Even without knowing about the chaotic shoot, it's clear that Bill Murray is caught between the divergent priorities of the script and the director, as well as a victim of his own shaky instincts (the result of perhaps a break from acting and his first time as a film's center rather than part of an ensemble). Murray's performance is both all over the place and nowhere specific. His outbursts (reportedly instigated by director Richard Donner) work like defibrillators on a dying person, but the defibrillators were made in someone's garage. Consequently smoke and fumes and a bad smell emanate from the movie, not life. Reaction shots calling for emotion seem to have caught Murray off guard, and the film is so herky-jerky his character never feels like it has an actual arc. He's just being yanked from skit to skit. That final appeal to the audience is quite the breakdown. It's like watching first time pilots fly a rickety plane through a massive tornado. Landing seems more impossible than actually keeping the plane in the air, so the film just keeps flying.

But there are some good instincts here, starting with the decision to transpose Dickens's tale onto a vapid and soul-sucking TV industry. At its best we feel trapped inside the mind of a TV executive whose only memories are of more TV. I like that Murray's Frank Cross is both a mean bastard and a spaz, with overlords of his own to appease (hello, Robert Mitchum!). Carol Kane's Ghost of Christmas Present taking giddy delight in beating the shit out of Cross should not be as funny as it is, but it feels even more appropriate today. The Scrooges of now can't just be spooked into change. They might need to get punched in the face a few times too. And I like that Alfre Woodard's Grace, the Bob Cratchet to Murray's Scrooge, is no pushover. She swears, she’s sassy, and she maintains her self-respect, which is more than I can say for Murray.

An interesting mess, but a watchable one. We're all Scrooged.

Btw: the film's fictional ad for a gun toting Santa movie was right on the money. Don't we now have at least two actual movies like that?

Fuckery as expected. But such unimaginative fuckery. Mainly watched to get the context for that Jack Nicholson meme. Was willing to give it two stars just for Marisa Tomei. Then came the Guliani cameo. Shame.

Fletcher would play at Trump’s Kennedy Center, and it would suck judging from his piano gig (Justin Hurwitz‘s Jazz is weak). 

Love the lines in J.K. Simmons’s face and that tight black shirt of his. It’s a sexy performance tbh. Teller weirdly still undervalued in Hollywood.

I should preface this by saying I have no emotional attachment to the Muppets. I didn't watch much as a kid and I always found Kermit's voice incredibly annoying. The only Muppets I know by name are Kermit and Piggy, and I have no idea why there's a rat Muppet doing Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy.

Having said all that, this is good for what it is. Having a Muppet Dickens to narrate the tale gets a good bit more of his prose into this version than others. I really like Caine's take on Scrooge. Beyond the heroic feat of playing straight to a bunch of puppets, Caine locates the sort of contempt bred from having escaped the very poverty he loathes, likely informed by the actor's own working class upbringing. His responses to the impoverished around him feel personal. But there's such an innate melancholy to Caine, his voice like snow gently falling. He suggests a man as scared to change as he is stubborn. So when the Ghosts come to spook him into evolution, you believe the ease with which he allows himself to be spooked.

I didn't care for the songs, which sound like the typical treacly distractions for little kids. Judged against the more sophisticated music in say Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol or Charlie Brown Christmas, it should not be a necessity that music for kids be so sing-songy.

Won't be a perennial watch, but I'm glad I could get it on my cultural resume.

For better or worse, a touchstone of 21st century screen pop art, and something more. As a culture we have now caught up to QT's global sampling, taking from high and low, east and west. But beneath its globalized surface runs an ancient and ceaseless current: men abusing and controlling women, across time, on different continents, in whatever form possible. I'm a bit ashamed to admit it just registered that Bill clearly groomed The Bride (and probably Darryl Hannah's Elle as well). I had forgotten Bill's father figure (a repulsive Michael Parks) is also an abuser of women.

The shadow of Weinstein is obviously thick and heavy, as is the shadow of QT's own misdeeds regarding what he knew and how he treated Thurman on set. It's hard not to see Kill Bill as a dark evocation of the energies running the industry, and QT's own puerile fetishes can leave a sour taste in the mouth. It is a testament to Thurman's performance, which is truly towering, that Kill Bill has any soul. The performance is a triumph of cinematic co-authorship, and of extratextual resonance. She was abused, silenced, buried alive. She paid a terrible price. Nevertheless, she persisted.

