Category: Movie Reviews
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Adopt a Highway (2019)
This is sort of a tough one because this movie’s strong points almost allow it to make a clean getaway, but the story is frankly too nonsensical for the otherwise breathtakingly vulnerable filmmaking to obscure its weaknesses. It is certainly the most empathetic characterization of an ex-convict that I’ve seen in a film, and Ethan…
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Marty Supreme (2025)
I’m so glad I watched this just a few days after seeing Glengarry Glen Ross for the first time. There’s no better superstar in 2025 than Timothee Chalamet to reinforce the aforementioned film’s insistence that acting is performance is salesmanship. Chalamet’s devotion to his role is both parts ironic, as demonstrated by the 20-minute long faux marketing meeting…
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Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
It makes so much sense that this film was originally written as a stage play; very little matters in this movie besides the delivery of dialogue from the actors. The salesman are ostensibly competing for the highest dollar value on the chalkboard, but what they truly desire is the perfection of performance— for their clients,…
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Slacker (1990)
I realized that I used the word “meandering” in the last two posts I made here, which is truly a shame because I don’t think you could describe this movie without using this word, so I’m going to have to make it three in a row. There are multiple references to the micro budget of…
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How to Blow Up A Pipeline (2022)
I have what I think are a few rather pedantic critiques of this movie, which I generally found to be suspenseful, well-made, and above all unapologetically radical; I feel like I’m harping on it a bit but I think it’s a very thought-provoking film so I might as well articulate them. First, the good: I…
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One Battle After Another (2025)
My reading on this is that PTA badly wanted to adapt another Pynchon novel after Inherent Vice (my personal favorite movie of all time), but by the time he got around to it, he felt a greater responsibility to ground the story in a darkly recognizable present as opposed to Vineland’s comically cynical retrospective on the 1960s-1980s. …
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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
The sheer brutality of Texas Chainsaw relative to its time would have probably been enough to deem it a landmark in horror history, but it goes even further by demonstrating considerable artistic vision for any movie of its era, irrespective of its status as a horror film. There’s certainly evidence of its low budget at times, but…
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Bugonia (2025)
This feels the most straightforward work I’ve seen from Yorgos thus far; while it’s as brutally violent (if not more) than Killing of A Sacred Deer and contains some of the same surreal eccentricity as Poor Things, it doesn’t feel nearly as slippery compared to those films, and certainly not compared to the incredibly tedious Kinds of Kindness. It…