The consensus seems to be that Shia is the performance to see, here, but it's a meme of a performance—as with Joaquin Phoenix in You Were Never Really Here, it's the casting we praise, because it so aptly picks up on the most thrilling nook of the actor's persona and lobs it at the discerning viewer with about as much finesse as a Devo needle drop in a piece of nostalgia porn. It feels good being "right" about Shia, who's…

Some of the critiques of this movie have prompted me to give some thought to why we accept and dutifully seek out nuance in Eastwood and Spielberg's aesthetic and ideological conservatism but consistently dock women and POC filmmakers for not living up to some radical ideal we merely dreamed up to reject our classical forefathers.

Yes, it is a movie mired in and pitched to a distinctly conservative attitude — just like the nation the movie is about, and undoubtedly…

McDonagh’s sense of morality readily lends itself to entertaining plot turns and impressive acting. He leans into the kinds of vicious, manipulative contradictions that make melodramas so powerful. But in this case, his predilections only lead us down a rabbit hole of dumb ideas, symbolic ironies that really only make sense to people with $80 screenplay software on their MacBooks. Or is this the kind of advice you get when you stick to the free trial? 

Keep a lookout for…