A few more notes on The Whole Bloody Affair:

- the extra anime sequence was both superfluous and not very good.
- I did not stay until the end credits for the fortnite sequence. I like myself more than that.
- You cannot convince me that Lucy Liu is a villain when she's on screen. That's just not how my brain works.
- Saw on 70mm and before the film started the projectionist talked to us about her job. When the credits started, she had to adjust the frame a little. A human touch. Long live film.

(AFI Silver Spring)

Just actively against most of Del Toro's choices here (sets and Elordi mostly innocent). Wishlist priorities for his next film: a third of the budget, a screenwriter, lose all contact with Netflix, lose all contact with Dan Laustsen.

Ngl Lucas did the volcano sword fight better.

Looked up Eggers's next film and was a bit disappointed to see that it's going to be a werewolf movie. After some adventurous stuff in The Lighthouse and this, I fear the success of Nosferatu will lead him to more "authentic" monster movies. I'm not sure more literal-minded ghouls push his art the way his conjuring of more spiritual tremors does. The Witch for me still remains his most successful film because he weds his fastidious period detail to a persuasive embodiment of period fears. The titular witch need not be real because the characters' testing of nature itself promises such wicked consequence. But fear of vampires and werewolves is just too tired. Here, ditto talk of Vengeance and Fate. Eggers needs to go weirder. Will another monster movie get him there?

Well dammit. This is starting to become my favorite Friedkin. Rare and formidable is the work of art that can bring to mind both a McCarthy apocalypse and a DeLillo network of man-made terror. Fitting that the latter's novel Players, his first to deal explicitly with modern violence, came out the same year as this. Both works have absorbed the steady drumbeat of global upheaval across the back half of the 20th century. But while Players is about the absorption, Sorcerer seems to spew the chaos of the modern world back out like bile. The physicality of Sorcerer's world is also overwhelming, terrifying. Friedkin maybe should not have been able to get away with all this. But thank God he did.

Also just remembered that when I spoke to Genndy Tartakovsky about season 5 of Samurai Jack he cited Sorcerer as an inspiration on the show. So that's just one more reason for me to be thankful.

(Blu ray)

New criterion looks gorgeous. Nothing like a quiet Friday in eating some take out and wrapping a few Christmas presents as this dream of Yuletide mischief fills my subconscious

Ugh

Had the entire theater to myself so I could've groaned as loudly as I wanted when "On the Nature of Daylight" started playing. Movie jail for the next filmmaker who uses that piece.

Once all the earthy, witchy textures have to make way for all the Grief and Misery, it's pretty striking just how small minded Zhao's vision starts to feel, aggravated by the stagey, boxed in framing. Buckley's a force (I'd have loved to see her in JLaw’s Die My Love role), but she too gets undercut by stultifying proceedings.

And I do not think it's good that this reminded me just a bit of Wicked. Is this not more nerdy fan fic? For truly imaginative imaginings of Western icons, might I recommend George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo (complete with another dead kid).

(Alamo Drafthouse, DC)

All the leads (but especially Hsu and Park) deserve long careers. Will they get them?

When I first saw this I likely thought myself superior for liking this film and having no time for Lena Dunham's Girls, which premiered the same year. Girls for grownups, I must have thought.

Turns out I'm actually more of a Girls gal. I prefer my whimsical white bullshit messier and more emotionally and thematically knottier than what Gerwig and Baumbach offer here. But the latter's clear affection for the former remains an endearing quality.

And that runtime is a beauty.

Aggressively male content, so obviously I'm partial.

Some plot stuff I'm unsure of, as well as overall POV on alcohol, but totally dialed in re: male bonding and delusion. I would have benefitted from seeing this back in 2020.

Fewer more perfect confluences of audiovisual elements than Schubert and those faces caked in white, and the candlelight.

Also we don’t talk enough about what the Barry Lyndon / 21 Savage mashup did for the culture.

