Watched on Friday May 30, 2025. 8101l

Watched on Thursday May 29, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday May 28, 2025.

<beginning of official A24 book research>

(not gonna log all of these, but felt like commemorating the occasion)

bleak as hell. my 5-year-old asked me "how many minutes are left?" before lilo and stitch even met for the first time.

his trailer reviews:

- The Bad Guys 2: “no”
- The Smurfs: “never”
- Superman: “is he a bad guy?”
- Elio: “I saw this on YouTube” (?)
- Zootopia 2: “What DAY in November?! We should go to the movie theater every day just to check.”

Watched on Friday May 23, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 22, 2025.

Horrified by the country of his birth and heavy with the weight of its sins, Nadav Lapid has created modern cinema’s most splenetic filmography by fighting his Israeliness as if it were an incurable virus infecting his body of work. 2019’s eruptive “Synonyms” was a semi-autobiographical identity crisis about a man who flees to Paris because he’s convinced that he was born in the Middle East by mistake, while 2021’s “Ahed’s Knee” was a similarly personal scream into the wind — this one rooted in the blue-balled impotence of artistic resistance amid an exultantly genocidal ethnostate.

Spasming with anger where Lapid’s previous features (“Policeman” and “The Kindergarten Teacher”) searched for hope, both of these movies were fringed with a sense of resignation that they fought tooth-and-nail to shake off. As a result, I naturally assumed that his follow-up feature — written in Europe before the events of October 7, 2023, and then furiously reworked around them as Lapid conceded to the futility of escaping his background — would either be the wildest film that Lapid has ever made, or the most defeated.

The vituperative genius of his cinema is epitomized by the fact that “Yes” is both of those things at once. Extremely.

As sincere in its satire as it is satirical in its sincerity, the deliriously provocative “Yes” is a veritable orgy of self-loathing surrender that reaffirms Lapid as the world’s most visceral director on a shot-by-shot basis. In a movie that unfolds like an Ecstasy-addled cross between Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom” and the Jim Carrey comedy “Yes Man,” Lapid doubles down on the frenzied violence of his filmmaking at the same time as he fully embraces his growing appetite for submission.

Here, in a movie about a struggling jazz musician and his dancer wife who afford a life for their newborn by acquiescing to every demand made of their talent and bodies by Tel Aviv’s militaristic ruling class, Lapid doesn’t rage against the worst monstrousness of the modern age by speaking truth to power, but rather by volunteering his characters to get crushed under the heel of its boot. And then — with a literalness no one else would dare — by forcing them to lick that boot so clean the whole world can see the dehumanizing nature of Israel’s crimes reflected in its leather.

But “Yes” isn’t the simple polemic that might be implied by that description. Lapid isn’t much interested in making a clear political argument, and even less so in trying to convince any potential fence-sitters to fall on the right side of history. On the contrary, this is a film that firmly believes Israel’s atrocities to be self-evident, and it’s only interested in exhausting itself for a viewership that already feels the same way. In one of the muttering stream-of-consciousness monologues that have become the default mode of communication for Lapid’s recent protagonists, pianist Y (Ariel Bronz) stops himself in the middle of a self-justifying hot streak to concede that “even the film’s audience hates Israel.”

Indeed, “Yes” is such a singularly vital addition to post-October 7 cinema because Lapid — sick of bashing his head against a wall in a hopeless attempt to change his own mind — knows that arguing against Israel is no longer enough to save anyone from it. Shadowed by the sense of ambivalence it shows towards its own value, “Yes” maintains that any movie worth making on this subject would have to do something bolder than just picking between the two sides of a massacre. And so it careens in the opposite direction with the same physical force that Lapid tends to pan his camera, reveling in the golem-like emptiness required to ively subscribe to a war until its characters are so debased by what that requires of them that they can hardly stand to look at each other without throwing up.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

“It’s hard to love someone without mercy.”

Sitting across the dinner table from his actress daughter after sweeping back into her life with a high-concept plan for reconciliation, acclaimed filmmaker and absent father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) offers that wisdom to Nora (Renate Reinsve) as if directing her on how to forgive him. And in the wake of his ex-wife’s death, that’s precisely what Gustav intends to do — not by apologizing for his decision to leave their family when Nora was still just a child, but rather by casting her in an autobiographical Netflix drama about his own life.

Exploitative as that sounds, Gustav isn’t just hoping to make Nora say the words he’s always longed to hear from his firstborn daughter in exchange for a cut of Ted Sarandos’ money. On the contrary, his plan — like everything else in the transcendently moving “Sentimental Value,” a layered masterpiece that “The Worst Person in the World” director Joachim Trier has been working toward for his entire career — is layered with a delicate sense of personal history. Because the (once) great auteur Borg doesn’t intend for Nora to play a version of herself in his movie. No, he insists on using her as a stand-in for his mother, who committed suicide in the sun-bathed Oslo house that has belonged to their family since at least the start of World War II.

Gustav has never understood the reasons why his mother took her own life after kissing him goodbye one morning — he was only a child at the time. Now a 70-year-old Volker Schlöndorff-type who’s been fading toward irrelevance in the 15 years since his last narrative feature (and has only found late-career success by entombing himself in a documentary about his life’s work), Gustav is convinced that the answers he seeks are still hiding somewhere in the Borg’s ancestral home. That home contains several generations of secret feelings that will only reveal themselves to those who know how to find the cracks in its foundation.

Nora — whose emotional avoidance has fueled the same acting career that it threatens to derail with stage fright, as we see in a funny and spectacularly fraught scene where she demands that her married lover (Trier mainstay Anders Danielsen Lie) either fuck or slap her before she greets the opening night audience of her latest play — has zero interest in helping Gustav look for where those cracks might be. She also vehemently rejects her father’s offer to star in his film. But as he charges forward with the project anyway (which he intends to shoot in the actual house that inspired its story, and still legally belongs to him), each of the surviving Borgs will be forced to navigate the resentful ocean of lost time that stretches between the truth of who their parents actually were, and the fiction of the characters they’ve created for them to play in their minds.

Few recent movies have reconciled the difference between those distant shores with the same tenderness that “Sentimental Value” achieves by the end of its soul-melting final sequence (though Charlotte Wells’ more haunted but equally poignant “Aftersun” comes to mind). Even fewer have so elegantly literalized how the love that parents are able to share with their children — and vice versa — can be limited by their ability to express it. Almost none have more beautifully explored the role that making art, which is to speak without talking, can play in facilitating that process.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

Watched on Wednesday May 21, 2025.

decent as a (very) muted romance, much louder and more effective as an argument for physical archival media.

"is that The Fray?"

The first time that dissident Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was imprisoned for his supposed crimes against the regime, he spent most of his time in solitary confinement, blindfolded whenever he was taken out to be interrogated. Deprived of the use of his eyes, Panahi focused all of his attention on his ears — he would obsessively listen for auditory clues around him, and fantasize about his captor’s identity based on the sound of his voice.

When Panahi was imprisoned again 12 years later, he was placed in the general population with 300 other prisoners, most of whom had opposed the government in one way or another, but few of whom agreed on the best tactic of doing so. The filmmaker was unnerved — and compelled — by the inevitability of those disagreements becoming even sharper between these people after they were released; some traumatized former detainees would simply try to get on with their lives, while others would be consumed with a rage that bent them toward revenge.

In his first project since the regime ostensibly lifted their restrictions on his art, Panahi draws from those very different prison experiences for a raw and blistering moral thriller about a hard-working Azeri man whose most tormented memories come rushing to the surface when he hears someone walk into his place of business with the same haunting squeak of his former torturer’s prosthetic right leg. Played by Vahid Mobasser, a TV station programmer and part-time cab driver, Vahid impulsively abducts the man (Ebrahim Azizi, the only professional actor in this extraordinary cast), drags him into the middle of the desert, and digs a hole big enough to bury his pain alive.

But — as he begins to suffocate the hostage under a small mountain of dry earth — Vahid is confronted with a stab of doubt. The man, whom we know to be the father of an adorable daughter and the husband of a very pregnant wife, insists that he doesn’t have any idea what Vahid is talking about; that he never worked in a prison, and only lost his leg in an accident the previous year.

Indeed, the scars in the flesh above his missing limb seem as if they’re still in the process of healing. And so, however cathartic it might be to simply commit murder and call it vengeance, Vahid feels as though he has no choice but to stuff the man into a wooden crate, load him into his minivan, and drive around Tehran in search of other ex-prisoners who might be able to help the captive’s identity.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

still recovering from the bemused shock of realizing what this seemingly cute little June Squibb movie is actually about.

Julia Ducournau has insisted that genre “imposed a distance” on her first two features, but to watch her third — the dour and dismal “Alpha,” which eschews the more legible body horror of her earlier work in favor of a comparatively grounded AIDS allegory — is to appreciate that genre wasn’t a wedge between emotions in “Raw” and “Titane” so much as it was a conduit for them. Depriving herself of that same channel as she plunges headlong into the most loaded material of her career so far, Ducournau struggles to find another mode of expression that might be able to take its place.

Regrettably, “Alpha” is just a few minutes old before that struggle begins to seem futile, as the opening scenes are so helplessly adrift within a cold gray sea of unformed feeling that the rest of the film can only do its best to tread water. The only surprise is that it takes the better part of an hour for one of the characters to almost drown.

Ostensibly as keyed into its title character’s emotional growth as the director’s previous films were to their heroines’ physical transformations, “Alpha” starts with the first of its many grave mistakes. The world is overrun with a bloodborne virus that its scientists have yet to understand, and yet 13-year-old Alpha (Mélissa Boros) — for reasons that are never compellingly articulated — decides to get a massive “A” tattooed on her arm at a Portishead-soundtracked house party where all of the kids are sharing the same dirty needle. The film’s incoherent timeline will later suggest that the virus has already been ravaging for several years by this point, which only raises more questions about Alpha’s choice of body art. Was this an uncharacteristic display of rebellion, or was it the first expression of a self-destructive streak that was seeded within her as a child?

Ducournau will hint at the answer in an exasperatingly roundabout manner, but it’s safe to say that Alpha’s motivation is of little interest to her unnamed single mother (Golshifteh Farahani), who works as a doctor at the local hospital and spends her days watching infected strangers petrify into marble-like statues as their skin hardens and their coughs emit plumes of clay sand. The virus’ symptoms are meant to evoke the holiness of recumbent effigies, but most of the victims more closely resemble the guy from “Beastly.”

Will Alpha soon their ranks? She has to wait two weeks for her test results (pour one out for Emma Mackey, flexing her French in a thankless role as the nurse who facilitates the examination), but that’s an eternity for a junior high school kid who was already plenty anxious about boys before she had to deal with the possibility of turning one of them into a perfectly sculpted Alex Pettyfer look-alike. As a fellow critic mused to me after the screening: “I don’t know if we need a cool aesthetic stand-in for AIDS.”

~this review continues on IndieWire~

Titled like a sequel, plotted like a remake, and shot with enough of its own singular verve to ensure that most people never think of it as either of those things, Spike Lee’s deliriously entertaining — if jarringly upbeat — “Highest 2 Lowest” modernizes the post-war anxieties of Akira Kurosawa’s “High and Low” for the age of parasocial relationships.

Formerly a hyper-capitalistic shoe magnate embodied by the wolfish Toshiro Mifune, Kingo Gondo has been reborn as record executive David King (Denzel Washington, in what might be his most towering screen performance since “Training Day”). Likewise, the glass mansion his progenitor owned atop the hills of Yokohama has been swapped out for a penthouse apartment at the Olympia building in Dumbo — soon to become a minor tourist attraction if this refreshing late summer treat is seen widely enough during the two-week theatrical run that will precede its disappearance into the annals of Apple TV+.

Beyond that, however, the basic chords of the song remain the same as they were back in 1963, even if Lee includes a bit more screaming directly into the camera about how much Boston’s sports teams suck than I there being in Kurosawa’s take. Once again, our protagonist is forced into a compromising position on the eve of a critical business deal when a downtrodden kidnapper mistakes his driver’s son for his own kid, Trey (Aubrey Joseph). And once again, all the money in the world can’t save him from paying a price for his greed.

The world is a very different place than it was 60 years ago, but some things never change; when people lose hope, they still turn against the people who gave it to them. Only now, the cash-strapped kidnapper doesn’t have to physically look up at the rich man’s castle in order to be taunted by his fortune (although Lee makes sure to include a scene where the criminal does that anyway). In the version of the story that screenwriter William Alan Fox has reworked for 2025, the bad guy may not be able to spy his idol and nemesis from his own apartment in Forest Hills, but he feels like David is personally mocking him every time he looks at his phone.

Even at a time of immense economic stratification, technology has the power to make people’s dream lives seem close enough to reach out and grab for themselves, and that closeness is especially palpable for a young Black rapper (A$AP Rocky, just as good here as he is in recent Sundance highlight “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”), who sees so much of himself in the multi-millionaire CEO of Stackin’ Hits records. He feels like they know each other already, and that the real crime is that they don’t.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

it's funny to think that Alexander Skarsgård and i technically belong to the same species.

If family is the sharpest and most cutting of double-edged swords, few storytellers have ever wielded it with more violent enthusiasm than Wes Anderson, whose movies often start with — and then scab over — the seemingly mortal kind of wound that only a severed relationship can leave behind, and only a carefully mended one can ever hope to fix. In that sense and several others, “The Phoenician Scheme” is the most enthusiastically violent film that Anderson has made thus far.

Spackled together from all the gray paint and seriocomic grotesquerie that he couldn’t find a use for in his previous work, the “Asteroid City” auteur’s hectic father-daughter story takes pains to clarify a certain ethos at the root of his art, even if it does frustratingly little to flesh that ethos out any further.

