This review contains what I would consider spoilers, because at last I’m just giving in. Do know that any smartass comparisons to the subject matter have already been noted, by me when I made them at myself.

**

It was the last workday before our holiday break, so I sailed into this movie on some almost cinnamon-y champagne brought around by one of my coworkers. Champagne always comes over you rather faster than you expect with all those bubbles, leaving you a little spun and already wondering just what you’ve gotten yourself into. Sometimes I think champagne tastes brighter and more beguiling for how you know at the first sip that you’ll likely regret this, but hell, it’ll be sweet as you go down.

So, Call Me By Your Name. Hand of god deliver me.

It’s a yearning romance gorgeous enough to make your heart momentarily forget what it’s doing, then rush back in sending dizzy numbing warmth all through your arms and legs. Maybe that’s called sumptuous. Maybe that’s called ravishing. Maybe it’s the most vibrantly drawn love story I’ve seen in ages, maybe that.

Even though— well, even though. Even though at one point when they’re rueing how long it took them to get together, Oliver protests that he’d given Elio a sign that he liked him back at the beginning of the summer, when he’d tried to massage a knot out of his bare shoulder (a Classic Move™, hilarious that everyone around seems to think this guy has some sort of new level game), “—and you acted like I’d molested you!” and it just, it lances, because oh my god Oliver, he’s too young! He’s too young you shouldn’t, he’s 17, oh god he’s only 17. And, hell though, 18 is just a line in the sand, it’s a line in the damn sand, and…maybe when you’re a man who loves men in 1983, maybe…maybe you take this rare precious thing within your reach, reaching for you. Because he is precious, Elio, he’s exquisite. And when Oliver starts showing his giddy nervous heart, then it feels equal, because they’re equally lost to each other.

It aches to watch them together. They’re so devastatingly beautiful, clumsy and perfect and weird with want. God bless Timothée Chalamet by the way for just helplessly climbing Armie Hammer like a tree, in the most literally rendered take on that phrase I’ve ever seen on film. Honestly though where did they find this kid, fluent in French, fluent in movement, this sweet graceful awkwardness. Chalamet is incandescent, the glowing heart of this movie. And Armie Hammer is marvelous as a smart, loose-limbed grad student who turns out to be so young as well. The music is flawless, the elegant ramshackle Italian villa crushingly aesthetic, the pacing a dream, the shorts: sublime. And somehow at the end, when you think you’ve passed the most breathless heights, Michael Stuhlbarg delivers a gentle father’s monologue that takes the whole house down, and then a long, unbroken shot of Timothée Chalamet’s face holds you there, too tender to move.

There are two things I think are really interesting about Star Wars as a phenomenon. One is the extent to which people seem to forget that even the vaunted original trilogy was never actually that good, in a traditional sense. The editing is clunky more often than not, there are so many nonsensical or flat-out weird interludes, the characters are cartoony as written, the plot is contrived and patchy at best—and none of this turns out to matter at all, because these movies are pure magic. Where there are plot holes, there are headcanons. We fall in love with these characters dropped in from nowhere, and make them into icons. The absurd throwaway moments become our favorites. The hokeyness feels like home. It’s STAR WARS, and it lights up our imaginations and our hearts.

Which brings me to the other thing I find really interesting: that these movies have this effect on such a wide variety of viewers. It seems possible for people with nearly any interests or philosophical viewpoints to find a reflection of what they love in these movies. Sometimes it’s clearly a case of different sorts of people focusing on different aspects, but other, more fascinating times, it seems people can look at the same thing and see something different. Is Han Solo the smooth, roguish epitome of cool, or the galaxy’s most haphazard dork? Is Star Wars a leftist, progressive allegory reacting critically to the Vietnam War, or an inherently retrograde, conservative work dreaming of returning to a better past through a religious system that clearly defines good and evil? Who knows! Actually a whole lot of people think they do, and Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi seems to have set them afire unlike any Star Wars movie that’s come before.

