TheVictoriousV Reviews (400)

Sinners (2025)

If you still have a chance to see this in a theater, take it!

[8/10 · 12 May 2025]

Sinners has been killing it these last few weeks, which may be a sign of better times and better audience taste. At first, I wasn't sure if I would wind up watching it, but the more I heard, the greater it sounded.

Of Ryan Coogler, I didn't have any strong previous opinion. He directed the Creed films (unseen by me) and Marvel's Black Panther, which, shoddy rhino VFX or not, is one of the more colorful MCU films and certainly one that managed to reach beyond the usual Marvel audience in an entirely new way -- its Afrofuturism giving black viewers representation of a sort that Hollywood had never previously achieved.

Even so, Coogler wasn't entirely "free" with Black Panther. (In my review of its sequel, Wakanda Forever, I argued that the film is an example of an artist trying to make art under a studio that won't seem to let him -- a serious euology for Chadwick Boseman forced to double as a backdoor pilot for a Dinsey+ show about "what if Iron Man was a teen girl".) With Sinners, he is untrammeled, and there is no doubt that he is one of the Millennial greats.

Set in 1937, in Jim Crow Mississippi, the tale follows the Smokestack twins, Elijah "Smoke" and Elias "Stack" Moore, both played by Michael B. Jordan (in some very well done duplication VFX), as they return from Chicago, having worked a lucrative job for the mafia, to spend their new fortune on a juke joint for black persons only. They convince their young cousin "Preacher Boy" Sammie (Miles Caton) to join in the project as their blues guitarist, and a grouchy old pianist named Delta Slim (a phenomenal Delroy Lindo) and an aspiring singer named Pearline (Jayme Lawson) are also brought in as performers.

They're also joined by an imposingly sized field worker (Omar Miller), Smoke's spiritually in-tune ex-wife (Wunmi Mosaku), two Chinese shopkeepers (Li Jun Li and Yao), and Stack's "half-black" old flame played by Hailee Steinfeld, who provides some of the funniest line deliveries in the film. However, evil forces also move towards the juke joint; a group of bloodthirsty vampires led by Irish immigrant Remmick (Jack O'Connell, another awesome performance) move through Mississippi and make a stop when Sammie's music makes the fabric of reality dance and catches their attention.

It's an electrifying thriller -- with effective fight scenes and another thunderous score from Ludwig Göransson -- that gives us something to think about; even if you aren't a thinkpiece writer, you will likely notice something about how these particular monsters are used and what their existence may represent. The first vampires we see are white people; the very first appears to be a victim/ghost of Irish colonialism, who tries to sell the black folk -- and their Chinese immigrant friends -- at the juke bar on a sort of false "coexistence". A tweet from Jillian Chili describes it as a clash of "two marginalized groups" that "have differences in the ideology of freedom, with one continuing the vicious cycle of its oppressors disguised as empathy".

In addition to its themes of racism, culture, and spirituality, its strongest theme is of course music -- the expression of it and the powers that may come with said expression, provided the right sound is created at the right moment with the right level of frankness.

An opening narration describes various types of music from around the globe that are "so true that they pierce the veil between life and death" and have the capacity to summon spirits from both the past and the future. This is visualized in a later scene that made me feel untethered from my own time and space, just as the characters seemed to be from theirs. Even if you're not the sort of person who believes in spiritual experiences, cinema (as Sinners proves) is the medium that can give them to us -- or, if you're a believer, make them more real than they ever were. (The auditorium I watched this in has a pretty stellar sound system, but I do believe that Sinners is best experienced, most probably, in IMAX.)

I was admittedly a bit disappointed that a few plot threads, e.g. The Native American policemen (or are they vampire hunters?), didn't go anywhere, and I sort of understand people who were perplexed by the ending, even though I believe it works well thematically. (I'll try not to give too much away, for now.) All the same, this is a stirring and often hilarious film with superb musical sequences, first-rate costumes courtesy of Ruth E. Carter, and great performances all around.

And if somehow this isn't doing it for you, see the film for its horniness. To paraphrase a friend, it may the horniest film to feature basically no nudity whatsoever.

Asterix & Obelix: The Big Fight (2025)

Another joyous return to Gaul

[7/10 · 1 May 2025]

As much as I rag on those who want more of the same (be they Star Wars geeks, Marvel geeks, or Human Centipede geeks), I'd be lying if I said I don't always get giddy when there's a new piece of Astérix media coming out. If it's animated, anyway (can't say I was too riveted by the recent live-action movie starring Zlatan Ibrahimovic -- yes, you read that right).

This new show looks at least as beautiful and high-energy as the remarkably cartoony 3D we got in the 2010s animated features (which were done by Mikros Image, the studio that would later do TMNT: Mutant Mayhem and The Captain Underpants Movie). Those films always moved more energetically -- and hilariously -- than we were used to seeing in 3D-animated worlds, and as I see it, it figures that these characters would one day get a Netflix show with the same high-speed animations plus the sorts of textures and stylistic flairs we've seen in the likes of Arcane, The Wild Robot, and the Spider-Verse films (albeit not as often here as I would've liked). Would 3D animation have been quite as fun as it is today without Mikros' work on the Astérix films?

Asterix & Obelix: The Big Fight supplies much of what any good Astérix story should have, including the slapstick battles, with superpowered Gauls pummeling lowly Roman troops with more energy than ever, and the punny names and wordplay -- some of them working in more modern references, e.g. Such characters as Centurion Fastanfurius and a Gaul named Tenmillionclix who changes his name into the more Roman-sounding Tenmillionvius. There are also Marvel references, which may sound eye-rolling but, I dunno, I snickered.

It's especially nice to see Astérix and friends look like their old comic-book and cartoon selves. That may not sound special, since the prior CG films also looked right, but considering what Disney did to their Seven Dwarfs when converting them to a 3D format for their Snow White remake, you never know.

I do have some notes: The show is very clearly based on an Astérix book that didn't even have enough story to fill a feature film (hence why the 1989 movie, which was also a lot more unhinged than this, worked in plot points from both The Big Fight and Asterix and the Soothsayer), ergo we get several dragged-out sequences that also aren't staged very excitingly.

Worst of all, we never see Redbeard and his crew get sunk while minding their own unrelated business. What kind of Astérix story doesn't have that?

Andor: Harvest (2025) Season 2, Episode 3

Let the adults have this, guys

[24 April 2025]

How blessed we are to have something like Andor. It is the only great thing (maybe even the only truly good thing) to come out of the post-Disney Star Wars era, it's the best that Star Wars has been since the franchise first began, and perhaps most impressively, it is the only piece of Star Wars media I could recommend even to people who don't much like Star Wars.

The reasons for this are several: It is mature in a way that the other films and shows aren't, it goes to different corners of George Lucas' galaxy that don't involve (or demand the viewer's knowledge of) the same old characters and concepts, and it aims to first and foremost tell a good, complex, resonant story of revolution instead of getting bogged down in precisely that -- call-backs to characters and places you already know and whose mere mention you're supposed to soy out over.

The characters act and speak like fully fledged human beings, things move with heft and weight, its political messaging goes beyond modish buzzwords, and the Galactic Empire feels like a threat in a way you'll never see in other Disney-Star Wars media -- where Din Djarin or Boba Fett or whoever dispose of Stormtroopers like they're mere video game enemies. Andor understands "quality over quantity" better than the Sequel Trilogy ever could; it doesn't just throw 100 superlaser-equipped Star Destroyers (that then get easily destroyed because "they don't know which way is up") at us. Last season, one single TIE Fighter (the ship that exists in a swarm of disposable "mooks" during most of the franchise's space battles) was presented with all the terror of the WW2 bomber that inspired their sound design. In Season 2, we get scenes that demonstrate how fascists make their ideas more palatable to those on the fence; these aren't simply mustache-twirling villains, which would be the easy way of doing it.