We’ll go to that, but first — the violence. Like so many of Anderson’s bad dads before him, mid-century European business mogul Anatole “Zsa-zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro) is determined to be larger than life or die trying. No one has managed to kill him quite yet, but they’re getting awfully close — as we see in a high-flying prologue that makes it weirdly easy to imagine how Anderson might have shot the first scene of “The Dark Knight Rises.”

“The Phoenician Scheme” begins with one character being shredded in half by a saboteur’s bomb, and ends with another character getting their head blown off by a hand grenade. In between those two explosions are several plane crashes, a spate of trigger-happy communist revolutionaries, and a homicidal argument over the profits from a poison gas that has killed more than 10,000 soldiers.

And yet, Zsa-zsa repeatedly insists that he feels “very safe.” For a man who mostly communicates in maxims, that might be the closest thing he has to a mantra. And why shouldn’t he feel safe? The immoveable center of a sweet but frantically spinning caper in which family is presented as the only force more inescapable than death (family is a lot of things, okay?), Zsa-zsa has effortlessly managed to elude them both for as long as he can . Or so he thinks. The truth of the situation, as our unscrupulous hero starts to realize after surviving his sixth plane crash, is that every step he’s taken away from one has led him closer to the other, and vice-versa.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

In his 2023 essay film “Pictures of Ghosts,” a haunted cine-memoir that uses Recife’s once-glorious movie palaces as a lens through which to examine — and to mourn — the cultural amnesia of a country so determined to forget itself, Brazilian auteur Kleber Mendonça Filho somewhat counterintuitively observes that “Fiction films are the best documentaries.” If Mendonça had to make a documentary in order to illustrate that idea, the sober but gripping thriller that it inspired him to shoot next proves the point with gusto.

Born from the process of researching “Pictures of Ghosts” (a fact that becomes rewardingly self-evident over the course of its 158-minute runtime), “The Secret Agent” recreates 1977 Recife with even more vivid detail than Mendonça's documentary was able to restore his childhood vision of the city through archival video and photographs alone. Focused but sprawling, the director’s first true period piece is absolutely teeming with the music, color, and style of the “Brazilian Miracle” that marked the height of the country’s military dictatorship, and yet all of those signifiers — along with most direct evidence of the military dictatorship itself — are sublimated into the movie’s pervasive sense of mischief.

That’s the word Mendonça uses to identify the time period in the film’s opening title card, and it accurately sets the scene for a story less rooted in the terror of Walter Salles’ “I’m Still Here” than in the wistful barbarity of Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Of course, those movies both hinge on the tragic poignancy of their stolen pasts, and this one does too — but slowly, and with a much softer approach to the way that memory persists in spite of the gangsters who might work to erase it.

Far from the high-octane spy picture that might be suggested by its title (a title that’s easy to imagine written in giant letters across the marquee of Recife’s São Luiz Cinema), “The Secret Agent” only bumps into espionage tropes as if by accident, and its protagonist seems to be as confused by them as we are. Mendonça's movie operates at the pace and tenor of a drama in exile, albeit one that’s fringed with B-movie fun and stalked by a pair of unscrupulous hitmen.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

June 24, 1993 will become known as one of the most consequential days in the brief history of post-colonial Nigeria, but — for the two young boys at the heart of Akinola Davies Jr.’s semi-autobiographical drama “My Father’s Shadow” — that date is destined to be ed for considerably more personal reasons.

It was on June 24, 1993 that Major General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, refusing to accept that the citizens of Nigeria had overwhelmingly voted for the people’s champion MKO Abiola, annulled the results of the country’s first democratic election since the military coup 10 years earlier. It was also, this poignant and vividly realized film invites us to imagine, on June 24, 1993 that brothers Akin and Remi were invited on a rare trip to Lagos with their dad, Folarin, a strong but mysterious figure in their lives who was often away from their family for months at a time.

Over the course of their wistful and chaotic journey into the big city (a two-hour drive from Ibadan that becomes an odyssey unto itself, thanks to Nigeria’s petrol shortage), the boys will come to see their father in a brilliant new light — one that will light up their dreams for decades to come.

Set at a moment when Nigeria seemed to be on the precipice of a new dawn, “My Father’s Shadow” tempers a nascent sense of hope with a lingering air of hauntedness. The horrors of a recent massacre are splashed across newspaper headlines, but men like Folarin (“Gangs of London” star Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù, entrancingly tough and tender all at once) are eager to move forward and invest in their children’s future — to steal it back from the military.

“If you die for Nigeria, you die for nothing,” someone says. Folarin would prefer to stay alive.

His kids barely know him, but — like most fathers, and absent fathers in particular — he looms over their lives like the sky itself, and the boys would struggle to conceive of a world without him in it. And yet, Davies, who naturally co-wrote the movie with his brother Wale, shoots Folarin as if he’s already halfway gone. Despite the basic and tangible need that motivates his trip into Lagos that day (Folarin hasn’t received a paycheck for his last six months of work, and the time has come to collect), there are stretches of this film in which he seems to be a spectral projection of some kind, if only because his sons have never seen him in this context before.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

A movie called “Peak Everything” might seem to imply a certain measure of maximalism, but Anne Émond’s disarmingly low-key romance — its title alluding to the strain that the 21st century has placed on all of the world’s resources at once — prefers to vibe off the emotional paralysis of living at the end of the world. To borrow a word that the film doesn’t bother to define (we know what it means even if we don’t know what it means), this twee French-Canadian love story is steeped in the heartache of “solastalgia,” or the existential distress caused by a change to one’s home environment. The sea levels rise and the moon glows red, but “Peak Everything” remains at the pitch of a self-help tape as it strains to find a ray of light in the storm clouds of what’s coming.

Be that as it may, the apocalypse is as real to Émond’s protagonist as it was to the characters in spiritual forebears like “Miracle Mile” or “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.” Kind-hearted kennel-owner Adam (Patrick Hivon) is simply too overwhelmed by anxiety to panic or to partner up. His mother is dead, his boorish father doesn’t believe that men should have feelings, and his psychiatrist just starts doodling whenever he goes on one of his usual rants about ecological collapse. By the time we first meet him, Adam’s only recourse is to order a Polar Lux light therapy lamp on Amazon.

The sound of the delivery person scanning the package is the first thing we hear at the start of the film, and it’s distressing how perfectly that beep meep BEEP! — so recognizable from the ambient noise of our own lives — articulates that Adam’s world is on the brink of ruin. The lamp doesn’t work, but when Adam phones the customer service line for help, the upbeat voice on the other end of the line suddenly fills him with hope and possibility in the face of catastrophe. The feeling is mutual; Tina (Piper Perabo) is as stirred by Adam’s naked unease as he is by her immaculate cheer. They don’t know anything about each other, but — at a time when the fate of humanity is as clear and inflexible as scientific data — the unknown might be the last place that either of these people can still look for salvation.

Set to be released as “Amour Apocalypse” in French, “Peak Everything” is a cute and winsome little movie that often suffers from the same paralysis as its cute and winsome hero, whose permanent hangdog expression makes his high cheekbones feel like some kind of cosmic joke. Kooky in a way that it always embraces but never its to, Émond’s wryly neurotic script isn’t just rooted in Adam’s anxiety, it’s flattened by it as well.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

perfect for anyone who thought mother! was too restrained. this is a hot mess about a hot mess but it’s so on fire the whole time i was happy to go along for the ride. we love to see Jennifer Lawrence swinging for the fences again, don't we folks.

it's cute i guess, but i fail to see the point — few movies are better documents of their own creation than Breathless. the cosplay of it all is that much more disappointing from Richard Linklater, one of the only living filmmakers who actually knows what it's like to spark a revolution.

“Babygirl” star Harris Dickinson is a little too young, a little too handsome, and a little too hot right now for critics to pretend as if his directorial debut exists in a vacuum, and yet the raw and raggedy “Urchin” — which would command our attention regardless of who made it — is only a few seconds old before it’s locked into the thrall of a different actor altogether.

Best known for playing the young Tom Riddle in “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” Frank Dillane awakens into this movie with the ache and neediness of an open wound. His character’s name is Mike, he’s been living on the streets of London for the last five years, and he doesn’t take kindly to the street preacher whose shouting (“Have you heard about Jesus!?”) stirs him out of his latest drug stupor. It’s bad enough that she’s loud, but it’s even worse that she’s trying to save people — in her own way, at least.

Such generosity of spirit proves to be something of a trigger for a tousle-haired lost boy like Mike, who resents anyone for daring to offer him the help he doesn’t know how to accept. He’s pleasant enough to some of the people he recognizes from various shelters and the like, but when a good samaritan offers to buy Mike some food, our man returns the favor by violently mugging the man for his kindness.

And so it’s off to another stint in prison, the next part in a cycle that Mike seems ambivalent to escape. The film around him displays similarly little interest in forcing the matter, even after Mike is released from jail — now sober for seven months — and lands a job as a cook at a low-rent hotel on the outskirts of town. He makes friends with two of his co-workers, sings Atomic Kitten’s “Whole Again” at karaoke, and even attends a supervised reconciliation meeting with the man he beat up.

But Dickinson’s lithe and tetchy script only feigns at a clean hero’s journey in order to undercut it with the chaos of human behavior, and what might have been a nice three-act story about a moppet on the mend sours into something far less digestible or instructive (comparisons to “Naked” practically make themselves, and while “Urchin” lacks the sadism of Mike Leigh’s Thatcherite-era scream, it’s a credit to Dillane’s remarkable performance that the two movies seem capable of holding a conversation with each other).

~this review continues on IndieWire~

When famous actors decide to try their hand at filmmaking, the results can be — and often are — unremarkable by design. Timid and safe with a network TV aesthetic that screams “I’m a lot more afraid behind the camera than I am in front of it.” Not so of Kristen Stewart’s “The Chronology of Water.” Not in the slightest. Some movies are shot. This one was directed.

Which isn’t to suggest this aggressively fragmented adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir should be graded on a curve because its famous auteur dared to film on 16mm, or even because she had the skill required to adapt her source material with the same febrile porousness that made it such a striking piece of literature in the first place (a process that required the “Clouds of Sils Maria” star to invent her own language of elliptical thoughts and extreme close-ups). On the contrary, I only make note of the laziest presumptions that people might create for Stewart’s debut because of the visceral fearlessness with which she defies them.

There isn’t a single millisecond of this movie that doesn’t bristle with the raw energy of an artist who’s found the permission she needed to put her whole being into every frame, messy and shattered as that might be. And it’s largely for that reason why “The Chronology of Water” works even when it doesn’t: Because, on an almost subatomic level, Stewart communes with the liquid spirit of a woman who only became whole by allowing herself to dissolve into the smallest essences of her being — over and over again until it seemed impossible she might ever regain a recognizable shape.

As Lidia puts it: “In water, like in books, you can leave your life.” And writing, like swimming — which she aspired to do on an Olympic level until drugs and alcohol put the kibosh on all that — becomes another body for her. It’s a metamorphosis that Stewart depicts with a refreshing lack of metaphor, as her script, a constellation of scattered quotes and half-invented memories, all but literalizes how Lidia (Imogen Poots) disassociates from her sexually abusive father in 1970s San Francisco.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

Watched on Friday May 16, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 16, 2025.

The first truly modern American Western, or at least the first one that has the nowness required to mention Pop Crave by name, Ari Aster’s “Eddington” is also the first major Hollywood movie that’s been willing to see the COVID pandemic for the hellacious paradigm shift that it was — as the moment when years of technologically engineered polarization tore a forever hole in the social fabric of a country that was already coming apart at the seams.

Few other filmmakers would have the chutzpah required to make a “No Country for Old Men” riff that hinges on mask mandates and the murder of George Floyd, and we should probably all be grateful that none of them have tried. But Aster, who’s exclusively interested in making the kind of films that should be reviewed straight onto a prescription pad, is too beholden to his neuroses for his latest movie to play like a cheap provocation. This time, however, there’s a good chance those are your neuroses, too.

Stemming from a collective sickness to the same degree that “Beau Is Afraid” was born from some very personal trauma, “Eddington” — the tagline for which reads: “Hindsight is 2020” — only wields its what’s the opposite of nostalgia? specificity as a means to an end. It might set the scene with a little “ how it felt to wait in line outside the pharmacy?” fun, but Aster’s bleakly funny and brilliantly plotted assessment of how fucked we’ve become since then soon leverages those fun memories into a far more probing story about the difficulties of sharing a town between people who live in separate realities.

If “Eddington” is still a discourse generation machine powerful enough to make “Civil War” seem like a wind-up toy by comparison, that isn’t because it picks sides — or risks the navel-gazing tedium of Alex Garland’s epic by explicitly refusing to. Virtually everyone in Aster’s COVID Western is a victim to one extent or another, even if some of them have a lot more blood on their hands by the end of it than others; there’s no need for false equivalencies in a film whose characters are all powerless to disentangle the internet from the fabric of their personal lives.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

and that's why i don't go to raves.

Watched on Thursday May 15, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 15, 2025.

Whether or not “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” actually ends up being Tom Cruise’s last time racing to save the world as a renegade member of the IMF, there is no mistaking the fact that Christopher McQuarrie’s heartbreakingly flat and disted epic was intended as a last hurrah for America’s best action series.

That has almost nothing to do with how the movie ends, and just about everything to do with how it comports itself for the 160 minutes before that. Case in point: The festivities kick off with a bonafide supercut of Ethan Hunt’s greatest hits from the saga’s previous seven installments, neatly divided into subcategories like “love interest” and “villain.” And it would be a massive understatement to say that “The Final Reckoning” only leans harder into its everything has led to this ethos after that.

