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"Saving Private Ryan" is the best war movie ever made. There are movies I like better that use war as a backdrop, but none of them deliver the visceral insanity of men trying to kill each other. The movie is famous for its D-Day opening, but on a re-watch I found the bookend bridge defense just as frenetic and terrifying. The bombed out city and and maze of rubble is more depressing than the beach heads of Normandy. Families used to live here. Between those two standout scenes is some of the best acting and writing you're doing to see in the "ragtag group of men" genre. Like "The Dirty Dozen", "Inglorious Bastards" and similar men on a mission movies, "Saving Private Ryan" knows that to make the audience feel for the death of a character, you need to create them first. Standouts for me are the performances of Ed Burns, Jeremy Davies, and Tom Seizemore. There are no slouch performances here, and during the group's traversal through the early stages of Market Garden you'll find a favorite G.I. along the way. I know I bring this up in lots of my reviews, but this era of film, before CGI was used for just about everything, really helps to create believable, tactile worlds. A ruined Europe, constantly under attack, never has looked this good. The cinematography is both chaotic and specific. Just when you can't keep track of the action it'll take a moment to pause on something especially gruesome, mimicking the perspective and thoughts of its participant witnesses. I watched this movie after playing a board game version of Omaha Beach, which is a notoriously difficult game. The first few waves of the landings are brutal for the player, and there is no way to avoid heavy casualties, no strategy to prevent it. There's only a built in luck to the card draws. Sometimes you make it, sometimes you don't. Your board game brain will be mad at the outcome, then you remember, well, this actually happened. This is how it was. Surviving a war is due to luck or cowardice. Those that rush the hill, or peak around a corner are testing fate. "Saving Private Ryan" is an excellent movie made by a director at the peak of his powers. It's not one of my favorite movies to watch, but I think everyone would benefit from seeing it. I like that it doesn't pull punches and put American and German soldiers in good and bad piles. At the infantry level, it's ugly for everyone.

I grew up as a pretty heavy Star Wars fan. The original trilogy had a great hero's journey story with some of the most fun villains in all of cinema. Since then there have been dozens of Star Wars related properties; some were good (Andor, Rogue One), some were bad (Obi-Wan, The Last Jedi). "Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu" is the first chapter in the universe where I not only didn't like it, but thought it actively lessened my love for Star Wars overall. This move has severe pacing issues and boring villains. Not only does it feel like two or three separate episodes were squashed together to make a movie, but it actively fights against the style of the TV show that preceded it. "The Mandolorian" TV show felt authentic to the original trilogy and remixed it through the lens of pulp westerns. The music, the camera work, the silent protagonist -- everything was a send up of classic western cinema. All of that style is thrown out the window in "Grogu", which is a mediocre action film with very long periods of dead space during which nothing happens. It has famous actors in boring bit parts, and big parts for new characters that weaken the world-building in the Star Wars universe. Rotta the Hutt is my least favorite character in a Star Wars property, full-stop. His existence, buff physic, nimble movements, and English first dialog destroys all the gross, sand slug, thieves guild potentate fun of the Hutts as we knew them. Forgetting all that, he is terribly designed and has some of the worst CGI I've seen since... well, Han stepped over Jabba's tale in the late 90s. This is a TV series that prided itself on bringing practical effects back to Star Wars. To see it bring in a Jar Jar Binks style CGI sidekick (yes, he's that bad) is an unquestionably bad decision. I can smell the Disney feedback on this one. "You can't have that many subtitles, just make him talk English. This is a kid's movie." Movie versions of TV shows should feel grand and larger than the shows they spawn from. They need stakes (see "Serenity", "Star Trek: First Contact"). They need to have impact to the world and answer questions that were left hanging. "Grogu" instead of moving the plot forward turns Mando into a walking commando, not even pausing to have the kind of dramatic standoffs the show was popular for. Everything about this movie feels lazy and a cash-grab. You can smell the bad TV episodes collided together, trying to wrestle a cohesive arc across the narrative. Don't get me started on why Signorney Weaver needs to be here. It was a great TV show. The movie version? It stinks.

