crime

I probably watch this a little more than once a decade, often enough to see the clothes date further each time while the motivations don’t really move at all. JD would be on Twitter now, and he’d be annoyingly good at it. Winona looks superb and plays Veronica with more precision than the part needs. Slater’s Jack Nicholson impression is fine once you accept it for what it is. The satire only works because it’s brutal. Its target isn’t school so much as everything school is a rehearsal for. The lines survive brilliantly: “my teenage angst has a body count.”

One oddity. In the final act, I’ve always noticed that a part of David Newman’s score sounds lifted from Super Metroid, released six years later. Still no idea what to do with that.

Saw this at the cinema in 1999 and, I think, never since. Memory had filed it as Rashomon-adjacent, with unreliable narrators and contradiction; on reflection the three strands complete each other rather than compete. A different and altogether gentler trick. Mostly it’s a time capsule of faces I then assumed were headed for bigger things: Scott Wolf, Desmond Askew, Taye Diggs. A very young Melissa McCarthy turns up briefly. And obviously Sarah Polley, whose subsequent career rather outstrips the material here. Watchable, propulsive, thoroughly of its moment. And I say that as someone who considers the turn of the millennium to be a few years ago, not twenty-six.

Cusack, in the Allen role, plays David Shayne, a playwright certain of his own genius, and spends the film discovering he isn’t the best writer in the room. That honour goes to Palminteri’s mobster bodyguard, who keeps improving the script from the wings. Cusack plays the straight man to all the noise and never begs for sympathy.

Playing moral compromise is something Cusack has always been good at. Shayne trades his principles one small concession at a time, and Cusack maps that slide without softening it or asking you to forgive him. It foreshadows the negotiated conscience he’d later bring to Grosse Pointe Blank.

Mixed feelings about Woody Allen, clearly, but this is one of my favourites of his.

Inspired by a Guardian ranked list, I’ve decided to spend the summer rewatching John Cusack films—I’m not sure why, but I’ve been rather obsessed with him for about 35 years—and where better to start than one of the most insane films of the 90s. It was intended as an action film, but it works far better in hindsight as a dark comedy: a postmodern blend of Top Gun, The Rock, Speed, and Face/Off, celebrating and unwittingly sending up those sorts of films by sheer excess.

An absurd premise, stacked cast, bonkers juxtapositions of scene, score and dialogue, an audience set up to cheer for a cannibalistic child killer’s escape to freedom… I ought to watch this more often. Cusack plays his honest, moralistic US Marshal straight as the madness unfolds around him.

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.

Uses each of its 160 minutes. Digressions into folklore, a severed leg inside a shark, Jaws, Carnival, yet it’s compelling throughout. Moura anchors the sprawl with a fantastic performance. The real achievement is textural: the 1970s Recife of the dictatorship years is rendered so completely, with all the grain, the cars, the sweat-damp collars, the paranoid zoom-ins that you’d hope for. You’d believe it was unearthed from a vault rather than shot last year.

I’m a complete mark for films where some aimless nobody pulls at a thread and gradually uncovers a conspiracy several orders of magnitude bigger than they bargained for. Under the Silver Lake knows this about people like me and exploits it ruthlessly.

Andrew Garfield is perfectly cast as a repellent protagonist—no job, no aspirations, no redeeming qualities, and (the film is at pains to remind us) he literally stinks. The whole thing drips with cynicism about Hollywood and that part of LA, landing somewhere between David Lynch and a paranoid Reddit deep-dive. It’s the sort of film you’ll either love or find completely insufferable.

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.

My gateway to the Coens. A VHS buy sparked by an Empire review. From there it was Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, and The Hudsucker Proxy in quick succession—possibly the same week.

Since then they’ve made slicker and more audacious films, but this remains my favourite.

Watched on Saturday February 14, 2026.

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

Watched on Saturday January 24, 2026.

There is absolutely no need for either Damon or Affleck to be in this, although they do improve it.

100 minutes spent rooting for one of the worst guys

First viewing in maybe 15 years?

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.

Very understated, terrific score. Josh O’Connor is great: he plays a greedy, stupid and increasingly desperate character very well. Would have been nice to have seen more of Alana Haim and Gaby Hoffman.