This is one of those instances where I’m having a hard time telling if this is objectively a good movie or not, because it contained such a murderer’s row of specific things I personally enjoy. It means that when I look back it’s not really stored in my brain as a movie as much as a series of pleasing vignettes. Perhaps this is my personal Ballad of Buster Scruggs?

But if I’m gonna describe this generally, and that’s what I’ve set out to do here, I’m pretty sure The Sisters Brothers is a meandering (but in an existentially on-theme way), surprisingly sensitive and also just surprising Western slash maybe darkly comic fable in which everyone’s delivery style is basically the opposite of Jeff Bridges in True Grit. Like, Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly—the titular Sisters—are out here in eastern Oregon territory in 1851 clearly articulating all the letters in “Yes” in response to each other’s queries and brotherly arguing around the campfire about whether you should really use the word “victimized” to describe slights against some sort of shadowy Old West mob boss (theirs) only known as The Commodore, who inexplicably has this big emblem on the entrance to his large house composed of two noble mermen. Meanwhile the colors and camerawork are really very beautiful, and the score is by Alexandre Desplat and inspired by jazz combos, electric violin, and spare experimentalist John Cage of all things.

But if I’m going to try to explain the elements that to me make up the overwhelming portion of what this movie has to recommend itself, I’m gonna need to tell you about, *ahem*:

Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed as the Slow West Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin

JAKE GYLLENHAAL, who has not forgotten how to be gay in a Western setting, appears a few scenes into this movie as Morris (eventually and tellingly, if you like to believe everyone is always ready for an E.M. Forster reference, Charlie Sisters will slide to calling him Maurice): a fancily mannered, constantly journaling, Gold Rush PI-for-hire with some form of accent, who has been tasked with tracking down Hermann Kermit Warm (oh okay), for nefarious reasons he does not as of yet fully comprehend (but give the plot time)!

Warm is RIZ AHMED, oddball frontier chemist & twink, who is appalled by greed and cruelty and wants to get the Star Trek future started several centuries early by establishing the beginnings of a post-capitalist utopia based on Mutual Respect, Science, and Self-Improvement, and he’s so beautiful and quaint and sweet that anyone who talks to him for more than two minutes is like y’know what, yeah I’m gonna follow this 5’6” (a metric mentioned in dialogue) prospector Gene Roddenberry to Dallas (sure) to join his New Society.

So these two have a meet-cute in the Old West equivalent of a hipster coffee shop that runs through pretty much every beat of Aubrey and Maturin’s first lunch in Patrick O’Brien’s legendary Napoleonic seafaring adventure/rom-com Master & Commander, only with the added spice that Morris is deceiving Warm all while becoming steadily besotted. “Make haste!” his letter reads to the Sisters brothers after he has ~obtained~ Warm, “—before I fall in love with him!” I added in soto voce to my friend next to me. And then it just keeps going, being gold. Sometimes literally.

I mean don’t let me mislead you into thinking this is just a romp, as it’s definitely a Western where shit definitely turns very unfortunate and gruesome. But still, worth driving out to see at a second-run theater way off in the east side where the tickets cost about the same price as the big artisan donuts you brought in.

Widows is pretty cold folks, and it rules.

This is basically the antithesis of Ocean’s 8, when it comes to 2018’s lady heist movies. There’s a moment where Viola Davis just spells out for the other women that they are not going to become friends, this is a job, and when it’s over they are on their own. The timeline for being on their own will be moved up are they to be caught while the job is still happening. This is a bleak movie about doing something rough and harsh because you’re being threatened, and the only way you can see out of the trap closing in is to be as hard as the steel of the bars, and move first.

