Friendo: “Poor Things + Barbie = same story. Imagine if Barbie was about a sexual awakening after she gets her VAG.”
HE: “[A critic friend] said Poor Things was like Barbie directed by the Marquis de Sade.”
Friendo: “Okay but I say Russ Meyer.”
This morning I asked World of Reel's Jordan Ruimy about the best films he'd seen thus far the 2023 Toronto Film Festival, and he listed six -- Alexander Payne's The Holdovers, Richard Linklater's Hit Man, Cord Jefferson's American Fiction, Azazel Jacobs' His Three Daughters, Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron and Kristoffer Borgli's Dream Scenario.
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Three days ago (9.10) London Times columnist Hadley Freeman posted a thoughtful, paywalled essay about Woody Allen that’s certainly worth reading. I usually post excerpts from articles that I approve of, but this time I’ve pasted the whole thing.
By striking terror in the hearts of industry cowards and thereby suppressing the distribution of Allen’s Coup de Chance (even as a streaming title), Woody haters are perpetrating a social and cultural crime that is absolutely loathsome and pernicious.
After 31 years of this, it’s really time to back off and let it go. Lord knows their punitive point has been made over and over. They are the witch dunkers of Salem.
And as difficult as it may seem, they all need to once again attempt to understand a basic truth that all mature societies understand. A work of art or art-tinged commerce, like a movie or a play, is one thing, and the private behavior of its creator, however imperfect (and who among us is?), is something else entirely. They are two parallel twains that can not and should never meet.

“Not happening…way too laid back…zero narrative urgency,” I was muttering from the get-go. Basically the sixth episode of White Lotus Thai SERIOUSLY disappoints. Puttering around, way too slow. Things inch along but it’s all “woozy guilty lying aftermath to the big party night” stuff. Glacial pace…waiting, waiting. I was told...
I finally saw Walter Salles' I'm Still Here two days ago in Ojai. It's obviously an absorbing, very well-crafted, fact-based poltical drama, and yes, Fernanda Torres carries the whole thing on her shoulders. Superb actress. Fully deserving of her Best Actress nomination. But as good as it basically is...
After three-plus-years of delay and fiddling around, Bernard McMahon's Becoming Led Zeppelin, an obsequious 2021 doc about the early glory days of arguably the greatest metal-rock band of all time, is opening in IMAX today in roughly 200 theaters. Sony Pictures Classics is distributing. All I can say is, it...
To my great surprise and delight, Christy Hall's Daddio, which I was remiss in not seeing during last year's Telluride Film Festival, is a truly first-rate two-hander -- a pure-dialogue, character-revealing, heart-to-heart talkfest that knows what it's doing and ends sublimely. Yes, it all happens inside a Yellow Cab on...
7:45 pm: Okay, the initial light-hearted section (repartee, wedding, hospital, afterlife Joey Pants, healthy diet) was enjoyable, but Jesus, when and how did Martin Lawrence become Oliver Hardy? He’s funny in that bug-eyed, space-cadet way… 7:55 pm: And now it’s all cartel bad guys, ice-cold vibes, hard bullets, bad business,...

The Kamala surge is, I believe, mainly about two things — (a) people feeling lit up or joyful about being...
Unless Part Two of Kevin Costner's Horizon (Warner Bros., 8.16) somehow improves upon the sluggish initial installment and delivers something...
For me, A Dangerous Method (2011) is David Cronenberg's tastiest and wickedest film -- intense, sexually upfront and occasionally arousing...