Best Movies of 2024

I wasn’t so sure that this year ended up being such a great one for movies, at least for me. Some of 2024’s most acclaimed mainstream hits like Challengers, Dune Part 2, and Anora that have been sweeping the awards circuit were mostly misses for me. But when I started combing back through my Letterboxd […]

Review: “A Complete Unknown”

You can’t fully know Bob Dylan. Thats’s something that Todd Haynes understood when he made I’m Not There, his radical 2007 biopic that crafts an image of the legendarily enigmatic musician’s life in fragments portrayed by six different actors, ranging from a young Black boy to Cate Blanchett. Perhaps that’s also something that director James […]

Holiday Classics: “I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes” (1948)

You should never throw your shoes at a cat, no matter how much their midnight meowing keeps you up at night. You especially shouldn’t do it if you’re Tom Quinn (Don Castle), a struggling tap dancer who sits at home anxiously awaiting the return of his taxi dancer wife Ann (Elyse Knox) from work, where […]

Review: “Sugarcane”

In 2021, numerous unmarked graves were discovered on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Mission, a former Canadian residential school situated near the Sugarcane Indian Reserve near Williams Lake in British Columbia. This wasn’t the only school where such a discovery was made. It is, however, where directors Julian Brave Noisecat and Emily Kassie choose to […]

Review: “Wicked”

Jon M. Chu’s 2021 film adaptation of the Broadway musical In the Heights made me suspect that he wasn’t a particularly skilled director of musicals. His long-gestating film adaptation of Wicked confirmed it. It’s a shame, because even more so than Heights, there’s a legitimately great movie musical rocking around inside that two hour and […]

Review: “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat”

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat— Johan Grimonprez’s documentary tracking the events leading up to the 1961 assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba that’s comprised entirely of archival footage and audio and text excerpts from a wide range of sources and first-hand accounts— opens at the close. Text rippling across the screen illustrate the dialogue between […]

Review: “Memoir of a Snail”

If there’s one person who has experience with just about every seemingly good thing that life throws at you blowing up in your face, it’s me. So maybe that’s why I became so strongly wrapped up in the story of Memoir of a Snail, even as its tugging of its protagonist from terrible life event […]

Review: “Joker Folie à deux”

Joker Folie à deux opens with the sort of stylishly vacuous sequence director Todd Phillips is so great at realizing: an animated short modeled after Warner Brothers’ vintage Looney Tunes cartoons starring Joker— the psychopathic clown with a sadistic sense of humor, most known for existing as the arch villain to DC Comics’ superhero Batman— […]

Fantastic Fest Review: “The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee”

“On the seventh of June in the year 2015 I passed away at the age of 93. By then I had become quite accustomed to dying.” Christopher Lee rises from the grave to narrate a documentary about his own life in Jon Spira’s The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee. That statement, uttered at the […]

Review: “Sleep”

The scary part is the lack of control. When you’re asleep, anything can happen. Your mind can dream up things wonderful and terrible. You can talk out loud. You can get up and move and walk with zero conscious control over your limbs. Recently, I fell asleep at my desk while working on a job […]