Deep Focus

Watching Megalopolis is like passing from surprise to surprise, some delightful, others confounding, but always interesting.

There are segments throughout the film that feel spacious, like Costner is reveling in the opportunity—maybe his last opportunity; there’s a “shoot your last shot” air to all of this—to create iconic “American” images, to commit them to the screen, as they used to say.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a film that was so obviously fictional but which feels so anthropological and which has this strong meta-commentary element running through it.

Fury Road’s staging and spectacle are exhilarating while the film’s pace is ultimately numbing. Furiosa’s saga is more poetic, using of surprising visual symbolism and editing rhythms to make the film more dynamic.

The Apes movies are at their best when they show us something akin to our human world but reflected through the series’ monkey-shaped mirror. In this installment, that simian similarity has to do with Caesar’s legacy.

Challengers gives us the sport as an allegory for love, an intense physical, emotional, and psychological relationship between two people so riddled with the trappings of our economic reality, genuine connection becomes almost impossible.

Like Fremen on the back of a worm, Dune: Part Two’s storytellers ride the story and beckon the audience to do the same.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things parses the difference between morality, immorality, and amorality with a butter knife recently used to spread clotted cream on a scone. He doesn’t wipe it off first.

Godzilla is scary in Godzilla Minus One, like, heart-racing, muscle-tensing scary.

There are over a thousand film festivals in the U.S. alone each year, but Sundance is the one we keep returning to. Why?

Mann’s protagonists are always haunted by time. In Ferrari, the end has caught up to Mann’s protagonist before the movie begins.

The Boy and the Heron is an old man’s film, thick with grievances, guided by questions, punctuated with answers that feel more like observations unrelated to the questions but somehow conciliatory nonetheless.

Maybe read this after watching the movie. I’m not going to reveal anything really, but May December is a film that was fun to experience fresh.

The Holdovers is a wonderful Christmas film. I predict it will become a regular holiday guest for many.

What Napoleon lacks in psychological subtlety, it makes up for in spectacle.

The tagline for David Fincher’s latest film, The Killer, reads “Execution is everything.” It’s as much about the style of the film as it is about the story it tells.

PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie is kids’ stuff, of course, and it’s satisfactory fare of its kind.

I think Killers of the Flower Moon is an indictment, but it might be a testimony.

Gareth Edwards much be some kind of wizard because, while he has only made special-effects driven, science-fiction films, he makes movies you can feel like you feel it when a jet airplane breaks the sound barrier over your house.