The Mighty Kubrick: On Barry Lyndon at 50

It’s a gift for the young cineaste to be introduced to certain filmmakers at certain stages of life. The films of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, for instance, are a perfect education for the very young. They teach a fundamental fact. Movies are composed of conventions — frames, movements, transitions, plots, character types, stock situations — and it’s the responsibility of a great filmmaker to idiosyncratically adapt, or else explode, those conventions whenever possible.

We Are Superman: On James Gunn’s Superman

Superhero films are strange things. For all that we’ve been inundated with in that bloating genre ever since Bryan Singer’s first X-Men movie kicked off the contemporary rush, it’s easy to forget just how unlike everything else these kinds of films are. They’re sort of like other blockbusters, sure — only of course we all know they’re not. Each new superhero flick, in these days of superhero exhaustion, serves as an opportunity to step back, and consider just how strange it is that the last 25 years of American culture have seen us drowning in fantasies of wearing tights, capes, and technosuits while beating the ever-living hell out of each other.

Model Collapse: On Jesse Armstrong’s Mountainhead

A peculiar development is on hand. The people in power, the people who make the news and shape history, no longer want to wait for someone to play them, years later, in a movie; they want to play themselves, now, live on TV, with dramatic flair. They imagine how they should be perceived by the audience and they deliver to us that perceived character. Our Defense Secretary imagines what a Defense Secretary should be like and plays that version on TV. Our Attorney General plays her version of Attorney General. Trump, of course, plays Trump. They all decided to cut out the middleman — the historian, the biographer, the screenwriter, the actor — and deliver their own unfiltered biopics straight to the consumer.

The Art of Letting Go: On Bill Burr’s Drop Dead Years

“I have been on the road for the last five months . . . really thinking the worst of people.” This is how comedian Bill Burr opens his 2010 stand-up special Let It Go, right before he launches into a tirade detailing his disgust for the human biomass he regularly encounters at the airport. It’s a sentiment you’d expect from a comedian who is known first and foremost for his anger. But contrast that with how he opens his most recent stand-up special, 2025’s Drop Dead Years: “It’s kind of a weird thing to be over fifty, really starting to realize how fucked up you are. I thought I did stand-up because I loved comedy. I did stand-up because that was the easiest way to walk into a room full of a bunch of people that I didn’t know and make everybody like me.”

Cinema’s Last Great Gamble: On Three New Films, Warfare, Sinners and Friendship

Prophesying cultural doom has become a popular pastime online, to the point of being hackneyed. I have been guilty of it myself. My most popular post on my Substack, Cross Current, titled “There Has Been a Drought of Cultural Greatness for Most of the 21st Century So Far,” has the subhead “Human Mediocrity Will Pave the Way for AI Supremacy.” Dramatic, I know. When I say I see a speck of light in my crystal ball, this is not some manifesting hocus-pocus. I hurt my own brand by saying this, potentially losing scrollers fiending for their next fire and brimstone doom sermon.

A World Beyond Words: On Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow

A century ago, all Hollywood knew was silent films. People flocked to the cinemas. Dressed in gowns and tuxes, they treated a night at the movies like a night at the opera. Of course, they had nothing to which to compare it. Perhaps to our bleary, overstimulated eyes, the silent film is as much a quaint relic as the rotary phone or a children’s toy fashioned out of sticks. To the moviegoer of 1925, though, going to the theater to see static photographs transformed into moving images must have seemed as mystical as the thought of flying to the moon. Recently, I experienced a form of this magic for myself with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. I wanted to watch it out of obligation.

Great American Psycho: On the Film and Novel, 25 Years Later

Search the internet far and wide, and you’ll find that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of fan-edited videos of Patrick Bateman, the serial killer from Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho; Bateman is portrayed by Christian Bale in the film adaptation directed by Mary Harron. Beneath these videos is an interpretation of Bateman as an Übermensch figure with the ideal body. This powerful investment banker lives in luxury, carved from nowhere like a porcelain statue, with a devil-may-care attitude. Many of the movie’s scenes have been parodied numerous times.

The Rocket Never Landed: On Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17

Mickey 17 longs to make sweeping and grandiose political statements but has to settle for a referendum on Robert Pattinson’s merits as a leading man. While those who are wholly immune to his charms should stay clear, if you’ve been won over by his transformation into a bona fide leading man, then it’s worth the price of admission, if nothing more than to see what Bong Joon Ho can do with a mega budget. Bong has been one of the grittiest, most genre-bending international auteurs in the cinematic game. He’s never been one to pull punches or to withhold layering in seriously heavy social critiques.

