I've never been big on Dune (I think I read half of it as a teenager) and I thought Villeneuve's first movie was fine. But my wife and I went to check out a matinee of Dune: Part Two last week and I thought it really lived up to the hype, fantastic movie. I thought Villeneuve chose a good way to break the story up into different movies, especially for Paul's story arc, because it just felt like Michael Corleone's transformation from the first Godfather movie to the second. I've been something of a Timothee Chalamet skeptic but he really rose to the occasion here and stood out in a movie full of great performances by Javier Bardem, Rebecca Ferguson, and Austin Butler, among others. 

I can understand how some people didn't enjoy this movie -- I found Yorgos Lanthimos's whole deal off-putting with The Lobster and especially The Killing of a Sacred Deer. But I loved Poor Things, it's probably my favorite of this year's Best Picture nominees, I was rooting for Lily Gladstone but I thought Emma Stone gave an incredibly strange and funny performance that deserved the awards it got, this movie probably would not have worked half as well with anyone else in that role. And the colors, the sets, the costumes, Willem Defoe's face, the whole thing was really fucked up and creative and stood out in a year that all its competitors were very good but far less bold or original. 

This Netflix movie with Millie Bobby Brown turned the usual fantasy book trope of the damsel in distress on its head with a young woman rescuing herself from a bad situation. I found myself comparing it unfavorably to The Princess, a similarly themed Hulu movie from a couple years ago starring Joey King. But Damsel was pretty good too, I loved Shohreh Aghdashloo's creepy performance as the voice of the big CGI dragon. 

I feel like Sam Esmail's first feature since creating "Mr. Robot" should've gotten more attention, or at least been a brief water cooler sensation like other Netflix apocalypse movies like Bird Box. Esmail is just so good at using carefully framed shots and reveals to build tension, Leave The World Behind felt very Hitchcockian, and Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali were great as these very different people thrown into a scary situation where they had to trust each other. It also felt a lot more true to the confusion we'd feel if some kind of huge societal collapse did happen,

I called Shiva Baby my favorite movie of the decade so far, so I was excited to see Emma Seligman and Rachel Sennott's next collaboration. I thought Bottoms was just good and not great, but as a deliberately silly comedy, maybe it would grow on me on a second or third watch. One of Ayo Edebiri's funniest performances and Ruby Cruz was a great scene stealer, there were just a lot of moments where it felt like they were throwing kind of predictable gags at the wall. 

Kristen Roupenian's 2017 New Yorker story Cat Person was one of those rare moments where a piece of short fiction briefly gripped the world, or at least a certain corner of the internet, and it wasn't surprising to see it get adapted into a movie. I always feel like short stories are a little underrated as a medium, and in many cases would make better source material for features than novels. That said, Cat Person is one of the most worthless movies I've ever seen, like I can't imagine anyone who'd read and enjoyed the story thought they did a good job with it, and for people that hadn't read it, it probably seemed like a really hapless, vaguely pointless, tonally inconsistent movie. The strength of the story was that it was a well written slice of life about a young woman's awkward experience dating a slightly older man, getting weird vibes, and breaking it off (he claims to have cats, but when she goes to his house, there are no cats). The story ends with the guy sending a few mean, accusatory texts, ending with him saying simply, "Whore." The movie, however, goes on for about a half hour after that, with a violent confrontation and a house fire, trying to turn the whole thing into a psychological thriller, and it's just embarrassing. I get that the original story only had a couple of characters and not a lot of actual scenes, but it just felt like they padded the whole thing out with so many unnecessary supporting characters and over-the-top moments. The guy doesn't just not have cats, he has a dog! Gasp! 

I hadn't heard of this movie until it was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, and I put it on last weekend and my 8-year-old and I just loved it, such a fun, funny movie with a really unique animation style. Apparently Blue Sky Studios of Ice Age and Rio fame was making Nimona a few years ago when Disney bought the studio and then shut it down, so the movie was completely canceled for a year until another studio revived it and it was released on Netflix, so it's just an amazing feelgood story that it even got made, let alone got an Oscar nomination. 

The first one was fun if by no means a masterpiece, I hoped the sequel would at least be entertaining but it just felt wrong all the way down. Patrick Wilson was a good antagonist for the first movie but when the brothers team up and it becomes a reluctant buddy comedy in The Lost Kingdom, it just doesn't work, Wilson's not funny, no chemistry there.

Jennifer Lopez recently went on a publicity blitz for her first album in a decade, with a 'visual album'-style film of the album, a making-of documentary, and a streaming concert special. The album is actually alright, I thought she was just starting to get good at making albums on 2014's A.K.A., but the documentary is actually pretty interesting, JLo very earnestly admitting that nobody is clamoring for a new album from her, but she had this passion project she wanted to make, and so she puts her own money into this big expensive thing. The Bennifer spectacle made them both seem less likeable at the time, but now that they've reunited and married 20 years later, it's kind of sweet and poignant, Affleck seems a little bewildered to be in the documentary but very loving and supportive about the project, they have some really funny candid scenes in this. 

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