Movies I Watched September 2025

Limite - dir. Mário Peixoto

My attention waned toward the back end of the film but it has moments of total cinematic command that warrant its place in the pillars of experimental achievement. I don’t think it’s as complicated as people make it out to be. Yes, it’s avant-garde but it’s quite clear in its communication. It is not dense or obtuse. 6/10.

Perfect Blue - dir. Satoshi Kon

Least misogynistic anime of all time.

The Substance and Black Swan and at least 40 other “elevated” horror films want to be Perfect Blue very badly. They fail, but I still feel quite irritated with the originator.

By stacking dream sequences on top of one another, Kon deliberately makes criticism of the work nigh impossible to mount. Anything you pick at within the text can be rebutted handily with “it wasn’t real, it was in her head, etc.”

For example I find the final twist pretty stupid. It was her ugly manager the whole time? Huh? That seems weird to me. But you could easily be like “oh that’s actually commentary/a dream/a projection/a manifestation” which I find a cowardly defense. If Kon did not want us to think of the fat ugly woman as the ultimate traitor he would not have placed those images in the film.

You can’t convince me this is “feminist” when the main villain, at least according to the logic of the film, is the closest woman to the main character. I’ll at least give Satoshi Kon some credit in portraying the entire male gender as a jittering carousel of potato shaped perverts.

Moving beyond this admittedly debatable nitpick this is simply not a movie for me. I have dwindling patience for directorially engineered psychological torture chambers. It reeks of myopia. 6/10.

The Shadow’s Edge - dir. Larry Yang

Occasionally this dips close to the approach of Michael Mann’s Blackhat but never its ambition. Overwhelmed in a deluge of information we are left with only signals, sleight of hand, and communication via tracking and highly coordinated human data analysis. Action often takes place through the screen. I wish it was directed by a more intense formalist because this really has the potential to be the best movie of the year, it just lacks an awareness of its own auspice. At least the fights and setpieces are phenomenal. 7/10.

The Threesome - dir. Chad Hartigan

Why is every American indie film shot like this now? Bleeding edges and “intimate” close ups. Back the camera the fuck up man. Nobody’s fooled by the fake warmth and intensity.

Terribly unsexy threesome scene. Terribly unsexy and unwitty dialogue. Whole movie seems to be built around this scene and then we spend time after on boring bullshit. Splitsville comes out on top I’m afraid. Literally every movie about poly dynamics comes out on top I’m afraid.

Had to leave early. Life’s too short for hacky faux-romcom fare.

The Conjuring: Last Rites - dir. Michael Chaves

Such a frustrating experience because it has moments of clarity and a finger on the pulse of what makes for effective horror but no competence to thread the needle between the mandated scares every five minutes. And don’t get me wrong, I had fun when the movie was in scare mode (I prefer when horror movies are fun to watch and not boring “cultured” slogs that waste your time with pretend-depth) but I could so easily imagine a better movie while watching it. 4/10.

All That Heaven Allows - dir. Douglas Sirk

The swirling technicolor of All That Heaven Allows is borderline expressionistic and it was the machete that cleared the path for a guy like David Lynch to come around and lay termites to the foundation of the American dream, the American family, and the American home. I almost cannot believe something like this is real, it is so beyond emotionally pitched to perfection.

I was very worried Sirk would pull the rug out from the audience near the end but no, the story is so gentle and threadbare. Its lavish exteriors coalesce around a pillowy center like a lozenge that melts in your mouth or a marshmallow floating in a cup of hot cocoa. It is horrifying at moments when we sense the social hell coiled around Jane Wyman’s heroine, trapping her in the so-referenced “Egyptian tomb”, but it is forgiving to her and her daughter’s mistakes. Sirk allows his characters the freedom to escape their emotional shortcomings even as he teases at the futility of their endeavors (like when Cary’s daughter tells her she’s getting married, we can see Cary’s crestfallen expression… she’s seeing her daughter repeat her mistakes and she’s powerless to stop them).

Literally just a perfect film. I honestly am a bit speechless and I wish I’d gotten to this sooner. 10/10.

Metropolis - dir. Fritz Lang

It’s not as literal as a mere class divide or a class war. The real tension comes from the negotiation of power rather than the outright detest between the hierarchical schemas. A lot of the film takes place in the underbelly, which is Lang’s favorite place to hang around in when it comes to depicting the closest version of “truth” that artists can aspire to when it comes to diagnosing social ills. It is only through observing the fossilized architecture built into the opulent image that we can hope to understand and thus disassemble the sprockets that keep the system churning. The ending is unsatisfying because the battle isn’t over. Or it’s because Lang is a lib. 7/10.

A Woman of Paris: A Drama of Fate - dir. Charlie Chaplin

I would almost never levy this criticism at any silent film, but Woman of Paris feels like it could’ve been dramatically improved by the addition of sound. This thought struck me right at the ending when we watch a truck full of musicians vanish into the distance, and I realized much of the film lacked a sensory tactfulness to ground me in its proceedings. It felt vague and loopy. Chaplin works better when his drama is underscored by comedy, and none of the actors were pulling their weight, to be honest. 5/10.

Tampopo - dir. Juzo Itami

Far too mannered for me to fall fully head over heels for, but Juzo Itami is having way too much fun for it not to be infectious. This made me so hungry when I watched it last night that I vowed to get ramen as soon as possible, and now I’m waiting for the nearest high-rated place from campus to open. Even if I’m eating ramen at 11:30 in the morning, I’m doing what I fucking have to.

Somehow a lot of people seem to have overlooked the obvious satire in their reading of this film. It’s cute and wholesome, sure, but that cutesiness is pretty clearly derisive and Itami taking the piss out of delicate Japanese social norms. Like these characters are all romanticizing the pork and the noodles and the broth but then Tampopo collapses when she sees the head of the poor pig that was mercilessly slaughtered to allow her to make her ramen.

I’m not a vegan but I think we have to be honest with ourselves–the vegans are 100% correct, there’s no good argument for continuing to kill animals for food at the scale that we currently do. The cutesy Japanese aesthetics work on Westerners well but if you remember Itami is a satirist then this starts lapsing into parody. Which isn’t a bad thing, mind you, I just don’t think I can ever fully love and give my heart to satire. 8/10.

Winchester ’73 - dir. Anthony Mann

In its lie the Western is honest. Mann’s eye is unflinching. A scrappy fight in the canyons for the prize of a gun. All civilization is mediated by violence. No civility, just tactics. 7/10.

