems like a random collection of surreal interludes finds its purpose, becoming sweet and hilarious and intentionally stupid and meaningful and beautiful all at the same time.

I almost always go for subtitles but I’m glad we did the dub on this one - there are so many great visuals while dialogue just flys at you, I would have missed so much.

This movie is so much, it’s hard for me to articulate how I feel about it. But I definitely feel about it.

Never before has a director and script asked so little of a cast capable of so much.

What if you made a movie that was equal parts E.T. and THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP and it was better than both of them?

My only real complaint is minor, the opening drags on too long before Daniel Radcliffe is allowed in on the fun.

I didn’t know that anyone else was thinking about these challenges in maintaining friendships. Am I too dull to be someone’s friend? How do people find the time to be a friend? This would be the movie I’d make if I just had time, talent, ambition, capital, and was about twice as smart. (but those are the only things holding me back)

Can we start giving Oscars to animals? Jenny’s performance was better than the majority of the human performance I’ve seen. In life, not just in movies.

Back when Facebook groups were a thing, I used to be a member of ”… And Then I Found $5,” a group of people who knew they couldn’t tell stories effectively because of random details.

I suspect the author could have been one of our ranks. I liked the style of this and I’ll read the second in this series someday, but the substance was more “here’s a collection of random things that happened one time” rather than a coherent story with plot or meaning.

No one found five dollars though, so perhaps I’m not giving the author enough credit.

I only stumbled into this book because of a strangely named achievement in Civilization 6 that I accidentally achieved. Then I read the summary of this voyage and thought “no way, that’s crazy” and had to learn more.

YOU GUYS THIS WAS WILD.

I loved this book. The author peppers the story with historical context and does a reasonable job of balancing the remarkable achievement of Magellan & his crew against their horrible actions. You can see why some celebrate his accomplishments and others celebrate his final end.

One of the better histories I’ve read in awhile.

If I was a person of character or work ethic, I’d go back to all my other five-star Goodreads reviews and bump most of them down just so I can show how deeply I loved this book. I suffer from no such flaws though.

I don’t care about spies and I’ve never been able to finish a Le Carre book. The plot of this was secondary for me - it was just an opportunity to revel in these oddball characters who despise in equal parts each other and themselves. Funny, exciting, and surprisingly relatable.

A fun read. Flavia is a borderline-sociopathic girl, brilliant in some ways but still young & naive in others. It makes for a wonderfully unique mystery as she, if not quite an unreliable narrator, at least an inexperienced one.

My only gripe is that the substance of Flavia’s character seemed to bend to the story’s needs in the moment. Sometimes she could be ruthless only to be saccarine-sweet moments later. Perhaps that’s just part of being a teenage girl though?

Two great performances elevate this movie. I wish it was shorter (I’m now set for several lifetimes on interviews of children, thanks) but there’s something about this understated, gentle waft-in-the-breeze of a movie that sticks with me.

I think this Joaquin Phoenix kid has a bright future in the pictures.

Look, this is a super okay movie, almost completely unobjectionable in every way. It is not a 4-star movie. I watched it today and I will probably struggle to tell you anything about it tomorrow.

BUT THAT VAL KILMER SCENE

Bullet Train is the Tonight Show of action movies - great cast and a hope that constant fun helps you overlook the lack of substance or entertainment value.

I didn’t turn it off so it mostly worked on me.

Also, it is easily the second-best Tatum-Bullock-Pitt movie of 2022

Perhaps the ending doesn’t totally work, but everything else is so dang great that I cannot be bothered to care.

More Knives Outs until I decease, please and thank you.

When David Lynch makes a high-concept movie that’s too long with bizarre dialogue delivered in tonally strange ways and character behaviors that rarely make sense, we call it high art and lose our minds over it.

When M. Night Shyamalan does it though, we all look down on it. Why?! I don’t get it. In the same way I have a soft spot for early Lynch movies like Dune that were both super-flawed and super-interesting, I think I enjoy M. Night movies in a similar way.

