Daily

Critical Drinker: “We have peaked in terms of a common pop culture movie current…a shared cultural experience that we can all get invested in. It feels like we just don’t have that any more. As compared to the days when a movie like The Matrix, say, would come out and everyone would talk about it. Because it was [a] cultural event.

“But over the past ten years it’s difficult to think of anything that’s come out that we are all invested in**.. We’ve lost that spontaneity…that occasional occurence when something new and really interesting would come along.

“The general consensus is that woke messaging in films is dying down, but you’re always gonna get a few hold-outs. Something like One Battle After Another is a good example of that. Just a straight-up [left] propaganda movie…extolling the virtues of domestic terrorism, and just all the usual nonsense. It’s hard to believe that a movie like that was greenlit in this day and age.

“But it probably speaks volumes to the fact that it was a massive flop at the box-office, [and a film] that contributed to the worst October at the box-office in 30 years, and that’s not even adjusting for inflation.

“OBAA is the kind of movie that people do not want now. There’s an actual political fatigue that has kicked in….people don’t want political propaganda [coming from] one direction or the other.

** HE’s top ten films of the 2020-2025 period thus far: (1) Roman Polanski‘s J’Accuse (which premiered in Europe in late ’19 but wasn’t pirated for U.S. consumption until early ’20), (2) Sean Baker‘s Anora, (3) Joachim Trier‘s Sentimental Value, (4) Steven Zallian‘s Ripley, (5) Edward Berger‘s Conclave, (6) Steve McQueen‘s Mangrove, (7) David Fincher‘s The Killer, (8) Pedro Almodovar‘s Parallel Mothers, (9) Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard, (10) Tran Anh Hung‘s The Taste of Things (The Pot au Feu).

Second Grouping of Ten: (11) Guy Ritchie‘s The Covenant, (12) Joseph Kosinski‘s Top Gun: Maverick, (13) Hasan Hadi‘s The President’s Cake, (14) Janicza Bravo’s Zola, (15) Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, (16) Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, (17) Eva Victor’s Sorry Baby, (18) Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, (19) Bradley Cooper‘s Maestro, (20) Alexander Payne‘s The Holdovers.

Best of 2019: The Irishman, Joker, Les Miserables, The Lighthouse, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, 1917, Marriage Story, Bombshell, Parasite, The Farewell (10).

Best of 2018: Roma, Green Book, First Reformed, Cold War, Hereditary, Capernaum, Vice, Happy As Lazzaro, Filmworker, First Man, Widows, Sicario — Day of the Soldado. (12).

Best of 2017: Call Me By Your Name, Dunkirk, Lady Bird, The Square, War For The Planet of the Apes, mother!, The Florida Project. (7)

Best of 2016: Manchester By The Sea, A Bigger Splash, La La Land, The Witch, Eye in the Sky, The Confirmation, The Invitation. (6)

Best of 2015: Spotlight, The Revenant; Mad Max: Fury Road; Beasts of No Nation; Love & Mercy, Son of Saul; Brooklyn; Carol, Everest, Ant-Man; The Big Short. (10)

I’ve listened to Max Richter‘s “On The Nature of Daylight” so many times in so many films. The note progression is so slow and meditative you almost forget where it’s begun before it ends. Hard to get a handle grip, but you certainly know it when you hear it. It’s more of a vibe than a “melody.”

Hamnet, Stranger than Fiction, Shutter Island, Disconnect, Arrival, The Last of Us, Call Me By Your Name, etc.

This video has really and truly brought joy to my Thanksgiving. I’m thinking I don’t wanna eat anything now. Food might spoil the vibe.

This behavior needs it's own documentary. pic.twitter.com/dDRKZi13of

— Joey B Toonz (@joeybtoonz) November 26, 2025

James Cameron‘s 52-minute recitation of most of the creative challenges he faced and solved over the last 40-plus years….I could listen to him prattle on for hours. Why would a guy who knows so much, who’s so good at crafting high-end epics and thrillers…why would a guy this brave and industrious and gifted devote so many years to making five Avatar films? Why? Surely not for the money. He’s bigger than that.

