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.
No narration, no score to speak of, no panning over the bay of Naples at golden hour. Instead, fixed cameras pointed at archaeologists brushing ash off a shinbone, emergency services staff answering calls from scared residents, a tutor helping children learn a variety of subjects, Syrian workers bringing in thousands of tonnes of Ukrainian grain. Vesuvius looms in almost every frame, usually grey, often half-swallowed by cloud. Everyone on screen is, in one way or another, in its shadow: extracting from it, measuring it, living despite it.
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.
My son’s first Miyazaki, and—with apologies to everyone who’s been telling me for twenty-odd years—mine too. Enjoyed the unhurriedness: no villain, no ticking clock, no third-act lesson, just Chihiro earning her courage by the minute. Watching it with an eight-year-old turned out to be the antidote to arriving at canon late, burdened by other people’s readings. The boy had no readings, just a quiet “wow” at the train across the water. Now we have the rest of the shelf to work through.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
Exquisite dysfunction.
20-odd years since I last saw this and I can only watch it through two modern lenses: roguelikes and LLMs. None of us knows what happened; we’re all just dying and resetting for each new run. And Leonard’s context window is tiny; the Polaroids are his system prompt.
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
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.
Well made and fun to watch, and I’m glad the wonderful Ram keeps getting its due as a proto-indie blueprint. Ultimately though, it’s a familiar story told capably rather than a new angle on it.
Watched on Sunday March 1, 2026.
Watched on Monday February 23, 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.
Highly recommended. A Winter Olympics Hoop Dreams, unfolding against a backdrop of national decline and the long shadow of war.
Very flawed, but watching it with a kid helped a lot.
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.
This looks like a PS4 game. One that I would kill to play. As it is, it’s a moving and thoughtful film.
“Oh, the usual. I bowl. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback.”
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.”
This will be a specific kind of young person’s favourite film for the rest of their life. 10/10 soundtrack
There is absolutely no need for either Damon or Affleck to be in this, although they do improve it.
Excellent. Quiet, subtle, really well observed. Lovely to look at too.
100 minutes spent rooting for one of the worst guys
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.
First viewing in maybe 15 years?