Certain fanboys are, of course, testy about all this: from complaints that it "doesn't feel like Star Wars" -- even though my father, a fan since the 70s, argues that the fact that it treats us to new sights makes it "feel" the way witnessing Star Wars felt at the very beginning -- to complaints that the franchise that gave us The Slave Bikini "suddenly" regards sexual abuse. They also think it's boring and that nobody cares about Cassian Andor, which may be the same mentality for why Disney execs let Tony Gilroy cook, meddling-free, vs if he'd used more marketable characters and stories.

You'll get your keys plenty jangled some other time, guys. Let the adults have something.

X-Men '97 (2024– )

THIS is how you do it (ABRIDGED ARCHIVE REVIEW)

[8/10 · 19 April 2025]

In an age where a great many animated TV shows are given the closure they never quite got when they first aired (from Samurai Jack to Clone High), it figures that, since we still somehow aren't sick to death of superheroes, it would eventually happen to 1992's X-Men: The Animated Series.

Released around the same time as Bruce Timm's Batman series, this was a show that ushered in a new era of darker and heavier superhero cartoons when most were accustomed to the tone of something like Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends or Ninja Turtles. Alas, beloved though it was, it ended on a cliffhanger -- one that only now, 27 years later, gets resolved.

The announcement of X-Men '97 made me cautiously optimistic; intrigued but wary. And when we eventually saw that the final product looked more like Invincible and less like Marvel's What If...? (few of us expected a properly 2D-animated show), I became hopeful. Most of the characters looked right, many of the old voice actors were back, the Ron Wasserman theme music went as hard as ever, and, get this, the show seemed to understand that Cyclops is the leader of the group -- now with even more on his plate following the passing of Professor Charles Xavier -- and that Wolverine isn't the main character.

In the first episodes alone, they managed to understand the Cyclops character better -- while making far cooler use of his optic blasts -- than Fox's movies ever did. The show quickly made me realize just how much those films were lacking in terms of what I once adored about this crew of heroes: Beast quoting literature while kicking ass, Storm being a fearsome mentor, Rogue NOT being an angsty teenager, and of course, Wolverine being short, smelly, and unpleasant instead of an Australian Broadway hunk.

Hell, some elements of the show are spot-on precisely because of how "bad" they are, namely the sometimes stiff animation, the odd pacing, and the very "Saturday Morning" dialogue (there's even a "...NOT!" joke). The digital drawings do look a little too clean, which results in more distractingly stiff moments; it's never as charming as the old hand-drawn images. But the action is often spectacular (in choreography as well as speed and sound design) and the themes are handled in a way that works for the temporal setting while evoking modern equivalencies -- MAGA rioters, Jan6, etc. -- in ways that make sense. The stories being adapted are fairly old; nonetheless, their themes resonate just as much today, if not more. The personal drama is just as potent, and while I ragged on the character animation earlier, the coloring and shading intensify the drama something fierce.

And in some ways, I do understand people who feared that this reboot would be, maybe not "suddenly progressive-minded" -- there is nothing sudden about it -- but more didactically, preachily, and simplistically so. As it should, however, X-Men '97 regards issues of injustice and equality in mature terms -- certainly more so than 2021's The Falcon and the Winter Soldier or the throwaway lines about rich white men in Harley Quinn.

Most importantly, it treats the debates between Xavier and Magneto in a manner where we understand both perspectives; both methodologies. A flashback scene between the two includes one of my favorite lines in the series, where Magneto scrutinizes humanity's unwillingness to get better: "They're already the best everything. Best tribe. Best faith. They even fight over who is the best victim."

In an age where more and more people are growing weary of superheroes, X-Men '97 serves to remind us what it is we love -- or used to love -- about these stories and what it is that, for the longest time, has either been missing or been shoddily replicated (not just because men in tights will always look a little silly in live-action, hence why the first-ever X-Men film sheepishly went for black leather instead of colorful spandex, and yes, there is a joke about that in one episode). Hell, this show even seemed to steal all the attention away from Season 2 of Invincible (once regarded as the best and cleverest superhero show of its era), which is no small feat. As tired as we get of both superhero stories and reboots, it's always a joy to see both done right.

Black Mirror: Common People (2025) Season 7, Episode 1

Now we're talkin'!

[7/10 · 14 April 2025]

This is the only episode I've seen of the new batch so far, but I'm comfortable saying the season is a "return to disturbing form" for this show.

I've joked before that Black Mirror is becoming an increasingly unnecessary show in a world where nothing these writers come up with could hold a candle to some of the things that have started happening in reality -- the things people actually do with technology now, including letting it do creative expression for them. Dystopian sci-fi satire doesn't hit as hard when we live in a time of suicide pods, gamepad submarines designed to take billionaires on vacation to the Titanic wreckage, apps in place of girlfriends (or even friends), pop stars going to space (!) for fun while others barely make ends meet, and the IDF making wholesome anime AI art of itself.

That said, I think the latest season is a step up from the previous one (with its weird werewolf story and its poorly acted, toothless critique of Netflix and AI entertainment), starting strong on what feels like a decently believable "not-too-distant future" where companies have found a way to effectively make life itself into a subscription streaming service, through a procedure that puts the personhood of a dying patient on a hard drive and then "streams" the consciousness -- for a price, of course -- to a brain implant that replaces the malfunctioning bits. As you'd expect, the service eventually sneaks in price changes, extra costs, and even ads, as per the TOS fine print.

Episodes like this make me rethink my stance: Black Mirror has the potential to hit even harder than before, its dark futures/reflections seeming more realistic than they ever did.

We'll see if the rest of the season is up to par or if it continues to pale in comparison to real life. When a bunch of tech bros took to Twitter and started talking about how nice it'd be if we had a "White Mirror" that talks about how GOOD technology and AI can be for everyone, Charlie Brooker no doubt kicked himself over the fact that he didn't come up with the premise of an AI apologist getting angry at Black Mirror and asking ChatGPT to make White Mirror for him.

A Minecraft Movie (2025)

This is all you'll ever get

[4/10 · 7 April 2025]

Video game movies aren't ever going to get better. I think this is abundantly clear from the way audiences vote with their wallet -- and continue to defend even the dumbest, laziest, most formulated slop on the grounds that it happens to remind them of other products that they like.

When I reviewed The Super Mario Bros. Movie, my criticisms were fairly mild; even as I filed it as a negative review, I was ultimately pleased with how sincere it came off at times. Yet, this was enough for net objections from fanboys who explained to me all the references I didn't get (those always make a movie better) and branded me a biased film critic who hates gaming.

I let it slide because I didn't think the Mario film was that bad -- I find it perfectly "defensible". But when I saw a similar level of defensiveness over the atrocious Five Nights and Freddy's and now A Minecraft Movie, I realized that we may not be seeing any betterment in the much-maligned category of "video game adaptations" any time soon. (The only game movies that spring to mind where the Audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is as rotten as the Critic Score are Borderlands and The Angry Birds Movie, and even then, the audience scores aren't abysmal.) No matter how bad something is, gamers will largely be pleased, accusing critics of holding a bias toward video games and the movies they inspire.

Funnily enough, video game adaptations seem to do more than fine, review-wise, in episodic TV form. The ratings for things like Arcane, Fallout, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, and The Last of Us speak a plain language -- and also utterly shred the idea that the movies get panned purely because critics have it out for your little computer games. What have the people involved with streaming-site shows figured out that big-studio filmmakers have not? And why do audiences not seem to want them to?

