I enjoyed this is as a flashback to my teenage years, when the original Now You See Me was a particular favorite of mine, but it made me wonder something I also contemplated after the first sequel came out. It is clear that there was a certain amount of magic1 that the first film had, which 2 and Now You Don’t have mostly fallen short of replicating. My most compelling theory as of now is that, despite being just as funny and featuring just as clever choreography, the second and third movies lack something more earnest that I had almost forgotten about from Now You See Me: Mélanie Laurent’s character, Interpol agent Alma Dray.

Now I’m not saying that the movies would have been better if they had literally included Alma Dray in them. My point is that Alma was the heart of that first installment. Her emotional dynamic with Mark Ruffalo’s Dylan Rhodes balanced out the banter and swashbuckling of the Four Horsemen, giving a film with an inherently absurd premise some crucial maturity. Justice Smith’s Charlie could have filled that role well, and he did in a way by the end of the story, but the writers clearly did not prioritize that well enough.

Ballad of a Small Player (2025, dir. Edward Berger)

This film takes far too long to get off the runway. Apparently, the novel upon which it is based has been called, “part ghost story, part psychological thriller,” and it “drew comparisons of the author to Graham Greene and Dostoevsky,” but honestly, I don’t see based on this movie. Berger departed from his usual conventions, but not in a good way. As someone who thinks his last two movies were both robbed of Best Picture, this is definitely not what he should be doing right now. I think the version of this that would have impressed me more would have been more surreal, faster-paced, and slicker, instead of this sort of whimsical romp.

Keeper (2025, dir. Osgood Perkins)

This might be my favorite film from Osgood Perkins yet. I’m glad his affinity for misappropriating the Christian Devil is out of his system. The only critique I would offer is that Liz could have had more depth. Specifically, her insecurity over being a “side piece” was the most interesting detail of her character, and it could have been explored more, and perhaps thematically connected to the role she takes on at the end of the film. I will eschew spoilers, but if you’ve seen the movie, you can probably put together what connection I am imagining.

William Tell (2024, dir. Nick Hamm)

This is obviously quite derivative of other period epics about freedom, mainly those starring Mel Gibson, but it is still an entertaining watch. This is the type of film that should always be released in a theater. That said, the VFX do betray a lower budget than Braveheart- or The Patriot-type pictures usually get when they are made for the big screen. William Tell had a really strange combination of limited theatrical screenings and digital releases that didn’t seem well-timed and all took place long after trailers for it stopped circulating. It almost reminded me of the Sing Sing debacle, just with no awards contention.

I would have given this an additional half-star if not for the ludicrous “if I kill the bad guy I’m no better than him” scene. First of all, such an idea is firmly presentist and would not have stopped a real medieval revolutionary from executing a tyrant, especially not after killing so many of said tyrant’s henchmen. Secondly, the “Batman doesn’t kill” trope feels silly in 2025. It probably should have been left behind in the Hays Code era where it belongs, but it is even more out of place now.

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1. My New Life

It’s impossible for me to recap my recent sources of inspiration without filling you in on some contemporary Ethan lore. About two-and-a-half months ago, I moved back to my home state of Pennsylvania after far too long an exile. I live in a smallish but thriving town a stone’s throw from Philadelphia, and since my arrival, my interior life has benefited tremendously. I have much better mental health and as a result, more creative juice, so to speak.1 I’ve started a new job as a bouncer to pay the bills while getting my film career up and running. If you ever want to learn more about human behavior and generate some interesting character and dialogue ideas, let me tell you, working as a bouncer is a great method.

I’m sure that soon, I’ll come to find parts of my new home and new routine that are cloud and not just silver lining, but in the meantime, I’m soaking in as much peace as I can. It helps, of course, that for the first time, I live in a truly walkable town, which brings me to…

2. My Recent Listens

My walks to work have given me a lot of time to put headphones in and zone out in a way that I have been advised not to do while driving. I have a pretty reliable rotation:

In the last couple years, I’ve become a devotee of the Blank Check podcast, hosted by actor Griffin Newman (Draft Day, Pavements) and movie critic David Sims (The Atlantic). Essentially, they go through major directors’ filmographies from beginning to end, putting each film in context as a part of the filmmaker’s creative and professional evolution. They have a range of guests as diverse as Alex Ross Perry, Karina Longworth, David Ehrlich, Rachel Zegler, Jane Schoenbrun, Brian Michael Bendis, Ari Aster, and Seth Rogen. They’ve covered directors from Stanley Kubrick to Buster Keaton to David Lynch. Their podcast has opened up massive windows into areas of film history that I only thought I knew well. Hearing how Spielberg pulled off Jaws, Fincher pulled off Se7en, and more helps me feel a little bit more prepared to face the imminent trials of making my own feature.

Yes, I am aware of how it sounds to say the sentence, “I find Blood Meridian inspiring.” Hear me out though. In preparation for John Hillcoat and New Regency’s planned adaptation, which I am happy to hear seems to have had McCarthy’s express approval, I am rereading the novel in audio form. Something that, to be clear, I already appreciated, but had not been quite so rocked by before, is just how paradoxically beautiful the prose in this book is. If you don’t know what I mean from experience, I highly encourage you to go to where you get your audiobooks, pick a chapter (ideally an early one to avoid spoilers), and listen to McCarthy describe something for a few minutes. Even the most barren, dreary, ruthless landscape, he renders with the exactly correct balance of epic grandeur and fine detail. Few authors have ever been so effective at transporting me somewhere.

For brevity’s sake, I’m not going to go into the details of all the music I’ve been listening to lately, but consider this selection a fairly comprehensive look at what songs have been inspiring me:

And some extra since I have officially made the transition to mainlining Christmas music:

3. My Recent Watches

The French New Wave is a subset of the cinematic canon that I have long known I would need to delve into. I decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 debut, Breathless, would be the ideal place to start. I knew enough about Godard’s background and influences that I was able to pick up on most, if not all, of his references, some of which are sincere, others of which are tongue-in-cheek. It is very much the work of a subject matter expert, a filmmaker who learned everything he possibly could about cinema before sitting in a director’s chair himself. He reminds me of Tarantino in that way, though both I suspect would resent the comparison. They share a common affinity for creating films that not only stand on their own, but also exist firmly in the context of cinema history, unapologetic about deriving ideas and images from their ancestors.

What made me really fall in love with Godard, so to speak, was just as much my experience with Nouvelle Vague as it was Breathless. I have already briefly reviewed this new film from Richard Linklater in this newsletter, so I will let my opinions and rating in that piece speak for themselves. Suffice it to say that in terms of inspiration, I was utterly compelled by Godard’s methodology as depicted by Linklater. I fully intend on stealing adapting some of his improvisational, punk-rock technique for my own directing in the future.

No sooner had I completed this French New Wave-themed double feature than I cracked open a recent Criterion sale purchase that I had not yet gotten around to watching. King Lear (1987) is not an adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, rather, a meditation on the process of adapting Shakespeare. Godard’s choice of King Lear is almost incidental; almost any of the Bard’s works could have been chosen for this story of his descendant, in a cultureless post-Chernobyl dystopia, struggling to piece together the play from fragments. This film is disordered, Brechtian, and a middle finger to most of the “rules” of filmmaking I was taught in school. All of those are compliments. It seemed tailor-made for my response to this inspiration challenge, both because I’m a Shakespeare superfan and because I’m always looking for movies that upend the medium’s conventional wisdom.

Speaking of my love of Shakespeare, I knew Hamnet would probably make me sob, and it did. Again, I am going to withhold commentary that belongs in my forthcoming review of the film, but it overwhelmed me with so many emotions, and it renewed my already-bountiful admiration for Hamlet, a play about a father and a son, through which William Shakespeare made his child immortal.

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4. My Recent Reads

The most recent book I’ve completed, Kitchen Confidential, is not only a fascinating look at the hidden world behind the swinging doors of the restaurant kitchen (a world I have grown a fondness for in my own time in the service industry), but a profound work of literature, a gonzo memoir by one of the twenty-first century’s greatest raconteurs and explorers. In my years watching his shows and reading his words, Anthony Bourdain has taught me many things: to sojourn fearlessly, to eat intentionally, to jest mercilessly, but above all else, to be unafraid of my own unique lens, through which I observe the world in a way no one else can. No single writer has as much influence on the tone and style of Dispatches from the Cinema as he does.

I’m also nearing the end of Oscar Wars, a history of an institution that played an integral role in my development as a cinephile. Among my fondest childhood memories are those of my parents ordering takeout, dimming the lights, and sitting me down in front of the biggest show of the year, where great films would battle it out for a place in cinema history. The first few years, I had obviously seen almost none of the nominees.

But as my horizons broadened ever so slightly from year to year, I gradually learnt enough to have skin in the game. I remember laughing my ass off at Seth MacFarlane’s “I Saw Your Boobs” and feeling my heart soar at Neil Patrick Harris’ “Moving Pictures.”2 I remember rooting hard for Lincoln, Les Misérables, and The Revenant. I remember cheering when Leonardo DiCaprio finally got his Oscar, and booing when Spotlight won Best Picture that year.3 The following Oscars, or the one after that, was the year I first started trying to predict the winners. I plateaued at about a fifty percent accuracy rate until a few years ago. In 2023, the year my all-time favorite filmmaker won Best Director, I got 19 of 23 categories correct. No, no, hold your applause, I insist.

All of this to say, as much as the results often infuriate me, the Oscars have been part of my cinematic life for as long as I have had one, and this book has not only been educational, but has brought me a bit closer to that little boy, looking up at the TV, bewitched by gold statues and tearful speeches and flowing gowns, not yet aware that those movies would change the course of his life forever.

I’m not telling you what this last book is, because it’s a novel that I want to adapt into a movie, and I don’t want any of you scooping me. But trust me, it’s a great book, it somehow hasn’t been optioned yet, and based on a few formerly-unconnected details about my life, it’s basically perfect for me specifically to make a film out of.

5. David Lynch

I don’t mean to sound parasocial, but I miss this man every day. I know exactly where I was when I found out he was gone. It hasn’t been the same down here since. Wherever he is, I hope the Master of Dreams is dreaming peacefully.

Through the darkness of future past
The magician longs to see.
One chants out between two worlds
Fire walk with me.

6. My First Ghost Hunt

To clarify, I wasn’t actually hunting the ghosts. I was…hunting the ghost hunters…in a way.

Backing up.

A cool part of my recent move that I didn’t mention is that I got to meet and become acquainted with my favorite YouTubers, over at The Lore Lodge, who coincidentally live in the town where my dad grew up. They asked me the other week to help with a video about Pennhurst State School and Hospital, known colloquially around here as Pennhurst Asylum. They further explained that the premise of the video would be to educate their audience about this historic site, which has fallen into considerable disrepair and been partially demolished since weathering a federal class action lawsuit and closing in 1980s. Although it consistently draws tourists, photographers, and paranormal investigators, proceeds from whose visits fund the property’s upkeep and restoration, it has lately become in danger of total demolition to make room for an AI data center.

My role in this project was to shoot a segment of the video dedicated to the spooky side of Pennhurst’s offerings. The Lore Lodge recruited a group of disparate ghost hunters4 and tasked me with documenting their work.

Now I’m fairly agnostic when it comes to the paranormal. I have no skin in the game of whether or not any of the plethora of alleged supernatural activity at Pennhurst is “real.” I have no problem believing people who claim to have experienced it, as long as they aren’t obviously motivated by financial gain or some other predatory end. Yet at the same time, I recognize that humanity is far off from having the methodology to definitively prove, in a way that satisfies science, that ghosts or other things that go bump in the night are genuine phenomena and not a collection of unrelated occurrences that people’s pattern-seeking brains have organized conveniently into “ghost.”

My goal here wasn’t necessarily to capture a ghost, or to capture proof that there are no ghosts at Pennhurst. It was something more akin to Werner Herzog’s motives in shooting Grizzly Man, Into the Abyss, and Into the Inferno. I hypothesize that if you really pressed Herzog, he would admit to not really being interested in bears, criminal cases, or volcanoes as things in themselves. His interests are humanity’s relationships to nature, to our fellow creatures, to justice, to death, to our rocky planet, to our very origins as a species.

Ghosts to me are just as significant if they’re fictitious as if they’re real. Ghosts are how we wrestle with the existential questions that stump us the most. Where are our lost loved ones? What will happen to us when we are lost? What would someone on the other side say to us if they could? What would we say to them? Ghosts are a way for us to connect to that which has passed into shadow. When we talk about something “haunting” us, we need not mean a literal, actual spirit is walking among us. We are haunted by the past every day, both the distant, eldritch, spooky past, but also the recent, painful past.

I say this not to “both sides” the issue of ghosts. I say it to contextualize my creative mandate in taking on this role of ghost hunt videographer: I didn’t much care if I would see a ghost. I cared a great deal if I would see interesting people revealing their inner selves in the process of seeing ghosts.

I don’t want to spoil the video, so I will let you find out for yourselves if I accomplished my goal when you (hopefully) tune in to The Lore Lodge to watch it.

All I will say further is that this project charged the hell out of my creative battery. Getting to see human nature up close and personal is one of my favorite things to do. It’s why I like being a bouncer so much. It’s why, among other reasons, I became a filmmaker.

In a way, humans are the best source of inspiration of them all.

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Nevertheless, I have pressed on. I have met with a cinematographer who has expressed interest in shooting my first feature on his Arri Alexa, a far nicer camera than I ever anticipated shooting this film on. I have also put together this “one-pager” summary for the purpose of sending to, first, my contacts in the film finance world, and second, anyone else who wants or needs a written summary of this project in lieu of a traditional outline or treatment.

I have pasted this one-pager below, with a key qualification: I am not quite ready to reveal my first feature’s title yet. I intend to reveal that at a later, more auspicious moment.

That said, read on for some more details on this movie than I have previously shared with you:

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This is the second time I’ve seen Mia Goth play dual roles for psychosexual purposes. Two nickels, etc.

This film falls somewhere between Branagh and Whale on the scale of fidelity to the novel. Most of del Toro’s liberties were to conform the story to his preexisting creative sensibilities. As an auteurist, I do somewhat respect this approach, versus surrendering the self wholeheartedly to the material at the cost of ego, as Coppola did with Dracula, a film I love for mainly that reason. However, there comes a point at which imposing oneself onto a prior work transforms it intrinsically into less an adaptation and more an original piece in the clothing of the prior. Frankenstein (2025) travels far past that point. His overhaul of the character dynamics and stripping down of ambiguities makes this firmly a Guillermo del Toro movie about Frankenstein, rather than a “Frankenstein movie” as such. Your mileage may vary. I for one found it irksome, in spite of my appreciation for the formal excellence of the picture. Moving the story from the late 18th century to the 1850s, for example, seemingly solely to afford the opportunity for the Creature to read a poem by Shelley’s husband, was pure silliness and, like the other inaccuracies, served no purpose of elevation over the source material.

