You Can See Everything (2026)

Director: Nathan Fielder, Lance Oppenheim

Cast: Nathan Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes, Billy Evans… and Amanda Seyfried*

Have I Seen It Before: Has anyone? Has anyone seen anything like that?

Did I Like It: For the past few weeks, people who have seen it have been describing it like it defied genre, and may have defied description. Just as I was about to go into the film, somebody asked me if I had seen it yet, and it increasingly grew difficult for us to talk about the possibility of the film.

Surely, there is nothing new under the sun. Every film can be described to those who have not seen it before.

Then I saw it myself.

I come home, and inside of an hour, I try to explain the movie to Lora, and then to my parents during our weekly telephone call…

…and I’ve got nothing. Yes, it is a documentary. Yes, it is a dramatic re-enactment. Sometimes it is one thing in direct conflict with the other, and eve nother times it is one of those things when it probably has no sensible claim to being that thing.

I’m already all turned around. A full day after seeing the film, and I’m still putting it all together in my head. Do I believe Elizabeth Holmes intentionally defrauded people? Do I believe she can’t—in a million years—see her way clear to understanding how this has become the course of her? Do I believe that this was all a misunderstanding? Do I believe she is the single most manipulated person of our times? Do I believe she is the single most manipulative person of our times?

Is it possible to believe all of those things simultaneously? Maybe I’ll have to get back to you on that.

As a matter of form, one might make a knee-jerk reaction that Fielder has—in true Fielder form—possibly made himself too much a part of the documentary, but he’s taken that to an appropriately absurd level. The line that ought to separate film from filmmaker is surely debatable, but once the filmmaker shares a bed with his subjects (while watching a docudrama about one of the subjects) we can all agree that the line has been crossed, even if I’m prepared to say that Fielder is well aware of what he is doing, and there is likely not a single moment in the film that is anything less than intentional. That includes the moment of full-frontal nudity that was long rumored, comes out of nowhere, and doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with the rest of the film.

Let’s talk about that penis, while we’re at it**. It’s presented—and I’m failing to come up with any better word—and then disappears. Is there any way to think of this as anything other than a performance? Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans*** would insist it isn’t, but that’s the whole point.

This review has already gone on too long. You want to really talk about this? You’re really just going to have to see it for yourself.

*Yep. We’re already into spoiler territory.

**And other sentences I never thought I would write.

***Find me two characters in film who spend less time blinking. I’ll wait.

Sunset (1988)

Director: Blake Edwards

Cast: Bruce Willis, James Garner, Malcolm McDowell, Mariel Hemingway

Have I Seen It Before: Never. Until Circle announced a screening of it this month, I hadn’t even heard of it.

…and you think I would have. Hell, you would think I would have written it.

Did I Like It: It’s a nice, cute little movie. Apparently at release it was met with comprehensively hostile reviews. But it’s the kind of movie that would just happen to be on Turner Classic Movies when I get to a hotel*, and I would be ready to watch just after seeing the cast list.

Willis hasn’t yet found his right movie opportunity (that would be held for later that year) and is ad libbing his way through an episode of Moonlighting that no one else was aware they were in. Garner is as watchable as he ever was. Malcolm McDowell is more menacing than amusing, in a role that clearly couldn’t have been called Charlie Chaplin, as he (spoiler) dies at the end of the movie, and even if he had lived and gotten away with it, would have gotten a cease and desist letter from Lady Oona, but is so obviously Chaplin that one can’t think about it in any other terms. All of the pieces are there, but there are certainly times where the casserole is less than the sum of its ingredients.

The film is at its best when it places its tongue fully in cheek and stops pretending as if this is some genuine history of Tom Mix and Wyatt Earp, and acknowledges that, especially where the movies are involved, there’s going to be at least the gleam of a lie involved. It’s an odd movie to watch right in between Digger (2026) and You Can See Everything (2026).

*Because like some idiot, I got rid of my cable, and can only enjoy the relative randomness of TCM in those times when I can look forward to a complimentary continental breakfast in the morning.

