contrary to what the goofy trailer may lead you to believe this felt like a relatively tame blend of starship troopers and moonraker that falls in line with godzilla minus one’s plea for action moviegoers to start valuing each individual life depicted onscreen, in this case contrasting the indifference with which humans treat the casual murder of foreign babies against how any other species might react to such extreme violence. obviously a lot here rooted in reality (i get the…

movie very recognizably about life in exploitation-all-the-way-down gig-economy hell within a planet where the atmosphere is 100% composed of farts. it’s always a risk incorporating vulgar modernist concepts into a narrative—such as andrew tate or tesla or minecraft or the cinephiliation of advertising or cemetery plots being pitched as “subscriptions” or the oz-like disembodied heads of clients on zoom calls being pathetically catered to by a roomful of coworkers you hope you never learn the salaries of—but the entire point…

movie serving to turn off the tap of late-’90s modern high school shakespeare adaptations. for better and for worse the true-crime source material limits the meandering plotting of kids to the first act, which swaps in pregnancy for AIDS as its initial misogynist teen conflict, thurston moore’s brooding no-wave for lou barlow’s slacker-punk, and florida’s suburbia for the rough streets of NYC as it demonstrates how the middle class is just as culpable for churning out the degenerate children they…

coming-of-age story about discovering the correlation between actions and consequences from a bygone era of much simpler password protection. basically opens as a remake of fail safe and maintains that reference point throughout while, obviously, introducing it to younger audiences via a teen-comedy lens where the impact of global thermonuclear warfare is playfully contrasted with that of failing molecular biology, all while signaling the imminent trend of video games as a recruitment tool for a career in the military. works…

analog horror about the cultural moment when television began to lose its synchronicity between what its viewers wanted and what’s responsible to show them, with prodding at hornets’ nests live on-air soon giving way to christine chubbuck and network and, later, maury and the 24-hour CNN news cycle. goes deeper than the fairly obvious selling-one’s-soul-to-the-devil-for-ratings angle, as the intro points out that prior to this era (which incidentally also gave us the exorcist and the smug con-man expose f for…

unlikely intersection of the ’70s-era ultra-paranoid political thriller and john c. lilly’s dolphin cognition studies which unconscionably takes itself as seriously as both of these individual factions do. feels like this was thrown together in order to compete with day of the jackal—which came out the same year—so quickly that no one considered the fact that that movie wasn’t actually literally about the mammal referenced in its title, leaving them with a script about a cutesy talking dolphin that’s basically…

andrea arnold’s welcome return to the concrete housing blocks and urban realism of her early UK films while toting all of the emotional color of american honey, as well as a newfound sense of dark humor best exemplified by barry keoghan furiously chasing his children around on an electric scooter looking like gob bluth. fun blend of extended fontaines music video/general paean to the cultural significance of the UK and ireland’s music scene over the past three decades (enhanced by…

all due respect to the largely-female cast and crew involved with this movie from an era when that was fairly rare but i can’t imagine anyone’s watched this on purpose at any point in the past 30 years outside of the context of it being the one-of-one third-billing role for david lynch wherein he completely separates himself from His Whole Entire Deal to do generic handsome-guy acting. it’s sort of a custody-battle drama that mirrors the bookish-matilda/domineering-trunchbull/sympathetic-honey dynamic as the…

loosely organized parade of musical and absurdist-comic ideas ultimately serving to expose the various parties looking to cash in on the movie’s subjects, who seem content with just dancing in the ashes of the madchester scene (there’s also maybe a central idea about how women can be famous pop stars and still deliver babies?). surprisingly as influenced by the resurgence james bond saw with goldeneye as it is hard day’s night’s playful postmodernism (also, was austin powers already in production…

movie about all the things you can do with turtlenecks. in being the same age as these characters, as far as i can tell, i identified with this weird thing that happens where reconnecting with an old friend leads you to question all of your relationships, whether it’s because you have too much in common or not enough. for such a slice-of-life character study, it goes surprisingly deep on a complex relationship that’s somehow romantic (they act like testy exes…