Some might throw this in the good dumb fun category, and certainly the cast is having a great tine, but it’s so blandly directed the “real stunts” fleetingly fly by. Little that happens is motivated. And worse, most of the best bits are spoiled in the trailer.

a lot of great acting here, but especially by Michael Shannon and Matthew Macfadyen, who all give nuanced turns of humor and sadness. I usually feel what I might call the "Shannon vibe" coming through his performances (complimentary), but he really disappears into this one.

DEATH BY LIGHTNING is particularly great for the LINCOLN-heads, which also contrasts the spoils of high office with the underhand sausage-making that feeds our government. Only, with the added dimension of a man whose limited grasp of the American Dream spurs him to violence.

PLURIBUS is also clearly a show made by Vince Gilligan. Not just the cold opens, but he also interweaves BREAKING BAD style set-pieces –– with characters problem solving bizarre situations on the fly –– into his philosophical questions. It's incredibly smart, savvy storytelling.

Gilligan has episode 1 ends where most shows would've ended the season, and episode 2 repeats the trick. Instead, each development prompts an existential problem: individualism and agency, the solipsism of wish fulfillment, the ethics of civil responsibility. It's a thrillingly dense show.

Like PREY, BADLANDS has rad sci-fi ideas (sword fights with tree tentacles, fields of razor grass, etc), but those novelties are undercut by bland filmmaking and flat, low-contrast images. Trachtenberg comes up with cool stuff, but he's not a strong enough visualist to execute.

Yeah, and being clever about which arcs to adapt into movies.

it's wild how Disney via Marvel and possibly Star Wars (we'll see, I guess) have been struggling to interconnect TV and theatrical releases, you've got DEMON SLAYER, JUJUTSU KAISEN now CHAINSAW MAN proving the effectiveness of the model when done right.

BUGONIA is much more a comedy about the nature of language and syntax as a way to unravel our warped perspectives, especially from a top-down point of view, than it is a kidnapping thriller. It doesn't quite do everything it wants but a more interesting movie than I expected.

I also felt a kinship to THE SECRET AGENT, which is likewise about sad people encircling the terminus of history in the context of filmic artifice, designed around structural games between past, present and future. They would make a weirdly compatible double feature.

RESURRECTION'S half-dozen stories are united by lost souls trying to make amends to their broken pasts through their dreams –– and therefore cinema as a whole –– as a form of collective healing. At least until there's anxiety towards a new tomorrow. I found it incredibly moving.

One last point: Brolin's firebrand monsignor is being branded a Trump analogue, but this is how religious fundamentalists have always talked, in the rhetoric of persecution and war. I'd know, I grew up with them. Many Catholics will be angry, even if it plays fair with faith

I'm not the first to say this, but WAKE UP DEAD MAN is also incredibly savvy in invoking a deep bench of detective fiction masters –– Christie, Carr, Poe, Chesterton, etc –– and then knowingly fucking with each of them in different ways. It's a delightfully literate movie.

WAKE UP DEAD MAN is about my platonic ideal of a Benoit Blanc movie; a brilliant whodunit, stylish and spooky, Big Themes, and full of sly subversions without the zany deconstructionism of GLASS ONION. I wish the cast was used more and I caught on a little too early, but quibbles

After all the talk THE SECRET AGENT is a punishing slow burn, I was surprised how robustly it unfolds as a pure genre piece; hitmen on the loose, legs inside of sharks, chase sequences. But then those elements slyly wrap back around into a meta-reflexive device onto itself.