Deep Focus

Moana 2 is gorgeous. You just want to see it on as big a screen with as much light bounding into your eyes as possible.

Gladiator II is taffy, which isn’t to say it’s not tasty. It’s just not a meal in the same way its predecessor was.

It’s not often you go to a movie and hear an actual sermon. It’s even more rare for that sermon to be erudite, biblically literate, and theologically challenging.

Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winning film is so light on its feet, you’ll think you’re watching an Astaire and Rogers musical… if Fred played the son of a Russian oligarch and Ginger played a stripper.

Will the show go to air? Of course it will. The fun is in watching all the little plots within the big plot arc and resolve.

Autobiography is an exercise in making sense of what was actually just a random series of events. It’s putting together pieces into a whole. It’s not real, so in that sense, the use of LEGO is appropriate.

I have never seen a film exhibit such contempt for its audience as Joker: Folie à Deux. You have to see it to believe it.

What a lovely film!

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.