Mandy (Panos Cosmatos)
Mandy is destined for the Rowdy Midnight Screening Valhalla, what with the death cult and the chainsaw fights and fully unhinged Nicolas Cage. But what really makes Mandy special is its heart. The slow burn ahead of the sharp descent into madness is what gives away the game here. Cosmatos clearly knows his way around the ‘80s fantasmagoria playbook, but the care he takes to establish the simple tenderness between Mandy and Red is delicate and masterful. It is that care that elevates the chaos into something sublime. Lest I sound like a total square-ass mark, though, the “fun” part of the movie is more than worth the price of admission. The movie exudes this astonishing confidence as it basks in its own profane weirdness. The best theater experience I had this year.
3. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen)
The Coens have dipped their toes in the Western pool before, and the results ranged from great (No Country for Old Men) to mostly forgettable (True Grit). But both of those were based on prior source material, and watching the siblings play that game in their own handcrafted sandbox was a marvel. The six-piece anthology is the Coens’ very essence sprawled out across the canvass of the American west. The stories unsurprisingly flit from whimsy to sincerity to morbidity with ease, but the throughline of mortality and death is inescapable. The eponymous short that opens the movie with Tim Blake Nelson as a singing cowboy who has the quickest draw in the land until he doesn’t is a standout, as is an idyllic one-man odyssey with Tom Waits as a desperate gold miner.
2. Annihilation (Alex Garland)
What a beautiful and sad piece of art. It’s hacky to describe movies as “nightmarish,” but Garland creates a world that evokes a specific type of bad dream that I have a lot, where the setting is an ostensibly familiar one but with just enough out of place and off-axis to create a creeping sense of dread. That creeping dread eventually gives way to something truly devastating and profound, the kind of stuff that just doesn’t make it into the third acts of major studio releases these days.
1. Roma (Alfonso Cuarón)
Cuarón is playing a whole other game here, giving us a story and a vision that’s vast yet personal, sad and hopeful, quiet and raucous, and so often deftly zigzagging between these points on a razor’s edge. Every single scene feels like an absolute work of art — an effect that has scanned as laborious for some detractors — that you could spend an entire day discussing with your loved ones.
Sincerest Apologies To:
Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse
Minding The Gap
You Were Never Really Here
If Beale Street Could Talk
Disobedience
First Reformed
Avengers: Infinity War
Mandy is destined for the Rowdy Midnight Screening Valhalla, what with the death cult and the chainsaw fights and fully unhinged Nicolas Cage. But what really makes Mandy special is its heart. The slow burn ahead of the sharp descent into madness is what gives away the game here. Cosmatos clearly knows his way around the ‘80s fantasmagoria playbook, but the care he takes to establish the simple tenderness between Mandy and Red is delicate and masterful. It is that care that elevates the chaos into something sublime. Lest I sound like a total square-ass mark, though, the “fun” part of the movie is more than worth the price of admission. The movie exudes this astonishing confidence as it basks in its own profane weirdness. The best theater experience I had this year.
3. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen)
The Coens have dipped their toes in the Western pool before, and the results ranged from great (No Country for Old Men) to mostly forgettable (True Grit). But both of those were based on prior source material, and watching the siblings play that game in their own handcrafted sandbox was a marvel. The six-piece anthology is the Coens’ very essence sprawled out across the canvass of the American west. The stories unsurprisingly flit from whimsy to sincerity to morbidity with ease, but the throughline of mortality and death is inescapable. The eponymous short that opens the movie with Tim Blake Nelson as a singing cowboy who has the quickest draw in the land until he doesn’t is a standout, as is an idyllic one-man odyssey with Tom Waits as a desperate gold miner.
2. Annihilation (Alex Garland)
What a beautiful and sad piece of art. It’s hacky to describe movies as “nightmarish,” but Garland creates a world that evokes a specific type of bad dream that I have a lot, where the setting is an ostensibly familiar one but with just enough out of place and off-axis to create a creeping sense of dread. That creeping dread eventually gives way to something truly devastating and profound, the kind of stuff that just doesn’t make it into the third acts of major studio releases these days.
1. Roma (Alfonso Cuarón)
Cuarón is playing a whole other game here, giving us a story and a vision that’s vast yet personal, sad and hopeful, quiet and raucous, and so often deftly zigzagging between these points on a razor’s edge. Every single scene feels like an absolute work of art — an effect that has scanned as laborious for some detractors — that you could spend an entire day discussing with your loved ones.
Sincerest Apologies To:
Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse
Minding The Gap
You Were Never Really Here
If Beale Street Could Talk
Disobedience
First Reformed
Avengers: Infinity War
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