July/August Round-Up 2026

Evil Dead Burn(7/11/2026)

The Evil Dead is probably one of the strangest horror franchises around with the original film being this super underground cult film which was nonetheless successful enough to inspire a pair of larger sequels and propel its director to the big time but never really big enough to that much of an ongoing concern like, say, Halloween.  In fact there was a twenty year gap between Army of Darkness and the 2013 remake and another ten year gap between that and the 2023 reboot Evil Dead Rise which seems to have finally turned this into an ongoing series in the 21^st century with the first follow-up being Evil Dead Burn, which I think is supposed to be a direct sequel to its predecessor but it has a different cast and tells something of a separate story about a rather dysfunctional adult family who come together for the funeral of a recently deceased son, which is awkward for his widow.  Soon it becomes apparent that these are the descendants of Benjamin Price, the scholar who was responsible for the original study of the Necronomicon and made the recordings that set off the trouble in the very first movie.  Now, my big complaint about Evil Dead Rise was that it was a little too effective for its own good at making its central family likable and making your root for them and once the horror cruelty started happening to them it just seemed kind of mean and unpleasant… this sequel does not have that problem.  Outside of the “final girl” the family here is kind of awful and while I wouldn’t exactly say they “deserve” what they get I certainly don’t mind them being in the middle of a violent horror film.  In broad strokes this is pretty similar the last film, which itself hued closely to the formula of the first movie and its remake: a group of people get trapped in a building (in this case a dilapidated country house), the infection/curse starts going around, and the deadites start killing people off in violent ways while taunting them.  So this isn’t the most creative of entries (none of them have been since Army of Darkness) but what it does have going for it is execution.  Sam Raimi has been using this franchise as something of a farm league for up and coming new horror directors like Fede Álvarez and Lee Cronin and he seems to have found another strong prospect with French filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček, who clearly has something of an eye for clever camera compositions and choreography and also for depicting rather brutal violence.  I’m not going to tell you that his work here is “next level” or something but it more than gets the job done and will probably satisfy people who liked the last couple of Evil Dead movies but might be less satisfying for people who like the series when it was a bit more comedically minded.  This isn’t a movie that’s going to change the world or even the franchise it’s from and it has some problems including some kind of drab color grading and a questionable “final boss” but I’d say the strengths overcame the weaknesses for the most part and it was a pretty fun sensory experience for horror fans.
***1/2 out of Five

Rose of Nevada(7/19/2026)

Mark Jenkin is one of the more unusual filmmakers working today as he makes sort of quasi-experimental films that end to be rooted in the Cornwall region of England.  I mainly knew him from his 2022 ghost story Enys Men, which is set on a largely uninhabited island which may have a slightly haunted past.  His new film Rose of Nevada is likewise doing something of a homespun twist on a genre, in this case a sort of Twilight Zone inflected science fiction (maybe) involving time travel.  It follows a young man who takes a job as a deckhand on a small fishing boat called the “Rose of Nevada” which has re-appeared after seemingly having disappeared years ago and when the boat comes back he’s surprised to learn that he’s seemingly come back some twenty years earlier than from where he left.  This doesn’t seem to be traditional time travel however, there’s some sort of weirder magic at play and it’s also unclear how much of what’s happening while in this past is going to affect the future, and to some extent the film’s style discourages you from engaging with it the same way you’d engage with something like Looper.  Like his last two films, Jenkin shot this film on a hand cranked 16mm camera and added all sound in post-production, which was choice that made a lot of sense in Enys Men, which was straight forwardly a period piece set in the 70s with minimal dialogue and which was meant to have someone of a found footage feeling but it seems like more of an odd choice here.  It does capture some of the grit of the setting but adds a layer of anachronism to a film which seems to be predominantly set in the 21^st Century.  I will also say that the film took a while to grab me which is a bit of a problem because there’s some in retrospect pretty important set-up in the opening scenes that I probably should have paid a bit more attention to.  That having been said Jenkin does still very much conjure a feeling of unease with this movie that ultimately builds into something of an interesting morality paradox even if I think this style works a bit better on a pure mood piece than it does for something that requires as many plot machinations as a time travel film.
***1/2 out of Five

I Want Your Sex(8/2/2026)

Gregg Araki is a filmmaker I haven’t seen a ton of films from but I feel like I get the gist of his deal, he was like a Gen X John Waters who makes kind of wild sex comedies to scare the normies, but does it with a little more professionalism and formal skill and who has also made more serious fare from time to time.  His latest film I Want Your Sex would seem to be something of a return to his usual shtick but looks to bring it into the post-#MeToo world of Gen Z.  The film looks at a young college graduate played by Cooper Hoffman who gets a job working for an eccentric artist played by Olivia Wilde who has a very, uh, provocative “sex positive” demeanor and who finds herself crossing various boundaries with the Hoffman character leading to much mishegoss.  This whole business of gender swapping sexual harassment has been something of a go-to for movies that want to run thought experiments about questions of whether workplace sexual mores are valid and I’d say that’s not a particularly proud tradition, a lot of them seem like thinly veiled attempts to defend sexual harassment by suggesting it’s actually kind of sexy.  I wouldn’t say this movie is doing that (better HR policies at this place most certainly would have saved all involved from a lot of trouble and pain) but I wouldn’t say that it’s 100% not doing that either.  Araki clearly views this Hoffman character as being more repressed than the horndogs that populated his earlier films but the character isn’t fully virginal either; the guy has a live in girlfriend and while his sex life with her isn’t great it’s not non-existent either and he doesn’t seem to be remotely put off by his bosses erotically charged art either.  He’s really only prudish compared to Wilde’s proudly “slutty” character who has something of a dominatrix aspect to her demeanor inside and outside the bedroom.  So I’d say the message here is pretty muddled but fortunately the movie does have a lot going for it just as a straightforward sex comedy.  Wilde and Hoffman are both quite striking in their roles and tonally the film captures exactly that tone of heightened absurdity that I think Boots Reilly tends to shoot for but often misses by overstuffing his movies.  So I was certainly entertained and intrigued by this movie even if I can’t entirely get behind its message on a first viewing and that’s probably enough for me to view it as a “win.”
***1/2 out of five

The Samurai and the Prisoner (8/8/2026)

It’s probably stupid but I’m probably never going to hear the name Kiyoshi Kurosawa without at least for a beat to two thinking about the name Akira Kurosawa even though the two directors are not related and their movies for the most part are not very similar.  That’s about as logical as comparing Ken Russell with David O. Russell, but the mind does what it does.  Well, for the first time Kiyoshi is almost inviting the comparison by making a full on historical epic with samurai and I’d say that he very much holds his own in the milieu.  The Samurai and the Prisoner is a work of historical fiction focusing in on a figure named Araki Murashige, who is explained in an opening title card to be a feudal lord in charge of Arioka Castle during a siege by the warlord Oda Nobunaga, who Murashige was previously allied but then switch sides to an alliance with one of his rivals.  The aforementioned title card points out that to this date there’s a gap in the historical record as to why Murashige switched sides and the circumstances of why and this film speculates about that.  Set over the course of a year the film tends to focus on the relationship between Murashige and a prisoner he takes early in the film somewhat in violation of the bushido code which would have required him to execute this man (an outcome that the man himself preferred for the safety of his family), one of many signs of pacifism that Murashige exhibits that are contrary to the usual practice of his times and which have decidedly mixed results for all involved and which could be viewed as something of a meditation on the role of force in leadership more broadly.  The film however is also something of a murder mystery, or rather a series of murder mysteries, which is kind of an odd structure that yields slightly mixed results.  Still, the drama here is mostly fascinating with a lot of dense court intrigue that we get in rapid fire succession.  There’s a lot of history here and in some ways the audience (especially a western audience unlikely to be familiar with these figures and this world) is kind of dropped into the deep end but we do mostly get what’s needed to follow along if we’re paying attention.  I’m not going to say this is quite up there with the best samurai movies of the golden age of Japanese cinema but it’s definitely a cool drama that does some interesting thing with the form.
**** out of Five

