Reaction Shots

  “We have no other land, that’s why we suffer for it.”  - A Palestinian Woman in   No Other Land First, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences deserves respect for choosing   No Other Land   for Best Documentary Feature. Second, the River Oaks Theater in Houston deserves a vote of thanks for bringing it to the public when it cannot seem to find a distributor in this country.  I need some more time to myself to sit with this and process this document. I really don’t feel like this is one of those films that gains in being analyzed as a film; it’s power is in its immediacy and what it shows us.  Let me be clear about something else; being against Israel’s policies of occupation, erasure, and let’s call it what it is, genocide, is not antisemitic. Yuval Abraham, one of the film’s co-directors, is Israeli ano of course, faced backlash for his support of the Palestinians. But the story is Basel Adra’s, if we’re looking for a central figur...

Osgood Perkins strikes again and between this and Heart Eyes, 2025 has two hilarious, if grim and gory, horror hybrids. Heart Eyes is certainly a rom-com/horror hybrid; The Monkey is very much a family comedy/horror hybrid.The former plays more with upending genre tropes while the latter is rooted, form the get-go, in a family haunted by a specific trauma and this tends to lend The Monkey a little weight, if not gravitas.   By centering the tale around a fraught family dynamic between twin brothers that grows increasingly toxic with the machinations of a malevolent,  death-dealing mechanical toy (for the love of God, don’t call it a toy!!!) monkey that bangs a drum and on the last downward strike, someone dies. Fun and games, right? Actually, it kind of very much is. With an introduction that involves Adam Scott attempting to offload said monkey on an unsuspecting pawn shop owner that results in said pawn shop owner’s demise in an unforeseen manner, you know you’re in for a ...

“ Pa inting..is an instrument of war.” - Picasso “Shut up and act (or write or play football or do anything but talk about political issues)” - Too many people who know nothing about art or politics. I didn’t really do much to celebrate the Academy Awards this year because my mind has been elsewhere. That said, I did see all of the best picture nominees and a few others, but if I’m honest, I’ve weighed in on the movies I genuinely cared about. Well, except   Nickel Boys , which was gripping and used first-person camerawork to good effect.  Emilia Pérez was a disappointment that I’ll have more to say about, below, as well. I feel I should at least give these films some due. They made it to the nominations and while one is more engaging and challenging than the other, I’m reluctant to completely dismiss the other.  More to the point is that I didn’t watch the show this year. I checked out Conan O’Brien’s monologue and enjoyed it well enough, but I figured I’d catch the win...

  “Of all the forms of murder, none is more monstrous than that committed by a state against its own citizens. And of all murder victims, those of the state are the most helpless and vulnerable since the very entity to which they have entrusted their lives and safety becomes their killer. When the state murders, the crime is planned by powerful men. They use the same cold rationality and administrative efficiency that they might bring to the decision to wage a campaign to eradicate a particularly obnoxious agricultural pest…[S]tates that have chosen to murder their own citizens can usually count their victims by the carload lot. As for motive, the state has no peers, for it will kill its victims for a careless word, a fleeting thought, or even a poem.” - Clyde Snow in   Witnesses from the Grave,   p. 217 In my lifetime, I’m guessing that the number of  mass executions by order of various states numbers in the dozens. This includes the disappeared and executed in Arge...

Sometimes a movie just knows what it is and what it wants to do and the team behind it are on-board/in-sync enough to make it happen. I was the only person in the theater and part of me was sorry there weren’t other people around to laugh with but the other part of me was extremely glad to laugh my ass off with impunity. And volume.  Josh Ruben and the writing team (Philip Murphy, Christopher Landon, and Michael Kennedy) wrote a solid rom-com set in a serial killer slasher flick that, well, just made me happy. Don’t get me wrong. I love a good rom-com; I really do. But as I’ve opined lately, it’s an oft-flabby genre and if there’s one development I’ve gotten behind, it’s the rom-com/horror mash-up.  Granted that this isn’t a new development; you could argue that the genre mix has been around since My Bloody Valentine (1982), but it’s been in the past few years, maybe decade, that we encounter more of these little marvels. One of my favorite films from last year, Lisa Frankens...

  Brady Corbet’s opus is a strong flick within certain parameters. It is an expertly crafted, epic bit of filmmaking. There is historical sweep, beautifully executed moments of intimacy, and grand themes about capitalism, art, and humanity. I wanted to really like this film. I really did. There’s much in it worth pondering; it’s just that the film is too organized, too aware of itself, and while it is one big swing, a large part of the problem is that you feel like you’re being shown just how big a swing it is. In some ways, The Brutalist is more about filmmaking itself - and perhaps even about this film in particular - than it is about the man at the center of the film, Lázló Tóth (Adrien Brody in yet another career-defining role…that’s so banal, his career is very well defined, and this is a way of saying that he’s predictably outstanding).  In many ways The Brutalist feels like it is supposed to be Corbet’s   Tár . However, where Field's film laid a groundwork for gett...