ALTHOUGH WHEN IS THAT NEW MIDSIZED SEDAN SINGLE GOING TO DROP?! One of the all-time great character names in cinema.

Our pandemic film club watched over 60 movies together, then we all picked our single most and least favorite movies.

ORLANDO was the only movie to appear on both the “best of” and “worst of” lists.

It’s five stars, it’s best of, g’doi. There is nothing like it, there will never be anything else like it, and it’s one of the all-time greats even if I cannot tell you exactly what it’s about or what it’s saying.

ORLANDO!

There should be an Oscar for Best Punch Ups to an Existing Script. A superb cast and a seemingly nonstop supply of side jokes elevate what would have been otherwise unremarkable.

I knew I was in for a good time once Channing Tatum was scrolling through the contacts on his phone.

It’s amazing how carefully people avoid mentioning what this is about

Like most PT Anderson movies, I wish this was about an hour shorter. Nearly every man on screen chewed through their lines and dominated their scenes. Doubly true for poor Gary - the kid put in a heroic effort but nearly every Gary-centric scene is a snooze. Gary talking to Bradley Cooper especially felt like it was seemingly without beginning or end, a scene that gradually expands to consume the rest of the film until there is nothing left but blank reaction shots to an infinite staccato monologue.

I suspect I would have greatly enjoyed a version which was exclusively from Alana’s point of view.

Best inappropriately rom-com movie I have seen in awhile.

I watched the movie Casino Royale in a theater, seated next to a Bond superfan. Late in the movie, Bond enters a sportscar as the music swells. “Aw yeah, FINALLY!” the superfan exclaimed as the movie was signaling a car chase. I smiled because I had seen the movie once before, so I knew that Bond immediately crashes – there is no car chase in Casino Royale.

The Widows of Malabar Hill is the Casino Royale of mysteries. It is a richly told and well-researched story which sits at the intersection of so many different cultures, all carefully and thoughtfully represented. However, the actually mystery of this mystery book is a bit like the superfan’s movie experience. It comes late in the book and the tale really doesn’t have much interest in it – the mystery finally starts at page 120, only for the subsequent 50 pages to focus upon an unrelated flashback. It was my “Aw yeah, FINALLY” moment.

If a good mystery is full of twists & turns, then this book is more like the lazy curves of a gentle country road. This is less of a whodunnit and more a journey to understand the culprit’s motives, perhaps a whydunnit? I knew where this road was going long before the end, but it was a pleasant journey nonetheless.

Let’s hope the next one has a proper car chase though.

2 / 5 - more accurately, “Lunch, Pussycat! Chill! Chill!”

While I appreciate this as a historical artifact, I found it very dull. Very little happens and yet it is a pretty confusing movie to watch.

Have there been three less dirty people in cinema who spent so much time showering or found such joy in it?

Utopias are rare in fiction because they lack dramatic tension. Ministry for the Future serves as proof of this: after a harrowing opening, it’s 550 pages of life going very well for everyone in general but no one in particular. The book is largely devoid of characters or a traditional plot. Anything that might be interesting to the reader happens offscreen so that we can focus on extremely detailed descriptions of rewilding efforts as observed by dirigibles, brief meeting notes of government committees, or first-person accounts of the life experiences of a photon.

Here’s a short list of the book’s events which sound captivating but are unfortunately handwaved past in a few sentences:

• Terrorists use drones and swarm missiles to basically end standard air travel, shipping, traditional armed conflicts between nation states, consumption of animal products, and coal power.
• An open-source, distributed social media platform emerges that rapidly displaces all existing social media companies and allows users to monetize their own data.
• The world collectively agrees to a de facto individual wealth cap of $50mil / person and uses a variety of legal and extra-legal means to enforce it.
• Refugees are granted global citizenship and universal free travel.
• Fiat currencies are replaced by a single blockchain-based carbon coin which doesn’t have power consumption issues and just works.

Each of these would face incredible resistance from individuals, organizations, and nations. Unfortunately, the book either has no interest in exploring that resistance or assumes that everyone would come around quickly.

