Now Watching 2026

[Beltmann]

 

As a roller coaster aficionado, let me tell you there's zero chance a ride op would let Kyle Marvin, or any rider, buckle in while holding bags of goldfish. Sure, Marvin ends up delivering one of the year's best bits of physical comedy, but to exist, the joke must first be forced, and that helps explain why, after a brilliant opening 30 minutes, I began to increasingly resist this movie's charms. Too often Splitsville feels like it needs to secure its loose articles; in coaster enthusiast parlance, it's the GP (general public) version of a screwball comedy or a Rohmer scenario. Much of it is wonderfully performed and gaspingly funny--the fight scene is an all-timer--but the screenplay's "sophistication" and "wisdom" almost always feel pushed through rather than thought through.

[Beltmann]

 

Sovereign

 

Extra half star for the Jeff Tweedy song performed over the end credits and for the perfect final shot, which movingly brings together the movie's ideas about fathers, sons and ideological failure.

 

In terms of diagnosing the social diseases, and resulting psychological havoc, that have led to our current political malignancy, this is a good start. Unfortunately, at this grotesque stage, with new and worsening symptoms at every turn, we need much more than a good start. Sovereign may be a movie of the moment, but it already feels behind the times.

[Beltmann]

 

Primate

 

"Why doesn't anyone in this movie ever turn on the frickin' lights?," asked the exasperated woman sitting next to me. There are some memorable kills in this horror movie, but after that, it's about as lazy as they come.

[Beltmann]

 

Is This Thing On?

 

Much better than Maestro, the previous movie directed by Bradley Cooper. partially because it's show-offy in less show-offy ways. Laura Dern is so, so good in this.

[Beltmann]

 

Lurker

 

Pairing this with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford would create a fascinating double bill about weaselly fans; what Jesse makes subtext, Lurker makes text... until it turns itself inside out, becoming an ultra-modern spin on the celebrity leech story. Or is it a vampire story?

[Albert Tatlock]

Late to the party (free 3 months of Apple TV with a new iPad sp catching up on the 'best of' from teh past few years) - Severance.

How good is this? Right up my street - slow thoughtful TV. Like all the best sc-fi, it's not all flashing lights, laser guns and CGI, just a great concept. Series 1 finale last night. Starting series 2 now. Fingers crossed (I think it's true) that it is a proper self contained set of programmes with a planned resolution, not like many of these shows where someone comes up with something that is successful so they string it out forever without said resolution ever being decided upon c.f. Lost. I hope that Pluribus doesn't go that way but I fear it might.

Having great fun dropping subversive references to Severance into my own office work.

Plus, Walken!

 

[Beltmann]

 

Margaret / This viewing: Extended Edition

 

Still love this movie. It's a Great American Novel about many things, but mostly about three things: A mother, a daughter and New York City.

 

Throughout Margaret, private lives and public spaces coalesce while the architecture eavesdrops in a way that reminds me of Hawthorne: "The dell was to be left in solitude among its dark, old trees, which, with their multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had passed there, and no mortal be the wiser. And the melancholy brook would add this other tale to the mystery with which its little heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone than for ages heretofore."

 

Or maybe Wilco: "Tall buildings shake / Voices escape, singing sad, sad songs."

 

Someday I'm going to catalog all of Lonergan's curious choices regarding composition, editing and sound--all those planes and helicopters! all those background conversations at the frame's edge!--that exist in the 186-minute Extended Edition, but today I'll mention a single fragment.

 

Starting at the 2:05:47 mark, there is an 84-second shot that pans through a city park. Mostly we see only the distant tops of trees and buildings. We notice the branches and the birds (and one plane!). We listen to Strauss on the soundtrack, until we overhear a young girl, who seems nearby but remains out of frame, confidently make an assertion: "Actually, it doesn't go like that, it goes 'dashing through the snow'..." The poetic rhythm of this miraculous shot is interrupted only when two separate joggers enter the extreme foreground, their hair flashing by at the bottom of the frame. Their sudden, fleeting presence is jolting, almost as if unwanted interlopers became happy accidents.

 

Lonergan then cuts to a rear shot of Margaret. In vivid contrast to the previous long shot, this shot is tightly filled; her long, black hair cascades down the center of the frame. We can surmise that she is about to cross the street. When she moves forward, the camera starts into a follow shot that keeps her in focus while she is swallowed up by fellow New Yorkers on an increasingly clogged sidewalk.

 

This shot lasts 70 seconds and contains several intriguing moves. Seventeen seconds in, the tracking comes to a halt while Margaret keeps walking. For the next 16 seconds, the camera holds while she disappears into the crowd, and you might be reminded of the final shot of Bicycle Thieves. But then, in a subtle maneuver, the camera begins to slowly recede, becoming a reverse tracking shot that hastens the growing distance between itself and its subject. The shot expands its purview beyond Margaret to consider, for 21 seconds more, all of the bustling, street-level human activity that surrounds her.

 

The camera then jarringly and rapidly tilts up, beholding the overburdened skyscrapers that daily bear witness to the mortals below. They know there are eight million stories in the naked city; Margaret's is only one of them. Think of the little girl in the park. Think of the joggers. Think of the planes coming and going.

 

The next shot observes the helicopters in the sky. Helicopters, those machines that help humans keep watch, track, surveil. The city is alive. Is it well? Can Margaret forgive and be forgiven? Time will tell, but the dark, old trees never will.