Down By Law - dir. Jim Jarmusch

I wish Jarmusch had continued working in this minimalist monochrome mode for longer, because his films were never quite as beautiful as this. I was inspired by some of the compositional choices for my own feature film I’ve been writing, the stuff in the swamp in particular made my eyes pop out of my skull. Jarmusch is known as the whacky guy, and he’s certainly leaned into that reputation, but his movies are frankly, and frequently, picturesque. 7/10.

The Circus - dir. Charlie Chaplin

The central pillar of a Chaplin comedy gig is “what the fuck is he going to do squeeze out of THIS?” And he always finds a way to extract damn near anything a setting will allow to see the bit through to its full potential. Here we get the mirror bit, the lion bit, the tightrope bit, and those three alone would be enough to cement this as an absolute master class in silent comedic storytelling. But as usual Chaplin hits us with the emotional haymaker–last few shots really fucking did something to me. Twisted my heart into knots. Onwards, Tramp, onwards. 8/10.

Penda’s Fen - dir. Alan Clarke

Slap an A24 logo on this and I guarantee at least 50% of the good reviews would immediately be revoked. Good god this shit is insufferable. Please show actual stuff happening in your movies in the future. Just abysmal stuff, the cinematic equivalent of a wet dish rag being squeezed over your eyeballs. Grey, dull, turgid.

Between this, Wicker Man, and Saint Maud we should just embargo British horror permanently (except Danny Boyle and Ken Russell, feel free to let them do their thing). Slap 80% tariffs on them shits and call it a day. It is crazy how an entire culture can be so incapable of producing effective genre work.

Shoutout British literature tho. Somerset Maugham the 🐐

3/10.

All the Light in the Sky - dir. Joe Swanberg

Being a male actor is already difficult. There’s an Adam Sackler line in Girls where he talks about how becoming an actor made him insecure about his face. As someone with a sort of unconventional look I feel that way all the time when I encounter the chiseled WASP men that are my competition. It is very difficult to imagine myself in lead roles, and I find myself playing the comparison game. My ethnicity is too ambiguous, my eyes are too small, my lips and teeth are asymmetrical, my face is a resting frown and I have acne scars on both my cheeks that everybody else claims not to notice. I notice them every day.

Being a female actor though?

Holy fucking shiiiiiiiiiiit. Probably 10x worse for your self-esteem. I can’t imagine the existential crisis of aging out of your career and watching the men you love turn their attention to younger prospects in front of you.

What a sad and empathetic movie this is, to make you feel Marie’s pain and regrets, to see them etched onto Jane Adam’s remarkably likable face. Ever since Happiness my heart always skipped a beat for her, she just has the kind of expression where you feel like you ought to protect her from the cruelty of the world, a perpetually tortured innocence. Excellent casting. 7/10.

Onibaba - dir. Kaneto Shindō

Crabs in a bucket. The violent retribution of a rain-soaked blood haven. The world cuts you down to size. Take, take, take. Not a single relationship in this film is defined by anything pure because everyone is guilty by virtue of existing. Everyone either needs each other for survival or kills each other to survive. In other words; hell, except hell is just the alternative to the real world, which is worse.

Poverty will kill you, and if it doesn’t, it’ll turn you into a demon.

Pretty much anything on top of this bare cruel reality is performance. Religion is a performance. Wealth is a performance. Bushido is a performance. The bottom line is that everyone is tainted by the perforating tendrils of an evil world. 8/10.

Secretary - dir. Steven Shainberg

I see why my girlfriend loves this movie…

The reason this movie comes off more empowering than demeaning is because it is literally a movie where a woman gets exactly what she wants at almost every point of the story–and the instances where she doesn’t get what she wants are obstacles that she must surmount in order to claim her desires. She is empowered throughout the story to earn her happy ending.

I think this is a lot less patronizing than 50 Shades of Grey where my impression is that Anastasia Steele is essentially groomed and babied into the relationship. Here it’s pretty clear that Lee is advancing and initiating the dynamic just as much as Grey is.

The central appeal of a sadomasochistic relationship is its permissibility. As somebody in control you are being given permission by someone to “dominate” them. It’s almost like a safe way to express cruelty, to cause someone pain in a way that doesn’t really hurt them. It allows us reprieve from the stifling reality of social norms. And I think the central appeal of being submissive is the release of responsibility. A good friend of mine who bottoms told me that what he enjoys about the experience is not feeling responsible for the other person’s feelings. You don’t have to worry about being the aggressor, you don’t have to “perform,” you just gotta be there and take the dick and take the pain. And for some people, there is real catharsis to be found in the pain.

I think good sex ultimately comes down to catharsis, whether it be physical or emotional or spiritual. That’s why religious people wait until marriage. It’s not because God said so it’s because if you hold in your nut for 20 years it feels way better to finally bust it. I personally disagree, I could bust that shit 20 times a week easy, but I get it.

Anyway. Solid little horny movie. Wasn’t in love with it but I could easily recommend this to a bunch of people. 6/10.

The Breakfast Club - dir. John Hughes

It never quite gets there, does it?

What rung to childhood me as sentimental and moving now seems insignificant and depressing. The transformation these characters undergo seems shallow and performative in a cruel sense, they are almost always at each other’s throats. It never seems as if there is any real warmth or care in their conversations.

Brian was the only one who felt like a real guy to me in his behaviors and gestures, in his tears and in his smiles. Anthony Michael Hall really put on a masterclass here.

I don’t NOT understand why Claire ended up with Bender but it still is pretty baffling. The only way it makes sense is if it’s not romanticized but it is. And obviously Ally Sheedy’s makeover is atrocious but I suppose John Hughes felt he had to beat the bechdel test somehow…

Disappointing to not love a movie as much as you used to, but I would’ve been more concerned if I loved it the exact same. Kid me’s judgment and adult me’s judgment should be different. That’s the way it goes. 7/10.

Baby Boy - dir. John Singleton

That John Singleton was not given carte blanche to make 20 movies after this is a crime by the film industry. Because if we’re being honest with ourselves–and I mean, really, really, dead fucking blunt and true to ourselves–we’ve gotta recognize this movie for what it is; a stone-cold pitched perfect melodrama on a Shakespearian bent. And I haven’t even SEEN Poetic Justice or Boyz N the Hood! I thought Baby Boy was so unbelievably compelling that I’m already committing myself to the Singleton auteurist appraisal. Based off this magnum opus of the 21st century alone he deserves all the flowers.

