The year 2025 being what it was — and the less said about that, the better, although the New Year doesn’t seem much better, so far — it was easy to miss some things. No excuse, but the unraveling of the social fabric, geopolitical fuckery, one’s own laziness and the continuing inability of the movie […]
Screens
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On Screens in 2025
So. That has been the year that was. Anecdotally, I can’t say it’s been a good one for anybody who isn’t a despot. Despite having such a futuristic-sounding enumerator, it has been a time of regression, retrenchment and (justifiable) fatalism. Even the movie nerds, those definitive solipsists, have found occasion to gnash their teeth and […]
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Solo at the Mic
Stand-up from Hoffman, Nanjiani and Chappelle If we’re not laughing, we’re crying, right? Or, more often, both at the same time, in a rictal horror that may never be unmade; it is still 2025 after all. As much as I relish the grand collaboration of the movies, there is something immediate, undiluted and handmade about […]
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Mother Christmas
Oh. What. Fun. and If I Had Legs I Would Kick You OH. WHAT. FUN. I probably don’t need to defend my undimming affection for Christmas movies, but I am of a defensive, decking-the-halls extraction, so here we find ourselves. I am as aware of all the hypocrisy and bad faith action and indelicate consumerism […]
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Alone at the Movies
Netflix, Jay Kelly and Train Dreams In the long-ago of my youth, I would often defend my pessimism as realism; I didn’t actually know much about the world. Ever a contrarian, though, as I have aged and hopefully wised up, I find my reactionary nature producing some strain of homunculine optimism, born perhaps of an […]
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Wake Up Dead Man Keeps Faith
WAKE UP DEAD MAN: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY. Writer-director Rian Johnson’s Knives Out (2019) is marvelous on a number of levels, harkening back to the ensemble Agatha Christie adaptations of the 1970s and, like the work of the queen of whodunnits, its cheerful skewering of the rich and powerful. In it, we meet gentleman detective […]
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Sisu: Road to Revenge Stays Driven
SISU: ROAD TO REVENGE. The original Sisu (2022), written and directed by Jalmari Helander is a marvelously focused action movie with nods to American Westerns but roots firmly in the history and cold mud of Finland. The movie takes its name from a Finnish word for grim determination that allows a person to push beyond […]
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Getting Away
The Running Manand Keeper THE RUNNING MAN. Even back in the salad days of ridiculous action movies, of impossible physiques and ridiculous armaments, The Running Man (1987) struck me as second tier. Maybe because it wasn’t grounded in a recognizable reality, or because it was released so close to Predator (also 1987) and Die Hard […]
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Predator Badlands Evolves
PREDATOR: BADLANDS. Whether regarding the Constitution or movie franchises, originalism is a trap, suffocating innovation and imagination against our natural impulse to learn, adapt and evolve with our environment and others in it. Doubtless, the internet is already rife with complaints over the departures Predator Badlands takes from the formula that’s been mostly lucrative, though […]
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Monstrous Creations Frankenstein and Bugonia
FRANKENSTEIN. Were anyone to ask (why would they?), I would have said, even minutes ago, that I first read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus when I was far too young to appreciate its form and content. My bookshelf has made a liar of me, though, yet again: The copy found there is a […]
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A House of Dynamite’s Harsh Realities
A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE. “Not exactly escapist fare,” was my first thought, which was followed rapidly by the notion that maybe, in the face of racist, fascist theocracy on the rise internationally, a movie about mutually assured destruction by nuclear annihilation can offer some fleeting relief. I kid (sort of), because A House of Dynamite […]
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Play Dirty and Shane Black’s Comeback
PLAY DIRTY. Sometimes (often? always?) the thing that suits is a rollicking actioner in the classical mode. Something with gunfights and car chases and heists and revenge, hopefully a soupçon of dark humor and sex appeal, maybe even set at Christmastime — a Shane Black movie, in other words. Black, to use the Wayback Machine, […]