Beltmann

Emilia Pérez / dir. Jacques Audiard, 2024 Often the real mission of criticism isn't making precise observations but rather deciding, when set against each other, how much those things matter. Those carping about the flaws of this garish musical melodrama aren't wrong--by turns it is clunky, tone-deaf, maybe even irresponsible. But it also obliterates conventions in exhilarating, joyful ways, and I suspect over time those pieces that work will overwhelm those that don't. They will emerge as the ones that most matter.

Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) is a slasher with a disembodied tone--the loopy, late rockabilly rupture between what we see and what we feel creates pure '80s delirium. Is this good? Is this bad? Ohh, God. Anybody got any tranqs?

You say Saturday Night dodges any real character insights or thematic reasons to exist? Well, la-di frickin da! This SNL kid with an encyclopedic knowledge of every era of one of TV's true institutions was left helpless to resist. Rather than present a factual portrait of that galvanizing opening night in 1975, director Jason Reitman aims instead to capture SNL's animating spirit, the one that knows irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of art. Like SNL itself, Saturday Night embraces high-wire chaos, volcanic highs and lows, and a naive yet sincere conviction that the "let's just put on a

Some of the reliable Wisconsin contingent was in attendance, so it was terrific to run into quite a few friendly faces. We missed you, pal! Jeff's banter was in top form, even if some of the "material" was recycled--for example, he told familiar stories about Sue being upset about that one time Jeff didn't dedicate "I'm the Man Who Loves You" to her and about the shenanigans that went down when he managed a liquor store at an age too young. One highlight: While Jeff was setting up "Lou Reed Was My Babysitter," a patron near the front stood and hastily made her way up th

I saw Terrifier 3. In my view, Art the Clown should be arrested for murder.

Announced today: Jeff Tweedy and Karly Hartzman have contributed a live Solid Sound recording of "How Hard It Is For a Desert To Die" to Cardinals at the Window, a 135-song collection of previously unreleased material being sold at Bandcamp to assist the victims of Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina.

In Azazel Jacobs' His Three Daughters, estranged sisters Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne gather to watch over their dying father. One of my favorite choices is to set this three-hander in a small, plain, undistinguished apartment, rather than the kind of sprawling estate that normally houses such stories (first to come to mind: Cries and Whispers, August: Osage County, September, This Is Where I Leave You). For me, the choice is especially uncanny--and unnerving--because the furnishings and cramped layout of this particular space closely resemble the modest condo where I spent

True! Pure gold.

Sports junkies are usually open to any story recapped in the "30 for 30" style, but the new documentary Just a Bit Outside: The Story of the 1982 Milwaukee Brewers might prove perplexing for anyone who isn't a local fan still clinging to the 1982 season. After all, it's not an underdog story (the Brewers were expected to contend) nor a triumph-over-adversity story (the Brewers came up short). Why chronicle a glorious run that ended in failure, ushering in another 40+ years of franchise futility? I'm not sure this movie can answer that question for anyone who isn't True Blue Brew Cr

FYI: All six songs were shared on Wilco's YouTube page on Thursday.

Great to see you last night, Paul. Totally agree about the intensity; afterwards, I described it as a "tune-up" show. Lots of "hits"--and I love hearing those!--with few curveballs. Even the banter was subdued. Fun fact: It was my wife Stacy who went to get the security folks that helped the ill woman. "There's an emergency!," she said, pushing me aside to leap into action before I even understood what was happening!