For that alone I would love TLJ, because anything that so highlights Star Wars’ Pop Culture Mirror of Erised quality is going to fascinate me just as an object. But it also so happens that Johnson must have seen in this franchise a lot of the things I like when I look into the mirror of space movies, so I end up part of the group that had an absolute ball with this one. (An Absolute Ball: Starring BB-8, coming soon if I made short films.)

What might be the easiest way to start explaining why I loved TLJ, is that I think it’s the best Star Trek movie Star Wars has ever produced. Yeah I know, and I’m only going to get worse, get ready: Star Trek connects with me more than Star Wars. I didn’t watch either of them until I was in my 20s, so it’s not any sort of nostalgic fondness winning out, just what grown me happens to like. Grown me likes both of them, don’t get me wrong — space things can make me cry like none other, because to me the most beautiful part about all the fantastical alien worlds and sweeping journeys and dazzling technology, is that we, humans on our one little planet, dreamt up all of them. That’s so wondrous I can hardly handle it. So for my money the very best space things are infused with the sense of possibility that I feel in the artistic creation of these universes. And therefore: Star Trek, the show that believed things would get better, that imagined a brighter future, that acknowledged the flaws and pitfalls of our past actions and promised that if we always try to improve from that, not even the sky is the limit.

This is the grandest thing I love about Star Trek, and the grandest thing I love about The Last Jedi, which definitely feels like the first Star Wars movie to look forward in this way. I can’t speak much more specifically without giving things away, but actually the very fact that the moments I would mention were major ones tells you how central this ideology is to this movie. Some have found this movement away from the past to be disrespectful to canon. I feel like you only spend so much time and care trying to grow something if you love it.

And underneath all the big-picture stuff, there were the details, a whole slew of silly or sublime things that I terribly enjoyed. Daring dashing pilots, dramatic space hermits, #jokes, #bits, Kelly Marie Tran (we would all die for Kelly Marie Tran), puffin hamsters, Laura Dern with purple hair, a brain-rocking infinity mirror of Reys, scathing portrayals of negging emo fuckboys and apoplectic British imperialists, costume changes, crystalline foxes, a salt planet blood-red under its crust of white, [redacted], [redacted], [super redacted].

Hell I even enjoyed the odd mistimed editing, because every sudden scene change just took me to something else I enjoyed watching — just like the odd edits in the originals trilogy. Star Wars never was all that well-made. That’s never been why we love it, no matter what it actually is in it that matters to us.

The Florida Project is one of those movies that I quickly forget is something with a script and actors and production design and direction, because it just feels so very, very real. Unvarnished. Piercingly credible. There are scenes that made me anxious in a manner so different than the usual movie tension, because I know these sorts of arguments, I know how this goes, because this is real in a gut-wrenching way, in an inevitable, undertow kind of way, in a pure and funny and awful way.

The central characters, a 6-year-old girl and her 24-year-old mom, are played by two people who had never acted in a movie before. This is completely insane and also probably the only way it could ever have been filmed. I can’t imagine any actress, no matter how trained, being able to access the role Bria Vinaite inhabits in this movie, just knows how to inhabit, with every right instinct for how Halley would be, who Halley is. And only a girl as little as Brooklynn Prince has the kind of innocent fearlessness to throw herself wholly into these scenes, just living as Moonee. Moonee treats the world as her playground, and Brooklynn Prince treats her film set the same way.

The only experienced actor in this movie, playing, with a bit of metafilmic beauty, the Only Adult In the Room, is the wonderful Willem Dafoe. He is the perfect complement to the rest of the cast: a pillar of tested strength, a foil, a masterclass of method. Worth the price of admission: the moment where Willem Dafoe has three sandhill cranes for scene partners, and of course nails it.

I think ultimately what is most astonishing and good and special about The Florida Project is all that it shows. It shows lives we rarely see on screen, and in the process shows what movies can be: honest, empathetic, and utterly, impossibly real.