A House of Dynamite (2025, dir. Kathryn Bigelow)

This is an Obama-era movie lost and adrift in 2025. Aside from the fact that the government essentially conducts its response to a nuclear attack over Zoom, everything about A House of Dynamite could have come out of Olympus Has Fallen, which interestingly came out the year after Bigelow’s most recent political thriller, Zero Dark Thirty. Whatever she may have had to say about American defense back then, or earlier in The Hurt Locker, the well has clearly run dry. This film is technically impressive, with razor-sharp editing and sound design I would’ve killed to have heard in a theater, but isn’t about anything. I would suggest watching Dr. Strangelove instead.

Bugonia (2025, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos)

This has one of those plot twists where it feels like the writer didn’t think through all of its retroactive implications. The reasonable person’s moral calculus of everything that has happened up to the final scene is completely upended in a way that appears at first blush to completely undercut Lanthimos’ sociopolitical thesis. To be quite transparent, I am still grappling with how precisely to interpret Bugonia’s conclusion weeks later, which in my book is the hallmark of a great ending, regardless of how convoluted it may render the rest of the picture. I would be curious for any readers to comment their interpretations below; perhaps your mental gnawing has been more fruitful than mine.

Christy (2025, dir. David Michôd)

Sometimes the way that critics refer to films involving heavy subject matter as “X porn”—torture porn, poverty porn, etc.—is reductive, but here, a similar phrase would definitely apply. Virtually every facet of Christy Martin’s1 life is omitted from the film except for her husband’s abuse. It is nonstop suffering from beginning to end. Even her professional talent and work ethic as a boxer are kept to the background. I understand the value of de-emphasizing athletic outcomes to a strong sports movie, as discussed in my review of The Smashing Machine, but Christy lacks crucial tonal variance and a formal story structure that would highlight the traumatic aspects of its subject’s life without them fading and blurring into each other until the whole story is a blob of exploitative suckage.

Die My Love (2025, dir. Lynne Ramsay)

This is to Nightbitch as Immaculate is to The First Omen. Like the Amy Adams-led black comedy, Die My Love is about the warping of personhood that comes with shifting one’s identity and occupation to primarily revolve around another person, even and especially one’s offspring. Unfortunately, this movie does so in a way that makes it practically impossible to take seriously. Where Adams plays a new mother we all know in real life, one who tries her hardest and is still unable to be everything she wants to be, Jennifer Lawrence portrays an irredeemable nutcase who acts out in immature, incomprehensible ways in order to get attention. It is impossible to empathize with what her character may be legitimately going through, because it is overshadowed by behavior that is as ridiculous as it is indefensible.

Nouvelle Vague (2024, dir. Richard Linklater)

This may be the movie that captures the magic of filmmaking best since Babylon. More than just an origin story for Jean-Luc Godard and an “Avengers” movie for great French directors, it is a tale of a small group of clever dreamers who dare to play with the conventions of their medium, in the vein of A Complete Unknown, in a way. It drives home with irrepressible charm the thesis that great art comes from not necessarily profound intrinsic genius, but from educated, informed formal experimentation. Is it deeply film-school-brained? Probably, yes, that would be an accurate thing to say. Does that make it any less brilliant? Absolutely not.

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I looked at the door more closely. There was no sign advertising the name of this place, but there were a few flyers that confirmed I had arrived at my destination, for the Philadelphia Jewish Film + Media Festival. Assured, I opened the door. Beyond was a closet-sized vestibule, painted black, lit only by a single dim red light. The interior door was unmarked, aside from a handwritten note taped above the knob: “Turn and pull.”

So I did, and found myself in a small room where stackable chairs had been lined up in front of a stage and a movie screen. Bob Dylan played over the speakers. The walls were papered with posters for such events as a Greg Sestero speaking engagement and “An Evening with the Satanic Temple,” featuring a live Black Mass and a screening of the 1922 film Häxan. Only half a dozen people were inside; I was early. I picked out the first official-looking person I spotted and said, “I’m Ethan; I spoke to Paige about a press pass.”

This brings our tale to a significant milestone for Dispatches from the Cinema: This is the first time yours truly has ever been issued press credentials for a film festival. At risk of distracting from my true purpose here, I want to take a moment to acknowledge those of you whose readership made this possible. I am closer now to a “real movie critic” than I once could conceive of being.

Such a leap forward for this publication was the result of this post by FilmStacker Adam Kritzer, subtitled, “…how FilmStack itself could be the decentralized distribution and marketing collective we need right now.” That sounded good to me, so I read on. I encourage you all to do the same on your own time, but the part that leapt off my laptop screen was under the header, “Critical Framing”:

I would love for our critics…to think and write about [Kritzer’s new film, Lost Cause] from various critical perspectives. I am confident each of you will see something in the film I do not and write about it in a way that helps others understand and relate more deeply to it.

Being a FilmStack critic in search of opportunities to bring this movement into “real life,” it could not have been more my pleasure. I messaged Adam with an offer to review Lost Cause, and he invited me to its East Coast premiere, which happened, as luck would have it, to be located at a former mausoleum store exactly one train ride and one spooky fifteen-minute walk from my place of residence.

As I sat down and jotted some preliminary thoughts before the screening to coat my mental stomach, I considered what I was looking for from this film, this experience. This was to be my first NonDē movie, that is, the first movie I watched by an active member of the NonDē movement. I’m sure in the future, critics will write thinkpieces on the question, “What was the first ‘American New Wave’ film? When did ‘NonDē’ really start?” but for me, in my capacity as audience member, it began here. Therefore, I decided as the lights went down that what I was “looking for” was simple: Will Lost Cause live up to the NonDē mantra, “ambitiously-authored cinema”? If it does that, I supposed, it will be a success, for the filmmaker, of course, but also for us all.

Reader, I assure you now, Lost Cause is ambitiously-authored indeed.

The film opens with a song, performed to the camera by Kritzer himself. It includes the line, “The job has gotten tougher being Stephen Miller’s mother.” As a lyric, that’s frankly a work of genius, but it’s so much more. All I knew in advance of Lost Cause was 1) it has something to do with Judaism, and 2) it has music. Yet in that first song, Kritzer lays out the foundation of the whole rest of the picture and the ideas into which he digs.

If you have the privilege of watching Lost Cause in the filmmaker’s presence, he will say little to nothing about the film before you watch it.1 But what he will say is the word, “meta-narrative.” This is the story of a group of actors at a table read for a musical about a Yom Kippur service. Kritzer plays himself playing a rabbi, and Julie Halston plays, as foreshadowed, the mother of Trump administration speechwriter and immigration czar Stephen Miller. Miller himself, referred to as a “symbol” and “lens through which to frame and examine the conflicted state of our country,” in a little yellow zine handed out at the screening, eventually joins in, read for by Olli Haaskivi.

Also present at the table read is a woman named Rebecca, a fictionalized version of author Sarah Schulman. Schulman’s real-life book, Conflict is Not Abuse, inspired Kritzer’s writing of Lost Cause, and in the movie, Rebecca does the same for the character of Adam Kritzer. However, she repeatedly criticizes him for putting on this musical in the first place. She believes that to feature Stephen Miller in this play, even as the ontologically evil, political and emotional boogeyman he’s depicted as, would be to amplify his ideas in a dangerous way. She basically urges Kritzer to pretend Miller does not exist. She is met, however, with the response: “I think it’s courageous to trust your audience. Even if it backfires.”

Few things earn my respect as a critic more than that.

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Interspersed with the table read scenes are more solos. I assume these are meant to be the numbers for the imaginary musical, sung by Kritzer rather than staged. The strongest of these is “This Land,” a parody of Woody Guthrie’s classic that goes, “This could be your land, but it is my land,” and “This land was made for you or me.” It’s quippy, satirical, and re-listenable, in spite of how close it hits to home for those disheartened by the divisions in America. The rest of the soundtrack, unfortunately, lacks the same punch. It too often slides into the territory that some punk music inhabits, where if read as spoken word, the lyrics could be mistaken for lines of a manifesto. This is especially true of “Woke Party Anthem (Hey DJ),” in which Kritzer in one verse simply lists off types of people with whom he disagrees politically. I’m sure the sentiments expressed in this track and others are sincere, but they feel at odds with the film’s overarching purpose.

As the songs convey an escalating degree of angst over the state of Stephen Miller’s America, the table read scenes seem to pursue a contradictory agenda, one of de-escalation, of connection. Miller’s mother attempts to understand why her son became the man he is. Did she parent him incorrectly? Did someone hurt him at a young age? She is disturbed to discover that, in Miller’s mind, there’s nothing wrong with him at all. Though Schulman argues that supremacy behavior and traumatized behavior go hand in hand,2 Miller doesn’t point to a traumatic event in his past. He doesn’t point to anything. He seemingly became Stephen Miller simply because he could, and because he enjoys it.

This appears at first blush to align with the staunchly partisan tone of Kritzer’s songs: If this is the man responsible for a significant percentage of executive branch policy in this country, then rage and indignation are more than appropriate emotional responses.

Yet there is still that sense of cross purposes. In the Q&A following the festival screening, Kritzer kept circling back to the notion of “the importance of difficult conversations.” This struck me as odd. The conversation taking place at Yom Kippur is only “difficult” because Miller is completely unwilling to have it. It’s only hard for his mother because she finds it impossible to communicate with him. Haven’t we all had harder conversations about politics at family gatherings? Is it not more challenging to talk to our articulate, passionate loved ones about subjects that divide us, than to speak to the embodiment of a brick wall about how we’re morally superior to them?

This is where Kritzer gets in his own way. He genuinely wants to have tough conversations about contentious topics that are ultimately productive. Yet he doesn’t see the people he’s talking to as having any good faith foundation. Granted, he chose Stephen Miller for this particular dialogue, someone who probably doesn’t have many undergirding principles that a reasonable person would find as anything other than amoral and ruthless at best, and outright evil at worst. But that may be the very essence of the problem. It’s even written explicitly into the movie:

“People like Stephen don’t change.”

“That shouldn’t stop us.”

Well, why shouldn’t it? What have we to benefit from seeking earnestly to engage constructively with people whose intent is to obfuscate truth and exorcise their own humanity? Feeling better about ourselves? Patting ourselves on the back for asserting our ideological superiority?

An essential aspect of “difficult conversations,” is also perhaps the hardest: listening. But that can only happen if we first concede that the other person may, may have something to say worth listening to. Do I believe that Stephen Miller does? No, I do not. For that reason, he is a poor choice for a “lens through which to frame and examine the conflicted state of our country.” That’s because Miller, Trump, and the rest of their coterie are not the conflict in our country. Conflict in a democracy produces electoral outcomes, not the other way around. America is in a conflicted state because the person who lives across the street, or in the next county over, sees the world differently than you do. You can choose to believe that they are worth listening and speaking to, and they can choose vice versa. Or, none of us could choose that, and we could all stay exactly where we are, or accelerate in our decline, refusing to poke our heads out of the trenches, not even if it means the difference between healing and destruction.

If the MAGA supporters in our lives are no different than Stephen Miller, then there’s no point conversing with them at all. If that’s true, then the only thing that will convince them to abandon their wrong ideas will be their defeat in a civil war. Actually, not even that will accomplish it, as evinced by the perseverance of the post-Confederate myth known as…the Lost Cause.

Aha.

Is the cause of difficult conversations really as lost as that one? This film’s answer to that question is muddy. Who knows? Perhaps I am incorrect to push back. Perhaps it really is terminally fruitless to have a productive discussion about these matters. But I’m not willing to give up just yet.

It speaks volumes about the artistry of Lost Cause that it gives me so much to process, even two days later. Too many filmmakers would have succumbed to the laziness of neat, black-and-white exposition of what’s wrong with America, who is to blame, and what we should do about them. Not Adam Kritzer.

Either with the assistance of or in spite of the movie’s minimalist style, Lost Cause inundates the audience with ideas in the best sense of the word. Some things work, some don’t, but the “big swing” deserves all the respect in the world, and if this is an indicator of the ambitiously-authored cinema yet to come from this community, we are all on our way to something truly special.

The Philadelphia Jewish Film + Media Festival “creates connection and community through Jewish cinema and digital storytelling.” The 2025 PJFM Festival runs through Sunday, November 23rd. Lost Cause will have an encore screening at 3pm on Friday, November 21st at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. More information can be found here: https://linktr.ee/lostcausethefilm.

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This past week, I had a meeting that will likely define the course of the rest of this project. The extent to which I can discuss it is as follows:

Remember in “Chapter 1,” when I mentioned that I got the initial idea for this feature from a Zoom call? Well, the guy who got my mind turning and brainstorming for my first feature was also the person I met with this week. He co-runs a company that has successfully helped multiple NonDē-esque filmmakers get their projects funded and out into the world. They’re still small; it’s not as if I’m talking to Neon here. But this is officially the first time that I have ever had a serious conversation with someone with access to funding about one of my films. Nothing may come of it, but it’s still a cool milestone.

Amusingly, we weren’t even supposed to be meeting about this project. I’d initially pitched him a Western that would be low-budget for a period piece and fit his company’s brand really well. We had an initial pitch meeting, he took some time to read the script and watch my past work, then we had a follow-up last week. His decision was, almost verbatim, “This would be an awesome movie; what’s the next script you have that costs much, much less?”

This is handily my favorite “no” I’ve gotten in my career so far.

I was excited that I had this project far enough along conceptually that I was able to, off the top of my head, explain it in detail while also embracing the flexibility that my scriptment, once completed, will afford me. I’m not one of those screenwriters who write a bunch of features on spec and keep them on the shelf for situations like this. It probably would be smart of me to start doing that, but I find it prohibitively difficult to stay focused on one single screenplay for long enough to make it perfect1 if I don’t have the ticking clock of actual production reminding me that it needs to get done and get done now. As it is, I was lucky that I happened to get asked for another movie idea in a serious meeting three weeks into a Substack series where I was developing another movie idea.

The next step from here is yet another follow-up meeting, by which time I need to have a “one-pager” describing the film. This won’t replace the scriptment; it will serve more of the role of a treatment or outline. My contact rocked with the improvisational, unconventional method that I’m planning to use for this project, but obviously I still need some sort of deliverable that makes this not simply a “movie idea” but an actual tangible thing that can be funded, greenlit, shot, or, you know, written.

This brings me to the final thought I wanted to get out in this week’s edition: This movie feels like an “actual tangible thing” now. It’s not just an idea. It’s not just something I fantasize about doing on my blog that 51 people read. It’s not just one of the approximate buttload of projects that I get really excited about, brainstorm, outline, and move on from when something else demands my attention. Even if this lead on funding doesn’t pan out, this is still a real movie that will really, actually get made, one way or the other.

So wish me luck. This time next week, I should have a banger of a one-pager ready for you to read (at least part of).

Excelsior.

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The question I asked of this movie as it began was, “Will this need to be from the POV of a dog?” This is as opposed to being a paint-by-numbers ghost movie, for which the dog provides a faux sense of originality. The answer to that question was firmly yes.

