Watched on Monday March 3, 2025.

Watched on Saturday March 1, 2025.

Liam Neeson playing a man called Ra’s al Ghul is almost as funny as that interview where he does the racist Japanese accent. 

Kinda lame; Gotham looks like nowhere in particular, the suit is dumb as hell, the whole premise is working-class Italians being made to have psychotic breakdowns so they can’t testify which feels like a missing season of The Wire, Scarecrow is way better as a supporting villain than he is a lead and Katie Holmes is a black hole of charisma. This shit doesn’t go nearly as hard as it did when I was seven but hey ho, even Christopher Nolan can’t stop the inexorable passage of time that powerfully.

Like all British comedy this is nowhere near as funny as its acolytes think it is, but the script is eminently quotable and it’s fun to travel back to a time when Richard E. Grant wasn’t annoying. Just never really found myself enjoying it, really.

Watched on Tuesday February 25, 2025.

Crazy how a huge chunk of the normal people captured in this charming, mundane slither of a normal day in 1967 probably lived through the Holocaust.

It’s like a Lana Del Rey music video where they forget to add the music

Watched on Tuesday February 25, 2025.

Bowled over by the potency and force - aesthetic and political - of Charles Chaplin’s first feature.

Best 💕

Genuinely one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. Horrible, soulless filmmaking that we need to collectively reject.

I’ve found watching Pamela Anderson rolling out of bed and schlepping herself around any junket that’ll have her deeply sad. Her boomer sexual Puritanism was sort of endearing at first but when she patronised and belittled Mikey Madison for daring to look unfathomably hot (and knowing it!) in Anora I tapped out of trying to care.

The Last Showgirl is fucking awful. It’s like the gods watched Sofia clear the nepo baby allegegations without breaking a sweat so decided to inflict whoever the fuck this ‘Gia’ is on us. No doubt this ‘Gia’ is very smug because she is exploring things like ‘the American dream’ and its ‘dark underside’ and doing us all a favour by telling a ‘real story’.

Even my guiltiest of pleasures Dave Bautista can’t save this one though his fits and general vibe are sick.

I enjoy these old-timey, “gee-whizz mista!” screwballs from a bit more of a distance than I’d like to, but if anything The Lady Eve proves that the rom-com is the only genre that’s gotten worse over time. It’s because there’s nothing more endearing than watching otherwise intelligent people rendered hapless by unbridled romance. The issue nowadays is that the average filmgoer just wants to forget how awful their life is so the characters’ intelligence has been lowered accordingly.

They just don’t make ‘em like they used to! etc.

Historically interesting and morally pretty repulsive, but it’s jarring how the film makes no attempt whatsoever to grapple with the global implications with the rise of the mega-behemoth we all know and love. It’s like it’s in some kind of vacuum.

Overcooked hodgepodge of references from the films of Jean-luc Godard, Raging Bull and Taxi Driver and a million videos for overplayed hip-hop and R&B videos.

Whoever did the subtitles for the version on BFI Player was obviously middle-aged so it all feels a bit “how do you do, fellow kids?” which obviously isn’t the film’s fault but I do wonder how much of the nuance is just obliterated by the language-barrier here.

The film itself obviously has a dreadful, incendiary topicality but the way it’s been repurposed by the cultural bourgeoisie into a kind of ‘chav safari’ is very cringe - sorry!

Watched on Tuesday February 11, 2025.

Growing up is realising that Sophie is a massive bitch and that Frances was right.

Yeah, it’s pretty fun. Never quite tops its opening, though and the ending is a little smug. My first Altman! Love how he bites the hand that feeds him,

So light and delicate that it feels like if you let go of it it’ll maybe just float up, up and away into the clouds. Toni Erdmann vibes with early Woody Allen thrown in for good measure. Dug it.

Does to the 90s indie-drama what Twin Peaks did to the soap opera. One of the most beautiful films about a gay rapist paedophile I’ve ever seen 💕

Dizzyingly unpretentious with not a lot to say about anything in particular, which only makes it all the more relatable. Plus I’d gotten it into my head that this was directed by the dreaded Ken Loach and got a nice little mainline of endorphins when Mike Leigh’s name came up at the start.

The idea that you can surround yourself with all the trappings of comfortable modernity and still just be really fucking miserable is hammered home a little too forcefully by its end (as soon as the goddess sister and her goddess daughters get sidelined my investment waned) but it still remains incredibly light and fleet-footed until the final shot.

