Monthly Check-in September 2025 Check In Hello! We’ve gone through another month! Hope you’ve been safe and well! The first half of the month was hectic. Lots of little trips and life getting in the way of all the work to do. I had almost two months lead time on watching the films for
Martin Scorsese This Is America - Taxi Driver One Travis Bickle was enough in 1976. How many are around today?
2025 James Cameron rewatch Space Marines & Space Mothers - Aliens James Cameron's sequel to Ridley Scott's sci-fi horror classic flips to an entirely new genre... but most people misunderstand why it works like it does
Building the Top 250 Life During Wartime - Dunkirk Christopher Nolan's World War II epic turns a legendary miracle into a small, intimate, personal tone poem
Joss Whedon She Always Did Love To Dance - Serenity Joss Whedon's theatrical debut was a sci-fi blockbuster that brought Firefly to a close, but in the wake of his cancelling, does it still hold up?
2025 James Cameron rewatch Should It Count? - Piranha II: The Spawning James Cameron has disowned his schlocky B-movie directorial debut, wishing it excised from his canon. Should it be?
2025 Films Fragmented Narratives - Weapons Review Zach Cregger's followup to Barbarian is a smash at the box office, but one complaint is more of a feature than a bug
Building the Top 250 Fame's Shallow Ocean - Sunset Boulevard Billy Wilder's 75-year-old celebration of old and new Hollywood buts up against the value of fame and celebrity. And it's probably even more relevant now than it was when it first came out
Building the Top 250 Kerouacking - Midnight Run Bounty hunter Robert De Niro. Shady accountant Charles Grodin. A cross-country road trip. Hilarity ensues.
2025 Films Everything's Fine - The Fantastic Four: First Steps Review The non-diegetics of Marvel Studios have become more interesting than the diegetics
Steven Spielberg Stoikey Muzhik Values - Bridge of Spies Spielberg's 60s Cold War drama depicts the American justice system at work and is more relevant today than it was on release ten years ago.
Wachowskis Catharsis Without Synthesis - Cloud Atlas The Wachowskis bring multiple timelines together without the use of time travel
Superheroes The Highest Fidelity - Zack Snyder's Watchmen Adaptation is more than just building a simulacrum
Building the Top 250 Dreams Are Just Memories While We Sleep - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Relationships are so much more than a cost/benefit analysis
Shakespeare Love's Leisure's Park Nostalgically celebrating Shakespeare and the good ol' days when kids could spend their summers in an edenic, anarchist fever dream
Before Sunrise Memories of a Sleepless Night - Before Sunrise Linklater's grand romance starts by hiding deep themes in a deceptively simple film
2025 Films The Zombie Apocalypse Makes Parents of Us All - 28 Years Later More than two decades later and it's still pretty gnarly...
Martin Scorsese Circling Around Themes With a long enough filmography, recurring fascinations emerge...
Television Marvel Studios' Thunderbolts* and the Waning of American Cultural Hegemony Does the world still want what America is peddling?
2025 Films Live Together, Die Alone - Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning For Ethan Hunt, it takes a village.
Television Have Stories Gotten Too Long? Or is it just our insatiable appetite telling us we're perpetually hungry?
Superheroes Thunderbolts*: Marvel's Old Habits Try To Build Something New - Review With the final film of Phase Five, Marvel is doing the Herculean effort of dragging the MCU back onto the tracks
