Why does Avatar endure but still feel like vaporware, even to people, like me, who basically like it? Blending dazzling technical achievement, breathless action, elbow-throwing but self-contradictory politics, and just plain goofy writing, Avatar is the most confounding franchise in Hollywood history, especially given the outsize nature of its financial success. With Avatar: Fire and Blood — my favorite film in the series! — fresh in our minds, Stefan Sasse and I look at James Cameron’s ongoing magnum opus in the latest subscriber-exclusive Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast!

Rooting you in the physical experiences of another person, one who isn’t even real, is one of the great magic tricks cinema is able to pull off. It’s especially hard when those experiences are unpleasant, enormously so when those unpleasant experiences drag on and on for an episode or a movie. Yet the Ordeal draws us in, because there’s catharsis to be found in physically connecting with someone who is suffering — the profound catharsis of empathy, which requires us to get out of our own heads just as the Ordeal itself requires its harried heroes to leave the comforts of the familiar world behind for parts unknown. As for Manousos, he’s still got a long way to go if he survives the spines. (The arrival of a hivemind helicopter is a good sign, right?) With any luck — ours, not his — his grueling, stunning Ordeal will continue. 

In honor of this week’s Pluribus I wrote about the Ordeal, one of my favorite cinematic subgenres. Deliverance, Sorcerer, The Revenant, Stalker, Gravity, The Descent, Aguirre – The Wrath of God, Annihilation, Children of Men, Fitzcarraldo, Valhalla Rising, The Terror, American Primeval — if a movie or TV show is about someone killing themselves to get from Point A to Point B, I’m going to make a Point of C-ing it.

One Battle After Another doesn’t become a downer until you realize that the title holds true long after the credits stop rolling. In OBAA’s America, the fighting never ends.

Kneecap takes place in a similar world. Now on Netflix, this 2024 biopic of the hugely controversial Irish hip-hop trio stars members Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap, and DJ Provaí as themselves, like they’re the bloody lads from Liverpool or something. And guess what? They are! All three deliver performances so naturalistic and funny that I was fully convinced they were actors. I mean, come on, the guy who performs in the balaclava, you’re telling me that’s the actual guy? As they say in Belfast, fuck up.

But it’s true! These charming men tell their own story, partially fictionalized for drama and comedy of course, in a film that feels like a 24 Hour Party People for Belfast, or a Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping that actually happened and also has pointed criticisms for Michael Collins. All of it is set to music that both makes you want to go out clubbing and take on the Black and Tans.

I wrote about One Battle After Another, Kneecap the movie, Kneecap the group, the Troubles, and the trouble in which we presently find ourselves for Welcome to Hell World.

There is an audience — a massive one, as Sinners proves — for forceful fuck-yous to fascism, racism, willful ignorance, gleeful sociopathy. There’s nothing delicate, nothing safe about any of it, either. People want to see antivax moms get yelled at by the guy from ER. People want a supervillainous politician as openly awful as the people currently occupying the White House and Gracie Mansion, and they want heroes who’ll take the fight right to him and his goose-stepping thugs. (You would be shocked at the sheer number of uniformed NYPD the Punisher murders alone.) They want to watch the Empire go down in flames not just at the hands of sword-wielding space wizards, but regular people who said enough of this shit and had the courage to walk the talk.

They want to see the Klan dead, and they want to see it happen at a Black man’s hands. They’re rewarding the movie that serves this up as its grand finale with history-making amounts of money. 

I wrote about Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, as well as Andor, Daredevil: Born Again, and The Pitt, in a new piece for Welcome to Hell World on audiences’ voracious hunger for watching cool tough people stomp fascism into the dirt.

You have an unusual screen presence. Your demeanor is a bit twitchy and unpredictable, and your look is striking. The cinematographer of “Mr. Robot,” Tod Campbell, once told me he had to change the lenses he was shooting with to better capture the beauty of your eyes.

[Smiling] No, look, I know I’m a very unique individual. My mannerisms are unique. My speech is unique. There’s a certain flicker behind my eyes that you can’t necessarily compare to anyone else — that’s what I’ve been told, at least. The camera has an ability to capture every essence of that. Perhaps it can see too much, at times. Perhaps it’s a deficit of mine. But I’ve found a way to embrace it, and the world has too, in a way. Most importantly, it helps the outcasts, the misfits, those who feel disenfranchised or alienated or just, for lack of a better word, different, feel more at home and at peace in their own skin, behind their own unique eyes.