"Wild Horse Nine" stars two fantastic actors who mostly chew through lines at dinner tables, hinting at more exciting things in their past. It reminded me a bit of "The Banshees of Inisherin", which is a better movie in its oddness and humor, but centers around a similar buddy duo of opposites. "Wild Horse Nine" unfortunately tries to be a little bit too redemptive with its characters that are long past that point. The dialog back and forth is great though, and the supporting cast of Posey and Buscemi provide fun bounces against Malkovitch and Rockwell. I found the general premise interesting. What do you do with CIA agents that are going senile? Malkovitch's senility is the Hollywood kind, which means it comes and goes as the plot requires it to be. The Easter Island setting is unique and provides the equivilant of a black box play with giant stone heads for our characters to talk in front of. As much as I liked this setup, the movie can't figure out what it wants to be about. It has funny moments, but it's not a comedy. It hints at a larger commentary about US international meddling, but never really makes any statements. This forced the movie to feel like it was about nothing in the end. So lazy is its plot, that we don't even get a proper conclusion. Nothing is tied up. I walked out frustrated because there's a good movie here somewhere. Parker Posey is great in two scenes, but those two scenes aren't really needed. Her character could be cut and the movie wouldn't change. The same could be said about Buscemi. This is a movie about two friends who know each other real well, and one of them is losing their faculties to such a degree that it's made their work and friendship untenable. I think I would have leaned harder into the comedy here. The occasional reminders that these are bad people who have done bad things didn't help to make me care about their relationship. All I cared about was how quick the dialog was. It felt like the fourth sequel to "The Trip" instead.

The "OSS 117" movies are a fun send-up of Bond movies that I much prefer to something like Austin Powers. They are 100% carried by the personality of Jean Dujardin who gives us a lovable, good-looking idiot in Hubert. Although I prefer "The Artist" as a movie, "OSS 117" is good fun for anyone familiar with Bond movies.

"Wildwood" is the dream of "Redwall" or "Watership Down" taken to their zenith as a fully produced animated feature. It is quite simply one of the most epic fantasy stories I've seen brought to life. It took me till the end of the movie to realize that from a comparative standpoint its large scope and multi-character story reminded me most of "The Lord of the Rings". This seems like the type of movie I'll rewatch with my kids for years, noticing new bits each time. The animation and special effects are extraordinary, and while I've always been a fan of stop-motion puppetry, "Wildwood" is in a singular class, so believable and expressive are its characters. Previous movies of this milieu (good as they are) always had robot mannerisms where you could see the puppets being moved. Here, the work is seamless, and I was lost in the artistry of it. In the modern age of AI where all graphics have that weird sheen to them, "Wildwood" looks real, and crafted with an artist's eye. Watching this movie all I could think was that a group of people put their heart into this one. You can see their effort in every grimace and glance. "Wildwood" now adds itself to a tradition of kid fiction that is grimmer than you'd expect. It is a fairy-tale in the vein of Grimm, not Disney, and deals with themes of grief, becoming an adult, suicide and death. There are over a dozen side characters, each with meaningful roles, that add to the tapestry of this dark forest. Walking out I realized that the movie seems to purposely avoid common tropes in storytelling. There is no romance, the villain is not naturally evil, but tragic in their own way, and many characters who seem like natural main characters die off quickly. It feels fresh, despite twisting its roots around other, classic fables. I watched "Wildwood" with my two kids, who also came out similarly wowed. This is the rare movie that pushes an art forward while also being approachable and entertaining. That it's targeted as a children's animation movie makes it even more impressive. I felt like I was enjoying my favorite painting for two hours. What a beautiful film.

"1917" tells a hero's futility journey that is largely upstaged by some amazing special effects and editing. It's single shot, straight timeline action creates a tense chase movie that sits up there with some of the better in the genre. In this second viewing I'm reminded of Mel Gibson's excellent "Apocolypto" as a worthy pair to 17's behind the shoulder running camera. The Great War doesn't have as many movies made about it, because it's hard to romanticize endless destruction. World War II has always been more palatable, even if it had similar results. Ask your average American why World War I started and you're likely not going to get an answer. Ask them the same about World War II and you'll at least get an answer without nuance ("because of Hitler") or understand why he came to power. "1917" then is a solid entry that solidly doesn't care about motives or even nations. War is pointless, and every story is personal. I'm a fan of long shots and I'll admit that I'm distracted any time I watch this movie because I look for the cuts. They are impressive, and it's a neat bit of film-making how they create a steady stream of tension. What it hides though is some absolutely astounding set design. Most of these long shots must be on giant shooting locations with large amounts of extras. The editing is cool, but it's what's in the frame that's even cooler.