I wasn't really planning on joining in on the Minecraft Movie discourse. I care very little about video games to begin with, and my only relationship with this one is that my baby brother was hellbent on playing it on the computer I always wanted/needed to use for other things (I can't remember what) when I was younger, so you can imagine why a film based on this particular game didn't exactly tickle my fancy. On paper, I shouldn't give a single sh* t, yet morbid curiosity -- brought on by the sheer volume of flabbergasted reviews and just as flabbergasted accounts of what it's like to see this film in a theater full of people -- got the better of me once again. And as it turns out, the movie wasn't as bad as I feared. It isn't good, no, but... there's something to it some of the time:

The film is a fairly standard adventure, albeit one that sometimes suggests the same "We don't care how silly this is" attitude as the Barbie movie -- a film that succeeds at being self-aware without being self-conscious. By and large, however, they treat its source material with the same irony and cynicism that's become commonplace in pop culture. There are also moments when they don't seem to know why, exactly, the silly things are silly. This film contains words like "unalive" and "chungus" -- something tells me the writers believed, correctly, that movie-goers would laugh at that, just not for the reasons they did laugh.

We get Jack Black saying "I am Steve", name-dropping the word "Minecraft" (it's an IRL "Morbin' time"), and several other meme moments that reportedly inspired uproarious applause and shouting at more crowded screenings than the one in my CamRip. To Black's credit, he seems to be having a hoot at every turn. I shall also admit that the idea for the CG designs is an interesting one, although the result doesn't always look especially pleasant.

I should note that not everyone in the Minecraft fandom is forgiving towards the film. Apparently there are several offensive errors in terms of how things are designed and constructed (I've heard one kid explain that our heroes also learn how to build "unrealistically" fast), and the power levels of the Enderman character are inaccurate, I guess. Regardless, it obviously makes sense that this film would be a mega-hit; I don't think it's fair, as some Film Twitter-ers seem to do, to pin the box office numbers on those who swear by this film as a new so-bad-it's-good masterpiece and go see it as a joke. (I, too, would've preferred if they had turned it into another Morbius scenario but it's too late for any of that.)

I do think it knows what it's doing -- what it is -- more than the "so bad it's good" label suggests, but much of it is indeed laughable rather than funny; to be laughed AT rather than WITH. Do as you please with this movie. If you need me, I'll be hyping the new Last of Us season.

Presence (I) (2024)

One of those films where the ending "changes everything"

[8/10 · 30 March 2025]

Steven Soderbergh's latest experiment, Presence, tells a haunted house story from the perspective of the entity that roams there. The camera sees what the ghost sees, gliding through the house (in what often looks like something out of a Terence Malick film) and observing the newly moved-in family and their troubles in what are sometimes single-take scenes. Occasionally, this presence makes itself known, starting with those who grieve the hardest.

It brings to mind something like David Lowery's A Ghost Story and/or Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void. While it didn't make me feel untethered from the mortal plane in the same way as either of those films, the experience is a remarkable one -- eerie, yes, but also poignant. The phrase "I'm sure the ghost is just as scared of you as you are of it" may apply; there are moments in this film where, as we see through the eyes of the ghost while it's hiding from the human family, the humans begin to seem a bit scary to us. At least, we dread what may happen if the characters keep looking in our direction.

There are numerous ways to read Presence and its central "gimmick". It's certainly one of those films where the ghost is more a representation of trauma than simply a ghost (as are so many other post-2010s "horror" films), but it also seems to contemplate the voyeuristic role of The Filmmaker, peering into his own universe as an unseen manipulator (see Jeff Zhang's review).

Regardless, it is more a family drama than it is a strict horror movie, but I'd say it succeeds at being heartbreaking and unsettling in equal measure -- and once we get to a certain revelation in the third act, the prior scenes become even more heartbreaking and unsettling in hindsight.

Mickey 17 (2025)

See it for Pattinson -- both of him

[7/10 · 25 March 2025]

Bong Joon-ho is rightly celebrated as one of the unimpeachable greats of South Korean cinema. It's when he hops into Hollywood that reactions become a bit more mixed. Films like Snowpiercer and Okja tend to be less universally beloved than his Korean-language films Memories of Murder, Mother, and especially Parasite. Mickey 17 is no exception, but, I dunno, I mostly rather liked it.

Being a Bong film, one can expect a wacky but dark anti-fascist satire that, even when it doesn't mirror our late-capitalist reality to a T, envisions something we totally would do if we had access to the technology. Case in point: Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson), a worker on an interstellar colonization mission who has agreed to be an "Expendable", meaning he exists only to die; lethal weapons are tested on him and he gets sent on deadly missions, and every time he dies, he reappears out of an organic printer with all the memories he collected up until his demise.

As the movie starts, we're on Mickey 17 (flashbacks tell us how he got the gig), but after Mickey 17 is wrongly presumed dead, he returns to his spaceship only to be faced with the far tougher Mickey 18.

This leads to several funny and sometimes thought-provoking situations, but the film loses focus at several points and veers into more of an environmentalist and anti-colonialist tale. Everything Bong critiques is a tendril on the monster that is fascism, sure, but the final act is probably going to feel a little out-of-left-field for people, or at least that it distracts from what could have been a more focused, more subtle comedy about the two Mickeys co-existing. (Additional subplots involve Steven Yeun as a drug dealer and Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette having the time of their lives as a blatant Trump parody and his even cartoonier wife.) It makes complete sense that neither the plotting nor the tonal shifts worked for everyone here.

Me, I was in inordinately high spirits as I got to attend a screening at Bio Capital -- a Swedish answer to Alamo Drafthouse where you can get dinner and alcohol with the movie -- as a late 30th birthday gift, so I admit that I may have been too tipsy to judge the film properly. But it's hard to imagine that even the soberest and crankiest person wouldn't at least adore Pattinson in this. (Bong continues to be uniquely good at directing physical comedy and clearly works well with a madlad like Pattinson.) See it for him, sez I -- both of him.

The Electric State (2025)

Tales from the Slop

[3/10 · 15 March 2025]

Simon Stålenhag didn't create some of the most evocative sci-fi art of all time -- especially his images of an alternate-history Sweden where gargantuan machines just sort of stand around the various familiar locations like it's normal -- just to have his first big-screen film adaptation be directed by the Russos (all but synonymous with atristically void commercial slop at this point), starring Chris Pratt as Himself Again, and not actually be on the big screen but dumped onto Netflix.

If I must pick any straight-to-streaming "adaptation" of Stålenhag's images and short stories, I prefer Amazon's attempt with Tales from the Loop -- although I had problems with that one too. It's always going to feel wrong to see Stålenhag's ideas in an American setting instead of Swedish torps and meadows (The Electric State has the excuse of the source material actually being set in the States), but Tales from the Loop still achieved a more accurate vibe than this did.

I will say, however, that The Electric State, based on one of Stålenhag's later books -- originally titled Passagen, or The Passage -- sometimes has the better VFX work; at points the overgrown mechanical colossi and strange silos do feel like Stålenhag's artworks come to life.

Be that as it may, this is a pretty unsalvageable film, even if we ignore its faithfulness to the ambiance of Passagen. (David Ehrlich, who was one of the first to comment as usual, noted that the original novel "has more evocative ideas in its first paragraph than this movie does in its entire running time".) It is a hollow, unaccountably expensive slog that, as I said, only sometimes has an impressive sight to offer. The rest of the time, we're made to wonder where exactly those 300 million dollars are, cuz on the screen it ain't.

The fact of this film's ugliness vs. The quantities of money that supposedly went into making it has raised discussions on the way movies get financed in Hollywood. Instead of funding, say, David Lynch's final creations (his animated show Snootworld was infamously shut down some time before his death) or any "indie" filmmaker's dream project, Netflix would rather spend 60 times whatever they would've probably spent on those films/shows to give us something like The Electric State. (A Letterboxd review estimates the film cost about 53 Anoras and 32 The Brutalists.) And for what? The lowest-rated, seemingly least-watched, and probably worst-acted movie in the Russo brothers' entire catalog. That's what.

As all this discourse was happening, my feed kept showing me a clip from last year's Oscars ceremony, where Cord Jefferson urged, "Instead of making one $200 million movie, make 20 $10 million movies or 50 $4 million movies". Perish the thought, eh?