That said, there are still nice moments of growth—or maybe nice isn’t the word, but satisfying. This is a grimly satisfying movie, the way good heist films can be. And there are grace notes of something warm under the chill of Chicago. There’s how Davis, wonderfully severe in this, carries her character’s soft white West Highland Terrier with her for seemingly half her scenes. She has just lost her husband, and the dog is her fluffy touchstone, fantastically incongruous against her highly structured clothes and stern manner. And there’s her interesting arc with Elizabeth Debicki, the 6’2” alien beauty from The Man From U.N.C.L.E. who gets to play relatively normal in this, an abused housewife trying to stand up on her own two feet, even if it’s to plant them in a shooting stance.

I just really like the casting of this. I like Michelle Rodriguez, with all her action bona fides, playing askew to type as someone who’s really not taking to this life of crime all that well. I like Liam Neeson, one of the current faces of action flicks like this, dying in the first act to the hand the movie over to his wife, where she can’t but move forward haunted by his shadow at every turn. I like Colin Farrell playing unsavory, always, and holy shit I like Daniel Kaluuya here, who takes his turn at BEING terrifying this time, damn. Congratulations on your eyes, you and Cynthia Erivo both, whom I did not know can also sprint like a full out track star. What can’t that woman do!

So yes the cast is superb, and the shooting is top tier. I recently learned that Steve McQueen began his career as a visual artist, and he was good at it, and yeah that shows deeply in how he sets up shots. This is a movie with a strong eye, and a really packed plot that only starts to sound outlandishly cinematic once you spell it out later, making the grimly grounded, realistic feel of watching of it all the more impressive.

Well this was prettier than I expected! Definitely an acting showcase sort of movie, but behind-the-camera Paul Dano turns out to have a really beautiful artistic sense, in addition to getting wonderful performances out of his cast. In particular the color language, cinematography, and sound mixing were gorgeous, and tie to what I somehow did not know going in: that the 1950s nuclear family falling apart in Wildlife are doing so against the breathtaking backdrop of a Montana autumn, as a wildfire roars just beyond the mountain line, and the whole town waits for snow.

Carey Mulligan is obviously the best part of this, but that really just speaks to how very good she is, given the quality of everyone and everything around her. Her character has this tendency to just say things to people, startling things, particularly to her 14-year-old son, who is in the uneasy role of his mother’s only confident in this remote western town where her husband has recently moved them. He’s our center character, this watchful, nice kid, around whom his parents start to orbit more and more chaotically as their own system is thrown off its axis.

And when I think of this movie, I think of Carey Mulligan’s hitching smile, but then I think of just wordless sequences of young Joe in his deeply cuffed blue jeans running, through tawny Andrew Wyeth fields fields, down quiet midcentury suburban streets, under that big sky. The claustrophobia of these sort of relationship stories is really set off this time with how towering the outdoors are as soon as they step outside.

Anyway, I did feel the length of this movie, which probably speaks to a first-time director. My friend I saw it with and I actually both thought that a moment maybe seven or ten minutes before the true end was the final cut we would have picked, and interestingly, that point we found a natural stop would have left an ending more up in the air. With the smoke, and high flakes of snow.

A lovely movie about snarky miserable loners, real good for November coat weather. Alcoholic incorrigible middle aged gays become tentative friends and shabby book-world fraudsters in 1991 New York City, starring Melissa McCarthy and Richard Grant as the churlish wlw/mlm solidarity pair of the season. Based on the memoir by writer Lee Israel herself about the true time she ran out of money and hope and started scamming collectors with fake letters from literary luminaries, and the English bar drifter she met along the way. This movie paints a really affecting portrait of down-trodden struggle and loneliness, but the bitter, tea-colored fog is mellowed with a dollop of grim sweetness from the story of two people discovering it’s better to be cranky together, and that sometimes you don’t realize you’ve made something good until you’re well past the middle of it, and on the run from the law.