What I find totally bizarre about a film of this nature is that it is at its center plotless. When you see those chrome-shined letters in the title card, you presume you will be seeing a crime film, but this is not that. It is a melodrama through and through. A melodrama on par with All That Heaven Allows in Singleton’s commanding cinematic catechisms. He is attuned to the geography of people in spaces in ways that strike you by surprise, because what is Baby Boy? It’s not a movie that did the festival circuit, it’s not even considered a classic by most cinephiles. It’s a BET movie that Black millennials saw in between commercial breaks as kids. It is not at all framed as “high art” but I would venture to say, again, that Singleton in this film understands the melodrama on par with contemporary Todd Haynes or herald Douglas Sirk.

In its most didactic moments I felt that there was a kind of surfacing of truth, which is what I’d argue makes melodrama special, the inner world of the performers being extracted by the formalisms of the filmmaker. In Singleton’s case it is how he frames his characters in conflict, how he saturates his colors and how he positions his characters in the spatiality of the scene. The character on the floor or on the couch becomes weak and vulnerable, the character standing becomes paternal and strong. Tension is strummed until the wire snaps and the emotions explode. And when they explode it’s not shrewy, not at all. It really hurts to watch. When Yvette and Jody reconciled I fucking teared up. When Jody and Melvin went to blows my heart dropped in my stomach.

The initial shock of the opener, where we see Jodie in amniotic fluid like a fetus, seems bald-faced and ridiculous, a literalization of the metaphor that it’s paired with. But because it is so zany it allows us to more easily forgive Jody, to empathize with his condition and to want to see him emerge from the womb, so to speak. Singleton primes us to view him as a “Baby Boy.” Misguided, not malicious.

I love this movie because it made me believe in the future. Jody’s lesson is to live harmoniously with the present. When we live as if we are going to die we doom ourselves to a life of torment.

Live to live. 10/10.

You, the Living - dir. Roy Andersson

The Swedish cinematic temperament as a whole does little for me, but I will admit there were moments where the film sort of had me in a trance. The wedding dream in particular really made me feel things I wish the rest of the movie had, but for the most part this is a slog. I can imagine a lot of people I know liking this (including my dad who loves Roy Andersson lol) but not me. 4/10.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind - dir. Steven Spielberg

My dad sits me down when I’m no older than 8–I probably still have that old habit of sucking my thumb that suddenly vanished as I entered adolescence–and he tells me we’re gonna watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I’ve vaguely heard that expression before. I am not sure what it means exactly… something involving aliens? He pops in the DVD. We still have those then, a whole case full of sleeves where they’re kept labeled. I’ve done it myself plenty of times but this time my dad sets up the picture. We watch “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and I think it’s pretty good. Nothing about my life has discernibly changed, though I probably remark its strangeness in comparison to the other movies I have watched up to this point in my life.

Most of this first paragraph is entirely invented. I did use DVDs as a kid and my dad did sit me down to watch Close Encounters, but I don’t remember anything concrete or specific. I remember finding the obsession with Devil’s Tower quite striking… the scene where Dreyfuss takes the yard apart to build a replica is the only thing I specifically remember being moved by. And funny enough I barely remembered any of the scenes with aliens, though in one way or another I’ve been passively (and now actively) obsessed with them since. I didn’t even remember that we SEE the aliens themselves at the end, it totally escaped me.

My recollection of this movie never amounted to much more than “a pretty good alien movie that I liked as a kid but never thought about a whole lot.”

And furthermore, as I developed more of a sense for my taste in movies, I found myself distancing myself from Spielberg. I don’t even entirely know why, I suppose I projected a lot of frustration onto his style, a kind of hipster’s rejection of the mainstream that served my tendency to provoke. I didn’t go out of my way to dislike Spielberg, I just… let it happen. I hated Schindler’s List. I didn’t fully enjoy Jaws for the longest time. Saving Private Ryan was dull to me. He had a bunch of corny movies that came out as I grew up like Ready Player One and War Horse. In my mind Steven Spielberg was a cheeseball. A hack. The person who’d killed my once-beloved New Hollywood canon with a candy-coated sledgehammer.

As a Jewish man, I’ve always held an expostulated contradiction at the center of my being, a kneejerk sense of outsidership that propels me into disagreement at every turn. As a Jewish man of mixed race I have often felt like my existence is a bit of an enigma, a passed-over miscellany that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and is better suited for oddballs than mavericks. When I watch this film, and Jaws, and when I process Spielberg’s career, I sense this same sort of wounded pride. This earnest desire to be “White” and yet to punish the whiteness that gets too close. The Indiana Jones who hands the Holy Grail to the nazis and lets it melt their faces off. Spielberg is the man who made American mythology popular again, the guy who took the reigns after the New Hollywood movement and constructed a new way of looking at the country, rooted in nostalgia and entrepreneurship. He is the ultimate Hollywood Jew, and I mean this not with derision but with unbelievable respect. He is the ultimate hustler of the industry, the king, Atlas carrying the game on his back. He turned a dying industry around. You can choose to look at the death of New Hollywood as a tragedy or you could choose to look at the birth of Spielberg’s cinema as a second wind. The audience chose their winner.

And I mean… if every blockbuster film was this immaculately conceived, I think I would argue that New Hollywood needed to die. We needed a mythos to propel us. The industry got hijacked by big money but Spielberg was threading the needle. When we talk about perfect, perfect movies, this ought to be in the conversation. Everything that I value in the art of movies is here–the risks taken with the special effects, the sense of scale and geography without losing the humans at the center of the frame, the wonder that comes with contact to the great beyond. Spielberg is not reliant in the slightest on dialogue, I would argue his movies could be seen on mute and understood, and this holds true for me because I saw it as a child and it computed, almost miraculously.

Transcendence, man. Transcendence is what it is. We see a society rattled by the supernal electromagnetic powers, the foundations at odds with the truth of it all. The ultimate, dogged pursuit of truth. The truth that is found in the fiction. A man going beyond the confines of what is real, what is rational, to nakedly face the truth. The history of all that we are as a nation stacked on Devil’s Tower. We face the Devil so we can see the truth of creation. We see things from the perspective of the child because their world is unmuddied by facts and statistics and false prophets. The child sees the alien for what it is–a thing of beauty. And we should pursue this beauty to the ends of the earth if we must.

