I haven’t seen nearly enough films from Catholic-majority countries to have the evidence I’d need to develop this into a real theory, but I have what I shall refer to as a notion that right now, the most interesting movies about the status of religious faith in the modern world, especially those aligned with (though […]

At the dawn of the third decade of the 21st Century, I for one am ready to anoint Cartoon Saloon the finest animation studio in the world outside of Japan. The studio’s wonderful first three features – 2009’s The Secret of Kells, 2014’s Song of the Sea, 2017’s The Breadwinner – might have been enough […]

Being the best film adaptation of an opera doesn’t take all that much. Stage-to-screen adaptations are, in general, tough to get more than passably well, and opera has the additional challenge of being exceptionally “stagey” and beholden to the peculiarities of live theater. Listening to a character spend five minutes singing to establish one plot […]

So, Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite! You’ve just got to love the stubborn optimism of that exclamation point, by the way. Like we’ll be convinced that it’s a bubbly, fun bit of high-energy nonsense if our brain reflexively rises up in volume as we read it Also, I cannot shake the feeling that it […]

The best thing ever made for television, anywhere in the world, is the 10-part miniseries Dekalog from 1988 – I think this is maybe even objectively true. The second-best thing ever made for television, anywhere in the world, now that’s where we can start to have arguments. For me, I think it’s a dead heat […]

I can barely process the words I’m about to type myself, but here goes nothing: imagine if – and it is a tough thing to imagine if you haven’t seen the evidence – imagine if there was a film about a 1970s British glam rock superstar so fucking bad that it made Bohemian Rhapsody look […]

Capone is an outright disaster, but it’s my favorite kind of outright disaster: ones that come from a mortifying surfeit of ambition and creativity. This is the third feature in the short but tumultuous career of writer-director Josh Trank, of the pleasantly clever and low-key Chronicle in 2012, and very much more visibly the farrago […]

My first response to Mank has absolutely nothing do with the what we do see in the film, and everything to do with what we don’t: this is not, as was rumored, “Raising Kane: The Movie“, and for that I am grateful. “Raising Kane”, if you have the good fortunate not to have read it, […]

The Old Guard is the the most perfectly Netflix-ey film you could hope for out of Netflix’s attempt to kick-start a superhero franchise. It is, for starters, deeply unpleasant to look at, filmed through a muddy digital veil that pushes all of the colors hard towards grey, unless the entire purpose of the scene is […]

First things first: I have an enormously hard time imagining the viewer who would be surprised by literally anything that happens in Run outside of its final scene, and that’s as much as anything because it’s final scene is a charming but dopey epilogue that feels tacked on in an especially ungainly way. But the […]

J.D. Vance’s 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis came out at a perfect time to be glommed onto by political and cultural commentators from every corner who desperately needed something that could shore up their Grand Narrative about what happened in American politics that year. I myself haven’t […]