One thing I really love about this movie is how the priorities and point-of-view are crafted with such a sure, gentle hand. Director Marielle Heller and her screenwriting team of Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, another woman and a gay man, have made something not flashy enough to be getting called feminist (and that’s an interesting realization) but simply is, as a movie that centers the experiences of a Jewish lesbian where the aspects of her identity aren’t the plot, they’re just who she is. The sole moment that touches politics, in the policy sense, is when Jack blithely mentions to Lee that all his friends are dead, and you’re struck with the reality of the date. 1991. Angels In America would have premiered this same year.

With similar grace, Can You Ever Forgive Me? builds a number of rounded, nuanced theses about authenticity, notoriety, the public view of private figures, and whether brilliant imitation is simply hiding your own light, or providing valuable illumination that the world wouldn’t otherwise get. There’s a scene that encapsulates much of this — even including the goddamn titular line but still not feeling like you’re being knocked over the head with anything (this movie is wonderfully done) — in which a tall, dear, Sally Hawkins-esque bookseller quotes a Dorothy Parker line to Lee, that Lee wrote herself. And what can she say? In this moment she takes the option of saying nothing, and becomes in one moment a little more famous, and a little more alone.

True crime was always a miss for me, but then Sandi Tan made a documentary about Shirkers, the indie film she shot as a teenager on the streets of Singapore in 1992, which was subsequently stolen from her and friends by their mysterious older mentor when he vanished with all their footage, and now I get it. This shit is riveting. Of course, it probably helps that three young renegade movie buffs in Singapore in the early 90s is a fantastic subject all on its own. Just connecting with each of the girls 25 years later as they reflect on that time and what happened to their relationship would have been amazing, but then you drop a con man and a great loss into the middle of it, and it becomes, yes, pure cinema.

Had it been completed, the original Shirkers would have been a marvelous oddity. Nowhere near a Great Work of cinema, being made by a bunch of kids and misfits with no money, but still game-changing as the first feature-length indie movie to come out of Singapore. Sadly we’ll never know what influence it may have had in its time. But in Tan’s documentary by the same name, Shirkers is not necessarily brought back to life, as Sophie, the 18-year-old producer turned film professor at Vassar, puts it, but given “an afterlife.” A ghost story after the style of Ghost World (though it would have predated that film, and Rushmore too, its empty spot in the lineage a loss Tan felt keenly when she watched these later movies), Shirkers is now a time capsule of a lost city, a key piece of evidence in the tale of a serial sham artist, and the subject of a documentary that might just change the game after all.

Probably at the end of the year the movie that will hold the most drastically different places on my ranked lists of Favorites and Bests will be Suspiria (2018), during which I mostly wanted to die, but which I think is probably a good or at least very notable movie in terms of concept/vision/execution/sheer audacity. Hard to say for sure though as I was cowering behind my fingers for 25-30% of it!!!! I knew, I knew as soon as I read the shocked reactions to that clip they showed critics back in April that I was going to spend this swamped with nauseous adrenaline, but still had the idiocy to skip dinner to instead spend 150 minutes locked in horror and agony, then limp home to get maybe five hours of sick shivery sleep, which is the story of how Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria wrecked my health for like 24 hours. A powerful film experience! Thanks I hated it!

So I’m very surprised to find myself wanting to fight people for dissing this movie in the wrong way. I’m not even dissing it myself, I’m just saying that I, personally, should have learned my lesson from Black Swan and noped out of the gruesome supernatural dance horror, because I respect but cannot fucking handle that shit. And so far I haven’t seen any critics with a bone to pick over how many bones…break, break so appallingly horribly and screamingly as dancers are cracked and twisted into demented drooling knots. Which is right, they are right to not fault it for that because that’s what this movie is, it’s gore—you don’t fault comedies for being funny you don’t fault gore for being harrowing. No, what critiques I’ve seen have been for artistic reasons, and that’s the place where I go from Suspiria victim to Suspiria stan, because while I did not at all want to go where this movie was going to take me (gore town), the thing I did like very much was the road it took to get there.

