Thematically rich, but it felt flat to me. It’s so interested in excavating genre and theme that it forgets to be interesting, giving enough context for its supposed thrills only an hour and a half in to this nearly-three-hour ride.
The backstory comes way too late for my taste. As a thriller, this utterly fails to thrill. As a genre piece, it does so many interesting things, but there’s no easy way to recommend it to anybody who seeks even slight entertainment.
It’s a shame because I would have been into this if it were paced quicker, with more tension. Unfortunately, it lost me early on, and I find myself wondering what everybody else sees in this.
]]>Extraordinarily self-indulgent filmmaking with a couple notable—probably excellent—performances. Very Assayas, but this is just a shadow of his work. Oscar bait by any definition.
This is not how intergenerational reconciliation in a family works, and maybe it’s my own history with my own family, but I was kind of offended by this take. I don’t want to say more, because I’m not airing my dirty laundry, but parents don’t get to dictate the terms of both their failures and their forgiveness.
]]>I’m going to largely ignore the base Studio Display for the duration of this post and focus exclusively on the XDR version.
At around half the price of the previous-generation Pro Display XDR, the Studio Display XDR offers the following:
Overall, this is clearly an upgrade, but also a mixed bag. For $3,500 USD (or $4,500 CAD), you’re getting a monitor that is substantially cheaper than its best prior comparison. The technology has gotten better. I will miss the Pro Display XDR’s cheese grater aesthetic, but that design was because the Pro Display needed a heatsink, and the lattice design clearly increased manufacturing cost. 2,304 dimming zones is four times what was available in the larger Pro Display XDR’s screen.
But at 27″, the Studio Display is smaller. I think Apple fumbled here; I would love a 32″ Studio Display XDR. And while 2,304 dimming zones is more than the “one” dimming zone on the standard Studio Display, it’s comparable to the dimming zone count in the MacBook Pros.
I want to hammer home the latter point, because it would be better if the Studio Display XDR had more dimming zones. The equivalent, proportionally, would be closer to 10,000. I don’t know if any display manufacturer makes a 27″ or 32″ screen with 10,000 dimming zones, but Apple’s own 13″ iPad Pros offered 10,000 mini-LEDs grouped into 2,500 zones years ago.
Again, I don’t know if this technology exists at these screen sizes. It’s just what I wished for.
Otherwise, this really does look like a great monitor for professionals.
Apple’s P3 colour gamut has now added Adobe RGB support, in addition to P3. They also say they have more than 80% Rec. 2020 coverage. Rec. 2020’s gamut is significantly larger than Adobe RGB. The Pro Display didn’t support Rec. 2020, and the laptops offer a bit over 60% of Rec. 2020. So this is a much more detailed (and hopefully even more accurate) display.
And why would you care about that? It’s very useful for print design and photography (especially for printing), and having it built in to the default P3 mode is great for keeping workflows easy. If you’re a working professional who cares about colour accuracy across multiple mediums (hello, it’s me), then this is a big deal.
My plan right now is to buy one and upgrade my current Studio Display, because this level of colour accuracy and HDR support is very useful for my work. But I dearly wish a 32″ 6K option were available.
I am waiting to read and watch reviews first before I place my order.
I have a few questions I’d like answered:
I thought this was magnificent, even if it stretched its own limits in the second half. The first half was transcendent, at least for me. Visually resplendent.
It felt a little like some of the metaphors were screaming at me towards the end (that scene in particular), but this was such a fascinating, multilayered take on Jewish diaspora.
]]>Some indelible imagery, but the kinetic energy of Fury Road is almost entirely missing, and the economy of storytelling is gone with it. It’s tough to follow up a near-perfection action film, and I applaud Miller for basically taking a hard right, but I think this misses the mark.
If Miller was able to make this right after Fury Road, as was his clear intent at one point, and if it were to keep Theron as its lead actress, I think it would have been more coherent. But too much time has passed, and Furiosa feels cinematically like a different world, one replete with obvious CGI, a new lead, and a filmmaking philosophy at odds with everything that made Fury Road so taut.
It’s clearly the same chef, at the same restaurant, operating in the same modality. But the ingredients have changed a bit, and the method is new, and the magic is sadly missing.
]]>Extremely average in its genre, and not Aronofsky’s usual vein or style. A little like if Guy Ritchie were to attempt his own version of After Hours. Very ’90s crime thriller, but without any revelations or additions to the genre.
I’m giving it extra points for the Hebrew gangsters, who I thought were hilarious. They seemingly perfectly understand and completely miss the point of Torah. I would love to see an entire film, Uncut Gems style, from their point of view.