Batman & Mr. Freeze: SubZero (1998)

Director: Boyd Kirkland

Cast: Kevin Conroy, Michael Ansara, Loren Lester, Mary Kay Bergman

Have I Seen It Before: Yes…

Did I Like It: I always dismissed it as an inferior effort to Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993), and while it probably is, I was delighted by this on my recent re-watch.

I’d imagine that the generally brilliant people behind Batman: The Animated Series felt a little bit put upon to make this. The big shield folks must have given the animation department a grocery list of things that would need to be included in the film, so that it could be used as a marketing tie-in with that previous summer’s Batman & Robin (1997). Mr. Freeze (Ansara), check. The story should include not only Robin (Lester), but also Batgirl (Bergman).

And, true to form, the animation kids made a film better than what their summer tentpole could manage*. It’s a brisk, fun adventure story that veers away from the darker elements of the character, but unlike Batman & Robin, doesn’t veer into self-parody, and no one ought to be embarrassed by what’s going on.

What’s more, this film succeeds where so many—including Batman & Robin, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016), and Birds of Prey (2020)—have failed, and gave Barbara Gordon her fair due. Barbara is the fuel for the plot, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt closer to Dick Greyson that when his entire story function is wanting to impress Barbara and go away with her for the weekend**.

*Is Mask of the Phantasm really better than either of its predecessors Batman (1989) or  Batman Returns (1992)? I’m not so sure, others would say yes, and most of spent most of the years before Batman Begins (2005) insisting that Phantasm is the best Batman movie, ever. You could definitely make the case, and its definitely in the same league as those two.

**At Bruce Wayne’s (Conroy) expense, one would imagine.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Director: Samuel Bayer

Cast: Jackie Earle Haley, Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara, Katie Cassidy

Have I Seen It Before: Here’s a funny one. There were a couple of years there where I’d buy practically anything at the right price off the Apple Movie Store. It’s why I have access to every Friday the 13th movie, even though I kind of hate them. All of them. Such was the case with the various adventures of Mr. Krueger. Some I liked. Some I didn’t think much of.

Then came the remake. For some reason, the film was perpetually out of sync. I even tried to complain to Apple Customer Service, but the AI platform that responded didn’t seem to grasp that something could be wrong with their tech. Between my Playstation 3 flat-out refusing to play my DVD of Halloween II (2009), or Disney+ steadfastly refusing to remember where I was in the process of watching Kraven the Hunter (2024), I’ve never felt more protected by the technology of today.

Did I Like It: That last sentence pretty much gave it away. I don’t even particularly love the original A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). I’m more of a Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) kind of guy. So, I’m not coming to this from the position of a purists. There could be a remake that might work, and still manage to draw the ire of those purists. Make it about the parents of Springwood who are positively shark-eyed about their kids making good on their failures and keeping them awake for as long as possible to study. There. That’s a movie.

Aside from the exact same amount of screen time to uppers as the original, there’s not much new explored here. In fact, it almost seems dutiful at putting the exact same material in the same ratios as the original. Jan de Bont, eat your heart out. The only new material explored is a twenty-minute stretch (subsequently abandoned) where the film considers the possibility that Freddy (Haley, content to get a check, and nowhere near as fun as Robert Englund at his worst) might not only be mis-understood, but is in fact the only character in the film who spent any period of their life doing nothing wrong.

Good Fortune (2025)

Director: Aziz Ansari

Cast: Seth Rogen, Aziz Ansari, Keke Palmer, Keanu Reeves

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Been sitting on my to-be-watched DVD shelf for the better part of six months.

Did I Like It: Someone said to me recently—and we’ve all heard similar laments, I’m sure—that the the mid-range drama or comedy targeted for adults have become an extinct species. It’s not even that everything is comic books now, but that almost everything—recent sleeper horror hits like Obsession (2025) or Backrooms (2026) come to mind—is geared towards moviegoers no older than twenty-five. Never mind that this phenomenon has been lamented/noted since before I was born. The films are there, and Good Fortune is proof. Now, it may be a little more important that you seek these films out during their theatrical exhibition if they are going to continue to exist, but on any number of levels, that’s going to be a discussion for a different day.