Mostly what I mean is that some critics are calling this movie a plodding, self-serious, pretentious art film, and that is wildly off to me if pretentious still means what I think it does, which is, yeah, plodding and self-serious—eye rollingly aloof while also vaguely neurotic and labored because the movie is trying too hard to be something. But even though I watched this wracked with dread, I still thought it seemed so relaxed in itself? Suspiria may stress me out, but it’s not stressed about its own identity. It’s really just having a good time being arty and ghastly during the German Autumn. There is a scene in this where Tilda Swinton wears an elaborate heavy silk caftan with iron grey hair spilling down to the middle of her back while she sits eating chicken wings and talking to Dakota Johnson about growing up in a Mennonite community in Ohio, like that is what I mean. It’s not like there are deliberately written jokes, maybe just a couple, but this movie is consistently funny in that way that’s only because you can tell the cast and crew were enjoying themselves. Suspiria sincerely enjoys the booms of the Baader-Meinhof Group terrorizing the streets of 1977 Berlin while Chloë Grace Moretz with a big overcoat and unhinged eyes informs her elderly psychologist (also played by Tilda Swinton, because enjoyment) that the witches that run the modern dance academy “will hollow me out and eat my cunt on a plate.” Hah oh my god what? you ask yourself with a soft startled huff, and the movie just laughs in return and asks if you’d like to see a cold, blocky marble foyer from above while rain pours down outside.

Which brings me to the other critique I rebuff: people calling the look and palette dull, instead of the best ’70s beiges since Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The aesthetics of this movie are certainly not Argento’s insane neons, but oh man this is gorgeous post-war European bleakness. Old Bauhaus modernism and dilapidated art deco, all scummy taupes and mauves and lichen greens in watery light. Thom Yorke mourning in the background over piano, every article of clothing an absolute look and a half, maybe a quarter of the dialogue or more in German or sometimes French. I mean, in so many basic ways Suspiria is a thousand yard stare over a howling abyss away from last year’s Luca offering Call Me By Your Name, but at the same time, a surprising amount of evidence that this is the same filmmaker…mood-forward, clothes-forward, polyglottal, alt multi-instrumentalist on the score….

Anyway I definitely prefer one of them in my head and not the other, please Gott take it away, my evenings are still troubled.

I’m into it. What an outrageously, bizarrely gorgeous movie. Schlocky ‘70s occult horror run through a technicolor prog rock prism of German Expressionism—the mind boggles! Why did Dario Argento make this! What the fuck! But since he has, it’s just gonna live forever in the minds of anyone who sees it, apparently. Added to some neon attic antechamber in our gothic heads. A horror film of the pulpy Italian giallo style, in English, set at a ballet school in Germany, in which our American heroine is menaced by evil dance witches. I mean, memorable.

Incidentally, I swear I saw an article header comparing this to Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming version (more on this in a mo) in which they said his was more immediately upfront about the fact that the school is run by evil dance witches. But I started watching this and within about a single minute the soundtrack was amazingly sing-hissing “WITCH!” at me in spare but regular intervals, so, no yeah I gotta say it’s pretty clear on the evil dance witches. Interestingly though, and this is a point on which I am led to believe Luca’s version will in fact differ, not a whole lot of dance actually going on at Argento’s Tanz Academy! Perhaps this is going to sound like someone who had a traumatizing yet formative experience with Black Swan—show of hands—but you give me ballet horror and I expect people’s bodies to be breaking. Turns out that’s not really the style of the gruesomeness here, it’s more great glugs of blood the color and thickness of candy apple red acrylic paint.

Suspiria is like a fairytale. Snow White or Bluebeard’s Wife sent off to a blood-colored mansion in the original Black Forest, the score full of eerie bell melodies and harsh whispering, plot stupid as hell but that’s not the point. It was too silly to be really terrifying, but it did scare me, in that way you’d get scared by things when you’re young. It almost felt like I was coming across indelible images that had marked me when I was a kid, some overtly frightening and others that had just unsettled and stuck with me the way things can. Like parts of old picturebooks you still remember.

