Thoughts on Dune: Part Two (2024)

Building on his excellent cinematic grammar of prophecy, Denis Villeneuve uses Dune: Part Two (2024), cowritten with Jon Spaihts, to examine the experience of being set before the prophecy, knowing you’re its intended subject. Not to take the whole messiah thing literally, but this narrative structure is famously hinted at in the Gospels.

Thoughts on Monolith (2022)

The jump scare is a curious thing. It has to be sudden, but suddenness alone just creates disorientation. You can add loud discordant notes, but that’s like your friend “scaring” you by punching you—a purely biological reaction devoid of cinematic interest. No, a good jump scare depends on expectation: The viewer must expect  something to happen, but not know when. And as viewers grow savvy to horror beats, the not knowing gets ever harder. Which brings us to Monolith (2022).

Thoughts on The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye / Восхождение 1977)

Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (Voskhozhdeniye / Восхождение 1977) is a subjective cinema masterpiece. This picaresque tale of two Soviet partisans during the Nazi occupation of Belarus was shot with utmost intentionality; Shepitko demanded that every word, action, gesture, and camera movement be internally motivated, and it shows!

Thoughts on The Conference (Die Wannseekonferenz 2022)

Matti Geschonneck’s The Conference (Die Wannseekonferenz 2022), written by Magnus Vattrodt and Paul Mommertz, is a TV film about, as the German title suggests, the January 1942 conference at a lakehouse in Wannsee, near Berlin, where high-level Nazis adopted the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”: working and gassing them in death camps. An opening title card says that the film is based on the Wannsee Protocol, the officially revised and published minutes.

Thoughts on White Balls on Walls (2022)

In Sarah Vos’s documentary White Balls on Walls (2022), new director Rein Wolfs spearheads a government-initiated effort to diversify the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam’s collection: Only 4% of its art was by women, no works by artists of color were exhibited, and they only had a single curator of color, Charl Landvreugd. The proceedings keep you on tenterhooks, but nuanced discussions and good faith see them through.

Thoughts on 20th Century Women (2016)

Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women (2016) is a masterpiece of intuitive plotting. The one part that doesn’t feel complete is Jamie’s (Lucas Jade Zumann) arc.

Thoughts on The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)

Though small in scale, even bracketing out the Irish Civil War raging just across the strait, writer-director Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) is epic in proportion. There’s a reason for this almost everyone has missed.

Thoughts on At Long Last Love (1975)

Contemporary critics weren’t ready for At Long Last Love (1975), I think, and entered the theater with erroneous assumptions, the same issue that tanked Hollywood Homicide (2003). They thought that writer-director Peter Bogdanovich was trying for an authentic 30s musical—and maybe so, but as Peter Sobczynski notes in his otherwise error-prone piece, it was doomed by how the studio system that kept a stable of comprehensively trained players no longer existed. Instead, it’s a modern recreation of the 30s musical that deliberately punctures holes in the atmospheric framing device—fun, witty, captivating.

Thoughts on Deep Impact (1998)

Released a couple of months before that other space rock-hits-Earth film, Armageddon (1988), Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact (1998) is much more sober than Michael Bay’s preposterously crude deep-fried filth. It’s a melodrama more than an action thriller. The surprise is that it does melodrama so well.

Thoughts on Inconceivable (2017) and Becoming Iconic: Jonathan Baker (2018)

Inconceivable (2017), director-producer Jonathan Baker’s debut, has been roundly panned by critics, which may surprise you when you learn that it stars Gina Gershon, Nicky Whelan, Nicolas Cage, and Faye Dunaway, all doing excellent work, Whelan in particular. (Baker himself has a tiny role, which he discharges woodenly). You may still be surprised after watching the film.