I hated this film. It has an "NR" rating but should have a goddamn trigger warning on the poster instead. You're definitely going to see at least one sexual assault (but actually two; the other is more subtle in presentation) if you manage to sit through the whole movie, which you probably shouldn't. You're absolutely waiting for it to happen, but for different reasons than it actually does, which is not to imply this film is nuanced in any way.

The only positive thing I can say about this film is that, as an American, this is how I think the rest of the world sees us, so it was gratifying to me to have English people acting like fools instead.

I've said before that a requirement of producing a biopic about a musician is that you have to present them in a flattering light, because otherwise their estate won't licensing their music to you for the movie.

Apparently that isn't always true, as Maestro wants you to know that Leonard Bernstein was certainly a genius, but primarily he was a philandering asshole. I can only guess that this script was signed off on by his daughter who, in the film, was vocally disgusted by his homosexuality.

Maestro is largely carried by Bradley Cooper's unstoppable charisma. Who else has the range to perform well as a depressed country western star, a bioengineered space pirate racoon, and a composer wearing a potentially-antisemitic prosthetic nose? Honestly, the film and its history is less interesting than his performance, which is downright hypnotizing.

(I actually managed to see this one in a real theater when it first premiered, before the Best Picture nom and Obama putting it on his best-of-year list. I just say this to point out: I saw it before it was cool, and this post has been sitting in my drafts for months and months now.)

Past Lives does two things that are remarkable in this age: it makes Americans care about a movie that is 90% performed in subtitled Korean, and it tells a dirt-simple but powerful story without a lot of glitz.

You could have staged this in a community theater—you could have shot this on an iPhone!—and it would still work. And yes, that’s almost always been a feature of indie and arthouse films, but seeing this one break through when everything else is big budgets and special effects by default…it warmed my heart.

The film is about life-altering decisions being chosen—and maybe chosen wrongly—as we all choose, all the time, carrying on our quiet little lives.

The two main characters speaking Korean to each other is great for American audiences, who probably use this to create a buffer around themselves. These other people have these problems, right? And the audience tell themselves that until they have a quiet moment, and their mind wanders, and they think about that guy from high school, and all the choices they made that pushed them each from that moment until now. Can new choices still be made? And would they make them, if they could?

I was certain I was going hate this one, and was genuinely surprised to find myself liking it. It's ridiculous, in all the ways you would expect Willy Wonka to be, and it's not the least bit sorry about it. It's an origin story, I suppose, but it's not totally obnoxious about it, as it could have easily been. Lots of callbacks to the original film (and book) without blazing a neon sign that reads NOSTALGIA behind it.

Also, it's a musical! Did you know that?! Could you tell from the first official trailer or the second? Me neither, which is a shame, because the whimsy this brings to the film is so necessary to its successful execution.