Sometimes a movie wants to tell you a story, sometimes it wants to provide you with a message, and sometimes it wants to just place you in somebody’s head. Queer’s aim is the latter. It wants you to observe a flawed, insecure man as he goes on an important journey. Your mileage on the quality of Queer will, I think, depend largely on how much you connect personally to that journey. My advice then is to see the film and know that if you loved it you’re correct, and if you were bored out of your skull you’re also correct.
I can’t imagine a person watching Nickel Boys and not being profoundly affected. I know inevitably someone out there will be an exception to that, but I think their uniqueness would prove the rule. Nickel Boys is emotionally truthful, narratively satisfying, and most of all genuinely formally innovative. It manages to tell its story in such a way that it essentially becomes a new, deeper story through the unique telling. It’s a difficult movie to watch, but its difficulty comes from a place of empathy that few movies manage. Go see Nickel Boys. I’d bet money it will affect you profoundly.
The Seed of the Sacred Fig is a great example of why genre really is a looser system of categorization than it seems to be most of the time. Is Sacred Fig a family drama? A thriller? A political statement? It’s all of these things, but besides all of that it’s just a thrilling watch. I went to see this nearly three hour long movie at 10:15 PM after a full work day and I wasn’t tired or bored for a single second. That might sound like faint praise, but I think it’s really a testament to the film’s quality, regardless of its subject matter.
The Brutalist’s reputation in pop-culture seems, at least to me, to be based mostly on its size and scope. How capital-e “Epic” it is. I think the quality of it comes from the fact that that epicness isn’t about war, as it almost always is in other movies. Armies don’t ride into battle, soldiers don’t shoot each other. People struggle to be safe, to be free, and unlike most of the epics that have come before, those struggles don’t automatically beget successes. They are met with hostility, hardship, and travesty, along with victory. Just like it was for our ancestors. The Brutalist begs us to make that struggle worth something.
I am tired of not being able to mourn real, dead Jewish people, because I’m too busy mourning real, dead Palestinian people. September 5 is a fine movie. It’s well made, slick, and it has John Magaro, one of my favorite actors working today, in it. I want to be able to enjoy it, but in the back of my mind while I was watching it and since I saw it I can’t help but think of how the Israeli government is robbing this of us. What is a true, real tragedy, becomes propaganda, purely by the circumstances of the world it releases in. It brings up past violence at a time when past violence is being used to justify present violence. I want to like you, September 5, and it’s not your fault that I don’t. I hope someday I can watch you again and not have this real world shadow hang over you.
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is a bad sequel to Den of Thieves, but a great heist movie that I wholeheartedly recommend. The original Den of Thieves was an exercise in urban warfare, a tale of greedy men calling each other slurs and firing rifles at each other on crowded streets. It was thrilling and it felt real, even if it was, of course, all a bit silly (as heist movies inherently kind of are). Den of Thieves 2 embraces that silly streak. Now there are gadgets, sports cars, parties, and one liners. It doesn’t feel real, but it is very, very fun, which I’d say is what really matters.
Presence is an experiment, something hard to quantify from an angle of quality. It’s not quite a horror movie and too creepy to really be thought of as a traditional drama, but all the same it’s an enjoyable watch. It justifies itself in being something new rather than being something great, which I often find to be the more interesting of those two options anyway.
Sometimes horror movies are fun, sometimes they’re scary, and sometimes they’re not quite either, not for lack of trying. Wolf Man is a little too goofy to be truly scary once its characters start talking, but whenever they’re not it’s quite thrilling and inventive. I really, really want to like Wolf Man more than I do. I want to tell you it’s excellent, but to do that I’d have to overlook a lot of on-the-nose dialog and frustrating choices. I’ll have to settle on telling you that I enjoyed it all the same and I hope it's received more warmly by the larger public as some time passes, because when nobody’s talking it does manage to be quite scary.