Lady Bird begins with an epigraph, a Joan Didion quote about Sacramento, which proved perfectly suited as this movie hit me as hard and in the same way as Slouching Toward Bethlehem. It has that same deft portraiture of a particular place and time (the same place, the time 40 years on), that same extraordinary insight into people and what they do, that humor, that confession, that skillfulness in how it is told. Greta Gerwig has discovered how to film the way Joan Didion writes, and we are going to be so much wiser for it. It’s so strong, it’s so funny, it’s so perfectly crafted, it’s so GOOD.

I’m not sure when in the runtime I started crying at something in every scene, but I remember accepting that it was just going to be my life right now, vaguely hoping that my chair wasn’t shaking too obviously. Mothers and daughters, fathers and daughters, best friends, first boyfriends, second boyfriends, trying to be your own friend — it’s a slice of life, and those can cut so deep.

Lady Bird is about the place you grew up, and needing to leave it, and how that’s okay. And how even though you may not want it be, that place is a part of you, and that’s okay too. It’s about love. It’s about, gently and surprisingly, faith. It’s about making mistakes over and over again. It’s about making who you are. It will also probably make Saoirse Ronan, who has been on the make since she was a child, and here shows just how much she can be. She’s brilliant and perfect, in the midst of a hilarious, wildly skillful cast that leaps up to meet her, every single person costumed impeccably. I am preemptively miffed about whoever designed Phantom Thread winning out over April Napier at the Oscars.

But right now this movie’s out there gathering up accolades and plaudits like armfuls of wildflowers, and I’m pumped about it, I’m so glad, I feel emboldened. We can give names too, like One of the Year’s Best.

When I went out to see this movie, the independent cinema that was showing it had dedicated space on their packed marquee to bill it as “GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S THE SHAPE OF WATER.” Guillermo del Toro’s. No the other movie had its creator highlighted. People had lined up outside half an hour early to see Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, the latest movie Guillermo del Toro wanted to make for us.

Historically, I have not given one hoot about what most mainstream critics might think about Guillermo del Toro movies. I care about what the people who love Guillermo del Toro’s movies think. The outsiders, the weirdos, the women, the people of color, the Others. Guillermo del Toro’s people. The people like himself, who love genre, who have found themselves in fantasy when no other story seemed to represent them. The community for whom he made The Shape of Water, a movie where the heroes are a mute woman, a black woman, an older gay man, a [redacted for spoilers but they are also Other], and a fish-man. Here it is, the outsider movie of the year, from our Guillermo.

And god, it’s beautiful. It’s green, everything, everything is green, a deep grotto emerald. It’s 1961, and it’s underwater, and I am living. The Shape of Water is a floating midcentury jewelry box, a fairytale for the people who always fall in love with the monster. This is the movie for anyone who has looked at what is being called monstrous and seen the extraordinary, seen something startling and misunderstood and lonely, something beautiful. Something attractive. Attractive. I love a work where the very fact of the characters’ eroticism is a daring act. It’s like Robert Rauschenberg putting his bed on an art gallery wall.

Alexandre Desplat’s score is gliding and bell-like and wonderful. The production design we have swooned over already, but just to re-emphasize: swoon. Octavia Spencer is as warm a presence as ever. Sally Hawkins is luminous as light on water. Richard Jenkins sounds exactly like a 1960s radio narrator, and if the man ever wants a change of pace he should absolutely record me some audio books. The three of them are just lovely with each other. At one point I almost thought it may be too cute, but no, no why would we ever set a quota on sweetness and charm. In this world? In our own or here, where Michael Shannon’s character is ever too ready to be gruesome and cruel.

The politics of Guillermo del Toro’s movie, and of Guillermo del Toro, are boldly drawn. On empathy and humanity and not being an abusive dick, and also I feel like—forgive—an undercurrent of environmentalism. In how the amphibious man was taken from the water, and the mission is to return him to it. Also all the green. All that deep, beautiful green.

The water has never looked so inviting.