American Faust: On Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice

It is abundantly clear, nearly ten years since he descended that gold-trimmed escalator, that Donald Trump is the most significant political figure of our time. Even his most bitter enemies would have to admit, however distasteful it may be, that no president has held greater sway over American government other than perhaps Franklin D. Roosevelt during his 12-year presidency, and no single biography has displayed more variety, or taken as many improbable turns, since the rise of Theodore Roosevelt.

Torture, Survivorship, and the Lens of Youth: On RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys

Nickel Boys is the story of Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) and Jack Turner (Brandon Wilson), a pair of black youth, one idealistic, the other cynical, who are snatched from their families and placed into a juvenile reformatory where students are routinely tortured. The story is a fiction based on the real Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida where violent crimes against students were regularly committed — and with students suffering many of the exact same tortures that were perpetrated on their ancestors by white hands. Nickel Boys is set in Jim Crow Florida in the 1960s, and partially in the 2010s, where one of the characters revisits his trauma through news articles online.

Trying To Save Emilia Pérez From Itself: On Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez

When a film has been widely condemned and derided, it can create within one an illogical hope that the movie is actually good. And I, the genius, am the only one to see its goodness and I will bravely present my contrarian take and convince everyone they have been wrong. I was kind of hoping this would be true for Emilia Pérez, but about ten minutes into the film I realized this was unlikely to work out, and what I would be left restating was everyone has said. Emilia Pérez! What the fuck?! Let’s just get some stuff out of the way. It’s the story of a violent Mexican narco who fakes his death, goes to Israel for surgery to transition as a woman, attempts to regain a connection to her children, and tries to atone for her past by establishing a nonprofit to help those whose lives have been impacted by narco violence.

Stand Up for Better Oscar Bait: On Edward Berger’s Conclave

The mother of all costume dramas. Conclave starts with a simple, can’t-miss premise. We will stick ourselves in the Vatican for two hours. What we have to spend on the elaborate set will be offset for by never having to change locations. We will be surrounded by absolutely fabulous art, by marble columns reaching up high over the top of the frame, by the sea of cardinal red. If we don’t have much in the way of sex or violence, the dopamine receptors in our brain will be lit up by cardinals, and here the film’s producers are really onto something.

Architecting a Myth: On the Brutalism of The Brutalist

I wonder if László Tóth escaped the Nazis by jumping out of a prison transport train? Director Brady Corbet does not tell us how Tóth, a fictional Hungarian Jewish émigré in America, survived the Holocaust in his epic The Brutalist. But towards the beginning of the film, Tóth mentions that he broke his nose jumping from a train car, while mistaking as gunfire the sound of bone cracking against a tree. Perhaps Tóth, as an architect and aesthete, would appreciate how Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl described a trip in a Nazi prison train as a rare opportunity to experience beauty: As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before.

Teenage Dreaming: On Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will be Girls

You ride a tattered scooter. You wear clothes that are either too baggy or too tight. You won’t shave. You flirt with Marxism. You hate capitalism. You believe you’re misunderstood. You’re mad at mom and dad because you think they don’t get you. No one gets you, and you know no one gets you, but something about them not getting you frustrates you greatly. You’re always fighting. They have dreams. You have dreams. And as you grow older you have stumbled upon that half-awkward, wholly painful realization that your dreams might differ from their dreams. You think you’re hopelessly lost, but the romance of that listlessness hasn’t set in.

Thirsty for Piss: On Joker: Folie à Deux and Megalopolis

When I was sixteen, in 1992, I wanted to be a novelist like Stephen King, only better. I wanted the literary prestige of Edgar Allen Poe. I had conceived of this idea for a novel: The River of Lost TimeM. It was about a deranged criminal who illogically stabs a little girl and dumps her body in the river. But he’s cursed; now he has to see the world through her eyes. With this shift in consciousness, he goes up the river and meets all the great figures of the past (Socrates, Shakespeare). These figures are on two opposing sides: the mind and the soul. I don’t remember much more about the idea (I wrote one page of it when I was nineteen before giving up entirely), beyond my desire to have the inevitable film adaptation play Stone Temple Pilots’ “Where the River Goes” in the closing credits.