Anyway I am very glad I’ve finally watched this. I’d been meaning to for years, since Bryan Fuller mentioned it as an influence on the highly visual and tonal way he built Hannibal (paint-as-blood to blood-as-paint is such a natural move). But yes, I finally sat down to see it because there’s a new Suspiria coming out I believe tomorrow. I don’t know what word Luca is using here, I don’t think it’s remake? Homage maybe? Haunting? What I do know is that it is going to be a TRIP, and that’s a Rock Fact.

Alright let’s go on a journey.

The trailer for A Star Is Born played everywhere before everything, and has also managed to roll up approximately a gazillion views online. This was mystifying to me as I thought it looked schmaltzy as hell, and yet the obsession was clearly genuine. I felt a little left out! Then the movie started playing in festivals, and soon after went into wide release, and I swear to god my entire film critic feed has talked about nearly nothing else since. This is when I moved crankily from confusion to resentment, because there was no way this movie was that good. But apparently I wasn’t going to be able to talk comparatively about this entire film season without seeing it, and unlike Three Billboards it didn’t sound like it was overtly racist (there is a Wise Down-home Black Character who just appears to literally pull a white man onto his feet, but y’know, Hollywood), so alright okay I’ll go.

Then one thing led to another, and I ended up having to wait a few weeks until I finally went to a showing with my sister this past weekend (the house was still PACKED) (my god this thing is POPULAR), and by this point, twist, I was really truly excited! I was finally seeing the hit of my Twitter dash! A woman in front of me turned around before it started to ask if this was A Star Is Born? — because we were at my beloved farm-to-table restaurant/movie theater that shows related old films beforehand instead of ads, adorable — and I explained to her how this latest is a remake of a remake of an adaptation, what was playing right now was the Judy Garland version, and with that interaction now this was like, MY movie.

It started and I was immediately happy. I was having a really great time. It wasn’t actually schmaltzy at all, it was just about feelings and music! Wonderful! Bradley Cooper is doing a great job! Lady Gaga is doing terrific, wow truly the star is born. She’s singing ‘La Vie En Rose’ at a drag bar, she’s singing ‘Shallow’ in a parking lot, “Jackson Maine” keeps getting tears in his eyes watching her and it’s so charming. His voice is so dumb, she’s so skeptical, what a delight. They get to that big concert moment from the trailer, you know it you’ve also seen it twenty times already, and my god if it doesn’t lose an inch of its power having been previewed. Tears just RUNNING down my cheeks, transcendent cinema, matchless magic, this is entertainment.

And then, its hold on me gradually loosened. I found myself noticing that this movie is long. (It is long, this isn’t a fault it’s just not something you’re supposed to notice.) I was prodding a little at my own feelings like hey what’s going on. Remember, my memory said, when we thought this movie was probably overhyped? Oh. Yeah I remember now. And at the end, I do, here on the other side, think A Star Is Born is not in fact the savior of cinema/the year, as it has been praised all over the board. Because A Star Is Born is just (just*) a good emotional movie.

*Good emotional movies are hard to make! This is a great accomplishment by Bradley, made even more impressive with this being his first ever directing project. He makes some really smart choices about how to update the story into our times, from the music genres to the way it frames substance addiction. He does an excellent job with the depiction of his character, and still gives the movie to L. Gaga, like a gentleman (who knows what’s up).

But A Star Is Born (2018) is a simple picture. Honestly I think that’s a huge part of its appeal to a lot of people, something you can just sit back and watch as it takes you through its comfortable melodrama beats — kinda like Colette, which I loved. But by and large, I most like weirder fare. And I don’t mean that as a synonym for ambitious, because this movie is wildly ambitious, and that it achieves what it wants is remarkable and what will carry it through awards season. It’s just that when I look though at my personal on-going ranking of new releases I’ve seen so far this year, almost all of the mainstream ones are in the bottom half of my list, because I gotta live my truth. But for what it’s worth, this one does currently lead that section. Because as David Ehrlich put it, “A Star Is Born is an okay movie, but a bonafide, overdrive, war-time meme and music factory.” And listen — I value that.