How I adore that Roy enters the ship. How I adore that curiosity wins, that Spielberg is able to romanticize the aliens without reducing their splendor. How I adore that they are terrifying, truly terrifying, so terrifying that my gaze never faltered when they abducted Jillian’s boy, when they upended the foundations of the house on the prairie. Our country belongs to the aliens, God’s country is the land of the weird, flashlights through sylvan backdrops, lights so majestic that they hypnotize their onlookers into cultish reverence.

I return to this film years later like Roy yearns to return to Pinocchio with his children. Sometimes you must leave home to discover what was in your heart with you since childhood. For me it was belief. I believe in Steven Spielberg, I believe in the power of cinema, I believe in the power of God, and most importantly, I believe in the majesty of motherfucking aliens.

10/10.

That Day, on the Beach - dir. Edward Yang

Really just an unbelievable first outing for Edward Yang.

When it hurts so hard to breathe, when none of the answers come easy, when the insouciance of life is too much to bear, when everything seems to be drifting into entropy. Time robbing us of our identities.

I was led to believe this would be less refined than Yang’s later work. Besides more cutting and more medium shots (perhaps some more jocose formalism with the mediums into close-ups? There were a couple of moments that stood out to me as unYang) I feel this is almost as strong as Yi Yi or Brighter Summer Day. 8/10.

A Confucian Confusion - dir. Edward Yang

Edward Yang’s most pointless film by my estimate. Had a very tough time getting invested in this. Felt too twee and mannered. Like listening to a shaggy dog joke with no punchline. I also didn’t finish it, hence no rating, so maybe I will revisit it at some point.

Museo - dir. Alonso Ruizpalacios

Impressive to make a film with ZERO charisma.

0s & 1s - dir. Eugene Kotlyarenko

Very cool conceptually but to me it never feels like Kotlyarenko is doing anything more with the expressionism than simply flexing his digital knowhow. And yeah, it is impressive but it didn’t make me feel much. Mostly just wondered how exactly they got all that coverage and how much of it was planned in advance or improvised in post. 6/10.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller - dir. Robert Altman

Christ almighty.

Robert Altman made a wish once upon a time to make a masterpiece, and a finger on the monkey’s paw curled.

He DID end up making that masterpiece: 3 Women. But the catch was that every other movie he made would be excruciatingly boring.

Worth it, to be honest. At least we got The Player and Long Goodbye. But the rest? I might never watch the rest of his work. Just insufferable stuff. Holy fucking shit dude. Please fuck off with this mumbo jumbo nonsense. I DO NOT CARE.

Occasionally he’ll give you a little treat and let you listen to Leonard Cohen but then afterwards it’s right back to bullshit. Snoooooore. How about turn the camera off and just let me listen to Leonard instead.

Go Go Tales - dir. Abel Ferrara

Ferrara’s camera drifts like a curtain of smoke. It is restless, implacable, always curious for more, like a ghost out of a garret when the new family moves in and new characters occupy the space. In theory this is a screwball comedy, in practice this turns out to be one of Ferrara’s most observant pieces; an excuse in artistry, or a panoply of performances.

Which takes on literal form! Because Dafoe’s band of misfits and miscreants functions in the same way Ferrara’s players do, as faces and heads and shapes that cascade off one another into fireworks. The dramaturgical underpinnings are flagrant but rooted in the aforementioned listlessness of Ferrara’s cinematic tendencies. He never concentrates too long for their outbursts to be prolix.

It’s super low stakes for Ferrara but I find that at his best he works in totally unoperatic terms. His most mundane films tend to be my favorites. Though maybe mundane is the wrong word, maybe instead I find his favorites to be more observational than didactic. 8/10.

Raiders of the Lost Ark - dir. Steven Spielberg

I claim Indiana Jones for the Jews. Possibly the most cringeworthy thing I’ll ever say (unlikely, but possible)–I identify with Indiana Jones, or at least I identify more with what I was able to project onto the image of his character than what was written into the text. More so than when I was a kid and all he represented was a cool guy who did cool stuff and explored cool places.

Now, when I rewatch Raiders, it’s what, a rediscovery? A jocose blunder into faith untapped? I am more conscious than gentiles are of Jewish images and Jewish themes and Jewish artists, so when Steven Spielberg shows us Harrison Ford’s face as it responds to the supernal majesty of the Ark, I don’t simply see a devoted archaeologist, I see a cynical Jew coming to terms with his own belief. Committing the heroic act of suffocating the cynicism and embracing the word of Elohim.

As I wrote in my review of “Prince of Egypt,” I appreciate the visceral brutality of the Old Testament God–of course He would melt the faces of the Nazis who tried to steward the Jewish covenant.

What I did not expect, and what I had totally forgotten about, was the ending. We don’t end on Indy riding off into the sunset with Marion, we don’t end on a teaser for the next adventure, we end on… endless crates. Crates belonging to the US Army. How forlorn. How sad is it that the Jewish artifact is appropriated as a bureaucratically sorted superweapon to be tampered and meddled with at the disposal of the military industrial complex?

It almost reminds me of Spielberg’s career. Here comes this Jewish wiz kid who basically saves Hollywood from itself and gets absorbed into the machine. Not unwillingly, mind you–I don’t dare romanticize Spielberg as a person, I am sure he was more than happy to take those blank checks, but as an outsider, as an observer of the art form, I cannot help but feel a sense of tragedy in his assimilatory trajectory, and I believe the ending reflects that.

When a Jew inherits the legacy of John Ford, he is bound to put a different spin on that inherited mythos.

And if you want to know who I think the next Spielberg will be… well, I have some ideas….

9/10.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom - dir. Steven Spielberg

I won’t even pretend to defend this film’s reactionary politics but you’d be hard-pressed to find a more fun film to come out of the entire Western hemisphere in the last 100 years of cinema. This movie literally never stops moving, it is constantly in the throes of action, seduction, occultism. It never rests, it’s like crack cocaine heaped over frosted flakes with a side helping of french toast and waffles, dollops of whipped cream shoveled on top in pyramids of sugar and grease.

I remember watching this movie at least 10 times as a kid, nothing had ever triggered my imagination or my fear quite like seeing the palace with the underground child slave camp right in its belly. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg understood how to activate the neurons of our pleasure centers more than any other filmmakers before or since.