So yes, there's plenty to dislike about The Electric State (I haven't even mentioned Chris Pratt's wig yet), but I maintain that those who know the source material will be especially affronted by it. (If you're unaware of the source, I suspect you'll think it's just kind of bad and move on; I can't see anyone liking it.)

Forgetting the way it looks for a moment, it's worth noting that -- to paraphrase a friend and fellow Stålenhag admirer -- it seems to encapsulate precisely the sort of future the original Passagen novel warned about: here we sit, staring at our Netflix player on an expensive device of our choice (instead of sitting in a theater with people), watching a factory-made movie and occassionally smiling about some of the 1990s member berries and all such mindless comfort foods. It doesn't match the vibe of the images, the solemnness of the story (it adds generic bad guys and MCU humor), or the thoughtfulness of the themes. It's just one big dud all around.

People have pointed out that, for all its flaws, Gareth Edwards' The Creator is closer to the sort of style we ought to see from a Stålenhag-inspired work. Maybe he should take the next crack at it. Or maybe Ian Hubert could make a helluva Stålenhag film one day. Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe the best advice I can give you is to simply check out the books. No film could ever fully match the feeling of staring into Stålenhag's illustrations until you forget where exactly you're sitting and what year it is.

No Other Land (2024)

The most important documentary of this moment

[9/10 · 8 March 2025]

No Other Land is one of the most important documentaries of this present moment -- it is a shame (but not a surprise) that it's become somewhat difficult to find/see anywhere.

Like 20 Days in Mariupol did with Russia's 2022 siege of Mariupol in Ukraine, it speaks to us bluntly right from the eye of the storm, that storm being the Israeli occupation of Palestine (chiefly the demolition of the filmmaker's home region in the West Bank, in this case). It may seem infantile to use terms like "pure evil", but there's basically no other way to describe some of what we witness in this footage.

It also involves a fascinating friendship, as Palestinian activist Basel Adra, who documents the gradual ruination of his home in Masafer Yatta on video, finds a connection with an Israeli journalist named Yuval Abraham, who wishes to help him, even as it becomes clear he can never quite understand his struggle. Nevertheless, their material became this film; both are credited as directors and writers alongside Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor, who is also Israeli.

Why this film would be inconvenient for Israel-sympathizers is obvious (when the film began to receive awards recognition, the IDF promptly surrounded Adra's home). But its central friendship -- and the fact that the friend in question demonstrably agreed to help get this movie made -- likely makes it inconvenient for those who use this conflict as an excuse for anti-Semitism, asserting that any Israeli person or even any Jewish person is fair game to brand a monster, if not outright kill.

Fact is, there are plenty like Abraham and Szor. For as much as Zionists like to insist that all "true" Jewish people ARE, in fact, on board with the whole Zionism thing (and in so doing they effectively agree with the aforementioned anti-Semites), there are several Jewish people and indeed Israeli citizens who are aghast at the idea that their ancestors survived The Holocaust only for the descendants to rework "Never again" into "Never again... to us".

Conclave (2024)

Gets interesting too late

[6/10 · 28 February 2025]

Conclave is a well-shot thriller that gets truly interesting too late. Following the death of the pope, Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), the dean at the College of Cardinals, oversees the election of a new one. As you may already know if you hang around Film Twitter, there are some memorably amusing sights in here. (There's just something about old men in Vatican robes sitting around using smartphones and occassioally vaping...)

Alas, as I said, it doesn't get fully interesting until its final act, involving a revelation that probably didn't please the sorts who are most likely to seek out a movie about Catholic figures -- I even heard someone whine that last year's Immaculate, the film that ends with an immaculately conceived child getting smashed with a rock, was less offensive. As with Immaculate, however, Conclave isn't as hilarious as its dissenters make it sound. It's still good, though.

Oh and of course, I'd be more than fine with Fiennes winning Best Actor for this performance. And no, Oscar voters, he has not already done that.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024)

"I won't sit"

[8/10 · 28 February 2025]

There are still places on this Earth where women risk death for committing the irremissible crime of bareheadedness; of not wearing enough fabric to God's supposed liking. Such was the case of Mahsa Amini, the Iranian woman who died in the hospital (from "unrelated causes", as the sorts of people we see in this film would try to tell us -- and themselves) after being arrested for not wearing her hijab in public, escalating the ongoing Girls of Enghelab protests to the point of major unrest that lasted from September of 2022 and all the way into the spring of 2023.

In The Seed of the Sacred Fig, directed by Mohammad Rasoulof (the Iranian filmmaker who has often found himself at odds with his government and currently resides in exile in Germany), the events are seen from the perspective of the family of an investigating judge in Tehran. Throughout the film, real TikTok and Instagram videos of the bedlam are interwoven with the narrative. The unrest is reflected in this family; the daughters question the authorities and traditions that their parents protect for little reason other than tradition itself -- and yes, a point of violence is reached.

This is a tense, atmospheric, moving film. I don't wish to reveal too much about it, but I will say this: if this film becomes as big and impactful as it ought to be, its recurring phrase "I won't sit" may get co-opted by many equal rights/freedom movements to come.

Many Oscar opinion-havers this season have quipped, "I don't care who wins; I just need Emilia Pérez to lose". This concerns all categories that it's (somehow) nominated within, including Best International Feature Film. I guess I don't care who wins either. But it should be The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

Nickel Boys (2024)

Excellent; rightfully celebrated yet under-awarded

[9/10 · 28 February 2025]

RaMell Ross' Nickel Boys is being rightfully celebrated by the Academy, but not enough so. Here is a hauntingly fantastic drama whose cinematography and editing choices may seem "gimmicky" if I describe them.

The film is shot entirely from the eyes of one Elwood (Ethan Herisse), an ambitious 1960s black youth who is wrongfully sent to Nickel Academy, a reformatory school in Tallahassee based largely on the real-life Florida School for Boys. The story, as I said, is seen entirely from this young man's eyes until he makes his only friend at Nickel Academy, Turner (Brandon Wilson of The Way Back), at which point we begin to see things from his perspective. As the boys become more and more connected, the film cuts more and more between their points of view.

This gives you a good idea of how the film is presented, but I feel as if I've barely begun describing the superb decisions within it. In addition to the visual presentation choices -- how the camera looks into this story, how it switches in the flashforward scenes, and why, exactly, the switch occurs -- there is the score, a beautiful yet unnerving composition by Alex Somers and Scott Altario, which is usually at its best during the film's chapter-marking montages, involving historical stock footage of Civil Rights icons, the space program, and other significant images/events.

Also strong is the acting; the direction thereof -- along with the immersive camera work -- creates the sense that we're observing a real, living setting. None of the extras feel like extras; in any given scene, it always feels as if anyone could come in from anywhere and interact with what's in focus at any time.

I could go on, but I shall leave it here. Just know that Nickel Boys is phenomenal, and while I always urge people not to take Oscars statuettes too seriously, I would agree that in an ideal world, Nickel Boys' acting, editing, score, and cinematography would also be up for awards right now.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man (2025– )

" What If... We Actually Fleshed Out One of The 'What If...' Concepts?

[6/10 · 20 February 2025]

Here's a show that, in many ways, feels like an elongated episode of Marvel's animated anthology series What If...?, specifically one that may have been titled What If We Actually Fleshed Out One of The What If... Concepts?

Like What If...?, it takes place in a VERSION of the Marvel Cinematic Universe; one that doesn't need to be regarded too seriously in terms of how it fits in with the rest of this multimedia tapestry. It's a pretty interesting mixture of familiar elements. Charlie Cox and Zach Cherry reprise their roles from the MCU media, the Netflix shows, and all that, while Peter Parker is played by Hudson Thames, who voiced him in What If...? In 2021. We also see characters like Thunderbolt Ross, although his design resembles the Sam Elliott version in Ang Lee's Hulk more than either of the actors who played him in the MCU.

