I‘m not a big fan of the Oscars. Don’t get me wrong, I love the pageantry, and I love the few weeks of the year where it seems like everyone else cares about movies almost as much as I do. Ultimately, whatever wins or loses rarely does so based on the actual quality of the […]
Film
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Wildest Heart
Goodbye, David Lynch
We lost the artist David Lynch on Jan. 15, just five days before his 79th birthday. As a writer, director, painter and designer, he spent his entire career finding ways to map the human subconscious, making movies that feel like glimpses of half-remembered dreams, scripts that turn dream logic into tactile reality and paintings that […]
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From Chimpan-A to Chimpan-Z
Robbie Williams struggles to be a “Better Man”
Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: So, you take the traditional musical biopic like “A Complete Unknown” or “Walk the Line,” but instead of casting some popular actor like lil’ Timmy Chalamet or Joaq Phoenix to play the subject, you instead have the musician played by a computer-generated monkey. Yeah, me neither. But […]
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The World Is a Vampire/Rockstar
A Complete Unknosferatu
While I knew it wouldn’t quite have the same cultural cache of “Barbenheimer,” I was still very excited for the same-day release of the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” and the Robert Eggers remake of the classic vampire film “Nosferatu.” In my mind, the two films wouldn’t be quite as disparate as the same-day […]
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They Never Stop Coming
Looking ahead to 2025
Not to compare watching movies to some sort of eternal Herculean struggle, but the weirdest thing about writing about cinema for a living is that I will never, ever be able to watch them all. In 2024, I watched 120-plus new releases, and not only failed to watch remotely all the new films that came […]
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Too Much Goodness, Not Enough Time
Jared picks his top movies and shows of 2024
This time of the year is always hard for me as someone who writes about film for a living. Publications all over the country start releasing their best-of lists featuring the top movies and shows they discovered over the past 12 months. Because I don’t live in Los Angeles, New York or another large market, […]
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There Goes My Antihero
Sony hunts and kills its own franchise with "Kraven"
Sometimes, a movie gets released that’s so bad you know someone at the studio lost their job, and the filmmaker will probably end up in director’s jail for a few years. When that same studio releases three movies in the same universe that are so insanely, preposterously stupid (while also hemorrhaging money) that they become […]
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Christmas Carol
A few new additions to the unconventional Christmas canon
Every single year, it’s the same discussion around the holidays: Is “Die Hard” a Christmas movie? Of course it is. Any film set on or near Christmas where people are actively talking about or celebrating the holiday makes it a Christmas movie. Right?! Is that the consensus? Can we be done now? The movie is […]
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May the Source Be With You: December Edition
Hallmark by way of Netflix
This is the time of year where I start watching Christmas movies with a gleeful and reckless abandon… quality be damned. It doesn’t really matter if it’s good or not because ultimately most of those Hallmark movies (or the new Netflix breed) have the exact same structure and arc with only a few mild variations. […]
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Are We That Entertained?
Gladiator II brings the bread and circuses
“Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.” —Juvenal (100-200 A.D.) There’s a meta […]