It’s been a long time since I’ve watched Dr. No, and what I found myself really noticing in this re-watch are the seams and limitations of the film. By the time we get to even a Connery film like Thunderball, you’re dealing with a degree of spectacle and production design that’s pretty substantial. I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing as the bloat of some of the Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan ones hold them back. Not surprisingly, the car chases (like the one in the mountains of Jamaica) or action scenes in Dr. No seem… slight or underdeveloped. The scene in which Bond, Quarrel, and Honey Ryder encounter the “dragon” is filmed in darkness and thus it is tough to really perceive what is happening. Even the final fight between Bond and Dr. No himself feels very quick and ragged. There’s something about it that’s refreshing as it’s worth remembering these films we’re about espionage and not action at the beginning (something we need to be reminded of more than 50 years down the road).

There are moments in Dr. No that feel like you’re watching a play in the “realism” (a strange thing to say about a film centering on a British secret agent). Bond securing his hotel room in Jamaica as well as checking to see that it has been searched over has a slowness or smallness that jumps out when seen through our modern eyes. I also think about the moment Bond escapes from the prison cell Dr. No has put him in—the lack of music, the way in which Bond seems to be physically beaten up— and it’s kind of surprising (until we get to the Craig films where that kind of physical pain is common place. All of this isn’t a negative exactly nor does it take away from the film’s entertaining qualities, but it’s a bit of a shock to see the first Bond film have some things that feel like what the series was striving for in the 21st century.

Dr. No is a bit hamstrung by simplistic portrayals of characters like Quarrel (as the reductive portrayal of a Caribbean man) and Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress, as the first Bond girl, possessing a kind of innocence and lack of agency that’s a bit problematic). Obviously, all these Bond films are products of the times in which they were made and thus possess elements that don’t fit with our modern sensibilities.

Encountering these things is just the proverbial cost of doing business. But I do think there’s a lot of it in Dr. No and perhaps it’s another reason why it’s one I haven’t watched in a while. It’s something we’ll certainly be confronting in those early films in the series.

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While there was clearly room for the series and the films to develop into what it would eventually become, one thing that works coming out of the gate is Sean Connery’s performance as Bond. I feel like Connery had this conception of Bond as cool, detached, suave, but also intense when needed. It’s a slightly different conception of Bond than what you get in Fleming’s novels, but that’s understandable (at that point in time and for a wide cinematic audience, you’d need to sand down some of those rough edges that Bond on the page possessed) and also… a lot it feels in keeping with Fleming’s creation.

Yes, you get some one-liners that feel like something different (“I think they were on their way to a funeral”), but the scene with Professor Dent coming to kill Bond only for Bond to shoot him when he’s out of bullets, that feels like something different from the cinematic Bond (as we came to know him).

I think Bond’s fashion sense is still coming into its own—there are some nice suits worn by Connery but not much that’s as distinctive as what we’ll get in the next films. This one, which anticipates some of his ensembles in From Russia With Love, is perhaps my favorite:

Speaking of introducing and establishing certain tropes, Joseph Wiseman’s depiction of Dr. No sets up a lot of what we’ll get with villains in these films between his metal hands and the Nehru collared jacket (and, of course, the desire for world domination as part of the SPECTRE organization). Dr. No’s scheme, using high powered radio jamming to stop a Project Mercury launch in America, seems spot on given that this was released right in the midst of the Space Race with all the attendant anxieties that came along with it.

There’s also the introduction of many of the hallmarks of the series—the opening gun barrel sequence, the iconic James Bond theme; “Bond, James Bond”; the vodka martini, “shaken not stirred”; the presence of CIA agent Felix Leiter (played by Hawaii Five-O star Jack Lord); the appearance of Bernard Lee’s M and Lois Maxwell’s Miss Moneypenny—that give you the sense that there was a vision to this as a real series. I also want to call attention to the use of Jamaica as a location (where they filmed) and some of the beautiful vistas that emerged from that as well as the excellent production design by Ken Adam (especially in Dr. No’s lair). These are things the Bond franchise would become known for and they’re very much present at the beginning.

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Ultimately, my sense of Dr. No is that it’s an important film and has a lot of what we’d come to identify with the James Bond films and yet it’s not as strong and good as some of the subsequent entries with Connery. The next film in the series—From Russia With Love—is one of my favorites and is where you see the production team really put it together and make it clear they know what they’re doing.

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I’ve read just about all of the Ian Fleming novels too, so it’s not just about the movies, and that’s led me to be interested in other works about secret agents. While I certainly enjoy a good private eye movie or piece of pulp fiction or film noir, those worlds did not interest me as much as the narratives of Fleming and John Le Carré and the like.

I’ve been thinking about the whole franchise of late, for some reason. Perhaps it’s because of the exciting news that Denis Villeneuve has been named as the next director of the 26th Bond film. Having someone like Villeneuve. who was about as good of a pick to helm the next entry of the franchise as you could imagine (short of Christopher Nolan), makes the potential for Bond seem quite exciting in a way that it hadn’t felt since immediately after Skyfall (a film that is, in addition to being my favorite Bond films, one of my all-time favorites). Villeneuve’s track record (with a franchise like Dune, with an action thriller like Sicario, and with something more challenging like Arrival) makes him, in my mind, a really ideal choice to helm the next Bond movie. Edward Berger, who directed 2024’s Conclave, was an intriguing potential choice, but getting Villeneuve was remarkable and shows there’s still some importance derived from the Bond franchise.

As I revisit the Bond films, I thought it might be fun to turn that into an ongoing series here. On Letterboxd, I made a list in which I ranked the Bond films (starting with Skyfall and then making my way throughout the rest of the franchise).

Thus, I’m officially launching Universal Exports: The James Bond Rewatch. I’ll be going in chronological order starting with Dr. No, which I’ll be writing about soon. Just assorted thoughts, things I noticed or particularly enjoyed or thought were worth noting. Let me know in the comments if there are particular things you’d like me to focus on or address in my posts on each film—I don’t have a specific, determined idea as to what this will look like, so I’m happy to have guidance and suggestions as to what you all would like to see!

I was in a moment where, rather than watching something new, I needed to go back to a film I’d watched before. I elected to go with 2011’s Moneyball, directed by Bennett Miller and starring Brad Pitt and co-starring Jonah Hill and Chris Pratt.

Our IMDB summary of the film is as follows:

Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane’s successful attempt to assemble a baseball team on a lean budget by employing computer-generated analysis to acquire new players.

Though I’d make jokes about it with others in the past, this was the first time watching Moneyball that I couldn’t help but think about how what was depicted (or the drama) was not what “actually” happened.

How do I know? Well, of course, I was there. This whole story was set when I was a junior in high school, probably at my peak of watching and caring about baseball. I was at games during the season depicted, and I remember what happened and can tell the difference between what actually happened and what is depicted in the film.

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The question I find myself really reckoning with—what level of invention and eliding and synthesis am I willing to overlook in the name of a good narrative when I’m quite familiar with a given subject. Or, in short, what is the difference between accuracy and authenticity (or truth)?

To be certain, there are things in Moneyball that are accurate and true. There was the big organizational concern about how to replace the lost production of Jason Giambi, the signing of Scott Hatteberg and his conversion to first base (also, the “picking machine” line), the A’s slow start to the season and the surge later on, the 20 game winning streak, the methods of Billy Beane as a GM and how he wanted to evaluate players and construct a roster in a way that challenged many assumptions and orthodoxy in Major League Baseball, the ways in which the Oakland ownership was quite unwilling to invest money into the club.

What did Moneyball forget or get “wrong,” as it were? There’s no mention of Cy Young winner Barry Zito and MVP Miguel Tejada (as well as pitchers Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder and third baseman Eric Chavez), Jeremy Giambi was already on the team (famously, not sliding in 2001 ALDS Game 3 against the Yankees), much of the depiction of manager Art Howe and the conflict over Hatteberg and Carlos Pena (like… most of the Hatteberg stuff in the film qualifies), what prompted the A’s rise in the standings, a lot of the Chad Bradford stuff… basically everything that makes up the plot and dramatic tension of the film.

For the first time in my many viewings of Moneyball, I found myself getting frustrated knowing all this, and I found myself wrestling with what does one do when they know and remember the events that a work of art (film, novel, tv show, whatever) is based on? There are certainly higher stakes examples of this—All the President’s Men and JFKaddress much bigger things—but this is the one that’s closest to my own experience. What do you do when you know (as best as one who wasn’t actually participating in it) what happened? When the history being turned into narrative was something you lived through?

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This, in turn, gets us into a larger question about adaptation and what the goal is for an adaptation of one narrative in one media form into another. What are you trying to accomplish when you take a nonfiction book and adapt it into a film (and, importantly, not a documentary)? While Moneyball certainly takes liberties with what “actually” happened in the name of drama, the story it’s aiming to tell about how Billy Beane was forced to radically change the approach he took in terms of player evaluation to account for the financial limitations associated with the Athletics.

Sidebar: Both in the film and throughout the baseball discourse, Oakland is referred to as a “small market” team, which is hilarious given that Oakland and the East Bay (not even considering it as an adjacent of San Francisco) is a major market. It is not a “small market,” though it is (or was) a frugal organization.