Can't help but chuckle at the idea that we once thought this was the worst of Hollywood pop. I mean we got real sets and locations here! Real extras! Stars! An original script!

Ok lol on that last point. And even relative to today's shit, this remains a squandered opportunity, and the action doesn't measure up to peak Bay (he did the heaving-things-at-cars bit much better just a couple years earlier in Bad Boys II). But McGregor is actually really good here, Buscemi can do no wrong (Sandler films excepted), and I always love seeing Djimon Hounsou (my man is glowing in this movie).

Also I don't really know the work of composer Steve Jablonsky, but he kind of went hard with the choral chants here. The track over the ending has been re-used by idk how many other movies and movie trailers.

I'll admit I am losing patience for today's white artists telling stories that other, greater white artists have already told many times over. And it doesn't help when a film like this directly (and gaudily) alludes to the work of said greater artists.

Despite all that, Trier and his cast find ways to modulate the tone, temperament and overall effect of their tale. I like the unexpected notes of wisdom, both in the familial ties and in its handling of Elle Fanning's ingenue. I liked when the film chose silences and elisions when it could have deployed italics and underlining. And of course I love what a showcase this is for Skarsgård (but is it bad I prefer him in Andor?).

And while I think the character and narrative arcs are ultimately too tidy, the mess of lived experience still resounds. Had a good post-watch hang with the homie, with plenty real-life mess to discuss. 

(AFI Silver Spring)

The gf had been hiding her obsession with the music from me because early on in our dating I said I didn’t like Dreamgirls. But that was mostly 15 year old me talking, when Dad dragged the family to the theater on Christmas and I had a lot less patience for musicals. This was back in the day when if a buzzy movie with an all black cast hit the multiplex, We, The People did our civic duty and supported. Hadn’t seen this since, and maybe it’s the post-Wicked funk talking, but it’s pretty solid. Lighting, color and costuming that actually accentuates the performers? Music that’s *whispers* actually good? Or at the very least less square and syrupy. A quick, snappy pace? 

In fact, the pace is too snappy. Condon and company seem so nervous about losing your attention that they montage their way right past meaningful events and relationship dynamics. Fox I think suffers most because of this, as he can’t quite play the sleazy, more sinister notes as well as he can the charmer. 

Murphy remains a lightning bolt, and I was shocked at how little he factors into the second half. A legit supporting performance (that should have won the Oscar). J Hud kills That Scene (I remember the theater turned into church), but I actually appreciated more how Beyoncé plays her character’s arc. 

In summation, why didn’t they give Wicked to Bill Condon?

Only watched this maybe a couple times, and with good reason. Clearly the least of the Big Three Peanuts holiday specials, both in emotional resonance and visual beauty. A thin story stretched even thinner by slack pacing. But I like the fight between Snoopy and the chair. Guaraldi adds some funky horns to the Linus and Lucy theme, and it was good to see my guy Franklin here, even though I'm not sure he actually had any lines. Laughed when he dapped up Charlie Brown.

It’s not thaaat bad really (one of Kevin Hart’s more likable performances). But not enough actual goodness to recommend.

And I really thought we were gonna make it the whole movie without Josh Gad singing. Silly me.

Interview with Josh Safdie coming to All Things Considered.

This is hitting me better than it has in the past. Maybe because I'm a sucker for a film that takes place during the holidays. Maybe because in our ongoing dearth of smart character driven rom-coms, this film is a unicorn. And to riff off the Johnny Mathis song used here, I got a little misty at the film's treatment of family and community**. All those conflicting energies and problems. Love (and work, LOTS of work) can make a harmony out of it all. 3rd act contrivances aside, that's my main takeaway.

(**Which is not to say that community can't get gate-crashed by some toxic interlopers. The racists at the tailgate are a shrewd dose of reality that unfortunately plays even better today than it did in 2012)

First of all there were THIRTY MINUTES of trailers/ads before the movie started. I want to keep theaters alive as much as anyone but there have got to be other ways.