I interviewed Rami Malek about his career and his new action movie The Amateur for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

I’m very happy to have returned to Jesse Hawken’s terrific pop culture podcast Junk Filter, and this time I didn’t come alone! My wife Julia Gfrörer and I joined Jesse in the wake of Gene Hackman’s death to discuss The Conversation, one of our favorite films of his and in general. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

“I’m not afraid of death…I am afraid of murder.” Watching this scene this morning, hearing those two sentences this morning, made me cry. Not because we’ve lost Gene Hackman, sad though that is, especially given the loss of his wife, musician Betsy Arakawa. I cried because I feel the same way, especially now.

We live in a time when people like the Director, Mark, and Amy — vicious, unscrupulous, driven by the will to power — are engineering death on a colossal scale. Ending vital healthcare programs at home and abroad. Tormenting trans people with the end goal of their erasure from public life, and life itself. Targeting immigrants, documented and undocumented, with deportation either to countries that will kill them or American concentration camps where no one knows what is happening. Pardoning traitors, insurrectionists, fascist militiamen, pedophiles. Ushering open Nazis into the highest levels of government. Aiding genocidal authoritarians around the globe with the goal of copying their playbook here at home. 

I’m not afraid of death. I am afraid of murder. I am afraid of murderers. I am afraid of their minds, which aren’t minds as you and I know them at all, which are masses of gray sludge in which there is no joy or beauty to be found but in the suffering of others. I am afraid of their powers of surveillance and their willingness to use illegal and lethal methods to enforce the conclusions they draw from what they hear. They’d kill us if they got the chance.

In honor of Gene Hackman, I wrote about his performance in the dream sequence from The Conversation and why it haunts me for Decider.

Shelley Duvall had some of the most beautiful eyes in Hollywood history; Bette Davis eyes, Ella Purnell eyes, Emma Stone eyes, Anya Taylor-Joy eyes. Indeed many of her early roles counted on the sex appeal those eyes radiated. But by taking on Wendy Torrance, Duvall showed she was fully aware of her physical instrument’s full range of capabilities. The same eyes that seduced half the male cast of Nashville, say, could also be used to convince an unsuspecting audience that your son was communicating with the spirit world, that your dry-drunk husband had gotten into a spectral bottle and grabbed a weapon to wield against you, that things had gone so wrong that the world itself is bleeding. That’s a special gift, one without which — without Shelley Duvall —  the greatest horror movie ever made would be measurably less great. 

I wrote about Shelley Duvall’s tremendous performance as Wendy Torrance in The Shining for Decider.

I’m very happy to have appeared on Jesse Hawken’s fine podcast Junk Filter to talk about the two Road House movies, Pain Don’t Hurt, and related topics. I hope you enjoy!

In the years since its release, Road House became the most basic of basic cable pleasures. A perpetual fixture of weekend afternoon timeslots on commercial cable networks that air movies for dudes, it won over a generation with its neo-western vibe, its assortment of colorful (read: weird) characters, and its unceasing onslaught of people getting struck in the head. Not even the censorship of the film’s colorful language and gratuitous nudity, male and female alike, kept it from achieving this life after theatrical death.

Along the way, cult comedy icons like the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew and Clerks director Kevin Smith sang the movie’s praises. Kelly Lynch started telling a well-received anecdote about how Bill Murray and his brothers call her husband any time they catch her big sex scene in the movie on cable. And a growing legion of fans discovered you can’t find its unique blend of sturdy construction and cockamamie content anywhere else.

So when Amazon announced plans for director Doug Liman—an action-filmmaking expert with Go, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, and the Bourne franchise on his resume—to helm a remake starring Jake Gyllenhaal in the Swayze role, the reaction from certain cinephile quarters was as if someone decided to take a crack at Citizen Kane. How could anyone hope to recapture the goofy glory of the original?

Turns out you can’t—and that’s exactly the strength of the new film, out on Prime Video on March 21. Liman, Gyllenhaal, and company recognize that what made the original Road House so delightfully stupid won’t quite work in 2024.Their version ends up being a sweet-natured, hilarious, and, of course, psychotically violent tribute to an unlikely masterpiece, and the creators’ affection for the original article shines through in every frame.

I wrote about Road House old and new, Swayze and Gyllenhaal, “Rowdy” Herrington and “Doug” Liman, for my debut at Time.

The Siegel house, intended to evoke comfort, safety, and the capital-G Good life due to its fancy pants and ultimately pointless “passive house” environmental certification, is where you feel that malevolence the strongest. The place the Siegels themselves designed to make them feel their safest and best is where they are most keenly and cruelly observed by the camera, and where they are, in the end, most harshly punished by whatever force exists to do so in their world. The family home is central to the middle-class dream; it is just as central to the nightmare of surveillance cinema.