That kernel, that idea, that clearly comes through in the film adaptation and it is, essentially, true. This is how Billy Beane and co. had to think and approach the game in order to compete. As Billy says, “if we try to play like the Yankees in here, we will lose to the Yankees out there.” Those tactics proved to be so successful (even though it did not result in playoff success for the A’s themselves) to the point where the Boston Red Sox built their curse-breaking 2004 team on many of the ideas that Beane stressed.

We then come back to that question of what matters: accuracy or truth? The film is, in many places, inaccurate. Yet, it is also profoundly true. Do those discrepancies matter? If we’re assuming the film is a documentary, then yes. But it’s not. If we’re treating it as an invented work in some essential way (certainly not fiction, but not strictly non-fiction either) with the important point to be the way in which conventional thinking was challenged and a new methodology was introduced? Then those discrepancies don’t matter because that idea is clearly communicated in the film. So while those of us who remember the 2002 baseball season, and the A’s season in particular, might get frustrated or roll our eyes at the way in which Hatteberg’s season is overly dramatized and centralized, it does communicate in broad strokes (in a relatively short amount of time) was was special about Billy Beane, those A’s teams, and their approach to baseball. Therefore, Moneyballis a film that’s worth watching and returning to both for its entertainment value and what it illuminates.

The synopsis of the film from IMDB lays out the film and its premise pretty clearly:

Anora, a young stripper from Brooklyn, gets her chance at a Cinderella story when she meets and impulsively marries the son of an oligarch. Once the news reaches Russia, her fairytale is threatened as the parents set out for New York to get the marriage annulled.

Mikey Madison won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance as Anora, or Ani as she likes to be called, and it was certainly worthy of it given how much she is on the screen. She is the movie, the locus, the focal point. For this film to work, she needs to be perfect. Like most everyone, I probably knew Madison just as Susan Atkins in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, so she was still a bit of an unknown quantity to me (having not seen 2022’s Scream). Madison brings so many different elements the character where she’s equally hilarious, aggravating, and sympathetic. There’s a great deal that this movie has going for it, but above all is Madison and her performance.

Mark Eydelshteyn plays that son who impulsively marries Ani and he captures the kind of unaware, capricious nature that the son of a Russian oligarch would have. Yura Borisov, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, plays one of the men tasked with getting this marriage annulled and brings both comedy and pathos, serving as perhaps not an audience surrogate but a sympathetic figure for us to hang onto.

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It’s also amazing to note that Baker not only wrote and directed this film, but also edited. Baker won Oscars for all three of those jobs. To have one person write, edit, and direct a film, and to do so at such a high level to win those awards, is quite the accomplishment. The cinematography, courtesy of Drew Daniels, is also exceptional and the film captures the glamorous locales (Las Vegas, opulent mansion parties) to the more grounded Brooklyn scenes. It’s a film that runs the visual gamut from the most stunning to gritty and unpleasant.

As I wrote about in my Letterboxd review, Anora is a blend of Pretty Woman and After Hours as well as a dash of Boogie Nights in there too. I do think there’s a lot that it has to say about what we value in America, especially the younger generation coming up. There are also elements to the film that feel like a modern update on the screwball romantic comedy of the early decades of the twentieth century. Is Madison giving us an updated version of the Hawksian girl? I also think what Justin Chang noted in his review of the film for The New Yorker is apt:

But would it be more or less sacrilegious to invoke Preston Sturges, the most class-conscious and marriage-minded of screwball auteurs? Like Sturges, Baker grasps how the clashing priorities of love, sex, money, and status can send an impulsive romance spiralling into matrimonial anarchy.

I wondered if the film was beloved merely because of some kind of prurient sensibility in filmgoers given that it tells of the story of a sex worker, but Anora is about much more than that. It doesn’t have the raw energy of Boogie Nights or the lightness of Pretty Woman. I honestly feel like the third act, the most After Hours-y portion of the film, kind of drags on and does not sustain the more energetic and captivating earlier components. But it’s ultimately a fascinating examination of what we value, what we’ll do to get it, and what love and sex mean in our increasingly transactional and materialistic world.

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If nothing else, Anora stands as a star-making turn for Madison and a clear statement of Baker’s authorial voice. I’m not entirely convinced it will age as well as its awards haul might suggest, and I do wonder how it will look in hindsight. But it is an undeniably interesting film—one that challenges, provokes, and pushes its audience in ways that feel increasingly rare.

Our Wikipedia synopsis of BlacKkKlansman reads as follows:

Set in the 1970s in Colorado Springs, Colorado, it follows the first African-American detective in the city’s police department as he sets out to infiltrate and expose the local Ku Klux Klan chapter.

John David Washington plays that African-American detective, Ron Stallworth, while Adam Driver plays his partner, Flip Zimmerman, who does the actual infiltrating and deals with the conflict of being Jewish and having to pretend to fit in with these people. Jasper Pääkkönen plays Felix, the chief antagonist amongst the KKK members. Washington (who I only recently learned is Denzel Washington’s son) does good work playing out the tension of an African American man working on the police force and the contradictions that would emerge from that, particularly in his relationship with Patrice Dumas (played by Laura Harrier). Driver is great as well and he remains a welcome presence in any film he’s in and Pääkkönen is menacing and terrifying in his role.

Topher Grace shines by playing David Duke, Grand Wizard of the KKK. What is both entertaining and notable about Grace’s portrayal is that he plays Duke like this boring, meek office worker or bureaucrat, showing both how present that kind of hatred can be while also… making it look ridiculous (hear this kind of dorky-looking guy talk so much about white power and white supremacy and you realize how full of it Duke and all those people are).

What struck me, and I’ve seen this appear in some of the contemporary reviews, is how Tarantino-esque the film felt. That’s not to say that it doesn’t feel like like a Lee film—it’s not as frenetic and it feels a little bit more in “touch” with the real world as opposed to the cinematic world. Now, Lee does make interesting calls to film with the invocation of Gone With The Wind and Birth of a Nation all feeling quite Tarantino. I also think about the incorporation of historical figures and the turning of a historical narrative into an action/caper/exciting narrative that feels a bit like Tarantino’s latter-day work. I also see wish fulfillment played out on screen too to some degree, though Lee is doing it with a bit more reverence. Lee had been pretty pointed with his critique of Tarantino in Django Unchained, saying “American slavery was not a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. It was a holocaust. My ancestors are slaves. Stolen from Africa. I will honor them.” Zach Vasquez highlights the ways in which this film connects or overlaps with some of Tarantino’s work

Loath as either man would probably be to admit it, BlacKkKlansman would make a hell of a double feature with any of Tarantino’s last three films, but especially his 2009 World War II revenge drama, Inglourious Basterds. Beyond the surface-level similarities of their creatively spelled titles and their plots — both are period pieces centered on the infiltration of white nationalist organizations (German Nazis and the American Klan) by members of the races they oppose (including, in each case, Jews) — they are also both feature-length essays on the history of cinema.

There are some masterful scenes in the film. In particular, the cross cutting between the David Duke KKK induction ceremony and Harry Belefonte playing a witness to a lynching is quite powerful. Lee is also able to really ramp up the tension when Flip, being “Ron” who is trying to infiltrate and get into the KKK, goes to meet with some of the local KKK members. Lee really amps up the sense of paranoia to make you feel what Flip must’ve been feeling in those moments.

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Lee is also clearly gesturing towards our contemporary politics by having characters like Duke speak about “mak[ing] America great” and “America first.” Lee also ends the movie with images off the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia as well as the hit and run attack that killed and injured counter-protesters, part of a speech by David Duke, and comments by President Donald Trump. While that shift felt a bit heavy-handed, I do think being explicit that we’re still living in the world where the ideas of these people who Stallworth infiltrated—violent, hateful people—have a root in certain strains of thought.

While I enjoyed BlacKkKlansman and do think it’s that “return to form” for director Lee, I was left wanting by the end of it. Given that the film took some pretty big liberties with the story (based on the experience of the real Ron Stallworth), Lee could’ve leaned in a bit to playing up the cinematic elements to tell a more… exciting? cinematic? story (this would be the Tarantino way). There were good moments and visuals and strong performances, but it felt like there was still meat on the bone, to use a metaphor. Perhaps it speaks to how high my estimation of Spike Lee and his work is, that I could be saying that after watching such a well-made and engrossing picture, but that was what I was left with at the end of BlacKkKlansman.

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Oppenheimer stars Cillian Murphy as the scientist behind the Manhattan Project. The film also features Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Emily Blunt, and Florence Pugh amongst others. Murphy won the Best Actor Oscar while Downey Jr. won Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Lewis Strauss, the chief antagonist to Oppenheimer. Those awards were certainly well deserved as both were excellent in their roles. More on Murphy later, but Downey Jr. was a standout in his first really dramatic role following his time in the MCU (to which he’ll now be returning, since he got that Oscar). Pugh is captivating as Oppenheimer’s paramour while Blunt is a bit hamstrung by a simplistic and reductive portrayal as Oppenheimer’s wife, but that has to do with the characterization rather than the performance. There’s also some great small performances, including Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence, Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr, Rami Malek as David Hill, Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, to again name just a few. My favorite was probably Hartnett as Lawrence, if only because of Lawrence’s connections to the University of California at Berkeley. Also, there’s David Krumholtz and Matthew Modine! And Gary Oldman!