It’s time you all knew that Thor has semi-secretly been my favorite Avenger since I first discovered superhero movies. I think I’ve watched the first Thor movie four times, and it’ll happen again. One year I even dressed up as Thor for Halloween. I pinned a red towel around my shoulders for my cape, made a winged helmet out of a hardhat, foam, and silver spray paint, and waited all night for a trick-or-treater dressed as Loki to come to my friend’s door so that I could swing him aloft and sing out: “HE AIN’T HEAVY, HE’S MY BROOOTTHEEER.” No little Loki’s came by that night, to my continued dismay. But at least I looked great.

What I love about the Thor movies is that they’re ridiculous and epic and fill me with joy. They are unabashed about their bouncing comic book absurdity in a way that actually feels more like an X-Men movie than the rest of the Avengers franchise, and I feel extremely positively about that. The first Thor flick, you may recall, was a grand, cape-swirling Shakespearean family drama in a gigantic golden space castle, with a comedy-of-errors astronomy interlude off in the hinterlands. Which tracks, given that it was directed by Gilderoy Lockhart himself, bonkers English thespian Sir Kenneth Branagh.

Incredibly, they managed to top themselves with their director choice this time. And how. Ragnarok, the third in the Thoeuvre, was blessedly given to maverick Māori improvisational auteur Taika Waititi, master of the misfit picture and maybe this blog’s favorite filmmaker. Applying his same incomprehensible genius that gave us a deeply lovable and hilarious buddy comedy about the broken foster care system, he took Marvel’s millions and turned out a rainbow-hued team-up smash-‘em-up about storming into your hometown on a fireworks-spewing party boat and tearing down everything built on imperialism and conquest. He’s perfect, it was perfect, I’ll go on.

Here’s a perfect thing for you: in this film, one of the central characters is a Fallen Valkyrie played by Tessa Thompson, who is hilarious and talented and a woman of color. And she gets to swagger onscreen drunk and badass, like a warrior, and get a plot about identity struggles and honor and reclamation, also like a warrior, and also like a commentary on displaced Indigenous peoples, BECAUSE TAIKA. And also because Taika: she spends the majority of her scenes riffing with a gloriously unchecked Jeff Goldblum, face done up in half the Wet ’n Wild line, and a thrilled Chris Hemsworth, who, thank god, is finally leading a movie that wants him to be the fantastically doofy comedic actor he was born to be.

Other perfections:
– Mark Mothersbaugh’s fabulous synthy rock score, especially during all the segments on the technicolor garbage pile of the universe
– Academy Award Winner and real-life goddess Cate Blanchett, who can do whatever the hell she wants, evidently wanting to stalk around in an antler headpiece and make evil villainess speeches at bald Karl Urban
– an actual staged Shakespearean dumb show of the concluding events of Thor 2
– the magnificent Rachel House stealing every and I mean every scene she’s in
– and Idris Elba’s Heimdall being given a plot that casts him as some wonderful mashup of Aragorn and King Arthur

In conclusion, Ragnarok was everything I wanted and more from Taika Waititi’s Thor movie, and the most gleeful fun I’ve had at the cinema with a big bucket of popcorn and an action movie since Mad Mad: Fury Road.

Loving Vincent is a film about the death of Vincent van Gogh, told through his paintings, and I mean that phrase much more literally than usual. Every single frame of this movie was hand-painted by a team of artists, building movement by repainting their brush strokes over and over, so that in these images you know so well, now the woman gets up from her chair, the man lowers his curled hands, the crows keep flying up over the shivering golden field and wing away into the dark sky.

It is one of the most beautiful and unusual things I have ever seen. From the very first moment it stuns you, your breath catching in your throat as a painting comes to life before your eyes. And then, a person comes life before your eyes. Because Loving Vincent is a meditation on art as much as a meditation on humanity. We get to know some of the people in Vincent’s life and in his works, and through these disparate, conflicting souls, get to know his. Also conflicted within himself, and tender, and ever, ever heartfelt.