It takes place around the time of Captain America: Civil War, but the sequence of events is, of course, different. In this show (and this will surely please detractors of the whole "Iron Boy" thing), instead of Tony Stark, the wealthy tech genius who approaches Peter and takes him under his wing is actually Norman Osborn. This makes for a more interesting story than anything we saw from the Tony-Peter dynamic; there is a sinister undertone to Osborn trying to make Peter his apprentice (I trust no one reading this needs a refresher as to who Osborn is/becomes?) and the manipulation is put in more honest terms than in the MCU Spider-Man flicks. Colman Domingo plays Osborn in this iteration, indicating that he may also be the MCU's live-action Osborn, should he ever appear.

The show itself is a mixed bag. Long-time readers may enjoy it (they'll certainly catch more of the foreshadowing) and its cel-shade animation surpasses that of What If...?, using textures and lines reminiscent of the original comic books. Alas, it often moves a bit clumsily -- more so than any good story about a crimefighting webslinger should. Something more could have been done here. Motion blur, smear frames... just something that gives the action scenes a sense of speed and impact.

All the same, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man gets right a lot of the things that a good Spidey tale ought to get right, and the else-world tweaks mostly work. It's nothing too deep or dramatic, and in a way, that's kinda nice.

Captain America: Brave New World (2025)

"Let's get this over with", indeed

[3/10 · 16 February 2025]

Here we go, the first proper Marvel Cinematic Universe chapter in ages -- that isn't a Disney+ limited series or Deadpool & Wolverine (which may not count, canon-wise, depending on which geek you ask). Several reshoots and 180 million dollars (plus a name change) later, Captain America: Brave New World hath finally landed.

And indeed, between a shaky production, the impressively fake-looking outdoor shots of the trailer, and posters that left the subtitle as an Arial placeholder, things didn't seem very promising for this film. Not when you consider just how much money reportedly went into it, how much it must therefore make back, and how little actually seemed to be on the screen.

The film we're faced with is one of awkwardly put-together action scenes, amazingly clumsy exposition (much of it blatantly ADR'd), VFX shots that make me feel bad about being so harsh toward 2021's Black Widow, and actors that seem justifiably weary of the project they've sunk all this time into. It is also worth noting that it appears to have regressed to the early days of the MCU, namely in the fact that (A) it plays more like a sequel to 2008's The Incredible Hulk than any of the Captain America solo joints and (B) it's been accused of engaging in propaganda similar to that of the Bush-era movies that started the franchise. To paraphrase David Ehrlich, this is probably not what fans had in mind when they wanted to get this universe back to basics.

At this point in the story, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), once known as The Falcon, has fully accepted the title of "the next Captain America" although the super soldier serum does not course through his veins; he is now joined by a new Falcon, played by Danny Ramirez (who is just fine even though I can't shake the feeling that the character only exists because Disney is making a Young Avengers movie). If you feel as if he gets unceremoniously introduced, well, that's probably because you didn't watch The Falcon & the Winter Soldier on Disney+, slacker.

We also get Tim Blake Nelson as his character from the aforementioned Incredible Hulk (finally following up on the tease of the supervillain Leader), Giancarlo Esposito as a blatant post-reshoots character, Carl Lumbly as the super serum experiment that American history erased, and Harrison Ford as Thunderbolt Ross, the character once played by the late William Hurt.

And of course, because the MCU is now going to start bringing in elements of the X-Men comics -- stay tuned for those TV series, folks -- the plot revolves around the discovery of adamantium, as numerous nations wanna lay their paws on the alien colossus that, in 2021's Eternals, began to emerge from within our world but has been frozen there since then. Yes, they're finally following up on that whole thing. So let me revise what I said earlier: this supposed Captain America story is chiefly a sequel to two movies: The Incredible Hulk and Eternals. (I've long been of the opinion that the MCU might as well drop its current naming convention and just title all of the movies "Marvel yaddah-yaddah"; the only "sub-series" within the MCU that truly works as its own thing is probably Guardians, but even that trilogy ended up detrimentally beholden to what the Infinity War and Endgame writers cooked up.)

The guy sticking out of the ocean has, as some of you will have noticed, been quite the talking point in Marvel circles over the past two years. "Just when will they acknowledge that this literally world-shattering event has befallen the Earth?" "How is this not grounds for at least a quarterly meeting at Avengers HQ?"

That sort of question has been common since the inception of the MCU, but nowadays, there's no telling how much time will pass or how many other movies and shows will be made before we get our answers; big stuff keeps getting added, yet it so often plays like a throwaway adventure. (There have been over 20 MCU projects since 2021's WandaVision and we still haven't seen more of the rebuilt Vision, sans an episode of the elseworld anthology What If...?, even in stories that take place in relatively close proximity to that "corner" of the MCU.) Well, now we finally have something more on Tiamut than an Easter Egg in an episode of She-Hulk. Plenty of blanks remain, however. Luckily there'll no doubt be a Disney+ show that goes into it even more (but not before seven other Disney+ shows).

Captain America: Brave New World aims to be a political thriller akin to TFATWS on one hand -- although that show, for all its pea-brained didactics and poor character work, was appreciably better-looking than this "mainline" project -- and, on the other hand, the type of film that has a Red Hulk in it. (Yes, Ross becomes The Red Hulk in this, and executive producer Nate Moore's explanation that "turning a guy who hunted Hulks into a Hulk himself makes him more tragic" is funnier than any joke in the entire feature.) I'm not saying a political thriller must never contain big, scary monsters. It just doesn't come together here.

A clash of tones is the least of this movie's problems, however. Brave New World represents pretty much everything that's either gotten sloppy about the MCU project or was always kind of lame about it. (Speaking of tone, how do we feel about Disney choosing this particular moment in time to try to sell us Sabra, the Black Widow of Mossad as played by a former IDF volunteer?)

Even if we still had Steve Rogers (the Heart of every tale he appears in) at the center of it all, this would've sucked the big one. It's hard not to feel a spot of pity for Anthony Mackie in particular. Neither of "his" MCU projects has done much to sell us on his version of Cap, instead getting bogged down in other stuff. Only occasionally does he get to grapple with his situation: a Captain America with no powers; a man of color tasked with representing the system that has so often abused and exploited those like him. (It may be a positive that Brave New World fails to say anything radical about the prospects of a black man taking on the mantle of "America's hero"; when these writers tried to say something in TFATW, we got the "Do better" speech and a Dhar Mann skit about cop racism.)

Again, I'd love it if the MCU was just one big TV show -- with a singular creative team where everyone agrees about the multiverse rules -- that tied everything together all the time without trying to contrive reasons for why only Character X is concerned with Event Y, but that's not to say that individual characters shouldn't get their moment in the limelight or be handled with care. Not so with Sam Wilson. In another universe, we may have just accepted Mackie as the new leader of the Avengers; in another universe, fans may have been stoked as Hell to see him lead a new generation of the Earth's Mightiest Heroes to face Kang -- played by, oh, let's say Colman Domingo in this scenario.

As it is, Brave New World is rough. And the fact that things are looking fairly propitious for Thunderbolts and the Fantastic Four reboot means that we'll move on from it quite quickly, which, in a way, makes me feel even worse for Mackie.

nothing, except everything. (2023)

This took me back

[3/10 · 11 February 2025]

The consensus on Nothing Except Everything -- stylized as nothing, except everything. -- seems to be that it lets us know what to expect as the younger Zoomers are getting old enough to make movies. Esther On Film wrote that it's basically Everything Everywhere All At Once meets Don Hertzfeldt, adding that "the kids who are growing up watching Family Guy clips over Subway Surfers gameplay on TikTok are going to make so much insipid tripe that looks exactly like this".

Similarly scathing was Jeff Zhang, causing several blowhards on Twitter to try to point out how mean movie critics are; alas, those days of discourse only served to show us how mean they AREN'T, especially compared to the heyday of Pauline Kael.