I’ll get to talk about the visuals and all of the Nolan flourishes we get, but what’s quite remarkable is that this film sustains both amazing visual work while also having a collection of amazing acting performances by an expansive ensemble cast. But the star really is Murphy, who is able to capture Oppenheimer (or something about him) perfectly in his stoic, removed performance. Seeing Murphy, who in interviews is so warm and gregarious, play this very theoretical and detached man is quite shocking.

The film focuses on Oppenheimer’s work in Los Alamos to develop the atomic bomb as well as his feelings following the use of that weapon, his 1954 security clearance hearing, and Strauss’ failed conformation hearings to become the Secretary of Commerce under President Eisenhower. It’s not a full biographical rendering of Oppenheimer, but you get to see that most important moment that leads to the development of the atomic bomb as well as the proverbial fallout within Oppenheimer and throughout the United States and the world from its creation and use.

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Coming from the director of Inception and Interstellar, it’s not a surprise that some of the visuals of the film are quite amazing. Sadly, I did not see this film in theaters but I can only imagine how awe-inspiring it would be to see this in IMAX, for example. The cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema, who worked with Nolan on Interstellar and Dunkirk, is distinctive as is the cool color palate seen across just about all of Nolan’s films. Van Hoytema won the Best Cinematography Oscar while Nolan won the Best Director award. There’s also the Nolan-esque flourish of playing with time (moving between the different hearing and conversations through flashbacks) that, yeah, can be a bit disorienting and destabilizing, but is also to be expected in a Nolan film.

The film feels like, understandably so, it’s building towards the Trinity test of the atomic bomb, which is a stunning sequence and up there with the best of Nolan’s filmography (at the same level as the truck chase scene in The Dark Knight). The scene in which Oppenheimer addresses the people in the Los Alamos gym following the use of the weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is also quite remarkable and shocking too and is really an effective counterpoint to that Trinity test scene. This also plays out the central…. not conflict, but tension of the movie and obviously what Oppenheimer himself felt. On the one hand, in the Trinity test, you have the success of this testament to science and creation… and yes, weaponry but in the service of winning a war against the evil of fascism. There is a larger discussion one can have about it, but I’m not equipped to do that.

But then that moment of addressing the crowds following the use of the bombs, and you see Oppenheimer really reckoning with the guilt of what he’s wrought. The former is maybe the most traditionally cinematic scene as the building to the big and pivotal moment of the film. But the latter is much stranger, less conventionally cinematic, but plays out the integral anguish and conflict that has been created. There’s also not true resolution, no easy answers given, which is not what you’d expect from a film that had such a broad appeal and yet Nolan challenges us there.

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Because I’m not evolved enough in my cinephile status, I always think about Nolan’s Batman films when it comes to his sensibility. However, I do see traces of his Batman films in Oppenheimer in some of the themes and ideas being explored. I’m particularly interested in the notion of escalation, which appears in all those films. There’s also the question of when one feels like they can do something to help win some kind of battle against evil, but also having to consider the cost… I strangely felt like there was a bit of Batman in Oppenheimer, which is kind of amazing. Perhaps it’s the greatest thing we can say about this film and Nolan’s direction of it is that he makes a biopic of a scientist feel as exciting as a super hero movie.

I think it makes sense that Oppenheimer is the film that earned Nolan his Best Director Oscar. It was a cinematic form readily understandable (the biopic of a major figure in American history), but it also included his directorial flourishes and thematic concerns. Yes, Killers of the Flower Moon was probably my favorite or the best film from 2023 (which I will be writing about, one of these days), but it doesn’t feel like such an injustice that Oppenheimer trumped it at the Oscars as it did when Wolf of Wall Street and even The Irishman was shut out. It’s a testament to Nolan’s ability to engage with big themes and ideas—America, guilt, morality, violence—that makes me even more excited to see what he does with his adaptation of The Odyssey. Oppenheimer feels like the culmination of something for Nolan, giving him a level of success he hadn’t reached, and perhaps sets him up to go even further as his career continues.

What Peele does so well is to take a largely innocuous setting and fill it with such horror and dread. This affluent, large home in upstate New York that, in a different context, might be the setting for light-hearted leisure and entertainment. In that regard, Peele’s very much putting us in the shoes/behind the eyes of Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) who, as an African-American man, is accustomed to feeling out of place in environments that appear comfortable and normal to most—particularly white people. Peele, along with cinematographer Toby Oliver (whose largely worked in conventional horror), uses the camera to make you feel Chris’ outsiderness and to establish these visual cues that take on greater meaning after you’ve seen the film once. I think specifically about seeing Walter running at night along with the “Sunken place” and the final confrontation between Dean and Chris in the Coagula operating room as being much more visually interesting than one might expect.

The performances Peele draw out of his actors are also essential to the film’s effectiveness. Kaluuya, as the lead, brings the charisma and warmth that keeps you on his side, but he’s also enigmatic enough that he becomes a kind of cipher so we project onto him just as the gathering’s attendees project (in that case, it’s their desires). Bradley Whitford and Catherine Keener, playing Rose’s parents, are perfectly cast in the way they embody a polite, post-racial liberalism that conceals something deeply sinister. For those of us who love The West Wing, seeing Whitford—so closely associated with Josh Lyman—inhabit a role of such menace is particularly jarring. Keener, a frequent presence in the empathetic, humanistic films of Nicole Holofcener, is equally unsettling as a quietly controlling figure.

Allison Williams also plays against audience expectations, drawing on her reputation from Girls as she portrays Rose, Chris’s girlfriend. Lil Rel Howery provides the film much needed levity as Chris’ friend, Rod, which really stands out in this film of very restrained or intentionally off-putting performances. Rod functions as a clear audience surrogate, openly calling out the absurdity of the situation and remaining unequivocally on Chris’s side. While he may not add substantial thematic weight, his presence introduces a necessary levity that enhances the film’s overall balance.

What makes Get Out not just an entertaining film, or one that briefly captured national attention, is its ability to remain gripping while offering a sharp and perceptive commentary on race in contemporary America—particularly among those who consider themselves “progressive” (as exemplified by the line “I would have voted for Obama for a third term, if I could. Best President in my lifetime, hands down”). Peele asks the audience to challenge its assumptions and recognize that even amongst groups that believe themselves to be benevolent or enlightened, something insidious can lurk beneath. At the gathering at the Armitage house, the conversations between Chris and the party goers initially register as awkward, clumsy attempts of older white people trying to make polite conversation with a young African American man. Over time, they are revolted to be manifestations of a desire to own and a fetishization of the black body itself.

Peele melds together different subgenres—body horror, mad scientist, and the haunted house—in Get Out while also delivering commentary that avoids platitudes or simple reassurance. It’s a testament to this film’s achievement that it can operate on so many levels, and do so effectively, without sacrificing coherence or meaning. Like many others, I have been reflecting on the past 25 years of cinema and compiling mental lists of the best films from that period. While there may be some recency bias at play, or influence from the film’s continued praise, I believe Get Out unquestionably belongs on such a list. If not among one’s personal favorites, then certainly among the most important. There are few films that so successfully confront a subject as vast and complex as race in America while remaining propulsive and engrossing. Peele accomplished exactly that with Get Out.

I want to return to my initial point about my general dislike of horror, and how only a small number of films—The Exorcist and The Shining, among them—manage to break through for me. Get Out belongs firmly in that category. It earns this distinction because it is not concerned solely with fear or shock. While it certainly employs those elements, it offers far more beneath the surface, inviting sustained reflection and interpretation. That Peele accomplished this with his directorial debut places him immediately alongside some of the genre’s most accomplished filmmakers and establishes him as one of the most important new cinematic voices of his generation.

OBAA is the second Pynchon work that PTA has engaged with following 2014’s adaptation of his novel Inherent Vice. There is something that really works with Anderson adapting Pynchon given that they have commonalities—the Southern California fixation, the surreal and almost silly humor that can occasionally feel incongruous, larded in a kind of irony. Some of the names in the film, the whole Christmas Adventurers secret society, it all feels appropriately Pynchon-ian.

DiCaprio’s performance as Pat/Bob feels very much of a piece with his role in Killers of the Flower Moon playing characters who are not as bright or as slick or in control as we’re used to seeing from DiCaprio. The former revolutionary who’s let himself go (in some ways) and is not as sharp as he once way really suits DiCaprio in this moment. It lends itself to a great deal of comedy—there’s a whole sequence involving a forgotten code word that plays into this. But I also think there’s some emotional weight to his performance in the ways he wants to protect and save his daughter and when he comes up short of it. Amidst all the chaos and calamity that is both exciting and entertaining, DiCaprio does bring a pathos and humanity to that narrative.