Also, MJ-B not getting an Oscar nom for this is fucking criminal.

Endearingly pointless; it’s fun to hang out with Orin for a little while but it feels hampered by its form in that 35 minutes just isn’t enough time to go into any real depth on this momentous career.

Sticky and gross but not in the Timothée-fucking-a-peach kinda way. Good for them I guess but this left me wanting to wash my hands.

The excruciating “shot on 35mm” card, as if I’m supposed to give a shit, made me want to immediately turn it off. But Strange Darling is a lowkey piece of genius. Everything works so, so well: the randomised structure feels simultaneously light and incredibly profound re: every piece of news we consume is effectively a form of narrative shaped by ideological forces.

The deployment of a candy-neon wig cheekily parodies one of the worst films ever made, Promising Young Woman. The sparse use of sound is effective but the songs are beautiful and their placement feels provocative in such a way that it makes me want to rewatch the film. It takes its violence seriously and isn’t afraid to upset the kind of simpering loser who’ll probably give this a bad rating out spiteful jealousy. 

It’s basically The Texas Chain Saw Massacre but instead of inbred hillbillies in Nixon’s America it’s a woman after #MeToo.

Absolutely horrible, nonsensical garbage: the kind of film that makes you resent the existence of the medium for robbing you of the time it took to sit through. A24 generally caters to midwit losers but even they deserve better than this.

Clumsily staged, desperately unfunny. Is it a comedy? Is it a horror? Both? Nobody appears to know or even seems particularly interested in posing the question.

It must be tough for the SNL-alum to even find a reason to bother trying when Conner O’Malley and Bill Hader are out there doing their thing but they need to do better than this.

JR seems like a bit of a drag but the goats AR and LC together is sheer bliss.

Absurdist, heightened melodrama lurking behind a craftily constructed facade of Française realism. Loved how weird and forced all the sex scenes are - implausible and smooth, just as psychological as they are physical. The perfect, squeaky-clean post-liberal family blasted apart by that one part of ourselves none of us have any control over: raw, unbridled desire.

Will Ferrel: what happened, man? You were almost in a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, then became the defining comedic talent of the 00’s, and now in 2025 we find you… here?

Insufferable faux-feminist spin on one of my all-time favourites, Eyes Wide Shut, which so moronically misunderstands Kubrick’s opus to an inadvertently hilarious degree.

On a straightforward, purely-narrative level, Eyes Wide Shut is about a man deciding whether or not to cheat on his uber hot wife. Bill doesn’t - he cracks under pressure and chickens out - but here Romy (Nicole Kidman) does, with a twinkish intern called Samuel (Harris Dickinson - really good). She’s a vavavoom Female Boss CEO and as a theatre director her husband (Puss in Boots) tells actors what to do with their hands all day: ergo, the film tells us, he’s a giant pussy.

The sun inevitably rises, however, and the cold light of morning brings with it clarity and the prospect of forgiveness and renewal. But there’s something the couple have to do first, as soon as possible. 

But Eyes Wide Shut isn’t really about infidelity at all; it’s about the fundamental unknowability of other people and the fact that the only head you exist inside of is your own. Remember, in the second scene of the film both halves of the couple contemplate cheating on the other. While Bill is out on his crazy nocturnal sex odyssey, Alice is at home playing housewife. But turn the premise of the film on its head: while Bill is out at work and their daughter is at school, who knows what Alice gets up to? What secrets is she keeping from him?

But to director Halina Reijn, Eyes Wide Shut is about tepidly halfhearted kink at Christmas before order reimposes itself. The sex scenes are nonexistent lest the sexual puritans of Gen Z get upset. The emotional climax is even lit by the fuzzy glow of a Christmas tree’s lights à la Kubrick. And while he ends his masterpiece on Kidman seemingly stretching out one syllable into eternity, here Reijn treats us to some half-hearted fingering to kick off the credits lest we miss her point. Miserable.

But Nicole Kidman? She got that dawg in her.