]]>Watched with some friends who had never seen it as part of a double feature. One of the funniest movies ever made.
]]>Watched with a group of friends who hadn’t seen it, and they were all shaken and confused as I was most of the time on my first run through. I liked it more the second time around. I still think it’d be better if we dropped the first act entirely and got this down to a taut two hours.
]]>This review may contain spoilers.
In the moment, it felt like this was a thematically rich slow burn that had something to say about school shootings, unresolved communal grief, poisonous and infectious group think, and even addiction. At times, it necessarily and smartly tips its hat to films like The Shining and It, but again, it’s mostly subtle about how it does it, so it leaves the viewer feeling smart.
And then the final 25 minutes happen and the credits roll, and I felt all my good will sort of vanish. The plot is so explained that it loses its shine, and the themes are left so unexplored that, while I see them there, I’m not sure the film makes any observations about them, beyond noting their existence. It feels natural to elevate horror to social commentary; the best horror often is. (Even Night of the Living Dead and Psycho were doing this way back in the day.) But taking on the language of social commentary without actually making a point is just abusing a trend.
Despite that, I had a great time watching this. I even liked the weird structure, which kept me guessing and on my toes. But I wish that some of the evil here was kept a mystery, or that it were resolved in a less fantastical way. (I’d prefer something without a witch; it’s so overdone it’s kind of farcical.)
But the fact this was one of my “least favourite” movies from 2025 — what a banger year!
]]>Grown on me over time. Very funny and also good fun. Gosling’s scream is excellent, and I think this is the last time I liked Russel Crowe in anything.
]]>Essential and important.
]]>Unbelievable storytelling, so detailed and dense, shot expertly by Gordon Willis. Just enough exposition that you can follow along without actually noticing. Redford and Hoffman are great. In the end, the crooked president resigns. What more could you ask for?
One of the more beautiful films of the 70s. This new 4K restoration is fantastic and feels like having a film reel in your home.
]]>This is elder abuse.
I hope that, when I’m old enough to be in the target market for movies like this, they make good movies. They hire a cast of stars that would remind all these old timers of some great films, and they make this?
I am aware that part of the problem with this sappy, no-consequence, low-stakes murder mystery is the source material. But there are ways to do this in an interesting fashion. Do a spoof of a good spy thriller! Helen Mirren’s character is retired MI6. Play it up. Add a bit of tension; it won’t hurt anybody. Add a little bit of grit and texture to the frame; a little film grain goes a long way to making this look less like a bad “Shot on iPhone” ad.
In other words, make something you wouldn’t be embarrassed to show your grandkids.
But this is forgettable, and a wasted opportunity. The worst kind of cinema is the kind that rejects everything interesting about the art form in the pursuit of safety.
]]>Liked it more the second time around. Mostly a masterclass in polish. There isn’t a single frame of this that isn’t ridiculously smoothed over; there are no hard edges to this at all. Even the audio is perfect; this is one of the few films I’ve seen where it feels like the LFE shifts in response to where vehicles move along the screen.
But the flip side of all this polish is that there is no life to it. It’s the equivalent of a two and a half hour commercial for F1, which means the movie is mostly an exercise in style. It’s a fun exercise, but that’s all there is to it.
I understand the attraction directors have to racing movies. The conflict is obvious. The directorial challenges are clear. If you wanted to spend $100 million (or more), you could make a difficult film like The Revenant or you could make something extremely fun to shoot, like F1. I can see the appeal of the latter.
But it’s hard to offer something new in a crowded genre. The only thing F1 brings to the table is its sheer level of polish. That’s valuable, but it makes it a tough pick for movie night compared to Ford V Ferrari, Rush, and a myriad of other classics.
]]>This rocks. Watched as part of a double feature I hosted for some friends. Great little pairing with No Country for Old Men. Mitchum is amazing. Fantastic cinematography.
]]>A masterpiece of cinematography and adaptation. So much of the book is (gratefully) compressed and lyrically told within the visual composition of each frame. An incredibly focused film.
Paired with Night of the Hunter as part of a double feature with friends. A very well received evening.
]]>This review may contain spoilers.
Utter garbage. This poorly done take on When Harry Met Sally doesn’t attempt to cover anything new, or share new insights into the genre or humanity. It’s just a thoughtless retread, with poor pacing and poor execution.