As a result, the world presented in this book is extremely hard to relate to even though it begins here & now.

While much of this book’s message resonates with me, I didn’t find it particularly scholarly and didn’t see new insights beyond what Borg has contributed to this field. This felt like reading one of those academic papers which just summarize other academic papers

After a vivid opening about life in a Louisiana devastated by climate change, the rest of the book is filled with dry, workmanlike prose that reads like much nonfiction journalism. It is a factual accounting of many action-packed events but I really struggled to find any character or soul.

Outside of the climate fiction, I also really struggled with the world building. The structure and battle lines of this second American civil war were very confusing in an era where red states have grown so much beyond the deepest south. It was hard for me to see the path from the world when this book was written into the one that it describes.

I would have swore my Netflix tier didn’t have ads

My first manga! When I heard this was about a 20 year old woman who is married off to a 12 year old boy in the 19th centur Silk Road, I had many preconceived notions of what this would mean. They were all wrong in the best of ways. Charming and incredibly human story written with detail and care. Absolutely lovely as well.

Short and sweet overview of how to create practice groups in an organization. Provides some great specific frameworks on how to kick them off but everything else is pretty general. I am still unsure about how to keep these groups going through the seemingly inevitable doldrums that happen once the initial excitement wears off though.

Dr. Barr is forthright that she is a historian, not a theologian. It is no surprise then that her theological arguments are a little thin but her historical arguments are compelling. Dr. Barr argues convincingly that gender neutral readings of key passages are not a new fad but instead are a return to a tradition that predates the KJV. As a result, the case to exclude women from church leadership must heavily lean on both a particular view on inerrancy in conjunction with a very specific reading of select translations of New Testament. As a result, it is hard to view complementarity as anything but a modern construct created to defend and enshrine the patriarchy.

What a refreshing spin on a very standard heroic journey plot structure! The setting, structure, and characters blend a rich set of ancestries which are horribly underrepresented in this genre. I also loved the fact that the plot moved 100mph while still giving the main characters space to breathe and connect with one another.

The plot has few surprises in store, however. After the first 20 pages, most readers will be able to sketch out how the rest of the book unfolds. Don’t let that stop you from a fantastic, unique, and fast read though - I loved it.

Even the poster for this is all over the place and a total mess.

Hard to beat qntm’s take on this qntm.org/rise

I love the author’s podcast, Hardcore History - Carlin goes amazingly deep on varied historical subjects, but always through the lens of making it personal. So I was very excited to read this book.

This book is fine. Many chapters are abbreviated stories from the podcast*. Chapters vary wildly in their scope** and include frequent footnotes of varying interest***. Portions of the book are fascinating like the Bronze Age collapse, but many others left me scratching my head as to their inclusion.

I enjoyed it and if you’re curious about the grim possible fates of humanity, it’s a great read. Otherwise, start with his podcast Hardcore History and then perhaps come back to this if you love it like I do.

• • at least he chose great episodes like Fall of the Roman Empire or Logical Insanity.

** - a general history of plagues in one, a personal retelling of the Cuban Missile Crisis in another.

*** - his podcast is heavy on tangents just like this. It’s one of the ways he makes it personal, but these tangents translate to book form as many, many footnotes. Some are interesting but the sheer quantity makes it distracting in a way the podcast isn’t.

If you believe in yourself or others as perfectly (or even mostly) rational beings, this book will demolish such beliefs. It took me the better part of six months to read. Here’s an abridged list of what it changed about me in those six months:

• My interviewing practices and interview design (since humans are objectively terrible at subjective assessments)
• How I evaluate risk (since I’m too risk averse, even when I think I’m not)
• How I feel about my happiness (since regression to the mean is a thing, bad times are inevitable and have to follow good times by definition)
• How I make regret-based decisions (since we regret far fewer things than we believe we will regret)

It’s a heavy, dense book that has changed my life. I’ll have to return to it in 5-10 years for another pass - I’m sure I’m missing more lessons to be learned.