I wrote about the “surveillance cinema” of Nathan Fielder’s The Curse, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink, and Alan Resnick’s This House Has People in It for the Welcome to Hell World newsletter. Scroll down to read it!

In offering the biscuit to Ole, Dorothy is essentially rewriting the very similar sequence from No Country for Old Men, in which the freakish and seemingly unstoppable hitman Anton Chigurrh (Javier Bardem) pays an identically menacing visit to Carlar Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald), long after his business with her husband Llewelyn (Josh Brolin) seemed to have concluded. Like Dorothy tells Ole, Carla Jean tells Anton that his strange code of honor isn’t some binding thing placed on him from some external authority — it’s a choice he makes, or doesn’t make, to continue hurting people. He could stop if he wanted, stop right then and there.

The Coens’ oeuvre and the Fargo TV show alike are full of characters like this — strange, implacable killers who seem like visitors from another world. (Indeed, they usually are alien to “normal” American culture in some way, in terms of nationality or subculture.) No Country’s Chigurrh, Raising Arizona’s Leonard Smalls, Miller’s Crossing’s the Dane (J.E. Freeman), a character I won’t spoil for you in Barton Fink. On the show, you’ve got Season 1’s Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton), Season 2’s Hanzee Dent (Zahn McClarnon) and the Kitchen Brothers (Brad and Todd Mann), Season 3’s V.M. Varga (David Thewlis) and his henchmen Yuri (Goran Bogdan) and Meemo (Andy Yu), Season 4’s Constant Calamita (Gaetano Bruno), plus the recurring character of Mr. Wrench (Russell Harvard). Whether they live or die, these men all have one thing in common: Ain’t no one serving them biscuits. No one’s telling them they can refuse to swallow the shit the rich and awful make us eat. No one’s telling them they can be forgiven.

I went long on the end of Fargo Season 5 for Decider. (You can skip the servicey bits if that’s not your thing.)

We’d all love to be remembered at our best—some great thing we did or said, a life we touched or changed, a moment of pure pride or bliss. Tom Wilkinson will forever be remembered with this photograph. His legacy is encapsulated in a hilarious image of him doing a tremendous job as a beloved character in a fantastic scene from an original and righteous and perfect movie. That’s tough to top.

I wrote about Tom Wilkinson and his Michael Clayton baguettes for Defector.

The main characters of Godzilla Minus One are a kamikaze pilot living with the shame of refusing to kill himself to kill others, a survivor of the Tokyo firebombing who found herself caring for the baby of a woman she watched die, a sailor who wishes he’d been old enough to fight and a crew full of navy veterans who tell him he should be “proud,” in their words, to never have fought at all. I cried when the traumatized pilot twice had mental breaks in which he was convinced Godzilla had actually killed him years earlier. I cried when the orphaned little girl asked for her dead mother. The day I was found sobbing in front of the open produce drawer I had cried in the shower earlier over a different song from the score, “Resolution,” which sounds like all of humanity inhaling and exhaling as one. (I hear Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Bernard Herrmann’s Taxi Driver “Main Theme” in the song just for starters.)

Yamazki’s film is the best and worst of humanity refracted through a radioactive green lens. It’s uranium glass. It makes you feel the colossal weight of the crimes committed by both sides in World War II, embodies them in the form of Godzilla, and unleashes it on people who do not deserve to suffer and die. What more could you possibly ask from a horror movie?

My piece on Godzilla Minus One for Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World is now available to read for free, without a subscription!

Sometime last week my wife returned home from an appointment to find me sitting on the floor in front of our open refrigerator, surrounded by the groceries I hadn’t finished putting away, sobbing into my hands. I was crying, hard, because I was listening to the song “Last” from Naoki Sato’s score for Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, released the weekend prior. I was crying because the song is a sonic last stand, the musical expression of a distant final hope for the survival of some beautiful doomed thing. In Yamazaki’s film the beautiful doomed thing is the population of World War II era Japan — fed into a meat grinder by a government so indifferent to their lives it had an entire program dedicated to killing its own pilots on purpose, subjected to the fires of creation itself by their swaggering conquerors, horrifically traumatized by what they saw on the front and what they survived in the rubble of their homes. An enormous monster that kills everything it sees is on its way to add more misery, destroy more families, rain more pointless death upon an exhausted people. And some of those people will give up their lives — instantly, reflexively, without thinking — to save the lives of others.

I’m pleased to be making my full-fledged debut at Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World with an essay on Godzilla Minus One, one of the best films of the year, and on Godzilla in general. The piece is for subscribers only, but great news: Luke has been generous enough to donate 7-day free trial coupons for anyone who wants to read it.

