drama

This review may contain spoilers.

Marty Mauser is a confidence man, and the film is built almost entirely out of his energy: when he talks the world seemingly rearranges itself around him. I spent the whole thing wanting him to fail to the point where it coloured my enjoyment of the film.

Some of that is the Safdie method pointed somewhere new. In Uncut Gems, Howard Ratner was unbearable in a similar way, but he was prey: always the smallest man (figuratively) in the room, owing money to bigger ones, hunted through every scene. The sympathy was more structural; you root for anything being chased. Marty has the wind behind him. He gets the components of the underdog (small man, big rivals, sport as the ladder out) while functioning as a predator on everyone within reach. I didn’t enjoy the mismatch.

The consequences do arrive but they’re a little more bureaucratic rather than escalating: too late to enter the Championship because of his own scheming, flying home with GIs because he’s burned his passage, missing the birth of his son. Every closed door in the last act is one he built himself.

And he never seems to notice. He talks his way past each of them exactly as he’s talked his way past everything else, right up to demanding a real rematch with Endo. The confidence man suddenly insisting on the genuine article, perhaps the neatest trick he pulls and, like me, if you aren’t charmed, the one worked on the audience rather than by the character.

Which leaves the recognition nowhere to happen except that final shot: hands clamped over the mouth that ran the whole con, glasses still on, weeping at a baby behind glass in a room full of other people’s children. It’s beautifully played, almost entirely through containment. It’s also the only available location for a humbling the film never dramatises anywhere the camera can see, and the readings I’ve come across all say the same things: trading fame for family, coming to terms, the repercussions sinking in, etc. I don’t agree. He didn’t trade anything. He ran out of options and then cried where nobody could watch him do it. And anyway, who’s to say fatherhood isn’t the next scheme he’s going to try to exploit?

Umpteenth rewatch and the nostalgia has gone recursive on me. Linklater made this in 1993, looking back mid-70s he half-remembered and half-invented. I’m now looking back thirty-odd years to a film that was already looking back, which means the object of my longing is itself an act of longing. Turtles all the way down!

I was reading Svetlana Boym last week and she’d call this the reflective kind of nostalgia: not trying to restore anything, just steeping in the ache of it, aware the ‘76 on screen never quite existed and that my own first watch has been smoothed by the same process. I get older, the film stays the same age.

What holds up is how little happens, and of course how completely that’s the point. It’s a last-day-of-school film where the freedom on offer is mostly the freedom to drive around. Nobody’s having the time of their lives; they’re circling the parking lot waiting for lives to start, which at seventeen is exactly what it feels like.

The boxy aspect ratio squeezes the Alps into a portrait shape, which makes the peaks feel tall rather than wide. It also means the landscape never quite escapes the two men at the centre of it. All perfectly fine stylistic choices yet I still spent the first twenty minutes wishing someone would open the curtains.

Narratively it’s straightforward, and there’s no reward in coming for the plot. Two boys meet in Grana; one leaves, one stays; they build a house together decades later. Directors Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch let it run to 147 minutes and not all of that is essential. The Nepal digressions are interesting but you could skip one and lose nothing. What accumulates instead is a study of class and social mobility working itself out inside a friendship: Pietro’s family can afford to consider adopting Bruno, and that offer is the wound the rest of the film and their friendship circles.

The two of them see the world in completely incompatible ways and understand each other perfectly, which is a harder thing to dramatise than it sounds, and the leads Marinelli and Borghi do it mostly in silences. It builds to something genuinely affecting and it looks utterly beautiful.

Third in the summer’s John Cusack rotation, and the first where he’s actively running the con rather than absorbing someone else’s. Nick Easter arrives with the whole thing planned, and the fun is watching him work rather than watching him decide.

Which makes him the odd one out. David Shayne in Bullets Over Broadway trades his principles away a concession at a time. Buck Weaver in Eight Men Out is ruined for a compromise he never actually made, done for standing in the room. Even Martin Blank, who at least chose his profession, spends Grosse Pointe Blank trying to reverse out of it. (Incidentally: one of my favourite films. Cannot wait to rewatch it.) Here, Easter is the one who got there first, and knew what he was doing when he did.

The film belongs to the excellent Hackman. Rankin Fitch (a name that simply screams “Grisham adaptation”) with his wall of monitors is doing what Cusack usually does: playing it straight while everything around him gets sillier. And, of course, the plot gets sillier by the minute.

Hoffman, sharing a screen with Hackman for the first time in their careers, is somehow given nothing to do. I’ve seen this film before but had very little memory of it, and I suspect that will be the case again should I ever press play once more.

That scandal that Field of Dreams turned into myth, this time told straight. Where the other film lets Shoeless Joe walk out of the corn to be forgiven, this one keeps things factual: how the 1919 White Sox actually threw the World Series, and how they were ruined for it.

Another film I’m mostly watching for John Cusack. Here he plays Buck Weaver, the one who knew the plan, stayed quiet and took nothing. And who still paid the same price as the men who sold out. Not the same as his other characters’ moral slides: here a decent man is ruined for being in the same room. You want him to escape it all and you know he won’t.

Incidentally Strathairn and Sweeney are both good here. Actors you wish the industry had handed bigger careers.

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.