Two performances that really jumped out to me are Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro. Penn, coming off his portrayal of William Holden in Licorice Pizza, plays Colonel Steven Lockjaw perfectly as a Pynchon character representing the fascist military industrial complex. There are moments when Penn becomes a cartoon and a caricature, and it’s all quite appropriate for this narrative. It’s also always interesting to see someone play a character who runs so profoundly against their personal beliefs and politics, but that's certainly what Penn is doing, going against “type” just like DiCaprio is doing with his performance.

Del Toro plays Sergio, both Willa’s karate teacher and Bob’s companion, providing a kind of humor and levity that he’s known for. I do find that his character, and what his character is doing, grounds the story and makes it more than just a story about a revolutionary who's gone to seed. While Penn and del Toro are known commodities and thus I was ready for their great performances, I was not prepared for how great Chase Infiniti would be as Willa, Bob’s daughter. I would be willing to wager a great deal of money she ends up with a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, and it will be well deserved.

One Battle After Another features the hallmarks of PTA’s directorial style. The production design is absolutely perfect, not surprising for the director behind Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood. You also have an examination of America and American ideals, particularly as it pertains to race and class and the conflict between freedom and constraints. You also get the same considerations of the found/created family units and what does it mean to be “family.” I think specifically about the escape of the immigrants from Sergio’s home—the ratcheting up of tension, the steady camera movement—which all feels very much of a piece with the stuff you see in Boogie Nights, for example. There’s also the famous (by this point) showdown/sequence that takes place on one stretch of California highway, which will probably be one of the takeaways from the film. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention cinematographer Michael Bauman, who has now worked on PTA’s last three films. I also think some of the questions the film raises about revolutionary ideology and the costs of that life are very interesting and appropriate (and remain appropriate) in our place and time (I think about the beginning of the film and the pull between Pat and Perfidia Beverly Hills and what that ultimately leads to). It’s a film that does have a certain moral charge and point to it, but it’s not easy or simple.

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One Battle After Another is quite interesting within PTA’s oeuvre and the connections that it makes to may other films. There’s that connection to Inherent Vice that’s obvious, you can see some of those links to Boogie Nights, there’s a dash of There Will Be Blood in there too. It’s a fascinating amalgamation of so many of PTA’s interests and concerns. I don’t know if it’s his best (probably There Will Be Blood) and it’s probably not going to end up being my favorite (Boogie Nights). But I do think One Battle After Another is up there with PTA’s best and will hopefully yield the critical praise and awards that he certainly deserves. I’m still making my way through the films from 2025, but I think at this point it’s probably my favorite and the best one released this year.

Unfortunately, I sometimes lapse into that kind of thinking (that once you “know” the most important thing, you can just move on) when it comes to films. There are plenty of films I’ve skipped over because I know what they’re “about” or what the most important thing is to take away about the movie. Falling into that camp is Deliverance, John Boorman’s 1972 film based on James Dickey’s 1970 novel. I knew about “Dueling Banjos” and the raping of Ned Beatty’s Bobby, and thus I didn’t feel like I really had to see it (I’d also read Dickey’s novel, and this is a pretty faithful adaptation—Dickey himself even wrote the screenplay and appears in the film). Despite my interest in the cinema of the 1970s, I just felt like I didn’t need (nor really wanted) to see it. However, after hearing the film discussed by quite a few people and taking a dive deeper into the films of that decade, I finally caught up with it.

Boorman makes sure to highlight the key concepts at the center of Dickey’s novel, which have to do with questions of masculinity and modernity versus the natural. Even before that pivotal scene, you get Lewis (played by Burt Reynolds) asserting the importance of adventure (“I never been insured in my life. I don’t believe in insurance. There’s no risk”) and reclaiming an essential, non-modernisized and civilized sense of one’s masculinity. I also think the dynamics of the four men on this canoeing trip—Lewis, Bobby, Ed, and Drew (played by Ronnie Cox)—and what they represent are all interesting commentaries on masculinity. Reynolds plays someone who is in many ways what you’d expect from a Burt Reynolds character (a heroic, adventuring figure), but that gets… if not subverted, then at least challenged in a way that would allow him to then really solidify that persona as his film career went on.

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Beatty plays the “weak,” domesticated man in the wild just right and Cox as the artist comes across (Cox gets to show off his guitar-playing skills in the “Dueling Banjos” scene). Voight, as the man caught in the middle—civilized, but also closer to Lewis’ ideas and ideals in some respects—is strong as well and is another in his line of his great performances of the 1970s.

One thing that I really noted was the cinematography, which was by Vilmos Zsigmond (who later worked on 1978’s The Deer Hunter). You see the similar muted color pallet and the landscapes that you get in that film (I’m thinking of the hunting scenes in the pre-Vietnam section of that film). I think Boorman’s restraint as a director, telling a story that is a thrilling adventure story at its core, makes that visual style work a bit better (Cimino really lets things play out). That approach to cinematography, the naturalistic and muted, is quite apparent in that infamous scene featuring the rape of Bobby and the tying up of Jon Voight’s Ed. Things play out for longer than you would expect and you don’t cut away from it as much as you’d think. Again, this is a film that Tarantino writes about in Cinema Speculation and certainly you can see its influence on Pulp Fiction. The scenery, with this film done on location in Raburn County, Georgia (where the film is to take place) is really remarkable and the kind of thing you just don’t see anymore. It’s a cliche to describe the location as a character in a film, but it really and truly is with Deliverance.

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Deliverance is a film that proven to be quite influential and relevant for cinema going forward. Whether it’s the idea of the excursion gone wrong, the depictions of the rural space as one filled with horror, these ideas keep popping. But it really is a testament to how a film is not and cannot just be reduced to just one thing, one scene, and if you know it you know it all. For one thing, the performances and the craft (the cinematography and editing) would be lost. Additionally, this film is about so much more than the horror of the “squeal like a pig” scene. These concerns about masculinity, modernity, and the wilderness are the stuff of great literature. I’ve thought a bit about Tarantino’s connections to Hemingway, but I’m intrigued if there’s a way to triangulate his interest in this film and how Dickey’s narrative was influenced by/connected to Hemingway (I would be willing to bet anything Dickey’s got some kind of connection to Papa).

There are certainly moments in Deliverance that don’t hold up—where the tone isn’t right or the technology takes us out of it (I’m thinking about Ed’s climb up the rock face and some of the day-for-night filming) or something just doesn’t work (a lot of the Drew stuff/his death doesn’t seem to work). But it’s an important film—for Boorman, for Reynolds, for Voight, and ended up being so for Tarantino and other directors. It’s one that took me a while to commit to watching, but ultimately I’m glad I did. Though I don’t think it’s a film I could ever teach given what transpires, I do think there’s a lot about the film that’s interesting to think about and that elevates it from being something so generic or exploitative.

Directed by Sam Peckinpah with a script written by Walter Hill based on Jim Thompson’s novel, the film tells the story of Doc McCoy (McQueen) and his wife, Carol (McGraw) who go on the run following a bank robbery in Texas. It’s only the second film directed by Peckinpah I’ve seen (I watched The Wild Bunch a while ago, but probably need to revisit it sooner rather than later), but I picked up on a lot of the stylistic hallmarks; namely, the slow motion, the depiction of violence and action, and this life outside the boundaries of normal, law-abiding society. The Getaway feature some strong set-pieces that allow Peckinpah to show off a bit. There’s a great, highly stylized shootout in an El Paso hotel near the end of the film that in a strange way makes me think of No Country For Old Men. There’s also a great bit of conning and chasing involving a train station too.

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It’s an interesting McQueen performance that seems so different than the aforementioned Bullitt or The Great Escape. Though Doc is cool, he’s not cool in the same way Bullitt is (or even Hilts in The Great Escape). But McQueen’s magnetism and charisma is in abundance and you can’t help but be drawn to him. It’s the first thing I’ve ever watched starring McGraw (I’m not really one for Love Story). Besides her stunning, obvious beauty, she does have this… live wire quality. The chemistry between McQueen and McGraw is palpable and you can see them, essentially, falling in love and you can understand why.

Tarantino devoted a chapter to The Getaway in Cinema Speculation (I promise I’ll cover films that weren’t discussed in that book at some point), but I couldn’t help but remember what Tarantino wrote about Al Lettieri who plays Rudy, who was part of the bank robbery with Doc before turning on them. Though he’s playing a villainous character, it feels so over the top it’s distracting. You’ve also got Ben Johnson, figure from John Ford’s films, playing Benyon, the Texan who puts together the bank robbery that goes awry while also facilitating Doc’s release from prison that precipitates the action of the film. But the film is about McQueen and McGraw. It’s their show and their stars burn bright.

I’m not sure what my assessment is of The Getaway. I like McQueen and McGraw a lot, and I do enjoy some of Peckinpah’s flourishes and interests. But there’s so much about the film that’s strange, and not in a good way. There’s peculiar stuff dealing with sexuality going on (Carol and Benyon, Rudy and Fran Clinton) that seems so dated and regressive now. I also find the moments of humor, of almost a slapstick variety, to be disorienting. Roger Ebert described the film as “a big, glossy, impersonal mechanical toy […] It functions with great efficiency but doesn’t accomplish anything” and I think there’s something to that. I don’t think it’s “big, glossy”-ness or its “great efficiency” should be forgotten. I also think it’s a tremendously important film as a way of understanding McQueen’s star persona. But I also don’t know if it rises to the level of some of the other great McQueen films, nor do I think it’s an equal to some of the other great films produced at the same time.

