comedy

Three stories, each with a flicker of something that never quite holds. Jarmusch’s deadpan usually finds the warmth under the stillness; here the stillness is mostly just… still. Whatever thread runs through them (family as obligation? as performance?) is far too faint.

It was today I realised that this and The Other Guys are different films. Cleverly written, sharply directed, and Gosling is, as ever, a delight. Keith David and Kim Basinger perhaps a little wasted.

I can see exactly why people love this. It hands you a version of your seventeen-year-old self and asks you to forgive her, which is a generous trick. The complaints land too. Lady Bird is a brat, and the world Gerwig builds around her is conspicuously white and insulated in ways that are never interrogated. But Ronan and Metcalf are excellent, the latter astonishing at times. Gerwig directs tightly. Other directors would have added at least 15 minutes of exposition.

I really do like this a lot. About as good as these things get (not intended to be faint praise). Half a star bump.

Cooper’s least showy film and for me his best. The stand-up scenes could have been a vanity exercise for everyone involved; instead they’re the most honest stretch of the film. I’ve enjoyed Arnett’s bluster for years but he’s doing something else here and it suits him. Dern matches him scene for scene and then some, especially in the back half once Tess stops absorbing and starts pushing back. They feel like two people who have actually been married. I really enjoyed this.

I remember this arriving in 1990, though only as a soundtrack and a general early-60s mood; the film itself never registered. Winona Ryder anchors it completely. Charlotte’s neuroses are pitched exactly right, and the voiceover prayers are the best thing here. Ricci, in her first film, is unnervingly assured. Cher is a natural, somehow both warmer and colder than I expected and with less screen time too. She was forty-four playing a woman of about thirty-one, which no amount of presence quite sells, but it matters much less than it should. Bob Hoskins is charm in a cardigan and flat cap. The whole thing is far sweeter and stranger than its reputation suggested to me.

The marketing was the bait: sold to teenage boys who turned up for Megan Fox and got a feminist horror about the intensity of teenage girl friendship and what men do when they need a sacrifice. In 2026 the reading is unmissable; in 2009, a year after “I Kissed a Girl” had pitched queerness as a party trick for boys, Fox’s casting read as more of the same. She is magnetic and clearly having a great time weaponising her own image, and the script gives her some of the best line readings of the decade. Diablo Cody, Karyn Kusama and the soundtrack each earn the reputation they’ve developed since release. Seyfried almost convinces you she’s the plain one.

Sadie Sandler and Chloe East have the right uneasy chemistry, Sarah Sherman’s framing-device dean is doing a lot with very little, and Lyonne and Garofalo turn up exactly when you want them to. Then the third act swings somewhere else entirely—a different film, a different register, a different idea of what the joke is. Whatever it was meant to do, it lands as a shrug. What came before deserved a closer.

The time loop genre deserves more entries, not fewer, and Palm Springs is the argument for why. Strip away the gimmick and you’re left with the oldest question there is: what would you actually do if consequences were suspended? Groundhog Day answered moral growth. Palm Springs answers commitment, and the particular flavour of nihilism that sets in once you’ve already tried everything else, and it turns out that’s the richer question. Samberg is restrained here, playing a man who’s been funny for so long he’s forgotten why. Milioti is the whole film.

Continuing to show my son the high-concept family comedies of my youth—a genre Hollywood was unusually good at in the late eighties and early nineties, when a one-line premise could carry a whole film. This one was well-received. Some of the practical effects still hold up. The digital work does not—1989 was a year or two too early, and the seams show in every composite. Memories of watching it at the cinema with my grandmother aren’t quite enough to lift it any higher.

The sketch-to-feature problem is real (you can feel the last twenty minutes stretching), but the hit rate on individual gags is high enough to carry it. Impressively stupid, in the most complimentary sense.

Showed this to my eight-year-old and it went down a storm: the floor piano, the bunk bed, the vending machine. Everything a kid fantasises about adulthood, which is to say everything that has nothing to do with actual adulthood.