Tonight my 16-year-old son and I paired David Lowery's The Old Man & the Gun (2018) with Michael Mann's Heat (1995) to create an idiosyncratic double feature about career American thieves. It's both bonkers and edifying to perceive Lowery's microscopic rural charmer--a personal favorite--as a bizarro version of Mann's large-canvas urban thriller. For starters, there's a common theme of how this line of work impacts someone's private life. To imagine further, there's Robert Redford as De Niro, Casey Affleck as Pacino, and Sissy Spacek as Ashley Judd; there's the restroom meeting that echoes

Some viewers will find İlker Çatak's The Teachers' Lounge too far-fetched, too gripping to be believable. After all, this idealistic teacher will navigate an ordinary situation that spirals, with domino logic, into the interrogation of critical pedagogy, deep-seated workplace tension, toxic office politics, weaponized parent groups, accusations of xenophobia and privacy violations, student civil disobedience, physical altercations, district staffing and legal woes, the censorship of student journalism and even a broken copy machine. But as a teacher who has been in the public school trenches--

Matthew Vaughn's Argylle starts with a ridiculous sequence that's excusable because it's pitched as an easy yet winking satire of clunky spy movie cliches ("We're not so different, you and I"). The idea, seemingly, is that Elly Conway is a very bad writer with a devoted following of very bad readers. But then the movie switches to a "real" story that becomes precisely the thing that Vaughn opened by mocking, and it disorients the entire enterprise. Is he taunting his own viewers? Is he interrogating his own showmanship instincts? There's nothing in the movie, however, that suggests any level o

Throughout The Zone of Interest a woman sitting near me eagerly chomped through a bucket of popcorn, and I wanted to lean over and ask, "You were making out during Schindler's List?" My 15-year-old son came along, and our subsequent conversation during the 35-minute car ride home was one of our best movie conversations ever. (And he had the moral wherewithal to intentionally finish his nachos during the trailers!)

Okay, I saw this intensely moving, elegantly crafted movie in the final days of 2023, but I have bonus thoughts about The Iron Claw right now. There's a surface layer about family, masculinity, bodies, and sports that is rather obvious, but then there's the deeper layer that finds much more eloquent things to say about those same things, often expressed solely through meticulous cinematography and resourceful editing. There's something Shakespearean in this telling, which might explain why, two hours after leaving the theater, I was still feeling wrecked. Semi-spoiler: There seems to be g

Same to you, Tweedling! Wonderful to see you popping in.

Caught up with The Exorcist: Believer (2023). Perhaps the point is to make us despair. David Gordon Green has now hollowed out two major franchises, this time especially doing Ellen Burstyn dirty. We cast you out, Mr. Green. The power of Chris (MacNeil) compels you!

My last viewing of The Exorcist was in 2000, when I went to a theater to see the recut "Version You've Never Seen," which means I last saw Friedkin's masterpiece right as I was beginning to rearrange my own religious convictions and several years before becoming a father. These days, I'm much more agonized about my children's well-being than about the devil; our family demons are more concrete, related to physical and mental health rather than the imagined perils of the incorporeal world. But confronting those demons can feel just as mysterious and confounding as trying to decode the so-called

After only two fiction features (Adam and now The Blue Caftan), former journalist Maryam Touzani has proven to be a tender observer of how the personal becomes political, so much so that the social themes appear to evaporate before our eyes, leaving behind characters that are simply living their lives in ways that overpower any urge to see them as avatars rather than unique people. In both stories, what matters most is the filigree, the heartrending intimacy between individuals at a specific moment in time.

I put this on Facebook after seeing the movie on Saturday, but I'll put it here, too, since it's a topic of conversation: I've seen Stop Making Sense too many times to count--David Byrne is one of those artists that make me eternally grateful that my brief time on this planet has coincided with their lifespans--but this 40th anniversary restoration, in IMAX and 4K, has made the movie feel bold and fresh all over again. For my money, it's the most intensely pleasurable movie experience of the year. Of course the Talking Heads songs are genius--and there's automatic exhilaration in he

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Glad to see you, bleedorange!

I still love this place. Thanks for being a big part of it, TCP!

When I saw it, there were only two other people, a couple presumably on a date, in the theater. At the end the guy turned to me and sincerely asked, "What the hell was that?" We laughed, I stayed for the credits, and then ran into the same guy in the bathroom. Upon seeing me, he said, "Seriously, what the HELL was that?!?" (I liked it a lot.)