Tony(8/10/2026)

The death of food personality of Anthony Bourdain elicited several reactions and one of the more surprisingly impactful one was a tweet sent by writer Kyrell Grant on June 8^th 2018 which asserted that Bourdain had “big dick energy,” a tweet that is said to have been the springboard to the popularization of the phrase.  That sometimes misunderstood phrase refers to a kind of unflashy demeanor exerted by calmly confident people who are not, uh, compensating for shortcomings.  I bring this up because the guy that comment was directed at was the Bourdain people knew in 2018, the guy in his 50s and 60s who people saw on his travel shows, but it’s very unlikely to be a complement directed at the 19 year old Bourdain we see in this bildungsroman take on the guy’s early life in which he first found himself working at a small Cape Cod restaurant.  So this very much isn’t a “birth to death” biopic, it’s a “the one summer that molded this future notable person” biopic… so, like, The Motorcycle Diaries but for a dude who filmed himself going to restaurants instead of a future revolutionary.  This genre is usually prone to being a bit simplistic in their outlook; the movie gives the impression that this guy matured significantly over three months into becoming something a lot closer to the guy we used to know but anyone who’s read “Kitchen Confidential” will know that he was still a bit of a fuckboy well after that point and spent years being pretty wild and irresponsible long after that point.  That said, you don’t really need to know or engage with the Bourdain of it all to enjoy this movie, in fact I think it may well hold up better if you just view it as a coming of age film unto itself without worrying too much about the future of the famous figure in question.  It seems to captures that Cape Cod feel pretty well and the dynamics of stressful kitchen work (a trope popularized by Bourdain’s book) seem well captured.  Perfectly decent little movie but I can’t say this ever really felt particularly special and I’ll also say that this feels like a rather dull direction for Blackberry director Matt Johnson to take his career in.
*** out of Five

The End of Oak Street(8/14/2026)

David Robert Mitchell is a director that in retrospect feels like something of a precursor to people like Ari Astor who got a start in indie-horror and then leveraged the success of his profitable debut (It Follows) in order to make a crazy freakout of a movie called Under the Silver Lake.  The moneymen do not seem to have been all that forgiving of that movie’s box office trouble however so after an eight year wait he’s finally come back and he’s done so with a much more commercial project: a high concept thriller in which a suburban neighborhood gets transported (through never explained magic) back in time to the Cretaceous era where they must survive attacks by dinosaurs that quickly start walking onto their newly relocated street.  So, that’s a fun premise and there’s certainly some fun to be had here.  The early 80s suburban setting is clearly meant to be a pastiche of the signature Amblin style that was also recreated in the likes of Super 8 and “Strange Things” and is in some ways starting to be a little overdone but this is about as good as either of those projects at recreating that aesthetic and it remains a fun milieu.  I will say though that once the “adventure” kicks off I was a little surprised at how lonely the film gets.  “Oak Street” and its surrounding seems like a pretty big place but we don’t tend to see a ton of its denizens, or if we do it’s only one or two at a time.  Instead the focus is pretty squarely on this family and in typical Spielbergian fashion the parents have a pretty rocky marriage.  But we’re not really here for domestic drama, we’re here for dinosaurs and the creature scenes here are pretty alright.  I will say the film seems to be trying to go along with recent scientific consensus that dinosaurs were bird-like creatures that likely had feathers and that looks… kind of silly to my eyes.  Apologies to paleontologists but I think we should stick to printing the scaly legend on this one.  Still, dinosaur attacks are dinosaur attacks and it was kind of cool seeing David Robert Mitchell trying to out-Spielberg Spielberg with his own dino flick and some of the time travel shenanigans here are also fun.  Could have done without the epilogue though and I’ve got to say that at the end of the day this is a pretty shallow B-movie at its absolute best so I do hope that Mitchell has something more interesting up his sleeve for later.
*** out of Five

The Rivals of Amziah King(8/16/2026)

The Rivals of Amziah King, Andrew Patterson’s follow-up to his 2020 debut The Vast of Night, is a movie that’s had a somewhat tortured production and release cycle.  The film needed to get a special waiver to film during the WGA/SAG strike, there were disputes with producers about final cut, and while it was praised when it premiered at South by Southwest it wasn’t able to find a distributor and is now being given a very small scale theatrical release by an upstart company and is probably going to have a hard time finding an audience.  I’m glad to have finally seen the movie as it does have a lot going for it but also has some clear issues which are probably why people weren’t rushing to release this.  The film is set somewhere in rural Arkansas and the “Amziah King” of the title is a beekeeper played by Matthew McConaughey who seems to be what you’d call a “pillar of his community” amongst his neighbors and things kick in when he reunites with a young woman named Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass) who he’d foster parented when she was younger and offers her a job on his farm.  The film starts as something of a character study that showcases this community while focusing on the healing process for all involved… and then half way through there’s a somewhat jarring transition and the movie turns into a sort of neo-noir thriller that strongly resembles Winter’s Bone.  So, you’ve kind of got two different movies, both with their strengths and weakness, kind of awkwardly mashed together in a way that gives the audience whiplash and kind of undermines both.  Angelina LookingGlass’ performance is unfortunately part of the problem, she’s very well suited for the first part of the movie but much less well suited for the second and she isn’t really able to pull off the transition between the two, but I’m not entirely sure anyone could given that the script and the filmmaking is kind of failing her in this regard.  Still, there are some very good qualities to both halves just the same; the first half has a lot of folksy charm and the second half is a peak into the under-examined seedy underbelly that exists in a lot of rural America and the movie has a pretty good visual eye and populates itself with some interesting side characters.  Ultimately it’s kind of messy but also a movie I can’t be too mad at and there’s enough good there to carry itself over the finish line, albeit with a noticeable limp.
*** out of Five

Coyote Vs. Acme(8/23/2026)