Reddit moment

“I think there must be probably different types of suicides. I'm not one of the self-hating ones. The type of like "I'm shit and the world'd be better off without poor me" type that says that but also imagines what everybody'll say at their funeral. I've met types like that on wards. Poor-me-I-hate-me-punish-me-come-to-my-funeral. Then they show you a 20 X 25 glossy of their dead cat. It's all self-pity bullshit. It's bullshit. I didn't have any special grudges. I didn't fail an exam or get dumped by anybody. All these types. Hurt themselves. I didn't want to especially hurt myself. Or like punish. I don't hate myself. I just wanted out. I didn't want to play anymore is all. I wanted to just stop being conscious. I'm a whole different type. I wanted to stop feeling this way. If I could have just put myself in a really long coma I would have done that. Or given myself shock I would have done that. Instead.“
- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

A film about DFW for people who don’t really know about DFW; it’s all very wistful and manages to balance tenderness with a plaintive, frosty aesthetic, but casts only glances towards his genius. But it’s endearing, warmly told stuff. It’s always fun to just hang out with people you’d like to be friends with in real life.

“What is your true home? Help us to help you get home.“

Gonna get right into it and say that The Brutalist has possibly the best beginning and ending combo of any film ever, even if it’s as indicative of the film’s strengths as it is its weaknesses. It’s insane and audacious.

On another note, I’m going to get right into it and say that I have absolutely no idea where to even begin writing about The Brutalist. It’s fucking massive.

Sandwiched between its open and close is a sprawling gesamtkunstwerk overburdened with capital-S Significance that occasionally seems likely to break against the rocks and fall apart completely. Corbett’s vision never quite coalesces into something more than the sum of its - admittedly astonishing - parts, but there’s something so brazenly pretentious about the whole thing that it’s hard not to tumble into the void with it. It’s really nuts that this is a real thing you get to go to a movie theatre and watch in 2025.

Definitely a film that demands a rewatch or two - even if it’s just to savour Felicity Jones’ standout performance. I just wish Corbett had found a way to let his characters slip out of the narrative and just breathe a little: László’s an architect but we never hear him speak about architecture. Erzsébet is a political correspondent, but we never hear her thoughts on the spirit of the times that the characters inhabit.

And back to that ending: total genius or total trash, though what makes it so perfect is that Corbett wouldn’t have it any other way. That rictus, saleswoman grin into the camera is so bleakly hilarious. Who is really speaking here? Or is she just putting words in his mouth? Your entire life reduced to neat soundbites. Welcome to the future, baby.

“‘Don’t let anyone fool you, Zsófia’, he would say to me as a struggling young mother during our first years in Jerusalem, ‘no matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.’”
🎶 One for you, one for me 🎶 

Basically just a four and a half hour declaration of love to that eminently enviable, svelte postwar Euro-modernity that the UK rejected in favour of endless poppies and handouts for pensioners. They all cycle around on their bikes, go jogging in the park, drink beer with friends on the sidewalk - the kind of thing that you’d catch a fine for here. Adored the deadpan English narration from Melanie Hyams, which adds another layer of dissonance to McQueen’s forensically ordered approach to a sprawling slab of bravery amongst the horror; the perfunctory, observational camerawork punctuated by jarringly disorienting drone sequences.

Unlike Glazer’s froideur Holocaust masterpiece, Occupied City feels just a little bit cynical: you can feel McQueen lurking in the wings, waiting for your attention to wane, for you to get bored of it, so he can pop out and say “Gotcha!” But I mean it when I say that I was never bored by Occupied City - though as I near the end of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow maybe I’ve just become impervious to excessive length.

Kelly Reichardt's period piece is evocative and tender as you’d expect but feels flawed in a way it never quite grapples with; I love her films because of their profoundly humanistic tendency, but the somewhat strange decision to effectively frame the entirety of First Cow as a flashback covers it with a drearily fatalistic air. The characters have no choice here but to move towards the conclusion as if on rails.

This is the kind of film that makes me hate the fact I have to give it a rating. There’s so much to love here but it all feels so predetermined and never coalesces into the film it tries so hard to be. I never really found myself drawn into its world like I was with Showing Up or Curtain Women. I’ve no idea why people find this heartwarming or cozy: it’s a real tragedy.

Every time I have to go to Stirchley I feel like this.

Rewatching Part One making my wish they’d found some way to get Oscar Isaac into Part Two. His performance is so poised and regal - everything the young Muad’dib isn’t.

Not my cup of tea.

When they start cutting across the two perspectives it just looks like Peep Show.

