Always lovely to spend another nine hours with my best friends The Beatles.
After Get Back and A Hard Day’s Night and the George Harrison doc and I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Beatles ’64 and now this, you’d think I’d had enough Beatles, but I believe I’ll go on a whole 1960s/70s rock-doc binge in 2026…
Priest Josh Brolin, Gardener Thomas Haden Church, and Doctor Jeremy Renner conspire with Glenn Close to perform a miracle, but she kills them all, confounding disheveled priest Josh O’Connor until our guy Blanc figures it all out.
The bar with a hell theme has a Ricky Jay poster:
After Don’t Look Now and The Church, I’m on edge when there’s an artist on scaffolding in a movie. Pinocchio (the puppet) is a real horror, created in a drunken rage. Fascists insist that P go to school, but carnie Christoph Waltz wants to kidnap him into the circus instead.
When you are being puppeted by a monkey:
The technical “perfection” doesn’t work in the movie’s favor – it doesn’t look handmade, but composited. Feels like the voices are on one plane, visuals on another, and they are not in unison. At least Waltz (who cannot pronounce Italian names) is having a flamboyantly good time. And have I mentioned it’s a musical for children?
Have I mentioned Pinocchio is Jesus Christ:
When you meet Dragon Cate Blanchett in the afterlife:
–
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964, Larry Roemer)
I had never seen this before, at least not in living memory. Mildly distressing to discover it has better songs, better voice acting, and better stop-motion than the Guillermo. Nobody ever talks about the team’s follow-up, a James Cagney Smokey the Bear movie.
Paula Beer is in a car crash, losing her family, in front of the house of a family who lost their daughter/sister, so she naturally falls in with them.
If I was properly caught up with my Petzolds I’ve have seen the mom in Yella and The State I Am In.
Babybel:
1. But Why? (2021, Terence Davies)
2. Cat Soup (2001, Tatsuo Sato)
3. The Volcano Manifesto and more (Cauleen Smith)
4. Los Huesos (2021, Cociña & León)
5. Bad Luck Blackie, King-Size Canary, Screwball Squirrel (Tex Avery)
6. Inspirace (1949, Karel Zeman)
7. Glens Falls Sequence (1937, Douglass Crockwell)
8. The Demands of Ordinary Devotion & Stone, Hat, Ribbon and Rose (Eva Giolo)
9. Hacked Circuit (2014, Deborah Stratman)
10. Glass Life (2021, Sara Cwynar)
11. The Daughters of Fire (2023, Pedro Costa)
12. There Once Was a Dog (1982, Eduard Nazarov)
13. Street Musique (1972, Ryan Larkin)
14. Unemployees (2023, Joel Potrykus)
15. The Black Tower and Om (John Smith)
16. A and B in Ontario (1984, Frampton & Wieland)
Shocktober faves:
1. Gemini (1999, Shinya Tsukamoto)
2. Dangerous Animals (2025, Sean Byrne)
3. House of Wax (2005, Jaume Collet-Serra)
4. The Haunted Palace (1963, Roger Corman)
5. A Chinese Ghost Story III (1991, Ching Siu-Tung)
6. Scream 3 (2000, Wes Craven)
7. It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987, Larry Cohen)
8. Oddity (2024, Damian McCarthy)
9. Bring Her Back (2025, Danny & Michael Philippou)
10. Alone (2020, John Hyams)
11. Quatermass and the Pit (1967, Roy Ward Baker)
12. Ick (2024, Joseph Kahn)
Rock docs:
1. The Beatles Anthology (1995)
2. The Cry of Jazz (1959, Edward Bland)
3. Jazz ’34 (1996, Robert Altman)
4. Amazing Grace (2018, Sydney Pollack)
5. Gowillog (2025, Billy Woods)
6. Pink Floyd at Pompeii MCMLXXII (1972, Adrian Maben)
7. Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988, Charlotte Zwerin)
8. Beatles ’64 (2024, David Tedeschi)
9. Gimme Danger (2016, Jim Jarmusch)
10. 20 Feet from Stardom (2013, Morgan Neville)
Not Quite New, from the past five years:
1. Flipside (Christopher Wilcha)
2. Wildcat (Ethan Hawke)
3. The Tale of King Crab (Matteo Zoppis & Alessio Rigo de Righi)
4. Spermworld (Lance Oppenheim)
5. Fifth Thoracic Vertebra (Park Sye-young)
6. Heretic (Scott Beck & Bryan Woods)
7. Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood)
8. 100 Yards (Xu Haofeng & Xu Junfeng)
9. Circumstantial Pleasures (Lewis Klahr)
10. Walk Up (Hong Sang-soo)
Older Movies:
1. The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926, Lotte Reiniger)
2. Silvestre (1982, João César Monteiro)
3. 24 City (2008, Jia Zhang-Ke)
4. Yard Work Is Hard Work (2008, Jodie Mack)
5. Secrets & Lies (1996, Mike Leigh)
6. The Extravagant Shadows (2012, David Gatten)
7. When The Levees Broke (2006, Spike Lee)
8. Vive L’Amour (1994, Tsai Ming-Liang)
9. Nowhere (1997, Gregg Araki)
10. Serial Mom (1994, John Waters)
11. O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization (1985, Piotr Szulkin)
12. Amour fou (2014, Jessica Hausner)
13. Deja Vu (2006, Tony Scott)
Rewatches:
Lost Highway, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart (David Lynch)
Altered States (1980, Ken Russell)
Black Book (2006, Paul Verhoeven)
Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)
Drowning by Numbers (1988, Peter Greenaway)
Fireworks (1997, Takeshi Kitano)
A Fistful of Dollars (1964, Sergio Leone)
Heat (1995, Michael Mann)
Koker Trilogy (1994, Abbas Kiarostami)
No Country for Old Men (2007, Coen Bros.)
Poltergeist (1982, Tobe Hooper)
Starship Troopers (1997, Paul Verhoeven)
Svankmajer shorts
1. No Other Choice (Park Chan-wook)
2. The Shrouds (David Cronenberg)
3. The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson)
4. Reflection in a Dead Diamond (Cattet & Forzani)
5. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson)
6. Train Dreams (Clint Bentley)
7. Universal Language (Matthew Rankin)
8. Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhang-Ke)
9. Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie)
10. Miroirs No. 3 (Christian Petzold)
11. Sinners (Ryan Coogler)
12. Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes)
13. Dead Talents Society (John Hsu)
14. The Naked Gun (Akiva Schaffer)
15. Vulcanizadora (Joel Potrykus)
Happy New Movie Year!
Went to theaters a handful of times, skipped True/False and the Virginia Film Fest, watched Locorazo and Shocktober alone on the couch, ho hum. Identified fewer must-see new movies than ever (and watched some 69% of them, nice). The 20th blogniversary will be in April, taking suggestions for how to celebrate. Something list-related, no doubt.
K recently told me “you’re such a completist,” but what have I completed really? Six years ago I rounded up the Alain Resnais movies, since then I’ve knocked out the last few of Criterion’s first 100 DVD titles. But I’ve got an ever-increasing number of must-see lists and filmmakers, and have preferred skimming between each list and project rather than tackling any one head-on. Just finished watching all known Agnes Varda movies and I’ll round ’em up when done reading the book on her career. Maybe in ’26 it’s time to complete more projects?
The 2025 Lists:
2025 Favorites: New and Recent Movies
2025 Favorites: Older Movies and Rewatches