Anywho, this is a mess. Through and through. Storytelling, world-building strained to the point of collapse. Gifted leads constantly undercut by clumsy material. I have no memory of the musical (I saw it on a field trip in middle school), and I don't have a close connection with The Wizard of Oz, but every choice this film makes to incorporate that technicolor classic into its dimly colored tapestry is just stupid (the sister subplot is pathetically contrived). There's probably about 45mins worth of actual story here, and no spoilers on the film’s many endings, but if we're to take the film's allegory on tolerance and racial acceptance at face value, then what a ghastly message to give the kids in the audience. Might as well give them Uncle Tom's Cabin to read.

The crosscutting between the Yoda/Sidious fight and the Obi-Wan/Anakin fight remains pretty epic I can’t lie. 

GF appreciated Ian McDiarmid hamming it up I think.

Beyond the overall badness of his movies, the on-screen Adam Sandler persona is quite the scam to me. And I'm not just talking about its dubiousness as entertainment. This angry social delinquent thing. I mean, it's bullshit, right? As far as we know Sandler was a harmless class clown with a happy childhood who ended up graduating from the Tisch School of Arts. He likes to hang out with his friends and play basketball. The ugliest thing about him may be his donation to Rudy Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign.

I just kind of despise this veneer of sentiment and sweetness that he smears over a type of person that in real life would listen to Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate. A better lead for most Sandler films would have been Mark Wahlberg, who has actual history as a hateful son of a bitch, and unlike Sandler struggles to convey being in on the joke. Because these angry man children are never in on the joke. But they're the kinds of ppl who treat racism and misogyny like a joke, and are only redeemed in the worst corners of the internet.

The better version of this movie would have cast Lizzy Caplan, Mindy Kaling and Illana Glazer as the leads. But Rogen can still make his zonked out shtick work, and the cast overall is very likable. 

And Michael Shannon as a NYC angel and pot dealer makes perfect sense to me.

If Phillips was an artist his mean streak could maybe manifest in some interesting ways. Instead of this.

Watched on Thursday November 20, 2025.

Something’s wrong with Todd Phillips. 

Superfly reference was kind of funny though.

Some fun colors, costumes and visual sleights of hand in the first half, but I was also pretty bored overall. Second half nuttier in a way that at least made me sit up, but all manner of directorial and thematic handle on the material goes flying out the window. 

Ellie better marry that dude John.

"I'm just gonna die alone. Or get a rich husband."
"Same thing."

"What's it like being a matchmaker?"
"It's like working at the morgue..."

A really strange viewing experience. Matchmaking/filmmaking as necropolis.

Billed as a rom-com. Or maybe rom-dram? But the rom has been anesthetized, the com non-existent, and the dram DOA. Every scene betrays the clickity clack of Song type type typing her Themes onto the page. Yet at almost no point did I feel like she really knew what she was doing, or at least knew what sort of ad she was really selling. 

The key lies in Dakota Johnson, whom I've defended for some time, but my belief has begun to waver. Before this, I (and many others) have championed her for smuggling a comic sense of derision into material that was beneath her. But this is the first instance that I've seen where the material seems to be trying to meet her on her own terms. And the results prove genuinely unnerving. When her character says that she hates her clients, we believe her, maybe more than the movie itself believes it, and certainly more than anything else in the movie. When, in a tear-stained monologue, she tells Chris Evans that she's "shallow and cold and materialistic," I think we're meant to feel pity, even empathy. Instead I nodded along in agreement. A bitter dissection of the modern dating scene manifests through Song and Johnson's uneasy partnership as loud contempt for their fellow humans, contempt it can't even follow through on as Song settles for the lazy and totally unearned happy ending with Evans’s broke boy who's given us no reason to care about him being with her, or him period.

The only spark in the film derives from a a couple scenes between Pascal and Johnson. But it is less the spark of chemistry between two actors than it is the spark of Song's brainwaves firing because she feels like she's Really Nailed Modern Dating. But while she was on her soapbox she forgot to write real people. Frankly, Materialists barely feels like a real movie. The film's natural state is an essay on The Cut.

Produced this interview with Edgar Wright for All Things Considered.

Great fits on Portman

Sorry it is impossible for me to dislike a movie starring Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz and Viola Davis. Even a wasted Viola Davis.

