drama

The sort of high-concept swing nobody risks any more (which is of course a small tragedy). What struck me most was this: do this exact film with football and it’d be insufferable, yet with baseball it’s earnest and earned. The mundanities of another country’s sport arrive here as something close to myth. We don’t have that for football. Partly the game’s class baggage, partly a national suspicion of taking it too seriously, of being caught intellectualising a thing that’s meant to be felt. Costner stands in a cornfield talking to ghosts and it plays straight. Try the equivalent featuring a centre-half on a wet Tuesday in the Championship and you’re looking at something vastly different.

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.

Paolo Sorrentino gives us Toni Servillo as a president in his final months: a former judge who values truth and certainty above all, a man who ponders but does not dream. Several pressing decisions await him, but the film is less concerned with the verdicts than with the weighing. Underneath it all sits a grief he can’t resolve, for a wife whose infidelity he learned too late to confront. A straightforward premise, and a fascinating character study built on it. Servillo brings exactly the gravitas and indecision the part needs, holding the screen while doing, on the face of it, very little.

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.

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.

A film about storytelling. Incredible to look at. Seems to have been an enormous labour of love; I expect my rating will rise or fall significantly upon a rewatch.

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.

Kaufman’s least immediately legible film, and potentially his most rewarding for it. I didn’t clock how the Jake scenes and the janitor scenes connected until the credits rolled, which may be the point or may just be me being slow—either way, I want to come back to it, just not yet. I suspect a lot more clicks if you’ve got the full reference shelf to hand (David Foster Wallace, Pauline Kael, Wordsworth, A Beautiful Mind, the musicals, etc), rather than catching half like I did. Buckley and Plemons are fantastic, and Collette and Thewlis match them on a fraction of the screen time.

I don’t entirely know what I just watched, and I think that’s the point. It opens like a coming-of-age film about two kids bonding over a Buffy-esque TV show, then quietly stops being that and becomes something stranger. The Lynch comparisons are well earned. Schoenbrun shoots suburbia soft and pink, and the Alex G score sits underneath everything like static you can’t quite tune out. The broader soundtrack, Caroline Polachek and yeule especially, is great. What stays with me is how patient the film is about not naming what it’s actually about. For anyone working through questions of identity and dysphoria, I suspect this will matter for a long time.

The plot creaks and Cruise does his earnest-sprinter routine, but the real pleasure is watching Pollack assemble the deepest supporting cast of the decade. Hackman (weary, rueful), Hal Holbrook’s avuncular menace, Ed Harris doing more with a sigh or a “fuck!” than most leads manage with a monologue, Holly Hunter stealing twenty minutes outright, plus Strathairn, Brimley, Busey, Tobin Bell, Sorvino, Dean Norris: every door that opens, someone you recognise walks through.

Most of Riz Ahmed’s acting happens through his eyes—Ash barely speaks aloud, his lines passed through a telephone relay operator. That constraint sharpens everything, and it’s all gruff exchanges, mailed packages and payphone protocols. Then the ending arrives, and it crumbles. A script this fastidious about process shouldn’t ask you to swallow quite that much.

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.

Rose Byrne is almost the sole focus. There are several important voices that we barely see. A formal choice that doubles as the argument. What it generates is noise. Overwhelm, guilt, the low hum of panic even when nothing’s on fire; and here, quite a lot is.

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.

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.

I expected a materialistic thriller and I got an iPhone ghost story about grief. Quietly great!

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.

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.

Exquisite dysfunction.

Watched on Tuesday March 17, 2026.

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

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

Watched on Sunday March 1, 2026.

Back to this after 15+ years. Gosling and Epps are outstanding, and it quietly avoids white-saviour clichés. Intimate, honest and unsentimental, and I love how the Broken Social Scene songs are woven through it.

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.

Incredibly affecting. Great performances. The way it deals with memory is stunning; the impact and feeling of the ‘Under Pressure’ sequence will stick with me for a while.

Watched on Sunday February 15, 2026.

Watched on Saturday February 14, 2026.

Watched on Sunday February 8, 2026.

Watched on Tuesday February 3, 2026.

Fiona Shaw and Emma Mackey are both great. Didn’t care for the Vicky Krieps character at all which hampered my total enjoyment.

“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.

Jennifer Lawrence is, again, incredible here

Watched on Saturday January 24, 2026.

“Never ask for what ought to be offered.”

Excellent. Quiet, subtle, really well observed. Lovely to look at too.

100 minutes spent rooting for one of the worst guys

I have vivid memories of watching this at the cinema, especially the delayed opening credits and Beck’s “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime” arriving about 20 minutes in. A song I had no idea was coming. Its appearance and reprise at the end are moments that have stuck with me.

The nonlinearity isn’t as complicated as it first felt, but it still keeps repeat viewings interesting.

Above all, it’s just such a fucking good *film. *A story that could only work in cinema, and a beautiful collaboration from Gondry, Kaufman and Bismuth all at or near the height of their powers.

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.

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.

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.