Leonberg uses the dog’s perspective to strong effect in playing with the audience’s comprehension of what is going on. Indy, the titular character, does not understand concepts like illness, drug abuse, or death. Looking through his eyes, we feel his limited cognition impacting his relationship with his owner. Good Boy makes us wonder if the house is actually haunted, or if that’s simply the only way that Indy can understand the confusing, tragic behavior of the human he loves.

Anemone (2025, dir. Ronan Day-Lewis)

I take a moment here to acknowledge my own bias: It is next to impossible for me to empathize with a character who was an occupier in the north of Ireland. Anemone’s grippingly emotional story, given almighty gravitas by the great Daniel Day-Lewis, builds up to a huge crescendo as he finally allows himself to be vulnerable and admit what haunts him so: It’s that he shot a guy. Whose land he was on. Fighting to keep him and his people from independence. Forgive me for struggling to pity him.

The aspect of this film that interests me in the way the above does not is its exploration of toxic masculinity. Both Day-Lewis and Sean Bean play men who face issues at home. The former deals with them by running off to the woods to live as a hermit. The latter does so by shrugging his shoulders and shuffling off to the hermitage in the hopes that his brother will come home and solve the problem for him. Though they are different men in many ways, they share a deep unwillingness to tackle their problems “like men.” Here a likely unintended subtext reveals itself, one that strengthens the picture’s storytelling: Oppressive wars attract disturbed, weak men.

Who woulda thought?

Deliver Me From Nowhere (2025, dir. Scott Cooper)

When I saw last year’s A Complete Unknown, I imagined it would lead to a shift in the way Hollywood executes musician biopics. Unlike others of its niche, A Complete Unknown did not attempt to shape Bob Dylan’s entire life and work into a three-act narrative, rather, it focused on a single aspect, Dylan’s relationship to folk music, and explored it in depth. In light of that film’s acclaim, it stood to reason that the industry would take note of this innovation in a quite stale subgenre. There is precedent for this outside of music movies; Spielberg’s Lincoln, my favorite biopic, similarly zeroed in on the fight for the Thirteenth Amendment, a period of about three months.

Deliver Me From Nowhere1 did exactly what I predicted. Barring some childhood flashbacks, the film exclusively depicts the process behind Bruce Springsteen’s sixth album, Nebraska. For this album, Springsteen controversially chose to record without a full band’s backing and do no promotion. Drawing from such diverse sources of inspiration as Dylan, Flannery O’Connor, Charles Starkweather, John Ford, and Howard Zinn, Nebraska is considered a historic work of art and arguably the Boss’ finest record.

Within these temporal parameters, the film prods at the notion of art as therapy. Springsteen2 writes the album as a means of processing his troubles, from his abusive father to his difficulty being vulnerable with the woman he loves, or who at least loves him. Yet in spite of the success of this creative endeavor3, it does not resolve Springsteen’s problems. He still needs counseling at the end of the movie. Concluding a biopic with its legendary subject getting professional help is a subversive choice for a subgenre built on uncritical lionization.

Shelby Oaks (2024, dir. Chris Stuckmann)

It is always fascinating to see how a film critic or commentator performs when they make the jump to making movies of their own. Sometimes it works out flawlessly, as in the French New Wave, when a handful of writers at Cahiers du cinéma became some of the most influential film directors of all time. Other times, however, the critic in question’s well has become so poisoned by abstract theory that they have no voice of their own. Shelby Oaks is decidedly in the latter category. There’s a little of Lake Mungo, a little of Prisoners, a dash of Twin Peaks, and nothing resembling anything to say at all.

Blue Moon (2025, dir. Richard Linklater)

I was initially irked at the Mank-esque casting of Ethan Hawke as a 47-year-old, but he gave such a damn good performance that I eventually stopped caring. As someone who idolizes the 20th-century New York City arts scene, this was such a cozy movie for me. The Stuart Little origin story, Hart extolling the virtues of friendship stories to the future director of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Weegee, and baby Steven Sondheim all made me cheer at a theatrically appropriate volume. At the same time, Hart touching the lives of so many legendary artists and yet failing to appreciate himself crushed me. This is the beautiful emotionality that Linklater built his career on. Thank God Hit Man is out of his system. Onward to Nouvelle Vague!

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“Maybe if I get up early Tuesday morning and post, they won’t notice that I didn’t do it Monday night.”

“Maybe this could be a biweekly series instead.”

“I didn’t accomplish enough productivity on this project this week for me to have anything to write about.”

These are some of the involuntary thoughts that have come to my mind in the last hour. I knew this was going to happen. It does with a lot of major projects I start. Without fail, I invariably 1) begin a time-consuming endeavor, 2) get frustrated with myself for not progressing as quickly as I’d like, 3) lose motivation and give up, and 4) repeat.

Now, I say “invariably,” but it’s not true. I’ve completed two short films as a director, with a third in post-production, and produced a dozen or so more. I’ve started and finished uncountable projects at school and at various jobs. When I was in high school I wrote three novellas (which are all ass and will never be printed anywhere ever).

The point is, I have actually finished a lot of time-consuming endeavors in my time. But every time I do, it’s because I’ve successfully fought a constant battle not to let the ubiquitous second-guessing, insecurity, and little voices telling me it’ll never amount to anything, win.

And I’m not going to let them win this time either.

It might objectively be true that I haven’t had time to do much towards my first feature this week. Or that I have had time, but simply have been filling it with other tasks instead.

But I’m still showing up here. This whole purpose of “Road to My First Feature” is to document my process, however much it may or may not conform to the Platonic ideal of consistent work. Part of the transparency integral to this series is telling the truth about how much I get done in a given week. This week, it was very little, but it was something. Next week, I hope to be able to tell you all that I accomplished significantly more, ideally towards getting my “scriptment” underway.

See you then.

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Today, I’m going to go through these and some other key sources of inspiration for this film. My hope is that this will give you a mental image of what it is you’re in for if you follow my journey to its conclusion.

I chose to discuss my “comps” before revealing the title or giving you a peek into my screenwriting process because I don’t want you to think about words when you first start imagining this project. I want you to see images. The most authentic way you can conceptually understand my first feature is by receiving, not a verbal description, but the cinematic profile established below.

1. Eraserhead - An Occupation Fit Only for the Damned

David Lynch’s long interest in breaking down the boundary between his characters’ interior lives and their “realities” began with this debut, which took him five years to make. There are a lot of images in Eraserhead that don’t “make sense,” but nevertheless serve to communicate Lynch’s meanings about fatherhood, sexuality, etc.

Similarly, my first feature will not be subjected to literality. I intend to show you things that would not happen or exist “in real life,” but evoke in you the emotions felt by my protagonist. When he feels fear, I’ll scare you. When he dissociates, I’ll make you uncomfortable. When he gets depressed, I’ll make you depressed too. But these feelings won’t come from my telling you to feel them. They’ll be elicited by the strange, the disturbing, the surreal.

2. Eddington - Designed to be Divisive

There is no way to tell a story about the coronavirus pandemic without pissing someone off. It would be foolish to even try. People experienced the personal tragedy of a sometimes-deadly illness alongside a collective trauma more akin to September 11th than anything we had experienced since. Contemporary to COVID-19 were high racial tensions, plummeting social trust, skyrocketing dependency on social media, and one of the most polarizing and controversial presidential elections in American history.

I’m walking into an emotional minefield here.

And that’s the point.

Eddington was unafraid to present some harsh truths about American life in 2020. It addressed the problem of SJWs who spoke out against injustice for social brownie points, not because they had genuine compassion for the oppressed. It showed how charismatic Internet personalities made some lose their grip on reality. It depicted the speed with which civility and respect went out the window when we realized the person next to us voted for a different candidate, listened to a different set of medical advice, or put a different level of trust in law enforcement. That made it an odious movie to some, who would have preferred to see this subject matter dealt with in a way that affirms their ideas about what happened back then.

If you were part of that group, then my film will challenge you too. It will not be autobiographical, but it will draw upon my experiences in a single room, perpetually disoriented, bombarded with information and misinformation from the outside, lost in my own mind. If that holds up a mirror to you, if that makes you uncomfortable either with the film or with your preconceived notions, good. It was an uncomfortable time. That’s all the more reason to face it head-on, both for you, the audience, and for me, the storyteller.

3. Apocalypse Now - All the Children are Insane

The comp here is specifically the first ten minutes, starting with the montage above. Diegetically, the only thing happening in the scene is Captain Willard lying on his bed. The images of helicopters, fire, battle, are reflective of the inside of Willard’s mind, of his dreams. This symbolism comes to head as Willard awakens, looks up at the ceiling fan, and hears the chopping of a helicopter rotor. The shot selection, framing, editing, and sound design all immerse the audience in the violence within the main character, before we’re even properly introduced to him. The scene continues thusly:

“Saigon. Shit. I’m still only in Saigon.”

Willard narrates his struggle to know what is real and what isn’t. His whole grip on sanity has been rocked by the war. He can see glimpses of the world outside, but he’s still confined to a single room. This physical claustrophobia, accentuated by Coppola’s liberal use of closeups in the scene, mirrors the warped sense of place Willard experiences on the inside.

4. Memento - I Have to Believe in a World Outside My Own Mind

The black-and-white scenes in Memento are not where most of the plot unfolds. That is reserved for the reverse-order color scenes. The black-and-white are where we see the cracks in Leonard Shelby. In color, he manages his anterograde amnesia as well as anyone could be expected to, and he seems to have his shit together enough to be an effective sleuth. But here, he’s confused. Misdirected. Unsure of himself.

I could go on and geek out over every minute of this movie, including these scenes, but that isn’t my purpose here.

Suffice it to say that these parts of Memento are, much like the beginning of Apocalypse Now, a good representation of how my first feature will feel. My protagonist may also talk to an unseen entity on the phone. He may be talking to no one at all. He may recount a story of someone he knew before the pandemic. That someone may be himself.

These four films are by no means an exhaustive list of the wells from which I am drawing influence and inspiration for this project, but they are enough of a primer, I hope, to get your mind’s gears turning.

If you think a movie that draws from the above in the specified ways sounds interesting, you’re in exactly the right place.

Subscribe to Dispatches from the Cinema to get updates on the road to my first feature every Tuesday morning. Thanks for reading. See you next time.

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Derrickson’s latest foray into religion-adjacent horror is the sequel to his 2021 kidnapping thriller, The Black Phone. The premise of the first film is straightforward: A boy named Finney is taken captive by the Grabber, a pedophile serial killer, and held in a basement devoid of any distinguishing characteristics except for a telephone. When the phone rings, strange voices speak to Finney. He discovers that they are the voices of the Grabber’s past victims, advising him from beyond the grave on how to escape. Escape he does, strangling the Grabber to death in the process. Aside from the titular phone, the only supernatural elements in the film are Finney’s sister, Gwen’s, dreams, which reveal details about the kidnappings to her. She uses the contents of these dreams to help the police locate the Grabber and by extension, her brother. This all makes for a simple, trope-fueled horror flick.

Black Phone 2 goes deeper. The sequel introduces us to more background information on the Grabber, the phone, and Gwen’s dreams. I’ll eschew spoilers for most of this material, but there is a unifying theme worth discussing across all of these lore expansions.

We find early on that Finney and Gwen’s mother, who had dreams very similar to Gwen’s, once attended a Christian winter camp, where she also encountered a magical black phone. The intrepid siblings volunteer for camp staff to investigate what happened to her that day. In Derrickson fashion, we are brought into an environment where faith will intersect with the paranormal and the horrific. Two of the supporting characters that Finney and Gwen meet at camp represent the different types of approaches that religious people often have toward the supernatural. Armando Reyes, the ex-convict head of the camp, believes that the phone and the dreams can be used for good, to stop the Grabber once and for all. Barbara, the office lady, writes all of the above off as the work of the Devil and insists that Gwen is complicit in the Grabber’s undead terror, rather than a fellow victim.

Compassion vs. legalism is a dichotomy as old as Christianity itself, and Derrickson puts it on display in a way that made me grin, despite the subject matter. I’ve known many Armandos and many Barbaras in my time. Derrickson depicts them accurately to a T. While it’s not surprising that a director with his track record would explore these concepts, and bleed Christian notions about the afterlife into a movie about communicating with the dead, I was not expecting the venue for it to be a sequel to a robustly secular Blumhouse picture.

I wrote extensively in my review of Sketch about the (rightfully) abysmal reputation of faith-based movies. The culprit is often that these films are made with the intent to evangelize, proselytize, convert. In other words, the writers and directors take messages meant for sermons and essays and try to package them into fables. Not a recipe for artistic excellence.

Yet, in its own way, Black Phone 2 will introduce many to Christianity, perhaps some for the first real time. Heaven, hell, salvation, damnation, these concepts are considered granted by this story. It is not difficult to imagine an audience member leaving the theater with a newfound curiosity about religion that would never have been elicited by a tacky folk tale about cops who realize they’re crappy fathers and start going to church.

Paradoxically, I have found my religion explored less obnoxiously by a supernatural horror film about a pervert who murders children than by nearly anything I’ve seen that was produced under a faith-based aegis. Some might find that fact depressing, but for me, far from it. Religion is a subject too often treated with awkwardness by mainstream entertainers. Yet it is a part of everyday life, a reality experienced by everyone. Even atheists and agnostics interact with it, amongst their family, friends, or neighbors. It is simply a part of the human experience. It need not always be handled with argumentation, for or against. It can simply be represented as every other dimension of life is by truly human storytelling.

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The first was a Zoom call I was on last month with some fellow independent filmmakers I’ve met through online networking. We were discussing some of our works-in-progress, and the guy who coordinated the call pointed out something that got my brain turning. He noted that even though the pandemic was a historically traumatic event for the entire world, nobody has taken a stab at telling the story of how the forced isolation of lockdowns affected people, especially young people.

In my review of Eddington, I wrote the following:

I am fascinated to see how cinematic interpretations of the pandemic will evolve over time. After 9/11, different filmmakers explored its effects on the country and the world in unique ways. Some leaned heavily into patriotism and militarism. Others criticized the Bush administration’s response with varying degrees of subtlety. To write out a chronological list of American films that converse with 9/11 is to map the fluid relationships that the country has had with its last nationwide traumatic event. Last, that is, until COVID-19. This time, not just American cinema, but world cinema will have a long history of critical, contemplative, even therapeutic films through which to process it, and the first picture on that list may just be Eddington.

My colleague didn’t elucidate what his vision would be for such a film, but my imagination started building upon this concept right away.

Initially, I was loath to consider creating any work of fiction about the pandemic. It was as unpleasant a period for me as it was for anyone. I mentioned this briefly midway through my essay on James Gunn’s Superman. COVID-19 caused, directly or indirectly, almost everything that was bad about my life for a period of years. I don’t like writing realistic fiction at all; I like it even less when it involves revisiting my least favorite chapter of my life.

Yet I must admit: That is why I probably should. I do my best writing when I’m pissed off about something. Most artists in any medium do. And if someone is going to tell this story, it ought to be someone who lived it. I don’t need a 40-something telling me how my generation experienced these events.