I underrated Indiana Jones over the years because I wanted to distance my present self with the tastes of my kid self, like the rest of Spielberg I thought I was better than the material. I’m not. I fucking love this shit more than anything and I wish we could get more blockbusters like these. Movies where you feel like they’re the most lavish, expensive dessert you’ve ever tasted in your life, lava cake topped with strawberries and cream. A feast for the eyes and a feast for your arteries. 9/10.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - dir. Steven Spielberg

I don’t know that there’s anything quite as sentimental as this in Spielberg’s filmography–in some ways too sentimental as it teeters towards feeling like a retread of the first–the final shot of Indy, his father, and his friends riding off into the sunset a passing acknowledgement of the concurrent immortality and mortality in the icon. Indy as a figure and as a character is now quite literally immortal, but there can only be so many adventures. 8/10.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - dir. Steven Spielberg

I just don’t buy this version of Indy at all. He worked for the CIA during the Cold War? He’s ideologically opposed to communists? What? Even when Indy was fighting Nazis he wasn’t really anti-fascist, he was just a pragmatic adventurer and they were gross sons-of-bitches who got in his way. I don’t think it’s possible for me to get invested in watching Soviets get murked because, frankly, they’re not evil. The Nazis want to use Jewish artifacts to take over the world. The Soviets (as portrayed by the film) expressly want to catch up to the US in the arms race since the US has nukes (and in this point in history has used them).

I like Shia Labeouf as a performer a lot, I think he actually fits quite neatly into the Indiana Jones paradigm. What I don’t like is that his role is diluted by Ray Winstone and John Hurt, who are both great actors in their own right, and needlessly complicate the group dynamic. If this is a movie about Indiana Jones as a father then let’s see that. The best dynamics in this series have been trifectas or less, I don’t see why that should change.

Some of the setpieces are cool. Aliens, fine enough. The nuke fridge thing never bothered me too much since Indy’s plot armor has always been bonkers. People never criticize Temple of Doom for the lifeboat scene but that was equally improbable and we didn’t care. The difference isn’t the feat it’s the relation it bears to the rest of the story. In Temple of Doom it’s an act of survival after they get screwed on their flight through the Himalayas. In KCS it’s a totally unnecessary setpiece that has essentially no preamble. You could argue its justification thematically and I’d be open to that debate, but the scene, like much of the grandiose imagery in the film, feels more like Spielberg flexing CGI and a budget than anything else.

Ultimately it’s hard to surmount the feeling that this whole movie is totally inessential to the series. Spielberg wants to convince us we’re right back in the thick of things with Indy. He wants us to feel like we’re kids again playing with our action figures. And his skill is still there! No doubt about that, Spielberg still has the talent to pull something like this together. I still enjoyed watching the movie, which is a testament to his direction. But do I FEEL anything? No, not really… and I did feel things watching the first three. Many things. Excitement, bittersweetness, religiosity. Here, not so much, which is sadder than anything else.

Not gonna watch Dial of Destiny on principle. 6/10.

The Gleaners and I - dir. Agnès Varda

My first artistic love was comic strips. We didn’t get the LA Times so I would go to the neighborhood paper bins and crawl inside looking for disposed-of rolls of newspaper that people had tossed out. I’d find every edition of the week and I’d cut my favorite strips out and paste them into one of the dozen composition books we had laying around the house. My mom gleans the fruits of the neighbors. She and my dad made a map of the last neighborhood they lived in and figured out where they could find each fruit. Apples at Sunshine, a fig tree on the corner between the CVS and the elementary school, a tomato bush barely sticking out of a yard somewhere in the middle.

The point of gleaning in this film, then, is not intellectual exercise but a runaround Varda leads the audience on in the journey to collect footage in the same way a gleaner would collect leftovers. There is an inherently disposable quality to the digital footage, like Varda is scrapbooking an investigation more than doggedly pursuing a lead. Like I said in my review of Jacquot, watching a Varda movie feels so liberating because she does literally whatever she wants. Something about her style feels so warm and maternal to me, just seeing her play around with a digital camera fills my heart with indescribable joy. I had a very shitty day and watching Agnes Varda just like… hold a bunch of corn over her head and throw it on the ground made me tear up for some fucking reason.

This movie made me miss my mom tremendously because she always gets angry whenever she sees perfectly edible fruit on the ground, and she casts blame at the stinginess of the universe. How dare the world waste so much delicious food. It also reminded me of my girlfriend. Perhaps it’s that we watched it together. Perhaps it’s that I can see Varda’s influence on her style whenever she shows me her short projects.

When I started watching this movie I chuckled to myself and thought “wow, people will make a movie about anything.” And YEAH THEY WILL! That’s the beauty of it!! People will turn the very act of scavenging into an artistic, philosophical, political experience. It’s really incredible how that becomes the very mode of expression Agnes Varda works in. A simple documentary on the surface reveals something fascinating and central to the human spirit. 9/10.

The Long Walk - dir. Francis Lawrence

Difficult not to imagine a better director mining this material more intensely. I appreciate that Lawrence doesn’t shy away from the drama and plays it straight; this very easily could’ve been quippy and annoying and it’s at least not obnoxious. The political elements could’ve been more specific, though, and I would say the movie at large lacks any sense of specificity. I don’t think we ever find out what state they’re even walking through, where Ray is from. Makes it hard to buy into the dystopia when it feels so unanchored to any geohistorical background. 5/10.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence - dir. Steven Spielberg

I feel I can reliably dub Steven Spielberg one of my favorite filmmakers ever. It goes beyond technical appreciation, it’s love, it’s the feeling that I know this artist and I can see the seams that thread together a master work. I can see the trails of grief as tearful rivulets on the CGI sheen. I can make out the impressions of loss and death etched upon the characters’ hands. I can hear Spielberg craning his neck out in a desperate bid for vulnerability, as the clamor for cynicism threatens to rob our dear art form of its majesty.

To plea with the wizard for an answer, to beg love from a stone, to be overcome with all the folly and splendor of the human spirit. It is eventual that our epoch will consume itself, we are finite creatures belonging to a finite world, and all things must pass. Science fiction as fantasy, fantasy as fable, fable as truth, truth as love, love as destiny. The only thing more human than human is human creation. It thus makes perfect sense that the only remnant of civilization is David. If you believe in something it becomes real, literally, is that not the core message of Spielberg’s whole filmography?