Sometimes movies become known simply for a daring and original feature of their production. This will be one of them, because there has truly never been anything like it. Driving back from the theater, my friend and I were trying to figure out what Oscars it will even be nominated for anyway. Is it Art Direction? Does Art Direction apply to the incomprehensible feat of painting over 65,000 frames to make a movie? Or does it fall under the category of Animation? Is it still Animation if the artists were working off of filmed performances by actors?

But these are all questions I had after watching it. While watching it, there was only the hypnotic, vivid beauty of seeing the postmaster breathe under a starry night sky, listening with me to one of the countless exquisite letters Vincent wrote his beloved brother, Theo. Loving Vincent is more than its conceit. It is a simple yet introspective film, a picture book, a poem, and, yes, a work of art.

I don’t know how I slept on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. as long as I did. Which is doubly a tragedy as I bet there are more people like me, and if only we’d turned out in the giddy droves this movie deserved, it wouldn’t have flopped terribly at the box office, and maybe we’d be in the midst of a beloved franchise to rival the Oceans movies right now.

But instead, we just have this single outing. Perhaps, if we’re wrestling ourselves into a sort of wild good-naturedness, we can convince each other it may be more special for being singular. One perfect gem. One stylish, retro-fresh, all-out charming 1960s Cold War spy romp that dances skillfully around all the tropes you don’t want and embraces the ones you do in a close, passionate waltz. Two guys fighting over a girl? Out. Fake relationship plots? So in. 

I watched this drinking knock-off French 75s (French 74s?) and at many moments could not tell if my happy swoopiness was the drink kicking in, or if I was just having that much fun.

Let’s go over your new favorite trio real quick before I usher you off to go watch this one right now:

Napoleon Solo, dapper art thief turned CIA spy. The role Henry Cavill’s hilariously clean lines were made for, and he is having a blast with it. He looks like a drawing in a comic book and sounds like he walked right out of a radio play from the middle of the last century. His is the character who spends one third of the opening car chase dramatically marksmanning in chiaroscuro Berlin alleyways that highlight his features, and the other two thirds calmly reading a map in the backseat and providing blithe directions while they whip around corners. He’s simultaneously the hero and his own comic relief. He’s James Bond, were James Bond written by an American P.G. Wodehouse. He’s a treat.

Illya Kuryakin, deadly strong KGB agent who FEELS THINGS JUST AS STRONGLY. Approximately 65 feet tall — more room for feelings. Armie Hammer (the same height) evidently looked at this “troubled Russian spy” role and decided to play him as a bisexual disaster, and bless him for it. His is the character who adopts what are supposed to be dismissive, distancing nicknames for the others, but which are immediately seen as the terms of endearment they actually are. Constantly precious, constantly aggrieved. There are easily six shots of him in this movie that are just that meme from Arthur where he has his hand clenched at his side while he tries to master his emotions. Again, #bless.

Gaby Teller, darling German car mechanic and inveterate troll. The wonderful Alicia Vikander, whom I was surprised to learn is actually a little bit taller than I am, was clearly delighted to be cast alongside two giants, and so takes every opportunity available to her to walk up on top of things like a cat who has decided this is hers now. Fitting room pedestals, fountain ledges, coffee tables, Illya’s heart…. Hers is the character who can casually do math on the fly, and will use that to defeat you conversationally. But part of what she can so easily calculate is other people — she’s a wonderful read, actually. She’s a magician in the guise of the magician’s girl, keeping people looking just where she wants them to.

And, in Guy Ritchie’s 2015 masterflick The Man From U.N.C.L.E., you can watch all of these spy loves gallivant around the imaginary 1960s wearing fabulous clothes in fabulous settings, and just generally have yourself a damn fabulous time. I sure as heck did.

Last weekend I finally took myself out to see the latest feat in cerebral blockbusterin’, noted clockwork person Christopher Nolan’s peculiar passion project, Dunkirk. In 70mm, because that felt part of the point of this one.