The second place from which I derived the basic concept of this project was a newsletter issue I got from Noam Kroll a couple weeks ago. It was titled, “A Formula For Your Debut No-Budget Feature Film.”

As someone looking to make a debut no-budget feature film, I clicked on it with interest.

The newsletter lists numerous steps to follow to do this, but to summarize what stood out to me the most, Noam’s advice is to create one, nuanced character in a single location and write their story as a “scriptment,” a high-level document that permits the most flexibility on set and is conducive to the most creativity between the filmmaker and the actor. The basic idea is to write something that can be shot almost immediately without reliance on the gatekeepers to funding and other resources that most other movies of any budget level require.

In other words, the perfect NonDē film.

Combining these two inspirations together led me to the nucleus of my first feature: This will be the story of a teenager during the pandemic, cut off from friends and family, inundated by the Internet and the media, who becomes disoriented by the destabilizing reality around him. In true Ethan fashion, this will not be a straightforward drama; it will be a surreal, frightening journey through a collapsing soul.

Think Eddington meets Eraserhead.

I could reformat that into a “logline,” i.e. a no-fewer-than-25-words-long sentence in present tense for the purpose of convincing bored middle managers at streaming services that your movie will have a high click rate, but after all my self-aggrandizing about the future of cinema and my project’s part in it, that would feel like a bit of a betrayal.

So this is what you get.

Tune in next week to read about the start of my “scriptment” writing process.

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Yet I did, five days ago, and I was fine.

Yes, “comparison is the thief of joy” and all that, but considering some of the filmmakers I admire and how they were younger than me, my age, or less than half a decade older than me when their first feature-length films arrived in theaters, it’s difficult not to feel like I have no excuse.

There’s a robust discussion to be had about what the healthy emotional response to this is, but healthy emotional responses be damned.

I’ve decided to indulge it.

I might not make Citizen Kane or Reservoir Dogs, but I will make something.

I have no excuse.

This series, “Road to My First Feature,” will document my endeavor. “Chapter 1” will probably be about project genesis. Maybe I’ll come up with my logline. Future chapters will be about the writing process, funding, production, and so on.

Much has been written on FilmStack by Ted Hope, The Label, and Sean King O’Grady, among others, about “NonDē filmmaking,” or alternatively, “the American New Wave,” a model for a cinema purged of the gatekeepers who have hijacked the studio and independent industries alike and stifled true freedom for too long.

This revolution isn’t a theoretical one. It’s already been going on. Mike Cheslik and his six-person crew shot critical darling Hundreds of Beavers on a consumer-grade Panasonic for $150,000. Our fellow Filmstacker Cameron Andrews directed Missing Pieces on weekends for a summer for even less than that.1 I’m sure by the time the subject of this series exists in any real way, there will be many more.

All of this to say regarding NonDē: I’ve been loving the ideas, I think the movies are awesome, and I’m joining the party.

I’ll save any further elaboration about this project for “Chapter 1,” but on one final note, if I’m going to set the goal of making my first movie, I need a deadline. Otherwise it’s a dream, not a goal.

But whatever shall that be?

Well, in preparation for this post, I did some research on many directors I admire and how old they were when their first features were released. I noticed, and this is completely anecdotal, that one number popped up a lot more than others:

Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Werner Herzog, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Peter Jackson were all 26.

That feels like a good enough arbitrary mark.

My last day as a 26-year-old will be October 1st, 2028.

My first feature film will be released to the public no later than that date.

“Ethan, that sounds impossible because [whatever your issue is].”

Good.

That’s the point.

On September 12th, 1962, President John F. Kennedy spoke at Rice University to describe his ambitions for American achievement in outer space. He said, “Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind.”

Later, he continued:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

And near the end of the speech:

It will be done. And it will be done before the end of this decade…

Many years ago, the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it? He said, “Because it is there.”

I don’t have much to add to that.

See you next Tuesday for “Chapter 1.”

See you in theaters between now and October 1st, 2028.

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Until this week, the most recent sports movie to win me over this way was The Iron Claw, a movie that is totally unconcerned with whether or not any member of the Von Erich wins a particular match.1 It focuses rather on the effect that the sport, and the harsh parenting of retired wrestler Fritz von Urich, had psychologically on brothers Kevin, David, Kerry, and Mike.2

The Smashing Machine is the latest example of this. Mark Kerr’s victories in MMA are tangential to the main story; in fact, Kerr is established to be one of the most dominant fighters in the sport in the opening montage. His ability to win fights is never called into question. The plot isn’t driven forward by the pursuit of a climactic championship, which does take place, but it isn’t handled the way it is Miracle or in a conventional “will they/won’t they” sports drama.

What really gets the story going is actually a draw. After his opponent, Igor, uses an illegal move to submit him, Kerr first non-victory in professional MMA is declared “no contest.” This cracks Kerr’s unstoppable persona. He ramps up his painkiller usage and takes out his frustrations on his girlfriend, Dawn. In their biggest fight yet, Kerr accuses Dawn of treating him like a child. “I just want you to treat me like a man,” he says, and as they make up, she whispers softly in his ear that he’s her “big, strong man.”

This is where Safdie tells us what this movie is about. Mark Kerr’s whole life has been built around being the largest, strongest, most powerful person he knows. He talks about defeating opponents like he is asserting personal, almost spiritual domination over them. Yet it’s all in pursuit of assuaging his insecure feeling of not being a man.3

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What we might call Kerr’s “toxic masculinity,” to use a phrase that everyone on the Internet is completely normal about, is never a character flaw he grows out of. This is no Hero’s Journey. When he gets out of rehab for drug abuse, he makes it everyone’s problem to cater to his “new self,” especially Dawn’s. His self-centeredness in their relationship is brought to a head in The Smashing Machine’s cleverest moment: Dawn accuses him of caring only for himself and demands he answer the question, “What do you even know about me?” At this moment, the audience tries to anticipate what he might say, what he could say…and we realize that we don’t know anything about her either. Safdie has deliberately underdeveloped her character to make us complicit in Kerr’s neglect. We instinctively feel the guilt over this that Kerr does not.

Dawn suffers so much that later in this same argument, she attempts suicide. First responders take her away, and Kerr resumes business as usual, preparing for his biggest fight since rehab, a major heavyweight championship in Japan, the site of his no contest years earlier. This is the aforementioned climax of which many sports movies would hang everything in the balance. Kerr seems destined to face his best friend and training partner, Coleman, in the semifinal, then rematch Igor for the top prize and “a life-changing amount of money.”

Yet the story takes an off-ramp hard. Kerr is defeated in the round prior to fighting Coleman. He’s taken off the chessboard in his own movie. Here we see a glimmer of perhaps the barest growth in Kerr’s character: Instead of lashing out, he gives Coleman his blessing and cheers him on to win the tournament. He even permits himself to laugh in the shower, content with the outcome.

This psychological anatomy of a professional “smashing machine” is perfect for the Rock’s first significant venture into real acting. He fits right into a cast made up, in the Safdie fashion, of real members of the martial arts community: Ryan Bader, Oleksandr Usyk, and Bas Rutten as himself. While this isn’t the performance of the year, the Rock still far outdoes himself and sets a precedent for commendable acting in his future.

Benny Safdie’s first directorial venture without his brother, Josh, is flawed, lacking the sharpness of Uncut Gems and the intensity of Good Time, but it shines as a simple prestige drama that I hope will pave the way for a fascinating solo filmography to come.

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Over the last two months, my output via this Substack has dropped considerably. For a period of time after I created Dispatches from the Cinema, I was ably churning out a prompt review every time I watched a newly-released movie, with time to spare for replying to Filmstack Challenges and throwing the dictionary at DC Studios, etc. But thanks to two job changes and a cross-country move, that has ground to halt. Hence, I have not published anything since my August round-up, and I will be reviewing no fewer than ten films today.

Dispatches represents my first real attempt at creating anything that can be broadly categorized as “content” and maintaining a consistent output of such. When I posted my first piece, I was aware that the early months, even years of this newsletter would likely be characterized by well-intentioned messiness, repeated format changes, and cumbersome uncompensated mental labor for the benefit of (most likely) no one but myself. The idea that 41 people (as of this writing) would find my reviews worth cluttering your inbox with was something I imagined would happen in the far future, or not at all. 41 feels like an absurdly low number to take pride in, but 41 is all I have, and for your readership, I am grateful.

Since April, I have learned much, and I have discerned some ways in which to make the endeavor that is Dispatches more sustainable at an output level that feels neither unsatisfying nor overwhelming. These changes will be effected over the course of the month of October. A new chapter is beginning, one that I hope will elevate the quality and frequency of my work.

Come along, if you’d like.

The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025, dir. Michael Chaves)

I speedran this franchise in anticipation of Last Rites, and they are arguably some of the tamest, safest horror movies that this industry has ever produced. Baby’s First Demon Movie, if you ask me. Yet as much as I would like to be a snob about them, they keep emotionally manipulating me. Ed and Lorraine Warren1 are superlatively endearing, and watching them pass the torch along to their daughter, whose growth we have followed throughout the series, and her new fiancé was touching to say the least. Last Rites is a beautiful send-off, and now I never want anyone to make another one.

The Roses/The Threesome/Splitsville

I have zero thoughts on any of these movies, save one: It is mystifying how unsexy they are. The inciting incidents of each of them are sexual: The titular Roses’ romance starts with a spontaneous hookup, The Threesome has a title I doubt you’ll misinterpret, and Splitsville is about two open relationships. Yet they all seem to actively avoid steaminess. In The Roses, I believe this serves a semblance of a purpose, as these characters are Very British People, and their instinct towards distancing themselves from each other in multiple ways while remaining steadfastly married for most of the picture is characteristic of stereotypical Englishness and helpful to understanding them psychologically. But in the other two, sensuality is notable by its absence. The Threesome’s participants almost never have physical contact after kissing once in the first act and leaving the rest of the encounter to the imagination. The only nudity in Splitsville consists of several frank shots of a penis, the owner of which is the member of the cast who is implied to have the least sex.

Film data researcher Stephen Follows conducted a much-discussed study of the decline of the cinematic sex scene, and while he lists a number of cogent possible explanations for how and why this trend is occurring from a social perspective, I am much more interested in what it says about the films themselves. To portray these relationships and marriages as actively sexual ones, and to simultaneously divorce the couples from their sex lives is to make their sexuality exclusively abstract. Sex is now something that couples do off behind closed doors somewhere, out of sight and mind. It strikes me as a paradoxically conservative paradigm. It’s quite the irony that movies about divorce, polyamory, abortion, and more would have such a repressive, awkward approach to a basic reality of human life.

The Toxic Avenger Unrated (2023, dir. Macon Blair)

From the mind of Oppenheimer’s lawyer in Oppenheimer comes the apotheosis of every downward trend in superhero writing. Squeezed to bursting with irony! Self-loathing! Cringes! Tropes! And more! It reminded me of something I wrote about in my Letterboxd review of the Whedon-penned The Cabin in the Woods: Playing every trope completely straight, then pointing to it and saying, “Look at how we did that trope!” is not real subversion. It’s laziness disguised as cleverness.

Also, it’s not nearly gory or transgressive enough to warrant putting the rating in the title. You wish.

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The Long Walk (2025, dir. Francis Lawrence)

At it’s core, The Long Walk is a war film. All of the ingredients are there: A disparate group of young men with unique coping mechanisms and responses to trauma, most of whom embody archetypes straight out of Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now. A brutal mission almost absurd in its futility and purposelessness. A perverted sense of masculinity, expressed through the evil Major’s constant crass references to testicles in his speeches. Systematic dehumanization.

Different from a traditional war picture, the enemy is not another group of young men on their own brutal mission. The enemy is the mission itself, the Long Walk. A spiritual precursor to the Hunger Games, if you will. A competition aired to a national television audience where the prize is enormous and the cost of losing is cruel, violent death. Unlike the Hunger Games, however, and like only some war movies, the competitors join the Long Walk voluntarily. They aren’t chosen by lottery or drafted by their government. They are here because, in their risk/benefit analysis of this dystopian society, they have better odds of getting ahead in life through the Walk than through normal means. Ergo, one might say that societal systems are the enemy in this war. One might include in that statement their fellow citizens watching at home, finding entertainment in their suffering, depicted by the director not in montages of small leering crowds in living rooms, but in the simplest of props: a TV camera at the end of a tank barrel.2

Waltzing with Brando (2024, dir. Bill Fishman)

Billy Zane’s Marlon Brando is either an afterthought in his own movie, or takes up way too much space in someone else’s. After an opening flash-forward to his appearance on The Dick Cavett Show later in his career, the movie follows Bernie, an architect who befriends Brando while scouting out a prospective hotel site. Brando later recruits him to build his new tropical home. We see the story almost exclusively through Bernie’s eyes and accompanied by his stilted, ham-fisted narration, which would feel more at home in a PBS special than a Maestro-esque cinematic tribute to one of the greatest performing minds of all time. Zane’s reverence of Brando is on full display, but it doesn’t translate to a substantive treatment of him by the writer and director. Brando is molded like clay into a spirit guide archetype for Bernie that distracts from the powerful story he lived as a genius in self-imposed exile from his industry, obsessed with making the world a better place by example. This film lacks a core driving purpose and is thematically hollow from beginning to end.

HIM (2025, dir. Justin Tipping)

Rumor has had it for a while that Jordan Peele fired his managers because he lost the bidding war for Weapons. If I didn’t realize why when I saw that film in theaters, I sure do now. This took an impeccable premise and whiffed the hell out of it. It committed the same sin as The Substance (an acclaimed movie I was cooler on than most critics), which was getting too carried away with spectacle in the second half despite a relatively solid first. In general, I’m predisposed to think we have enough “dark side of prodigious talent” pictures in general, but this one in particular adds nothing to the conversation. “Football is like a death cult,” is a bold thesis that demands bold execution. With more substantive writing, it could’ve been rendered in an incisive way that provoked fascinating discourse on the sport and its fandom. As it is, it will go as unremembered as its hero fought so hard not to be. I’d be pissed I lost out on Weapons for this, too.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025, dir. Kogonada)

Not a film worthy of substantive inquiry. Whimsical for whimsicality’s sake. Dull.

One Battle After Another (2025, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)

Leonardo DiCaprio is undeniably one of America’s great living actors, but I do wish he’d go back to playing characters who influence the story. His Bob Ferguson in One Battle After Another could practically (as the cliche about Indiana Jones goes) have been omitted from the movie, and the major plot beats would largely proceed as they do without him. This makes his significant screentime feel somewhat wasted. I felt the same way about Ernest Burkhart, his character in Killers of the Flower Moon, one of that film’s several narrative dysfunctions. One Battle After Another is a much stronger all-around work, but the fact that it shares the flaw of underwriting a DiCaprio character tells me that this is a trend of some kind, either in DiCaprio’s own role selection or in filmmakers’ choices in utilizing him.