I had wanted to see A Ghost Story because I’d had a rather profound experience with Ain’t Them Bodies Saints in 2013, with the same director and actors*. And because I knew the ghost in question is someone unjokingly just wearing a big heavily draped sheet and I am so into that. I chose October, because there’s a ghost. Even though I also knew that this movie isn’t really scary, per se. However, fascinatingly, while it’s definitely not the traditional horror scariness a ghost story may imply, what it does include is serious jump scares, way more jump scares than anything I’ve seen recently, until the next thing I watch probably (ho ho ho, stay tuned).

Anyway, what I wanted to say is that A Ghost Story is really unusual, and like usual I like unusualness a lot a lot. A friend who had recommended it to me said she thinks the script is probably less than eleven pages, and I believe she may be right! Love that. It’s composed of these long, loonng, steady quiet shots that just drift together, softly layering up like slow falling dead leaves. It’s floating, meditative, introspective, only sometimes what those shots are showing is just an open door in a dark house. For a long, loonng time. And then something unseen falls over, and I jolt. It’s like a new genre, like lullaby horror. Existential lullaby horror about grief, and time. Maybe mostly time. Or property? What is meant by something being haunted. Oh I don’t know. Maybe it’s just about Rooney Mara eating a pie for eight minutes. Frankly….

This is a really interesting movie qua movie, because it’s not a showcase for acting, it’s not a showcase for production design, it’s not actually a showcase for pie, and it’s not even a showcase for story, it’s just filmmaking. This is a Movie Object, and we really don’t run across these all that often. It’s a director’s project. This is David Lowery’s, who wanted to make a movie about a ghost.

*I really wish Casey Affleck would stop making work I like and putting me in this terrible position of disapproving of his personal choices so greatly but approving his movie choices so much

“Inner City vs. Outer Space” is a great concept that also happens to be a great movie! And that was not guaranteed! But Joe Cornish is buds with the Cornetto trilogy guys, Edgar Wright also serving as a producer on Attack the Block, and this group loves Tropes, Jokes & Genre, but they also have a remarkably fine ear for genuinely observed human relationships woven in to the mayhem. This movie, which gladly presents itself as a sci-fi adventure slash social commentary comedy, honestly does more with its characters than a lot of movies that would call themselves character-driven. I was touched. I love that.

Anyway I’m very much looking forward to annoying a certain kind of person by classing this in with the new wave Kids On Bikes genre, wherein this absolutely stands alongside Stranger Things, and not just because the kids…are on bikes. Attack the Block is also Kids On Bikes because you’ve got a core group with few smaller associated or enemy gangs running parallel who fall in different age brackets (though all still “young”), and because it’s mostly boys who add in a couple girls later on, and because the central kids start out pretty terrible tbh but grow up over the course of an hour and a half. Also: falling into shouty tumults, makeshift backpack weaponry, and of course: WEIRD MONSTERS.

Honestly, a moment to spend on these loping Vantablack beasties with bio-electric blue chompers, because I love them. I love how simultaneously they look very silly and very cool and kinda cute and can absolutely rip a limb off on camera if they feel like it. I love that kids—spoiler—totally fucking die in this! Real stakes! And I love how that’s also partly a point on how the streets are real shit.

I would also like to spend a moment on baby John Boyega, who is such a star in this. You watch him just like, well that kid could anchor a franchise. And then he got one. Also, a lovely woman who looked familiar whom I now discover is Jodie Whittaker! Well look at that. Incidentally, alien monsters plus low rent London is a combination I don’t think I’ve seen since early New Who, and yeah that’s still real good.