The live-action/animation hybrid Loony Tunes film has become something of a cause célèbre among online film enthusiasts because it looked for a while like Warner Brothers was going to permanently shelve the finished film in order to turn it into a tax write-off rather than release the film, a wildly unpopular practice that Warner executive David Zaslav has become infamous for.  Fortunately the situation was salvaged after several years by an indie company called Ketchup Entertainment who is now distributing the film and, well, given how many posts I made taunting Zaslav it sure would have felt hypocritical to not go see the movie when it was made available even if a Looney Tunes movie isn’t necessarily something that would have had me rushing to theaters in a vacuum.  Fortunately it turns out the movie really is good!  The idea here is to basically dramatize the longtime half-joking conversation people have been having for years: “why doesn’t Wile E. Coyote sue the Acme corporation for all the defective products that keep failing to foil the roadrunner?”  Well in this movie, which takes place in a Roger Rabbit-esque world where “toons” walk amongst normal humans, the coyote does exactly that by hiring an ambulance chasing lawyer played by Will Forte to file a suit against this corporation and the investigation ends up uncovering a larger conspiracy this company is engaged in.  Obviously this is all meant to be something of a parody of courtroom dramas and corporate conspiracy movies with the premise of a mute accident prone bipedal canine going through all this legal rigmarole being rather comical and I almost wish the film had leaned even harder into courtroom accuracy just to heighten that comic juxtaposition.  That’s probably where this gets a little odd as a product; most of this courtroom drama parody (and accompanying anti-corporate messaging) is probably going to go well over the heads of most children and yet a live-action/animation hybrid Looney Tunes movie is going to still be a tough sell to adults.  If I had to guess that’s probably why Warner Brothers panicked and tried to (literally) write this one off.  It’s tempting to try to over-rate the movie because of its production history and I don’t want to oversell it too much, but on its own merits I do think this is a fun and humorous family movie.  Aside from the aforementioned Who Framed Roger Rabbit? the best “comp” to this is probably Akiva Schaffer’s Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, which was also a movie that tried to do something surprisingly ambitious and meta with a children’s property and got a lot of plaudits for it.  That was a cool movie but I’m not sure it’s one that’s really stuck with me and I’m not sure that this one’s quite one for the ages either, still, really cool use of a classic and frequently disrespected IPs out there and the fact that this solid movie could have been disappeared for crass business reasons is downright scary.
***1/2 out of Five

The Dog Stars(8/30/2026)

Ridley Scott’s lengthy streak of making rather large scale movies at a wildly fast pace continues this year with The Dog Stars, which I guess is a relatively “small” movie by Scott’s standards but which is nonetheless a fairly costly movie with something like a hundred million dollar price-tag.  The studio doesn’t seem to have a lot of confidence in getting that budget back and seems to have kind of dumped the movie into theaters with minimal marketing and while I do think the movie is better than that fate would suggest I’d also be inclined to admit there’s not a whole lot here to excite audiences.  The film is set in a post-apocalyptic future and follows a guy played by Jacob Elordi who has a bit of an advantage over other survivors because he’s a pilot who owns a small plane and can use that to fly into the city (Denver) for scavenging while living on a rural compound with a survivalist played by Josh Brolin and the film follows him as he considers breaking his routine and seeking out other settlements.  As tends to be the case with Ridley Scott’s movies this has some pretty well executed world-building and renders the world of this post-apocalypse pretty effectively and gives a pretty good procedural overview of this guy’s life.  However, while I think these are well realized I don’t think they’re pretty creative.  Since roughly The Road we’ve seen tons of visions of the post-Apocalypse (“The Last of Us,” The Quiet Place, “Station 11,” 28 Years Later…, “Fallout,” “Paradise,” etc) and this really just doesn’t have much new to add to the conversation.  On the other hand, I’d say that Scott still has some juice behind the camera for the most part and while the movie doesn’t make the greatest case for itself it doesn’t really have massive gaping flaws beyond a kind of messy third act.  So I wouldn’t say the movie is a total bust by any means and it may well prove to hold up a little better later on when people are less inclined to compare it directly with the competition within the genre that its up against these days.
*** out of Five

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma(8/13/2026)

Jane Schoenbrun may or may not be the filmmaker the world wants right now but they’re definitely the one the world needs.  Schoenbrun is a filmmaker for whom there aren’t really easy comparisons even though they’re not exactly shy about showing their influences.  They seem to have a rather uniquely millennial voice informed by pop culture touchstones and puts together these rather “meta” movies about people whose lives are as informed by media as they are by anything else in their lives and they’ve managed to establish all this with just two (now three) movies which seem to form something of a trilogy.  Their first film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, was an experimental film seemingly about a teenager’s obsession with an online “creepypasta” which maybe lacked a certain visual oomph.  That was rectified with their second film I Saw the TV Glow, which was a trans allegory about a young person’s obsession with a 90s TV show.  That movie is to date their magnum opus and likely one of the best movies of the 2020s and its critical success has set expectations quite high for their follow-up, a film called Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, another movie about a character’s possibly dangerous obsession with a “screen” but this time around it’s the cinema screen and this time around it’s the pop culture of the 1980s that gets interrogated rather than the 90s or 2000s.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma centers around a fictional horror franchise called the “Camp Miasma” movies which, like lots of slasher movie series, began in the early 80s and then burned out after numerous sequels and is now being considered for a “reboot.”  The catch is that this series is now considered “problematic” and the original film has a transphobic twist akin to the one featured at the end of the 1983 film Sleepaway Camp (it otherwise basically seems to be a subtweet of the Friday the 13^th movies).  Because of that twist the studio has hired a young queer non-binary filmmaker named Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) in order to reboot the franchise, an assignment that suits her because she saw the original Camp Miasma at a very young age and feels a strange connection to it.  As part of her process in finding an “angle” into the material Williams decides to take road trip to meet with the original star of the first movie, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), who purchased the summer camp where that movie was filmed and has turned it into a house.  The meeting the two have begins pretty awkwardly with Presley skeptical about Williams’ overly intellectual take on the property but the two do come to find some sort of understanding, but this becomes complicated as this property seems to have a strange hold over both of them and it starts to become unclear just how fictional the property even is in the first place.

Between seven different Scream movies, The Cabin in the Woods, and stuff like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon I’d kind of thought that the well was close to dry on the topic of slasher movie deconstruction but this film definitely managed to tap a new vein of material from the genre, in part from looking into what women and AFAB non-binary people get out of the genre.  Like the other movies in the “screen trilogy” this is interested in the effect that this media has on the viewer but not in the old “scary movies make people violent” pearl clutching way.  On the contrary this is about how the women who are often the murder victims as well as objects for the male gaze in these movies and the film’s protagonist, who became obsessed with the movie at a very young age, perhaps empathized with protagonist a little too much to the point where she equates sex with violence on some subconscious level.  This is a pretty complicated psychosexual dynamic to try to convey and the movie tackles it pretty directly.  Beyond that the film is generally a bit more overtly “meta” about the film series at the center including some (slightly dated) industry satire about the central filmmaker being assigned to the project for “woke” reasons and a very amusing opening credits sequence involving newspaper clippings and ephemera from the fictional franchise in question.  I might nitpick that the film is a bit inconsistent about just how successful the Camp Miasma franchise is supposed to have been in this world and about the Anderson character’s exact role in the film within a film (was she a “final girl” or did she get killed off?), but that’s not too big a deal.

So thematically it’s not hard at all to connect this with Schoenbrun’s other films but the form it takes is pretty different.  This is a much more comedic film than I Saw the TV Glow both in terms of its film industry satire and just generally the way the characters carry themselves.  At its center is kind of an odd meeting of minds between this Gen Z director and this Gen X actress and it takes a while for this relationship to really come together.  I was initially a bit put off by Anderson’s performance as Billy Presley, which is kind of broad, and while I liked Einbinder here this work isn’t too far removed from her work on the show “Hacks” which is notably also about an intergenerational meeting of minds between feminine people in entertainment.  It’s probably a bit of an open question how much Einbinder’s character is meant to be something of a stand-in for Schoenbrun themself given that both are experimental queer filmmakers who’ve suddenly gotten a higher profile gig and have similar media obsessions.  In fact it would not shock me at all to learn that some producer somewhere actually did try to offer a Sleepaway Camp reboot to Schoenbrun only to have them propose some crazy thing like this that said producer was not looking for.  That said if this character is meant to be a Schoenbrun self-insert it’s a very self deprecating one as this character is depicted as being a rather neurotic and kind of annoying young character, a sort of parody of the kind of person who would be part of a polycule, but despite that the film does still take this character’s emotional arc fairly seriously.