Bill Murray is doing something precise in the early scenes: playing a man who thinks he’s too good for his surroundings. The film’s quiet argument is that Phil is wrong, but not in the way you’d expect. It’s not that Punxsutawney is secretly wonderful. It’s that contempt is a kind of blindness, and the loop forces Phil to look. David Thomson described Murray as “the obdurately sensible persona responding to orderly madness,” which is exactly right. Phil isn’t heroic. He’s competent and irritated, and the film’s engine is watching competence and irritation gradually lose to something harder to name—attention, perhaps. Care. The kind of knowledge you can only acquire through repetition. Phil’s arc from contempt to mastery to something like grace mirrors what happens when you watch anything often enough: you stop watching the plot and start watching the texture. I have seen this film perhaps fifty times. I’ll watch it again soon.

Nintendo’s great gift in game design is knowing when to walk away from an idea. A mechanic is introduced, developed, twisted once, then discarded before it outstays its welcome. Some of these ideas—gravity flipping, bee suits, entire physics systems—are things another studio might base a whole game around. To Nintendo, they’re a single level. A philosophy of creative abundance: you can afford to throw away good ideas when you trust yourself to have more.

This does not translate to film. Galaxy is 99 minutes of TikToks, each scene a self-contained vignette stuffed with boss fights, power-ups, and environments from the games, stitched together with the connective tissue of a clip show. The production design is mostly gorgeous. But the introduce-develop-discard rhythm that makes a Mario game feel endlessly inventive makes a Mario movie feel exhausting. A game earns its density through play; a film needs to earn it through narrative. One rewards your attention with agency, the other just demands it.

The movie can’t decide whether it’s for people who’ve played every game or people who’ve played none. Minor characters and references arrive in two flavours: unexplained cameos that flash past like inside jokes at a party you weren’t invited to, or over-narrated introductions that grind the pace to a halt for the benefit of someone’s confused parent. The makers of Super Metroid once said they didn’t want to explain things to the player using too many words. They designed the world so you’d discover things yourself and feel like the discovery was yours. Galaxy never trusts you like that. It either assumes you already know, or it stops to make sure you do. No middle ground, and no discovery.

What it actually resembles is the nostalgia-industrial complex it was born from. Callback upon callback, each reference feeding the next. The cinematic equivalent of a “do you remember this?” Facebook post: you see the thing, you recognise the thing, you feel a brief warmth, you move on. The first movie had plenty of this too, but it largely got away with it—the novelty of seeing these characters on screen carried the weight that the story couldn’t. Galaxy doesn’t have that excuse. With that charm spent, the underlying problem is fully exposed: the film mistakes recognition for emotion, as if reminding you that Lumas exist is the same as making you care about them.

The irony is that Nintendo, in its actual games, resists this. Their whole competitive strategy is refusing incrementalism—competing on terms rivals aren’t even considering. In games, they’re fearless about throwing away what works and trying something new. This movie plays it safe in exactly the way their games don’t. A greatest-hits tour where the songs are played too fast and in the wrong order—and where the thing that made Nintendo interesting in the first place, that willingness to let a great idea go, is the one thing they couldn’t bring themselves to do here.

My son loved it.

I’m not always the biggest Tarantino fan. The cleverness is too often the point, the references fold in on themselves, the secondary meaning always matters more than the first. But I’ll say this: he makes a hell of a good movie now and again.

Very strange. Pretty good! Best new Pixar film for a while.

The received wisdom is that this is Anderson before he became Anderson, but I’m less sure. The Futura, the overhead shots of handwritten plans, the 60s-inflected soundtrack, the lovable failures stumbling through aimless privilege… these are more than mere foundations for what else would come, they’re in many ways the centre of the thing itself. Sure, it needed time to develop, but what isn’t ‘Wes’ here is probably better explained by studio pressure on a debut filmmaker than by any absence of vision.

Watched on Sunday March 15, 2026.