To a certain extent, that’s to be expected from the culmination of a franchise that’s grown more self-referential towards its own past at roughly the same rate as it’s become more freighted with the responsibility of fighting against Hollywood’s future. 2018’s miraculous “Fallout” supercharged its third act by looping back to a plot thread that seemed to have already been sewn up, while 2023’s madcap “Dead Reckoning” — a direct prequel to the ponderous new “Mission,” despite being tonally unrecognizable from it — dusted off a spiteful bureaucrat from the very first “Mission: Impossible” movie just to emphasize how much Ethan Hunt can’t trust his own government.

“The Final Reckoning” one-ups that trick with the kind of spectacularly goofy aplomb that will convince hardcore fans they’ve died and gone to heaven, but that’s the least of the movie’s efforts to make its bizarrely joyless story feel like the living manifestation of destiny. Everything that happens in “The Final Reckoning” is framed as a consequence of the choices that Ethan has made in the past, and while that approach results in two of the cleverest ret-cons in blockbuster history (both of which do a silly but satisfying job of tying the whole franchise together), it has the unfortunate side effect of forcing the film to haltingly dramatize — and thereby diminish — the same tensions that Tom Cruise has latently seeded into every stunt, sprint, and hard stare over the course of the previous seven movies.

The singular pleasure of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise — especially since its purpose was streamlined by “Mission: Impossible — III” — has always been rooted in Cruise’s supernatural ability to balance reality with disbelief, fatalism with free will, and the snuff-like daredevilry of the silent era with the larger-than-life spectacle of the blockbuster age. The struggle to reconcile those things is of paramount importance to a franchise about a man who adamantly refuses to compromise between them; Ethan Hunt is constantly risking millions of human lives in a desperate bid to save his loved ones, just as Tom Cruise is constantly risking his own life in a desperate bid to entertain millions of strangers.

In other words, “The Final Reckoning” isn’t the first time those balancing acts have been suffused into the plot of these movies. But previous “Mission” adventures — especially the ones helmed by returning director Christopher McQuarrie, all of which moved with the confidence of a prophecy being fulfilled even though they were built on the fly and held together with sticky tack — understood that action is the best argument against predestination. That’s especially true of “Dead Reckoning,” which saw Cruise fight back against the brain rot of A.I. by driving a motorcycle off a cliff for our enjoyment; “There’s always a choice,” Ethan is fond of saying, and the man playing him tends to prove that by making choices that no one on Earth has ever made before.

That same A.I., better known by its stage name “The Entity,” is back with a vengeance in “The Final Reckoning,” and it’s determined to goad humanity towards nuclear annihilation. But this time, Cruise and McQuarrie choose to illustrate the crisis of algorithmic thinking across a ploddingly scripted boardroom drama that cleaves a lot closer to the Cold War brinksmanship of “13 Days” than it does to the Buster Keaton-esque brilliance of their previous “Missions.”

The change of pace feels deliberate, but why ditch the franchise’s signature elegance in favor of the same kind of blockbuster tedium that “Mission: Impossible” has always defined itself against? The choice — and there’s always a choice — might stem from a strained production that was nearly torpedoed by strikes, but it’s also possible that McQuarrie and co-writer Erik Jendresen were handcuffed by the apocalyptic stakes the Entity demanded of them. Maybe they wanted to background Ethan Hunt in order to seed his ethos to the future his franchise is leaving behind, or maybe McQuarrie and Cruise just saw this story as the next step in their war against technological enshittification. If Tom Cruise can get people back to the movies, who’s to say he can’t get them to stop relying on ChatGPT?

Whatever the case, I can’t overstate how frustrating and redundant it feels to watch some random people we don’t care about — namely, President Angela Bassett and her beefy cabinet of flop-sweating character actors — equivocate over (and over) the lesser of two evils at the tail end of a franchise whose hero continues to disproves that logic with every mind-boggling setpiece. And the setpieces are still mind-boggling, even if this movie desperately needed more of them. The climactic biplane chase is somewhat diminished by the sheer worthlessness of the film’s villain (a new low in a franchise that has frequently struggled on that front), but the wordless 10-minute sequence where Cruise is tossed around the hull of a sunken nuclear submarine as it rolls towards the edge of a cliff reaches levels of “how the hell did they do that?” that have previously been reserved for certain Renaissance sculptures and early Björk albums.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

Unfolding like 100 years of home video footage that were shot by the family ghosts, Mascha Schilinski’s rich and mesmeric “Sound of Falling” glimpses four generation of young women as they live, die, and suffuse their memories into the walls of a rural farmhouse in the north German region of Altmark.

In the 1940s, after some of the local boys are maimed by their parents in order to avoid fighting Hitler’s war, teenage Erika (Lea Drinda) hobbles through the halls with one of her tied legs up in string, eager to know what losing a limb might feel like. Unbeknownst to her, cherubic little Alma (Hanna Heckt) expressed a similar curiosity some 30 years earlier when she played dead on the parlor room couch, posing in the same position that her late grandmother’s corpse had been placed for a post-mortem daugerreotype.

And yet, coming of age in the German Democratic Republic of the 1980s, Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) might think she’s inventing her girlish impulse towards self-negation when she fantasizes about lying down in front of her father’s tank-sized land imprinter as it mulches her body into the earth, just as Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) — living in our present — wonders if she’s the first person to be looked at in a way that burns under her skin. We rarely see these characters overlap in a literal sense, and their specific relationships to one another remain hard to define (it would take a professional arborist to untangle the roots of this movie’s family tree, at least on first watch), but “Sound of Falling” is deeply attuned to the echoes between them.

Somehow both hyper-subjective and hauntingly disembodied all at once, Schilinski’s recursive second feature floats through the decades like an errant thought hoping to find someone who might recognize it as one of their own. The film lopes forwards and backwards in time without notice or warning, Fabian Gamper’s camera often peering through keyholes and floorboards in order to reconcile the tunnel vision of being alive with a quietly Teutonic awe at the vastness of having lived. Some eye-level shots are clearly tethered to the perspective of a certain character, while others seem to stem from the POV of an invisible spirit crouching next to them, as if asg physical dimension to the third-person of our ed pasts.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

Watched on Tuesday May 6, 2025.

When cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was inadvertently shot and killed by a live round on the set of “Rust” in October of 2021, it seemed unfathomable to me that production would ever be completed — let alone that I would be tasked with reviewing the finished product one day.

“Twilight Zone: The Movie” and “The Crow” were both released in spite of similar tragedies (in addition to more recent examples like “American Made” and “Deadpool 2,” whose stunt performer deaths sparked considerably less attention), but that was before the internet had so thoroughly flattened every film into the context of its own creation. The horror took on a life of its own when second assistant camerawoman Sarah Jones was fatally struck by a freight train on the first day of filming “Midnight Rider” in February 2014, and the Facebook group that crew started to oppose resuming the shoot had swelled to more than 10,000 by April of that year.

And what happened on the set of “Rust” caused such an instant firestorm that most of the film’s production team — huddled together in a tent as police and medical personnel began to address the situation — first learned that Hutchins was dead by reading about it on their phones.

By the time the sun went down that day, “Rust” had become inextricable from the calamity that had occurred in a small New Mexico church on the 12th day of the film’s production. And while armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed has since been convicted of involuntary manslaughter for her role in the accident, the enduring mystery as to why a live round was loaded into that weapon — and the persistent question of star/producer Alec Baldwin’s culpability in firing it — has only made it more difficult for the movie to escape the dark shadow cast by its production.

“Rust” was completed for that very reason.

In a bid to create some closure of their own, much of the original cast and crew reunited in the spring of 2023 to finish what they had started 18 months earlier. Some only agreed to do so at the direct urging of Hutchins’ husband, who received an executive producer credit as part of a settlement, and insisted that finishing the movie was the best way of honoring his late wife’s memory and dedication to her craft.

In that light, whether or not “Rust” is a good movie would seem to be irrelevant; a masterpiece wouldn’t be “worth” the loss of Hutchins’ life, and a disaster wouldn’t make her death any more senseless than it was to begin with. Still, I can’t help but feel as though reviewing the film — a film that’s about to be dumped into a handful of theaters in tandem with its low-profile release on VOD — is a critical step in the project’s transition from a cursed production to a lasting monument.

I emphasize the purpose of reviewing “Rust” in part because there’s so little else of consequence to say about the movie, a competent but uncompelling Western whose story is saddled with the unfortunate irony of being about an accidental shooting. The triggerman is a 13-year-old orphan named Lucas Hollister (Patrick Scott McDermott, making the most of this grim opportunity), whose younger brother depends on him to protect their late parents’ Wyoming ranch from wolves and other predators. One fateful morning in 1882, Lucas aims his rifle at a four-legged treser, only to hit a human villain hiding just over the ridge. The law holds the boy able despite his lack of malice, only for Alec Baldwin — of all people — to save Lucas from a noose by murdering all of his jailers.

The two fugitives make a break for the Mexican border: young Lucas and Harland Rust, a legendary outlaw who also happens to be his maternal grandfather. Harland has never met the kid before, and — underneath his cartoonishly gruff exterior, and layers of lily-gilded dialogue like “You tell any son of a bitch who comes after me that he will shake hands with the devil himself” — it’s clear that the old man is eager to make up for lost time, even if Lucas just wants to get home to his little brother.

And so the long-estranged relatives trek across a rugged sweep of the American Southwest, the hostility between them (very) slowly thawing into something that resembles love as they elude bounty hunters and have campfire heart-to-hearts. Those conversations largely boil down to Harland saying things like “This ain’t no game, boy,” and “There’s alive and there’s ain’t — try to focus on the former,” but even the most derivative aspects of Souza’s script resonate with an inescapable awareness of life’s cruelties. While Hutchins’ memory is obviously most palpable in the movie’s sweeping vistas, backlit interiors, and dusky skies, it’s hard not to feel her presence when sheriff Wood Helm (an effective Josh Hopkins), hot on Harland’s trail, laments the random illness that has befallen his own son.

Much of Hopkins’ performance is wasted on the lopsided “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” triangle — completed by a devil-eyed Travis Fimmel as ruthless bounty hunter Fenton “Preacher” Lang — that needlessly warps “Rust” well beyond the two-hour mark, but every second of bloat is an extra opportunity to savor the beauty of a film that only exists to be looked at. Hutchins lensed a relatively small fraction of the footage that appears in the finished edition of “Rust,” as several actors had to be recast and their scenes reshot (the church scene was scrapped altogether), but co-credited cinematographer Bianca Cline has honored her late colleague by adhering to the details and lighting choices left behind in Hutchins’ notes.

As a result, the footage is not just impressively seamless, but also beautiful throughout. The film’s digital gloss dovetails with the rustic elementalism of its genre, whereas so many other recent Westerns have forced those two aesthetics into direct confrontation with each other. Clunky as “Rust” can be when its script tries to navigate how the regrets of one generation might seed the hopes of another, the film’s photography creates a nuanced conversation between the heartbreak of the past and the promise of the future. In this case, that promise will remain eternally unfulfilled.

“Some things in this life you can’t get back, I reckon,” Harland laments. It’s the one truth that “Rust” conveys all too well.

~posted the whole review of this one, but the original can be found on IndieWire here~

Frustrated as fans might be that every Marvel movie has become a referendum on the state of the mega-franchise itself — and the superhero industrial complex at large — the MCU has cast itself in such a constant state of self-reflexivity that it’s all but impossible not to see each installment as its own act of meta-commentary. The “problem” isn’t just that the story of the MCU has grown to be more interesting than the stories of the films that comprise it, it’s also that — in the wake of “Deadpool & Wolverine,” the public scramble to reconfigure the next “Avengers” sequels, and the transparent bid to sell the latest MCU title as “from the cinematographer of ‘The Green Knight’” instead of “from the writer of ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’” — there’s no longer any point in divining between the two.

So when “Thunderbolts*” opens with Yelena Belova intoning that “there’s something wrong with me… an emptiness… a void,” not even Florence Pugh’s borscht-thick Russian accent is enough to hide the fact that the former child assassin is speaking for the entire multiverse. “Maybe I’m just bored,” the character muses as she absentmindedly jumps off the second-tallest building in the world (a practical stunt that Marvel has marketed with all the chutzpah of a “Mission: Impossible” movie), which leads to Yelena practically yawning as she dispatches some random goons in a long-take hallway fight streaked with jagged shadows and altogether shot with more panache than anything else in this phase of the MCU.

The point is all but unmistakable: Marvel has lost any sense of purpose in the aimless years since “Avengers: Endgame,” and “Thunderbolts*” is determined to get some of it back. To restore the swaggering confidence of those early movies. To return to their focus on (relatively) tactile action, clear emotional stakes, and — eventually — the kind of reluctant team-building that forges strength out of the same differences that threaten to tear our world apart.

Whatever initial ambiguity there might be to that intention will be long, long gone by the time this ragtag group of “disposable delinquents” assemble for a climactic fight at the very spot where the Avengers waged the Battle of New York, and that isn’t even the movie’s biggest tell. “You can’t outrun the emptiness,” someone says, but “Thunderbolts*” wants to suggest that you can hide from it for a little while by retracing your footsteps.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

The pleasures of Gareth Evans’ long-awaited “Havoc” are fewer and less consistent than die-hard fans might hope from a project they’ve been waiting to see for so many years (principal photography wrapped in the fall of 2021, only for routine reshoots to get postponed until 2024 due to various strikes and scheduling issues), but the best moments of this comically scuzzy crime saga reaffirm why the Welsh director’s work is worth the hype.

And by “the best moments,” I’m not talking about the clenched dialogue scenes that help to prop up a convoluted gang war between the Chinese mafia and the city’s corrupt mayor — a conflict that feels needlessly convoluted even before Tom Hardy, of all people, volunteers to interpret it for us.

No, I’m talking about the hyper-ballistic car chases and shootouts that all of the movie’s yapping exists to justify. While the action sequences here aren’t as extreme or sustained as those in Evans’ previous fare, they bristle and burst with the same frenzied physicality that elevated “The Raid” from an ordinary beat-em-up to an orgiastic carnival of violence.

