johnke.meRobocop
This is still the high watermark for eerily on-the-nose satires of late-stage capitalism. Every year, we seem to inch closer and closer to what Verhoeven predicted thirty years ago.
Perfect.
Altered States
Doesn’t feel fully like a Ken Russell film — it’s his first Hollywood film and he was brought in as a last-minute replacement. But at the same time, it feels like a film that could only have been made by Ken Russell. It’s a daft, druggy story that could have been so silly in lesser hands, but Russell is in full flight here and navigates the trippy stuff perfectly.
Watching it now, I realise how much Poltergiest parallels with this film, except in this film the haunted house is William Hurt himself.
Best Wishes to All
Wait, sorry, I’m pretty sure I know how sex works but I’m confused - did the grandma get pregnant from that time she sucked off the grandad’s finger?
The allegories are a little heavy handed but there are still plenty of wtaf moments to make this worth your while.
The Stuff
Overstuffed (apols) with ideas and made with more love and enthusiasm than talent, but every scene contains at least one tiny delight. Michael Moriarty’s Mo Rutherford is a spectacular creation.
An Open Letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Who Thinks My Daughter Is a Tragedy - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency »
She is five. She does not speak in sentences yet, but she knows how to answer a joke with a smirk. She organizes her markers by color, then chaos, then color again. She plays baseball without rules, which is probably the right way to play it. She hums when she’s thinking. She hums a lot.
This is beautiful.
The Truman Show
Watched this for family movie night. My 9-year-old loved it and got really into it. My 7-year-old is now questioning every aspect of his reality.
A rousing success.
Billionaires Convince Themselves AI Chatbots Are Close to Making New Scientific Discoveries »
Holy shit, the level of second-hand cringe I just got reading this is off the charts.
“I’ll go down this thread with [Chat]GPT or Grok and I’ll start to get to the edge of what’s known in quantum physics and then I’m doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it’s vibe physics,” Kalanick explained. “And we’re approaching what’s known. And I’m trying to poke and see if there’s breakthroughs to be had. And I’ve gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that.”
Happy Gilmore 2
The trailer for this made it look like this was just going to be a low-effort reheating of the jokes of the original Happy Gilmore. And, yes, there are a lot of callbacks to jokes in the first film (often with the actual scene from the original film spliced in). But the film (weirdly? bravely?) immediately paints itself into a narrative corner to force it out of its comfort zone and address the fact that it’s 30 years since the first film and a lot of its dumb shit wouldn’t really make sense in the context of a middle-aged man or in the context of society in 2025. As an example, one of the more problematic sequences in the original was the “happy place” scene which is sexist and juvenile. Here it’s been updated to be more sensitive and age-appropriate. And it’s still so stupid (complimentary) and still has that Happy Madison touch and it had me wheezing.
And that’s basically what this whole thing is — a gentle, emotional and compassionate take on nostalgia that works more often than it doesn’t and is probably the best straight-up comedy I’ve seen on Netflix in a long time.
War of the Worlds
This is only my second time watching this film. The last time I watched it was on the opening day in the cinema and the main thing I remember is how much this felt like a post-9/11 movie. Watching it now, twenty years later, and having lived in Warsaw and learned so much about what happened to the Jewish people there during WWII, it’s clear how Spielberg was channeling the feelings of 9/11 — the confusion, the panic, the helplessness — as well as the imagery (the “lost persons” signs, the dust) to make a film that’s less interested in the “Worlds” and more interested in the “War”. This is a film about the trauma of being a civilian trapped in the machinery of one-sided conflict, and all the terror and devastation that entails.
The first half of this film is an all-timer. The second half, specifically the Ogilvy section, is a tonal shift but still within Spielberg’s comfort-zone, so he handles it brilliantly.
Also I would be remiss if I reviewed a Tom Cruise film and didn’t complain about how he wasn’t the right person for this role. Don’t get me wrong, he’s great at selling the panic. A believable, emotionally conflicted father? Not so much!
Superman
James Gunn was the exact right person to direct Superman. But at the same time, he’s also the exact wrong person to direct Superman. For every iconic moment in this film that makes you pump your fist and say “yes! He gets what makes this character so great!” you also a moment of classic James Gunn excess as he once again reaches onto his well-worn grab-bag of directorial bag of tricks that we’ve seen a little too often now, regardless of whether they suit the scene or not.
This works more than it doesn’t and the overall message — especially in the context of recent Superman movies — is a real balm.