Time to fess up. It is 2026 and this is the first time I've ever seen RoboCop. It arrived when I was eight years old and its "Hard R" rating at the time meant it was something my family actively steered me around, despite it being a movie that a young kid would obviously love. I don't know why I never got around to watching it as an adult, perhaps because it looked... well... cheesy? I guess, similar to other Verhoeven films like "Starship Troopers" it's actually campy, not cheesy, and that's on purpose as a method to deliver its satire. It's hard to appreciate a film like "Robocop" today. Yes, it has a fun corporate greed, surveillance state storyline that feels perfect for the times, but nearly forty years later it feels somewhat ancient. It's near-future Detroit doesn't really gel and feels like a bad imitation of better John Carpenter films. As an example, RoboCop walks into his old house to be greeted by a retro-future kiosk real-estate agent, but then walks into the next room where an old ass 70s TV sits in the living room. It doesn't quite make sense. The set design and "future" stuff just feels messy and low-budget. What made "RoboCop" popular at the time, and the reason I couldn't watch it was the over the top violence. It's gratuitous, funny and pretty solid effects-work for the time. It's also super tame today. It seems anything risque in the past is doomed to be passe in the present and that's the experience I had with most of "RoboCop". I wished instead that there was some more meat and satire to the storytelling, something Verhoeven would perfect with "Troopers". While watching this I'm making my way through Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth". It's a similar experience, because I can definitely appreciate the historical significance of the creation and art for the time, but imbibing them in a modern setting, after years of effects work, and better social satire on the same subjects just deadens the impact that it had originally. I'm actually hoping "RoboCop 2" ups the camp, and leans into its silliness. The stuffy baggage in the first one is better left to more elegant films that preceded it like "Rollerball".

I, like many other people I'm sure, walked out of "You Can See Everything" not exactly sure what the fuck I just watched. It took the car ride home for me to process the onion skin depth of a documentary that challenges the form. The farther the nearly three hour runtime continued, the more I realized this was less a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, and more a documentary of Nathan Fielder attempting to make a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes. At its heart the film seems to swirl around what literal truth is versus what the individual experience of truth can be. Like "Synecdoche, NY" and the recent "Digger" it uses Hamlet's play within a play format to force a mirror on the audience and ask them how confident they feel about what they are seeing. During the entirety, I sat in my seat with a mild level of anxiety and embarrassment, which I'm sure was the intended reaction Fielder wanted. The way he stands, like Michael Corleone, half hidden in almost off his shots — just around the corner — makes him an unreliable narrator in the story. His comedic timing, and ability to sit silence, make him as genius a manipulator as his subject. As the story progresses, the tension only builds, and a thriller-like score only builds that rise like an approaching storm. The more personal side to watching the movie for me was the reminder of Silicon Valley smoke-shows and the "act as if" culture of venture capital and selling yourself. It's an upsetting, but realistic portrayal of people that toss around terms like "radical transparency" as if they mean anything more than jingoism. I felt like I was watching a car wreck the whole time, but the time seemed to just pass by. It'll take me awhile to break down my feelings about this one. It's very obviously brave and interesting art from Fielder. I can easily recommend it to anyone who is interested, and hope they can view it with fresh eyes. At the same time I feel disturbed. These are the parts of humanity I'm least equipped to stomach, and part of me wishes this thing was never even made. I felt worst for the few side participants, like Holme's parents, involved in the masquerade. Coming home from the theater I expect I'll need a shower, and am lucky to not have cameras follow me in.

"Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother" is a stylistically excellent film with several nuanced performances that has trouble coming to a worthwhile conclusion, despite its commitment to character tension. Its frenetic action and absurdist humor reminded me of cult favorite "Boondock Saints" and even carries over that films vague holy vengeance motifs. Mahershala Ali's portrayal of Latif feels like a direct decedent of Forest Whitaker's "Ghost Dog" and it too shares that movie's rambling, doesn't entirely make sense sensibilities. The general through-line is fun! After his wife's recent death, a Dad needs to provide breast milk to a colicky baby. This leads him into mosques, strip clubs, evangelical churches, and even a Mormon guitar circle. There's certainly a plethora of extreme religiosity in the movie, but I couldn't quite figure out the greater meaning to all of it. Did Tarif only come to religion through his wife? Is he himself actually religious? Is this more a commentary on how his daughter finds it? By the end, I decided the backdrop of religion, like Boondock Saints, was merely window dressing for a somewhat absurdist plot that is only vaguely vigilante in its delivery. I came out of the theater thinking, this is just an action movie, and I'm being tricked by indie flavored shot composition and quirky, well-delivered characters. Maybe I'll see more in a second viewing. Worth noting that John Cho creates an electric, weirdo villain in Pastor Hwan. Similar to Tarif, and the porn peddler Hatty, we're not quite sure where any of these characters fall in God's hierarchy, but a confusing moment near the end where Hwan's character recognizes a miracle, and asks "Who prays for you?" to Tarif suggests that maybe he too is touched. Why any of these characters deserve God's grace is beyond me, and I could never reconcile this with their despicable nature and motives. Ultimately it's why I left the movie shrugging. It was an interesting ride, but I wanted a deeper payoff of redemption. Perhaps I lack faith.