Netflix’s emphasis on ive viewing makes the streamer an ill-fitting home for a film so eager to grab you by the throat, but not even the Tudum! of it all can fully diminish the impact of a cop being crushed to death by a washing machine full of coke or a Triad getting harpooned in the chest at point-blank range. And the two seconds in which it seems like Luis Guzmán is about to go full Iko Uwais on a nightclub full of gangsters? Well, the mere idea of that hits harder than the average studio setpiece.

But Evans is less interested in remaking “The Raid” than he is in one-upping “Max Payne,” and while that might be considerably easier for him to pull off, it doesn’t always play to his strengths. The opening seconds of “Havoc” establish that Evans doesn’t have the same command over hard-boiled neo-noir that he does over Indonesian battle royales, as Hardy’s introductory voiceover tees up a film that would rather spar with familiar genre tropes than clobber them into something unrecognizably new.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

There are two extremely jarring elements to Constance Tsang’s “Blue Sun Palace,” an otherwise soft and immaculately textured micro-portrait of three Chinese immigrants whose lives criss-cross at the Flushing massage parlor where two of them work. The first is the casting of Lee Kang-sheng, whose presence in Tsang’s fluorescent take on New York City — a world removed from the dilapidated Taipei he’s come to embody in the films of Tsai Ming-liang — instills every frame with an extratextual aura of dislocation. The second jolt comes from a shocking act of violence that triggers the title card some 33 minutes into the movie. It’s a cold reminder of the risks that come with starting over so far from home, and a new beginning for the warmly purgatorial story that follows; a story less compelled by the American Dream than it is by the void that forms in the wake of that empty promise.

Largely confined to spaces cloistered enough for her characters to forget where they are, and almost entirely told through the kind of unblinking long takes that her lead actor has lived in for so much of his career, Tsang’s debut is born from a palpable tension between the loneliness of leaving home and the tenderness of imagining a new one. “This restaurant is small,” Cheung (Lee) says to the smiling Didi (Xu Haipeng) in the date scene that opens the movie, “but the food is quite delicious.”

The camera swishes back and forth between the sturdy Taiwanese construction worker and the buoyant, Mainland-born masseuse sitting across from him, creating an internal velocity that seems to shrink the world down to the size of their table. Whether speaking Mandarin in a Chinese restaurant, singing Faye Wong ballads at a karaoke bar, or teasing each other after an intimate night in Didi’s bedroom above the massage parlor, being together allows these characters to forget what they left behind, and — for the time being — to ignore the heartache of finding something to replace it with.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

Pop quiz, hot shot: There’s a bomb on a bullet train. If the Shinkansen drops below 100 kilometers per hour, it blows up. What do you do? What do you do!?!?!

Well, one thing you don’t do is confuse “The Bullet Train Explosion” for a “Speed” remake set in a country with a functional public transportation system. For one thing, this sleek Netflix spectacle is actually a remake of the 1975 Ken Takakura/Sonny Chiba vehicle that inspired “Speed,” even though “The Bullet Train” was itself a response to American disaster films like “Earthquake” and “The Towering Inferno” (pour one out for free trade).

For another thing, Shinji Higuchi’s glossy new version — as fawning toward the East Japan Railway Company as the “Shin Godzilla” director’s kaiju movies have been skeptical of the Japanese government — isn’t fueled by unleaded suspense so much as it is by the sheer thrill of seeing people maintain their professionalism and moral decency in the midst situation that could rocket off the rails at any moment.

The strength of such “Pitt”-level competence porn makes it easy to forgive “The Bullet Train Explosion” its penchant for corporate propaganda, as there are probably more nefarious things on Netflix than a two-hour commercial for a train company that prides itself on the integrity of its employees. Employees like veteran train conductor Kazuya Takaichi (the iron-jawed Tsuyoshi Kusanagi), whose love affair with the railroad is the only romantic friction this film ever needs.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

A bloody, muscular, barrelhouse of a vampire movie that throbs like the neck of a blues guitar on fire, Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” might be the first story the “Creed” director has ripped straight from his own guts, but it thrillingly continues his post-“Fruitvale” tradition of filtering real and imagined Black histories through the prism of blockbuster entertainment, and of doing so in a way that recognizes genre as a living connection between the past and the future, as opposed to seeing it as a necessary evil of funding his art in the present.

“Sinners” is nothing if not a film about genre, and the distinctly American imperative of cross-pollinating between them to create something that feels new and old — high and low — at the same time. It’s a heartfelt and viscerally well-researched historical drama that introduces the blues as the devil’s music before fighting to reframe it as a kind of fourth-dimensional magic in its own right. It’s also a ridiculous and horny-as-hell creature feature that leverages Coogler’s enduring love for multiplex favorites like “The Faculty,” “The Thing,” and “From Dusk Till Dawn” in order to convey the hope, heartbreak, and humanity of Mississippi sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South.

“Sinners” is a movie where the fact of the old Delta’s Chinese-American population is affirmed by the fantasy of watching dozens of Black vampires perform a perfect Irish jig, and a movie in which the agonizing push-and-pull between safety and freedom — a tension familiar to any marginalized community — is perhaps best articulated by a shot of Hailee Steinfeld slowly dripping her spit into Michael B. Jordan’s open mouth. Despite being confined to a small handful of hyper-expressive locations (and the awestriking 65mm cotton fields between them), “Sinners” feels like it had to be shot on IMAX cameras just to fit all the different ingredients that Coogler wanted to mix into the stew. The film he’s made from them is inevitably too much at times, and not always in full command of its many competing flavors, but that too muchness is also the greatest strength of a visionary studio product that sticks its fangs deep into an eternal struggle: how to assimilate without losing your soul.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

Logic suggests that rogue CIA assassin Jason Bourne might be much less of a threat if — instead of a shredded government super-soldier with a sniper’s accuracy and no personal attachments — he were a vaguely autistic wife guy who couldn’t hit someone with a bazooka if they were standing right in front of him. James Hawes’ “The Amateur” begs to differ.

An aggressively competent spy thriller that has less use for logic than its lead actor does for his smile, this globe-trotting Robert Littell adaptation would have us believe that no one is more dangerous than a math nerd who refuses to think of himself as a killer, and the film makes a compelling enough case to sustain itself across the entire television season’s worth of plot that it packs into two hours. Rami Malek has made that argument before, of course, and the “Mr. Robot” star’s decision to play another socially maladapted hacker type suggests that he would rather weaponize his established strengths than correct for his weaknesses — an oddly fitting choice for the savant-like cryptographer he plays here.

An unblinking human sweater vest who’s married to a beatific Rachel Brosnahan, Langley-based cryptographer Charlie Heller loves exactly three things in this world: His wife, his wife, and sifting through confidential data sets in order to determine that unknown of the CIA have been assassinating targets in the Middle East and blaming the kills on suicide bombers. But mostly he loves his wife. When Sarah asks Charlie to make him a cup of coffee in the morning, he replies “of course!” with the enthusiasm of a dog who’s just been asked if it wants to go for a walk; in a spy movie so humorless it makes “The Good Shepherd” look like “Goldmember” by comparison, Malek’s sincerity in that moment is the closest thing we get to a laugh.

Unfortunately for Charlie, Sarah so obviously exists to get fridged that she might as well be a piece of Tupperware. And so, when our mild-mannered hero’s wife is taken hostage — and killed execution style — while on a business trip to London, Charlie is the only person on Earth who seems to be surprised. CIA Deputy Director Alex Moore (Holt McCallany, born for this) certainly knows more than he lets on, even if his boss (Julianne Nicholson in full “Paradise” mode) seems to be in the dark.

When Charlie resolves to hunt down the men who killed Sarah, Director Moore only agrees to let the twerpy computer genius get some much-needed field training because a firing range is a really convenient place to put someone who you might want to shoot “by accident.” That gruesome job would fall to Robert Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), a rather Morpheus-like mentor who feels like he’s wasting his time on a brilliant man who doesn’t have what it takes to pull the trigger. And Robert is right on both counts: Charlie is smart enough to slip off to Europe before the CIA has the chance to wipe him off the board, and also gutless enough that he tries to commit his first kill with… pollen.

And so it goes for a cloak and dagger yarn that uses its outward seriousness as a cover for the silliness at its core — a cover that it maintains with the help of Volker Bertelmann’s sawing, “Conclave”-loud violin score. Still, “The Amateur” never forgets its true identity, and while Hawes’ previous feature, the Holocaust-tinged biographical drama “One Life,” offers a strangely accurate preview of the tone at work here, the film seldom takes itself as seriously as its po-faced spycraft might suggest. Imagine a movie shot to resemble a less shaky version of “The Bourne Identity,” except — in the first proper fight scene — our hero isn’t throwing down with a beefed out henchman so much as he’s clawing at a middle-aged woman who’s in the middle of asphyxiating from an allergy attack. And he only wins the bout on a technicality.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk’s “Hell of a Summer” is a sharp and funny enough sleepaway camp slasher from two people with an obvious love for the genre. Still, it’s hard to watch the movie without being constantly reminded of the fact that its writer/director team — a Netflix star and a low-key Canadian nepo princeling who struck up a friendship when they were both cast in “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” — were basically still children when they shot it (Wolfhard was 19, Bryk 22). Actually, not “but” so much as “because.”

Nothing about the actors’ modest yet assured directorial co-debut suggests that they were undeserving of the opportunity to make it, or that Wolfhard was overeager to cash in on the cachet he’s earned as the lead of “Stranger Things.” On the contrary, “Hell of a Summer” only stands out from the endless sea (or crystal lake) of “Friday the 13th” knockoffs precisely because it feels like it was made by kids — kids who just how stupid and self-conscious coming of age can be, and still maintain direct access to the terror of reaching that point in your life when you finally have to become a real person or die trying.

That abstract terror is considerably scarier than anything that happens in “Hell of a Summer,” but Bryk and Wolfhard — for all their youth — already have wisdom enough to recognize that their movie wants to be more “Superbad” than “Sleepaway Camp.” The first hints of that inclination can be found in the film’s stab-happy and relatively straight-faced prologue, in which the married owners of Camp Pineaway are murdered by an unseen assailant as they enjoy a late-night date on the shores of the lake; one of them, impaled to death on his own guitar, is played by comedian Adam Pally, whose cameo is enough to suggest that “Hell of a Summer” would sooner make you laugh than scream.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

Considering that “A Minecraft Movie” seemed as though it might cause the end of Western civilization itself, I’m relieved to report that Warner Bros.’ bright, buoyant, block-busting video game adaptation merely coincides with it. That isn’t to say that it’s good, per se, or to suggest that I recommend paying money to sit through such a wantonly derivative corporate product about the sacred joy of creativity (and the soul-crushing evil of the profit motive!), but there’s some legitimate fun to be had in watching director Jared Hess and a small army of screenwriters try to excavate a kid-friendly adventure saga from the infinite sandbox of their source material.

Unsurprisingly — or, as someone with a fatal allergy to “Napoleon Dynamite,” very surprisingly — most of that fun stems from the moments when “The Minecraft Movie” actually feels like it was made by the guy behind “Napoleon Dynamite.” The vast majority of those moments are concentrated in the first act of the story, before the brunt of its human characters are sucked into the cubic dreamscape of the video game’s Overworld and steered through a paint-by-numbers plot so unashamedly mashed together from “The Lord of the Rings” and “The LEGO Movie” that WB might have to sue itself.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

The second chapter of what I’m tempted to call Alex Garland’s “American Typewriter” series, “Warfare” plays like a concentrated B-side to last year’s sprawling “Civil War,” which leveraged the aforementioned font to lend an air of objective reportage to a fictional story about photojournalists covering the downfall of Western democracy. From a distance, that font might seem to be the only thing these two films share in common besides their director (and his signature ambivalence), as one is a provocatively speculative epic that ends with a ground assault on the White House, and the other is a violently grounded simulation that aspires to be the most realistic movie ever made about modern combat. Where “Civil War” was born from anxieties, “Warfare” is based on memories — specifically, the memories of a Ramadi surveillance mission that went sideways for a group of Navy SEALs during the Iraq War in 2006.

And yet, for all of their overlying differences, both of these projects are defined by a shared effort to fill in the deadliest blind spots of American exceptionalism (a strange and/or charitable task for a British filmmaker like Garland to undertake, depending on your POV). If “Civil War” was a mealymouthed broadside against the idea that “it can’t happen here,” “Warfare” is a viscerally hyper-specific reminder of the human cost required to ensure that “it” keeps happening everywhere else instead.

Less irresolute than Garland’s previous feature but likewise determined to remain superficially apolitical in spite of itself, “Warfare” ignores the partisan implications of “ing the troops” in favor of trying to reconcile the fantasy of serving this country with the reality of dying for it. The only thing harder for Americans to fathom than a fake war our own soil, it would seem, is one of the real wars that have been waged in our name somewhere else; wars fought so far away that the people we send to fight them — impossibly young and impressively capable — are reduced to abstractions by hawks and doves alike.

Garland has long been fascinated by failures of the human imagination, and the sole purpose of this 93-minute immersion test is to bring the unvarnished truth of what those SEALs experienced in Ramadi closer to home. To make it real for the rest of us; as inescapable as a bad memory or the sight lines of an IMAX screen. In order to accomplish that goal, Garland has done his best to strip “Warfare” of any imagination altogether.

Conceived with/co-directed by former communications officer and “Civil War” stunt coordinator Ray Mendoza, who’s played here by “Reservation Dogs” star D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai, “Warfare” is absent most legible forms of editorialization. The film unfolds in something akin to real-time, its screenplay — collated from and corroborated by the memories of the soldiers who survived the ordeal — determined to feel more like a transcript of events than the blueprint for a Hollywood film.