I wouldn’t go so far as some critics have to calling this picture a masterpiece per se, but it is enjoyable to no end to watch Paul Thomas Anderson play with an unprecedented budget, rare (for him) action sequences,3 and (once again) Thomas Pynchon’s distinctive source material. Anderson’s use of VistaVision, Chase Infiniti’s introductory performance, and Jonny Greenwood’s score are all high in the plus column. Sean Penn handles the role that (I assume) would’ve gone to Philip Seymour Hoffman extremely well. His physical tics rendered Lockjaw as just the right balance of pathetic and chilling.

I cannot yet say with confidence whether this will be the film that bags Anderson his long-overdue Academy Award for Best Director, but he certainly seems to be an early frontrunner as we approach hot the time of year when contenders distinguish themselves…

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Weapons (2025, dir. Zach Cregger)

Zach Cregger follows up Barbarian (2022) with a twist on the classic Pied Piper story. If you aren’t familiar, the gist is that in the German town of Hamelin, there was once a rat-catcher who was so skilled that all he had to do to lure the rats away from town was play a tune on his pipe. The burgermeister of Hamelin refused to pay the rat-catcher for his services, so he took revenge by using his pipe to draw Hamelin’s children, rather than rats, away one night. Depending on the telling, the children were returned unharmed after the Piper got paid, drowned in the Weser, or taken to a far away place like Transylvania or Koppenberg.

The original legend is typically read as symbolic, either for a plague carried by rats or the Children’s Crusade of 1212. Cregger’s version modernizes it by moving the setting to a 21st-century American town and pivoting the metaphor to a more familiar epidemic: school shootings. He follows various members of the community, some of whom are directly related to the children’s disappearance (like their schoolteacher, played masterfully by Julia Garner, or one child’s father, by Josh Brolin), others of whom are not. Cregger deftly executes red herrings and frequently misdirects the audience as the truth behind the tragedy unfolds. Beyond simply adding to the mystery, this serves the purpose of showing how community-wide traumatic events, especially those affecting the most vulnerable among us, can deeply wound even those who didn’t know the victims personally.

Strange Harvest (2024, dir. Stuart Ortiz)

This imitation true crime documentary executes its premise as well as it probably can. Its cinematic excellence is limited by the format of the usually low-effort, stock-footage-heavy shows it’s knocking off. That said, the filmmakers deserve praise for nailing the authenticity. It feels nigh indistinguishable from a real true crime doc. It ended up being much more entertaining than I presumed it would be, a lesson in leaning too heavily on preconceived expectations when deciding whether or not to go see a movie. Strange Harvest could easily have been a snoozefest, especially for someone like me who doesn’t usually like true crime shows, but not so. The one indefensible error, though, is the missing “e” in the word “enforcement” on a title card towards the end. There’s really no excuse for missing something like that.

The Naked Gun (2025, dir. Akiva Schaffer)

I do not have much to say about The Naked Gun. I am probably not in the target audience for this. None of the humor works for me, and the writing overall is pretty stupid. However, I have to respect how good it looks compared to similar movies coming out these days. This is the rare 2020s comedy that feels like it was made by competent professionals. Nothing about it felt lazily executed, which unfortunately sets it far apart.

Americana (2023, dir. Tony Tost)

A big pet peeve of mine is out-of-order stories that don’t need to be out-of-order stories. Not everything has to be Memento or Pulp Fiction, and not everything should be. Once Americana got away from the unnecessary perspective switches, and all the characters came together, it ended up being a pretty good time. Sydney Sweeney has a completely out-of-type role, which I appreciate. Paul Walker Hauser is goofy, and Halsey finally gets a part with some substance after her glorified cameo in MaXXXine. Eric Dane and Simon Rex are always fun to watch. And let it never be said that I left out Zahn McClarnon, a tremendously underrated character actor in my book. They all play well enough off each other as a kooky, morally dubious ensemble a la It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, but the anchor, and my favorite character, is Cal Starr (Gavin Maddox Bergman), the white boy who believes he is the reincarnation of Sitting Bull. We’re never really enlightened as to whether it’s a bit or an actual delusion, but his absurd sincerity in it makes him stand out in a sea of storytelling mediocrity.

East of Wall (2025, dir. Kate Beecroft)

The region of South Dakota “east of Wall” is one I have driven through many times, and it’s a part of the country I’ve come to be quite fond of. I love the geography, the unironic tackiness of the advertising, the marked atmospheric vibe shift as I find myself officially entering the American West. I highly anticipated this film, for it is a portrait of the lives of people I’ve interacted with all too briefly as a traveler in the world they spend every day in.

There was a lot to like in East of Wall, especially the surprisingly good acting from a few members of the largely non-professional cast, but it dropped the ball on character development. To fast-track right into spoiler territory, we’re expected to believe at the end of the picture that Tabatha and Porshia (both played by their real-life selves) have mended their relationship and that Tabatha has figured out a better solution for their problems that selling the ranch to Roy (who we’re supposed to believe is an antagonist for wanting to give them a huge bag of money in exchange for continuing to do the jobs they’ve always done?), but we never actually see her do that. The whole story is disjointed and rushed.

It felt like Kate Beecroft wanted to make a documentary but couldn’t get funding unless she put Scoot McNairy in it somewhere (which for the record I am never opposed to as an avid Scoot McNairy enjoyer). There are examples of movies where blending documentary and narrative works in the film’s favor; this is not one of them.

Eden (2024, dir. Ron Howard)

Ron Howard, for the love of God, I am begging you to hire a dialect coach. Or, I don’t know, maybe hire actors from the countries that the characters are from? Why did you try to make Toby Wallace sound French? Why are Daniel Brühl and Ana de Armas the only people who sound authentic? Sydney Sweeney is supposed to be German but sounds like a disabled Englishwoman delivering every line with a grape in her mouth. At least Jude Law has the self-awareness not to try very hard. With how long it took Eden to get distributed, I thought it was going to be this groundbreaking, transgressive survival thriller. Nope, it was just that nobody wanted to release 129 minutes of acting students practicing accents for the first time.

Relay (2024, dir. David Mackenzie)

First Black Bag, then The Amateur, now this: The Dad Thriller is officially BACK, BABY. Light on character, theme, and logic; heavy on cool jobs that have never been portrayed on screen before, New York City chase scenes, and Lily James being beautiful. What’s not to love? I can’t believe one of these used to be in theaters like, every other week in the 90s. This is going to be some kid’s gateway drug into cinema in 2037. His dad will show him this, he’ll Google The Usual Suspects, and voila, new Letterboxd user just spawned.

Caught Stealing (2025, dir. Darren Aronofsky)

Who would’ve thought Darren Aronofsky knows how to have fun? Unfortunately, it seems he may have forgotten to do anything else but have fun… Caught Stealing offers some of the most pure enjoyment I’ve had at the movies this year, but it also is completely incoherent when held up to scrutiny. It can’t decide if it wants to be a deep drama about reclaiming agency in one’s fucked-up disastrous life, or a buddy romp about avoiding execution by organized criminals. Not that a film can’t be both, but rather than synthesizing the two, Caught Stealing just sort of bounces back and forth. It can’t seem to land its focus on the right thing; it needed a lot less of those random Russian heavies and a lot more Matt Smith. The best scenes in the movie were of him and Austin Butler being a chaotic dysfunctional duo. When he spontaneously died (of a concussion? I think?), I kind of checked out of logical analysis and just vibed out for the rest of the movie, which was probably for the best. I would recommend this to anyone who likes action comedies (the good kind) in the New York City underbelly, but it falls far short of the storytelling we all know the director is capable of.

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Courageous (2011, dir. Alex Kendrick) - 2.8 stars

War Room (2015, dir. Alex Kendrick) - 2.8 stars

God’s Not Dead (2014, dir. Harold Cronk) - 1.5 stars

Heaven is For Real (2014, dir. Randall Wallace) - 2.5 stars

Soul Surfer (2011, dir. Sean McNamara) - 3.0 stars

The Shack (2017, dir. Stuart Hazeldine) - 2.8 stars

Unplanned (2019, dir. Cary Solomon & Chuck Konzelman) - 2.0 stars

Facing the Giants (2006, dir. Alex Kendrick) - 2.7 stars

Lifemark (2022, dir. Kevin Peeples) - 2.5 stars

I Can Only Imagine (2018, dir. Andrew & John Erwin) - 3.2 stars

This sample wasn’t chosen scientifically, but it is representative of the bulk of theatrically-exhibited faith-based movies, from such mainstream production companies and distributors as Fathom Events, Affirm Films (a subsidiary of Sony), Pure Flix Entertainment, and Lionsgate Films.

If your gut reaction to this list is, “Well it’s not that bad,” remember: This is the religion that produced creative minds as brilliant yet diverse across times and mediums as Michelangelo and C.S. Lewis. Films about the Christian faith made by non-evangelists include:

The Seventh Seal (1957, dir. Ingmar Bergman) - 4.3 stars

The Exorcist (1973, dir. William Friedkin) - 4.0 stars

Silence (2016, dir. Martin Scorsese) - 4.0 stars

“What is going on here?” has asked your critic on innumerable occasions. “How does a lapsed Catholic make a better movie about Catholic missionaries than a practicing evangelical can hope to make about evangelical churchgoers?”

The answers to these questions are beyond the scope of this review. My purpose in mentioning them is to provide context for my relief upon witnessing the rise of what I believed for a very brief period to be the savior of Christian cinema: Angel Studios.

Angel Studios came onto the public’s radar through its flagship episodic series about the life of Jesus, The Chosen, created by Dallas Jenkins. I have never met Jenkins, but he is quite a celebrity at our common alma mater. Many of my classmates in the small, underfunded Media Production department at the University of Northwestern - St. Paul found Jenkins an encouraging, if rare, example of a practicing Christian who is also a competent filmmaker. If you’ll allow me a moment of pretension, I was far too immersed in discovering Iñárritu, Fincher, Lynch, and Coppola by that point in my education for The Chosen or any other faith-based media to catch my eye, but by osmosis, I became aware of Angel Studios.

The summer after I graduated, Angel became the subject of controversy when it released Alejandro Monteverde’s Sound of Freedom, starring Jim Caviezel, a picture (allegedly) deeply connected to the QAnon conspiracy theory. Again, we have reached a subject beyond the scope of this piece, but I would encourage the reader to watch the movie for themselves before dismissing it, lest they become just as conspiratorial as its dubious protagonist.

My primary takeaway from Sound of Freedom had nothing to do with politics at all. I took note of the sound dialogue and pacing, of Gorka Gomez Andreu’s strong camera work, and of the competent acting. This was a Christian movie by people who (shockingly, somehow) knew how to make movies.

Angel Studios impressed me again last year with Cabrini, directed also by Monteverde, a much less politically radioactive movie about the sexism and xenophobia faced by Catholic missionary Francesca Cabrini (Cristiana Dell’Anna) during her work in 1880s New York City. This was again a film made with genuine competency. I know, the bar is in hell. But this was a second consecutive step in the right direction.

Then Angel came down with a development problem. They followed up Monteverde’s two true-story period dramas with…more true-story period dramas. Sight, Sound of Hope, Bonhoeffer, Brave the Dark, Rule Breakers, et cetera ad nauseam. As it turned out, Angel Studios was just as much a one-trick pony as Affirm or Pure Flix. They were just a slightly less laughably talentless one-trick pony.

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I was ready to wholly write off Angel Studios by the time I saw this review of their latest film, Sketch:

I won’t out my friend and frequent filmmaking collaborator who posted this, but if they read this, they’re more than welcome to identify themselves in the comments. Suffice it to say that they are about as far politically and theologically from the worldview attributed to Angel Studios as it is possible for a person to be, and just as dismissive of mainstream Christian movies as I am. I took this glowing 5-star review as a sign that I should probably give Angel one last chance, and so I did last Saturday morning.

Sketch is a movie wholly indebted to Steven Spielberg, as my friend mentioned above, but less so Jurassic Park than E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Like E.T., it is a story about siblings who encounter an unexplainable phenomenon in the midst of a family crisis (in E.T., it’s their parents’ divorce; in this, the death of their mother). In both films, the plot’s central conflict is the catalyst for the kids to reckon with their unprocessed feelings. Neither the titular E.T. nor the drawings-brought-to-life in Sketch are metaphors, per se, but they do represent in a way the wonder and imagination of childhood which traumatic events like divorce and death invariably erode. I won’t make conjecture about Sketch filmmaker Seth Worley’s personal life, but in the case of E.T., it is easy to infer from the public details of Spielberg’s upbringing why that subject matter was important to him, particularly if one has seen his thinly-veiled autobiopic The Fabelmans.

Sketch’s heroine is Amber Wyatt (Belle), a little girl whose violent drawings get her in trouble at school. After her brother, Jack (Lawrence), discovers a pond in the woods by their house that has magical properties, she follows him there and accidentally drops her sketchbook in the water. This causes the monsters in her artwork to come to life. Amber, Jack, and schoolyard bully Bowman Lynch arm themselves with water guns and other kid-friendly weaponry and set out to disintegrate the drawings “before it’s too late.”

This premise is, like those of many kids’ movies, fairly absurd, but to its credit, Sketch never apologizes for it or condescends to its audience. Frequent readers of Dispatches from the Cinema know that if there’s any trend in contemporary film that makes my eye twitch passive-aggressively, it’s the patronizing insincerity popularized by the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the incapacity of filmmakers to take their own material seriously, the desperate need to feel smarter than the movie. “Marvel humor” enjoyers tend to label me “pretentious” for this take, but what’s really pretentious is demanding every movie you watch give you a fawning, deferent admission that you, the viewer, are far too smart for silly things like comic books and colored pencil monsters, and that the filmmakers would never presume to ask you to show such bullshit your respect.

I breathed a heavy sigh of relief when I noticed that Worley did none of that. Every moment of Sketch is completely sincere, even when it runs the risk that few faith-based movies dare to: showing the audience that real life doesn’t always look exactly the way smarmy Christian sermons want it to. Sketch is unafraid to depict the aspects of life that make suburban Bapti-costal mothers death-grip their imitation pearls, like misbehaving children and the word “ass.”

Speaking from my own experience, Christians who are honest with ourselves recognize that even the most faithful of us are messy. We bicker. We curse. We grieve in unhealthy ways. We fail to love our family members as well as we should. Films (and stories in any medium) that portray these realities without dropping a hasty sermon to the camera about why they’re bad are far more authentic to real-life Christianity than any Kendrick brothers movie could ever hope to be. For that reason, Sketch is exactly what Angel Studios, and the Christian movie industry as a whole, has sorely needed: a well-made, fictional film about compelling characters who are authentically (read, imperfectly) human.

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However, it seemed like a fitting early post for this newsletter, since it’ll give you all an indication of what my tastes are, how I approach moviegoing, and what I’m looking for in what I consider to be a great film.

