It feels like people have talked more about Killers of the Flower Moon's running time than they did about The Irishman, which was approximately 3 minutes longer. But I thought Scorsese filled the 3+ hours of Killers much more urgently and meaningfully without losing momentum, and there were a lot of excellent moments and performances by great supporting players that would've been lost in a tighter cut. Lily Gladstone rightfully is getting most of the awards season love and she is wonderful and heartbreaking in it, but I think De Niro and DiCaprio where also at their best in at least a few years -- DiCaprio is just gut-wrenching in that scene with Jesse Plemons in the jail, which you don't expect when the guy is such a moron for most of the movie up to that point. 

I went into A Star Is Born a skeptic and came out with grudging respect for Bradley Cooper as a filmmaker without totally loving the movie. And that process pretty much repeated itself with Maestro, which also gave me more respect for Cooper as an actor -- I had felt iffy about the whole prosthetic nose thing, but it looked real and convincing on film and wasn't distracting, felt like an authentic part of Cooper's performance. I also really thought the combination of black & white and color scenes worked really well, that kind of thing can be very showoffy and unnecessary in the wrong hands but was subtle and effective in Maestro. That being said, it felt kind of subpar as a musician biopic even without falling victim to many of the cliches of musician biopics, because Cooper seemed a lot more disinterested in the music part here than he was with A Star Is Born. If anything it felt like Cooper got too caught up in Leonard Bernstein's personal life and made a generic movie about an imperfect marriage instead of making a movie about a real individual who made important contributions to art and culture. "Fosse/Verdon" threaded the needle in doing both of those things much more successfully than Maestro. 

I respect Hayao Miyazaki a lot more than I actually enjoy his stuff. My whole family has watched a lot of his movies, and my wife in particular is a big fan, but I often feel a little indifferent to them, even as I appreciate his unique talent. I suggest to the family that we all go to The Boy And The Heron on its opening weekend, but our kids are homebodies and just passed on the opportunity to go to the theater, so Jen and I just went on a quick movie date. And I have to say, I'd probably like Miyazaki's movies more if I saw all of them in the theater, I think they benefit from me not having the option of passively getting bored and turning my attention to something else, to appreciate the pacing and emotion of it, because I really enjoyed this one. 

I mostly like Zack Snyder's movies before he sank a decade into a few bloated DCEU movies, and doing straight-up popcorn movies for Netflix like Army of the Dead and Rebel Moon feels like a perfectly fine place for his career to end up these days. Making two movies in a series at the same time never seems to work out great even for an established franchise, and feels a little foolhardy to kick off a new thing, but this was an enjoyable if not particularly memorable spectacle with a few cool FX moments and a decent cast, I will probably check out the next movie. 

It's always weird watching a cultural phenomenon a few months after the fact, especially when it's a comedy and you've already had a lot of its better jokes ruined for you. It's possible I would've really loved this in a theatre on opening weekend, but as is, it was just okay. In terms of doing a playful, relatively clever twist on a hoary pop culture staple, it lands somewhere above 1995's The Brady Bunch Movie but below 2001's Josie and the Pussycats. I got a few belly laughs out of it, though, I think they did seize the moment well and deliver something that will stay in the zeitgeist for a while, whether or not its reputation as a satirical feminist blockbuster ages well. 

Brian Helgeland has a couple Oscar nominations as a screenwriter (for L.A. Confidential and Mystic River), but as a director he's a bit more of an anonymous studio hand who's done middling stuff like Payback, 42, and A Knight's Tale. Finestkind wants to be both a folksy slice of life about Massachusetts scallop fisherman and a suspenseful crime movie, and actually succeeds pretty well, although I think I would've been fine with just a movie about fisherman. Ben Foster continues to be one of the best, most underappreciated actors of his generation, but this is not really one of his best leading roles, and Tommy Lee Jones kind of surprised me by stealing the movie toward the end, his role didn't seem to have much importance to the story initially. 

Bank of Dave is based on the true story of a businessman in a northern England town who decides to start a community bank after lending money to some of his customers during the 2008 financial crisis and seeing how little they were being helped by the big banks. I mean, you couldn't make up a better David and Goliath story where David is literally a guy named Dave. The movie isn't quite a The Full Monty-style romp but also feels heavily fictionalized and driven by a romantic subplot. That was fine with me, though, particularly because Phoebe Dynevor, who didn't leave much of an impression on me on "Bridgerton," just lights up the screen in this. 

My wife was really excited about this movie when it came out and was sad that we missed in theaters, but we finally got around to watching it on New Year's Eve, and it turned out to be a pretty ideal little movie for a night like that where you're just staying up and drinking wine. Director Chris McKay uncorked some of the inspired chaos of his modern animated classic The Lego Batman Movie, Nicholas Hoult continues to appeal to me more in comedy than in drama, and Nic Cage was used just the right amount in Renfield to be entertaining but not overbearing. A lot of it was a little closer to a formulaic studio comedy than I would've liked, but they didn't lose the spirit of the loopy premise and cartoonish color scheme. And I like the running ska jokes, especially that they referenced Voodoo Glow Skulls and Mustard Plug instead of spoonfeeding some more obvious references. 

Last month, Spin published my ranking of every Pogues album the day that Shane MacGowan passed away. I guess someone at Spin had some inside knowledge that MacGowan had taken a turn for the worse because I was actually asked to work on that piece two days before he died. So I had a couple days to pore over those albums and also checked out this documentary directed by Julien Temple (The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle), which came out three years ago and tells the story of the Pogues pretty entertainingly. Fair warning, the movie was produced by Johnny Depp, who worked with MacGowan in The Libertine, and there are some pointless segments in the movie where Depp "interviews" MacGowan but they're really just shooting the shit at a bar. 

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