I think when the book is finally closed on the 2020s—and that probably couldn’t come fast enough—this film might serve as the perfect picture of living in this decade, aside from all the pandemics and politics and somehow politicized pandemics. We may have money, we may not. We’re all miserable. About the only way we can enjoy ourself is if we blind ourselves to reality. I’m not even sure I agree with that sentiment, but then again that might be evidence that I’m blinding myself to something.

One might be struck by the fact that Reeves is doing nothing much more than playing a role tailor-made for him, but he’s such a singular, delightful screen presence that it almost seems a shame to put him in any other context. It might have seemed a bit silly in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) but I think we can all blind ourselves just a little bit and enjoy what he has to offer.

Kraven the Hunter (2024)

Director: J.C. Chandor

Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Russell Crowe

Have I Seen It Before: Nope. Barely have an awareness that the character exists in Spider-Man’s world. As this clearly didn’t strain my patience with attempts to tie its main character to the wall-crawler, I’m still not all that aware of it.

Did I Like It: I’m like most Americans. I eat beef. I’m angry about anywhere between a half dozen to two dozen things in life in the 2020s. I also had no interest in any Spider-Man film that doesn’t actually feature Spider-Man.

But then I started a podcast about bad movies, and that Sony’s flailing attempts to double down on the strategy that was brought out into open by North Korea* and bring the Sinister Six to the screen were coming for me. Both the character and series surrounding Venom (2018) have their fans, and golly, do I wish them well. Morbius (2022) might have been on the level of Citizen Kane (1941), but Jared Leto is so annoying, I wasn’t going to see it. No one who made Madame Web (2024) seemed like they wanted to be there, and in the great empathy machine that is the moving picture, I was right there with them.

And then there’s Kraven. There are only a few line readings that are worthy of derision, and only a few puts it in the lead for this series that never really was. The plot is kind bland, but it doesn’t ring as a traffic jam of things no one could possibly care about, so again, point to Kraven. Taylor-Johnson is occasionally a very charming screen presence, almost to the point where I suspect the rationale for participating in this film that was never, ever going to become a franchise was that Taylor-Johnson wanted to be on screen exuding a James Bond-like mystique to him, so that he could document such a quality before the EON people ever asked him to screen test.

*Kids, ask your parents.

Digger (2026)

Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu

Cast: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Hüller

Have I Seen It Before: No. But, tell you what: Check back with me in a couple of days, and I may have a completely different take on the whole thing.

Did I Like It: I feel like I’m lucky that I saw this almost immediately after taking in The Social Reckoning (2026). I came away from that film a little underwhelmed by seeing the seams in the docudrama, and more than a little put off by the fact that it was dramatizing a situation in which we the marginally innocent either have completely lost, or have. not seen the end.

I occasionally can’t help but compare films with similar themes, or ones I have seen in relatively close proximity, but I come to you with this statement: I’m still settling on whether or not I liked Digger, but I’m relatively sure Digger—if it were somehow made into a real-life boy—would have a few things to say about The Social Reckoning.

Is Digger brave? Maybe, but the film would probably blanche at such a description. Is Digger too pretentious for its own good? There’s certainly a way to read it that way, and the film—and the promotional material accompanying it—almost delights in that assessment. The film is primarily—and this might be something of a spoiler*—a commentary on the form of the docudrama. It can be entertaining. It can be, occasionally, illuminating. If it is dealing with a problem, and that problem isn’t ancient history, there’s a fundamental problem. The story can make a lot of noise, and it can make us feel things, but after the story is over, the problem still exists. That can apply to both the calamity brought on by climate change, and also by the fact that Tom Cruise can outrun as many of his demons as he possibly could, but he may still be estranged from parts of his life, and there are always moments where he is not “on.”

So, I’m sitting here still trying to figure out if I liked Digger, but I certainly am still thinking about it. I am prepared to say that counts for something.

*It’s a real spoiler, who am I kidding?

The Social Reckoning (2026)

Director: Aaron Sorkin

Cast: Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Wunmi Mosaku, Jeremy Strong

Have I Seen It Before: Well, that’s the funny thing about a piece of Sorkin. Youtube is literally littered with super cuts of disparate Sorkin characters saying the same thing over and over again. The problem is probably a mix of him having almost single-handedly written five seasons of television straight*, and may have a finite amount of things to say, but there’s at least a bit of an argument that getting sober might have saved his life, but dulled the edge of his writing. Nevertheless, by my casual count we at least got the “I prefer credentials” speech, but it almost seems like, given the subject matter, there was no way around hitting that chestnut again.