Respect what it’s trying to do and the sheer emotional force of some of its images is thunderous - the shots out the train! - but the whole thing just feels too low-key and acerbic: easy to admire but tough to love.

Squeaky-clean rendering of a pivotal and contentious moment of history without any of the grime or texture that would’ve made it worth living through. Chalamet nails the scrawny existentialist in the second half but save one scene with Guthrie the first half is a bit of a drag.

On a fundamental level the biggest issue with this is that every single supporting character somehow manages to be more interesting than Dylan himself; he’s too much of an enigma to withstand this kind of treatment. A young scrap with a big shard of the postmodern running through him. Barely linear, which this very much is.

Elle Fanning makes the most thankless part in the whole thing at least endearing. Monica Barbaro is transcendental as Joan Baez and Boyd Holbrook has fun with Johnny Cash, awkwardly filling the gap left by Alan Ginsberg’s nonce-shaped absence.

It’s fine.

Watched on Saturday October 24, 2009.

Watched on Sunday April 3, 2022.

Watched on Thursday December 14, 2017.

Watched on Sunday January 9, 2022.

It gives me great pleasure to report that Pascal Plante’s Red Rooms is absolutely incredible: an unfathomably awful subject matter is treated with disarming lightness of touch, the camera positioning itself not as an entity like in so many horror films but as a kind of presence, haunting these characters. You really do feel like the police are going to knock on your door any minute while it’s on, and there were times when I really wanted to look away but ingenious sound design gives you no escape. It just sort of occurs.

Parts of it feel reminiscent of Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the main character is Lisbeth Salander if she listened to Red Scare, but that’s not done in a droll, winking way - this is a film calculatedly devoid of any subjectivity or emotion. Men do awful things and woman flutter around in their orbit like perfect little butterflies, changeable and elusive and unknowable, and the whole thing is basically just about a chronically-online BPD girlie coming to acknowledge the concept of ‘moral responsibility’ via the most fucked-up shit imaginable.

The entire film functions as an opaque surface of polished glass; hard, distant, cold. Shapes move behind it but only outlines. There is a kind of cosmos to Red Rooms but à la Kubrick it’s an incredibly Materialist one: humans don’t have souls, are not at the centre of the universe and it doesn’t care for us. The world of the film is a passively horrific one; humans are fundamentally unknowable, beholden to whims and impulses they can’t even recognise let alone break free from. Only by embracing nihilism, the who-gives-a-fuckness of providence can some meagre spoonfuls of honest Good be found. The film ends on a note of good but it’s just one small drop in the ocean. Red Rooms is a surprisingly religious film and, if anyone cares, the first one I’ve seen in months that’s made me want to get my laptop out and start typing.

Really astonishing stuff: easily one of my best of 2024 and one of the best of the past few years.

Watched on Thursday December 12, 2024.

How can one film contain so much life?

Deeply strange film: the gaudy va-va-voom maximalism of the OG trilogy has been replaced by something greyer, more muted. The arena resembles a a bombed-out Soviet gymnasium. The Games are done by the film’s midpoint, giving way to a quiet, muted feature-length coda on how we cling to moral codes to give order to a cruel and miserable world.

The series has always flirted with a kind of crypto-transgressive treatment of its villains, who inhabit a remarkably diverse, seemingly liberal paradise. I’ve always had a lot of time for this franchise, especially the books, because Collins at least does here reading a tries to teach the kids something. I think it’s fascinating she’s never once spoken about her political leanings - and from her writing, it’s impossible to tell.

It’s cranked all the way up to 11 here with Viola Davis playing a deranged, slurred-speech psychopath; in other words, she’s playing Kamala Harris. It’s also mordantly hilarious that the only one of the contestants to embrace the slaughter and go psycho is a pixie-cut they/them. Again, I’m not quite sure if the film quite reckons with its own ideas here, but it’s at least fun.

It is comically overlong - way too many shots of people looking forlornly over forested landscapes in the second half - but it’s kinda crazy that they followed up their multi-billion dollar OG series with this slice of dreary pie.

Watched on Thursday January 9, 2025.

Love how the first thing the Capitol do when they take Peeta prisoner is get him on Ozempic.

Feels way cleaner and less-grimy than the first one

Watched on Monday January 6, 2025.