I cried real tears watching this movie, I was moved in ways I didn’t fully comprehend, I was made to feel like a child again, but I was also made to feel the full extent of grief. A masterpiece, one of the single best movies I have ever seen, an easy addition to my personal canon. 10/10.

Someday, Someone Will Be Killed - dir. Yoichi Sai

I’m a real sucker for quirky Japanese city pop stuff but this lacks any of Obayashi’s playful formalism that makes the silly proceedings pop out off the screen. If you’re really in a pinch I suppose this has some of that sugar, though it’s more of a gluten-free option to be honest.

Mystery Train - dir. Jim Jarmusch

Jarmusch’s fascination with immigrants continues. The film quickly becomes a game of comparisons. Yokohama Station vs Memphis Station. Elvis vs Otis Redding. Like most of his films I enjoy the vibe tremendously. Like most of his films I don’t fall in love. There’s too much of a detached restraint in Jarmusch’s gaze, a prickly irony that dares you to find meaning in the dada. So I keep my distance to avoid feeling like a fool. 7/10.

The Old Dark House - dir. James Whale

Believe it or not, I don’t enjoy shitting on British movies so consistently. I know I have British mutuals on here and I don’t want them to feel like I’m racist against the Britons. It’s not their fault that their country is seemingly incapable of producing good horror.

Is this cute? Cute enough for a 3 star rating, and it’s short enough that it doesn’t overstay its welcome. But as a piece of horror? It’s just abysmal. As a work of comedy? It’s not funny. As a work of drama? There’s nothing dramatic about it. And yet I found it sort of charming regardless. 5/10.

HIM - dir. Justin Tipping

We really gotta stop letting video essay bait come off the presses.

Gen Beta cinephiles in like 2050 are gonna comb through the 2020s and laugh at us for paying for shit like this.

Jordan Peele fumbled Weapons and decided to fund this instead out of spite LOL

Just watch He Got Game if you wanna see a movie that actually has something to say about black culture, sports culture, masculinity, and religion.

2/10.

6ixtynin9 - dir. Pen-ek Ratanaruang

The beginning is super solid atmospheric work from Ratanaruang until he starts riffing on the Coens with the whole cursed blood money schtick… a little too direct for its own good at that point, liked it a lot more as a grimy mise-en-scened-up meditation on alienation. Sometimes less is more. 6/10.

The Woman Who Left - dir. Lav Diaz

Inverted Fordian spectacle, a living breathing page of holy word, whispered on a faint prayer to collide with the souls of the destitute when the veil of darkness is too burdensome to bear. An angel spry from the shackles of injustice with wings on her feet and a gun in her belt. Keep the poets alive. And it goes on, and on, and on, and on and on and on and on…

“And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

Rather than devote the Church’s resources to helping the poor, the priest spends his time preaching to the wealthy parishioners and assuaging the guilt of the corrupt baron whose existence is defined by spite and malice. The real Christlike figure of the film is the resurrected Horacia, who comes back to the mortal plane from prison after 30 years with a new name and new identity, and spends about 80% of the film’s runtime giving alms and care to the wretched souls she meets.

The film is billed as a story of revenge, but ironically it is her kindness (which comes once in the form of beating the shit out of an abusive foster parent in front of their kids) which allows the revenge to take place. I won’t spoil it but it leaves the remainder of the film in a freefalling solitude. The weight of the setting presses hard on the spirit and then there is… a kind of mercy.

Lav Diaz simply is one of the best to ever do it. 9/10.

Only Angels Have Wings - dir. Howard Hawks

The most pragmatically romantic film ever made. Mortality. Love. The rain and the mud and the cozy smoke that fills the room. The final exchange is perfect. Vulnerability without sacrifice. Jean Arthur’s character is practically wish fulfillment for me, a person who gets to enter this magical Hawksian world, fall in love with it, and become a part of it. 9/10.

Boyz n the Hood - dir. John Singleton

The loss of John Singleton (rest in peace) and his blackballing from Hollywood is one of the single greatest film tragedies of the last forty years. With only Baby Boy and Boyz n the Hood the man proved himself to be a champion of melodrama, a cinematic master the likes of which nobody in his generation has topped, let alone matched.

The crazy thing is that Singleton was able to use the Black perspective as a pitch to get studios to fund movies that boil down to slice-of-life. His films offer an expressly political bent that comes as a result of their subject matter, but their plots are loose. All he’s doing is shining a light on his own community.

I don’t mean that as a reductive criticism, I actually think it’s incredible for an American director to accomplish stuff like this in our rigid studio framework. These days unless your movie is Oscar-bait, tacky horror, or franchise slop it stands little chance of getting made, and especially in the late 80’s there was a push for more spectacle. Boyz n the Hood literally has the pace of an Ozu or Sirk film if it was set in the projects.

Can you believe he made this at 23?

Will forever be gutted now that we did not get his Tupac biopic. 9/10.

Poetic Justice - dir. John Singleton

A near perfect intersection of film and music. We lost 2Pac, we lost Singleton, and Janet Jackson’s career moved way past these kinds of roles, so we’re left with this sublime time capsule of tender expression.

I’ve notably left out a lot of Black discourse from my reviews on Singleton’s work, which is an obvious omission on my end but also an intentional one–I feel pretty corny and ill-equipped trying to talk about the definite racial politics of his work. If I’m allowed one comment, I’ll just say that I’m happy a filmmaker like Singleton exists. I’m exuberant that the South Central community gets to see a version of themselves on screen.

Read a review where somebody mentioned Singleton said Pac was his “De Niro”…and it broke my fucking heart. 8/10.

Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles - dir. Zhang Yimou

The search for atonement across borders. Kind of a loose drama from Zhang, which in some ways is relieving–it doesn’t have the marked precision of Shadow or the eerily perfect frames of Red Lantern/Red Sorghum, so the experience is a lot more casual to demarcate the age and simplicity of the story, which is ultimately not revolutionary at all (not that it needs to be)! It’s a journey of redemption for an old man who must dip his toe into a neglected well of emotion. 6/10.

Alien - dir. Ridley Scott

A conversation is there to be had about whether or not this needed to be at all “added to” as a concept, or as a franchise, or as a “cinematic universe” but at the end of the day there isn’t much else to really pontificate on besides the fact that this is inarguably a perfect matrimony of science fiction and horror. You could make the argument that both those genres peaked here. I won’t make that argument but I’d be tempted to.