My method for this is a little different than the typical “list all your favorite films in preferential or alphabetical order” process. The following 40 films consist of:

1. 15 “honorable mentions,” films of varying quality that I thought were particularly intriguing for one reason or another, listed alphabetically, followed by,

2. My 25 favorite films of the year, in ascending order.

The plan is for this to become a Dispatches from the Cinema tradition, allowing me to assert my top films each year, while also including lower-ranked movies that I feel my readers should watch regardless of how much I personally liked them.

So without further ado…

The Honorable Mentions

The Apprentice (dir. Ali Abbasi)

There was really no way to make this movie that wouldn’t result in it being lambasted for some sort of political bias. I didn’t expect it to be in any way objective or centrist in its depiction of Donald Trump. I really only had one wishlist item going into the theater for this movie: That it would depict Trump as a fleshed-out human being, and not as an Alec-Baldwin-on-SNL-esque caricature. The Apprentice more than delivered. It obviously does take a strongly negative position on the man, but it also upholds the basic principles of writing good characters. The Trump of this movie feels like a real person with a much more complex psychology than either the Left or Right would typically have us believe. I have to applaud Ali Abbasi and Sebastian Stan for their courage in choosing to tackle this individual with nuance. Not only does it make for a much better movie, it also makes their ultimate condemnation of President Trump so much more effective in the end.

Civil War (dir. Alex Garland)

Speaking of politically charged films, this movie has gotten a lot of flak on Film Twitter for being “centrist” or “cowardly.” I think it’s exactly the opposite. There are two points that are important to address here: First, this is fundamentally not a movie about American political divisions. It’s a movie (directed by an Englishman, I might add) about war correspondents and the unique strife they face. Every other movie I can name about that topic is set in a foreign country, where the audience can place the conflict at a safe distance from themselves, but Garland chose to put the war in our own front yard, making the hell of war so much more impactful. Second, by refusing to commit to “taking a side,” Garland took perhaps the most courageous position possible: He chose to give his audience a Rorschach test. Do you identify your own ideology with the revolutionary side, or with the politically powerful side? Does Jesse Plemons’ question, “What kind of American are you?” sound like something you would say? Or something that someone would say to you? Does Nick Offerman’s President seem like Trump to you? Or a member of the swamp that Trump has always claimed to want to drain? By comparison, it would have been so easy for Garland to pander to the (mostly) liberal audience of his movie, but instead he told them a complex story that frankly, most of them weren’t prepared for. I loved every moment, and I picked up from the get-go exactly what he was doing. Stephen McKinley Henderson delivered the most devastating line, in a comparatively placid scene: “The State of our Union is QED.”

Coven of the Black Cube (dir. Brewce Longo)

Now, this is my lowest-rated movie on this list, and for good reason. It’s objectively terrible, especially when it comes to acting. I enjoyed the hell out of it anyway. It has witchcraft, serial killing, heavy metal, pizza, video rental stores, and Philadelphia. In other words, everything I love in life. It also just makes me happy to see films that are completely inaccessible to anyone but the person or people who made it. I have to grin at movies that I can’t wrap my head around, but that I can tell the director had a strong vision for. It’s been said that good art “disturbs the comfortable and comforts the disturbed.” I believe firmly that great art comforts the artist and disturbs everyone else. Coven of the Black Cube absolutely fits that bill. I didn’t “get it,” but I don’t have to, because Brewce Longo certainly did.

Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 (dir. Kevin Costner)

Westerns need to come back. Luckily, 2024 had quite a few, including The Thicket, listed below, and Viggo Mortensen’s The Dead Don’t Hurt. But the most memorable by far was the first chapter of Kevin Costner’s crazy four-part passion project, Horizon. While Chapter 1 definitely has symptoms of “Part One Syndrome,” everything it was setting up I found epic. Costner created a vivid ensemble, a thrilling adventure, and (of course) a charismatic antihero for himself to play. Unfortunately, Chapter 2 is being held hostage by Warner Bros. (the usual suspect for this sort of thing, as Looney Tunes and DC Comics fans are well aware). They’re refusing to distribute the completed film, and neither Chapter 3 nor 4 have been able to finish production. I for one want to see the entire saga made and shared with the world, not just because I philosophically support every director’s right to make their vision their way without interference, but also because Horizon is a specific story that I cannot wait to see more of.

Hundreds of Beavers (dir. Mike Cheslik)

After you watch this movie, read up on the process by which Cheslik and co. made and distributed it. I’d geek out way too long and hard if I let myself start typing a summary of it here, but suffice it to say that they pulled off a herculean feat of indie filmmaking that, in this critic’s opinion, puts them in the company of such microbudget legends as Sam Raimi and Myrick & Sanchez. This is exactly the type of film that the rapidly-changing industry needs to look towards making. Not stylistically or narratively per se, but certainly in its scrappiness, frugality, and originality. Not to mention its tailor-made distribution strategy that rapidly built up a cult audience without compromising on a theatrical run or a physical media release. My highest praise to the filmmakers for their artistic integrity and commitment to what makes this medium great.

In a Violent Nature (dir. Chris Nash)

I have a deep love of horror films, but for some reason, the summer camp slasher has never worked for me. My first watch of Friday the 13th was completely underwhelming, and all the subsequent rip-offs of that movie have been downhill from there. However, this one turned the subgenre on its head by following the perspective of the killer instead of the campers. The victims that would normally be front and center are introduced as background voices while our villain stalks them. In addition to this narrative twist, the camera primarily (and literally) follows the killer from behind. We don’t properly see his face until a considerable way through the film, at a particularly revealing moment for his character. Genre films are my bread and butter, so I’ll never pass up a chance to see something unconventional and unafraid to play around with tropes. In a Violent Nature was no disappointment. Johnny was so much more compelling of a character than Jason, and I believe that’s in large part to Chris Nash’s intentionality in making this a good story first, and a genre movie second. I don’t want any sequels or spin-offs to this (even though I’d enthusiastically watch them all), because I feel it would ruin the magic. What I do want is for other, equally original twists on pre-packaged stock movies to follow in its spirit. Give me a Western from the perspective of the six-shooter. Give me a heist movie from the perspective of a guy in the building next door who doesn’t even know there’s a robbery going on. I’m not kidding. Genres are like languages. If they aren’t evolving, they’re dead.

Kneecap (dir. Rich Peppiatt)

Obnoxious Americans who call themselves “Irish” get a bad rap, probably as they should. But being descended from Irish immigrants was and is an integral part of my family’s identity. I grew up hearing my grandmother tell stories about how her parents met in the Bronx, both having crossed the Atlantic before they knew each other. My siblings and I watched the St. Patrick’s Day parade with just as much enthusiasm as the Macy’s Thanksgiving one, and my devoutly Catholic parents made sure we understood the real meaning of a saint’s feast day, as something more sacred than a day to drink green beer and blast “Come Out Ye Black and Tans” over the Home Depot speakers instead of the usual coworker music.

Although my family wasn’t as aggressively anti-English as I am now, there is one principle that they subtly stood by, one that never really struck me as significant until recently. You see, my mother’s side was from Enniskillen, somewhere between 12 and 13 miles from the edge of the occupied territory. My father’s side was from Galway.1 Yet never did my parents or grandparents ever refer to those as being distinct places. My maternal grandmother was Irish. My paternal grandfather was Irish. My mother corrected me multiple times when I was a child for identifying her grandparents as being “from Northern Ireland,” prompting me to remove the phrase entirely from my vocabulary. Even though this wasn’t as intense as Michael’s Fassbender’s revolutionary-minded lesson to young Liam and Naoise in Kneecap, it ensured that the notion of Ireland as a single nation was lodged permanently in my mind.

My parents and grandparents would abhor Kneecap’s music. So would their forebears who came here in the 1920s and earlier. But this film and its fervency made me feel like I was at home again, hearing their stories, learning by example to take pride in my heritage. I might be from America, and it might be inappropriate to identify myself as “Irish” for fear of coming across like one of those German-French-Scottish-hybrid Americans who only recognize their 2.5% Irish blood on March 17th, but nevertheless, I dream as much as anyone of the day when my great-grandparents’ homeland will be freed from occupation. You should too.

Longlegs (dir. Osgood Perkins)

My reaction to this film was more complicated than it was to any of the others on this list. On one hand, it’s a masterful work of visual storytelling. The cinematography and lighting are gorgeous, the use of visual metaphors is superb, and the production design made the movie’s world totally immersive. Osgood Perkins used every trick in the book to make a breathtaking, terrifying horror film. And don’t even get me started on Maika Monroe’s and Nicolas Cage’s world-class performances. Unfortunately, it was really hard for me to appreciate this, because I was far too preoccupied with how hard this movie was trying to be like Se7en. David Fincher’s Se7en is one of my all-time favorite films, and a strong contender for the best crime thriller I’ve ever seen. But it’s not just the visuals and Fincher’s direction that make it great, it’s Andrew Kevin Walker’s razor-sharp script. I won’t go on and on, since this is not a review of Se7en, but suffice it to say: It’s a masterpiece. Longlegs’ script, by comparison, is much more abstract and focused on Agent Harker’s psychology and trauma than on a hardboiled detective story. At the time I watched it, it felt like Longlegs had taken the aesthetic and vibes of Se7en, took out the best part of Se7en, and kept the outer shell. The disappointment I experienced for that reason unfortunately overshadowed my appreciation of the film’s craftsmanship. Having said all that though, it’s still a good movie, and one I’ll certainly rewatch and re-evaluate at some point soon. So much of it still holds my interest and imagination a year later.2 Which I suppose is all you need to know to consider the picture well worth your time.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (dir. Kenji Kamiyama)

And just like that, a distinctively Jeff Bezos-shaped weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I can tell the world is healing because Peter Jackson has returned to put whoever that showrunner over at Amazon is in their place. War of the Rohirrim is everything a Tolkien adaptation should be. Jackson and his team of Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and now, Kenji Kamiyama are the only people who should ever be allowed to touch the Legendarium. Now that I know they’ve still got it, I’m actually pretty okay with The Hunt for Gollum happening. Is it a strange choice for a movie? Absolutely. But so was the story of Helm Hammerhand’s daughter that even many Tolkien buffs had never heard of. If Jackson and co. can make that this awesome, then I have every confidence that they and Andy Serkis will deliver come 2027.

Megalopolis (dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

I’m so glad this movie exists. It’s got an incoherent plot, an excessively and delusionally optimistic message, and it’s about an hour too short.3 It felt way less ambitious than Coppola made it sound. I’m frankly astonished that it took so long to make; it feels significantly less inaccessible and unproducible than some futuristic films that did get the greenlight back in the 80’s. I think the hype and mythology around the project contributed to my disappointment. Regardless of how I felt about it or how good or bad of a movie I think it is, I’m thrilled for Coppola that he finally got to share his batshit vision with us. I’m a consummate auteurist, as you’ve likely gathered, and I firmly believe that every director deserves to express themselves fully, even if the rest of us don’t like it. Obviously, that’s not always realistic, given the economic factors that go along with filmmaking, but that’s my principle. More power to Coppola for never giving up.

P.S. Coppola’s response to winning multiple Razzies is elite. Say what you will about his post-Apocalypse Now career but there can be zero doubt at all that he’s a badass.

A Quiet Place: Day One (dir. Michael Sarnoski)

If you wouldn’t be willing to do all this for some pizza in New York City, then you’ve never eaten pizza in New York City. Michael Sarnoski was a great choice to explore the world of A Quiet Place; he brought with him everything I loved about Pig, from the heart-wrenching emotions he elicited from his cast, to the gritty, grimy environments, to the electric tension that turns a drama into a thriller. Lupita Nyong’o’s Sam is just as vivid and singular as Nic Cage’s Rob. This movie validates what I’ve said about Sarnoski since 2021, which is that he is on track to be a renowned filmmaker if he maintains the quality of his output as his body of work grows. Next up for him is The Death of Robin Hood, which is objectively one of the coolest premises that somehow no one’s ever adapted. I can’t wait to see him direct Hugh Jackman as well as he has Cage and Nyong’o.

Sasquatch Sunset (dir. David & Nathan Zellner)

This was one of the silliest films I saw all year. I truthfully don’t know why this was so interesting to me, since it’s really just 88 minutes of Bigfeet bumbling around in the woods. The only reason I can think of why this held my attention was that it was narratively no different than a movie about humans bumbling around in the woods. My favorite scene in the film, in which the main characters discover an abandoned human camp, plays exactly the same way as a scene about humans finding an abandoned Bigfoot settlement would. That scene represents exactly what makes this movie work. If the Bigfeet were portrayed as animals, then this film would have effectively been a nature documentary without the narration. In other words, unwatchably dull. Instead, the Zellner brothers chose to give them the sentience and consciousness of people, without taking it too far and making them just humans with a lot of fur.

Strange Darling (dir. JT Mollner)

Let’s face it: Most non-linear movies do not need to be non-linear. Seriously. Think of a movie that happens out of order. Is it a Nolan movie? Is it Pulp Fiction? If no to both, then chances are, you’re thinking of a movie that would lose absolutely nothing if it played out chronologically. Strange Darling is the rare example in which the filmmaker uses a non-linear structure to shape the story in an effective way. Writer-director JT Mollner uses the technique of presenting the six “chapters” out of order to carefully control what information he is allowing the audience to have at each moment. To rearrange them from first to last would throw the pacing of the narrative out of whack, and remove any and all tension from the formerly-taut thriller. As it is, Mollner makes some the best use of temporal editing since Oppenheimer.

P.S. I did a double-take when I saw that the cinematographer of this film was none other than Giovanni Ribisi, shooting (as a title card proudly declares) on 35mm film. That alone should make you put your ass in a chair and watch this thing.

The Thicket (dir. Elliott Lester)

The cast of this movie is:

1. Peter Dinklage,

2. Hanna from that show Hanna that no one talks about anymore,

3. The underage girl Tarantino hits on in From Dusk Till Dawn,

4. A Charlie Plummer lookalike because the real Charlie Plummer backed out before filming,

5. The lead from that Batgirl film David Zaslav shitcanned,

6. Oppenheimer’s lawyer,

7. Private Cowboy from Full Metal Jacket,

8. That Italian dude who’s always on Joe Rogan and Theo Von, and

9. The lead singer of fucking Metallica.

And you know what? They all work goddamn perfectly together. This might be the best ensemble cast of 2024. Dune: Part Two has nothing on this.4

Wildcat (dir. Ethan Hawke)

The most stand-out element of Wildcat (aside from Maya Hawke’s career-best performance) is the hazy, dream-like color grade that reflects not only Flannery O’Connor’s sickness from lupus, but also her profound angst over her writing and faith. It might turn some people off who prefer sharper, cleaner cinematography, but to me it was a brilliant, bold stylistic choice. I also loved the narrative structure, which borrows from one of my favorite 2000s films, Todd Haynes’ avant-garde Bob Dylan movie I’m Not There, by weaving O’Connor’s fictional stories into her biographical scenes, with Hawke playing several of her characters. All of this works together to transport the audience into Flannery O’Connor’s mind and soul.