Spectacle is the language through which art communicates when the vocabulary of the everyday fails us. Fantastic fiction, an inherent trafficker in the unreal, says as much through spectacle as any art form this side of musical theater, in which excesses of emotion transcend dialogue and emerge through the eruption of song and dance. That Act Two showstopper speaks to us (or rather sings to us) because we recognize what it is to be so in love; so enraged, so bereft, so drunk on the possibilities or vicissitudes of life that mere spoken words could never capture it. Only an explosion of sound and movement will do.

So it is with genre. The dragon, the android, and the vampire embody fears and dreams either too delicate or too overpowering for realism to express. Ratcheting up the scale and stakes of ideas and imagery like these to the level of spectacle renders them capable of handling even more intense feelings and fantasies. A trip beyond the infinite, a monumental horror-image like a wicker man aflame, a last terrible battle between good and evil: Such spectacles describe our desire and capacity as people to do things so great or terrible—or so great and terrible—that they stagger the mind.

Before they assayed updating a country’s biggest pop-cultural icon and helming the first large-scale battle on what was rapidly becoming television’s biggest show (respectively), Hideaki Anno and Neil Marshall were past masters of this technique. Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion pitted giant robots against increasingly bizarre godlike beings in battles that directly reflected the titanic scale of its protagonists’ adolescent angst. Marshall’s The Descent plumbed the depths of its heroine’s grief in a literal bloodbath.

Importantly, they each recognized the role of beauty in such spectacularly grim visions. From Anno’s awe-inspiring animated angels to the firelit scarlet of Marshall’s subterranean charnel pit, the gorgeousness of it complimented and enhanced the terror rather than canceling it out. Beauty is the sea salt in the caramel of horrific spectacle.

Both filmmakers applied these lessons to the biggest assignments in their careers. In 2012, “Blackwater,” his directorial debut on David Benioff & D.B. Weiss’s blockbuster fantasy series Game of Thrones, Marshall depicted the horror of war with an explosion that beggars anything seen on television before, and most of what has come since. In 2014, Anno and co-director Shinji Haguchi’s satirical but harrowing update Shin Godzilla destroyed Tokyo with an alien dispassion that reignited all the majesty and menace felt by filmgoers when the king of the kaiju first emerged decades earlier. And despite their differences, the techniques used by each to convey the magnitude of these unnatural disasters and the people they befell are strikingly similar.

I wrote about Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla, Neil Marshall’s “Blackwater” from Game of Thrones, and the horrible beauty of spectacular violence for Blood Knife.

The demimondes depicted by the American master Martin Scorsese vary widely — his New York stories alone span three centuries — but they have one common requirement: It takes intelligence, of one kind or another, to navigate them. His protagonists are smart, street smart, shrewd, skillful or some combination of those qualities as a rule.

That rule is broken in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Normally, a character like Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) — a World War I veteran turned henchman in a plot to murder Osage people for their oil profits in 1920s Oklahoma — would either rise to the top of his uncle Bill Hale’s organization, or wise up and fight to stop it on his own. Ernest does neither, precisely because he lacks the qualities Scorsese has spent a lifetime depicting.

I wrote a little visual essay about Killers of the Flower Moon and Martin Scorsese protagonists for the New York Times.

Scorsese and Lynch share in the recognition that there are tragedies that cannot be undone, that there are wounds that cannot be made whole, that some tears in the fabric of human decency are permanent. By facing the horror of violence head on, they raise the curtain, turn on the spotlight, and allow the preciousness of life to take center stage.

I wrote about Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and the work of David Lynch, particularly Twin Peaks, for Decider.

And the thing looks so expensive. The casual ease with which it depicts the most expensive place to film in America getting completely destroyed by a gigantic entity and the United States military is mindblowing, especially after 15 years of bland destructive spectacles in superhero movies shot either on streets in Vancouver or in warehouses in Atlanta. I watched it with my 14-year-old kid, who at times literally couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “How the hell did they film this?” he asked, completely baffled — and awed.

I wrote about Cloverfield, an excellent and extremely effective giant-monster horror movie that deserves reappraisal, for Decider.

If you’re a horror person, it’s as fun (“fun”) to watch as anything; it wouldn’t have made major bank at the domestic box office if it weren’t. But at heart, it’s a film about suffering, about our compulsion to inflict it in ways both large and small, political and personal, extravagant and intimate. If it is indeed torture porn, it’s not here to jerk you off, metaphorically or otherwise. Hostel has a lot to say, as long as you have the stomach to listen.

I wrote about Eli Roth’s Hostel for Take 2, Decider’s series on films that deserve a second look.