I enjoyed writing about late period Spike Lee recently, and while Da 5 Bloods isn't as good as BlacKkKlansman, I think he's still on a roll, it was pretty excellent. Obviously it's hard not to compare Spike's Vietnam movie to his WWII movie Miracle At St. Anna, and while it has a similar mix of tones, it is superior in most respects. I particularly liked the audacious decision to have the same actors in the modern day scenes and as old men in the '70s war flashbacks, instead of using different actors or that de-aging CGI in The Irishman that looked like crap (Laz Alonso's old man makeup in Miracle was also laughably bad). Delroy Lindo's performance is amazing, the kind of thing that makes you realize his tremendous screen presence has been largely underused in supporting roles for most of his career, and I was surprised by how much action there was in the second half of the movie and how it kept me on the edge of my seat. 

Looper was the first Rian Johnson movie where I thought he really lived up to his potential, and I've been anxiously waiting a good 7 years to see his next original non-Star Wars feature to see what he'd come up with next. And Knives Out did not disappoint, in a way it's closer stylistically to his flawed first 2 movies but much better and more creative (while still having fun with the tropes that come with a murder mystery about the death of a murder mystery novelist). It's funny to think that Johnson and Daniel Craig went into this happy to do a standalone movie outside the franchise world of Bond and Star Wars, and now they're doing another movie with Craig playing Benoit Blanc, but I'm fine with that, it's a great character. 

This, the low-grossing directorial debut from Iron Man 3 and Hobbs & Shaw, was a nice little surprise, a fun and original and unpredictable and violent action movie with a great cast (Sterling K. Brown, Jodie Foster, Brian Tyree Henry, Jenny Slate, Dave Bautista, etc.). It takes place about 10 years in the future, in a Los Angeles torn apart by riots over water privatization, which is a good plausible dystopia with some cool-looking but plausible near-future tech innovations, but the whole thing still had a stylized sci-fi aesthetic. If this had made as much money as Knives Out I think there'd be some mileage in spinoff movies about Sofia Boutella's assassin character Nice. 

Like most people, I have nothing but fond feelings about Mr. Rogers and almost nothing but fond feelings about Tom Hanks, and found Hanks's performance as Rogers sweet and comforting. But as someone who's interviewed entertainers for magazine profiles, I don't really like the idea of a journalist who's done that turning around and making their brief time with a celebrity into a movie about them, particularly after the subject of the movie has died (I never see did see that David Foster Wallace movie that did the same thing). You come away from the movie with the sense that Fred Rogers was the lovely person you always hoped he was, but I don't think you really get much beyond that, and while the movie was well made, some of the storytelling devices irritated me. 

This looked like another sad astronaut movie, but I wanted to go into it optimistically that it might be a little less sullen than Interstellar, and it was more sullen. There are a few action sequences that are really thrilling (even moreso because they took place in space and realistically had very little sound), but then it would go back to the dull slow moving story that didn't totally make sense. I love Ruth Negga and found it frustrating that she got to play the female lead in a Brad Pitt blockbuster but her role was basically a glorified cameo. And I felt even worse for Liv Tyler, who plays basically the same character she played in Armageddon, except even more vaguely characterized and anonymous. Sad Bastard also has one of the worst endings of any movie I've ever seen, with a character saying "I will live and love" to the camera right before the credits roll. 

When I was writing my recent pieces about Dylan and listening to a ton of his music, I also rewatched No Direction Home and put on Scorsese's other more recent Dylan doc that I hadn't seen. It captures an interesting moment when Dylan had enjoyed a major comeback with Blood On The Tracks and for once seemed okay with indulging in nostalgia for his past: releasing The Basement Tapes and mounting a tour that featured people like Joan Baez and Allen Ginsberg. But it's 1975 so you see Patti Smith hanging out with Bob Dylan when they'd just met, and get a sense of what's going on at that moment. One really cool thing was finding out that Joni Mitchell's "Coyote" was inspired by her experience playing some dates on the tour and seeing her jam on the song backstage with Dylan, and there are a lot of good onstage performances, I love when Scorsese cuts together two very difference arrangements of "Simple Twist of Fate" from different nights. 

My son watched this movie today, because there are only two times of year for 5-year-olds: Christmas, and "I wish it was Christmas." Kurt Russell plays Santa Claus and it kind of takes the old idea of kids staying up to see Santa to an extreme and has them stow away in his sleigh and go on an adventure, it's cute. 

This was a big computer animated hit family movie in China, about a mythological demon child who has been cursed to be killed in three years -- it's a charming and funny movie, but you really get a sense of the different culture over there that this is their Toy Story or whatever. 

My kid has been really into "My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic" lately, so we watched the spinoff movie too, which is kind of 'bigger' and has more music but has pretty much the same charm as the series. It's funny to think that just a few years ago there was this big weird culture war over dudes liking "My Little Pony," feels so distant and quaint now. 

I kind of forgot there was an animated movie about snails racing in the Indianapolis 500 until my son found it on Netflix, but it's pretty entertaining, great voice work from Paul Giamatti and Samuel L. Jackson.