Immediate fav Streep performance. Top 3 easily. 

Hate all the vanilla side characters and vanilla plot turns fucking with the spicy material at the center and under the surface. But how many better workplace comedies have we gotten since? Any?

Watched on Wednesday November 12, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday November 11, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday November 11, 2025.

Forgot to log on Saturday. Gf’s pro Anakin and says he was groomed by the Jedi.

Interview with Edgar Wright coming to All Things Considered

Has its moments, atmospherics. New York is a theater of and for cruelty. Strong doesn't remind me of Cohn but his creation is vivid all on its own. Stan is very good, if less inspired. Wish Bakalova had more to do but she's wonderful, and she has a quiet moment with Strong that resonates. Great soundtrack. Awful score. Iffy photography. Idk. It's fine. Will it endure? Will we?

Less Lynne Ramsay's Woman Under the Influence than it is Ramsay's Antichrist. Also a horror film about your spouse forcing you to move from New York City to Montana. There were many occasions where I felt a little embarrassed for the lead actors here (Sissy Spacek innocent), which is one of my least favorite feelings to have when watching a film. But then only a frame later Ramsay and her inspired D.P., editor and sound designer can send white hot electricity through my brain. Every film of hers is essential, even while I fear she applies her extraordinary gifts to less and less rewarding schemas. And boy do I miss the poetic delicacy of her Glasgow-set films. Does she just think Americans are crazier than Scots? Will the fever ever again subside?

Speaking of fever, Interested to see how JLaw's performance plays for agnostics. She seems to put a lot of herself here -- what she's done before and also what new things she has attained and experienced in the years since her superstardom. She fills out what seems a blank of a character on the page (I'm not surprised to learn the character goes unnamed in the book) with her own sense of self, and that self can grate and enthrall in equal measure.

Lakeith Stanfield please get a better agent. You deserve better than this.

And did anymore else think that climactic wildfire scene looked like something out of a Creed music video?

Updates and fuses the western and the noir to provocative, intellectually stimulating effect. Great movie to show ppl and watch their reactions. But I can’t help but feel that there’s another gear the film isn’t reaching. 

(Blu ray)

Wouldn't you know I actually underrated this my last rewatch, particularly with the filmmaking itself. McG and his editors are kind of locked in here. That smooth one-take that opens the film. Then that SILKY smooth one-take that announces the film's twist and sends Dylan's world (and the camera) spinning. The shot ends exactly when it should. Also didn't clock one cut that didn't serve the action or the comedy. Then let's remember just how effortlessly the film establishes the personalities of the three angels, and how perfectly our actresses embody those personalities. Ebert giving this half a star is more wrong than the three stars he initially gave to The Godfather Part II.

Sixty-nine minutes and whole worlds contained within it. Jane Eyre inspired, informed by the works of Zora Neale Hurston, directed by a guy who never turned down a job if only to see how his sensibilities could be applied to any material. And all this for a "B-movie."

We really are talking about a different universe of standards.

Not that Jet Li can do no wrong in my book, but that I never blamed him for whatever went wrong in his American films. He was a real star and our industry gave him trash.

OK I guess I'm saying Jet Li can do no wrong. But we sure did him wrong.

This one has the added benefit of featuring two of my other favorite people in movies, Delroy Lindo and Carla Gugino. They also deserve(d) better.

Nu metal soundtrack is hilarious and really takes me back.

I am not the same person I was when I started my Twilight journey.

These movies spanned the entirety of Obama's first term. Did it make us stronger or weaker as a nation?

Probably weaker.

I will never get Michael Sheen's cunty smile during The Battle That Wasn't out of my head for as long as I live.

I regret nothing.

Getting a fuller picture of just how toxic the Twilight movies are. And that's leaving aside what utter disasters they are as, you know, actual movies. It's easy to mock at first but things get truly ugly here with this psycho pro-life agitprop.

And we didn't even see the sex!!

Watched on Monday November 3, 2025.

Gf loved the ewoks.

I'm probably not the first one to wonder what a Sight and Sound list of the worst films of all time might look like. I would hope it would not just include such infamous debacles like The Room or Plan 9 from Outer Space, but also works that, like the greatest films list, speak to the individual sensibilities -- moral, aesthetic, cultural -- of those polled.