For various reasons most if not all of its successors have failed in even coming close to understanding the magic of Alien. A lot of people talked about how the chestbursters in Romulus were the best in the series, to me nothing could top John Hurt’s writhing and screaming and slow death as the beast emerges from within.

I actually think xenomorphs are less female-coded and more male-coded than people say. The ship is called mother and the xenomorph invades her, the xeno’s head is shaped like a big ass dildo. The xeno kills the first three guys by a. penetrating and entering one, b. luring another into a dungeon with S&M style chains hanging from the ceiling, and c. cornering the third guy in the vaginal ovaries of the ship (we literally see Dallas crawl into a dilating air vent and feel up some slime on the inside… not subtle at all).

Cosmic pessimism at its finest; the recognition that the universe is built on violence and any trust or curiosity will get you annihilated. Read the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, I implore you. 9/10.

Blade Runner - dir. Ridley Scott

Autopilot takes over. The solenoid tubes that keep the body from freezing in the harsh conditions of the cold storage locker are unplugged, the acute awareness of the skin takes hold as ice condenses on the skin and the blood goes blue. Teeth chatter, teeth shatter. The body becomes intimately and horrifically acquainted with death. Meat creatures. A falsified existence justified only by perpetual reproduction, though what happens when sentience can be physically rearranged into spare parts and loose flesh?

Just another drone working for the cannibalistic system. The cabal of tyrants demand sacrifice as bodies are stacked as high as skyscrapers. So much fucking flesh it stinks. The rain is the only thing that temporary masks the smell of the abattoir. God is peremptory, but his body is also made of flesh, and he is a fragile creature. Words fail the modern man, the modern who fails to question his own origin, returning only after the task is completed to a state of dry limbo. We never see Deckard as a person. I once thought this was a flaw. I know see it as a key to unlocking the film.

So the cliche goes–the replicants are more human than the human. But this isn’t the case, not really. They only behave more human because their life and their circumstances more closely resemble the human condition. They are not resigned to the mud, like us, they do not simply give in to death like so many of the humans in the film seem to do. Their survival instincts, their memories, their sentimentality, and their desperation (oh, the desperation… the fucking HUNGER to keep LIVING), their IDEALS… it is not so much that they ARE more human, it is that they are treated as nonhuman, or subhuman, that compels them to paradoxically become human. Our existence is borne out of struggle, the recognition of Deckard to Rachael in the end is a recognition of the struggle.

We go by the whole film pretty much inert in acknowledging the moral decrepitude of the world it shows us. I feel like the film never directly acknowledges its own misery, in that none of the characters seem to talk about how horrible it is to live in a world with constant rain and darkness and blaring neon. They are like frogs brought to a slow boil. The ending, when Deckard’s task is finally complete, and he goes to find Rachael and escape with her, is the moment of recognition.

We live in hell, but we can escape. Choose humanity. 9/10.

Vagabond - dir. Agnès Varda

Society doesn’t prepare us for freedom, it stifles us in its comforts and traditions until we are ill-equipped to hack it without the charities of those more powerful than us.

I liked my girlfriend’s review which you can see below. A great read on a film that doesn’t give much in the way of answers.

At a certain point one must ask themselves if it is possible to be free from the shackles of society or if we are nurtured in the womb of civilization to be dependent on the teat. 8/10.

Jurassic Park - dir. Steven Spielberg

Even as a newly christened Spielbergian I’m not won over by Jurassic Park. To me the film has always and still resembles Spielberg’s worst tendencies as an artist. Like Crystal Skull it seems more primed on spectacle than substance. It isn’t pure cotton candy but it reads more like a toybox or highly orchestrated carnival ride. Reminds me of going through one of the mazes at Halloween Horror Nights. Yeah it’s cute but I can’t help but feel uninvested in the experience when I’m being churned in and out the gullet of a densely packed franchise experience.

The T-Rex stuff is incredible–and frankly where the film peaks. Everything before is shoddy exposition and meandering philosophical rambling. How are you going to ask the audience to consider the ramifications of bringing dinosaurs back to life when, as we’ve established, they’re cool as shit? I don’t care about the ethics of dinosaur cloning, I want to see dinosaurs eat people. This doesn’t have the character writing of Jaws to carry itself outside of the setpieces. I am not at all intrigued by the interpersonal dynamics between Dern, Neill, and the kids, and I find the found family trope hilariously out of place. Spielberg, as an artist, loves to find these nuggets of sentimentality and polish them off through the genre mold but sometimes you have to let it take a backseat to the meat and potatoes. In Close Encounters, the romance between Roy and Jillian is not given the same importance as the wonder and awe of the aliens and the obsession with contact.

The velociraptor scene is iconic but I dunno… maybe I’m an asshole, I just struggle to see how raptors could be as scary as a T-Rex. What makes dinosaurs awesome is their size and power. A velociraptor trying to kill you is, functionally, the same thing as a lion. But there are zero predators on this planet that are the same size as a T-Rex and will kill you. There’s a reason so many of us dino-obsessed kids had nightmares about being chased by one. There’s just nothing quite like that image.

Someday, I’d like to write and direct a dinosaur film that dips deeper into the horror elements, because I think that’s where Jurassic Park is at its tightest. So tune in for that, see you in 20 years. 6/10.

Glengarry Glen Ross - dir. James Foley

Very actor-y. I can appreciate this as an actor, but it’s not what I seek out from movies. Foley elevates it with solid blocking and framing. Could very easily be as little as “guys yelling,” so a minor miracle that it is not. 6/10.

Hacksaw Ridge - dir. Mel Gibson

Almost (and I really must emphasize almost) reminded me of a Clint Eastwood film in the first half hour or so, where instead of jumping straight into the “war is hell” of it all we spend time forming the boy first. The difference between Gibson and Eastwood is that Clint’s filmmaking is specific and curious. It’s direct but it doesn’t smooth out the wrinkles. I immediately felt a wretched gut reaction when Garfield meets his unit for the first time and they’re all male models. This is not a movie interested in the real, this is a movie made by a Christian conservative fetishist.