Rolling Thunder

Reading Tarantino’s excellent book Cinema Speculation, his chapter on Rolling Thunder was maybe the most intriguing to me. It’s a film that I hadn’t heard much about until Tarantino brought it to my attention. The film, which is part of what is referred to as the “vetsploitation” genre (where an exploitation film centers on a veteran as its main character), is directed by John Flynn based off a script by Schrader and Heywood Gould. William Devane plays the veteran, Charles Rane, who seeks revenge on the criminals who murder his family upon his return to America following a stay as a prisoner of war. The film also features a young Tommy Lee Jones as one of Rane’s fellow returning POWs.

The film has that rickety, exploitation film feel to it. Devane plays Rane as being almost catatonic and non-verbal, which reflects the inability to reacclimatize to the civilian world following the war. It is a bit of a shock to the nervous system to see such a young Tommy Lee Jones, but he’s perfect as one of Rane’s men who ends up supporting him in his quest for some kind of retribution for the violence he’s suffered.

You can certainly see elements of Taxi Driver present in Rolling Thunder: the returning veteran and the sense of displacement, the violent climax that takes place in a brothel. There are certainly differences: namely, Travis Bickle is clearly mentally unstable while Charles Rane is not, or at least not in the same way. Also, Rane’s vendetta is very much a personal one (these are people who hurt him—bad people but specifically bad ones who got to him) while Travis’ quest for retribution is more… philosophical.

What was interesting to revisit in Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation was the way in which Tarantino tied the film to The Searchers in ways I didn’t totally realize. Tarantino highlights the ways in which both feature narratives of men returning home from wars in which they lost (Vietnam for Rane, the Civil War for Wayne’s Ethan Edwards) and struggling to find a place within the world before heading out into a kind of unknown wilderness. While Rolling Thunder was a fun film in that late 70’s action film mode, reading Tarantino’s thoughts on the film and thinking about those connections to The Searchers made it a bit more interesting.

Hardcore

The second film, Hardcore, is not only written by Schrader, but also directed by him. There’s also a chapter in Cinema Speculation devoted to that film, just as there was with Rolling Thunder. The film stars George C. Scott as Jake Van Dorn, a conservative Dutch Calvinist from Grand Rapids, MI (very much the milieu Schrader grew up in and rejected to become a filmmaker) whose daughter goes missing during a mission trip to California and becomes involved in the world of pornography. The film also stars Peter Boyle (strengthening its connection to Taxi Driver) and Season Hubley.

While Rolling Thunder is very clearly in that exploitation/grindhouse milieu, Hardcore is interesting in that is has one foot in that world and another in something closer to Taxi Driver. The tagline and the poster emphasizes the tawdriness and sleaze and degradation, but that’s not all there is relative to what another filmmaker might do with this kind of story. Scott is an interesting choice in the lead role—he does evince that kind of stolid midwestern bedrock morality, but he also feels so much of a different era and world that it seems a bit out of place. I don’t know who would’ve been a better choice (Warren Beatty was initially attached, but I don’t know if that would’ve been any better).

There are certainly the elements of connection with Taxi Driver with a character going into the world of sex work (pornography rather than prostitution) to rescue someone. The way in which Los Angeles is used is like New York in Taxi Driver, in some ways the West coast equivalent. There’s also a reference to a Mrs. Steensma as part of the Grand Rapids crew, with Steensma being Iris’ last name in Taxi Driver.

But its connections to Taxi Driver are not as great as the ties to The Searchers itself. The notion of the man out of place with Scott’s man of Midwestern conservative values so outside the world of progressive sexual attitudes depicted in the film. He’s entering into a land he deems immoral or unjust, just as Ethan Edwards does into the terrain of the Comanche. You also have the private investigator Mast (played by Boyle) frequently referring to Van Dorn as “pilgrim.” The ending, when Jake does find his daughter, also clearly draws on the ending of The Searchers, even though (as Tarantino wrote about) it would have been much more interesting to have the film resolve in a different way.

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It’s obvious to just note the ties between these two films and The Searchers. What I find interesting is how Tarantino, who has issues with Ford’s seminal film, is drawn to these films that engage with and recontextualize The Searchers. I also think it allows us to understand how Ford’s film had become not just important but an American archetype that filmmakers like Schrader would be compelled to constantly reengage with.

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As I've said, Martin Scorsese is my clear, obvious, without a doubt favorite filmmaker. After Scorsese... you've got Bergman, Bresson, John Ford, Billy Wilder, Francis Ford Coppola (by virtue of the Godfather films), Hitchcock, and of the latter day filmmakers Quentin is probably the one that gets included. I can certainly grasp some of those complaints and criticisms, but I've ultimately really come to appreciate his work as a filmmaker and lover of film, putting him into my personal pantheon.

Amongst the many different things I appreciate about Tarantino (his obvious gifts in terms of film and story, his wit), one thing I've realized I really appreciate is his omnivoracious approach to all culture. There's talk about "high" and "low" culture and the mixing of the two, and I think Quentin is quite adept at that. He's just as apt to allude to some piece of world cinema or art as he is an exploitation film or comic book arc. As someone who is a cultural omnivore, I understand that and gravitate towards it.

Also, in his book Cinema Speculation, Tarantino talks about how his mom took him to more mature/complicated movies at a young age, showing him things that challenged him when his peers weren't watching those things. That is something that very much lines up with my experience (the story I always tell--my mom had it on file at our local video rental store that I, even though I wasn't 18 yet, could check out R-rated films because I was making my way through the AFI 100 Greatest Films list and wanted to watch The Godfather and films like that).

I've been filling in some of the gaps in my Tarantino study of late, watching the films of his that for one reason or another I hadn't caught up with. Here are some of my reactions to finally watching those films.

The Hateful Eight

After Django Unchained (which I enjoyed, but is near the bottom of my Tarantino film rankings), I wasn't really in the mood for a QT-Western. I also think I was put off by the expansive run-time and didn't know when I could justify committing the time. Thus, The Hateful Eight sat unwatched and unconsidered by me for a lot longer than I would care to mention. However, I finally caught up with it and was quite disappointed I'd waited this long. In the end, I think I prefer Eight to Django when it comes to QT's proper western films.

Beyond the great performances (Kurt Russell [more on him later], Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern), the plotting and the way in which the tension is continually raised is remarkable. When we think of westerns, we think of sprawling landscapes., and yet Tarantino has created one that takes place within one location (a snowed-in stagecoach stopover). It's not original to note, but the film draws on John Carpenter's The Thing, which starred Russell.

There are some things that keep it from being at the level of Tarantino's greatest work--I wasn't wild about Tim Roth doing essential a Christoph Waltz impression, some of the elements of race as well as gender (in regard to Jason Leigh's character) leave a funny taste in one's mouth, and the size/length does feel as though it could have been cut down a bit. But I think it's an interesting document of a film that doesn't seem like it would fit within Tarantino's oeuvre and yet it bears his thematic and stylistic hallmarks.

Kill Bill: Volume 2

It perhaps didn't help my experience of Kill Bill: Volume 2 that it's been almost 5 years since I've watched Kill Bill: Volume 1. I would be curious to go see these films in The Whole Bloody Affair single package version because Volume 2 very much didn't feel like (or feel like it should have been ) a whole film unto itself. Volume 1 did feel very much like a complete work that stood on its own, but Volume 2 didn't quite feel that way. There were some real standout parts, namely Beatrix/The Bride's (Uma Thurman) escape while being buried alive by Budd (Michael Madsen) and the fight between Beatrix and Elle (Daryl Hannah).

Thurman's performance is certainly great, and the way in which she differentiates between the earlier version of her character (in flashbacks) and who she becomes is very impressive. I also thought David Carridine's casting and use was a nice homage and point of reference. But the final confrontation between Beatrix and Bill (Carridine) feels... not quite right, especially when standing on its own as part of its own volume rather than one whole film.

Death Proof

In a similar vein to the Kill Bill films (which were an homage to martial arts and exploitation films that Tarantino loved), Death Proof really draws on the history of exploitation cinema (more horror/slasher oriented) in his film about Stuntman Mike (played by Kurt Russell) who murders young women with modified cars he describes as "death-proof." Russell has appeared in a few Tarantino films, and I wonder what Tarantino could've done with younger, more proper movie star Russell had he been directing at that time. I could see him using Russell in much the same way he's used Brad Pitt in Inglorious Basterds and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Russell is able to be both charming in the ways he naturally is but also menacing and horrific, as befitting this role.

Given that it's so clearly an homage to low budget exploitative cinema, it's hard to read too much into the Death Proof in terms of thematic weight and significance. There is some pretty low-hanging stuff when it comes to gender, sexuality, violence, and repression (particularly filtered through the lens of the cinematic experience). I also think putting Zoe Bell, who was Uma Thurman's stunt double in the Kill Bill films, was a nice touch and made this (to trot out a cliché) a kind of love letter to this kind of stunt work (that would be further explored in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood).