Instead of dialogue, the SEAL team communicates through chatter. Instead of characters, the cast is identified by rank and responsibility (the only things that make it even remotely possible to distinguish between Garland’s all-star team of pasty young hunks, most of whom look exactly like Tom Blyth even though none of them are). Instead of drama, the film’s considerable tension is sustained by the specter of death. There are no cheap thrills here. No well-calibrated jolts or “cool” set-ups. It’s all about dry verisimilitude (at least until Garland starts to lean a little too hard on the I.E.D. sound effects), which in this case proves more than compelling enough.

On its face, that may not seem to be a novel approach to a war film, but Garland and Mendoza’s relentless pursuit of military “realism” is uniquely weaponized by their refusal to comment on its meaning. One could argue that “Warfare” takes a fetishistic pleasure in detailing the competence displayed by these young men, in studying the camaraderie that binds them together, and in illustrating the occupational might they bring to bear upon the insurgents they’ve been assigned to monitor so that American troops could safely through the area. If you’re selectively looking for propaganda, as either a critic or a consumer, “Warfare” gives you plenty of material to piece into an argument; while there isn’t a millisecond of this movie that made “serving our country” seem like a fun or noble pursuit to me, I’m also stuck on the fact that even such a pointedly apolitical project would be impossible to finance or if told from the Iraqi POV.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

Jason Statham is shaped like a human bullet, and “A Working Man” director David Ayer — who also collaborated with the actor on last year’s “The Beekeeper,” a galaxy-brained “John Wick” riff that effectively climaxes with our humble apiarist blasting a hole into a member of the First Family’s head — continues to take full advantage of the fact that you can shoot the guy clean through some of the silliest and/or most staid vigilante stories ever conceived without having to worry about softening his impact.

On the contrary, undisguised contrivance, cliche, and cartoonishness only seem to increase the velocity of his screen image, which helps to explain why the brain-damaged likes of “Crank: High Voltage” and (the otherwise loathsome) “Expend4ables” were more effective star vehicles for Statham than comparatively grounded fare like “Transporter 2” or “The Mechanic.”

It also helps to explain why high-caliber schlock like “A Working Man” — which starts with Statham as a simple construction worker, and ends with him fighting a top-hatted super pervert while a moon the size of Melancholia seems like it’s about to crash into the suburbs of Chicago — almost has to feel like it’s ricocheting around the action genre at random in order to have a chance of hitting its target.

As the once and forever Guy Ritchie mascot approaches 60 without any sign of slowing down, his signature glint continues to harden into an indestructible moral code. For the second time in as many years, Ayer has cast Statham as the last good man in a world gone bad. And — for the second time in as many years — Ayer has created a piece of AMC A-List cinema par excellence by emphasizing the actor’s sheer force of will as a spectacle unto itself.

By casting Statham as a reluctant avatar of righteousness in a country that continues to prey on its own, and trusting that his implacable sense of honor will resonate with an audience who feel like they’ve been taken advantage of for their decency. I suppose a similar effect could be achieved by Keanu Reeves, Liam Neeson, or even by John Wayne for that matter (the movie’s press notes sheepishly compare “A Working Man” to “The Searchers”), but Statham’s recent films stand out for the sheer degree of the disconnect they create between the purity of his schtick and the absurdity of the nonsense that surrounds it.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

After the star graduate of an elite Belgian tennis academy commits suicide, her shocking death triggers an investigation into the late teenager’s relationship with the (now suspended) older male coach who’d been so instrumental to her success. That investigation gradually but inevitably comes to focus on the coach’s latest protégé, who’s spent the last several years under his wing, and is on the cusp of qualifying for the Belgian Tennis Federation. People can’t help but suspect that she knows a thing or two about how coach Jeremy (Laurent Caron) treats his pupils when no one else is around to see. Her friends, her parents, the s at her school… everyone is eager for her to fill in the blanks, but Julie keeps quiet.

Needless to say, Leonardo Van Dijl’s “Julie Keeps Quiet” doesn’t regard that as much of a spoiler. This impressive debut feature — cold as a crypt and yet enormously sensitive all at once — is never framed like a mystery, or at least not like the mystery that you might expect from its premise.

As the title of the film makes clear from the start, the question at the heart of this story isn’t whether Julie (first-time actress and veteran tennis player Tessa Van den Broeck) will speak up, or even what she might reveal if she did. The question at the heart of this film — which is executive produced by Naomi Osaka and co-produced by the Dardenne brothers — is why Julie chooses to remain silent, and the overlapping array of possible answers provided by Van Dijl and Ruth Becquart’s script allows this sober coming-of-age story to mature into an absorbingly implosive portrait of a girl learning to listen to herself.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

Watched on Sunday March 23, 2025.

Toward the end of Jessica Palud’s “Being Maria,” an uneven but poignantly restorative portrait of “Last Tango in Paris” star Maria Schneider (played here by “Happening” breakout Anamaria Vartolomei), the actress sits for an interview in which she reflects on her recent experience shooting Jacques Rivette’s self-disowned “Merry-Go-Round.”

With a warm smile on her face, Schneider describes the serendipity of the film’s premise, which revolves around a boy and a girl who cross paths in Paris after being summoned there by someone neither of them can find: “It’s about two people who meet because the person they were supposed to meet doesn’t show up.”

The production of Rivette’s creatively unmoored film was not a happy one (Schneider couldn’t stand the male lead, and quit the movie before it even wrapped), but you’d never know that from the way it’s discussed in “Being Maria.” So far as Palud is concerned, there’s more value — more truth — to be found in doomed and/or forgotten attempts at artistic discovery than there is in even the most iconic displays of artistic debasement.

It’s an ethos that “Being Maria” embodies in spite of itself, as Palud is much sharper in depicting Schneider’s trauma on the set of “Last Tango” than she is in detailing the psychic fallout of shooting Bernardo Bertolucci’s erotic drama — particularly the butter-lubricated scene of anal rape, which was sprung on the actress and her character alike.

That’s also an ethos that “Being Maria” comes to assume as an identity. Palud’s spare and elliptical script (co-written with Laurette Polmanss, and based on a second-person memoir written by Schneider’s cousin Vanessa) is the furthest thing from the work of Jacques Rivette, and yet it too could be seen as a story about two people who meet because the person they were supposed to meet doesn’t show up.

One of those people is Maria Schneider, and the other is us. The person who never shows up is Jeanne, the character she played in Bertolucci’s film, and would always be ed for — the one whose assault was captured on camera, and whose pain would follow the actress like a shadow for decades to come. Jeanne’s simulated but unscripted rape was meant to expose the truth of her character’s humiliation and distrust, but those emotions were manufactured at the expense of the 19-year-old girl who played her. They belonged to her, and “Being Maria” is determined to wrestle them back.

~this review continues on IndieWire~

Effectively splitting the difference between the crude human drama of his animated work (e.g. “The King of Pigs,” “The Fake”) and the genre spectacle of the blockbuster fare that followed (“Train to Busan,” “Psychokinesis”), Korean director Yeon Sang-ho returns with a glossy psychological thriller about a church pastor who’s cucked so hard that he convinces himself it’s an act of God.

And yet, the real problem for Pastor Sung Min-chan (“A Taxi Driver” star Ryu Jun-yeol) is that he’s not alone in mistaking earthly hardship for a kind of divine instruction, as “Revelations” will soon find the good father crossing paths with a serial kidnapper who claims his crimes are committed at the behest of a “one-eyed monster,” as well as a young detective who believes that her dead sister — one of the criminal’s previous victims — is urging her to catch him from the afterlife.

How Ryan Gosling and the Pandemic Helped ‘The Actor’ Find Its Tone
Each of the characters in this unholy trinity is trying to quiet a voice in their head, and as the uneven strands of Yeon’s morally complex but narratively convoluted movie begin to knot together, those voices will start to scream over the others in an effort to sound like justice.

Reworked from Yeon’s comic of the same name (co-written by Choi Gyu-seok), “Revelations” is the kind of layered yet messy adaptation that results from someone trying to find new ways of telling a story they’ve almost thought to death already. It’s a movie with slippery footing and a solid foundation, both of which are on full display throughout a needlessly complicated first act that puts all of its characters in motion (while taking great pains not to reveal the full extent of their personal traumas and/or relationships with each other).

~this review continues on IndieWire~

1. Sentimental Value
2. Yes
3. Sirât
4. It Was Just an Accident
5. Eddington
6. Sound of Falling
7. The Secret Agent
8. Urchin
9. Pillion
10. My Father's Shadow

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

sure

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

1. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
2. April
3. Sorry, Baby
4. The Perfect Neighbor
5. Predators
6. Train Dreams
7. Rebuilding
8. Twinless
9. Zodiac Killer Project
10. Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)

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

watch the countdown video here

please donate to my fundraiser for the Palestine Red Crescent Society here

1. Nickel Boys
2. No Other Land
3. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
4. Anora
5. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World
6. A Different Man
7. Challengers
8. The Beast
9. Nosferatu
10. I Saw the TV Glow

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

1. Nickel Boys
2. April
3. Cloud
4. The End
5. The Brutalist
6. Hard Truths
7. Queer
8. Friendship
9. Happyend
10. We Live in Time

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

in the true, poisoned spirit of Ready Player One

1. A.I. Artificial Intelligence
2. Schindler's List
3. Jurassic Park
4. Jaws
5. Catch Me If You Can
6. Munich
7. Raiders of the Lost Ark
8. Saving Private Ryan
9. Close Encounters of the Third Kind
10. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Anora
2. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
3. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
4. The Substance
5. Megalopolis
6. All We Imagine as Light
7. The Shrouds
8. Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron
9. Good One
10. Universal Language

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. I Saw the TV Glow
2. A Different Man
3. Between the Temples
4. Sasquatch Sunset
5. Good One
6. Look Into My Eyes
7. The Outrun
8. Daughters
9. In the Summers
10. Union

...plus 16 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

watch the video countdown here

donate to the fundraiser in of the Palestine Children's Relief Fund here

1. The Boy and the Heron
2. Asteroid City
3. Past Lives
4. The Taste of Things
5. Killers of the Flower Moon
6. The Zone of Interest
7. Love Life
8. The Delinquents
9. Oppenheimer
10. La Chimera

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

1. The Boy and the Heron
2. All of Us Strangers
3. Poor Things
4. The Beast
5. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
6. The Royal Hotel
7. Dream Scenario
8. Janet Planet
9. Priscilla
10. The Burial

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

1. Do the Right Thing
2. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
3. The Thing
4. Paris, Texas
5. Shoah
6. My Neighbor Totoro
7. Vagabond
8. The Green Ray
9. Possession
10. Sans Soleil

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Party Girl
• Variety
• Gallipoli
• Fear Is the Key
• Hester Street
• The Menu
• The Woman in the Window
• Deep End
• The Shout
• Moonlighting

...plus 70 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Taste of Things
2. Asteroid City
3. The Zone of Interest
4. May December
5. Anatomy of a Fall
6. Killers of the Flower Moon
7. La Chimera
8. The Breaking Ice
9. Monster
10. The Delinquents

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

whatever!

• Close-Up
• Eyes Wide Shut
• F for Fake
• Ikiru
• Marie Antoinette
• Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
• Sans Soleil
• Titanic
• The Wind Rises
• Yi Yi

~you can watch the video countdown here~

as chosen by AFTERSUN director Charlotte Wells, this year's video is in of non-profit Food with Fam, which supplies food to thousands of New York families and individuals in need.

please consider donating here

1. Aftersun
2. TÁR
3. Everything Everywhere All at Once
4. Hit the Road
5. Descendant
6. Return to Seoul
7. We're All Going to the World's Fair
8. Crimes of the Future
9. Decision to Leave
10. Nope

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

1. Past Lives
2. Eileen
3. ages
4. A Thousand and One
5. The Starling Girl
6. Scrapper
7. Sometimes I Think About Dying
8. Milisuthando
9. Fair Play
10. Rotting in the Sun

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Love Life
2. The Banshees of Inisherin
3. Women Talking
4. The Fabelmans
5. Glass Onion
6. The Eternal Daughter
7. Godland
8. Catherine Called Birdy
9. No Bears
10. Bros

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. TÁR
2. Bones and All
3. Women Talking
4. Love Life
5. The Banshees of Inisherin
6. The Eternal Daughter
7. Godland
8. White Noise
9. The Wonder
10. Athena

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

INDIEWIRE'S 100 BEST FILMS OF THE 1990S

(thanks to Joey Lewandowski for building the LB list)

1. Eyes Wide Shut
2. Close-Up
3. Schindler's List
4. Beau Travail
5. Hoop Dreams
6. GoodFellas
7. After Life
8. Titanic
9. The Long Day Closes
10. Safe

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

films seen at Cannes 2022, ranked in rough order of preference

1. Aftersun
2. Decision to Leave
3. Armageddon Time
4. Top Gun: Maverick
5. R.M.N.
6. Return to Seoul
7. One Fine Morning
8. Crimes of the Future
9. Tori and Lokita
10. Stars at Noon

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

1. Resurrection
2. Speak No Evil
3. Descendant
4. When You Finish Saving the World
5. Nanny
6. jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy
7. Cha Cha Real Smooth
8. Happening
9. Dual
10. Sharp Stick

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

VIDEO COUNTDOWN

FUNDRAISER W/ JANE CAMPION IN OF NON-PROFITS THAT PROVIDE ABORTION ACCESS TO WOMEN IN TEXAS

1. The Power of the Dog
2. Bergman Island
3. The Souvenir: Part II
4. Memoria
5. Drive My Car
6. Petite Maman
7. Pig
8. Licorice Pizza
9. Saint Maud
10. Red Rocket

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

cause i need closure.