But why are people so angry at those who roast this short? Well, because it's actually a student film. Sort of. It's a student film with a professional cast, numerous executive producer credits, professional-looking cameras, and other things that only happen when you already have industry connections, hence Zhang's opening line: "Wesley Wang's nothing, except everything. Is the antithesis of all the janky pleasures of amateur filmmaking." (In other words, he is decidedly not beating up on some kid; he's treating this very much professional production the way a critic treats professional productions.)

This means we also get a fairly privileged assessment of the Zoomer human (Zooman?) condition. Regardless, experience tells me you don't need to be an especially privileged or out-of-touch Zoomer to think EEAAO was the be-all-end-all of absurdist profundity or that briefly referencing climate change, Jung, or whatever makes you look thoughtful, so I'm sure we'll be getting more Gen-Z flicks like it.

I guess I prefer something like this to Are You Lost in the World Like Me?, that animated short film that critiques the smartphone era with all the depth of a Minion meme shared by your aunt (who also occasionally reposts the film with the caption "LIKE if u get it"). Wang's movie is more about the Zoomer experience than a critique of Society™.

Sadly, it doesn't explore this admittedly fascinating generation (born into a world of chaos, their best years snatched by lockdowns; a generation that's more sincere in their art compared to Millennials' self-conscious irony, yet also deathly afraid of sex scenes because all they've known during their youth is MCU movies) in any especially interesting ways. In some ways, however, the film's resonance may transcend Zoomers -- I, a curmudgeonly Millennial, definitely remember having rich friends in high school who could have made something like this for graduation if they so wished and think themselves "deep" for it (instead they dropped out to become bloggers).

Better Man (2024)

To think this would get my vote for Best VFX

[7/10 · 11 February 2025]

One wonders if I should really be reviewing this film. I certainly don't know Robbie Williams well enough to understand the decision to have him be played by a CGI chimpanzee. (I know his most famous songs and have of course heard tell of him countless times, but when I tell you that my clearest memory of him is the 2005 Little Britain Comic Relief special, it should tell you how invested I am.) Still, it turns out this film -- while decidedly not a "hit" in the financial sense -- earned itself some awards/noms, and I like feeling caught up before the Oscars telecast (which I thought I was, having seen Blitz, The Outrun, Challengers, Hard Truths, and so on, but we all know how those turned out), so here ya go.

Of course, there's no rule that says you must know who the subject is before you see -- or opine upon -- a biopic. Besides, I've been told that part of the reason for the CGI ape stunt was to make the movie more accessible: if you don't know Williams, you can still enjoy a magical-realist musical about a simian who wants to sing. Be that as it may, I think hardcore fans (which seems to be synonymous with everyone in the UK and almost no one from anywhere else, even though, again, this is a name I've heard quite a lot) are the ones who will get the most out of this viewing. No doubt there are references I didn't catch.

But is Better Man good? Honestly, I think it's quite enjoyable. It offers numerous electrifying musical sequences -- most notably the "Rock DJ" number that you've all already seen on the Internet -- and its VFX may rival the Planet of the Apes films in terms of finally making me believe that a CGI animal is really there and really speaking, which I used to think would never look as natural as it does here.

Ape-Williams almost never looks out of place; there are moments where you sort of subconsciously forget that you're watching an animal character, as opposed to a very weird-looking guy. Still, its musical biopic clichés sometimes made me wish I was instead watching those same clichés get played for laughs in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.

David Lynch: The Art Life (2016)

Thank you, David (ORIGINALLY WRITTEN IN 2017)

[8/10 · 1 February 2025]

David Lynch: The Art Life explores the mind of a filmmaker whose mind truly begs for it. A filmmaker whose movies are so distinctly strange, otherworldly, and similar to dreams that his name is synonymous with a style all its own. That filmmaker, of course, is David Lynch, a man of mysteries and non-sequiturs who has possibly never been as open as he is in this documentary and perhaps never will be again. Luckily, he is still a fascination to watch and listen to.

Having created the singularly influential Twin Peaks alongside Mark Frost, directed iconic films of varying comprehensibility (including two of my ultimate favorites, Mulholland Dr. And Eraserhead), released several web shows, designed furniture, made cartoons, drawn a comic strip, and even produced music, Lynch undoubtedly has a body of work to admire and a legacy that warrants this in-depth look at his very being. He has also made commercials, including one for the PlayStation where a man sits on a couch in a clouded dreamscape with his head transformed into that of a duck. So that's nice.

Some of us already know how Lynch became interested in moving pictures accompanied by sound. He was painting one day - "very dark paintings" - and thought he saw one of his little figures moving as a windy noise was heard, which led to him creating Six Figures Getting Sick (watchable here in its minimalistic yet surreal glory), which in turn led to him creating more advanced short films. The documentary travels further back, retelling his childhood and the ghostlike beings he may or may not have spotted back then. Lynch's monologues are intercut with grainy home video footage, photographs, and some artwork of his that may not always resemble much at first glance, but looks clearer the more we know.

Eventually we move into his troubled teenhood (where he was more concerned with human beings and "dark, fantastic dreams" than studying) and soon reach the start of his career; his art life, and the things he did and saw there. I will not reveal too much more of the film's content.

Still, as you're aware, Lynch went on to invite the rest of the world into his unique hallucinations, whether we got to see a nightmare about the anxieties of fatherhood, a family of rabbit people that may just be captured souls awaiting their ascension, a decaying humanoid that somehow seems even scarier because it emerges in broad daylight, or a jolly old man on a tractor. Anything can happen.

The local arthouse theater screened the film but once, and it took me a while to find any other place to see it. Worth my time it certainly was. As much as I admire this man and his art, though, there was one moment where he is visited by a babbling toddler and a caption explains "David Lynch's daughter". At this point I couldn't neglect thinking "You mean granddaughter, of course?"

But all the same, The Art Life celebrates the work of Lynch fairly and even mimics it to an extent - the music; the movements of the camera and the way it looks into the world; the oft-present ambiance that could be sounds of either nature or the unnatural; the animated images that are transfixing yet odd and terrifying. Even when we're watching this intriguing man do the most mundane things, such as painting on his porch or building something, it's almost as if we're doing so in the presence of incomprehensible forces.

There are still movies in this man's catalog that I need to see. I plan on watching Dune back-to-back with the Jodorowsky's Dune documentary and I have no recollection of getting through Wild at Heart but I'll get to that as well. Did I ever see Blue Velvet? Probably when I was too young not to repress it afterward. The point, I suppose, is that this movie along with the triumphant return of Twin Peaks to Showtime has re-ignited my obsession (I also found a new appreciation for the Fire Walk with Me film during my marathon). I think it's safe to declare he still got it.

There may be filmmakers who are "better" - or at least more celebrated - than Lynch, but none will ever be quite so fascinating, neither in their work nor in their thoughts, nor even how their thoughts affect the work. If any other director accidentally caught the reflection of a set decorator in one of his shots, he would probably have redone the take. He likely wouldn't have been so intrigued by how unsettling it looked that he'd turn said set decorator into one of the most well-known and frightening TV villains of all time.

In memory of David Lynch, 1946-2025.

Nosferatu (2024)

Why such division?

[8/10 · 12 January 2025]

Gothic horror, psychosexual fantasy, and a raving Willem Dafoe surrounded by pestilential rats in a flaming chapel. You'd think the reception would be more consistently positive here.

Once the sneak previews started, Robert Eggers' loving remake of Nosferatu (1922) quickly became the talk of the town, or at least my social media feeds -- and indeed, not all of it was terribly ecstatic. In one Film Twitter corner, David Ehrlich praised its purposeful darkness -- in the visual, tonal, and thematic senses of the word. In the other corner, Brandon Streussing wrote, "superfluous, tedious and deeply uninspired, Eggers is pulling from everywhere but his own imagination". Some say it is Eggers' best; others argue it's his worst.

