My family have a whole thing about capybaras, we love them and my son has a stuffed capybara. A few months ago I was musing that it's crazy that there hasn't been a big animated movie about a capybara, and then shortly after that I learned about Flow, which is about a cat who befriends a few other animals, including a capybara, while escaping a flood. I was excited to see it after all the raves and the Oscar win, and it totally lived up to my expectations, just an amazing demonstration of what one twentysomething Latvian guy can create with open source animation software, it's really quite an emotional journey by the end. People expend so much energy making talking animal movies with celebrities reciting sassy dialogue that it's refreshing to see someone do such strong visual storytelling with no dialogue and no names and still have this really compelling plot with identifiable characters. 

I get the sense I'm not as amazed by Robert Eggers as some people are, but this was pretty cool, I enjoyed it, some really great gnarly visuals. Lily-Rose Depp won me over with her performance in "The Idol" but I think she was the weak link in this, could've been better with a more seasoned star in that role. 

I have a lot of issues with the formulas and narrative shorthand of decades-spanning biopics, so I much prefer something like Saturday Night, which is basically a real time depiction of the 90 minutes before the first episode of "Saturday Night Live" went on the air in 1975. The cast is almost shockingly good at capturing the essence of a lot of the key players without it feeling like mere impersonation, particularly Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase, Ella Hunt as Gilda Radner, Gabriel LaBelle as Lorne Michaels, and Matthew Rhys as George Carlin. The second half of the movie piles up so many "that definitely didn't happen" moments that it gets kind of ridiculous, though, and Jon Batiste's score, while good and appropriate to the energy of the film, is mixed so loud that it was drowning out way too much of the dialogue, I don't know why they did that. 

This movie takes place in Baltimore but was filmed in Montreal, which I always find insulting. The city isn't iconic enough that you need to film on location but you still want to set the story here? Fuck you! It's a decent cat-and-mouse movie about a police officer trying to find a mass shooter, it gets good and intense toward the end, but nothing special. It's Argentinian director Damian Szifron's first English-language film, he definitely has a good feel for building atmosphere and choosing interesting angles in action scenes, hopefully he keeps getting some Hollywood opportunities. 

I love formulaic Jason Statham movies, I'm so glad they're still making these things. The gas station fight scene kicked ass, and the overqualified supporting cast (Jeremy Irons, Minnie Driver, Josh Hutcherson) does good work. 

The whole ordeal of Kevin Costner reviving his career with "Yellowstone," using that as leverage to get back to directing indulgent passion projects and exiting "Yellowstone" in a huff is kind of more interesting than the movie itself. As one of the few people who actually liked The Postman, though, I thought this was alright, if not compelling enough to justify a trilogy of 3-hour movies. I'm happy that Ella Hunt from Anna and the Apocalypse is starting to book some high profile movies like this and Saturday Night, but her biggest scene feels like kind of old-fashioned gratuitous nudity, and another young actress, Abbey Lee, has a gross sex scene with Costner.  

Cameron Diaz settled down and had a couple kids with the weirder-looking Good Charlotte twin and didn't take a single acting gig for a solid decade, which, y'know, good for her, she can do whatever she wants. Coming back to do a Netflix action movie doesn't really feel like much of a power move, but teaming her up with Jamie Foxx and a director who's mostly done straight up comedy was a good idea, it was light and fun. 

It kind of feels like Netflix has really mishandled the Witcher franchise with the loss of Henry Cavill and the forgettable spinoff and all that, but I think the animated one-off movies are pretty well done. It wasn't really clear to me where this took place sequentially in relation to the series but it was kind of a standalone story so it didn't matter too much. 

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