I could probably start half a dozen sentences with “What you need to know about Chris Nolan.” What you need to know about Chris Nolan is that his true brilliance might be how he has positioned himself as one of Hollywood’s few sure-bet original filmmakers, whom Warner Bros. will let make whatever strange, half-silent war film he wants thanks to his perfect history of delivering highly successful movies that did not stray one penny over budget. What you need to know about Chris Nolan is that once while location scouting in Iceland he took off his shoes and silently walked out into a freezing glacier lagoon to check the feasibility of a shot. What you need to know about Chris Nolan is that he didn’t realize so many people besides his daughter knew who Harry Styles was. What you need to know about Chris Nolan is that the characters’ initials in Inception literally spell out “DREAMS.”

What you need to know about Chris Nolan is that he’s a far more fascinating and specific and terribly uncool person than his vast popularity gives him credit for, and I could talk about this weirdo all day.

If anyone’s going to listen to me it would probably be Tom Hardy, who, as is so often his way, gets it. Tom Hardy’s been out here getting Chris Nolan since Inception, which is something Nolan recognizes and values and so will continue to cast him in every one of his projects that he can. He does this with a number of emotionally intelligent actors, who value him in turn for the combination of opportunity and responsibility he offers them. Because Nolan is indeed a very smart man, and he knows what he doesn’t know, which is human beings.

And this is why Dunkirk is Christopher Nolan’s Grand Budapest Hotel. It’s the one where he finally married his narrative with his deal. Just as Wes Anderson eventually made a movie with his aesthetic philosophy presented as philosophy, Nolan has at last made a movie that fully embraces being about a specific experience, not specific people. He so completely left the characters up to his actors that in many cases they’re never even called by name. I don’t think this feature was really a point so much that it just wasn’t important, which is different.

Dunkirk is Nolan’s truest work, for it’s the one where he is the most honest about what he wants to do, which is to make a concept piece about the experience of time in trauma and the deception of distances and the hopeless horror of trying not to get murdered for as long as possible. And to shoot it in 70mm, so that he can douse us with the whole grand harrowing ordeal of it, until you stumble back out of the theater feeling like you’ve just Gone Through Something. 

Anyway. I like this movie very much. I don’t believe I ever want to watch it again, but what can I say, at the time there’s this element of kind of enjoying the experience of being masterfully upset by something. Because Dunkirk will go down as a master work of filmmaking, and it should. My god are these sequences gorgeously constructed, the thought that went in to every technical choice as clear and impressive as Hardy’s pilot steadily calculating how much fuel he has left.

But perhaps most of all, I loved the feeling that I was watching a singular object. This stressful, beautiful, mathematical war movie, intimate but unsentimental, and where the most personal thing about it is its director. What you need to know about Chris Nolan, is that the ticking clock threaded through Dunkirk’s score is a recording of his own pocket watch.

I’ve been trying to start this write-up for about five minutes now, and have spent that whole time just passionately soft-singing to myself: “Majestical / We are the Wilderpeople / Skux life.”

Y’know what, large statement time: Taika Waititi could be my favorite filmmaker working today. This is because he regularly takes topics that are not inherently nice at all, and turns them into one of the funniest and sweetest things I have ever seen. If I were to tell you the premise and several subsequent developments of Hunt For the Wilderpeople, this movie would sound so dark and intense! But instead, somehow, we get the most kindhearted ride-or-die misfit buddy picture ever to come out of New Zealand. Likely the whole planet.

If you like any of the following things, this is the movie for you:

– What We Do In the Shadows
– found families
– sincerity
– laffs
– screen legend Sam Neill being upstaged by a 13-year-old Māori boy
– literacy
– a movie where female characters are allowed to be hilarious and odd and older than 35
– haikus
– badassery
– those parts of Moonrise Kingdom where an original choral song with bells would play over footage of trees
– footage of trees, especially ones in the New Zealand bush
– things that are good

I just really love this one very much, what can I say. It’s a triumph of weirdo heart. I can already tell it’s going into my small repertoire of under-the-radar gems I point-blank pitch to friends and occasional strangers. Only Lovers Left Alive. Over the Garden Wall. Hunt For the Wilderpeople.