1. The Odyssey

2. The Invite

3. Chronovisor

4. The Drama

5. Spider-Man: Brand New Day

6. Blue Heron

7. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

8. Obsession

9. Disclosure Day

10. The Bride!

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

Plainly the best deconstruction of the Slasher genre since the original Scream. It's phenomenal to see a new generation embrace Freud's central insights (everything is about sex, and your childhood) with such style and panache.

Jane clearly loves slashers, but Miasma also brings a great deal of the visual language of Twin Peaks -- as well as just a love of the movies and watching movies and being into movies.

Not everyone is going to be into an exploration of repression and generational media trauma and neurosis through the lens of Friday the 13th, Sleepaway Camp and the Twin Peaks Season 2 finale -- but I definitely am.

Major kudos for the production design, Alex G's incredible score, and killer (uhm literally) performances of Hannah Einbinder and the immortal Gillian Anderson.

A perfect slice of early 2000s sleaze entertainment. It manages to cover every cliche, trope and stereotype, yet it still rises to the sublime. Sure it’s essentially Point Break with cars and an incoherent last act - but who cares?

We all live our lives a quarter mile at a time. 

RIP Paul Walker - who is actually quite good in this film and might’ve made a solid Avenger.

Ja Rule received (by far) the biggest reaction from the audience at my screening.

“I am beyond embarrassment” - the koan of Marty Mauser

Probably best to leave the Westerns to the Americans and the Italians. This is aa existential as you would expect a French Western might be. It’s beautifully shot and fairly compelling - but notably lacking the genre’s soul.

Dark, madcap and eminently quotable, Better off Dead holds up better than any 80’s teen comedy other than Heathers. Lane Meyer probably grows up into the assassin in Grosse Point Blank (Lloyd Dobler wasn’t nearly as dark), as the film shows American teenage alienation has always had a violent streak.

Despite the film’s surrealism, it’s one of the more honest about the self-serious nature of American youth - 40 years ago or today.

Before the phones ruined everything, even the lonely people had people to be with, if only to share miseries. Aside from the atomization, maybe we’ve also lost some of the characters that used to hang out at places like Trees Lounge.

Life seems a lot less colorful without them around.

*Screened at the reopening of the Malverne Cinema and Arts Center, with Steve Buscemi in attendance

I knew it all along… I mean they make it pretty obvious. But still.

A tour de force of acting, directing, cinematography and subject matter. It defined (and still does) the way we think of teenagers in that era, and the strange new development of adolescent angst.

One of the best of these 1950s melodrama and morality plays. A film that’s somehow even better than its reputation.

Robert Wagner is the worst date ever in a film that could easily be American Psycho Minus One. Both Joanne Woodward and Virginia Leith should be way smarter - but come on - it’s the original Number 2!

So glad that Baylon from Gilda made it out west and into copper mining. By the mid 1950s a former German err…industrialist would fit right into the center of the new prosperity - and the pathos of the mid-century. 

And while I’d like to think that modern tech makes this sort of insane story completely unrealistic in 2026, I’ve also seen the 8am hour of GMA a few times as well. 

Great and twisted stuff. No wonder Lynch mined this material so closely.

Ernest Borgnine as an Amish action hero is just one of the bonkers twists and turns in this Western/Bourgeois bedroom/social melodrama. CinemaScope is somehow never better than when it transitions from a hushed discussion of an affair into a gun fight. This has several of both and in a glorious Arizona setting.

After seeing Eva walking in the moonlight, I might’ve killed and died for her too. Armed to the teeth indeed!

The American dream and nightmare have always been blurred beyond recognition.

My home and the subdivision it sits in was built in 1957 - the same year that Sunrise Hills saw so much drama on the other side of the country. 70 odd years later, with the post-war prosperity spent, and Americans no longer willing to build and develop, the idea that we were somehow “greater” or had more material satisfaction in this era is completely obliterated by No Money Down.

We are quite literally the children and grandchildren of these strivers and engineers and veterans. No different, save for the humanity sacrificed to the algorithm and digital spaces. But underneath the same basic animals cowering in fear and resentment and greed.

Joanne Woodward and Tony Randall in particular deliver powerful performances, but the entire cast inhabits the neuroses and insecurities of our supposedly most stable generation.

Tony Randall’s Jerry would obviously have multiple Kalshi/Robinhood and Coinbase accounts and five internet/AI businesses.

No surprise that Pat Hingle, who so convincingly played Commissioner Gordon in Batman (1989) is the most noble man in the whole film.

So when did the Palmer family move into this house? 

Horrific exploration of addiction and psychosis - by extrapolating every terrible “Dad” tendency into a torture chamber for James Mason’s family.

The patina of order and masculine virtue that define the 1950s in our collective memory is so thoroughly undercut by the era’s cinema. 

Nicholas Ray just absolutely dismantles the idea that “father knows best”, addicted to “cortisone” or no.

Figuring whether Orson Welles is brilliant or terrible in this film would take at least 5 more viewings. What is clear is that these 1950s melodramas (particularly the Southern fried versions) were more honest about sex, wounded masculine pride, repressed female desire and how ridiculous situations are taken seriously by whole societies than most films today.

Paul Newman and Orson Welles chewing scenery are the highlights - but the chemistry between Newman and Woodward is electric.

We need way more melodramas told today with this level of craft and widescreen vistas. And more honesty too.

At times it’s a highly cinematic Hallmark romance, but then it transcends its inherently tacky premise to become something much greater. 

Best of all it shows that the movies are the best because of their happy endings. Johnny To believes they can heal the deepest wounds. And maybe they can.

Even something good and beautiful can produce disease and rot. This is almost a retelling of the story of Job. A good man does lose everything despite his continued faith.

But the film is called HUD for a reason. And as the old man says, when we hold up evil as something admirable, our souls may already be lost.

Raw performances that drive home the depths of despair and desire for sin and redemption that lives in all men.

A much more romantic, polished version of this story, and one that suffers for its lack of transgression. The moment the film tells you the “slaves left” and leaves out the incest plot line and  Corporal’s kiss with Amy - you know the film is going to be far different than the Eastwood/Seigel version.

But the film really suffers from this overt lack of sin. The grime and dirt and decadence and resentment that pervades the earlier film is missing entirely here.

I’m not sure that it serves the “female perspective” either, nor the film’s verisimilitude. When the original
Beguiled was made - the Civil War was just over 100 years old. The people who made it knew people who knew people who fought there. It was present in a way we cannot conceive.

And that - more than a male or female POV is the major difference between the two films. 

A noble failure.

Die Walkure retold as a magical Japanese fish story with Wotan recast as a Richard Wagner-esque sea wizard? Voiced by Liam Nesson? With a soundtrack that alludes to both The Ride of the Valkyries and the soundtrack to Super Mario 64?

What an absolute masterpiece.

This might've surpassed Porco Rosso as my favorite Ghibli film. The layers and artistic allusions and retelling of ancient and not-so-ancient myths was deeply moving.

Beautiful.

It’s amazing how closely the aesthetic of Clockwatchers tracks The Backrooms. And why not? The Gen Z fascination with soulless liminal spaces from the 90’s is wrapped up with the broader questioning of materialism and the capitalist grind. 

But if you temped back in the 90’s-early 2000’s this film also feels incredibly true to life. The floating through a company where no one knows you save the temp wrangler. The trauma bonding with others in your “class”. The constant menial pointless tasks, and no internet or smartphone to distract. 

If AI does come for the office job, this film is a strong counterpoint to the nostalgia that’s already arising for this era of “work”.

Like the old coal mines and auto plants and garment factories that have been similarly automated - “the office” might not be worth mourning.