EVE Online has fascinated me from the sidelines. I was able to endure about 20 minutes of it before I grew bored, but I have followed the game from afar ever since. The stories that come out of EVE are unlike anything else in gaming (and perhaps even human history). It’s a fascinating and under-covered subject.

I struggle with this book, though. It’s a bit clumsily written, but my bigger issue is that the book’s ambition (covering the great wars of EVE Online for the first 6 years of the game’s existence) is so vast that there is little room left for personalities. Great alliances rise up and bash one another, but there is little drama to it as the factions tend to be faceless and the reasons for wars are typically “because this corporation needed to declare war on someone and this was the best target.”

I would have loved a take that was less comprehensive and more focused on smaller stories and individuals. However, this book and the story within are still unlike any other and has offered me the best insight yet on what makes EVE so different than other online worlds.

Who would have guessed that a book about a robot that just wants to be left alone would be full of such heart, excitement, and hilarity? I related to Murderbot deeply despite not having a small arsenal surgically implanted in my body. This robot is one of the most original and yet relatable characters I’ve encountered in science fiction. I absolutely adored this teensy little book.

I’d write a longer review, but the 700 episodes of TV I’ve been downloading while writing this aren’t going to watch themselves, you know.

I am tempted to describe The Gone World as “Tom Clancy’s 12 Monkeys” and leave it there. That does Tom Clancy a disservice though - while his books were stuffed with military minutiae that bordered on fetishism, he filled the gaps inbetween with characters of personality and spirit.

The Gone World lacks any of that. Central characters are defined by single personality traits and based on easily recognized tropes. The dialogue is painfully clunky, unintentionally providing this book’s few moments of levity.

The book redeems itself in the last third as the plot kicks into high gear. What had seemed like languid True Detective fan fiction evolves into an original and thrilling take on time travel. I flew through the final hundred pages in a single sitting, even if I didn’t quite understand what was happening.

I would have loved a novella version of this book.

A recurring theme in Ancillary Sword is that truth and fairness are relative to perspective, that one person’s truth may be hard for another to even conceive. In that spirit, here’s a couple of truths about this book - choose whichever you like.

—Option 1—

Ancillary Sword is a profound book about race and culture. Leckie examines the forces that create and sustain prejudice and stereotyping from all parties involved. You see how hard these prejudices are to dislodge because they are so prevalent, lurking deep in the subcontext behind even banal small talk.

—Option 2—

Ancillary Sword is about a godlike being with dictatorial levels of authority who is sent to a planet to prevent political instability. Upon arrival, it seems politically stable and that turns out to be mostly correct. There are a few minor events very late in the book to challenge that, but they are brief and without suspense against the main character’s near omniscience and omnipotence.

One of these books is profound, timely, and remarkable, with much more to say than Ancillary Justice. One of them is painfully boring. I suspect both books would have benefitted from providing real challenges to the main character. I’m glad I read it, but it’s hard to imagine revisiting it.

Killing Gravity is a short novella that feels like reading a comic. It features strong worldbuilding and a great lead character who feels torn between either using her amazing spacewitch powers to make her life easier or trying to be a better, gentler person.

The plot moves quickly but still takes a backseat to the characters and the setting. A great, quick summer read.

The author creates an amazingly detailed and inventive world all stemming from the core conceit of the British Empire gaining a foothold in the afterlife. Unfortunately, it was hard to find any characters with personality or depth between that detailed world and the Le Carre-esque espionage tale that drives the plot.

This is the first book I’ve read that sets out to convince me that I’m terrible. It succeeds, pointing out all the ways our imagination fails us in predicting happiness and how we continue using it nonetheless. My only complaint is that the book spends a bit too much time convincing us to trust it rather than diving into details.

“Hey Barbara! What does Sue got that I don’t got?”

“Haven’t you noticed? Her breasts are oddly lumpy and smell like nuts! You should try the FABULOUS NUT BRA!”

Tales Designed to Thrizzle is a remarkably silly book. Ostensibly an homage to the golden age of comics, each page is filled with incredible non-sequiturs, sight gags, and random fits of rage. Guaranteed to tickle your funny bone. Print off this page and mail it in with $19.95 to receive your own wonderful copy.