No matter how you slice it, however, Nosferatu is a film made by someone who deeply reveres the work he has been tasked with translating -- recall the impassioned letter he wrote for the Critics Choice Association, where he describes how the F. W. Murnau original shaped him when he saw it as a kid (reminiscing how he watched it on "a VHS made from a poor 16mm print, the degraded imagery making it feel more real"). In a later interview, he also shouted out the SpongeBob SquarePants episode Graveyard Shift, which, let's face it, is probably where everyone below a certain age was first introduced to Nosferatu. Bottom line, the man is a "true fan", maybe to a fault.

In the role of Graf Orlok (the character whom Murnau created as an "unauthorized adaptation" of Bram Stoker's Count Dracula, winding up with a horror-film figure who is arguably even more iconic than any official Dracula iteration, including Lugosi), Eggers has cast Bill Skarsgård, who might one day be synonymous with "21st-century horror". Yet again, opinions have been mixed.

People have compared him unfavorably to Klaus Kinski's iteration in Nosferatu the Vampyre (1976); others have given the highest praise possible, speculating that Skarsgård may be a real-life vampire -- not unlike the urban legends surrounding the original Orlok, silent horror legend Max Schreck, as explored in the 1998 comedy Shadow of the Vampire (which, as it happens, also starred Willem Dafoe). I personally think he acts more than well in the role, and I appreciate the inclusion of a book-accurate mustache -- supposing a remake of the knock-off should be faithful to the "real" source.

Verdicts on the rest of the actors have been all over the place too. Lily-Rose Depp's performance makes up for the stinking she was made to do by The Weeknd in 2023's The Idol, but people seem a lot less enthused by Aaron Taylor-Johnson (I think he MOSTLY works). People are fairly fond of Nicholas Hoult (from playing Renfield in Renfield to the Jonathan Harker expy in Nosferatu, he seems made for all things Stoker) and, obviously, Willem Dafoe is a blast as Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz -- Nosferatu's equivalent to Van Helsing. The scene near the climax where he acts opposite thousands of non-VFX rats is exactly as kino as you've heard.

The film looks absolutely fantastic. Yet, there are some issues here, and some of you will have feared them when you saw the trailers: the images don't always pop the way that a Nosferatu film ought to. In Ehrlich's review, he called it "luminously ashen where too many recent movies and TV shows have just been irritatingly dim", but I contend that a few of the shots are just that: simply dim. Yes, even during the breathtaking sequence where Mr. Hutter first arrives at Castle Orlok.

A movie that supposedly pays tribute to German Expressionism -- especially the most famous example thereof -- has no business shooting for a "natural" look, but this one sometimes does. (This means we don't get to see Orlok lug his coffin around like in the Schreck or Kinski iterations because, hey, that wouldn't look real.) However, the images are painterly and moody regardless, and the music is splendid.

Most importantly, however, the vibe this film achieves is transfixing -- derivative or not, it works. (I certainly never felt the tedium I was promised.) Its central Phantom der Nacht works as a personification of the ravages of the Black Plague, a manifestation of Mrs. Hutter's sexual repression, and as a simply memorable movie monster who has already inspired a slew of oh-so-funny TikTok impressions. What else to expect from good old Bill?

Granted, I understand if the film isn't for everyone; it certainly isn't for you if you're anything like the Zoomer seated a few rows ahead of me. Throughout the screening, this person whipped out her cell phone to (1) use Tinder for a little bit, (2) snap a few selfies with the flash turned on, and (3) use the calculator app. I have no idea what this math problem must've been that she absolutely couldn't wait until the movie was over to solve it, but the good news is that she eventually fell asleep and I was able to enjoy the film in peace.

Cunk on Life (2024 TV Special)

"Cunk on..." takes a step down but I'm still in high spirits

[6/10 · 8 January 2025]

The latest entry in Charlie Brooker's Cunk On... universe, Cunk on Life is certainly not Diane Morgan's funniest outing as the fantastically oblivious documentarian Philomena Cunk, but she retains all the brainless charm we would want. As usual, she offers up her own understanding of the subjects in-between a series of interviews where we yet again must ask just how "in on it" the interviewees were.

This time around, she explores life itself and the many different explanations for how life exists, not to mention the greatest of all questions: why.

It doesn't take too long before she starts interviewing those who believe that the greatest riddle of all time isn't actually a riddle at all (and yet will project arrogance onto those who simply try to explain that NOBODY truly knows the answer and/or ask that people would PROVE these things before taking them as definitively factual), namely the religious. The first exchange with "spiritual author" and parapsychology scholar Rupert Sheldrake perfectly distills what I'm referring to: "Is there a God?" "Yes." "Oh, that was quick."

Later, Cunk tries to wrap her head around science, death, the philosophies that concern death, and the role that science seems to have assumed following the proverbial death of God, but more and more of the jokes end up rather lame. Cunk on Life is not as consistently or constantly hilarious as 2023's Cunk on Earth, and some of the less successful gags are in the form of skits, an element that Cunk on Earth did not use. It's also markedly more juvenile than before. The best parts are still the narrations and interviews, which make perfect use of the bewildering stupidity of this character.

When people say she's Borat-ing, they don't just mean the simple fact that she's doing a docu-comedy where a character interacts with real people who do not know that it is a character. Just as Borat speaks with people who are racist enough to believe that a caricature like Borat could be a real person (validating them to a point where they reveal even uglier things about themselves), Cunk often seems to come across scholars who are sufficiently full of themselves to believe that Cunk/Diane Morgan really is just that dumb (not discerning that they're the ones being taken for a ride).

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)

Vengeance most entertaining

[7/10 · 5 January 2025]

Aardman Animation are the undisputed masters of claymation -- as if you needed me or anyone else to tell you that. Those big-mouthed, cheerful expressions are obviously unmistakable, but we could stand to talk more about how these animators work with characters who don't have faces like that. Few can inject ostensibly expressionless figures -- characters with no visible mouths and sometimes completely unmoving eyes -- with as much personality as the folk at Aardman.

One of the best examples of this is Feathers McGraw, the inimitable villain of Wallace & Gromit in The Wrong Trousers who is the pinnacle of minimalistic character design; a stiff-faced penguin whose body language and blank stare (as well as the way he's shot/framed) nonetheless give off pure, diabolic evil, but also stress, vexation, and fearsome intelligence when necessary.

Their other masterclass subject is, of course, Gromit. I'm sure everyone -- especially those who grew up in a European country in the 1990s -- distinctly remembers his various exasperated reactions to his owner Wallace's absent-minded ideas, nutty inventions, and lackluster discernment (e.g. Being able to tell when a certain foul fowl is really a penguin). You may also remember feeling genuinely devastated whenever he'd had his fill (running away from home in Wrong Trousers; being framed in A Close Shave) and cried along with him. All of this was achieved without the need for mouth animations. (Another excellent example is Cooker the Robot in their very first Wallace & Gromit short, A Grand Day Out, but let's not be here all day.)

In this movie, the kooky Lancashire scientist and his pooch are forced to once again square off against Feathers McGraw when he learns how to influence Wallace's latest invention -- a "smart gnome" meant to assist the Wigan townsfolk with their yard work -- from within the clink. Wallace's preoccupation with his robotic gnomes also represents the most neglectful he's been of Gromit yet, causing an online movement of anti-Wallace folk to advocate Gromit's being moved to a better owner.

There is a somewhat strange-sounding issue with the film, and it is the same issue that purists might have had with the previous feature-length Wallace & Gromit adventure, 2005's Dreamworks-distributed Curse of the Were-Rabbit: Now that Aardman has more money and resources, they can fill the screen with far more plasticine figures. In the original short films, there is a certain eerie "liminal space" feeling to the world that Wallace and Gromit inhabit, namely in the fact that they seem to be alone within it -- aside from animals (some of them anthropomorphic) and only the occasional human, e.g. Wendolene in A Close Shave and her unseen father.