I would also be remiss if I didn't note that the music in Death Proof is outstanding as is the use of Austin in the first segment of the film (Guero's and Texas Chili Parlor are all places I'm familiar with as a former Austin-ite).

True Romance

The outlier in that Tarantino did not direct this film (Tony Scott did), but True Romance is very much a Tarantino film even though it has some of the visual panache associated with Scott. Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette star as Clarence and Alabama, newlyweds (very much in love) making their way across the country looking to make a big score with stolen drugs all while chased by the mafia. The cast includes so many great names: Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, Gary Oldman, Saul Rubinek, Bronson Pinchot, James Gandolfini, Brad Pitt (?!?), to name just a few. The whole script, and particularly Clarence, bear the witty, savvy pop culture mentality indicative of Tarantino. There's visually a lot of the Tony Scott hallmarks (if you've seen Top Gun at least, you can pick up on them), but the narrative and the characters... that's all Tarantino. It was, of this batch of four films, the one I regret not seeing sooner. True Romance is both a subversion of a lot of cinematic tropes, but also an affirmation of them and the power of those stories.

However, I wasn't familiar with his work, really at all. I decided to dabble in this by watching Westfront 1918. The film, focuses on the lives and experiences of German infantrymen fighting in the front during the First World War and depicts something of the reality of the fighting of that war and something about the horror of war in general (to the point where when the Nazi's assumed power in Germany they banned the film and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels pointedly decried it).

Even in the context of post-World War I and texts like All Quiet on the Western Front, Westfront 1918 is a jarring film that depicts the horror of war as authentically as possible. Lucy Sante's essay for the Criterion Collection does a excellent job of highlighting the points of comparison and contrast between Pabst's film and a contemporaneous adaptation of that famous German anti-war novel:

Westfront 1918 came out almost simultaneously with Lewis Milestone’s adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which it resembles in many outward particulars: it is set on the German side; it focuses on a tight unit; it is structured so that a character’s furlough falls halfway through the film and separates everything into before and after; it kills or maims all its principals by the end. The differences between the two films, meanwhile, are instructive. Milestone’s picture, a huge international hit, had Hollywood financing and Hollywood equipment; its cast, including extras, ran to the hundreds, whereas that of Westfront 1918 is in the dozens. Furthermore, All Quiet serves up moral lessons and engages its characters in philosophical discussions. There are no discussions of much moment in Westfront 1918, and its only formulated message comes in its very last shot. And Pabst’s movie is much smaller-scale, having disturbed maybe a couple of acres of ground and demanded only three or four sets to be built, yet its setting is more viscerally credible than that of the Milestone picture, perhaps because it is that much more intimate. And, unlike a Hollywood movie rigged with moments of comedy and romance to appeal to the broadest swath of viewers, it does not let up for long from its bleak intensity of purpose.

I think specifically about this sentence, "Furthermore, All Quiet serves up moral lessons and engages its characters in philosophical discussions. There are no discussions of much moment in Westfront 1918, and its only formulated message comes in its very last shot." Both texts depict the hellishness of this war, but All Quiet is attempting to come to some kind of moral, to make some kind of point. Westfront is just showing the hellishness and does not seem to say anything about it beyond that it is hellish. It shows the atrocity but, in showing it as plainly and directly as possible, does not have to comment upon or elucidate the related ideas.

I took a class in my masters program that focused on World War I in literature and art (including film), and we watched that 1929 adaptation of All Quiet. Looking back on it, I wish we'd watched Westfront 1918 as I think it's a little bit more... I don't know if interesting is necessarily the right word, but would give an even richer text to talk about alongside those major literary works. There's a scene in which the German troops who are the focus of the film's narrative are being fired upon, though it's friendly fire (coming from their own men), which reminds me of similar moment in A Farewell to Arms. There is this highlighting of the confusion of this war and how little those fighting it really matter. They are just pieces on the chess board. If they are fired on by their own forces, that's fine.

Sante's final paragraph too makes some illustrative and useful points about the film:

Westfront 1918 does a signal job of conveying the fear, monotony, dirt, and exhaustion of the trenches, the boredom and uncertainty so poisonous that men would risk their lives just to leave the holes in which they were stuck. The camera is stationary in the trenches but runs wobbling along the surface up top with the soldiers. You see the blackout at night and the whiteout in daytime, hear the unsettling clicks and whirs that fill the silences between blasts. The process takes its toll on the viewer, who has been accorded ninety-six grimly visceral minutes of the outward signs of war. What the movie does not do is take any larger view. The men at the front are being butchered on both sides; at home, the people starve. No one, apparently, is to blame. War is a natural disaster, an act of God, though perhaps it could be alleviated if only we learned to love one another.

One shot of the fighting holds the camera almost remarkably steady and stationary, as if to highlight the unimportance of the men fighting the war itself. You're expecting that camera to move at least somewhat, but Pabst holds it exactly where it is.

The final moments of the film, showing an infantry hospital and all the wounded (both physically and mentally) within it, was another aspect that leapt off the screen and stayed with me after my viewing had ended. The madness, the chaos, the carnage in that space all feels so visceral and real in a way that's striking for a film of the 1930s. The lighting used with the character of Karl as he is in that hospital and how it makes him seem so grim almost like a skeleton.

I also think about the Lieutenant's psychological breakdown in those final moments too, how upsetting that is as it presents the mental torments that come along with fighting a way such as this .

For those interested in depictions of war on film as well as the art and literature of World War I, I would highly recommend watching Pabst's Westfront 1918. Though we are 95 years away from its release, the ways in which it depicts the reality of warfare for those conscripted to fight it remains notable and arresting.

The second film in that series, entitled Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, was released in 2022, delayed and affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The films stars Craig, along with Janelle Monáe, Kathryn Hahn, Leslie Odom Jr., Edward Norton, Kate Hudson, and Dave Bautista.

Our brief, two-sentence plot description goes as follows:

Tech billionaire Miles Bron invites his friends for a getaway on his private Greek island. When someone turns up dead, Detective Benoit Blanc is put on the case.

That setting, a gorgeous Greek island, gives this film a decidedly different sensibility than the first film. Gone are the chunky sweaters and warm fabrics, traded in for light, summery linen. Steve Yedlin's camerawork and Rick Heinrichs's production design deserves plenty of accolades and praise for making the film so enjoyable and so distinctive from that first film. The allusions and references to the Beatles that about (appropriate given the film's title and the song that plays over the closing credits) are also entertaining.

Craig is magnetic and charismatic as Blanc, in spite of (and perhaps because of ) that ridiculous southern accent. But it's fascinating to see him play this character with... shades of James Bond but without all of the baggage that must make it a challenge to play that role. He's charming and hilarious throughout, and it's a testament to his skills as a performer that he will be now known for not only being perhaps the best James Bond but also this singular movie detective. While in the first film, Craig was just one of many, in Glass Onion he is really the center of attention and gives the film its gravity and force.

Norton is hilarious and equally perfect as tech billionaire Miles Bron. Janelle Monae, who was great in 2016's Moonlight, gives another great performance in dual roles. Kate Hudson, who I will always associate with Almost Famous and her portrayal of Penny Lane, really jumped out to me, playing a ridiculous socialite/fashion designer/former model. It's a very broad, comedic performance, but that doesn't fail to command our attention and interest.

But in a film like this--a mystery--the writing and the narrative construction is the key to everything. That the film works is a credit to Johnson's work and craftsmanship. It's also worth noting that, much like in the first film, Johnson is able to imbue an entertaining mystery with some kind of social critique and theme. This is what, at least in these first two films (the third, Wake Up Dead Man, will be coming out soon), differentiates it and puts it a cut above just an entertaining mystery story. Glass Onion establishes Knives Out as being a bankable series with legs that could carry it into the future. It also solidifies Rian Johnson's place as one of the great writer-directors in Hollywood, particularly of these stylish and entertaining mysteries. I certainly expect Wake Up Dead Man to be a hit and for further adventures with Craig playing Benoit Blanc to be coming in the future.

The synopsis of the film is:

A fictionalized former President Richard M. Nixon offers a solitary, stream-of-consciousness reflection on his life and political career - and the "true" reasons for the Watergate scandal and his resignation.

Philip Baker Hall, who I will always see at the library cop Bookman on Seinfeld and Floyd Gondolli in Boogie Nights, is the lone actor, performing as this fictionalized version of Richard Nixon. When I think about the actors who could potentially pull off this feat, being able to be the lone figure at the center of the screen for an entire film, I don't know if I could have thought Hall was that person. Yet his performance as Nixon is powerful. He captures the seeming contradictions of Nixon, leaving us at times feeling sympathetic for him while then eliciting disgust.