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The Cheating Section

In which I stuff more films into this list even though I originally limited myself to 40:

Grand Theft Hamlet (dir. Sam Crane & Pinny Grylls)

This production of Hamlet was staged during a pandemic that affected places that hadn’t been discovered yet, inside a fictional version of a city that wouldn’t be founded for another 300 years, using technology that couldn’t have been imagined at the time William Shakespeare wrote it. There is absolutely nothing about the world of this play that the author would ever have recognized…except the words he wrote.

I wish I could take this movie back to him in a TARDIS.

Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths - Parts 1-3 (dir. Jeff Wamester)

Quick hits on these since I want to move on to the Top 25:

Part 1 - This is THE best Barry Allen story outside the comics and I’m not afraid to say it.

Part 2 - John Stewart and John Constantine have a “Martha” moment in this and I unironically loved it.

Part 3 - Kevin Conroy’s final moments as Batman. What more do I even have to say? Gotham hasn’t been the same without him. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

Overall - Beautiful farewell to decades of DC animation. As someone extremely pessimistic about the future of the whole DC brand,5 it was comforting to have one last ride with the versions of these characters that were so influential on me as a child.

Wander to Wonder (dir. Nina Gantz)

This should’ve won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. That’s all I’m going to tell you. This one is best if you go in blind. Just trust me and go watch it.

Ethan's Guinness & Pipe Tobacco Fund

The Top 25

And now for the main event:

#25. Armand (dir. Halfdan Ullman Tøndel)

My interest in this film was exclusively due to the fact that its director is the grandson of none other than the great Ingmar Bergman. I can confirm that the apple does not fall far from the proverbial tree. Tøndel manages to make the most mundane of situations (a parent-teacher conference) into an intense, heart-wrenching experience.

#24. Lee (dir. Ellen Kuras)

Kate Winslet delivers one of the best female leading performances of the year, for my money. Journalism was one of the recurring themes of 2024 cinema,6 and the story of Lee Miller was perhaps the most heart-wrenching example. This exploration of media ethics, censorship, and PTSD had an eight-year process to make, but the fruits of that labor are well worth the wait.

#23. The Peasants (dir. Hugh & DK Welchman)

I’d put this film up against any animated picture of the 2020s. It’s an enormous feat of craftsmanship with a shocking, emotionally provocative story. The Welchmans ripped my heart out despite my tendency towards detachment. The village’s treatment of Jagna (pictured) will deeply disturb you, and it should.

#22. Gladiator II (dir. Ridley Scott)

It’s extremely challenging to avoid instinctually basing my entire opinion of this movie on its predecessor. Gladiator is perhaps Scott’s finest work, and one of the few great epics of modern Hollywood. It’d be tempting to look at the sequel’s inferior visuals and the all-too-noticeable absence of the great Russell Crowe, and write it off as a pointless cash grab.

But this knee-jerk criticism would do a disservice to a film that, on its own merits, has just as inspiring and poignant a story as the first. Paul Mescal’s Hanno is no Maximus, but he’s a strong protagonist in his own right with an equally compelling drive for vengeance and surrounded by a phenomenal supporting cast. “Legasequels” are all too easy to get wrong, but pictures like Gladiator 2 remind us that, when handled with care, they can certainly be gotten right.

#21. September 5 (dir. Tim Fehlbaum)

If you pull up the top reviews on Letterboxd for September 5, you’ll see hundreds of combinations of words that all say the same thing: This movie is Israeli propaganda.

It’s not.

If it was supposed to be, then Israel sucks at propaganda. In no way does this film attempt to broadly litigate the Israel vs. Palestine conflict. Rather, it recounts the events of the massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich through the narrow lens of the sports reporters who suddenly found themselves covering not sports, but a terrorist attack. It’s exponentially more a journalism movie than it is an Israel/Palestine movie. If you don’t believe me, watch it for yourself.

#20. Juror #2 (dir. Clint Eastwood)

As of the writing of this blurb, this is has recently been confirmed as not Clint Eastwood’s last movie. While I’m happy to hear that he’s got at least one more in him at 95 years old, Juror #2 would have been a perfectly respectable note to go out on. It’s a courtroom thriller that successfully feels both formalist and substantive. Nicholas Hoult and Toni Collette are fantastic as always, and J. K. Simmons and Chris Messina both give outstanding supporting performances. Every minute had me on the edge of my seat, right down to the ambiguous final frame.

#19. Alien: Romulus (dir. Fede Alvarez)

This one got something of a bad rap for its controversial inclusion of a legacy character whose original actor has passed away since his last appearance in the role, but regardless of how you feel about that, Alien: Romulus should be evaluated holistically, rather than pedantically dismissed because of a brief cameo. It’s a strong return to form for the Alien franchise with mind-blowing cinematography, practical effects, and performances. The standout amongst the latter is David Jonsson in his second feature film role. He continues the tradition of the androids being Alien’s best characters. I don’t have a lot of expectations for the future of this franchise (other than wanting to see Michael Fassbender return at some point down the line), but based on Romulus, it’s on a solid track as far as I’m concerned.

#18. Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (dir. Ariane Louis-Seize)

I would never have known this movie existed if not for the kickass title. As far as I know, it only played at one small arthouse theater in my whole state, but it caught my eye instantly. The genre most aptly termed “urban fantasy” is all too underexplored in cinema. As a lover of folklore and mythology, I’m always intrigued by the ways in which storytellers integrate them into the present day.

#17. Rebel Moon: The Director’s Cuts (dir. Zack Snyder)

Yes, I’m aware I’m cheating again by putting two movies into one entry, but these really are two halves of a single whole story. They’ve been dismissed out of hand by most critics, which I blame on the crappy release strategy. While the idea of releasing one “family-friendly” cut and one R-rated cut of each movie might have sounded good in a boardroom, it didn’t work at all in practice. In the future, Netflix should really just let Snyder release his un-meddled-with vision, R rating or no.

As for the movies themselves, the Director’s Cuts are mind-blowing. The story is mythic and poetic. The action, the aspect of Snyder’s filmmaking that even his most asinine haters are often unable to impugn, is kickass. Tom Holkenborg’s score and Stefan Duchant’s production design are stellar, and the visual effects are possibly the best in the history of Netflix. Ever since Star Wars went off the rails under Disney, I’ve longed for a hardcore, grown-up space opera to scratch the itch that George Lucas’ opus did when I was a child, and now I have one.

#16. Freud’s Last Session (dir. Matt Brown)

This film will always have a special place in my heart, since it’s the first one I ever reviewed under my own byline.7 Apart from that, it struck a chord with me as a Christian who’s spent most of my life struggling with not having all the answers to life’s questions. Often, religious people are expected (or expect themselves) to have everything figured out. In reality, belief in God makes you realize just how little anyone has figured out. This is humbling but also, in a strange way, liberating. True faith doesn’t close you off to asking questions, but instead prompts you to act better ones and accept that some of them will never have satisfying answers in this life. Freud’s Last Session wisely doesn’t attempt to feed neat conclusions to the audience. Rather, it embraces the coexistence of the firm beliefs and troublesome doubts that both Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis held. Is this contradictory? Maybe, but so is life.

#15. We Live in Time (dir. John Crowley)

I cannot express how much this type of movie is not up my alley. Yet I had a day during a vacation to New Jersey last fall with no activities planned, and I had little better to do than to stroll to the nearest theater and watch a movie. For better or worse, nothing was playing except some eyeroll-worthy romance starring two sickeningly attractive leads.8 As you’ve no doubt guessed by now, those two leads knocked my socks off. We Live in Time has none of the grotesque schlock that so many love stories suffer from. It’s a wholly sincere, messy portrait of what true love is in the real world where endings aren’t endings and life doesn’t follow a three-act structure.

#14. The Seed of the Sacred Fig (dir. Mohammad Rasoulof)

Being a teenager under the roof of parents who staunchly support the regime in power is a unique type of strain. You’re old enough to have beliefs and defend them reasonably, but you’re powerless to effect any actual change, and rational argument does not work on people who hold irrational views. The Seed of the Sacred Fig represents this experience in a way that ripped open many old wounds of mine. Rasoulof is one of the bravest filmmakers working today. It’s truly a shame that the Academy went with a much weaker choice for Best International Feature; I would have killed to hear his acceptance speech.

#13. La Chimera (dir. Alice Rohrwacher)

A movie about grave robbing has to do very little to interest me, yet this one also offers mystical visions, the woefully underrated Etruscan civilization, and a delightful leading performance by rising star Josh O’Connor.9 I was disappointed that Italy chose to submit Vermiglio (dir. Maura Delpero) instead for Best International Feature; not only is La Chimera a much stronger film, but I think it would likely have been better positioned to make it off the shortlist. I could easily have seen The Girl with the Needle, if nothing else, losing its spot to this picture.10

#12. The First Omen (dir. Arkasha Stevenson)

This film was on my watchlist well before I realized that it was a prequel to a Richard Donner film entitled The Omen. I found that out the day before the film opened, and I quickly watched the 1976 original to familiarize myself. As Donner movies go, it’s fantastic; as The Exorcist knockoffs go, it’s decent. It’s most memorable element is a brief supporting performance from the Second Doctor himself, Patrick Troughton.

The First Omen on the other hand is a tour de force in how to properly spin off of pre-existing material. Despite not existing in the original film, Nell Tiger Free’s Sister Margaret is a powerful addition to the franchise. Free commands total rapture from the audience. Her story recontextualizes The Omen as more than just a horror movie about a young Antichrist, but a tragedy of a woman who was manipulated, tortured, and violated by a corrupt religious institution.11 Ralph Ineson is also excellent in Troughton’s former role, Father Brennan, a priest who sees the conspiracy for the affront to God that it is.

#11. Late Night with the Devil (dir. Cameron & Colin Cairnes)

Much like this year’s Bring Her Back, Late Night with the Devil struck me as a kind of parable about the supernatural. It appears at first to be an anti-Satanic Panic movie, a film about a courageous late-night host, Jack Delroy (Dastmalchian), who has the rare open-mindedness to interrogate reports of demonic activity with rationality, instead of dismissing it with superstition. However, it slowly descends into a terrifying cautionary tale. Delroy’s meddling in things he cannot control or comprehend ultimately brings about a dark outcome. Whether one believes in the supernatural or not, this is a powerful tale about the dangers of ambition that supersedes morality.

#10. Conclave (dir. Edward Berger)

Setting a political thriller inside the papal conclave is frankly something I’m surprised it’s taken this long for someone to do. In addition to being excellently directed, shot, and acted, it’s also a taut, sharp mystery that had me leaned forward in my seat from the first shot. The only aspect of the story that didn’t 100% work for me was the ending, which received a lot of criticism from Catholics who take themselves Very Seriously. My objection to it is far from moral, but instead because of the order in which information is revealed to the audience. I think the pacing would’ve been stronger if Lawrence had discovered Benitez’ secret before the final vote, instead of after.

#9. A Complete Unknown (dir. James Mangold)

Musician biopics are something that I think I would be okay if there were never any more of. That being said, Bob Dylan is one of my favorite singers and songwriters of all time, so there was no way I wouldn’t be first in line for this. A Complete Unknown thankfully dispenses with almost all of the pedestrian tropes of this type of film and puts a barrier up between its antihero and the audience, the same barrier Dylan himself has put up for his whole career. James Mangold intentionally doesn’t let us peek into Dylan’s interiority; rather, we watch his rise to success unfold from just over his shoulder. This movie has the humility to chronicle this part of his life without attempting to revise it and mold it into a neatly cinematic shape. But the most important reason why this movie transcends its subgenre is Timothee Chalamet: His long preparation for this role more than paid off. His was definitely the best male leading performance of 2024. Adrien Brody can pound sand.

#8. Monkey Man (dir. Dev Patel)

I can’t tell if it’s more impressive that this film is Dev Patel’s first as a director, or that it was only made for ten million dollars. It’s an elite action movie of the caliber of the John Wick and Mad Max franchises. It’s a testament to the creative power that madmen can wield even with few resources. Patel’s next movie is set to be a medieval revenge thriller, and it may well be among my most anticipated movies for the rest of the decade.

#7. Maria (dir. Pablo Larrain)

Pablo Larrain’s trilogy of films about famous 20th-century women has drawn to a close. My thesis on third installments in trilogies is that to be truly successful, they must feel like sequels to not just the second installments, but the firsts as well. The Dark Knight Rises is a satisfying conclusion to Batman’s story in large part because it not only responds to the themes of The Dark Knight, but also converses with Batman Begins. Similarly, Maria is a spiritual sequel to Spencer in its depiction of a woman whose private and public selves are necessarily different, a fact that drives the protagonists to lose their grips on reality, which Larrain illustrates with brilliant surrealism. Yet it also follows up on Jackie; Jacqueline Onassis haunts Maria without even physically appearing, thanks to her marriage to the titular character’s ex-lover and the brief presence of her first husband, John F. Kennedy.

The other compelling aspect of Maria is its meta-casting of Angelina Jolie, a performer past her prime playing a performer past her prime, both actress and character alike seeking to prove they are still talented even though their public personae have faded into some degree of obscurity. It’s poetic, so much so that it seems tailor-made for the Oscars. In one of my least favorite snubs of the 97th Academy Awards, Jolie was passed over, though I would put her performance as Maria Callas up against any of the actual nominees.

#6. Saturday Night (dir. Jason Reitman)

If I were to list off all of the comedy films and comic actors I like, every single entry on the list could be traced back with few degrees of separation to Saturday Night Live. Any appreciation I have for comedy at all is downstream of SNL. It’s an institution like no other, and its impact on my life personally cannot be overstated. If this movie did anything, it made me feel for 90 minutes like I was a part of it. That is the highest praise I can give, and it’s well-deserved.

#5. The Bikeriders (dir. Jeff Nichols)

The Bikeriders doesn’t really have a linear story, which works in its favor, since it draws its material from a photo book by Danny Lyon (played charmingly by Mike Faist12), a New Journalist contemporary of Hunter S. Thompson. Real human lives don’t follow three-act structures, and neither does this. The story demystifies and humanizes a biker gang; it’s members aren’t archetypal bruisers, but authentic people who crave belonging and companionship as we all do.

This was a moviegoing experience I’ll never forget (especially since it featured the first trailer for Nosferatu, my most anticipated film of 2024). It is physically impossible to leave the movie theater after The Bikeriders without wanting to drive straight to the motorcycle store. Love of motorcycling just oozes out of every scene.

My favorite little detail is Tom Hardy’s voice. When this movie’s trailer first dropped, I thought to myself, “Why is Tom Hardy doing a Marlon Brando voice?” I got my answer in an early scene, when his character, Johnny, decides to found the club. He gets the idea from The Wild One (1953), in which Brando plays the leader of a biker gang. Hardy shifts his voice from that of a fairly normal Chicagoan to the Brando impression that he does for the rest of the film. He isn’t doing Brando; his character is. Genius.

