Young Dev Patel! Adorable. The conceit is actually a really fun means of exposition with built-in tension/stakes. The only jarring thing is Boyle’s insistence on his typical frame-skipping cinematography in a misjudged attempt at introducing kineticism to a story that has enough of it intrinsically. Have faith in your material, Danny!
A fun confection of a film, if ultimately featherweight. Grace Kelly, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra all do what they do. Louis Armstrong gets to turn up in an extended cameo and be extremely meta. We get the song Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. People fall in and out of love and it all wraps up maybe 15 minutes after it should have, but it’s an amiable watch.
I could have sworn I had watched this since (checks Letterboxd) before uni?! - but apparently not. I think I liked it more this time, just clicked a bit more. It’s not as much of a vehicle for the cast to just play their personas, but Bill Murray is obviously larger than life and Rick Moranis is quietly great. Banging soundtrack too.
Not watched in some time (2017 according to Letterboxd), and obviously top of mind with Reiner’s recent tragic passing. It’s so very good. An obvious descendant of Annie Hall both in writing and directing, but leaning more on the earnestness. The line “I’ll have what she’s having” is so over-referenced now that it’s actually quite startling to remember just how effective a punchline it actually is.
Genuinely very affecting, especially towards the end. Mescal and Buckley both obviously very good (apart from, maybe, a couple of moments from Buckley in the more… overt grief moments), but Hamnet himself does a really great job. Can’t believe Jessie Buckley is going to win an Oscar for playing someone who talks all the way through a play.
Ah, the dichotomy of man. He’s an asshole! There might be mitigating factors from his childhood for his assholeness! But he’s still an asshole! It’s telling who they could and could not get to talk about him on camera. There’s a lot of time spent with Chase himself and his family, which means there’s a slight veer into hagiography towards the end, especially around the perceived SNL50 snub which is presented broadly uncritically on the part of the filmmakers.
Incredible accent work from Ben Whishaw here, amongst everything else. Always a pleasure to have a new Ira Sachs film, and this is an odd little egg. A quietly meditative film, almost a step removed from being slice of life, a recounting of a slice of life maybe. Oh how our lives expand when you stop to think about them.
The fun subtextual throughline of Cover Up is whether Seymour Hersh’s paranoia at being asked questions in this interview that he agreed to and continue to agree to is justified or not. A prickly participant in his own documentary, Hersh’s presence enlivens an otherwise solid documentary on the quite impressive array of major journalistic breaks he’s been responsible for, from war crimes in Vietnam to the abuse in Abu Ghraib.
Fun to see that Josh Safdie is the brother injecting the severe anxiety into the blood of the Safdie Brothers films. If not as much of a living panic attack as Uncut Gems, Marty Supreme is still cut from the same cloth, a frenetic film bouncing from catastrophe to catastrophe without let-up, all grounded by a compelling performance from Timothee Chalamet. What price glory indeed.
Certainly one of the films that I will have watched in 2026. I dunno, it’s a fun way to start the year. It’s all absolute hokum, of course, and it is massively skating on personality and cool visual location title cards, but the convoluted nature of the thing is fun, and Justice Smith is great in it and deserves all the roles he can get, so I’m perfectly happy with my choices here.