Perfect. Wouldn’t change a frame. Probably my favourite film—can’t think of anything I’d place higher

Watched on Saturday March 14, 2026.

Great short. Part of my mission to watch everything Vic Michaelis is in.

Watched on Saturday March 7, 2026.

Watched on Sunday March 1, 2026.

Very flawed, but watching it with a kid helped a lot.

Watched on Sunday February 15, 2026.

Watched on Sunday February 8, 2026.

“Oh, the usual. I bowl. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback.”

“Robin Williams wasn’t Gen X, but he mattered more than anyone who was. Dead Poets Society was contraband—“carpe diem” smuggled into classrooms. Good Will Hunting went deeper: Damon’s Will hiding behind arrogance until Robin cracked him open—“It’s not your fault”—again and again until it broke. Even Good Morning, Vietnam, our parents’ war, not ours, showed comedy surviving chaos without erasing pain. Robin was teacher, therapist, DJ. When he died, we didn’t just lose an actor—we lost the only adult we trusted.” (Mark McInerney, The Movies That Defined Gen X)

Read this today and thought I’d revisit a Williams film I’d not seen in 20 years or more. It has far less to say about the war than I remember, save for one specific scene, which stands out because of it.

Watched on Saturday January 24, 2026.

This will be a specific kind of young person’s favourite film for the rest of their life. 10/10 soundtrack

My son’s slightly strange BTTF ranking is 3 > 2 > 1. Enjoyed watching them with him.

My son’s first viewing of the trilogy continues. He liked this one a lot.

As a kid I was mesmerised by the scene at the end where Joe Flaherty turns up with the letter. Blew my mind.

A franchise’s worth of characters can’t save the franchise

Watched it with my son, who was seeing it for the first time. He thought it was great and is excited to see the sequels over the weekend.

Watched on Friday January 2, 2026.

My son liked it. I enjoyed the gypsy jazz part.

Chases the Heathers energy but adds a few too many plot twists and minutes.

Watched on Monday December 29, 2025.

Sennott’s great. Enjoyed the various power dynamics at play: financial, sexual, generational. They all helped amp up the anxiety levels.

I clicked on this expecting some unfunny Stranger Things parody and instead I got Scott Pilgrim + The Warriors + every Tarantino film. Based on those expectations, it was surprisingly good, even if it’s all been done a thousand times before.

My son asked me if this is where they got the idea for Wario and Waluigi.

This review may contain spoilers.

Enjoyed the weird little details of the world they’re in, and the final fight scene alone is worth the price of admission.

Slight, short, sweet. Monica Dolan is very good. Tim Key shows up in a brief Tim Key role.

Clooney and particularly Sandler are both very good. The final act focuses on family and regret and does it well without veering into schmaltz. The rest of the cast is great but mostly underused despite the runtime: Dern, Crudup and Gerwig especially. The exception is the supporting cast of the train segment who were mostly awful and poorly written. Also, weirdly: Lenny Henry is in this, in a brief yet important role. Very odd. Suspect I’ll like it more on a rewatch.

The leads are terrific: so natural it feels effortless. And the production is immaculate, as always with PTA. But it still plays like a string of fascinating vignettes rather than a fully great film. The stakes stay too low, the runtime feels too long… though I have to admit, I liked it more this time. Half a star bump.

Beautifully shot and with some amazing performances, especially the leads. Would need to be twice as long to explain some of the decisions made by the characters though.

The Game by way of The Truman Show and The Running Man. A weird one. Either a ⭐️⭐️ high-concept throwaway comedy or a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ portrait of deep, lonely paralysis. Maybe both, so I’ll meet in the middle.

I have never been interested in (or even really aware of) novels written by celebrities, and this book had passed me by completely until I heard Bob on Bullseye a couple of months ago. I borrowed it from my local library, and it was pretty much as I expected—a straightforward yet entertaining story, written by someone who is extremely funny, knows a lot about the legal profession, but who is definitely not a seasoned writer. A qualified recommendation.