“There are 52 categories. The goal is to watch any Criterion released film based on the categories below between 1/1/25-21/12/25. Your choices can be any films released by Criterion on 4K, Blu-ray, DVD, VHS, Laserdisc, or ones that have been featured on The Criterion Channel streaming service (although I'd prefer you choose films they've actually put out themselves)…

…Categories:
1. Watch a film from the CC40 Boxset
2. Watch a film from the year you were born
3. Directed by Robert Altman
4. Watch a film that would be your first choice in the Criterion Closet
5. Great Soundtracks
6. John Turturro’s Adventures in Moviegoing
7. 1920s
8. Watch a film that will be added to the physical collection in 2025
9. 1930s
10. Andrew Garfield’s Closet Picks
11. 1940s
12. Celine Song’s Top 10
13. 1950s
14. Watch a film from the Criterion Channel’s all time favorites lists
15. 1960s
16. Watch a film that is currently out of print from the physical collection
17. 1970s
18. William Friedkin’s Closet Picks
19. 1980s
20. Spine #451-499
21. 1990s
22. Documentary
23. 2000s
24. Janus Contemporaries
25. 2010s
26. Bill Hader’s Second Closet Picks
27. 2020s
28. Noir and Neonoir
29. All Time Top Criterion Closet Picks 
30. Criterion Releases Never Picked in the Closet
31. North American film
32. Ayo Edebiri’s Closet Picks
33. Wim Wenders’ Adventures in Moviegoing
34. South American film
35. Random Number Generator (Google random number generator, set values from 1 to whatever number Criterion has listed last here. This number will change as more releases are announced so please keep up to date by using the link I have provided as I will not be updating each time Criterion makes announcements. Watch whatever movie corresponds to the spine number you are given.)
36. AAPI Filmmakers
37. Watch a film shorter than 80 minutes
38. European film
39. Cult Movies
40. Isabella Rossellini’s Adventures in Moviegoing
41. Winona Ryder’s Closet Picks
42. African film
43. John Carpenter’s Top 10
44. Horror
45. Asian film
46. Dark Comedies
47. Rachel Kushner’s Adventures in Moviegoing
48. Australian film
49. Female Filmmakers
50. Ben Wheatley’s Closet Picks
51. A film by a director whose work you have not seen before
52. Watch any Criterion film from your watchlist.”

• Y Tu Mamá También

  1. Watch a film from the CC40 Boxset.

  4/22/25

• Happiness

  2. Watch a film from the year you were born.

  7/2/25

• The Player

  3. Directed by Robert Altman

  10/2/25

• Frances Ha

  4. Watch a film that would be your first choice in the Criterion Closet.

  11/2/25

• La Haine

  5. Great Soundtracks.

  14/2/25

• The Lady Eve

  6. John Turturro’s Adventures in Moviegoing.

  18/2/25

• The Kid

  7. 1920s.

  24/2/25

• Withnail & I

  8. Watch a film that will be added to the physical collection in 2025.
  
  26/2/25

In release order; I suppose, when I’m thinking about the word ‘Greatest’, I’m thinking about intellectual and formal audacity, the bravery to consciously break at the limits of the form to see what spaces lie beyond. And not necessarily ‘favourites’, either.

• The Rules of the Game
• Citizen Kane
• Wanda
• Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
• Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
• Barry Lyndon
• Apocalypse Now
• Holy Motors
• Spring Breakers
• The Master

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Films of intense psychic power, strange channels of energy in a postmodern swirl of depravity and darkness. 

Films branded as ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘incoherent’ even though they make complete sense for our sick world. Why? Films about the hidden structures of power that shape each of our actions, many conveniently buried upon release and condemned to helpful obscurity.

Your life is not your own. The world as you know it does not exist, nor did it ever belong to you. But it was easy to pretend otherwise, and the views can often be quite spectacular…

• Eyes Wide Shut
• Inherent Vice
• Under the Silver Lake
• You Were Never Really Here
• Holy Motors
• Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
• Hereditary
• The Sweet East
• Can't Get You Out of My Head
• The Scary of Sixty-First

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Not necessarily the ‘best’ or ‘greatest’ and certainly not in any particular order; 2024 was hardly a vintage year for the cinema, but when I look back on it, these are the ones I’ll remember.

• The Apprentice
• Anora
• The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed
• La Chimera
• Dune: Part Two
• Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
• The Beast
• A Different Man
• Challengers
• Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.