To say the least this movie plays really differently than I Saw the TV Glow does.  Deep down there’s a very similar melancholy here but it’s being processed by an older character, one who’s a bit more self aware and who’s in more of a position to work through their obsessions and traumas and as a result also by someone who’s more able to laugh at themselves a little.  In that sense it provides a relatively hopeful ending to the “screen trilogy” if that trilogy is even really a thing.  That said, call it bias for drama but at the end of the day I don’t see myself ever quite loving this movie like I do something as wrenching as I Saw the TV Glow, that movie was especially singular and it really caught lightning in a bottle.  On some level I’m tempted to hold this one to in lesser esteem just as a matter of comparison, but when I stop and think about it I still think this is quite a bit bolder and more interesting than most of the movies we see week to week.  Even for its occasional bits of messiness this still has some fairly powerful things to say not just about how we interact with media but also what inspires media and how potentially unsettling and offensive ideas are kind of always going to be out in the ether and it’s up to filmmakers to channel them in interesting, creative, and ethical ways.  The movie has its imperfections but I feel like I’m willing to take them for something that’s this willing to challenge its audience and be as watchable and entertaining and funny while it’s doing it.
****1/2 out of Five

Crash Course: Finishing the First Hundred Criterion Spines

I’ve been fascinated by the Criterion Collection since roughly the early 2000s.  I can’t put my finger on exactly how early I started paying attention to them but I can say I remember a time when there were less than 200 DVDs in the collection and that means I’ve been looking at that list of early titles for the better part of 25 years and I’ve particularly had a sort of fixation on the first 100 films that managed to get a spine number.  These selections were in many ways just as random as any other section of the collection.  I’m sure there were certain obvious titles like Seven Samurai or The 400 Blows or The Seventh Seal that they licensed quickly in order to make their brand clear but then there are other selections that seem to just be random quirks of licensing availability like “Fishing With John” or The Most Dangerous Game that seem to be borderline worthy of the collection at all.  Anyway, through the sheer amount of time I’ve had I’ve actually seen most of the movies from this span of the collection but I never made a concerted effort to check them all off, in part because the film Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom was sitting there at number 17 and I wasn’t just going to casually watch that thing to check it off a list.  Well, I did finally get that out of the way earlier this year and that leaves me with just six movies left to watch to say I’ve seen the first 100 Criterion spines and I think I’m going to try to do that this month.  Should be fun but I will note that there’s a reason I haven’t been rushing to see some of these so we’ll have to see if any of them are more to my taste than I expected.

Spine #38 Branded to Kill (1967)

Seijun Suzuki is a director I’ve long had trouble with.  If you dig into my Letterboxd account you’ll find a one star review of his film Tokyo Drifter (which is Criterion spine #39, and is thus presented as a companion piece of this) and I have my doubts that I’d stand by that review if I watched it again, partly because I’m a much kinder grader these days and partly just because I’m more inclined to admire the audacity and filmmaking that someone like Suzuki brings to the table even if it doesn’t speak to me and that’s kind of where I am with this next film of his.  In fact I’ve had a bit of a journey with this film as well.  Way back when, when I was just getting into cinema I tried watching this because I liked the title and thought it had cool cover art on the OG Criterion DVD but I think I only made it about twenty minutes in before turning it off, baffled at what I was watching.  That feels weird in retrospect, it’s certainly a weird movie but I’ve seen much weirder in the years since and I would have thought there was enough sex and violence here to keep me interested even if the storytelling was chaotic and the editing was kind of Godardian.  In fact, understanding the wave of global “New Wave” filmmaking was going on in the late 60s is kind of essential to understanding this.  The story, which is at its core just standard crime thriller hokum, is decidedly not the point.  This is more about style, one could call it “pure cinema” and it’s become influential in various ways.  The basic story (which, granted, is not the point) bears some clear similarities to David Fincher’s The Killer and that scene in Ghost Dog where someone gets shot through his sink pipes comes from this.  So, I am more equipped to process this now but… I don’t know, I think I’m still kind of allergic to this director.  The whole thing is just so chaotic and while it’s consistently “cool” I still like there to be a bit more of a backbone to the movies I watched so I’m glad that the best elements of this movie have been mined by other more conventional films that work better for me.
**1/2 out of Five

Spine #50 And the Ship Sails On (1983)

Long ago I’d been warned off of Federico Fellini’s late works with the rule of thumb that was handed down to me being that 1974’s Amarcord was sort of the end of his plateau and that it was mostly downhill from there.  That being said one of the earliest Fellinis in the criterion collection by spine number is this film he made in 1983, well outside of the ostensible imperial phase and having finally seen it I’m starting to question the advice I was given or perhaps speculate that I over interpreted it back when I heard it because this has a lot going for it.  The film is set on an ocean liner setting sail right on the eve of World War I and it’s kind of meant to look at the decadence and frivolity of the bourgeois classes of the per-war era.  The film feels a bit aimless in its opening sections (which probably could have used some cuts) but the film comes to life in its second half once the ocean liner is forced to rescue a bunch of Balkan refugees from a shipwreck, much to the disgust of the rich people on board who think that sailing with these people is beneath them.  That starts a neat conflict but this isn’t necessarily some Marxist tract about class conflict and is instead more of an almost nostalgic elegy to a more innocent time (albeit on with its blind spots) and this reminded me a lot of Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel to the point where I suspect it was a direct influence.  For that matter the visuals here, which involve a lot of elaborate and knowingly sets and costumes and hair stylings also give me pretty big Wes Anderson vibes, that sense of colorful whimsy is definitely there.  So by the end of the film I was pretty into it but that slow first half does weigh it down for me a bit and I can also see why this maybe felt a bit out of place coming out in the year of our lord nineteen eighty three and might have felt a bit like Fellini almost doing a pastiche of his circus-like style, but on the other hand maybe he was just being taken for granted, not unlike the aforementioned Wes Anderson is today.
***1/2 out of Five

Spine #71 The Magic Flute (1975)

Ingmar Bergman was a very prolific filmmaker with something like forty films under his belt which you’d think would keep him awfully busy but he actually had a whole other career working as a stage director around Sweden.  Those two careers finally collided late into Bergman’s film career when he opted to make a film out of a production of Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute.”  This is kind of a tricky film to categorize because it’s essentially a filmed version of a stage production but I don’t think the production in question was ever actually performed in front of an audience and that this was actually all staged for the camera even though everything that’s artificial about the theater is front and center.  The sets are clearly matte painting type things and there aren’t any “VFX” here (one of the first things we see is an attack by a dragon, which looks like a dude in a mascot suit) but the staging clearly choreographed with the camera in mind and we get a full array of close-ups and whatnot which can only be captured if you are unconcerned with getting A/V equipment in the way of an audience.  So this kind of is and isn’t a different beast from, say, the kinds of “pro-shoots” you see of Broadway productions and the like.  The production here in general seems pretty charming but it should be noted that “The Magic Flute” itself is kind of famously a lighthearted and kind of silly opera bolstered by music by an over-qualified composer and I can’t say I got particularly wrapped up in the storytelling here.  I’m also not going to say I’m terribly qualified to assess the skills of the various performers here, to be frank opera singing all kind of sounds the same to me.  So this movie was probably never really going to be “my jam” but if you are into opera the filmmaking here is quite well done and I can see why this might be something of a gold standard for how to film a stage production.
*** out of Five