PLEASE CIRCLE ONE:

YES - Enclosed is my $19.95 for a delightful copy of Tales Designed to Thrizzle printed especially for me! Complementary FABULOUS NUT BRA not included!

NO - I do not enjoy humor and laughter and would rather not read this book. I am strangely okay with printing off webpages and writing on them, however.

JJ Abrams proves to have a deft touch with homages to other original directors, always taking great care not to add anything new or personal. A loving, nearly shot-for-shot remake of A New Hope.

This was good and I read it forever ago and don’t actually remember that much aside from “people need to have honest, hard conversations about how & where they spend their time at work.” Instead, here’s a couple of stories about it.

First, this book was originally recommended to me by someone I managed, who framed it as “I think this will help with some of your management challenges.” He said this as if my management challenges were a regular topic of discussion rather than an out-of-the-blue declaration of fact. I wasn’t super eager to read it, but when YOUR DIRECT REPORT is telling you to read a book on the subject of how you are managing them, there’s no clear way to say “nah, I’m good.” So that’s how I “decided” to read it.

Years later, I saw it on the bookshelves of a CEO. I was newly hired junior senior management - important enough to meet regularly with the CEO 1:1 but unimportant enough that I could quietly cancel many installments without him noticing. He didn’t have a large bookshelf, only five or six books in an office where everything was just so. In an early conversation, I took a swing and told him it was exciting to work for a CEO who had read and enjoyed The Phoenix Project. He looked at it, smiled, and very casually said “Oh, that? It’s just for show, I don’t know anything about it.”

I would soon realize that this was a microcosm of working for that charlatan - everything we did was only for appearances, no substance. It’s no longer a business, sold in a fire sale after playing a Price is Right-style game of “how close to fraud can you get without going over the line?”

PRETTY CLOSE IT TURNS OUT.

Good book. Highly recommend.

I don’t say many books are truly “must read” books. If you have any interest in the future of technology, humanity, and capitalism, you have to read Accelerando.

At least it will make me seem less crazy.

I generally love Harris’ work, but this is definitely one to avoid. All the characters aside from the protagonist are very thin, and little happens in the way of plot until nearly 2/3 of the book is complete. The main motivator is unraveling the mystery behind the story. It’s ultimately unsatisfying to find out it’s a plotline that has already been explored by major works of fiction repeatedly throughout the last 25 years.

A Fire Upon the Deep is still incredibly relevant almost 20 years after it was published. This book explores the many possible consequences of singularities in the face of a largely uncaring and unmoved universe where the rise and fall of entire civilizations is a non-event. The book is one of the rare treats that presents an intellectual exploration of the consequences of technology and human nature while simultaneously providing a compelling tale of survival and intrigue.

Book three of this series quickly devolves into senseless savagery against the characters. Unless you are deeply curious about the future of the kingdom and Iron Throne, there is little reason to read this book. While there is character growth, each character changes along a predictable and nearly identical path.

It’s more than a bit disturbing to find myself identifying with a super villain, and yet that’s the trick repeatedly played by Incognito. A super villain goes into witness protection, and has to deal with his incredible abilities going to waste. Brubaker is at his best here, weaving a tale that is half pulp thriller, half human interest tale. Highly recommended.

The Reformation sets out to provide a comprehensive history of the Reformation in Europe, and largely succeeds. While many of the characters you know like Martin Luther get plenty of coverage, lesser known but equally-fascinating people like Zwingli and Erasmus get their due as well. What’s more, Diarmaid is careful to balance the individual human stories of the Reformation against the history and evolution of Christain thought in this time. You emerge from the book understanding both the people and the thinking behind these times.

The book suffers in a few places, however. The book starts in the middle, providing the reader with an information overload with little context. The book also includes a less compelling final segment on sexual and cultural mores of the Christian world to wrap the book up. However, neither of these should stop you from reading this if you have any interest in the subject at all.