1. Captain America: The First Avenger
2. The Avengers
3. Avengers: Endgame
4. Black Panther
5. Iron Man 3
6. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
7. Iron Man
8. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
9. Thor: Ragnarok
10. Eternals

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Souvenir: Part II
2. Red Rocket
3. Bergman Island
4. Titane
5. After Yang
6. Ahed's Knee
7. Drive My Car
8. Lingui: The Sacred Bonds
9. A Hero
10. The Worst Person in the World

...plus 19 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

every weekend during the pandemic my wife and i (along with friends over text) watch an '80s or '90s action movie that she's never seen. or something else in that vein.

suggestions welcome.

• RoboCop
• Under Siege
• Escape from New York
• The Hunt for Red October
• Crimson Tide
• Deep Blue Sea
• Demolition Man
• Cliffhanger
• Commando
• Con Air

...plus 25 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Nothing lasts forever in the world of Wong Kar-wai. Not countries, not relationships, not cans of pineapples. “Like Hong Kong,” filmmaker Olivier Assayas observed in a speech honoring Wong at the 2017 Lumiere Film Festival:

Wong’s cinema is built upon the ephemeral: the ephemeral nature of exile coupled with the ephemeral identity and existence of a city set on the edge of a precipice, living in a constant state of uncertainty at the mercy of mainland China, which could swallow it any moment and wipe out everything it has built, from one day to the next. This is a fleeting world of which Wong has preserved fragments, conscious of cinema’s mysterious ability to freeze time and bear witness to that which other arts cannot capture.

In the context of such a slippery body of work, it’s a strange feeling to actually hold the Criterion Collection’s astonishing new “World of Wong Kar Wai” box set in your hands. It’s as if the ornate package — which folds eight of the “Chungking Express” director’s films into a delicate jigsaw puzzle that reflects the shifting and elusive nature of Wong’s storytelling — might dissolve into a memory at a moment’s notice. Even the films themselves aren’t quite how you them, as some of the Wong-supervised 4K restorations tweaked their source material and challenges fans to confront the rigid nostalgia that traps so many of his characters (stay tuned for more coverage about this later in the week).

Revisiting the likes of “In the Mood for Love,” “Days of Being Wild,” and “Happy Together,” viewers are liable to discover that their own feelings about these films have proven to be as fluid and unpredictable as the films themselves. Some may find that personal revisionism is at odds with a body of work that fixates on the past as the one thing that never changes.

The beautiful people in Wong’s films twist and sway through the world like kites on a string, all of them so tethered to long-expired memories (which knot around food, kitsch, music, kung fu, and sometimes even the dreams of an imagined future) that they can only float through the present as tourists. They’re as much in exile from their heartbreak as Wong became from his birthplace of Shanghai when his family relocated to Hong Kong on the cusp of the Cultural Revolution, leaving two older siblings behind. On the other hand, watching so many of Wong’s movies in the context they lend to each other might also crystallize the same elusive wisdom that his characters struggled to internalize: Everything has an expiration date, even your most deeply held feelings.

Ranking works of art will always be a clumsy arrangement, but surrendering to the temptation can seem uniquely productive when it comes to the world of Wong Kar Wai (at least for the person ranking them, anyway). At the end of the director’s note included in the Criterion set, Wong writes: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. These are not the same films, and we are not the same audience.” In that spirit, you might find it eye-opening to look at these films anew and see if your own reflection has changed. Hypothetically speaking, if someone lives to regret arguing that neither “Chungking Express” nor “In the Mood for Love” is Wong’s greatest work? Well, to quote a line from the director’s most recent film: “How boring life would be without regrets.”

my mini essays on all 11 of these films can be found on IndieWire

1. 2046

   “Nothing lasts forever, anyway.”

   Wong Kar Wai’s only direct sequel is also his single greatest film, although calling “2046” a direct anything could be a misrepresentation of how scrambled this inwardly spiraling epic can feel the first time through. Tony Leung’s Chow Mo-wan — now a divorced, mustached, proto-Don Draper type who lives in a Hong Kong hotel and files garbage journalism whenever he isn’t busy negging on showgirls — tries to write his way out of the love story he continues to tell himself about his time with Su Li-zhen.

   That process is discursive and impressionistic, even by Wong’s usual standards; if “In the Mood for Love” flirted with symptoms of “Vertigo,” “2046” is so dizzying that it can leave you feeling a little seasick. Points of interest include a rotating cast of beautiful women (including Gong Li as Maggie Cheung’s doppelganger), a timeline that loops around on itself with little warning, and even a glimpse at an imagined future where people can take a train to 2046 in order to recapture their lost memories. No one has ever come back. 2046 is a date, a place, the number of the second-floor room next to Mo-wan’s, and of course the final year of the self-regulated status that China promised Hong Kong at the time of the 1997 handover, but here it always represents a kind of oblivion — a point of no return that forever divides what is from what once was.

   2046 is the place beyond the mountain in “Ashes of Time,” it’s the infinite minute in “Days of Being Wild,” it’s the lighthouse at the end of the world in “Happy Together” and the destination where Faye offers to fly Cop 663 at the end of “Chungking Express.” It’s where all of Wong’s characters have been hoping to go, and so it’s no wonder that we encounter so many of them on the way there. “2046” is effectively “The Avengers” of the WKWCU, with Leung and the leftover traces of Cheung (excerpted from “In the Mood for Love”) giving way to the reappearances of Carina Lau (reprising her role as Mimi/Lulu from “Days of Being Wild”), Chang Chen, and Faye Wong, the latter three of whom play double roles in a way that acknowledges their dual existences in this film and in our memory.

   It’s a dense ride, and its emotional tempos are certainly easier to appreciate for Wong diehards, but while “2046” depends on its director’s previous work in a way that his other films do not, it would be a grave mistake to write it off as bizarro fan service or the stuff of artistic indulgence. The forward-thinking nature of Wong’s cinema can disguise how looking backward is what it’s always done best, and from a certain perspective “In the Mood for Love” — for all of its ravishing beauty — is more powerful to reflect upon than to watch. It would almost be a waste of time for Wong to design that pit of quicksand in such granular detail if he never returned to see Mo-wan sink deeper as he flails around in search of his past.

   Operatic and sprawling where the similarly unkind “Fallen Angels” was punkish and serrated, “2046” isn’t a cold film so much as it’s attuned to the absence of warmth. The surreal and purposely retro-futuristic sci-fi sequences contrast with the airless elegance of the Hong Kong timeline, and Zhang Ziyi delivers one of the greatest Wong performances as a sharp-tongued prostitute whose look took six hours to apply every day, and stays mostly intact even as she follows Mo-wan into the abyss. Wong’s filmmaking reaches mesmerizing new heights as it forges the conflict that sparks between these parallel stories into the key that Mo-wan has presumably been looking for ever since his silent cameo at the end of “Days of Being Wild.” It’s a key that locks the past in place and opens Mo-wan to the possibility that memory is so valuable to keep because people can only be borrowed. It’s a key that allows him to see that nothing can ever be exactly as it was, even (or especially) if it was never that way in the first place. It’s a key that bears the number 2046.

2. In the Mood for Love

   “It is a restless moment…”

   Writing about “In the Mood for Love” has always been a bit like dancing about architecture. “If we could tell a film,” a frustrated Jafar Panahi once raged under house arrest, “then why make a film?” If we could express in words the heartstopping beauty of Wong Kar Wai’s sensually choreographed shadow tango (or bottle the shudder of feeling that runs up our spines at the first strains of “Yumeji’s Theme”), he wouldn’t have felt compelled to shoot it. For 15 months straight. To an extent that’s true of all Wong’s work, which is singularly cinematic even in its shortcomings. But the feeling is perhaps most palpable with “In the Mood for Love,” which was hardly the first of his movies to focus on the space between people, but remains one of the only movies — by Wong or anyone else — to capture that space on camera as if it were as tactile as anything else.

   For 98 minutes, the figure-ground confusion is so intense that you can actually see the longing between Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung’s would-be lovers take shape on screen like a Rubin’s vase in motion. You can feel the Shanghainese-accented rift between these characters’ origins in mainland China and their exile to 1962 Hong Kong, where they collide amidst an insular community that isn’t defined by one place or the other so much as the infidelity of belonging to both at once.

   Extrapolated from a planned triptych that Wong had intended to call “A Story of Food,” “In the Mood for Love” is nothing if not a gratuitous feast for the eyes. The most indelible aspects of the film’s visual resplendence — the transportive wizardry of William Chang’s cluttered production design, the 20 different cheongsam dresses that Cheung wears like mirages to obscure her underlying desire, the chiaroscuro halos that cinematographers Mark Lee Ping Bing and Christopher Doyle carve from the darkness of a rainswept alleyway where Leung waits for her under a streetlamp — are so effective because of what they hide from us.

   This is a movie about a potential affair between two neighbors who learn that their respective spouses are sleeping together. But it’s also, and perhaps more pointedly, a movie about the afterimage of an affair that’s already happened, and continues to happen off-screen (where Su Li-zhen and Chow Mo-wan’s partners are confined at all times, sometimes hovering just out of frame like the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon). We don’t need to see them to trust that they’re real. Likewise, Li-zhen and Mo-wan don’t need to fuck in order for it to feel like they’re cheating. Some cab rides can be more intimate than entire marriages; a lipstick-stained cigarette butt left behind by an unseen intruder can say more than a kiss; a shared desire can be more transgressive than any tryst.

   Touch is finite. Scientific. Touch is fleeting, and there’s no present tense in the world of Wong Kar Wai — the only valuable currency in his movies is the memory of what might have been. Like amateur videographer Ho Chi-mo in “Fallen Angels” or so many of Wong’s other characters in less literal ways, Mo-wan collects images and slivers and song cues that he can cut together in his mind. He whispers them into the hole of a temple wall at Angkor Wat for safekeeping. “The past is something he could see, but not touch,” reads the closing title card. “In the Mood for Love” tells us that Mo-wan is a writer of fiction — Wong Kar Wai shows us that Mo-wan is a filmmaker. Here, his past is so vividly projected that it can feel more real to us than some parts of our own lives.

3. The Grandmaster

   “All encounters in this world are a kind of reunion.”

   If Wong Kar Wai’s films suggest the detail and potency of a short story writer, Ip Man biopic “The Grandmaster” is his one true crack at an epic. To call this achingly sad Kung Fu saga a biopic would be misleading in the extreme: For one thing, that suggests the kind of dull linearity that Wong couldn’t do with a gun to his head. For another, “The Grandmaster” is less a focused story about the Foshan-born man who eventually found his way to Hong Kong and became Bruce Lee’s teacher than it is a bittersweet mural that depicts the emotional timbre of an entire migration.

   The only Wong film that starts with its hero in a loving marriage, “The Grandmaster” is split down the middle (and therefore still divided into segments) by the Second Sino-Japanese War. In the spring of Ip’s life, Tony Leung plays the title character with the cockiness of someone who possesses such precise control over his body that he can’t understand that some things are out of his hands. He will.

   First comes desire, as Ip spars with Kung Fu heiress Gong Er (an indomitably vulnerable Zhang Ziyi) in a series of spellbinding fight scenes that invert the choreographed longing of “In the Mood for Love,” finding the same romantic friction in hand-to-hand combat. Then comes devastation, as Ip loses his family in the war, Gong’s martial arts school is stolen from her family by collaborators, and the millions of Chinese people who flee to Hong Kong are forced to sacrifice one era at the altar of another.

   All Wong Kar Wai films are haunted by the past, but only “The Grandmaster” is so loudly concerned with the weight of legacy, and attends to the dislocation of exile like an open wound (one that becomes the source of Wong’s scars). This is his first movie about a historical figure, but in some respects it feels like the most personal thing he’s ever made; bruised and wistful even by his own unimpeachable standard. Umebayashi Shigeru gets a lot of well-deserved credit for “Yumeji’s Theme” from “In the Mood for Love,” but the gut-wrenchingly elegiac score he contributes to “The Grandmaster” is just as powerful. “The times make us what we are,” indeed.

   Comparing the mythic beauty of “The Grandmaster” to the operatic lavishness of “2046” or the pop rush of “Chungking Express” is like comparing Brueghel to Renoir or Basquiat, but Wong shot the living shit out of this thing. He restores all the classical wuxia splendor that he smudged beyond recognition in “Ashes of Time” with Philippe Le Sourd’s lush cinematography, William Chang’s impeccable art design, and heightened sound design that makes drops of rain squelch like broken bones. The film transposes the tension between looking back and moving forward into a veritable symphony that crescendos into one of the most awe-inspiring action scenes in the history of cinema: Gong’s fight to preserve her past at the expense of her future allows Wong to arrive at the ultimate harmony between poetry and violence. Her victory may be short-lived, but in the world of Wong Kar Wai, looking back is the only way to reliably find a path forward.

   Of note: Despite being overseen by Wong, the 108-minute American cut is a pale imitation of the 130-minute Chinese version (click here for details). The latter is hard to find, but worth the effort.

4. Chungking Express

   “We’re all unlucky in love sometimes.”

   Frustrated by the interminable post-production of “Ashes of Time” and itching to get out of the editing room, Wong Kar Wai hit the streets of Hong Kong and — in a blitz of pent-up creativity — slapped together one of the most earthshaking movies of its decade in less than two months. No wonder it moves in such a hurry. Is any other film so captivating so fast?

   Lightning in a bottle, “Chungking Express” bolts out of the darkness to the queasy sounds of Michael Galasso’s organ-grinder soundtrack. A blonde-wigged Brigitte Lin speeds through the bowels of Kowloon’s Chungking Mansions, the world streaking around her, life always in media res. By the time the title card arrives a few seconds later in a hail of bullets, it’s clear you’re watching sui generis cinema that can only be made in a melting pot as it threatens to bubble over. Today, when it’s steeped in nostalgia for the freedoms of a pre-handover Hong Kong (and inextricable from whatever flashbulb memories you might have about who you were when you first discovered it), “Chungking Express” still feels new.