It’s been 12 years since I last saw Kieran Darcy-Smith‘s Wish You Were Here. It’s technically not half bad…decently composed, well-edited, real-ish, moderately affecting, believably acted. Alas, I didn’t much like it because of a single maddening performance by Felicity Price, the director’s wife who has the lead female role

It’s odd how a film with a hugely irritating performance managed to stay in my mind, but it has. And now I’m watching it again on Amazon. Yes, that’s right — I’m giving it another chance.

I took my original 2013 review down during the height of the #MeToo movement (late 2017 through late ’23) for fear of someone slitting my throat.

Wish You Were Here is about the fallout from a tragic Cambodian vacation — a getaway that married, expecting parents Dave and Alice (Joel Edgerton, Price) have recently shared with Alice’s younger sister (Teresa Palmer) and her new boyfriend, Jeremy (Antony Star).

Jeremy vanished at the end of the getaway and nobody seems to know (or be able to admit) what happened, although it’s obvious that Dave knows and will eventually spill the beans by Act Three.

I’m sorry if this sounds like a primitive reaction, but Wish You Were Here is no one’s idea of a film noir.

Because the film, primarily set in Australia, is mainly about the reaction of Price’s Alice to a brief instance of infidelity that happened in Cambodia. A drunken and woozy Edgerton and Palmer got together on the beach, y’see. The kind of infidelity that happened so quickly with both parties so drunk or stoned that neither party remembers much. And the minute Alice learns of this you’re muttering “oh, Christ, here we go.”

Not that it’s wrong or unnatural for Alice to be outraged, but it becomes sooo tedious — the same piano chord played over and over. The four characters in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal were much, much better at dealing with infidelity and whatnot.

After a while I started muttering to Price, “Jesus, get over it, for God’s sake…it wasn’t planned, it was just beach sex, they were drunk and they’re both really sorry…Jesus.”

So basically we’re stuck with a horse-faced pregnant wife who can’t let this one bad thing go, and a seriously fetching and tormented sister named Steph you’d like to hang with more and a good-looking missing guy whom you’d also like hang with a bit more.

But Steph has been relegated to the sidelines and Jeremy is missing. So we’re stuck with angry Alice and conflicted, shaggy-faced Dave going through the pains of hell because he hasn’t told the truth to anyone about what really happened.

Wish You Were Here is basically a “get away from me, you fucked my sister!” movie with a side-plot about what happened in Cambodia. It’s about the cost of suppressing the truth and not coming clean, and the cost of coming clean about meaningless infidelity.

Price to Edgerton: “You effed my much more attractive sister? You loathsome animal. You contemptible hound. You think you know what marital misery is? Well, you’re going to suffer like never before. In fact, I’m so enraged that I’m going to put the audience through as much agony as you, my dear husband. We’ll all sink into the quicksand together — you, me, Jeffrey Wells, all the other people in the audience.”

I’m sorry but my Amazon viewing (it ended an hour ago) left me feeling no better than I did 12 years ago when I first saw the film at Sundance.

Reminder to all infidels: Never admit to catting around, deny it until death. Nothing good can ever come out of admitting to infidelity. This goes for Olivia Nuzzi as well.

HE to friendo a few hours ago: “That’s it — between Richard Brody’s ‘trivial baby food’ put-down and Joel Edgerton’s ‘masculinity is a word that should be thrown out’ quote, Train Dreams is all but FINISHED as a possible Best Picture nominee. Stick a fork in it.”

HE’s “Jeremiah Johnson was better” review, posted on 11.17.25.

An amusing if tough-minded 11.24 Washingtonian piece by Sylvie McNamara, based on a chat with a pair of married-but-anonymous crisis p.r. professionals, pretty much spells out the Olivia Nuzzi career–option situation, and it isn’t good.