This is meant to take place shortly after the events of The Wrong Trousers, and aside from the bump in animation quality, it's strange to jump from Wrong Trousers to this and see that the world is suddenly quite populated.

I understand if this sounds like an odd complaint. I understand if the folks at Aardman have different priorities now. The vaguely eerie nature of the original Wallace & Gromit short films isn't just because they couldn't afford to use quite as many characters for such long short films. It is also true that they're more concerned with child-friendliness now than they once were. They still have a certain edge to them that is absent in other family media, but you're decidedly not gonna see the bleakness of Creature Comforts, the brutality of the original Chicken Run (just remember how bright and bouncy its sequel, also a Netflix distribution, turned out), and definitely not the darkness and violence of their Strange Disaster segment Babylon. But maybe that's for the better.

It's possible that Netflix, although they usually don't hold creators back in the same way as "the studios", only agreed to platform Vengeance Most Fowl and the Chicken Run sequel on the grounds that they remain cute and kiddie-friendly. The charm of Wallace and Gromit themselves isn't harmed, but sometimes this movie feels somewhat... "throwaway".

It certainly doesn't have the same sense of occasion as Wallace and Gromit's first feature-length outing. (The title sequence plays like the one from Were-Rabbit on fast-forward.) But then, I do enjoy how it seems closer in spirit to the original shorts (even though, again, it's not quite as dark or off-kilter); it doesn't have the same American-friendly innuendo jokes as Were-Rabbit and, obviously, it has a far more intimidating villain. It is possibly British to a fault, containing -- supposedly -- a myriad of jokes you'll only get if you're from the UK. The satire of our excessive reliance on AI assistance -- here represented by those iconic Wallace gizmos that look "futuristic" as understood by the 1950s -- is fun and timely but feels a little been-done too.

Regardless, Vengeance Most Fowl is very much a Wallace and Gromit adventure. It's still the same loveable dynamic (although I see the anti-Wallace movement's point) and Ben Whitehead certainly lives up to the late Peter Sallis in his performance as Wallace. It's a cracking good time. (I'm sure nobody has used that yet.)

The Contestant (2023)

"When you're big in Japan..." (2024 LIST EXCERPT)

[8/10 · 30 December 2024]

The tagline dubs him the first reality TV star; this man, known as Nasubi ("eggplant" in Japanese, so called because of his oddly shaped face), who put himself through an ordeal that, if you heard someone describe it, you'd assume is simply a poor recollection of a work of fiction like Oldboy or something. But yes, this story is very real.

I give The Contestant a special mention because the morbid fascination of it all is something special. The story it tells is of a man who agreed to humiliate himself on Japanese television -- in ways that seem downright life-threatening -- but wasn't told that his year of isolation, nudity, and limited sustenance (magazine puzzles earned him clothes and food) would continually be aired live, resulting in a gigantic TV phenomenon. As funny as the movie often is (when it's not unsettling), the inevitable point of it all is that everything you despise -- and that vapid idiots adore -- about reality TV (especially the likes of Big Brother) can pretty much be traced back here.

As much as this movie got me thinking about the absolute state of reality television, the film itself doesn't delve into these ideas as much as I should like, but this is still a highly recommended viewing and my favorite documentary feature of 2024.

Anora (2024)

Loved it, including the bits that others decidedly did not love (2024 LIST EXCERPT)

[9/10 · 30 December 2024]

Not only is Sean Baker's Anora an absolute blast, but I'd even go so far as to apologize for its latter half hour, which a lot of critics deride as being a bit too slow compared to the hysterical chaos of the preceding acts. I think the film benefits from getting as slow and quiet as it does; the moments where the heroine realizes what situation she's in -- and that her fairytale delusions are precisely that -- hit all the harder because of it. The silence is deafening.

Mikey Madison gives one of the most entertaining performances of this year as Ani, an exotic dancer who marries Ivan, the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch. The parents don't take kindly to this impulsive union and so send two goons (including one played by Yuri Borisov, who turns out to be one of the better characters in the film) and an Armenian handler to go talk to Ivan, who promptly flees into New York.

This is a blast to watch and the kinetic camera makes us feel a part of the ensuing hurly-burly. The actors are all wonderful and frequently shout over each other in a way that makes the film feel both more natural and all the more chaotic.

For all its strengths, however, it is fair to say that this is mainly Mikey Madison's moment. Neon has more than solidified her stardom and the character she plays is a mighty enjoyable one. (There is more depth to her than some realize -- and as I pointed out in my original review, even if she IS shallow and naive with a Disney Princess mentality, that's neither impermissible nor a sign that she isn't a fully fledged character.) What else could I really add? Just see it already!

Rumours (2024)

Tons of fun, yet it seems to grow bored of itself

[6/10 · 29 December 2024]

For someone who is a bit behind on Guy Maddin (and yes, that "someone" is me), Rumours is probably a bad place to begin. It also makes sense, as this is a lot more accessible than his prior catalog of silent films (a phrase I am comfortable using without the addition of "tribute" or "pastiche", because they're just that faithful to how silent cinema used to look), so I'm definitely not alone in starting here -- though I may have lost some cinephile cred in admitting this.

Regardless of how well you know your Maddin, this is certainly a movie with a lot of personality. It's hard to compare to any other film released this or any other year -- although I'm tempted to name one particular sequence "a better adaptation of Color Out of Space than the actual Color Out of Space movie".

Every location contains strange colors and magical mists; the music choices are bizarre to the point of idiosyncratic brilliance; the characters -- from the inexplicably British US president (Charles Dance) to the Swedish Secretary General (Alicia Vikander) who knows the forest's secrets -- are delightfully odd, but sometimes irritatingly unintelligible. (Cate Blanchett's performance, which has been described as an impression of Sandra Hüller doing an impression of Princess Diana, is particularly bemusing.)

It is also a pretty funny movie. For a while, at least. It loses some of its steam and satirical edge in the second half, seemingly getting bored of itself. Regardless, I am eager to check out more of this man's catalog and deeply ashamed that I have not.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024)

Rare third-movie W

[6/10 · 23 December 2024]

The Sonic the Hedgehog films are... pleasant. I think that's a fair way of putting it. And Sonic the Hedgehog 3 may be the best so far -- for whatever that's worth. (It is certainly a rare occurrence that a trilogy actually IMPROVES film by film.)

The most promising sign for this movie was the significantly lowered billing of James Marsden and Tika Sumpter on the cast list. The previous film understood that nobody wanted to see more of the "obligatory" hot-celebrity human protagonists from the first Sonic, instead emphasizing the animated critters and Jim Carrey (who is himself as close to "animated" as a real-life homo sapien can get) and although Marsden and Sumpter got a boring rom-com wedding B story, it was excusable.

For this one, however, they're straight-up absent for most of the runtime; this movie belongs entirely to Sonic (Ben Schwartz), Tails the Fox (Colleen O'Shaughnessey), Knuckles the Echidna (Idris Elba, still hilarious), newcomer Shadow the Hedgehog (a fan favorite here voiced by Keanu Reeves), and Carrey as Dr. "Eggman" Robotnik, who is still so good in the role that he makes even the cringiest, most "How do you do fellow kids" bits of dialogue actually kind of work, or at least seem natural for this iteration of the character. (He mentions having "entered the chat" at one point.)

We even get to see Carrey act against himself, as Robotnik reunites with his long-lost grandfather. People have likened these scenes to Carrey's shifting between various personae in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), only here the characters get to interact -- through some fairly well-done doppelgänger FX.

As for how this film will play for long-time admirers of the Sega games, I have it on good authority that several screenings have erupted with applause, cheer, and laughter; the scenes with Shadow have been particularly exciting to both the kids in the audience and whatever passes for adults in the Sonic fandom. They even kept his gun and the grimdark backstory. Now you've GOT to go see it.