Did I Like It: The simple criticism of this film is that Sorkin is not anywhere in the same league of a director as David Fincher. <The Social Network (2010)> contained some of Sorkin’s best writing, but moved it along with nimbly alternating senses of sadness and energy. Here, I wonder if Sorkin might have been happier making this a stage play. Sorkin never once directed an episode of any of his television shows, when he certainly could have exercised that ambition then, if he wanted to. Contemporaries like Matthew Weiner or (no judgments; we can have that conversation later) Joss Whedon were directing with frequency in preparation of riches yet to come. I honestly wonder if Sorkin was peer-pressured into directing, and there’s been very little about Sorkin’s work since Molly’s Game (2017) that has made me feel otherwise.

Not to load this up with everything I think is wrong with the film, but there’s a structural problem here that I find more than a little surprising. Appropriately, there’s a few references to <All the President’s Men (1976)> here, but we didn’t read or see that story in a popular format until after Nixon had resigned. Here, Sorkin swings for a neo-Capra ending, but we’re still sitting here in an era where misinformation rages (arguably even more so) and Facebook is content to ruin our lives with impunity. It’s almost as if we’re treated to the version of All the President’s Men that was written in the Watchmen universe, where the story ends not with Nixon out of the way, but with Woodward and Bernstein in a ditch somewhere.

*From the first season of Sports Night straight through to the fourth-season finale of The West Wing, and the first season of The West Wing and the second season of Sports Night overlapped. I know from where I speak.

Ella Cinders (1926)

Director: Alfred E. Green

Cast: Colleen Moore, Lloyd Hughes, Vera Lewis, Doris Baker

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I tell my wife the title of the movie after I saw it, and she immediately noted a modern (for 1926) re-telling of the Cinderella. I’ll admit it took me the better part of twenty minutes, and I had to keep myself from bellowing “Oh…” when it finally came to me.

Did I Like It: All movies are comic books now, and things were way different back in the day.

Ho-hum. We’ve been peeling ink from the funny pages with our cinema cameras like it was always so much mechanized silly putty since before we cracked the notion of syncronized sound.

I’ve had a bit of crisis of faith with silent cinema as of late. Having to sit through an army of turgid westerns and saccharine romantic epics that I had to wonder if nitrate decay had some sort of sinister need to spare the patience-testing and destroy the real gems. That may yet prove to be true in the aggregate, but at least this buoyed my spirits. I’m certainly more convinced than ever that horror and comedy are the two genres that age the best in these cases. Both are concerned with basic, less-than-intellecutal reactions. Shadows can become inhuman like in Metropolis (1927), and a chill goes down one’s spine. Harold Lloyd or Charlie Chaplin can embrace their purer clown, and if I’m still laughing, the century between myself and the film is merely a number.

So, here, I chuckled at a number of spots. Moore might not be remembered as much as some of her masculine peers, but she knows how to work with her face and the camera to elicit the laughs. Sure, the entire plot—such as it is—falls apart the moment a marriage proposal comes into play, but as I mentioned above: I felt the feeling for which the filmmakers aimed. Mission accomplished.

Quiz Show (1994)

Director: Robert Redford

Cast: John Turturro, Rob Morrow, Ralph Fiennes, David Paymer

Have I Seen it Before: Somebody mentioned to me that it was by far their favorite movie many years ago, so I went directly to the downtown library to track down a copy, and I remember thinking it was one of those classy, grown-up pictures, even way back when. For some reason it never got into regular rotation for me, and I don’t think I’ve seen it since.

Did I Like It: The movie strikes me in very much the same way now. We’re not really in a period where studios generally—and Disney or their prestige label Hollywood Pictures, specifically—are interested in making a thoughtful drama about intelligent people largely reckoning with their own insecurities.

Class, wealth, formal education, religion, looks. There’s this notion in American life, and probably never insisted on as stridently as it was in the first fifteen years after the second World War, that none of those factors should have any weight on the success of a man*, as long as that man maximizes his smarts (definitely separate from education), luck (someone will have to explain to me why that’s different than class, wealth, and looks, but we’ll leave that discussion for a different day), and hard work. Smarts and luck are on full display, but ease of work is what’s reached for by these people.

