Big Fish (2003)

Tim Burton, you bastard, you’ve done it again. Hit a remarkable 0.7 Titanics on the cry-o-meter and made me want to call my papa. (8/10)

Alien: Romulus (2024)

I reviewed this one in full back in August, so go check that out if you want more detail. A stylish sequel (sevenquel?) that makes the world of Alien more believable than ever and introduces some great new talent. (7/10)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

Seeing Christopher Lloyd in this was like seeing Jeff Goldblum in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Like, hey, you’re not meant to be famous yet!

It’s one of those films that’s been talked about so much that i have very little new to add, but i will say that i wasn’t expecting this to be as funny as it was.¹ (7/10)

Sexy Beast (2000)

Ugh. Once the plot gets moving two thirds of the way through it’s pretty good, but that first hour is æsthetically revolting in the most perplexing way. The Spanish countryside has never looked so grimy and clammy. I hate all of these people. (3½/10)

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

I didn’t know Steven Spielberg had the capacity to be so… cryptic? I love how the film builds up the mystery of what’s going on, with an ending that leaves you wondering in both senses of the word. Contact’s better, yeah, but Contact wouldn’t exist without Close Encounters as a base to work off. (9/10)

Silent Running (1972)

Douglas Trumbull, 2001’s special-effects man, gets into directing with this sickeningly seventies environmentalist sci-fi fable. There’s a lot to like here, but i can’t help the feeling that this would have worked a lot better if you’d cut it up into five twenty-minute TV episodes and had Tom Baker show up midway through. (5/10)

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Went to the cinema for this, for… some reason? Tim Burton is back, baby, having finally freed himself from Disney’s offputting computer-generated tendrils, and while Beetlejuice²: Beetlejuice Harder is ultimately inessential, it’s a fun legasequel that’s better than anyone was reasonably expecting, keeping up the same manic energy as the original. Michael Keaton, Catherine O’Hara, and Winona Ryder haven’t missed a step since 1988. Willem Dafoe is great too, though like most of the new cast, his character doesn’t have much to do in the story, which struggles to commit to any of its three plot threads.

Also, the lead girl falls in love with a socially awkward zoomer who listens to Sigur Rós, which means there’s still a chance for me. So that’s… that’s good. That’s reassuring. (6/10)

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

Once you’ve seen one Woody Allen film, you’ve seen them all, and boy did i wish i was seeing Annie Hall instead. (5/10)

Casablanca (1942)

Come on. It’s Casablanca. What do you want me to say? Every five minutes there’s a line that made me point at the screen like Leonardo DiCaprio. “We’ll always have Paris.” (10/10)

Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Unnerving to see Dev Patel before his ongoing “sexiest man alive” era, but you can never go wrong with Danny Boyle, whose kinetic, saturated style elevates a simple feel-good rags-to-riches story. (6/10)

The Substance (2024)

I cannot fucking believe i roped my mum into coming to the cinema with me.² Greatest decision of my life. Her fucking face!

The Substance is the goopiest [sic] movie i’ve ever seen, and that’s ignoring all the body horror. Demi Moore digs through wet rubbish to pick up a sticky USB drive and splatters eggs everywhere. Dennis Quaid eats a bowl of shrimp that makes the world’s most viscerally disgusting noise. Margaret Qualley’s teeth fall out.³

My one complaint is i wish it had gone further. Everyone on the internet thinks it went too far. No. They are fools. That blood-sprayed audience should have started melting into The Thing, and we all know that deep inside our hearts. (9½/10)

Videodrome (1983)

Long live the new flesh! A film starring a Betamaxussy and a man who exists exclusively through semi-sentient VHS tapes. So many ideas, so little time (the Cronenberg special). Watching this is like trying to remember a nightmare you just woke up from.

I’m filing this in the same folder as Rear Window, a film with a surprising amount to say about an internet that it couldn’t have reasonably foreseen. What are we if not, like Brian O’Blivion⁴, ghosts of all our past transmissions? Is the online avatar not the new flesh? Existenz tackles the internet more head-on, but suffers from the fact that David Cronenberg doesn’t know what a video game is. Videodrome is unburdened by the future facts, and so can say whatever it wants. (10/10)

Hundreds of Beavers (2024)

A double feature with Videodrome. Sure. Why not. Let’s go.

This tickled the Gremlins 2 area of my brain in delightful Looney Tunes-esque fashion. What a silly little flick. (9½/10)

The A-Team (2010)

Stepdad’s pick for movie night. My review: “Stepdad’s pick for movie night”. (3/10)

Megalopolis (2024)

Francis Ford Coppola’s final fart is why Hollywood can’t have nice things, an incomprehensible schmaltzy mess about how Adam Driver is a Very Special Boy who is always right. I don’t know where the money went — everything looks like Spy Kids. What an embarrassing way to go out. (2/10)

Francis Ford Coppola shoots for the moon and misses with Megalopolis, his long-gestating passion project that shows why studio interference isn’t always the worst thing. Sometimes you need someone in the room to say “no”. Every creative decision made here is baffling: Adam Driver’s character can stop time, and this never comes up. Our main character can stop time, and this does not play a role in the film’s story! His political rival leaks a video of him having sex with an underage pop star, and within about five minutes, it turns out it was fake and she was 23 anyway, so that plotline’s resolved and never comes back up. Every conflict is like this. I don’t know what’s going on. (4/10)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: A Fable defies your puny human notions of “good” or “bad” in an ambitious sci-fi drama that’s like if Hillary Clinton wrote a Neil Breen film.⁵ You can neatly split the cast into “knew what kind of movie they were in” and “didn’t”. Shia LeBeouf knew — he chews the scenery with every line as if the sets were made of cotton candy. Aubrey Plaza knew, because there’s no way not to know what kind of movie you’re in when your character is called “Wow Platinum” and makes Mr LeBeouf give her head. Adam Driver probably knew? He can get pretty hammy, but he’s kind of trying to keep a straight face. Nathalie Emmanuel didn’t know — she’s the female lead, but her performance is so wooden i was genuinely shocked to find out she wasn’t a nepotism hire. Giancarlo Esposito is insulated enough from the properly weird stuff that i don’t think he knew. (6/10)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: A Fable is so sincere i can’t help but love it. It’s a man who built his fame on films about the criminal underworld and the hell of war going: “I refuse to let this be my legacy”. Megalopolis is about a man with a vision for a better future and the power to make it happen. (His vision for a better future mostly involves those moving walkways they have at airports. I never said it was perfect.) And, yeah, it’s a little undercooked. Yeah, it’s as subtle as a brick.⁶ But it’s the film the man wanted to make, and it’s a film that proudly stands against the cynical doom and gloom that has infested popular culture since the nineties. I can’t help but respect that. (8/10)

“Whaddaya think of this boner i got?” —Jon Voight, 2024 (10/10)