The Oregonian - dir. Calvin Lee Reeder

Cool indie spin on Inland Empire, feels like a rare film that actually understands some of what made Lynch’s art so fascinating. You get the death dreams of traumatized souls, the bitterness between old lovers, the disorienting imagery that isn’t afraid to be silly (many directors influenced by Lynch seem to forget that the guy had a pretty rich sense of humor). The silliness doesn’t come at its own expense, which is nice. I was in kind of a bad mood before watching the movie so I couldn’t quite let my guard down but I could see myself loving this on a revisit. Not bad at all. 6/10.

One Battle After Another - dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

Do people REALLY think this is leftist?

I mean, it hates cops. So points there, I guess.

The idea that the military would black bag a glorified podcaster is super funny to me. Hit me up when Trump has Hasan Piker shipped to El Salvador and then maybe I’ll believe it. The French 75 aren’t a threat to the status quo at all. They just make life harder for everyone around them while occasionally doing good. I can see why young stupid leftists like this movie, because it shows militant hippies blowing up telephone towers and robbing banks (and freeing detained immigrants, which was admittedly pretty cool) which is what a lot of suburban teenagers fantasize about doing. Who doesn’t wanna firebomb a walmart??

But let’s think about it for a sec. What’s one thing every successful revolution had? Popular support. How do you get popular support? It’s not by blowing shit up, generally. The reason the Black Panthers were so effective wasn’t because they had guns it was because they provided for their community. They fed schoolchildren. The CIA destroyed them because they were showing their people there was a way outside of the white capitalist hegemony. The Bolsheviks capitalized on a mounting tide of anti-tsarist sentiment to overthrow the monarchy without even drawing much blood (the civil war came later when the White Army regrouped, but I digress). The French peasantry was OVERWHELMINGLY in favor of guillotining the aristocrats.

I guess when I went into this movie hearing that it was a call to revolution, I expected the revolutionaries to be likable or at least pragmatic, intelligent, and ideologically cohesive. As they are presented in the movie, they are a motley of autobiographical takes on Paul Thomas Anderson; vapid, pretentious, and above all else flashy with no substance. They preach jargon and they accomplish zilch. And of course the movie expects Generation Z to fix the mess the dumbass hippies left behind. Leave it to hipsters like PTA to abdicate all social responsibility to the NEXT generation. He’s more than happy to take 150 million dollars to fund cynical “political” projects though. Viva la revolution, right kids?– now please, purchase tickets to see my newest overblown piece of shit.

Another reason PTA consistently flounders at political filmmaking is because he’s a hopeless moron–in the sense that he can only understand the world through ape logic. Titties, ass, pussy, and milkshakes. He can’t do social or material analysis so instead his understanding of why the right wing took power comes down to “they’re repressing their desire be sexually dominated by black women” which is obviously idiotic. Yeah sure there’s a huge psychosexual component to why men become fascist and it’s worth pointing this out, but if that’s where the analysis ends then it’s toothless.

I find it all very strange that, consistently, these huge political swings at unpacking the Trump era, lay the blame at women’s feet. In Mickey 17, the real villain isn’t the Trump analogue (Mark Ruffalo) it’s his evil manipulative wife, because I guess fascists are motivated by listening to their bitch wives? And here, we get some redemption for Teyana Taylor’s character but she is still the reason the revolution fails. The movie makes it clear that Lockjaw is purely motivated by sexual attraction to her and their daughter. Weird shit. This is not the call to revolution that it thinks it is. I guarantee you NOBODY is firebombing a walmart after watching this.

But whatever. Honestly none of that shit really matters. I probably would forgive a movie for being politically stupid if it was at least fun to watch.

You can guess where this review is going.

I wanna pose a question–does Jonny Greenwood ever shut the fuck up? Does Paul Thomas Anderson ever shut the fuck up? What an earache this movie is. Does not. Shut. The fuck. Up. For a second. PTA is content to let Greenwood noodle on his piano like a five year old for 90% of the runtime. Sometimes it’s a guitar. No matter what it is, it burrowed in my head like a brain parasite. This film is a cinematic migraine. Sonically disgusting, irredeemable. Once you make me want to tune out half the sensory experience of watching a movie you might as well pack it the fuck up.

PTA has never been too inspired visually, he sort of moves his camera like a chimp on wheels doing circus tricks. Here he sinks to new lows by staging every conversation with close-up to close-up to close-up. Is he directorially challenged? The jury’s out.

Half the time all we’re doing is going through the motions. Here’s what’s happening. Now here’s the next thing that’s happening. We get like ONE conversation between father and daughter to establish a bond that is supposed to carry us through the next 2 hours of the movie. The first half hour is almost pure montage, shitty Jonny Greenwood and Altman-esque conversational overlap. PTA has never trusted his audience to be intelligent so instead he likes to bombard them with sensory information. None of it does an effective job of showing me who these people are, what their relationships are like, how they plan their moves, what their ideological motivation is.

Instead of taking the time to get to know characters–which would rob PTA of the chance to jangle keys in front of tiktokbrained 17 year olds who fantasize about telling their mom to fuck off and having sex with real people instead of AI language models–we watch our revolutionaries uhhhh… fuck while blowing up electric towers. Fuck while building bombs. Shoot guns at nothing (a pretty decent metaphor for the movie, incidentally). Talk over each other about vaguely lefty sounding shit. In the beginning, there’s a decent scene where we get to see them free a bunch of immigrants from a detention facility. What I find indicative of this film’s overall disinterest in politics is that we never find out why any of that is happening. Why is the government keeping them there? How come we never get to see that rhetoric? Why are our revolutionaries invested in freeing immigrants? Why not allocate their resources elsewhere? Seriously, WHAT IS ANY PARTY’S MOTIVATION TO DO ANYTHING? WHAT ARE THE IDEOLOGIES AT PLAY?

In short… WHERE ARE THE POLITICS?

2/10.

Four Brothers - dir. John Singleton

The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was impressed with Four Brothers. It’s a flawed film, no doubt about it, and I wish Singleton was more on top of it when it came to the framing of particular shots (too many uninspired mediums and close-ups for my liking), but he still manages to capture the bond between the brothers by putting them in frame together, like that scene where Tyrese Gibson walks in on Garrett Hedlund taking a shower and Wahlberg taking a shit and is mostly unfazed. Moments like that sell you on the brotherhood because frankly that’s some shit I used to do with my little brother.

The plot itself is largely uninteresting, we get some city corruption and some wintry Detroit shit, but with a Hawksian ass movie like this you really are just in it to see 4 guys shoot the shit for an hour forty.