Sherwood Week: Sheriff don't like it

ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES

1991

Directed by Kevin Reynolds

Written by Pen Densham and John Watson

Spoilers: inapplicable, really

00 Week: The fear of Voodoo and the supernatural, still deeply, primevally ingrained

LIVE AND LET DIE

1973

Directed by Guy Hamilton

Written by Tom Mankiewicz (based on the novel by Ian Fleming)

Spoilers: severe

Reviews from gulag: Get behind me 2025 (part 1?)

More capsule or at least capsulish reviews as we finally finish cleaning up the movies of the previous year, three months and change into the new one.  Herein we discuss Resurrection, House of Dynamite, Black Bag, and The Running Man.

RESURRECTION

Can you guess the theme of these five graybles?  I didn't, despite it being exactly as childishly simple as The Senses, which I choose to hold against the movie rather than myself because it did "taste" twice; or at least it obscured "touch"—the segment with vampires is the one that does "touch"—though since that one is also the long take with the stabilized camera, maybe that was intended to expand our consciousness and include "the vestibular."

Resurrection is legitimately less than the sum of its parts, as sometimes happens with anthologies, and I'm not even altogether sold on most of the parts, though the opening is pretty nifty and seems like it ought to be in possession of a more interesting movie following on from it, not so much because of its framing narrative (that framing narrative—"IN A WORLD WHERE DREAMS ARE AGAINST THE LAW, ONE MAN IS A CINEPHILE"—is, I'm sorry, as off-puttingly wanky as it gets), but because it's a fascinating pastiche of silent cinema and early silent cinema at that, remarkably opting not to surrender color nor even allowing itself to be restrained by the primitive limitations of early color processes (though handschiegl and general-issue tinting are, nevertheless, 100% evoked), but still very much managing to remind you of early Technicolor despite blatantly surpassing its capabilities, and bridging the rest of the gap with aspect ratio, shot selection, what amounts to basically non-editing, set design, obviously that framerate, and some good old Meliesisms.  Very cool, and I was a bit stoked to see how the advent of sound was treated as we follow Jackson Yee, playing a dreamer in various guises in various dreams, is explicitly sent on a death odyssey through history, generally, and the history of film, specifically, an art form well known for its engagement of all of the five senses.

Reviews from gulag: Kinda dropped the ball on the Best Picture nominees this year, wonder why that could be, I place so must trust in the Academy and its judgment

I mean, part of the reason might be the rather underwhelming slate of Best Picture nominees this past year, and in fairness to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, they were confronted with a deeply underwhelming year in 2025—though I think we could all name some very obvious snubs that range from "irritating" (Die My Love) to "irritating as well as confusing" (The Testament of Ann Lee) to "earnestly outraging" (Avatar: Fire and Ash, 2025's very-clear-to-me actual best film, essentially the co-equal second half of a movie that was in fact nominated for Best Picture in 2022), especially given what did make the grade.  (I have not to date seen Marty Supreme, Sentimental Value, or Hamnet, and in all likelihood shall not see them.)  Anyway, hopeless as its nomination was—I mean, are you really just filling slots?—F1 forever, everybody!  I guess!  All in all, at least the Oscars were less of a sick joke than they were last time.

Nevertheless, apart from the nominees that already got full reviews (F1, Bugonia, GDT's dreadful Frankenstein), I did see these four: One Battle After Another, Sinners, The Secret Agent, and Train Dreams.  I only regret watching one of them, which, hey, is progress, but then 2025's problem as a film year was never that it produced too many bad movies (some of this is probably that I just watched fewer, but the worst movie I saw this past year still got a 4/10 out of me) but that it produced very few great ones.  Well, the following are edits, hopefully relatively slight edits—hopefully no more than the (tedious) work of writing some synopsis copy for them—of Letterboxd capsules I already wrote (of course, as I knew what most of 'em were ultimately intended for, they're perhaps less capsule-sized than that should indicate, though less interminable than usual, to be sure).

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

In an alternate 2020s following on from an alternate 2000s, that was originally an alternate 1990s following on from an alternate 1970s—and undoubtedly made more sense that way—the former revolutionary currently known as Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) has gone to ground, raising his kid Willa (Chase Infiniti) as a single father in the years since Willa's mother and Bob's former comrade Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) betrayed their resistance group under duress in part administered by jackbooted thug Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who leveraged her into sex and then leveraged her out of prison, leaving her to flee to parts unknown to either of the men in her life, or her child.  As for that child, there's a bit of ambiguity about that, of course, and as Lockjaw's star rises in the white supremacist movement that now runs these United States, he sets out to resolve that ambiguity with extreme prejudice.