Michael Wilmington's opening paragraph for this Criterion Collection piece on the film sums it all up:

Nixon as Hamlet, Nixon as Lear, Nixon as Blanche DuBois, Nixon as Krapp—clutching every last tape to his breast with the wild fury and despair of a man on the precipice . . . Nixon in his study, poring over his past, gazing at his own multiplied monochrome image in a bank of TV monitors . . . Nixon fulminating, raging, screaming at a portrait of the “whoremaster” Kissinger, dictating with somber resignation his own defense against history and disgrace into a tape recorder . . . Nixon drinking, defiant, dissolving into tears, Nixon Agonistes, Nixon bellowing every expletive you could imagine, then sinking to the floor in exhaustion . . . Nixon with the gun to his temple, the final gambol and endgame of the Old Prankster, Tricky Dick in the mirrored halls of memory and conscience.

Though Hall isn't giving us an impersonation of Nixon (like we see in some other, later films depicting historical figures), he is able to capture and manifest the essence of Nixon. The jowliness, the feeling of inferiority, the scheming, the sentimentality, the vengeful, Hall renders it all on screen. I look at the nominations for the 57th Academy Awards (which honored the films of 1984) and I cannot fathom that Hall would not be at least nominated. Yes, it's hard to argue that anyone was beating F. Murray Abraham as Salieri in Amadeus, but... Jeff Bridges in Starman getting nominated and not Hall is a bit of a shock.

It, almost certainly, has to do with Altman and his standing that Secret Honor would be "perhaps the least seen and appreciated of all the great American films of the 1980s," to again quote from that Criterion essay. Altman was certainly no friend of Nixon and thus this project, which would explore Nixon as this (even more) paranoid and broken man would be of interest to him. But I like this assertion made by Wilmington:

He’s exploring himself as well. More than a few critics have pointed up similarities between this Nixon—isolated, cut off, ruminating on past glories, playing with video cameras, manipulating his image—and the “exiled” Altman of 1983, at the recognized low point of his career.

In a figure whom he seemed to detest, perhaps Altman was able to engage with himself.

Though Secret Honor is set up much like a staged play put to film, I don't think we can dismiss Altman and his team's vision with this film and that it is a film fitting within Altman's whole corpus.. Though the camera work is subtle, limited by the single location, its movement and positioning does contribute to the viewer feeling the paranoia and claustrophobia that Nixon feels as well. It's an upsetting film, and it's meant to be.

You also get that sense of critique and satire that pervades so much of Altman's other films in Secret Honor. It is clearly satirizing Nixon himself, but there's also this critique of institutional power ("The Committee of 100" and the "Bohemian Grove"). While there isn't dialogue in the film (since it's just one character), you don't get the typical overlapping Altman dialogue. But I think of the halting way Hall speaks as Nixon, the sudden starts and stops and digressions, and perhaps see it as being that form rendered by just one figure.

Secret Honor is a unique film within Robert Altman's filmography, yet doesn't seem to be one we should overlook. If you are curious about some of those divergent aspects of his work, or you just want to see an amazing, singular acting performance from Philip Baker Hall, you should give it a watch.

After being released from prison, Hayden's character, Johnny Clay, goes about setting up a heist of a horse racing track. The theft involves many steps, including a fight causing a distraction and shooting a horse from long distance to create delays.

Hayden is striking and unique as the lead, Clay. Again, for those of us more familiar with him in The Godfather and Altman's The Long Goodbye, seeing Hayden as a young man comes as a bit of a shock. But between this and Asphalt Jungle, Hayden is certainly (like Robert Mitchum) the kind of ideal lead for a film noir--there's something captivating about him but also dark and menacing.

The rest of the cast--including Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook Jr., Jay C. Flippen and Timothy Carey--are all great as well, though none rising to the level of Hayden. Cook, Flippen, and Carey are all quite distinct and grab your attention. Carey in particular was quite distinctive in his role. Art Gilmore's narration gives the film a wholly distinctive feel, emphasizing the procedural nature of the film (perhaps owing to crime novel author Jim Thompson's work writing for the film). That narration is also useful and effective when it comes to laying out and grasping the non-linear narrative of the film.

I'm trying to process, even as I write this, how the film fits within Kubrick's oeuvre and his thematic themes and concerns. Some of the play with narrative--fragmenting, non-linear--sort of plays out in his later films. I also think this is true, pulled from Haden Guest's essay for the Criterion Collection on the film:

[T]he idea of a secretly shared yet never fully understood plan, simultaneously motivating and systematically subverting the film’s narrative. Most often, this idea is expressed through characters who are steadily overwhelmed by obscure and at times fantastically intricate designs they have invented and/or are struggling to control—and that nevertheless refuse to be redirected or rationally understood.

The plan, the conspiracy, the crime... from Dr. Strangelove to Eyes Wide Shut you see that played out and engaged with. Yes, here's it's much more literal and direct, but you do see that engagement with a theme that would recur throughout his career. I did not notice any of the visual flourishes one would associate with Kubrick going forward present in The Killing. There were some distinctive visuals for a mid-century Hollywood film though. Amongst them, the closing shot caught my eye with the framing and the inside-outside setup (which calls to mind 2001).

As I was watching, I could not help but think of Quentin Tarantino's breakout film Reservoir Dogs and the ways in which this film seemed to anticipate that later work. This is, of course, not really a great revelation as that film was alluded to in contemporary reviews of Reservoir Dogs and Tarantino himself was quoted as saying "I did think of it as my Killing, my take on that kind of heist movie." With all of the different stages and distractions going on to make the heist go through, The Killing also felt a bit like the Sodebergh Ocean's 11 film (though obviously much grittier). Also, given that Clay wears a clown mask to pull off the robbery, one's mind cannot help but go to the opening scene of The Dark Knight.

The Killing is an solid film, particularly as an example of the film noir style/genre, and hints at the possibility that existed within Stanley Kubrick that he would achieve and realize over the course of his career as one of the most important minds in cinema. There was still a ways to go (the Paths of Glory-Spartacus-Lolita sequence would help get him there), but for a director's first major/Hollywood film this is a worthy entry.

I was familiar with Cagney and his distinctive style and voice even before I ever actually watched him in a film, which was in White Heat. Again referencing the now-defunct Great Movie Ride at Disney Hollywood Studios, I remember seeing the trailer for Footlight Parade in the queue for that ride. But more importantly, I remember the animatronic version of Cagney that appears in the "gangster" section.

I decided, given that it is streaming on HBO Max and is on the shorter side, to watch Cagney's other famous gangster role (besides White Heat) in The Public Enemy. This pre-code Warner Brothers film directed by William Wellman stars Cagney, Jean Harlow, Edward Woods, and Joan Blondell. The synopsis of the film reads: An Irish-American street punk tries to make it big in the world of organized crime. Cagney plays that Irish-American, Tom Powers, who rises through the ranks. Cagney's performance in this film is, of course, iconic. You get the famous grapefruit-in-the face scene that would be endlessly referenced and parodied.

But beyond that iconic moment, Cagney's portrayal of Tom Powers clearly establishes his style as an actor--the fast talking, the almost nihilistic glee in the actions and trappings of the criminal life. I think a lot about this image, with Tom standing in the rain waiting outside to get revenge on the men who killed his friend and partner, Matt Doyle. The smile, that look, Cagney brings such an element of menace and force to the screen, which is perhaps shocking as he's definitely not a big guy (I found myself thinking a lot about Joe Pesci as I watched Cagney).

Seeing the younger Cagney too, compared with White Heat, is quite captivating too and you see what a spark he brought was quite striking.

What I also find fascinating about Cagney as an actor and the two films of his I've seen--this and White Heat--is all the stuff just below the surface. The true menace he seems to evince as well as the psychosexual questions lurking beneath the text of Cagney's performance. Much like White Heat, you get this very close relationship with a mother that encroaches upon the Oedipal. There's also the Jane character, Paddy Ryan's girlfriend, who takes advantage of a drunken Tom Powers, which is quite shocking to see in a film of the 1930s. It's not coming from the director or screenwriter, but rather it's just was Cagney brings to his performance.

Taking a look at the rest of the cast, Jean Harlow plays Gwen Allen, Tom's girlfriend. Though I knew who Jean Harlow was (again, thank you You Must Remember This), I don't know that I'd ever seen a movie she was in. But her hair is certainly a platinum blonde and she does bring a certain energy and charge to this film. I did think Donald Cook did a good job as Tom's brother who was on the straight and narrow. I do think they do something interesting with Tom's brother and perhaps hinting that he might not be as "good" as presented, or after he returns home from serving in World War I and chastises Tom for his links to organized crime:

Besides, your hands ain't so clean. You killed and liked it. You didn't get them medals for holding hands with them Germans.

Just adding something more interesting and challenging to the film than one would expect. Circling back to the transgressive nature of this film, the ending is somewhat shocking. After going in and killing the gang members who killed Matt, Tom is sent to the hospital to recuperate after suffering injuries of his own. Mike , Tom's brother, receives word that the rival gang has abducted Tom from the hospital but that they'll return him to his home. As his mother busily gets his room ready, there's a knock at the door, which Mike opens.