That’s the film’s greatest revelation, even if that revelation should have been self-evident: Our grandparents in the so-called Greatest Generation were just as obsessed with fame for the sake of being famous as we are. As with all great stories taking place in a bygone era, it’s just as much about the people of the 1950s and the Quiz Show scandals, as it is about the people of 1994 at the height of MTV and CourtTV, or the people of now with social media dominating their lives.

*The film insists it doesn’t have room to reckon with women’s angst in any real way, and given the balance of Stempel (Turturro), Goodwin (Morrow), and Van Doren (Fiennes), there’s probably a reason for that.

High Anxiety (1977)

Director: Mel Brooks

Cast: Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Harvey Korman

Have I Seen it Before: I have the clearest memory of renting it on VHS at some point in the distant past, but I remember very little about it, and retrospectives on Brooks tend not to dwell on it much at all.

That should probably tell both you and me something.

Did I Like It: On paper, this should be one of the better Brooks satires. Like Young Frankenstein (1974) and Blazing Saddles (1974)*, but unlike Spaceballs (1987), he is lampooning a type of film—the Hitchcock thriller—for which he has genuine affection. Additionally, one watches the cast displayed—especially Kahn, who can make a classic out of an otherwise languid comedy—and is comforted that, at minimum, a good time is about to be had.

And yet the film leaves me somewhat cold. There were chuckles to be had, and Brooks dutifully creates a Hitchcock pastiche that is silly enough to accomplish what it set out to do. Maybe it is that the film owes more to Vertigo (1958) than any other film in the Hitchcock library. Had it been more North by Northwest (1959) or Psycho (1960) (and there are certainly bits of both films present), I might be more inclined to get behind the film. There’s also the guilless ambition of Brooks, present in all of his work and only in more recent years came to fruition, to be a creature of Broadway. When Brooks breaks out into song, I somehow doubt that he objected as much as legends has it to the “Puttin’ on the Ritz” number in Frankenstein.

And that may be the real problem, which I alluded to in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975). Come to think of it, these two films might yet be closely related. Most of the ingredients are in both films, but there was something singular in the team up of Brooks and Gene Wilder that inherently diminishes films in which they worked apart.

*No one can take 1974 away from Brooks.

Captain Blood (1935)

Director: Michael Curtiz

Cast: Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Lionel Atwill, Basil Rathbone

Have I Seen it Before: Never. One of the characters in The Lowdown muttered that this was one of Curtiz’s favorites, so it went to the top of (or at last found itself on) the to-watch list.

Did I Like It: I’m not sure what they were talking about. I can think of five Curtiz movies right of the top of my head that I like better*. This movie moved with the speed of something far thicker than blood. I became overwealmed with wanting to ask when, or even if, someone might start buckling a swash in this ostensive swashbuckler. Other films in the genre and of the period—I’m at this point mainly thinking of The Mark of Zorro (1940)**—are slightly bogged down by the more romantic, pontificating trappings of the genre, but still remember that swordplay put butts in seats in the first place.

Then there’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)***. Almsot exactly the same ingredients. Is it possible I’ve become one of those people who views a movie that’s in color as better than a corrolary in black and white? I definitely think more highly of White Christmas (1954)****, for any number of a reason, is better than Holiday Inn (1942). Maybe Curtiz and company had to get better at the swashbuckling formula before old Jack Warner lets the technicolor film stock out of the vault.

*Might be unfair, because the guy made about a million of them. Nothing like the point I keep trying to make about Rob Reiner when people bring up The Princess Bride (1987).

**I’ll get to some other very key examples here in a little bit.

***Speaking of Michael Curtiz movies I like more than this…

****Speaking of Michael Curtiz movies I like more than this…

Walk the Line (2005)

Director: James Mangold

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Reese Witherspoon, Ginnifer Goodwin, Robert Patrick

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, yeah. I went into a weird spot there for about six months where I was mildly, but insistently obsessed with the Man in Black, and it all had to do with this movie. I’d go in more detail, but I worry I might lose whatever connection I have with you, dear reader, if the phrase “Johnny Cash of the Oklahoma Democratic Party” (brief though it may have been) comes into the conversation.