Now, it's nice of the movie to finally start after clearing its throat for a fucking hour; and I'm confounded (I mean, not really, but if I'd been frozen in 2008 and this was the very first thing I'd been shown—no news, no history—after being revived in 2026, I would have been confounded) that people would be crawling over broken glass to call it a masterpiece and give it awards, eventually culminating in its undeserved-even-in-these-circumstances Best Picture victory.  I mean, let's even leave aside the astoundingly cringeworthy elements of that first hour, such as get thrown down like a gauntlet within the first few minutes ("oh, pish-tosh, you're exaggerating for the sake of content" I might've said, but if so, just barely); no, let's leave that aside.  That first hour, or maybe it's only forty-five minutes, is as disastrous an exercise in pacing as I could readily imagine, totally fumbling the challenge this story presents, which is that it has something akin to an actual story's worth of backstory—basically Lust, Caution: ICE Edition—to get out of the way, but that it can't tell an actual story with, because its priority is, at least hypothetically, to get to the actual movie.  It handles this challenge with a completely inadequate combination: a wrenching, merciless efficiency at the task of laying out its two prefatory plot points without hardly any emotional anchor to them, doing it as essentially all-montage yet somehow circling around and around and, despite what seems like an effort at doing it quickly, managing to make relating these two plot points a full third of the feature's running time.  And, likewise, let's be real, that running time is manifestly unacceptable even by the absent standards of the 2020s—a cisapocalyptic action thriller set in a world only two steps away from our own cisapocalyptic reality, in other words basically an exploitation movie, with a plot that any movie ought to be able to execute in less than two hours (and could be done in 100 minutes, even with this unusually-complicated backstory), and is, effectively, just fuckin' Commando*, yet which in his infinite auteur indulgence and frankly blasphemous levels of hubris writer/director/albatross-on-my-neck Paul Thomas Anderson has positively refused to cut down from a bleary-eyed 162 minutes.  This is the case even when there's very obvious things that could be cut: at least some fraction of the five-to-ten-minute denouement at the end, whereupon I groaned, "why the fuck is Steven Lockjaw still alive? why in the world does he have a fucking coda where he just dies again?", or consider the momentum-annihilating scene with Lockjaw's fascist junta, the Fathers of Christmas or whatever idiotic thing they were called (oh, let me look it up, ah, it's the Knights of White Satan), a little over halfway through, whereupon Anderson's screenplay re-explains the previous hour and a half's three plot points, and does so in what feels like real time.

Walt Disney, part LXXXIV: Why did it have to be snakes?

ZOOTOPIA 2

2025

Directed by Byron Howard and Jared Bush

Written by everyone with a script by Jared Bush

Spoilers: high

Census Bloodbath: You have a 20th century mind—you may soon regret it

SUPERSTITION

aka The Witch

It's Halloween again, and for our 12th annual Switcheroo with Brennan Klein of Popcorn Culture, we're doing what we always do this time of year when we turn the tables on one another: he takes over my Cardboard Science feature and reviews some of those corny mid-century sci-fi movies, and I do some fieldwork for Brennan's Census Bloodbath, as he gives me a slate of sick 80s slasher flicks from his ever-expanding encyclopedia of death.  This year we're back to full power, with three psyche-scarring films of Brennan's selection.

1985

Directed by James W. Roberson

Written by Michael O. Sajbel, Bret Thompson Plate, Brad White, and Donald G. Thompson

Spoilers: moderate

Mentally ill from Amityville: A devil-shaped hole

AMITYVILLE 3-D

1983

Directed by Richard Fleischer

Written by David Ambrose

Spoilers: moderate

Cardboard Science: But he had glimpsed a dark swooping patch overhead, lighted by gleams of fox-fire redder than the aurora glow, and had heard a flutter of thick wings and smelled a whiff of corruption tainting the clean air

THE GIANT CLAW

1957

Directed by Fred F. Sears

Written by Samuel Newman and Paul Gangelin

Spoilers: high

Plutonian shores

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

2022

Written and directed by David Cronenberg

THE SHROUDS

2025

Written and directed by David Cronenberg

Spoilers: moderate

Superman returns

SUPERMAN

2025

Written and directed by James Gunn

Spoilers: moderate

00 Week: In his particular line of business, peace had reigned for nearly a year. And peace was killing him.

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

1963 UK/1964 USA

Directed by Terence Young

Written by Richard Maibaum, Johanna Harwood, and Berkeley Mather (based on the novel by Ian Fleming)

Spoilers: severe

You take your car to work, I'll take my board

THE SURFER

2025

Directed by Lorcan Finnegan

Written by Thomas Martin

Spoilers: moderate

00 Week: Spelled like Yes?

DR. NO

1962

Directed by Terence Young

Written by Richard Maibaum, Johanna Harwood, and Berkeley Mather (based on the novel by Ian Fleming)

Spoilers: severe

Note: runs a bit longer than I'd have preferred, mostly thanks to the inefficiencies of getting a retrospective of a film series of this magnitude started

Well, not wholly unfavorable

A SIMPLE FAVOR

2018

Directed by Paul Feig

Written by Jessica Sharzer

Spoilers: moderate (maybe high although I presume you could get at least that far ahead of it)