This drama could potentially end tragically for her. I hope it doesn’t, of course, but man, right now it seems quite bad.

Especially if “American Canto”, Nuzzi’s autobiographical book that’s mostly about the RFK “digital affair” mishegoss (it pops on Tuesday, 12.2) doesn’t mention her other alleged (according to ex-boyfriend Ryan Lizza) sexual affair with a big-time politician, former South Carolina governor and onetime presidential contender Mark Sanford.

If the book ignores Sanford, “Nuzzi’s credibility is shot,” one of the p.r. sources flat-out states.

I recently noted that the difference between Nuzzi’s glancing “digital affair” with RFK, Jr. (which may or may not have included oral pleasuring) and the curiously close relationship between President Lyndon Johnson and NBC and CBS TV correspondent Nancy Dickerson in the ‘60s may not have been all that different in this or that way, but who knows?

I doubt that Johnson and Dickerson were ever as decisive (much less athletic) as was Nuzzi in her reported 2020 tryst with Sanford.

Either way Nuzzi’s unfortunate infamy has resulted in an impressionist Isabelle Brourman painting of a mostly nude Nuzzi in a forthcoming Vanity Fair issue (i.e., also next Tuesday).

To me, this seems kinda cruel if not voracious, but when there’s blood in the water, the sharks tend to go crazy.

Update: Ryan Lizza‘s latest Telos chapter just dropped (just before 4 pm eastern), and it nails Nuzzi hard for questionable journalistic ethics and behavior. The finale mentions Olivia’s portraitist, the above-mentioned Isabella (aka “Izzy”) Brourman, whom Olivia asked to surreptitiously record an encounter with 2024 candidate Donald Trump.

Here’s how the piece ends:

Read more

Pic snapped early yesterday afternoon (Tuesday, 11.25) in Port Chester…

My only quibble with Lesh is that Altamont moment in the Maysles brothers’ Gimme Shelter (‘71). Santana drummer Mike Shrieve informs the just-arriving Lesh and Grateful Dead cohort Jerry Garcia that some Hell’s Angels have been beating up on audience members. Lesh thoughtfully replies, “Doesn’t seem right, man.”

Kicking and bruising audience members doesn’t “seem” right? Hey, Phil…don’t go out on a limb!

In a just-posted 11.24 interview with IndieWire’s Ryan Lattanzio, Eyes Wide Shut dp and Criterion vandal–beast Larry Smith says that with the exception of the large-widescreen-format Spartacus and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick “only shot in one format, [which was] 1.85…that was his preferred aspect ratio.”

From The Killing to Eyes Wide Shut and (once again) Spartacus and 2001 aside, Kubrick shot every one of his films in 1.37. Some were theatrically cropped to 1.85 (Eyes Wide Shut, Full Metal Jacket) or 1.66 (Paths of Glory, Lolita, The Shining, Barry Lyndon. Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange), but they were all shot in 1.37 (including Full Metal Jacket).

Larry Smith is a bullshitter. He’s a bad, bad guy.

/p>

The late Leon Vitali to DVD Talk:

…the Movie Godz, deeply offended, will do what they can to arrange for the winner to “pay off the debt”, so to speak, by condemning him/her to star or costar in…okay, perhaps not a string of mediocre films, but at least one or two.

Ned Beatty to Peter Finch in Network: “And you…will…atone!”

I wish I could say that one current example is Jamie Lee Curtis. Her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her laboriously broad performance as an IRS agent in Everything Everywhere All At Once, a deeply despised bullshit genre hodgepodge that opened three and a half years ago (3.25.22), was an awarding that will live in infamy. I literally shouted “no!…no!” when her win was announced.