With that in mind, and in light of all the badness already being unleashed from the new administration, I felt like offering my own list of all-time offenses. I don't make a habit of seeking out bad movies, which is largely why you won't see a lot of old stuff on here. And I'm not saying these are the worst films of all time (though more than a couple listed might qualify). Some are totaly fine movie ideas completely irredemable on levels of movie craft. Others embody the most cynical, assemblyline examples of Hollywood production. While others still find crude, regressive or just plain laughable means of expressing already flimsy ideas about Who We Are that only makes me more cynical about Where We're Headed. Every movie here, on some level, I find insufferable.

Not trying to cause any arguments here (though I welcome fun(ny) reax/discussion), just thinking of an innocuous way to reflect my current mood.

• Porky's
• Home Alone
• Home Alone 2: Lost in New York
• Forrest Gump
• The Waterboy
• Battlefield Earth
• Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
• Killing Me Softly
• Enough
• From Justin to Kelly

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

As we continue to mark five years since the start of the COVID pandemic this month, I've been thinking a lot about the movies released or made in its wake that best spoke to some aspect of our experiences (so no Groundhog Day or The Thing). You'll notice some very clearly flawed, even messy, films here. One of these films is flat out awful. I think that's fitting for epochally messy, awful times. I don't believe we have fully grappled with COVID's devastation or its emotional and psychological fallout. Maybe we never will. But this list is short not only because I haven't seen everything, but because I expect that the people who make our movies will continue to try. There are still so many stories we haven't told.

Please comment with some of your picks below.

• Palm Springs
• Malcolm & Marie
• We're All Going to the World's Fair
• Language Lessons
• Petite Maman
• Old
• C'mon C'mon
• Kimi
• Aftersun
• Pearl

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Chose films that didn't make their list (2011 was a good year).

• 25th Hour
• The Bourne Ultimatum
• Magic Mike XXL
• Margaret
• Nostalgia for the Light
• The Interrupters
• Poetry
• Time
• Weekend
• Werckmeister Harmonies

The Cruise vanity project has reached a new overinflated low with the Reckoning films, and funny enough the best thing about the franchise has been its ability to support a variety of directors' visions.

1. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol
2. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
3. Mission: Impossible
4. Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation
5. Mission: Impossible III
6. Mission: Impossible II
7. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
8. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

Ten Fav Performances From The Mad King

1. Jerry Maguire

   The best Cruise. The Cruisiest of all.

2. Magnolia

   We now live in a world of Frank TJ Mackeys

3. Collateral

   "Yo homie. That my briefcase?"

4. Born on the Fourth of July

   Should have been his first Oscar. Wild how many notes Cruise could once play if given the chance.

5. War of the Worlds

   His most human performance of the millenium to date. Same year as The Couch.

6. Interview with the Vampire

   Pitt seemed legitimately flummoxed by his inability to match Cruise's zeal

7. Minority Report

   A great avatar for the future. There's always been something a bit post-human about him. His single-mindedness is scary, then painful.

8. A Few Good Men

   DID YOU ORDER THE CODE RED

   Cruise > Nicholson

9. The Color of Money

   i say again. SWAGGER. AH-HOOO

10. Top Gun

    Has to be here. The swagger. The shades. The smile. The playing volleyball in jeans. The weird line delivery ("That'sRIGHT...ice......man. Iamdangerous"). Supernova star power.

When Mom and I first saw WALL-E, she didn't get it. I think the blending of dystopia, no dialogue and cuddly pixar robot threw her for a loop. I tried best I could afterwards to express my excitement over Pixar's visual and thematic ambitions, to highlight how expressive and clear the storytelling was with nary a word spoken, how the images told the story. We saw it again. It's now one of her favorite movies. The "Define Dancing" track is her ringtone. I even got her a WALL-E Christmas ornament. Getting her to give WALL-E another chance remains one of my proudest moments.

In honor of Mother's Day, a list of films my mom has called a favorite or expressed love for. Love you, Mom.

