Finally, someone made a history of Hollywood picture for acerbic word nerds. David Fincher's Mank, if it is a sign of the quality of the director's forthcoming partnership with Netflix, gives an astonishingly optimistic outlook for the future. Brilliantly cut and shot, this is the best film of the year. This film is an remarkable technical achievement that in a just world would compete for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Lead Actor, Cinematography and most crucially Sound Mixing and Film Editing.…

Ah it's good to have our old melancholy friend Charlie Kaufman back, isn't it? Believe it or not, I think I'm Thinking of Ending Things might be his most idiosyncratic work to date, to the point where I wasn't sure exactly how I felt about many of its choices for a good chunk of the runtime. Happily, the film really fell into place for me in the final forty minutes or so and even became pretty deeply moving. I'm not…

I am burdened with glorious purpose.

Avengers should be the blueprint for every single superhero movie, at least in terms of conception. It sports a tight script which understands its characters, graciously balancing a cast that would collapse most other efforts. It's funny, it's briskly paced and most importantly, it still feels thrilling to see a roster like this realized on a big screen. The visual style is plasticine and looks more like a made for TV, but given how…

Christopher Nolan is here to save cinema as we know it the only way he knows how, and in a way only his most fanatical devotees could love - an expensive looking, action-stuffed James Bond pastiche with funky video game mechanics. This movie has exactly two modes: ceaseless exposition and loud, convoluted setpieces, yet no matter how didactically it explains its physics to you, the mechanics never come close to making sense. It's horribly apropos that a third of the…

Perfectly structured, perfectly paced, perfectly written and perfectly acted. The Irishman is an astonishing filmmaking achievement and a landmark of both gangster stories and cinematic art. There are simply too many fine tuned working parts to illustrate them all in less than an essay, but in total they form a life, and like life itself the experience is funny, tiring and melancholic. Like Sheeran's life it's also cold and empty, focused on all the wrong things while the important details…