Paul Giamatti is one of those actors that I’m never not glad to see on-screen. There’s something about the exasperated, schlubby curmudgeons he plays that’s just endearing and endlessly watchable, not unlike the gruff characters that Spencer Tracy or Walter Matthau or even Philip Seymour Hoffman used to play – the kind of middle-aged geezer that may look soft from afar but that can cut you down with an icy, venomous wit if you get too close. He fits a…
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Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 2000
Can’t tell you that it’s some kind of hidden gem, but man is this way better than what its garbage reputation led me to believe. I knew a bit about its meta nature going in, but didn’t at all expect a level of self-reflexivity that would put it in virtually the same anti-sequel wheelhouse as GREMLINS 2, WES CRAVEN’S NEW NIGHTMARE, and THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS, that kickstarts its narrative with news report footage covering the craze over the original BLAIR…
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The French Dispatch 2021
Wes, you can't just sneak in a hand-drawn animated short into the middle of this movie's climax without expecting me to begin campaigning for you to direct a full-on hand-drawn feature -- c'mon now, the world needs it.
Pretty sure my face broke from smiling during this. May not be Anderson at his most emotionally resonant but it's him at the very height of his visual powers. The sheer imagination and inventiveness on display is exhilarating - ever since FANTASTIC…
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Tenet 2020
Wildly ambitious and admirable, but ultimately frustrating and exhausting. This is very much the director of THE DARK KNIGHT and INTERSTELLAR doing his own version of PRIMER. Take that however you'd like.
Like INCEPTION, it's a film of mechanics and logistics, and like MEMENTO, there's a vague structural resemblance to an ouroboros, but it lacks the energy and mystery of either of them -- especially the way that INCEPTION piecemeals out the various machinations of dreamsharing without losing the forward…