   The second part of the movie is so iconic that people tend to sleep on the first, but their lack of overlap makes it easy to forget that neither would be so electrifying without the other. ”Chungking Express” requires both of its uneven halves to forge a complete portrait of a city in which people can be close enough to feel like home but still too far away to touch.

   The neon-lit first part, with Kaneshiro Takeshi’s handsome pineapple obsessive crossing paths with Lin’s homicidal cocaine-runner, drops us into a romantic underworld in which starry-eyed longing and sociopathic violence brush within centimeters of each other and lose themselves in the same tune that’s playing on the jukebox. The intimacy of the voiceover harmonizes with the indifference until everyone feels alone together. It’s sad and wonderful at the same time.

   The ultra-shy connection that blossoms between Tony Leung’s beat cop and Faye Wong’s proto-Amélie manic pixie dream waitress becomes a Wong signature love story. They find romance in the strangest of things: home invasions; the sense memory of certain music; the echoes that someone leaves behind that can seem more real than the person themselves. The most routine objects that Faye discovers in Cop 663’s apartment become imbued with a holy power, like totems that she carries to remind herself that he isn’t just a dream — or because she’s afraid to risk him becoming anything more.

   The preciousness of this storyline doesn’t play as well now that it’s been thoroughly weaponized by the likes of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and various lesser talents who tried to bend that kind of quirk towards their own purposes (Leung is maybe the only person alive who can sell a line like “Did I leave the tap running, or is the apartment getting more tearful?,” and even he barely squeaks it out). It’s also true that Wong’s delirious style is dependent on his sincerity, and a film like “Chungking Express” wouldn’t fly without scraping back the topsoil of modern life and exposing the sensitive layers we all hide just below. In a world that streaks by so fast, nothing could be more valuable than a concrete offer to share the same future — even if that offer is written on a napkin.

5. Fallen Angels

   “The night’s full of weirdos.”

   A weird and jagged film that was conceived alongside “Chungking Express” but came into the world a year after Wong’s international breakthrough, “Fallen Angels” is effectively the evil twin to “Chungking Express,” the “Amnesiac” to its “Kid A,” the Tartan Extreme version of an urban fairy tale that was almost a bit too cuddly for its own good. It’s another dyad about unexpected collisions between lost souls in the restless hustle of pre-handover Hong Kong — but this one sinks into a midnight glimmer where its predecessor found sunshine, it’s murderous where Wong’s previous movie was sweet, and above all, it’s moribund where “Chungking Express” was bursting at the seams with life.

   That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There is, to put it in the most regrettable , a certain “poptimism” to “Chungking Express” that balances the damnation of Brigitte Lin’s plot with the expectant hope for a better tomorrow. The film’s characters are free to roam if they want to, whether that means sneaking into a stranger’s apartment, floating off to California, or smuggling cocaine (that one doesn’t work out too hot, but at least they give it a go).

   The opposite is true of the crepuscular “Fallen Angels,” where Kowloon is draped in a purgatorial darkness so complete that the people who landed there seem to have lost hope of finding the light. Christopher Doyle’s close-up CinemaScope lensing flattens every frame into its own kind of prison cell; these characters can’t even grab a bite at a fast-food restaurant without it feeling like they might be stuck there forever. Even their pleasure is easily mistaken for pain, as we see in the opening images where an unnamed hitman’s assistant — again with the assassin brokers! — writhes on her bed while she masturbates to her partner’s memory. She’s played by the enigmatic Michelle Reis, while her dour triggerman is Leon Lai, two Wong one-offs whose presence fortifies this movie’s reputation as an outlier that could only appeal to completists.

   It’s true that “Fallen Angels” offers some deeps cuts to fans who see it in the wider context of Wong’s body of work. Kaneshiro Takeshi’s Ho Chi-mo goes mute after eating a can of expired pineapples, echoing the softer character he played in “Chungking Express;” Chi-mo’s dad is played by the manager of the actual Chungking Mansions. It’s cute that Wong’s characters — always communicating through objects — have finally discovered the magic of the fax machine.

   But the aspects of “Fallen Angels” that really make it sing don’t require any homework. For one thing, it might be Wong’s funniest movie; the guy isn’t known for his sense of humor, but the scene where Lai’s hitman encounters a buffoonish old classmate on his way home from committing an act of mass murder epitomizes the droll comedy of a city where life and death ride the same bus.

   The film leverages the liminality of its setting into a universally accessible pair of sloppily threaded stories about people in need of salvation at the end of the world. Their mutual resignation reflects Wong’s general distrust of destination-minded thinking, and — with a last-minute burst of emotional poignancy — only move foreard when they embrace the kind of freedom that has to be rented from other people. (“Are you borrowing me, or am I borrowing you?” someone would eventually ask in a different Wong film nine years later, as if the director had been searching for the answer to his own question ever since.)

   In the end, the fraying messiness of “Fallen Angels” becomes what’s most fulfilling; the film’s tangled chaos allows its survivors to find a sense of possibility in each other. Nothing lasts forever, not a job or a partnership or a city, and especially not a point in time. “For her,” the assassin concludes about a girl he’s dumped, “I’m just a stopover on the journey of her life.” But maybe, the last shot appears to suggest, it’s people who are life’s journeys, and the stopovers just where we wait for the next one to start.

6. Happy Together

   “It turns out lonely people are all the same.”

   “We’re going to shoot a road movie in Argentina,” Wong Kar Wai told his cast and crew before they boarded the plane that would take them to the next year or two of their lives. “From where to where I don’t know yet.”

   While the film world was still recovering from the one-two punch of “Chungking Express” and “Fallen Angels,” Wong sought to make something that would recapture the magic while keeping his audience on their heels. The result is a movie that’s as much the flipside to that couplet as “Chungking Express” and “Fallen Angels” were to each other — an antipodean love story that cemented Wong’s auteur status by turning the world upside down and seeing his signature tropes in a sun-baked new light.

   Everything about “Happy Together” is familiar to fans of Wong’s earlier films, and yet everything is also different. The day-dreaming Lai Yiu-Fai and the more volatile Ho Po-Wing are typical Wong archetypes; the actors who embody them (Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Leslie Cheung) are as synonymous with his work as step-printing and “California Dreamin’;” and the way they’re both desperately alone save for their moments of shared collision is true to Wong’s stance that love is better ed than kept.

   Here, however, the lovers are both men, their relationship is carnal rather than coquettish (the film opens with the most explicit sex scene that Wong has ever permitted Christopher Doyle to shoot), and the story of how they repeatedly break up and careen back into each other is as straightforward as “Ashes of Time” was non-linear. Wong wanted to make a gay romance that was as raw and grounded as hetero love stories were allowed to be lighter than air, and it remains fascinating to watch him bend his poetic flourishes in service of something so bitter and physical. Certain moments feel as if they could’ve been adopted from Fassbinder.

   And then there’s the Argentina of it all, which allows Wong to explore the personal nature of exile and the parts of themselves that people can’t help but bring with them wherever they go. “To me,” Wong has said, “‘Happy Together’ applies not only to the relationship between two persons, but also the relationship between one person and his past. If people are at peace with themselves and their past, this is the start of being able to be happy with somebody else.” Yiu-Fai and Po-Wing are so determined to run away from themselves that they can’t help but collide into each other over and over again, each “new start” actually betraying their mutual inability to begin anew. It’s only when Yiu-Fai is able to peel his memories away like the bark from a tree and transmute his love for Po-Wing into something tactile — say, a tchotchke-sized lamp embossed with an image of the Iguazu Falls — that he’s able to reconcile himself to his home and achieve the same freedom he once tried to find by leaving it behind.

   Like the couple it depicts, “Happy Together” is a film that works best during individual moments; it burns with a frustrated, implosive energy that can make the chatty interstitial stretches feel like Wong is just waiting for the inevitable detonation. While there’s something transcendent about how it crystallizes the searching nature of its own conception, the movie also finds Wong hitting upon ideas that find more poignant homes in his later work (e.g. the lighthouse where Chang Chen leaves his sadness behind as a first draft for the tree hole at the end of “In the Mood for Love”). But Cheung and Leung are magnificently combustible from start to finish, and those individual moments are the stuff that other filmmakers would be lucky to have in their best films. The kitchen tango, Hong Kong literally turned on its head, the climactic submersion into the Falls… we may never see anything so beautiful again, but at least we know where to go looking for it.

7. The Hand

   "Never touched a woman before? Then how can you be a tailor?”

   Wong Kar Wai’s “Phantom Thread” (how’s that for a hook?), “The Hand” has long been disregarded as a curio due to the circumstances of its creation: It was conceived as one of three segments in the omnibus film “Eros,” which collected shorts original by Michelangelo Antonioni, Steven Soderbergh, and Wong into a triptych of love and sexual desire. Two of the shorts were forgettable, to put it kindly. The other is just about perfect. And why shouldn’t it be? Not only was Wong unfairly well-suited for the assignment, he’s also been making crystalline short films for his entire career — but smeared into each other in ways that allow them to overwhelm us.

   “The Hand” doesn’t overwhelm, but its touch is shattering all the same. Set in Hong Kong circa the early ’60s (a huge surprise), the diorama-like duet casts Chang Chen against type as a shy and virginal tailor’s assistant named Zhang. Chang is Wong’s go-to actor whenever the filmmaker requires a razor-sharp beauty to slice through a story and open it up in unexpected ways, and for all of his uncustomary bashfulness that’s still exactly what he does here Zhang pays a house call to a high-end prostitute (Gong Li, a tragic vision as Miss Hua) whose beauty — the film asks us to believe — is fading in time with that of the city around her. Zhang supplies Miss Hua with new threads as she threatens to unravel, and in return Miss Hua gives Zhang… inspiration. Like any of Wong’s accidental lovers who are misfortunate enough to know a moment of shared bliss, these two are headed in opposite directions, but the hold they have over one another perseveres in memory.

   Set against a backdrop of sickness and shot at the height of the SARS pandemic, “The Hand” is a refreshingly contained riff on the usual Wong tropes — even the far-superior extended version found on the Criterion box set doesn’t include a single moment that isn’t laser-focused on the central romance. As a result, Wong is free to slow down and indulge in some of the details that tend to blur on by in his longer work: The mechanics of sex (hands are rendered with the compulsively recurring purpose that Wong once reserved for pop songs), the blunt physicality of a film without the interiority of voiceover, and also the distance of class, which separates these characters in much the same way that time would in another of the director’s love stories. The result is a cramped melodrama writ small — a flawless ornament of a thing that makes up in density what it lacks in sweep, and contains a small hand-ful of Wong’s most evocative moments. Gong Li on the phone with her wealthy ex-lover while Chang Chen’s fingers size her up for a dress… the past on her mind as the present literally breathes down her neck… this isn’t a bonus feature (you’ll find it hiding on the “2046” disc), it’s one of Wong’s defining fashion statements.

8. As Tears Go By

   “None of us knows what’s going to happen tomorrow, right? Let’s eat.”

   It began, as all great careers should, with Maggie Cheung showing up on Andy Lau’s doorstep in a cotton face mask — and what better to set the tone for Wong Kar Wai’s filmography than a little social distancing?

   It’s easy to understand why people are quick to dismiss Wong’s debut as a foot-in-the-door movie beholden to the conventions of ‘80s Hong Kong crime thrillers (the film’s plot invites “Mean Streets” comparisons that haven’t extended to its place in the canon). “As Tears Go By” remains a fascinating document of a young artist trying to articulate his own identity through a language that lacked the vocabulary he needed — a language that he would ultimately have to invent. Tentative and brash in equal measure, it tells the story of mob enforcer Wah (Lau) and the delinquent best friend Fly (Jacky Cheung, a rolling wave of destructive id in the Robert De Niro role) who keeps threatening to get them both killed by the rest of the triads.

   The ins and outs of it are a little more complicated, but Wong can’t be bothered to sweat the details; he’s more interested in the rush of a camera through a snooker hall chase sequence, the “what might have been” that Cheung’s character offers from her seaside perch on Lantau Island, and the melted cheese of the Cantopop soundtrack that’s gooey enough to take your breath away. The gunplay and its attendant nihilism seem like afterthoughts compared to, say, the match-cut that transforms a paper airplane into a commercial airliner, or a gang fight that’s step-printed to abstraction. Many of the shot compositions in “As Tears Go By” reflect a conventionality that would soon disappear from Wong’s lexicon, and the broad melodrama they (“I destroyed your baby!” a woman yells while thunder claps in the background) would mercifully dissolve into the atmosphere by the time the sun rose on “Days of Being Wild.” The haunted essence of Wong’s cinema — the sense of letting another life slip through your fingers — is here on full display.

   It’s possible that “As Tears Go By” is more rewarding to excavate than it is to watch (or perhaps it’s simply impossible to see outside of the context of its director’s career), even if Wong’s lifelong refusal to judge his characters whether they’re mob goons or cops or hitmen or home invaders or belligerently drunk David Strathairns adds a rich new wrinkle to a genre that’s long on blood and short on heart. It’s understandable that “Days of Being Wild” is seen as the birth of the Wong Kar Wai we’ve all come to know, that view unfairly dismisses the work he did to get there. In hindsight, it’s even more fascinating to see Wong find his rhythm amidst the noise of mainstream cinema than it is to see him conduct on his own for the first time.

9. Days of Being Wild

   “I used to think a minute could so quickly. But actually, it can take forever.”