The story ends up feeling like a reductive Hallmark movie in reverse, where the guy loves his small town home in Ohio more than the girl does, and he can’t possibly commit until she can agree that she needs to make compromises. All of that just to drop it and move to New York with her anyway, all while she solipsistically voiceovers about how she found a home and doesn’t care where it is, so long as he’s there. The whole thing feels gross, and I think it’s because the film ends in a way that leaves Alex in complete control of her. It’s like the film accidentally says that women just need to find a man who can smooth off their rough edges, and I’m not convinced they’re not purposefully saying exactly that. It feels like a film lobbied and campaigned for by a Men’s Rights group.
This is all bad enough, but it’s terribly paced, and it felt like it was building up to its ending at least four times in the final thirty minutes. There are more endings here than in Return of the King. This film does not earn the payoffs it attempts.
What holds me back from believing any malice was actually attempted is the sheer incompetence on display. Many of the sets are overexposed, with poor lighting and poor colour choices. The colourists push most skin tones into a sort of sickly yellow, and most of the mid tones live there too. Crushed shadows are everywhere, often in the same shot as overexposed streetlights. The film is over saturated and filled with ProMyst filters, which I suppose the filmmakers believe amplifies the surrealism of the whole “travel for a living” job. But the moment the two of them finally get together, the colours are stripped away, and we’re left with an image that looks almost ungraded. I think they’re trying to suggest that they have finally found something real, instead of the fantasy, but the effect is done for such a brief period of time that it feels like the sex must have just sucked. This is all utterly thoughtless filmmaking, inconsistent and without a cohesive approach from shot to shot and scene to scene. It’s offensive to the form to try this little and make something this banal.
The net effect of all this incompetence is that it looks like a Blu-ray mastered in 2010, or a cheap TV show made for cable, which is not a compliment. The camera work is as inspired as an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.
It’s not that this is the worst film I’ve ever seen. What angers me is that this level of incompetence is now acceptable at a studio level. The same studio that wants to push this technical drudgery on us is the same one who wants to buy Warner Bros, and if this level of thoughtless “craftsmanship” passes for art, I’m going to entirely lose interest in the medium. There are YouTubers who are doing more interesting visual work than this. Before somebody tells me that cinema isn’t all about the cinematography, I need to remind you you’re staring at a freaking picture box for 2+ hours when you watch a movie. The whole point is the moving picture. If you suck at making sensible pictures, you have no business making me sit through two hours of your commercial misery.
]]>Fine in every sense of the word. Catchy songs. Inoffensive without being completely soulless. Better than Frozen II, but also revealing of how far ahead Disney still is in musical choreography and cinematic table setting, so to speak.
]]>Catnip for theatre kids. Ethan Hawke is astounding; he is unrecognizable and completely disappears into the role. They should mail him the Oscar now and save us all the trouble.
It’s also nice to see Linklater operating in this mode again, even though he doesn’t reach anywhere near the highs of his previous work. Keeping this largely contained to a single set was a brilliant idea.
The set design, acting, and direction all earn this movie extra points. Ultimately, though, Hawke’s performance can’t save this from being a bit of a bore. The way Blue Moon portrays him, Lorenz Hart is a sad man with few redeeming qualities. A well-inhabited performance unfortunately doesn’t make Hart more interesting.
]]>A masterpiece of the genre. Unbelievable cinematography, great performances. It emulates the Coen Brothers, but remains its own thing.
Somehow I had managed to avoid seeing this for nearly a decade, even though it is extremely my sort of thing. But I’ve heard all the criticisms, particularly those of the “extreme violence” and the “simple plot.” I am not sure what to make of all that.
I didn’t think it was anywhere near as gory as Seven, for example, but somehow this has been lauded to me as one of the most gruesome films ever made.
Multiple people have told me this is one of the films they loved, but would never watch again. To that, I say you’re no longer friends, and I would happily watch this multiple times. It’s been described to me as brutality porn, misery porn, and frontier porn. I don’t understand what any of those three critiques mean in the context of this film. Hereditary is misery porn; this is merely survival in the face of unspeakable odds.
I am not sure what to say about critiques that the story is straightforward. It is linearly straightforward, but there is depth to its portrayal of revenge as a fantasy and its portrayal of native Americans.
I think this is the rare art film that crossed the line into blockbuster territory. The sort of people who watch blockbusters for the sake of transportive (and shallow) entertainment are caught off guard. The sort of people who want their art to challenge them and enlighten them may find this neither challenging or enlightening.
But it’s a crossover film with a massive budget and incredible spectacle. If anything, it’s underrated by all parties. I’m happily adding this to my rotation of “quality films to watch during never-ending winter.”
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