Did I Like It: I’m sort of glad that the film fell of regular rotation for me, if I’m being honest. The thing that put this into the class of quite-good biopics is that the main and supporting cast are not bad at what they’re trying to imitate. So many other biopics struggle to recreate the art of their subjects. When comedians are at the center, things can get very grim indeed, as even a joke told correctly isn’t all that funny the second time around. Musicians tend to fare quite a bit better, and this may be one of the better examples in that pantheon. Phoenix and Witherspoon are not pure vocal copies of Johnny Cash an June Carter Cash, but they are adept enough musicians that I spent the next six months after first seeing the film listening to the soundtrack (the liner photos of which made it seem like an honest-to-God , and I may be putting it into my regular Apple Music rotation once again.

The quality of the musical performances paper over a lot in the film, which might be weighed down a bit by the typical tropes and structure of a biopic, and one of a musician, no less. Tragedy, being downtrodden, sudden success, equally sudden self-destructiveness, followed by redemption that might strike anyone who has actually lived a human life. It’s all there. If it weren’t for Witherspoon and Phoenix’s palpably chemistry, there might not have been any thing here, other than a concept album.

Madame Web (2024)

Director: S. J. Clarkson

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celest O’Connor

Have I Seen it Before: What could possibly possess me to do such a thing?

Did I Like It: As my new podcast, Say Something Nice! proceeds through its first season, I knew some titles were going to inspire some dread. Morbius (2022) sur inspired such feelings, but then I remembered that this film was waiting for me. Even with that earlier film, the performers seem to have had the intent to entertain, even if the film never quite came together.

Here, and under remarkable similar circumstances, one gets the sense that each and every cast member—yes, including Adam Scott as the future Uncle Ben*—realized suddenly that they had not been listening too terribly close to their agent, and agreed far too quickly to any old superhero film and just had to hope that the thing would release and be forgotten without doing any damage to their careers. It almost makes sense that Dakota Johnson is at the head of this endeavor, as her screen and public persona is predicated on most possible detached irony at any given moment.

One might press me for some pontification about the film’s story, and just as soon as the filmmakers come up with one, I’ll be happy to break a long-standing rule and re-review for a film I’ve already reviewed or update an existing review. Nothing happens of any consequence, despite their being a lot of clarevoyance about things that might one day happen.

Kraven can’t be this bad, can it? Only one way to find out, I suppose.

*I’ve been scratching my head about what to make my particular Say Something Nice for the eventual episode recording, and it might have just occurred to me: Of all the Spider-Man spin-offs no one really asked for, this one almost, almost fits into the established mythos of an existing screen Spider-Man, although even that only works out after extensive re-shoots shifted the film’s setting from the 1990s to 2003. No one bothered to cancel the clearance for The Cranberries’ Dreams, which more than any other song establishes that something takes place in the 1990s. Boy, is that a relief.

Route 66: The Main Street of America (2026)

Director: John Paget

Cast: John Paget, Michael Wallis, Angel Delgadillo

Have I Seen It Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: As a mini-series eventually airing on PBS, this will be a delight. Characters that the uninitiated (like me) were completely unaware of will delight. The history is presented entertainingly.

And in that format it will take you about a week.

I sat there, however, for a version of the film that would suggest that it ran for just over two hours, felt easily like it went north of three, and really felt like I had gotten in my car in Chicago and committed to the crazy idea of making it to the Santa Monica Pier before dawn. The versions shown in the filmmakers’ roadhouse tour is showing a region-focused, trimmed down version of the film. Wile the charm of the subjects still comes through and I’m very much excited by the prospect of seeing this work in its ideal expression. Everything about it, to the interstitials, and long (presumably) drone shots following Paget as he makes his way to every town the Mother Road once touched screams to be on a television screen. I was left with the strange sensation that I wanted the Oklahoma section to be a little less, and the wild characters both east and west to be more substantial.