   The Big Bang of the Wong Kar Wai Cinematic Universe (WKWCU), “Days of Being Wild” sketches so many of the elements that became signatures. It starts with the people: Carina Lau’s Mimi/Lulu, Tony Leung’s Chow Mo-wan (introduced primping himself in the film’s ecstatically uncontextualized final shot like a glimpse of the future), and Maggie Cheung as Su Li-zhen, but a different Su Li-zhen than the one she’d play in “In the Mood for Love” a decade later (or maybe the same woman, snow-globed inside the Hong Kong of the early ’60s as the rest world spins forward without her). Most unvarnished and bittersweet of all is Leslie Cheung as Yuddy, the late queer actor carving the prototype for so many of Wong’s male leads as a restless womanizer who’s in exile from his past and likens himself to a bird with no legs: “All it can do is fly and fly.”

   Yuddy is a heartless backhand of a character — a reminder that the romance around them soften Wong’s protagonists in our memories. This apolitical sketch of a bitterly diasporal man struggling with his own dislocation (“If you could fly, you wouldn’t have to be here,” someone cuts him down) is only one thread of a movie that flirts with the kind of associative storytelling that would go on to define the likes of “Chungking Express.” Cheung’s plot — another of Wong’s almost-romances — finds her making midnight conversation with Andy Lau’s sympathetic cop under the glow of aquamarine lighting so deep that the whole movie feels like it’s swimming. Soon-to-be-legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle made his presence felt right out of the gate.

   These Shanghainese characters are locked into their own orbits and held together by mutual distrust in the idea that any of them will still be there tomorrow. Finding love is one thing in a cast where everyone is this beautiful, but how can anyone hope to hold on to it when they can’t even keep their feet on the ground? Of course, that lack of gravity doesn’t stop them from colliding with each other in typical Wong fashion, as the film’s heartless violence and hesitant sensuality double helix around each other like they’re slow dancing to the Latin sounds of Xavier Cugat.

   Yuddy is Wong’s most abusive lead (an early scene with a hammer in a bathroom feels like it was cut from “Oldboy”), but also perhaps his most self-actualized. Or maybe just the coldest. “I can’t know how many women I’ll love in my life,” he says in response to a leading question. “I won’t know which I loved most until the end of my life.” The end comes sooner than he might think, but Yuddy’s certainty — what he knows he doesn’t know — peels away the soft layer of longing that makes the rest of Wong’s male characters so tender despite themselves. Yuddy’s nostalgia reaches all the way back to the moment he was born, to a birth story instead of a breakup, and so he doesn’t have a romantic memory to yearn for or some distant idyll he can no longer picture in his mind’s eye. As Assayas described Wong’s characters in that same address at the Lumiere Festival: “They are beings haunted by the nostalgia of what they have not known.” After Yuddy, they would tend to know a bit more, and be haunted a bit less. A wise course-correction, it turns out.

10. Ashes of Time

    Without a past, every day would be a new beginning. Wouldn’t that be great?”

    In hindsight, it’s so perfectly on-brand: The big-budget martial arts epic that was supposed to launch Wong Kar Wai into the highest echelons of commercial Hong Kong directors turned out to be so inscrutable that even some of his most dedicated fans struggle to make sense of it (this critic included, though I’ll try my best). A sandy and overcranked wuxia soap opera that cobbles together so many different stories it ends up feeling more like an exquisite corpse of old suds, “Ashes of Time” unfolds as if Wong put all of his pet obsessions into a blender and let the blades puree them into a strange kind of mystery pulp.

    In essence, the film is a prequel to a beloved 1957 novel called “The Legend of the Condor Heroes” Wong reimagines the book’s medieval lead characters as younger men in the midst of the losses that will define them later. Leslie Cheung plays the Western Venom, a dangerous bloke who lives way out in the Gobi Desert and spends all year waiting for his buddy the Eastern Heretic (Tony Leung Ka-fai) to come by for a visit. Sounds simple (and sweet) enough. But then the Eastern Heretic swigs from a bottle of a memory-erasing wine known as “Drunken Alive, Perish in Dreams,” and everything goes sideways in a hurry. Before you know it, Huang is going blind and getting mixed up with a pair of twins named Yin and Yang who may in fact be the same person, Brigitte Lin is sword-fighting the pool of water in an oasis, Feng is falling head over heels for his own sister-in-law (Maggie Cheung, whose beauty Christopher Doyle shoots as a subplot unto itself), flashbacks are melting into each other like mirages, and bandits’ heads are falling off by the dozen.

    Described by Wong as “Shakespeare meets Sergio Leone in Chinese,” “Ashes of Time” (and the cleaned up “Ashes of Time Redux,” which is essentially the same movie) feels like a recurring fever dream that suffocates all logic in an effort to reach the things that might float to the surface in its absence. Shot to look as subjective and unclear as the Heretic’s fading vision, the film is a hallucinatory look backward through the eyes of characters preoccupied with their pasts several decades before they appear in the stories that make them legends. No matter how far back you go, there’s always room for regret.

    In its own way, this is the truest dry — or arid — run for the rest of Wong’s filmography, and there’s something incredibly cool/dementedly overconfident that he stranded half of Asia’s most famous movie stars in the middle of the desert while he shadowboxed his artistic worldview. You can feel the Gobi heat melding Wong and Doyle toward a shared vision, like two lenses soldered into a single pair of sunglasses (Doyle’s camera moves like a martial-arts master, rendering actual combat almost redundant), and even the most incoherent fight scenes reflect the pleasure of bringing a CGI-like imagination to practical effects. But while “the turmoil of man” teased in the opening crawl is there on the screen, chaos soon reigns over everything else. Past and present merge into a hyper-saturated sludge that leaves you begging for the future to start. Lucky for us, Wong grew similarly impatient along the way.

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

1. The World to Come
2. On the Count of Three
3. I Was a Simple Man
4. Flee
5. Judas and the Black Messiah
6. The Sparks Brothers
7. Pleasure
8. We're All Going to the World's Fair
9. CODA
10. All Light, Everywhere

...plus 17 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

watch the video

1. Time
2. Minari
3. World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime
4. Never Rarely Sometimes Always
5. I'm Thinking of Ending Things
6. Bacurau
7. Nomadland
8. David Byrne's American Utopia
9. Bad Education
10. Swallow

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

a running list of all the films i've seen "at" Venice / TIFF / NYFF 2020, ranked in rough order of preference.

1. David Byrne's American Utopia
2. The World to Come
3. Nomadland
4. Lovers Rock
5. Mangrove
6. Wolfwalkers
7. Red, White and Blue
8. In Between Dying
9. Beginning
10. On the Rocks

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

At a time when the star system has started to fade and movie studios are blandly reasserting themselves as the true auteurs of Hollywood cinema, a soft-spoken British director with a flair for puzzles and a fiendish penchant for scarves has somehow become one of the most famous pop artists on the planet.

In less than two decades, Christopher Nolan has gone from an anonymous micro-budget filmmaker to a genuine household name, a figure whose cultural cachet now rivals that of Quentin Tarantino or Steven Spielberg. This, despite the fact that most people probably couldn’t pick Nolan out of a line-up. He’s a bonafide brand despite not being much of a personality; his films do all the talking for him, “Inception” going so far as to become modern vernacular’s go-to word for describing literally anything with layers (“that nacho was stuck to that other nacho, it was like a nacho ‘Inception,’ bro!”).

Of course, Nolan wouldn’t have it any other way. To truly understand who he is — to appreciate his body of work — you can’t rely on public image, you have to take stock of his films and solve them for the secrets they hide. And with “Dunkirk” slated to hit theaters on July 21, now is the best time to do just that. Here are all nine of Christopher Nolan’s films, ranked from worst to best and laid flat so as to reveal what binds them all together.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON INDIEWIRE

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

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

1. Minari
2. Never Rarely Sometimes Always
3. Shirley
4. Dick Johnson Is Dead
5. Time
6. Ema
7. The Father
8. Palm Springs
9. Miss Americana
10. Promising Young Woman

...plus 24 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Lost in America
• Wanda
• Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore
• The Crucified Lovers
• Downhill Racer
• Richard Jewell
• Bombshell
• Until the End of the World
• Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.
• Scarlet Street

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

imprecisely thrown together while my baby napped -- just went with what felt right.

1. Certified Copy
2. Carol
3. The Wind Rises
4. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
5. World of Tomorrow
6. Lady Bird
7. The Wolf of Wall Street
8. Moonlight
9. This Is Not a Film
10. Paddington 2

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

as seen in my annual video countdown

1. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
2. Parasite
3. Little Women
4. Ad Astra
5. The Farewell
6. The Souvenir
7. Uncut Gems
8. Synonyms
9. Her Smell
10. Knives Out

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

1. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
2. Synonyms
3. Parasite
4. About Endlessness
5. A Hidden Life
6. Uncut Gems
7. Ema
8. Hustlers
9. Knives Out
10. Beanpole

...plus 43 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Ad Astra
2. Ema
3. About Endlessness
4. The Truth
5. Marriage Story
6. Babyteeth
7. Verdict
8. Joker
9. The Perfect Candidate
10. Saturday Fiction

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
2. Parasite
3. Bacurau
4. A Hidden Life
5. Beanpole
6. For Sama
7. The Lighthouse
8. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
9. I Lost My Body
10. Frankie

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

1. Synonyms
2. Tremors
3. Monos
4. Varda by Agnès
5. By the Grace of God
6. Piranhas
7. Fourteen
8. Ghost Town Anthology
9. Out Stealing Horses
10. The Plagiarists

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

the films of Sundance 2019 + one Slamdance thing ranked in rough order of preference.

1. The Farewell
2. The Souvenir
3. High Flying Bird
4. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
5. Blinded by the Light
6. Cold Case Hammarskjöld
7. Leaving Neverland
8. Sister Aimee
9. Hala
10. The Report

...plus 24 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. First Reformed
2. Paddington 2
3. Madeline's Madeline
4. Shoplifters
5. The Tale
6. Burning
7. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
8. If Beale Street Could Talk
9. Wildlife
10. Mandy

...plus 30 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Burning
2. High Life

   READ THE FULL REVIEW ON INDIEWIRE

3. Shoplifters

   READ THE FULL REVIEW ON INDIEWIRE

4. Roma
5. If Beale Street Could Talk
6. Wildlife

   READ THE FULL REVIEW ON INDIEWIRE

7. Widows
8. First Man
9. Non-Fiction

   READ THE FULL REVIEW ON INDIEWIRE

10. Cold War

    READ THE FULL REVIEW ON INDIEWIRE

...plus 41 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Burning
2. Shoplifters
3. The House That Jack Built
4. The World Is Yours
5. Happy as Lazzaro
6. Long Day's Journey into Night
7. BlacKkKlansman
8. Cold War
9. Buy Me a Gun
10. Asako I & II

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

a list of films i saw at the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival, ranked in rough order of preference.

1. Isle of Dogs
2. Daughter of Mine
3. Utøya: July 22
4. Transit
5. Profile
6. Black '47
7. 3 Days in Quiberon
8. Grass
9. 7 Days in Entebbe
10. Infinite Football

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

every movie I saw at Sundance 2018, ranked in rough order of preference.

1. Madeline's Madeline
2. The Tale
3. Wildlife
4. Hereditary
5. Private Life
6. Eighth Grade
7. Damsel
8. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
9. Bisbee '17
10. Leave No Trace

...plus 21 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

THIS LIST BEST ENJOYED IN VIDEO FORM

1. Call Me by Your Name
2. Dunkirk
3. A Ghost Story
4. Personal Shopper
5. The Florida Project
6. Columbus
7. Lady Bird
8. The Post
9. Faces Places
10. Phantom Thread

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

“There’s a difference between being obsessed and being motivated,” Mark Zuckerberg blithely insists during the opening moments of “The Social Network.” But the thing about the characters in a David Fincher movie is that they never seem to know what that difference is. In fact, the same might be true of David Fincher himself. And thank God for that, because if the Denver native had any idea where to draw the line between determination and dementedness he probably would have left Hollywood after being fired off his first Hollywood feature. Three times.

Ever since he transitioned from visionary music video director to features, Fincher has established himself as one of the most idiosyncratic and indispensable voices of mainstream American cinema. Often described as “the next Kubrick” (even while Kubrick was still alive), Fincher is an unyielding perfectionist working within a deeply imperfect system. From “The Game” and “Fight Club” to “Zodiac” and “The Social Network,” his peerlessly audacious films tell stories about people who recognize that rules are made to be ignored, who are willing to walk over broken glass if they find something worth bleeding for.

With his big screen career on hold for the moment as he makes another foray into the world of streaming content — the first season of “Mindhunter” is now on Netflix — we’ve decided to look back at David Fincher’s body of work, and rank his 10 feature films from worst to best.

For the full annotated list, click over to IndieWire.

1. The Social Network
2. Zodiac
3. Fight Club
4. Gone Girl
5. Se7en
6. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
7. The Game
8. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
9. Panic Room
10. Alien³

1. Call Me by Your Name
2. Faces Places
3. Lady Bird
4. The Florida Project
5. The Other Side of Hope
6. Who We Are Now
7. Ex Libris: The New York Public Library
8. mother!
9. First Reformed
10. A Fantastic Woman

...plus 38 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

i watched all of these for FOR THIS ARTICLE and it was agony.

1. Léon: The Professional
2. The Fifth Element
3. Lucy
4. The Big Blue
5. Subway
6. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
7. La Femme Nikita
8. Atlantis
9. The Last Battle
10. Angel-A

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

films / Jane Campion things I saw at Cannes 2017, ranked in rough order of preference.

1. Top of the Lake: China Girl
2. The Beguiled
3. Faces Places
4. The Florida Project
5. Wonderstruck
6. You Were Never Really Here
7. Happy End
8. Good Time
9. Okja
10. The King

...plus 16 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Other Side of Hope
2. A Fantastic Woman
3. On Body and Soul
4. Barrage
5. For Ahkeem
6. Django
7. Butterfly Kisses
8. Final Portrait
9. The Young Karl Marx
10. The Queen of Spain

...plus 4 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.