Spine #77 And God Created Woman (1956)

Many years ago, before there was a Criterion Channel and even before there was a FilmStruck, the Criterion Collection tested the streaming waters by licensing some of Janus’ movies out to a sub-channel on the then fairly new streaming service Hulu.  Notably at that time you could sort movies on that service by different criteria like alphabetical sorting or sorting by run time and most notably sorting by popularity.  I remember this because when I sorted Hulu’s Criterion movies by popularity the number one movie was not one of the stalwarts like Seven Samurai or The Seventh Seal, no, it was Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman.  Why?  Almost certainly because the thumbnail had a naked woman on it.  I don’t remember the number two movie when ranked by popularity but it appeared to be popular for similar reasons.  But in many ways this is appropriate because despite whatever artistic merits the film had it likely became famous in the first place because of a salacious title and advertising campaign.  This is a movie that would have been considered very sexually open and salacious, probably even within European cinema, when it came out back in 1956 but there are still certainly limits to how much skin is in this (likely to the disappointment of many a Hulu user in the late 2000s.)  The film opens with a scene of Bridget Bardot tanning nude in the sun but you only see her from the side and the film uses angles and strategically placed objects throughout to avoid ever entirely showing you the most explicit of body parts.  Still, the sexuality baked into this story (about an eighteen year old orphan getting into a strange love triangle with two brothers) is daring unto itself and it especially brought to life by problematic fave Brigitte Bardot, who was married to Vadim at the time, and this movie was her big breakout as an international sex symbol and really pops from the screen whenever she’s on it here.  Vadim also brings some style to the proceeding, shooting the film in Technicolor widescreen, which was probably a slightly unconventional choice for this type of movie during this era and that brings a degree of professionalism and legitimacy to the whole thing.  Vadim would divorce Bardot shortly after the release of this film and eventually married Jane Fonda and made Barbarella with her which suggests that this guy had quite the aptitude for wooing iconic women who are out of his league and a unique interest in, uh, displaying them to the world.  He’s definitely not one of the greatest talents of the golden age of world cinema but he’s an interesting enough side figure of the era and this movie holds a similar status; something worth knowing about but probably not one of the greats itself.
***1/2 out of Five

Spine #81 Variety Lights (1951)

In 1963 Federico Fellini released what many feel to be his magnum opus: the unusually titled 8½.  That title referred to the number of films that Fellini had made up to that point and that total included a “half film” in part because of this movie, Fellini’s feature debut but one that he co-directed in collaboration with another filmmaker named Alberto Lattuada.  Lattuada is much less famous than Fellini but is he’s still a respected director with some classics like Mafioso under his belt.  It’s not known exactly how the two divided work on this film but at the end of the day it’s generally viewed more as the beginning of Fellini’s career and I’m probably better equipped to view it in that context without thinking too much about Lattuada, and the film definitely feels of a piece with Fellini’s work rather than some exception diluted by some other guy’s contributions.  The film is set in the world of Italian vaudeville and in some ways feels like a bit of a precursor to the circus troupe we see in La Strada, but these characters are given a much less interesting or dramatic plotline.  In a lot of ways this is kind of like one of those “backstage musicals” from the early sound era, but obviously this isn’t a musical and while you do occasionally see the vaudeville style acts they aren’t really meant to be a particular source of entertainment here.  If Fellini hadn’t gone on to be a major artist later on I have my doubts this movie would be particularly widely seen today but that shouldn’t be too much of an insult because it’s still a decent little movie for what it is and was as good of a place for the guy to start as anything.
*** out of Five

Spine #92 A Fiend Without a Face

Criterion has always taken it as something of a mission to represent a large variety of genres and film types, which often leads to some kind of unexpected choices that baffle people who’ve reduced the collection to a certain kind of arthouse cinema.  Right now we’re seeing some bafflement at their decision to release a physical version of K-Pop Demon Hunters but they’ve always been doing stuff like this going back to their infamous decision to put out Armageddon on DVD.  This instinct does not, however, always involve huge budget Hollywood blockbusters like that and it sometimes leads to even more baffling choices, such as the decision to make one of their earliest DVD releases this cheesy science fiction film about sentient brains trying to kill people.  This was one of those unofficially paired releases the company sometimes does alongside spine number 91, which is the much more famous 1958 produced sci-fi/horror B-movie The Blob.  In reality the (future) Criterion release this has more in common with is their “Monsters and Madmen” boxed set (spine 364), which is a collection of four films also produced by Richard and/or Alex Gordon and in retrospect they might have been better off saving this for that.  The film itself is a functional enough B-movie with a lot of the strengths and weaknesses of the form.  It’s an unpretentious production with some fairly stock actors and cheap sets but it notably some kind of interesting (if low budget) visual effects involving stop motion brains (some of them with spinal cords) killing people and that’s kind of neat.  Does the movie belong in the Criterion Collection?  Probably not by my metrics, and I’m not sure I’ve gotten much else from the Godons’ movies either and I’m not sure how much of a renaissance these releases provided for those guys either, so maybe this is just kind of a quirk of one of their programers’ taste, who knows.  Regardless, if you set aside the Criterion baggage this movie is mostly fine for what it is and I’m okay with it.
**1/2 out of Five

In Conclusion

So, I’ve finally crossed off all of the first 100 Criterion spines (including that weird Beastie Boys music video anthology, which I watched all of via Youtube).  Did I learn anything from this?  No, not really.  Ultimately it was just kind of an excuse to watch a grab bag of movies whose titles have been nagging at me for a while and which I wanted an excuse to cross off.  There was definitely some decent stuff here though nothing too revelatory, there are reasons I’d avoided most of them and I can’t say they defied my expectations too much.  And the Ship Sails On… was probably my favorite of the bunch, that definitely clashed with its reputation as second rate Fellini and it did make me a bit more curious to check out some of that guy’s later work, most of the rest of the movie were kind of just what I expected.  I don’t plan on following this up with further explorations of Criterion spine number sets, firstly because there aren’t any other stretches with this few to cross off and secondly just because nothing else in the collection has gnawed at me as much over the years.  This was fun for the most part though.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day(7/30/2026)

There’s been a lot of talk as of late about MCU-fatigue and superhero-fatigue more broadly at theaters and at this point it’s pretty close to undeniable.  Just look at Supergirl, that movie had problems but it wasn’t terrible or even particularly “bad” in my eyes.  If it had come out in 2018 it would have had no problem opening big and doing decent business regardless but in 2026 it flopped hard.  Stuff like Thunderbolts and Fantastic Four: First Steps also struggled so clearly the days in which a Marvel or DC logo ensured a hit are probably done… however, there are complications to this narrative.  There appear to be certain top shelf characters that can still draw crowds regardless of how much trouble their “cinematic universes” are in.  People still showed up for James Gunn’s Superman and they also still showed up for Deadpool Vs. Wolverine.  These movies had most of the “easter egg” stuff these movies usually have but the people making them seem to have understood that these were in some ways “bigger” than the brand and can still put up huge numbers even when people are otherwise disillusioned by the rest of the genre.  It would seem that this dynamic goes double when it comes to the character of Spider-Man, who seems to be particularly bulletproof.  The Spider-Verse films are far and away the most popular animated spinoffs in all of franchise media and the last Tom Holland starring Spider-Man movie broke every record imaginable despite being released during a big COVID surge and by all accounts this new installment is not going to be diminished in the slightest by the waning interest in the rest of the MCU.  But does it deserve that?