Tom's body then falls over, dead. It's such a grisly image, the dead stare of Tom standing there and then falling over. Mike then walks into the camera and out of frame as the shot stays on the doorframe where Tom's body lies. While I wasn't expecting any kind of "happy" ending for Tom (though this was before the implementation of the Hays code, it's still a film coming from Warners and thus with a certain morality to it), the ambiguity and the shocking visuals was quite powerful.

Having watched The Public Enemy, I can grasp how influential it was on the conception of the gangster film both in that Classic Hollywood moment and later. Cagney's performance in particular is what stood out, and one can grasp the way in which his portrayal and characterization of the gangster had such an outsized impact. I'm certainly glad I caught up with it and it helps to color my view of some of those modern-day gangster films.

The first one I selected was clearly geared around the Halloween holiday--1925's The Phantom of the Opera starring Lon Chaney and produced by Carl Laemmle. Thanks to the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, the narrative of the Phantom of the Opera has become one of those things that everyone knows and thus the narrative of the story is quite familiar. Lon Chaney's transformation into the deformed, mysterious, monstrous Erik is quite remarkable. He certainly was worthy of his nickname, "The Man of a Thousand Faces."

It would certainly be remarkable in our time, so doing that in the 1920s is even more striking. Rather than being this quasi-romantic figure, you do get this sense of the horror associated with him and that he's a part of that Universal collection of monsters. The most distracting part of the film was the mask that Erik wears when he first sees Christine. It's more an issue of how Erik's ailments were rendered in this film and that it extends to the mouth (and thus it needs to be covered in some way, in this instance what seems like a piece of fabric).

The other film I watched is Sherlock Jr. directed by and starring Buster Keaton. It's my first Buster Keaton film (most of my experience with silent film has been with Charlie Chaplin and a little Fritz Lang and Dziga Vertov. Keaton's distinctive approach to comedy and performance is quite notable and does seem different from that of, say, Chaplin (which I might not have grasped all that long ago). The grandiosity of Keaton's physical comedy certainly stands out as does his "stone face" expression, standout out in contrast to Chaplin's extremely expressive face.

I haven't really dipped into the films of Harold Lloyd, the other great silent film star, but I'm planning on doing that soon. The stunt work and Keaton's physical comedy are both quite notable in Sherlock Jr. This chase scene is particularly striking, and some of the stunts and action stand out today.

There's also an interesting, meta-fictional moment in the film, which perhaps establishes Hollywood's long-running fascination with itself through movies about movies. Keaton plays someone who works at a movie theater and, during a daydream, imagines himself in the world of the film that's screening at his job (playing the titular Sherlock Jr.) and solving a mystery that very much mirrors the strife he is experiencing in his own life. As Dwight Macdonald wrote:

He falls asleep in the projection booth, dreaming about his girl and his frustrated love. His doppelganger extracts itself from his sleeping body … and walks down the aisle of the darkened theatre to climb up on the stage and into the society-crook melodrama being projected on the screen … There's no explanation for this or any other lapsus naturalis in this 1924 film which makes later efforts by Dalí, Buñuel and Cocteau look pedestrian and a bit timid. They felt obliged to clarify matters by a symbolistic apparatus. Keaton never rose—or sunk—to that.

That magical quality--some have associated it with surrealism--gives Sherlock Jr. a magical quality that makes it quite distinctive. Woody Allen would draw on the film in his 1985 film, The Purple Rose of Cairo.

As I've said, my journey into silent film will likely continue with some of the works of Harold Lloyd, thus providing me with a sense of the three major silent film stars (Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd). But it's quite remarkable to watch these silent films, almost one hundred years removed from their release, and to continue to find them so engrossing.

Not surprisingly, I thought this documentary was excellent. Of course I would, it delves deeply into the life of one of my absolute favorite creators with an extensive range of interviews and insight into his art. Assessing this is going to be just about impossible in any objective sense. This was engineered in a laboratory for me to love it. But while there was likely no way at all I wasn't going to love this, I can still assess it.... if not objectively, then with an eye for what distinguishes it from something that only the avid, obsessive Scorsese fanatic would enjoy. Even if I take off my rose-tinted glasses, there's so much to Mr. Scorsese that I feel quite comfortable in recommending it to just about anyone.

It perhaps goes without saying given that it's an Apple Films production, but the style and production values of Mr. Scorsese are both outstanding. The look, the incorporation of clips from Scorsese's films, the talking head interview setups, they all look great and fit in seamlessly. The people Miller featured as taking head interviews--Paul Schrader, Jay Cocks, Spike Lee, Robert DeNiro, Jodie Foster, Isabella Rossellini, Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Steven Spielberg, Brian DePalma, just to name a few--are all outstanding.

It's also quite revelatory to have contributions from the friends Scorsese grew up with in New York (including Sally Gaga, who was in many ways the basis for the Johnny Boy character in Mean Streets). While we have this sense of the world that Scorsese comes from, I don't think I've ever heard that much from the people who were right there with him. We also had contributions from Scorsese's children, and of course perhaps the most insightful coming from Scorsese himself. Miller has amassed an extensive and wide-ranging collection of individuals who can help us to gain a more complete picture of Scorsese. It's a testament to director Miller's scope and vision to bring in all these voices and get so much great material from them.

Speaking of Scorsese himself, one of the moments that was very striking was Scorsese talking about the sixties, his growth and development, and the ways in which hearing the hierarchy of the Catholic Church not standing up to the Vietnam War really disillusioned him. Sometimes I think of Scorsese as being so divorced from history, outside of it and in his own world, but you get these moments in the documentary where you see how these outside factors affected him.

You also get this in the final episode in which Scorsese talks about The Departed and how it reflects coming from the moment of the Iraq War and Patriot Act. While the specter of the War on Terror and Iraq hangs over that film in many ways, I hadn't made those connections. Scorsese also, in the section on Gangs of New York, connects the ideology of Bill the Butcher and his gang to some present analogues (which he's done before, but here Scorsese really hits the nail on the head).

Scorsese also tells a story that is quite illuminating. Scorsese remembers burying a friend from his neighborhood who dies young and realizing that the cemetery was in the shadow of a canning company nearby and highlighting how capital doesn't really care what happens to people. These are all things that savvy viewers of his films knew he was engaging with (the way in which money/power dehumanizes, destroys, and doesn't really care), but that perhaps needed to be stated explicitly by him (and so, hopefully, people will stop watching The Wolf of Wall Street as some kind of aspirational narrative one is meant to follow). While Mr. Scorsese is a great record and a kind of cinematic tribute to this great figure in film history, I think having him provide this explanations and articulations will go a long way in helping later generations accurately grasp and understand what he was trying to do through his cinematic art.

The only thing that was "frustrating" about Mr. Scorsese was that... well, I wanted more. I honestly would've watched an episode on each of Scorsese's films and that time in his life. I felt like there was so much more to say about Color of Money, Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas (somehow!), Hugo (which wasn't even considered), Silence, and The Irishman. No appearances from Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel, Andrew Garfield... But I understand that this could not be something infinitely long and that choices had to be made in terms of where to stop and what to cut, so I don't think it holds the documentary back at all. But I felt like there was still a good bit of proverbial meat on the bone that Miller could've explored.

Rebecca Miller's Mr. Scorsese is something I cannot recommend highly enough and was well worth the wait as we were able to get such an insightful documentary look in Martin Scorsese's career as he enters this remarkable final stage. Mr. Scorsese is something I would recommend to.... just about anyone. The Scorsese die hards and true believers (like me) will love it and find something interesting to grab onto. All film goers, from the most casual to the more dedicated will enjoy it. I think it would provide an excellent introduction to someone who was not familiar with Scorsese's work and wanted to learn a bit more before digging in. Also, if someone is just a fan of.... great artists and great art, they will find a lot to like within Mr. Scorsese.

That moment comes during one of the important scenes in the film, one reflects Michael's change and ascension into the position of power within his family. With the camera slowly moving in on Michael, taking him from one in the frame into the absolute center and focus, he articulates the following:

As Michael concocts this plan to assassinate Sollozzo and McCluskey--Sollozzo being responsible for the attempt on his father's life--he responds to the assertion from Sonny and Tom Hagen that one cannot kill a cop with the following:

"I'm talking about a cop that's mixed up in drugs. I'm talking about a - a - a dishonest cop - a crooked cop who got mixed up in the rackets and got what was coming to him."

He then follows with this:

"That's a terrific story. And we have newspaper people on the payroll, don't we, Tom?"

The adjectives ascribed to the character of Michael Corleone are things like cunning, ruthless, remorseless. It goes along with cunning, but I think about a word like savvy when I hear that line. Michael has a sense for what works in the more modern world. The Godfather is a film that touches on many things and addresses different fields--America, morality, masculinity... but there's also a great deal about the old world and the new.

On the one hand, Michael has to head into the old world (Sicily) before he can return and secure his position as the head of the Corleone family. But what also makes Michael so effective as the head of the family is that he can also see the landscape of the present, which becomes clear from early on. It's a small moment, but I believe it reveals a great deal and is aided by Al Pacino's youthfully enthusiastic exclamations. When I think about why a film like The Godfather is so great, and why we can and should talk about film in the same we talk about literature, I think about a small moment like that and just how it reveals something about our character.