• Arsenic and Old Lace
• The King and I
• North by Northwest
• West Side Story
• Charade
• The Sound of Music
• The Silence of the Lambs
• The Piano
• The Fugitive
• Schindler's List

...plus 14 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

For reasons having absolutely nothing to do with the state of the world, I've been thinking about films that put me in an apocalyptic mood. These movies aren't all about a literal apocalypse per se. Some are closer to spiritual apocalypses, dystopias of the soul. But all for me conjure a feeling of things falling apart, of centers not holding. Below are the first 30 films that came to mind, put in order of their release dates. Please feel free to comment below with some of your picks, especially if they aren't listed.

Need to see: Time of the Wolf, Sátántangó, The Turin Horse, City of Life and Death

• M
• Kiss Me Deadly
• The World, the Flesh and the Devil
• Hiroshima Mon Amour
• L'Avventura
• The Trial
• Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
• Pale Flower
• Shame
• Night of the Living Dead

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Probably depended too much on comfort watches this year (but can you blame me). Will try to explore more new worlds in 2025.

Happy New Year, folks.

1. Werckmeister Harmonies

   Darkness, visible.

2. Nostalgia for the Light

   They burnt a corpse upon the sand
   The light shone out afar

3. PlayTime

   I see it everywhere I look now.

4. First Man

   Men? Still not OK. But occasionally extraordinary.

5. The Cave

   Essential dispatch from before Assad's fall.

6. Targets

   See #7

7. Peeping Tom

   Men are not OK

8. Victims of Sin

   Thank you, Criterion

9. Middle of Nowhere

   I appreciate what Ava produces for The People, but I appreciate her art more.

10. I Saw the TV Glow

    Flaws and all, the 2024 release I've seen that I've thought about the most.

I just noticed that with my rather unremarkable yet earnest "review" of Shrek 2, (good movie!), I have now reached 1,000 reviews on Boxd. So I clearly spend too much time on here. But given that it is the only good social media we have, I'm not too bothered by that. Here's to the folks who make it so.

And as Dec 20 marks the 50th anniversary of The Godfather: Part II, and the nation on the verge of a bigger and badder presidential sequel, here's a list of my 10 favorite sequels, in alphabetical order (2's only; no threequels or fourquels).

Honorable Mention: Blade II, Dawn of the Dead, X2: X-Men United, Spider-Man 2, Before Sunset

Dishonorable Mention: Space Jam: A New Legacy, Wonder Woman 1984, Gladiator II, Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York 

• Aliens
• The Bourne Supremacy
• The Dark Knight
• The Empire Strikes Back
• The Godfather Part II
• The Look of Silence
• The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
• Magic Mike XXL
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day
• Toy Story 2

In alphabetical order, 25 of my favorite film scores, scores I can, and often do, listen to divorced from the films themselves (indeed a couple of these movies wouldn't be much without them).

HM: The Piano, Schindler's List, The Dark Knight, WALL-E, The Last Samurai, Michael Clayton, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Double Indemnity

• The 400 Blows
• Anatomy of a Murder
• The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
• Brokeback Mountain
• Chinatown
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind
• Defiance
• Elevator to the Gallows
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
• Finding Nemo

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Top spot goes to the one I've watched the most. Bottom spot goes to the one that risks and imagines the least.

1. Aliens
2. Alien
3. Prometheus
4. Alien Resurrection
5. Alien³
6. Alien: Covenant
7. Alien: Romulus

• Killers of the Flower Moon
• Oppenheimer
• Past Lives
• Anatomy of a Fall
• The Zone of Interest
• Barbie
• Poor Things
• Maestro
• The Holdovers
• American Fiction

An Ode to the man with many movie ideas, but few about humans. A mathematician as would be artist. Which makes his best film a real breakthrough.

1. Oppenheimer
2. Memento
3. The Dark Knight
4. The Prestige
5. Interstellar
6. Inception
7. Dunkirk
8. Insomnia
9. Batman Begins
10. Following

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Wolf of Wall Street
2. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
3. The Departed
4. Django Unchained
5. Shutter Island
6. What's Eating Gilbert Grape
7. Blood Diamond
8. The Aviator
9. Titanic
10. Catch Me If You Can