So, my review, possibly more so for this film has to go back to the first question I ask for these reviews. Have I seen it before? Honestly, I still haven’t quite seen everything it could be at this point. I look forward to doing so. And yet, aside from the unique shared experience that only a thriving, non-corporate movie theater can offer*, you should probably hold off on watching it until the film is really ready to wow you, too.

*You knew I was going to get that in there, didn’t you?

Morbius (2022)

Director: Daniel Espinosa

Cast: Jared Leto, Matt Smith, Adria Arjona, Jared Harris

Have I Seen it Before: Starring Jared Leto? A Spider-Man spinoff? Well, clearly I was there opening weekend.

Did I Like It: A movie review should probably not be a wellspring of snark. It’s easy, and doesn’t really engage with the film.

But I really can’t help myself.

We seem to be past the part of human history where Jared Leto is a leading man movie star, thank you very much, the one-two punch of Tron: Ares (2025) and Masters of the Universe (2026). That’s good. We can—as a species—begin to heal. I might have preferred it happened more because we all came to our senses and less because he is something of a sex pest, but sometimes we can’t choose where our progress comes from.

But, and I ask this not to crack a grin out of you, how did he become a huge star in the first place? I’m told people went head over heals for that My So-Called Life show, but didn’t that thing air for about a month? How did we confuse the cute boy on the show no body cared about with the rightful heir to Jack Nicholson?

Because, honestly, the biggest problem in this movie is not its completely average screenplay about a character even the frothiest of fanboys couldn’t care that much about. It’s the fact tha Leto is an absolute negative vortex of charisma. While he could fake his way through a Suicide Squad (2016), or a Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and any number of supporting roles, once he has to share almost every scene with an actually interesting actor like Matt Smith (whose only crime here is getting confused when Karen Gillan told him doing a Marvel movie was a career-boosting lark), the whole illusion falls apart.

Panic in the Streets (1950)

Director: Elia Kazan

Cast: Richard Widmark, Paul Douglas, Jack Palance, Zero Mostel

Have I Seen it Before: Never. I’m the kind of guy that remembers Palance from Batman (1989) more than anything else.

Did I Like It: If the art of making a thriller is, at its fundamental level, an act of telling a basic story while adding—as seemlessly as possible—complications to the proceedings, this one succeeds in spades.

If anything, it plays even better in the 2020s. A noir murderer cat and mouse game playing at the razors edge of the breakout of a potential endemic of pneumonic plague* works so well, this viewer almost feels like he’s taking advantage of the filmmakers** and got two full A-length features for the price of one.

A less skillful attempts at such material would ave felt uneven and over-complicated, but before we give Kazan too much credit (he deserves as much as we can give him, garnished for everything else he did), there’s something about this cast that is taking advantage of iconic talent before they became iconic. I’d recommend this as a crime movie that partners up Mostel and Palance, and that should be more than enough. Mostel wheezes and Palance glares through the film, perfectly and perpetually trading off their positions as the most interesting thing in the movie. That might hint that Widmark’s leading turn is a little underpowered, and that’s at least somewhat true, but such a minor complaint in such an otherwise electrifying movie.

*Where sufferers can’t remember things for a test, no matter how many memory tricks they use. Har har har.

*Not really. Please insert your own comment about how Kazan is simultaneously both a rat and an imminently solid director. He was and he was. What more could I add to the discourse on that subject? Go look up Orson Welles’ thoughts on the matter. He says it much better than I ever could.

The Big Show (1926)

Director: George Terwilliger

Cast: John Lowell, Evangeline Russell, F. Serrano Keating, Jane Thomas

Have I Seen it Before: Never. Only vaguely certain that I’ve seen it now.

Did I Like It: Hacking together the mere idea of the motion picture must have been heavy work, but one gets the sense that one of—if not the key—motivations would have been to show people around the world something they were unlikely to see in their own lives. Nosferatu (1922) wanted to give us something monstrous and inhuman. Georgees Méliès took us to the moon. Hell, even the famed train that startled everyone out of their seats was meant to show people an unattainable nagle on something.

So, here’s the problem: Living in Oklahoma for most of my life, I’ve had to work fairly hard to avoid seeing a circus with a horse show at its center, and I’ve been fairly successful in that pursuit. So seeing horses and horse people—and divorced from any sort of adventure story or some great neo-Western naval gazing—is at least a waste of the nitrate film that captured the light and shadow at play, and certainly a waste of what had to be a heroic effort to save the film from the vagaries of rot and disinterest.