Reviews from gulag: Am I out of touch? No, it's the Academy who's wrong

As we approach the 97th Academy Awards—as with all Oscars ceremonies—it's incumbent upon the dutiful film fan to at least make some good faith effort to try to see an appreciable fraction of the Best Picture nominees.  (This is what has been described to me as "a prison of my own making," but if I didn't live in such a thing, whose would I live in?)  It has been a harder task this late winter than maybe it's ever been for me, thanks to a somewhat moribund populist film industry and an Academy that has responded, contrary to their apparently abortive attempts to remain remotely culturally relevant, by veering as far out from the actually-popular culture as it has in years.  It's a particular pity with 2022 and 2023 right there in the rearview mirror, perhaps the highwater marks for any modern—like, post-70s at least—efforts from the Academy at trying to care about what actual audiences care about.  Hey, at least The Substance got nominated for BP.  It ain't gonna win, and I don't know why I ever got it into my fool head that it would, except for that whole "moribund populist film industry" thing and, other than Dune: Part Two I guess, it's the only film with what feels like to me any legitimate cultural impact to have been nominated that also has any right to be there.  (I am speaking incredibly out of turn about Wicked, I guess, and I will disclose that, though I feel pretty confident about it.)  I'm increasingly worried it won't win anything for which it was nominated, which is going to be miserable for me, and then that misery's going to be compounded once the Internet gets mad about it and that anger takes its inevitable form.

In any event, this made for one glum Sunday, and at this point I cannot say with certainty I will continue this quest—with Wicked, for obvious reasons; with Nickel Boys, because I'm not sure I'm interested enough in the two and a half hour race-in-America movie inspired, formally, by video game let's plays, and I think it's not even about cool boxing matches like I thought it was, what the hell; with I'm Still Here because, uh, it's all the way over there; and with A Complete Unknown, because ha ha ha, oh my God, no I'd rather not.  (These movies are also all between 138 and 160 minutes long.)  But I do feel a little bound to do so.  Not to be alarmist, but consider that the 97th Academy Award ceremony could be the last one to take place in a real country.

And yet, despite having been charged with that awesome responsibility, and confronted with that fearsome possibility, they gave us this anyway.  Thhpt.  Here's Conclave, The Brutalist, and Anora, which I somehow did in precisely reverse alphabetical order (because it's also in the order in which I liked them).

CONCLAVE

This is the shortest Best Picture nominee for 2025, in all but one case the shortest by a lot.  It's still 120 minutes long.

But it is, accordingly, also one of the comparative few that seems rightly-sized, and this helps it, this thing that's pulpier than it thinks it is and would likely be better if it were much more.  Despite its theatrical pedigree, director Edward Berger (of the year-before-last's most superfluous-seeming Best Picture nominee, the Netflix-distributed All Quiet On the Western Front) has delivered a film that looks "of streaming," but perhaps appropriately so, these crisp, sharp images from cinematographer Stefane Fontaine, of these semi-identically-dressed men standing or sitting in these sterilized surroundings, belied by the enormity of their institution's history and their readily-acknowledged potential for cruelty, deciding the fate of their religion.  (And so Suzie Davis's production design and to an only slightly lesser degree Lisy Christi's costume design—because it's even more baked into the setting, though I did get a kick out of attending to its subtle variety—are both pretty reasonable Oscar nominees.)  The story is very easy to summarize: the pope's dead and a conclave has been called to elect a new one.  The College of Cardinals convenes in Rome under the administration of their dean, British cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), and thus begins the struggle between the liberal factions (fronted by Stanley Tucci), and the conservative factions (Sergio Castellito, dressed up like Guillermo del Toro for some reason), and the even more conservative factions, albeit representing the long-deferred possibility of an African pope (Lucian Msmati), and, finally, the factions of a mostly-ideology-free, just-wants-to-be-the-pope desire (John Lithgow).  Meanwhle, there are terrorist acts afoot outside in Rome and conspiracies afoot within the Vatican, and there's some secretly-ordained cardinal no one's ever even heard of, from, get this, the archbishopric of Kabul (I feel like the practicing Catholics in an "archbishopric" should run into, at least, the double digits; Carlos Diehz), who keeps picking up what I assumed were protest votes.  Lawrence, against his own nature, will have to intervene to unravel the webs of intrigue that have been woven, and put his thumb on the scale more than he'd have ever liked.

Hundreds of beavers

DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS

2024

Directed by Ethan Coen

Written by Tricia Cooke and Ethan Coen

Spoilers: moderate

The land after time

FLOW

2024

Directed by Gints Zilbalodis

Written by Matiss Kaža and Gints Zilbalodis

Spoilers: moderate

Wait, did I need to have seen Juror #1 first?

JUROR #2

2024

Directed by Clint Eastwood

Written by Jonathan Abrams

Spoilers: moderate

Nightmare Week: I don't know why you like these stupid old fairy tales

WES CRAVEN'S NEW NIGHTMARE

1994

Written and directed by Wes Craven

Spoilers: high

La cité obscure

MEGALOPOLIS: A FABLE

2024

Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola

Spoilers: moderate