Alas, Curtis’s career has been going great guns since she won that Oscar in early ‘23. Praise for her work in The Last Showgirl, and Freakier Friday even. Not to mention a well-received guest performance as an alcoholic matriarch during The Bear’s second season. Plus her successful children’s books.

But at least she’s costarring in James L. Brooks’ Ella McCay, which is allegedly an embarrassment. (A critic friendo calls it “awful”.) The trailer tells us that Curtis wildly over-acts as Emma Mackey’s mom.

It goes without saying that the careers of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, co-creators of EEAAO, will be adversely affected by those damnable ‘23 Oscars. Okay, I don’t know that but these guys ought to suffer. They damn well should. Will they? Who knows?

Nearly three months ago I reviewed Mona Fastvold‘s The Testament of Ann Lee from the Venice Film Festival. “It’s certainly striking and, for what it’s worth, a wackazoid original,” I wrote.

“It’s a regimented, pageant-like, nutbag historical musical about Ann Lee, the eccentric Shakers founder who was into ecstatic God-praising and celibacy and fervent denial of sexuality.”

The title of the review was “Holy-Roller Madness….Indecipherable, Shitty-Looking, Audacious To A Fault.” I’m re-posting because of a recently-released trailer.

Lee was a devoted, shrewish-looking miserabalist who left northwest England, along with a couple of dozen followers, to re-settle in upstate New York (who’s ever even heard of Niskayuna?) and dedicate themselves to unmatched religious fanaticism.

How do you make a film about radical secularists who were into hymn-singing and general shrieking and, one presumes, pissing off the normies? Credit Fastvold, at least, for giving in to the crazy…for surrendering to Lee’s ecstatic mystical whateverisms, and really going for it willy-nilly.

While shooting near Budapest at the cost of a mere $10 million, Fastvold and her cast (Amanda Seyfried, Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Stacy Martin, Tim Blake Nelson, Christopher Abbott, Matthew Beard) and crew went mad with the Shaker spirit, and you have to respect that.

Congrats to composer Daniel Blumberg and choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall. The madness clearly engulfed them also, and they’ve created otherworldly asylum vibes.

The movie pulsates with extreme this and that — extreme behavior, extreme denial of life, extreme visual murkiness despite being shot in 70mm, the embrace of puritanical madness. All of the terrible spiritual suppressive stuff that has given old-time Christian religion such a bad name for centuries is abundant.

Plus I couldn’t understand a single word of it, and for whatever reason there were no English subtitles, which every Venice Film Festival entry has brandished so far.

I knew early on that The Testament of Ann Lee would almost certainly give me pain because Fastvold cowrote it with husband Brady Corbet, whose direction of The Brutalist made people like myself writhe in agony last year, and whom I regard as a kind of louche anti-Christ of modern cinema. I knew, in short, that the Corbet influence would be bad news, and boy, was it ever!

HE to industry friendo after last night’s press screening: “Fastvold’s Shaker film is mute nostril agony. A journo pally concurs — ‘Awful’. I noticed five to six walkouts, heard a couple of boos when it ended.”

Friendo to HE: “It sounds like this year’s Women Talking.”

HE to friendo: “It’s much, MUCH worse than Women Talking. Somebody has called it The Brutalist: Folie a Deux.”

The real Ann Lee, who lived until age 48, was rather ugly, and Seyfried (who turns 40 in December) is, of course, beautiful, so the film’s realism is lacking in this regard.

And as long as hotness is on the table, 35-year-old Stacy Martin, who plays Jane Wardley, a British born co-founder of the Shakers, is way too attractive to play a woman who’s into a no-sex, God-and-only-God lifestyle…one look at Martin and you’re thinking “what is she doing with this bunch?”

Fastvold: “I thought Ann Lee deserved something grandiose and wonderful. How many stories have we seen about male icons on a grand scale, again and again and again? Can we not see one story about a woman like this?”

Seyfried on her Shaker singing: “A lot of it was animal sounds as opposed to melodic sounds.”