#4. The Count of Monte Cristo (dir. Alexandre de La Patelliére, Matthieu Delaporte)

This may well go down as the definitive adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ novel. It blows away the 2002 film starring Jim Caviezel (which admittedly I did like until I saw this one). It does take some liberties, as all adaptations must, but they largely served it well; I actually like some characters’ endings more than the ones they got in the book. The only change I would make is to put the Napoleon Bonaparte cameo back in, but the story lives just fine without it. The Count of Monte Cristo is the definition of an epic, and every detail comes together for a kickass cinematic experience.

#3. Dune: Part Two (dir. Denis Villeneuve)

This movie releasing early in the year made a lot of people forget by awards season that it’s a masterpiece sequel of the caliber of The Dark Knight and The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers. It did get ever-so-barely edged out by two other films on this list, but I wouldn’t argue with anyone who claimed that it was the best movie of 2024. It takes everything great about the first Dune and turns it up to eleven. In this critic’s opinion, it’s a top three Denis Villeneuve picture along with Prisoners and Blade Runner 2049. As I write this blurb, I struggle to say something that someone else hasn’t already, so I’ll close it out with my sincere hope that the Academy gets its head out of its ass for Dune: Messiah and ponies up some overdue above-the-line nominations.

#2. Nosferatu (dir. Robert Eggers)

I’m convinced that Robert Eggers cannot miss. His fourth straight heater of a horror film is a remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Expressionist twist on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. My usual askance-looking at remakes (especially of one of my favorite movies) was completely shattered. Every detail of Nosferatu is razor-sharp, from Eggers’ dialogue to Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography to Craig Lathrop’s production design to the unforgettable cast. Lily-Rose Depp was the standout of course, but there wasn’t a bad performance in the whole movie. I’d give more examples, but that would just be listing off every actor in the picture.

#1. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (dir. George Miller)

“The question is, do you have it in you to make it epic?”

Furiosa narrowly beat out the rest of my 5/5’s from 2024, largely on its masterful evocation of awe. Every scene made me feel absolute wonder at the power of cinema, which for me is the true marker of a “movie of the year.” The difference between a good movie and a great movie, a great movie and a masterpiece, a masterpiece and a movie of the year, is transportation. No picture in 2024 transported me like Furiosa, both upon my first watch and my return to the theater with my best friend, which he and I followed up with a rewatch of Mad Max: Fury Road. I can’t recommend that double feature enough, by the way; it’s just as awesome as watching Rogue One and A New Hope back to back, if not more.

Conclusion

If you read this whole thing, thank you. I wrote 80% of it within the first week of launching this newsletter, and to my embarrassment, I just finished it about seven hours ago. The 2025 edition shall be far more timely. I have big plans for Dispatches from the Cinema, and these Top 40 lists will doubtless become a mainstay.

Together does this with a relationship that, once passionate, has begun to decay from within. Tim and Millie (played by Franco and Brie, respectively, whom your critic trusts the Internet has informed you by now are married in real life) move to a small forested town from “the city” (ostensibly Seattle). Right away, we are thrice introduced to the growing dissatisfactions between them:

1. At Tim and Millie’s going-away party, Tim’s friends (including Millie’s brother) ask him to join their band’s tour as a pinch-hitter guitarist. He accepts without consulting Millie or factoring in the decision’s impact on her.

2. Millie’s friend exhorts her to break up with Tim because of his disinterest in sex as of late. Mille dismisses her advice out of hand. Later, Millie proposes to Tim in front of all their guests. He freezes, then tentatively accepts to save face. No one is fooled.

3. Sometime between the party and the move, Tim has a nightmare in which Millie insults him, then says that she can’t sleep with “them” watching. Tim turns to see two undead-looking figures at the other end of the bed.1

Through these incidents, we see the characteristics of Tim and Millie’s relationship that will be tested as their body transformations begin: resentment, and a codependency that prevents them from acting on it.

While exploring their new area, Tim and Millie fall into an underground cave that was once a New Age chapel. They spend the night. When they awaken, their legs are stuck together. This is where the body horror begins. As the second act unfolds, the couple is supernaturally pulled towards each other, even while their fights get more heated and frequent. Whenever they get too far apart, Tim becomes unwell.

At one point, Tim feels himself about to pass out, so he rushes to Millie’s side while she’s at work. Desperate to alleviate his strange condition, Tim pulls her into a restroom and kisses her aggressively. They have sex in a stall, but Tim is unable to pull out. They finally get unstuck from each other just in time for Millie’s coworker, Jamie (Herriman), to notice them.

Millie goes to Jamie’s house (down the road from her and Tim’s) to apologize. He tells her to think nothing of it and invites her in for a drink. When she opens up about the conflict between her and her partner, Jamie brings up a concept from ancient Greek philosophy: Human beings were created with four arms, four legs, and two faces, but Zeus separated them in two. Thus, humans are cursed to spend their entire lives seeking out the person who would have been their “other half.”

That night, Tim and Millie fight again, and they go to sleep in separate rooms. Nevertheless, they’re pulled together once again in their sleep. Their arms fuse; they’re only able to separate by snorting muscle relaxers and using a power tool to saw their flesh apart.

They attempt to go to the hospital, but Millie realizes she left her keys at Jamie’s house. When she goes back for them, she finds a tape of Jamie and his late husband’s wedding. It took place at the chapel where all of this began, before it sank underground. Part of the odd ceremony involves the newlyweds using the cave to merge their bodies. The scene implies that Jamie is actually both Jamie and his husband.

Despite their horror at the realization of what is truly happening to them, Tim and Millie allow the process to run its course. They strip nude and embrace, their bodies fusing into each other. The film cuts to black and re-opens on a table set for three. Millie’s parents (whose imminent visit was referenced twice before) arrive at the house and ring the doorbell. The door is answered by an individual who appears to be a meld of Tim and Millie.

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One need not look too deeply to see filmmaker Michael Shanks’ thesis. This isn’t simply a horror movie about neo-Greek paganism.2 It’s about the highs and lows of a dysfunctional relationship, and the dissonance between the Platonic ideal of a relationships (two “halves” becoming whole in each other) and the realities of the partnered life. Tim and Millie instinctually draw towards each other, not just because of the supernatural force acting upon them, but also emotionally, because that’s all they know. As Millie states, she doesn’t even remember what life was like before she started dating Tim. And much as their mutual resentment causes them to push each other away instead of dealing with their problems, they spend most of the film trying to sever their new physical connection, instead of embracing it.

That fact, coupled with the final frame of the Tim/Millie hybrid, makes it seem like Shanks is endorsing his protagonists’ transformation. Is this what couples should strive for, to him? The emotional and relational equivalent of merging into a single person?

I doubt it. At the very least, I’m uncertain. That doesn’t line up with my vision of a perfectly harmonious partnership, or with what I imagine most romantically-inclined people desire for themselves. “Sacrifice your individual personhood for your relationship!” isn’t a healthy message.

That ending diminishes what is otherwise a strong movie. I liked the dolly shot over the three place settings. That, paired with the subtle implication shortly earlier that Jamie is a hybrid of two lovers, would’ve been a great clue to leave the audience with. It could have been left to us to infer what happened to Tim and Millie after they allowed themselves to meld, and whether or not that was the right choice. Had it been left that ambiguous, I likely would be arguing in this review that the better choice in light of the whole story would have been for them to end their dysfunctional relationship and never come close enough for the transformation to continue. I suppose I still could make that case, but I would be doing so in spite of the picture’s definitive conclusion that harmony was indeed achieved between them.

That being said, I would not describe the final scene as ruining the film as a whole. From a technique standpoint, it was remarkable. Visually, Together is unafraid of contrast and darkness, always a plus in this critic’s opinion. Shanks chose his shots meticulously, and cinematographer Germain McMicking moved the camera with absolute grace. The editing and use of licensed music also deserve praise. On the acting front, Herriman understands his assignment as well as ever. Brie finally gets a role that lets her show off her full talents, which have tended to go underutilized in her most well-known projects. Franco matched her well for the most part, but he did drift into overacting during some of Tim’s meltdowns. It’s painfully obvious in his voice when he stops acting organically and starts hamming it. However, the film benefits in many ways from the un-simulated chemistry and comfort of its two stars, so I can tolerate some weak moments for an overall irreplicable pair of performances.

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First Steps, by contrast, takes place in an alternate universe, numbered 828, in the year 1964. Earth-828 has experienced tremendous technological advancements compared to our own. Thanks to the inventions of Reed Richards (Pascal) and the diplomacy of Sue Storm (Kirby), world peace has largely been achieved, though the country of Latveria leaves their seat conspicuously unfilled when the nations come together. Along with Sue’s younger brother, Johnny (Quinn), and Reed’s best friend, Ben Grimm (Moss-Bachrach), Reed and Sue were altered into superhumans by an accident that occurred during spaceflight. First Steps does not depict this directly, but it does drag out a thorough summary of the Fantastic Four’s backstory in a voiceover at the very beginning, essentially defeating the purpose of skipping the origin.

To its credit, the movie soon overcomes its rushed first act and tells a fairly contained story. The world is informed by Shalla-Bal, the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), that her1 master, the eldritch god-like planet-devourer Galactus (Ralph Ineson), will soon be consuming Earth and all its living creatures. When the Four give chase, she offers them an escape clause: Earth will be spared if they surrender Reed and Sue’s unborn child. Franklin Richards is a superhuman in his own right, to whom Galactus believes he can transfer his hunger, allowing him to finally rest. The rest of the film follows the Four working to stop Galactus without surrendering Franklin, focusing more than most MCU movies on the character development that unfolds during that process.

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Specifically, Reed Richards struggles with his obsessive need to “solve everything,” as the comics once put it. This is what I hoped for from his character; this side of him has gone unexplored in previous adaptations. I maintain that Pedro Pascal was a miscast for this role, and his past performances as father figures don’t translate perfectly to Reed, but he services the material well enough. Ioan Gruffudd still wins out among Mister Fantastic actors.

Sue faces the brunt of the apparent dilemma between saving her son or the world. Vanessa Kirby was a pleasant surprise, giving arguably the best performance in the movie. I had my doubts about her casting, but of the four leads, she’s the one that I will think of as being the “definitive” version of her character.

Johnny and Ben, unfortunately, are much more underdeveloped. Like his comics counterpart, Johnny is a ladies’ man, but this is only ever referenced in dialogue and never shown. This robs the film of the opportunity to differentiate between the feelings he has towards Shalla-Bal and the “player” attitude he has towards other women. To date, I do not believe there has been a definitive Human Torch, Quinn included (although I don’t think we’ve had a bad one, either).

Ben ostensibly has a love interest of his own in schoolteacher Rachel Rozman (Natasha Lyonne), but their dynamic is much less interesting than the one that Michael Chiklis’ Thing had with the blind Alicia Masters in the 2005 movie. In general, Chiklis had more to work with in terms of character development, but Moss-Bachrach far from disappoints. His is perhaps the best casting in the movie, along with Kirby (Ineson comes in at #3).

Visually, First Steps is some of Marvel Studios’ strongest work. The absence of its signature flat, grey anti-aesthetic is a breath of fresh air. For the first time since Phase 1, the Marvel universe feels tangible and real even though it isn’t realistic, per se. Between that, the notable lack of stupid Marvel quips, and how much I enjoyed Thunderbolts*, I’m beginning to feel a glimmer of hope for the franchise’s future.

Or, I would be beginning to, that is, if not for the Latverian dictator in the room. First Steps’ mid-credits scene predictably teases the next major antagonist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Doctor Doom. He will be played, in the unlikely event you haven’t heard, by Robert Downey, Jr. This uninspired casting reeks of desperation for the relevance Marvel once had before it ran itself creatively into the ground. Despite the tremendous opportunities that Doom’s introduction to the MCU could have offered, Downey’s reuse indicates to me that we have not yet seen the worst that Marvel has to offer us.

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That world is called Eddington, New Mexico, a fictional town like many I’ve driven through in the western U.S. It’s a place of diverse sensibilities, from the conservative rusticity of Sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix), to the flower-child artistry of his dollmaker wife, Louise (Stone), to the paradisial privilege of the wealthy mayor, Ted Garcia (Pascal). This diversity manifests in a wide range of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic amongst members of the community: Some cope by putting absolute faith in the new social order, modeled by Mayor Garcia. Others turn to conspiracy theories, such as Louise’s mother, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), and the nameless radio host voiced by Aster himself. Still others channel their anxieties and frustrations into political activism, particularly in the wake of George Floyd’s death, some as true believers in the cause of racial justice (e.g. Sarah) and others as opportunists (e.g. Brian, who later switches to the right wing when he finds that there’s more fame and fortune to be had on that side).

I admire Ari Aster’s boldness in choosing to explore the pandemic in a way that challenges preconceived notions and doesn’t fit into either of the two main narratives about it. His thesis seems to be that communities break down when they stop seeing each other for who they are and start letting outside forces turn them against each other. Cross consistently responds to issues in Eddington with some variation of “That wasn’t us!” or “That was [other place in America], not Eddington!” And to some extent, he’s right. The young people protesting in the streets haven’t encountered oppression face-to-face. The crowd calling for their neighbor to be forced out of the grocery store for not wearing a mask haven’t been in direct danger of infection. In fact, it’s explicitly stated that there have been zero COVID cases anywhere near Eddington. The anger, anxiety, and tension that the townsfolk feel all come from third parties far away, like the news, social media, and a charismatic, quasi-religious motivational speaker named Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler).

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It’s hard for this critic to imagine a better way to describe what happened to us in 2020. We all started treating each other differently when the faces on YouTube and cable news told us that any one of us could be a walking biological weapon or a Communist race rioter. Now, you may characterize the reasons for the division in America differently. You may believe that one group was justified in its fear and hatred of another. Maybe Aster doesn’t take something into account in his assessment of our shared history that you do. But it’s a strong thesis, whether we agree or not.

By and large, he sticks to this central theme without going as far into absurdity as his previous film, Beau is Afraid (a welcome lesson learned, in my book). His restraint serves this movie well. However, he does lose control at one point, when he introduces a shadowy “Antifa” group, which raids Eddington and kills several major characters. This is a plot development that helps advance Cross’ character and tee up the film’s ending, but it undermines the point that I believe the director intended to make. Antifa was more conceptually valuable to the story as a vague specter that people used to monger fear. It was a crucial part of the rhetoric used by the outside forces I mentioned above. Bringing it into the movie as a group of actual characters implies that it was a legitimate threat to the community the whole time. This contradicts the idea that the primary danger to Eddington is its own manipulation against itself.

I am fascinated to see how cinematic interpretations of the pandemic will evolve over time. After 9/11, different filmmakers explored its effects on the country and the world in unique ways. Some leaned heavily into patriotism and militarism. Others criticized the Bush administration’s response with varying degrees of subtlety. To write out a chronological list of American films that converse with 9/11 is to map the fluid relationships that the country has had with its last nationwide traumatic event. Last, that is, until COVID-19. This time, not just American cinema, but world cinema will have a long history of critical, contemplative, even therapeutic films through which to process it, and the first picture on that list may just be Eddington.

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