This installment begins with something of a time-jump after the ending of Spider-Man: No Way Home, in which Dr. Strange’s spell made everyone forget both that Peter Parker was Spider-Man and also who Peter Parker (Tom Holland) was at all and left him on his own to fend for itself.  It’s now four years later and both MJ (Zendaya) and Jacob Batalon (Ned Leeds) have graduated from MIT and Parker has had to observe their actions from afar while he remains in New York and focuses on his superhero work as Spider-Man and he seems to have pretty successful at this and has even formed a pretty strong relationship with the NYPD (not sure what happened to J. Jonah Jameson).  In some ways this is all great for Spider-Man, but not so great for Peter Parker, who’s alone and stressed and generally not doing great.  This comes to a head after he crashes a house warming party that MJ and Ned throw when they move back to New York and rooming together and he sees that MJ has a new boyfriend.  This drives him so crazy that he comes to learn that it’s throwing off his spider-powers and making the arachnid DNA in him spike and heighten his aggression.  This comes at an awkward time because it’s happening right as Parker finds himself facing off against some unknown threat that appears to be able to possess ordinary people and force them to carry out crimes.

The first three Tom Holland Spider-Man movies were all directed by a guy named Jon Watts but for this fourth film he’s stepped aside and been replaced by Destin Daniel Cretton, who directed Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings for Marvel but who is otherwise known for more character oriented films like Short Term 12.  This reflexes something of a change in tone for the series, which clearly realized that they weren’t going beat Spider-Man: No Way Home (which ended on a duel between three Spider-men fighting several super villains on top of the Statue of Liberty) so it’s pivoting to more of a focus on character arc.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of superhero action here, but the film does seem more interested in the growth of the characters who are now twenty somethings instead of teenagers and the filmmaking does try to match the heightened emotional stakes of that.  It’s not exactly clear what income Peter Parker is getting as Spider-Man and how he manages to pay the rent (and I still don’t know if Dr. Strange’s spell erased Parker’s Social Security records) but it is taping into that stress than many a young person feels as they’re forced to “hustle” to establish themselves at a young age and some of the toll this takes on their personal lives, sort of.  Honestly that’s a bit of a stretch, Parker’s loneliness is partly because he’s busy but also because he’s a superhero who “broke up” with his high school sweetheart under the weirdest comic book circumstances possible and still pines for her in a way that’s not healthy.

So I do think this does a decently admirable job of progressing the Peter Parker character but I’m a little less impressed by what it does as just a standard Spider-Man adventure.  For one, I think Destin Daniel Cretton’s visual styling here is generally less fun than Watts’ was.  The film has made the rather annoying decision to be presented in different aspect ratios in different theaters and I feel like some of the framing seemed a bit sloppy as a result.  I also found some of the scenes to feel oddly under-lit and thought some of the action scenes worked better than others.  I also found the film’s finale, which may otherwise have been somewhat impressive, to be oddly similar to another recent MCU movie’s finale in a way that stole some of its thunder.  That said there are definitely some bits of spectacle here that do delivery and I also appreciate that they don’t feel obligated to make this the biggest and most bombastic that Marvel has ever made.  I’d also say that the film has a fairly curious assemblage of characters it’s working with; the film’s ostensible villain played by Sadie Sink is a well-known Marvel character but not one you’d conventionally expect acting as a Spider-Man villain and likely makes more sense here if you take them at face value rather than bringing in outside expectations about them from their depiction in other mediums.  The Punisher, who actually has a pretty big part in this, also seems like an odd addition here at first glance but he does share a common link in the story as another person who’s been stripped of his family and left alone in his crusade against crime and The Incredible Hulk also makes sense here as a character fighting an inner beast he struggle to control; these aren’t just characters selected to set up future MCU movies.

Aside from those cameos, which granted isn’t a small thing, this actually kind of has a different “feel” from a lot of the MCU in certain ways.  Not dramatically different mind you, and not necessarily different in entirely good ways, but kind of different.  The dialogue feels less quippy and the story feels less streamlined, almost feeling more like a short TV run or maybe even more like a series of comic book stories than like a regular three act film.  The film seems to have a more serious tone, which may partly be a conscious choice or may be a byproduct of the jokes that are here just not being as good as they could be, but regardless it makes the film feel a bit different.  Again, whether that’s for better or worse is probably debatable, I kind of missed that MCU-feel but I’m also not sure it can really be recreated at this point, it’s kind of a magic trick we’ve seen to many times so maybe it’s best not to chase it.  The movie we did get though has a lot of cool stuff in it.  The villain’s “line of sight possession” trick is pretty fun and I did remain pretty interested in Peter and his growth as a person.  If the film had managed to make certain twists a bit less predictable and punched up the dialogue a bit I think we may well have had one of the best Spider-Man movie to date but I’ll take what I’ve been given and admire what it’s setting out to do.
***1/2 out of Five

