🍿 Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) will, I hope, be the worst film I will have seen this year. Words fail to describe how utterly bad everything in it is, from the soulless story through the already-dated CGI to the then-edgy (if you squinted) now-cringe humor. The creator’s name is plastered all over the promos for his follow-up franchise. It serves as an excellent deterrent.

🍿 If you want me to see a movie, write a review like this. It’s for Perfect Days by Wim Wenders, and it made a 2-hour movie about a toilet cleaner in Tokyo look absolutely marvelous.

🍿 Orion and the Dark (2024) is Charlie Kaufman’s go at writing for children, and he did a marvelous job. Early on it declares itself as a literal bedtime story, and thus follows the logic of every improvised bedtime story ever told, from Alice in Wonderland to whatever tall tale you told your own kids most recently. So it runs on feeling more than on plot, but then which Kaufman movie didn’t? A David Foster Wallace mention and a Werner Herzog cameo are cherries on top.

🍿 Charade (1963) is what you get when the director of Singing' in the Rain want to make his version of North by Northwest: an absolute delight. Come for Audrey Hepburn’s fragile beauty, stay for all the shots of 1960s Paris set to Henry Mancini’s score.

🍿 Godzilla Minus One (2023) is the best live-action movie I have seen in years, and it wasn’t even close. In the topsy-turvy Monsterverse version Godzilla is a misunderstood hero. In Minus One things are as they should be: the reptile is a force of nature, the humans want to stop it, but the real battle is with the government inertia.

Caveats: it was the black and white version in a “4DX” theater which I thought meant a bigger screen but in fact involved motorized seats, strobe lights and gusts of wind blowing in my face. It was an unusual combination: the colorless, grainy images á la Kurosawa made into a theme park attraction. What would Scorcese have said?

I don’t care! The very first movie was also a thrill ride.

🍿 Toma (2023) is a biopic of a Serbian folk singer Toma Zdravković, and yes I’m biased but it was much more enjoyable than the more and less recent Hollywood attempts at the genre. Here is the problem: it is not available for streaming anywhere, there is little to no information about it online, and if you try to search for it you will get information about a 2023 TV show that is basically extra footage packaged into an 8-episode mini series.

So how many more international gems are out there, unavailable and unknown outside of their tiny target market? The internet is the first wonder of the modern world, but for all its greatness it also gives us a false sense of access to everything when there are in fact untold treasures disappearing at the margin.

🍿 The Father (2020) shows that the simplest of premises can make for the best of movies. Christopher Nolan, take note.

Here is something to warm your heart: a story about Lily Gladstone and the Blackfeet Nation in The Washington Post. Makes me want to see Killers of the Flower Moon this weekend, but from what I’ve heard the movie is, alas, far from heartwarming.

🍿 The first movie snow days bring to mind is, of course, A Christmas Story (1983). The second one is not its bloodless sequel but rather 8-bit Christmas (2021), the true spiritual successor. The snow day scene there is one of the best, but nowhere to be found online. Best to watch the whole thing!

🍿 Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986) was a delight, even at 2 hours. As the first Studio Ghibli movie it has been overshadowed by what came later, but its influence is obvious. Inside Ghibli itself, there is one-to-one mapping of characters (Captain Dola becomes Yubaba from Spirited Away, her husband becomes Kamaji) and plot points (a boy protecting a magical girl in Ponyo). Externally, the robots are echoed in The Iron Giant and Wall-E. Doesn’t the latest Zelda have a flying castle? And of course it is one of the first popular steampunk anime.

I will also note that the movie is almost 40 years old: it came out the same year as Top Gun and Crocodile Dundee. But good luck getting your kids to watch either. Incredible how much more gracefully animation ages compared to live-action.