The Well-Grounded Rubyist is one of my all-time favorite programming books. I normally loathe books focused on learning the particulars of a programming language, instead preferring blogs and experimentation. Well-Grounded Rubyist is a huge exception, though. The book is aimed at experienced programmers new to Ruby, and thoughtfully walks you through the features of the language. I read the book twice cover to cover, and have given several copies to programmers looking to learn Ruby. The informal style of the book combined with the deep, comprehensive overview of the language is just magic and was key to landing my first Ruby gig.

Transmetropolitan explores a future where self-centered consumerism has become the norm, and where everything and nothing are simultaneously sacred. Our tour of this world is through Spider Jerusalem, clearly an imagining of Hunter S. Thompson if his liver was surgically enhanced to withstand far more punishment than Thompson was ever able to dish out.

Like all good sci-fi, this series is very much about our modern world and the frustrations Warren Ellis has with it. At times, all notion of plot and character are thrown aside so that Ellis can rant. These few moments are the only weak spots in Transmetropolitan - otherwise, its a powerful work with both compelling characters as well as relevant reflections on modern society.

Three stars is just an average - if you’re interested at all in the history of this part of the world, this is a five-star book. If not, well, you should read something else.

Byzantium was an empire carved out of a rock and a hard place. Constantly bordered by rival states that basically wanted it gone, its history is tumultuous. Yet its impact on the region was huge and can be seen throughout the Mediterranean. Viewed as an Eastern state by Europe and as a European state by its Middle-Eastern neighbors, Byzantium maintained an uneasy balance between these two worlds that you can still see today in modern-day Turkey.

This book covers much of this history and has plenty of interesting details about the people of this empire. The book is VERY dry, however, and will probably test your endurance in a few places.

It’s an often hilarious tale of a team of superheroes being superheroic in a self-parody of the Marvel universe. If you aren’t grinning when the flying airborne submarines called the “H.A.T.E. Aeromarine” appears, something is wrong with you.

NEXTWAVE calls out every ridiculous element of modern comics that we take for granted, but it does so from a place of deep love. You simultaneously realize that this stuff is absurd and awesome all while being massively entertained. It’s almost lie WATCHMEN through the lens of Hunter S. Thompson, but I’m pretty sure the characters of Nextwave would kick/shoot you until you explode for saying that.

Hate it all you want, but this is still my favorite Hulk. I dig it’s paranoid thriller vibes and loved Norton’s performance. This downbeat movie doesn’t follow the MCU formula of exposition-joke-action-joke-repeat, but that’s part of why it stands out.

If they did an Across the Hulk Multiverse and brought back introverted, thoughtful Norton Hulk, I’d dip back into the MCU for that.

2007 was a crazy good year for cinema with all-timers like Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, and There Will Be Blood.

But even if Juno came out in the comparatively awful years 2005-2006 it would have been the worst Oscar nominee of the year. Yes, I’d rather watch Crash again than this.

A movie in 18 segments.

17 of them: paris is lovely, but that’s all I’m getting from this

The Alexander Payne / Margo Martindale one: I have to pause the movie because of how hard I’m crying.

(17 * 1 star + 1 * 37 stars) / 18 = 3 stars

Easily the best movie JJ Abrams has ever made. It created the template for what every subsequent Mission: Impossible movie is.

JJ Abrams’ strength is casting and then letting those leads carry their scenes. This movie works because of the two amazing lead performances, especially Philip Seymour Hoffman in what was casting against the villain type at the time. They are supported by a phenomenal secondary cast as well.

I think in some ways, Mission: Impossible III helped us figure out what a modern, post-Matrix action movie blockbuster would be.

I went on a mostly blind date around the time this came out. We traded emails beforehand and it happened that we both liked David Mamet films, so we decided to go see this one and have dinner afterwards to discuss it. A great, nerdy idea for a date.

…

I remember nothing else about this dinner or person other than how terribly uncomfortable it was, just a man and woman chatting about a movie where a man savagely murders a woman immediately after their first date.

There was no second date.

But it wasn’t all bad - this movie helped me realize that maybe I don’t like David Mamet all that much after all.