Home Video Round-Up 7/20/2026

The Sheep Detectives (6/24/2026)
	The Sheep Detectives is one of those movies that seemed to be based on such a silly idea that you had to wonder if there was actually something to it as no one would go through all the work of getting funding for it unless there was actually some passion behind it.  Sure enough the film has been much better received than the average family movie about talking farm animals and I can see why but there are some limits to how enthusiastic I’m likely to be about it.  The film sets what is essentially your typical British cozy mystery story on a farm where a beloved farmer/shepherd is poisoned and while the human investigators initially believe this to be a natural heart attack, but his sheep (who unbeknownst to the humans are intelligent and can talk amongst each other) who’ve been privy to various murder mysteries which the shepherd has been reading aloud to them for some reason, think he was actually murdered and want to nudge the detective towards the culprits.  So… it’s Knives Out meets Babe.  Insomuch as it works it probably because it takes its job pretty seriously: it seems to have put some thoughts into what being a sentient sheep is like in this world and gives them something of a culture and while this isn’t the most meticulous mystery ever constructed they do seem to have taken the mechanics seriously enough to impress the average viewer of a non-sheep related BBC mystery of the week.  The film also has a pretty decent cast and is shot well enough and is probably about as well done as this sort of thing was ever likely to be.  That having been said there are still some pretty big leaps of logic necessary to make this concept work (I cannot believe this dude was really reading entire novels out loud to animals) and there’s a degree of extreme “nicecore” at work here which had its limits for me. *** out of Five
How to Make a Killing (7/2/2026)
One of the better indie flicks of the 2020s was the film Emily the Criminal, which felt like a smart dramatic turn for Aubrey Plaza and I was interested to see if its director John Patton Ford would also go on to bigger and better things but he seems to have hit a pretty big roadblock right out the gate with this rather misguided modernized take on Kind Hearts and Coronets of all things.  I suppose that both this and Emily the Criminal are on some level movies about people turning to crime in order to “get theirs” out of unfair systems but “Emily” is a drama while this film is (I think) supposed to be a satire, albeit not a very funny one.  That’s kind of where this loses me as Kind Hearts and Coronets is supposed to be a rather absurdist story complete with Alec Guiness playing each one of the relatives that the protagonist tries to bump off including a woman.  This movie on the other hand clearly isn’t supposed to be taken entirely seriously but it isn’t going for jokes either and it’s not doing anything as nutty as that Alec Guiness thing.  The film also isn’t exactly going to hit that “eat the rich” zeitgeist either because Kind Hearts and Cornets isn’t really about someone who takes issue with the oppression of the rich so much as he feels entitled to his own piece of the generational wealth pie and is willing to kill to get it for entirely selfish ends.  I think I might have been a bit more generous to this if I was less familiar with its source material but as a remake I found it pretty misguided even if there are moments of wit to it here and there.  Ultimately it’s pretty inessential work and my hopes for this John Patton Ford guy have certainly descended. **1/2 out of Five
Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice (7/5/2026)
	Really?  We’re still making cheap Tarantino ripoffs in the year of our lord twenty twenty-six?  I suppose more specifically this is a Tarantino ripoff crime movie that collides with a science-fictiony high concept in that it’s a movie about a gangster guy who travels back in time six months using a time machine a friend invented (the details of which are not dwelled upon) in order to undo a set of actions he regrets, resulting in two versions of the same guy running around the movie doing stuff.  That’s a concept that could be fun in the right hands but these are very much not the right hands; this movie is positively obnoxious and feels like it was both written and directed by a fourteen year old.  It has most of the hallmarks of annoying bro filmmaking like obvious needledrops, flippant violence, and indulgent plot twists and most of this maybe could be okay if done with style and craft but it’s not.  We get a couple of okay action scenes eventually but most of the movie is pretty flatly shot and it also sports a mediocre cast and dialogue that isn’t as clever as it thinks it is.  The film ended up going straight to Hulu, which isn’t always the kiss of death these days but it seems eminently appropriate for this movie which mostly made my eyes roll. *1/2 out of Five
Outcome (7/15/2026)
Jonah Hill’s directorial debut, mid90s, was kind of different than I might have expected from him.  It wasn’t really a comedy and instead this Kids-like look at troubled youths in a skater subculture.  It wasn’t a great movie but it was an interesting debut and showed some clear promise.  His follow-up is closer to what I might have expected from Hill, and not necessarily in a good way.  That’s not to say this is a straightforward comedy though… it has larger pretentions than that.  The film is essentially a show-biz satire, which is a genre that’s pretty over saturated generally and you have to wonder if Hill was attracted to make it because he was jealous that friend and occasional collaborator Seth Rogen had achieved such success “The Studio” also on AppleTV+ and wanted in on the action.  As such he made this movie about a movie star (played by Keanu Reeves) whose personal life is a hot mess and who’s recovering from addiction and is trying to make amends with various people.  I don’t think Reeves is particularly well cast here, obviously he can convincingly play a movie star but I’m not sure I believed him as this messy addict and when the movie is trying to be funny he doesn’t really deliver.  “Trying to be funny” is kind of a key term there as I’m not really sure how much of a satire this was even supposed to be as it’s a big jumble of tones that Hill isn’t really able to navigate.  When I say this is closer to what I might have expected from him it’s because it’s well known that he’s become rather obsessed with “therapy” as of late, going so far as to have made a documentary about his psychologist and getting in trouble for sending a bunch of passive aggressive therapy speak texts to one of his exes.  This definitely feels like a movie made by someone who feels like it was made by someone who’s made having gone to therapy their personality.  The whole movie just feels really undercooked and meandering despite actually being quite short and it really doesn’t amount to much of anything.  Do not recommend at all. *1/2 out of Five
Propeller One-Way Night Coach (7/20/2026)
	I have a running list on Letterboxd ranking every original movie ever released on the Apple TV streaming service, which isn’t too hard so far as they only put out new stuff every couple of months and there’s less than fifty of them to date.  That means that I sometimes find myself watching some stuff I normally wouldn’t give the time of day to including this vanity project from John Travolta, who produced, wrote, directed, and narrated this film which is also based on a children’s book that he wrote back in the 90s and is clearly rooted in his aviation hobby.  This is one of those movies like A Christmas Story that’s being narrated by an adult who’s reminiscing about his childhood and trying to use that to get into a kid’s perspective of some possibly otherwise mundane events.  In this case we’re looking at a kid in the early 60s who’s excited to be going on his first flight as he joins his mother in flying cross country and because they’re doing this on propeller planes rather than jets this involves a bunch of stops along the way.  Along the way there are some interactions with other passengers that are of middling interest but more than anything this kid just really really loves airplanes for whatever reason and totally nerds out about them the whole way.  Needless to say this is an incredibly self-indulgent project on the part of Travolta and I’m sure it’s very meaningful to him, to anyone else… not so much.  That having been said the thing is so upfront about what it is that it’s a little hard to be too mad at it, like, I knew what I was getting into when I hit play.  Travolta also had the decency to have the movie only be one hour long instead of stretching this rather thin premise beyond that, which is appreciated, but also note that that’s quite the backhanded compliment. *1/2 out of Five

The Odyssey(7/16/2026)

Warning: Review contains spoilers, including spoilers for film specific adaptations

Roger Ebert wrote a lot of very memorable positive reviews and many memorable negative reviews in his career but one that stands out notably in my memory was a decidedly mixed review: his review of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.  Ebert nominally liked the film and gave it a “thumbs up” on this TV show but his review of the film seemed a littled… bummed.  He admired the film’s many technical achievements and anticipated that audiences would love it but he seemed a little at odds that the tomes he remembered as being these kind of quaint British children’s stories being turned into these kind of bombastic modern action movies focused on battle scenes and visual effects.  Back in 2001 I thought this review was crazy, I loved those movies then and I love them now and I also think Ebert (who readily admitted he was going off hazy youthful memories of the books) was maybe misremembering some of their more martial elements.  I still don’t exactly “agree” with that review but over the years I’ve come to realize that he sort of did have a point: I might very much like the modern action movie take on the material that Jackson took but it was a choice to make those movies that way and I’m not sure they are entirely in the spirit of the source material, which is indeed a bit more laid back than what we see in that film series.  I was reminded of this when I learned that The Odyssey was going to be getting a big budget adaptation by Chrisopher Nolan, a man I don’t necessarily think of as being a natural fit for the material.  The Odyssey is, among many other things, certainly an adventure story of epic proportions but in the wrong hands it could well be turned into something that was only that while missing a lot of the strange little tangents that make it special in much the way Wolfgang Peterson’s Troy (a movie that inspired Ebert to quip “Homer’s estate should sue”) is widely seen as a misbegotten and compromised take on The Illiad despite some cool fight scenes.  My fears about this weren’t exactly unfounded, I suspect Ebert would have been mixed about this film as well, but… I mean, there’s a reason I wasn’t on Ebert’s side on that one.

I don’t think Homer’s “Odyssey” needs a lot of introduction, if you live in the western world and received an even half decent education there’s a good chance you read it in school.  Indeed my main exposure to it came from 10^th grade English class (Robert Fagles translation) and have some nostalgic memories of the video we made as a final project on the book in which we Odysseus and Poseidon hash out their differences on an episode of the Jerry Springer Show.  That having been said, I did read that as a student doing homework and while I didn’t dislike the book I’m not going to pretend that it sparked some deep fascination in my fifteen year old self or that it turned me into a dedicated classicist.  I remember the broad strokes of the book but not all the details and I’m not going to claim to be an expert who can spot every single decision that Nolan made while turning this work into a film but I did feel like I remembered more about it than I expected to and will make the comparisons I can.