A long time ago (although not as long as the film has been around), I promised myself that I would write at least 300 words for these reviews, and I find myself struggling to come up with much more here. I also wonder about some of the potentially great films whose only sin against  the forces of oblivion were not having enough luck. I’d rather have every Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin film in pristine condition than think of all the pokey horsey movies that shoved their way on to the last chopper out of Saigon*.

*There. I made it to 300. If you had told me that the last word of this review proper would be Saigon.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

Director: Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones

Cast: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure.

Did I Like It: There’s a certain kind of person who insists that Monty Python could do no wrong. To them, this is probably a perfect film. These people don’t want to hear from me, or really anybody that isn’t prepared to talk exclusively in Monty Python quotes.

Anybody want to leave after that?

Okay, now that it’s just us. I like Monty Python, I do. There are moments where, even though I’ve seen the film, I was laughing louder than anybody else in the theater*.

At times, maybe not so much. Maybe it’s an American vs. English cultural thing, maybe it’s a the fundamental reality that—this being their second film over all and first attempt at a single narrative—that things aren’t quite as cohesive as they might otherwise be. Maybe, and I’m betting this is the more like explanation, Monty Python is imperfect. In their admirable efforts to throw everything—and I do mean every single thing—at the screen, some things hit and still others probably can’t be the least accounted for after fifty year, even if we had the Pythons here to answer for it**.

Told you that if the tonnage of topics you’re able to discuss were unladen swallows and the exclaimation “Ni!” you might not have been on board with this review. You can’t say you weren’t warned.

*Yes, I did get to see it on the big screen. Let’s just say that if I were prone to epileptic symptoms, the switch in the opening credits over to llamas, I might have been in real trouble.

**If we had Cleese, he’d probably write the whole endeavor off either way. It’d be difficult to be more measured in praise for the group’s work than him.

Cars (2006)

Director: John Lasseter

Cast: Paul Newman, Owen Wilson, Bonnie Hunt, Larry the Cable Guy*

Have I Seen It Before: Yes. It’s wild that it has been a full twenty years—and I come to the film again now with its 20th anniversary re-release—since I got the end of this movie and decided that a full ten years of invariably great movies had to end some time. The best I could say about the film then was that Michael Keaton was, in fact, in it.

And as we all know by now: For me, that counts plenty.

Did I Like It: This time, I wound up watching it with a room full of children (fear not; at least some of them were related to me) and although that group will tend to chatter, each of them was pretty well enraptured by the film, so it may not matter what I think

I’m not sure how into the world of Cars I might be. I get lost in the bigger questions this film rightly won’t ever answer: If Lightning McQueen (Wilson) and Sally Carrera (Hunt) can have a romantic flirtation, and Lizzie (Katherine Helmond) was married to the founder of Radiator Springs, does that mean that the Cars of Planet Earth procreate? Does no one question why all creatures big and small—indeed, including bugs—have space within them for some other kind of creature to take a seat? They apparently have a deity, or deities, as one character exclaims something to “the manufacturer.” Yet, each car is clearly a different make and model. Does that mean the world of Cars is pantheistic? Did anybody tell Larry the Cable Guy about this before he was on the hook for three films? Was Lightning McQueen born without headlights, pre-destining him to a life as a race car? Was Lightning McQueen born?

Maybe I’m no longer in my twenties, but the lack of essential cleverness in the film kind of works for it now. A longing for a simpler time—when Route 66 was the beating heart of America—gives it all a sweetness, that this proponent of typewriters** and analog cinema projection can certainly relate to…

But seriously, was Lightning McQueen born? If he wasn’t, is he the fabled manufacturer. I’ll be happy to pitch Cars 4, whenever you’re ready, Pixar.

*Yeah, I’m not wild about having to type his full name, either. Even The Rock eventually started going by something other than the name fans first knew him by. I guess before that happens Mr. the Cable Guy would have to become a big movie star. On second thought, maybe I’m fine referring to him by his full name.

**Where’s Disney/Pixar’s Typewriters(tm), you cowards!?