Before I get into what Nolan changed though I’m kind of in awe of just how much Nolan was able to include.  The Odyssey isn’t exactly the longest book in literature of anything, my old copy is about five hundred pages and that’s a verse translation, but it’s an eventful text filled with sections that are iconic elements of our cultural heritage that you can’t just casually omit.  Not too long ago they made an entire two hour feature that only covered the last few chapters of the poem so the notion that Nolan would be able to fit all of it into just three hours seemed pretty wild, and yet, he kind of pulled it off.  Just about every famous episode that I remember from the book is in here plus some events from The Iliad that are brought up in flashback and a couple of new elements are even added and yet the film does not really feel rushed or overly dense.  Nolan has also maintained the poem’s non-chronological flashback structure, which isn’t exactly surprising given that Nolan has long been known for structural trickery but his commitment to maintaining that is impressive given how much else is on his plate and for the most part he pulls it off without missing much.  There are some events that maybe get somewhat short shrift here or there with the sections on Calypso’s island in particular feeling fairly abridged despite some decent work from Charlize Theron in the role of the nymph in question, but for the most part Nolan managed to compress these events surprisingly successfully.

This is of course not to suggest that there aren’t major changes to be found here because there are, even to fairly famous episodes.  Take the adventure on Circe’s island for example; in the poem Circe is something akin to a queen living in an extravagant castle who’s thwarted because a direct intervention by Hermes and who also becomes Odysseus’ lover as he and his crew spend upwards of a year in her realm before leaving (something that would influence the larger Homeric Cinematic Universe).  Here though she’s played by Samantha Morton and is made to be something more akin to a Pacific Northwest Wicca practitioner living in a modest house, she’s thwarted through more mundane observations by Odysseus, and the Ithacans are happy to leave immediately thereafter.  I’m not complaining about any of this, it’s one of the highlights of the film and the body horror employed to depict that pig transformations is excellent, but it is kind of emblematic of some of the reinvention on display here which in many ways kind of smooths over some of the thornier elements of Greek culture from the poem and perhaps even Christianizes it.   For one, Odysseus is now a much more faithfully monogamous family man than he was in the books but perhaps more importantly it’s illustrative of how the influence of the gods on the story has been greatly transformed.  In the books the gods are always popping up in the story, often in person and just straight up telling Odysseus what to do and why they’re helping him.  Here they act more like Abrahamic gods; they certainly seem to be influencing the difficult waters Odysseus sails and occasionally offer prophesies through elaborate means, but they’re mostly off screen and work in “mysterious ways.”

That scene also plays into a larger thematic throughline of the movie in that Circe’s main motivation is that she assumes the Greek warriors to be a threat rather than someone to be welcomed under the “Law of Zeus” that the characters here keep talking about.  If I recall what my tenth grade English (shout out Ms. Matera!) told me this concept is actually called Xenia and is a sort of ethos of hospitality the Greeks held requiring them to take visitors into their homes and is the code that the suitors are exploiting to basically throw a years-long kegger in Penelope’s basement while Odysseus is away.  Odysseus and his men keep expecting to be greeted as guests under Xenia when they arrive at places like Circe’s home or the land of the Laestrygonians when they are instead feared as threats.  It’s later revealed that Odysseus himself believes this is a sort of karmic retribution for his own violation of the spirit of Xenia when his men used the Trojan horse as a dishonorable means of sacking Troy and unleashing a bloodbath upon it and that much of his demeanor later in the film is the result of guilt if not PTSD around this.  The consequences of this appear to be even larger than the trouble he faces on his own journey; back in Ithaca and later in Sparta we learn that throughout the Greek world there are reports of “people from the sea” sacking different areas, with Ithaca having added pressure to finally crown a king because of this threat.  As modern viewers we know this to be a reference to the “sea people” described in accounts of the famous Bronze Age Collapse that would in fact lead to the fall of Mycenaean Greece, suggesting that action has nearly apocalyptic consequences.

This entire Pandoran take is of course a Nolan invention, I don’t remember Homer’s Odysseus having anything like this same kind of guilt over his actions at Troy and if he did it wasn’t for the same reason and didn’t have the same effect.  This is all finally explained pretty late in the movie and once it’s laid out it makes a lot of what we’ve just seen come together and “click” with the rest of Nolan’s filmography, most obviously with his last movie Oppenheimer, which was of course also about a guy racked with guilt because his genius plan caused mass destruction with long lasting rippling consequences that may well destroy everything he was fighting for in the first place.  This is a little different than the atom bomb though as this is not just a single invention and Odysseus is not someone who passively handed it down to others, he was right their hiding in that Trojan Horse himself and got that blood on his own hands.  His ultimate sin wasn’t giving the world a new weapon (that horse trick is probably not replicable) but breaking a norm that kind of can’t be unbroken, he’s really more in the position of Truman than Oppenheimer but unlike Truman he wasn’t even really in the middle of a particularly just war, in fact this officially posits that the “face that launched a thousand ships” story was just a pretext for Greece to reclaim trade routes from Troy.

Clearly Nolan has some things on his mind about the world changing or the worst because of someone’s decisions given that they were central themes of his two most recent films.  When Oppenheimer came out some people speculated that this had to do with Nolan’s guilt over the mainstreaming of superhero films with his Dark Knight trilogy and how that genre took over Hollywood but frankly I think that’s a little glib.  The over-abundance of superhero films in the 2010s was annoying but I don’t think that’s akin to war crimes and I doubt Nolan does either.  I think this is much more likely to be tied more directly to modern politics both domestically and around the world.  We’re said to be living through the decline of a “rules based order” that’s being rapidly accelerated by stupid and selfish decisions on the part of people like Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu and these things are eroding any soft power that any of the major powers ever had and are eroding any sort of geopolitical trust that ever existed.  More profoundly the shamelessness of these people seem to be inspiring a similar brazenness in a lot of people across all walks of life who seem to be adopting an attitude of “nice guys finish last” and now aren’t even pretending not to be assholes and the world is becoming shittier and shittier because of it.  In the midst of times like these it probably isn’t too hard to see why Nolan would be so focused on dangerous turning points in history and their consequences.  Furthermore I can’t help but see, under this context, the suitors as something of a stand-in for the way bad actors exploit old norms of civility and procedure that were built for more genteel times and may simply serve to keep the good people who still believe in those norms from fighting back to restore order.

So, it’s not too surprising to me to see these very relevant concerns popping up in a movie released in 2026 but was Homer’s Odyssey really the ideal delivery mechanism for them?  There are definitely going to be people who feel this isn’t really that in keeping with Homer’s poem and those people aren’t really wrong, just as Roger Ebert wasn’t entirely wrong about the Lord of the Rings movies having a pretty different tone than Tolkien’s books.  So this probably won’t be one for the classicists, at least not the ones who aren’t pretty open to revisionism, and I’m similarly not sure what people who are completely unfamiliar with this story are going to make of it.  Watching the film’s reception in places like China where I imagine this story is just as foreign as “Journey to the West” is to us may prove interesting.  But the vast majority of the audience for this are going to fall somewhere between those camps and will consist of people (like me) who mostly know this story from either hazy high school memories or maybe from just cultural osmosis and those people are likely to be unencumbered by whatever adaptation reservations I might have and are going to be extremely well served by this movie.  As long as this review is I still don’t really have time to get into every choice Nolan made in putting this thing together.  There are tons of great things here I haven’t even been able to touch on (Matt Damon’s extremely solid movie star performance at the center, the excellent casting throughout, the excellent location scouting, numerous excellent set-pieces, etc) and I have my nitpicks too (Scylla sure sticks out like typical Hollywood CGI creature for a Nolan film, that fight with the suitors at the end could have been a few ticks better, the Travis Scott song in the credits feels a bit “how do you do fellow kids,” etc.) but by and large I’m quite satisfied with it and I think its take on the material is timely and interesting.
****1/2 out of Five