Avidavr: Media Reviews

Category: Uncategorized

  • A Ghost Story (David Lowery, 2017)

    A sheet, a pie, and a lot of waiting

    David Cross once called Alvin and the Chipmunks 3: Chipwrecked “the most miserable experience of my life.” He only did it for the money, as he wanted to find funding for some of his own passionate projects. Sensing utter desperation, a producer coerced David into conditions he felt were pointless. In one scene, he wore a Pelican mascot costume, for real, for days worth of filming during extreme humidity. A stunt person or extra could have been in the costume instead, and, even worse, his character was not even supposed to actually be in the costume. The audience was only supposed to think that he *might* be in the costume.

    I thought of that while watching this haunted little movie. Apparently, Casey Affleck was always underneath the sheet in A Ghost Story—a lot more than he ever needed to be for the experience to be, I’d say. Sometimes, hiring a major actor for a role where you can’t see their face qualifies as stunt casting, especially when they are given so little to -do-.

    .

    The visuals are the primary draw here. Everything is impeccably framed, with a little bit of vignette on the outer corners of the frame. It’s as though a ghost is remembering their past as if they were watching a vintage home movie. There is a Tsai Ming-Liang level of action happening onscreen here. I feel like I need to research more about the house where this was shot. Whereas in Goodbye Dragon Inn, Tsai focused on a movie theater’s final days before it was shut down, focusing on all of the grody little details that still existed there: the leaky roof, the cruisiness of its usage by gay men. I felt like Tsai looked at the theater, saw it was going to be demolished, so he gave an assignment to himself. How can he capture the majesty of a theater, it’s downfall, and somehow preserve it. Goodbye Dragon Inn was a movie about the very worst days of a once majestic theater.

    A Ghost Story’s backstory is a little less noble. Yes, the house was condemned, but the story came first. David Lowery found a house from a list of buildings that were to be torn down and used the film’s budget to fix it up to make it look more livable as a family home before its eventual destruction. Whereas in Goodbye Dragon Inn, Tsai incorporated a character who moved extremely slowly with one leg that couldn’t move so you could really take in the atmosphere of the theater, there are shots in A Ghost Story where nothing happens for almost no reason. The most memorable scene in A Ghost Story comes when Rooney Mara grabs a dish left for her on a table, sits at the wall for some reason, and pierces the fork right in the center of the tin. I thought “Are we going to watch her eat this entire pie in one shot?” There is nothing else to look at. There is a ghost and a piano. Old, undecorated suburban houses are not that interesting to look at, so we just watch her, chomping away.

    I liked the pacing of A Ghost Story. It was like Tsai Ming Liang or Apichatpong Weerasethakul without the purpose. There is nothing that makes me roll my eyes as quickly as the idea that a ghost might be haunting an old house, but I do love the folklore tradition of ghost stories. There is truth in that aspect, that ghosts are more bound by a location than by time. I understood the main point of the movie: someone who believed in his own love so deeply that, once he died, he becomes his own self-fulfilling prophecy. “Wait… I have been haunting myself for years? Why?” Tsai makes slowness feel like observation; Lowery makes it feel a little like homework.

    7/10

  • Bugonia (2025)

    The bees are dying, the executives are talking, and the joke may be on us.


    Is Bugonia a place? A character’s name? Apparently it has something to do with Greek mythology and bees. I’ve always thought that if the human race died out, it would have something to do with colony collapse disorder. I just never imagined it could happen—or look quite like this.

    Emma Stone plays Michelle, an executive at a vast, vaguely defined conglomerate—something like Amazon filtered through the pharmaceutical industry. She delivers corporate edicts that sound humane while being quietly coercive, the kind of language designed to make people work harder for less while thanking management for the privilege. Stress is treated as a given. Burnout is reframed as responsibility. Somewhere in the background, the bees are dying.

    There’s enough good in Bugonia to almost compensate for Yorgos Lanthimos’s increasingly questionable sense of humor. The film has the shape and texture of something very familiar—procedural, paranoid, vicious. With only minor adjustments, it could easily pass for a season of Fargo. The score and cinematography are immaculate, and the performances are absurd in ways that still feel recognizable. Everything seems carefully built. It might even feel like a masterpiece—right up until it decides not to be one. But what’s the fun in that?

    The Oscar buzz around Stone feels less about nuance than about her continued commitment to being Lanthimos’s most pliable collaborator. Yes, she really shaved her head for this. The film flirts with weighty ideas—mental illness, institutional power, corporate systems managing human behavior—in ways that feel unnerving and recognizable. But it keeps shifting, nudging, testing how much disbelief the audience is willing to suspend.

    The whole thing plays like a meticulously structured Upright Citizens Brigade sketch that refuses to announce where the joke is—or when it’s over. I understood what it was doing. I admired the confidence. This could have been No Country for Old Men or The Silence of the Lambs. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that it was laughing at a version of the movie I would have liked better.

    Bugonia is handsome and deeply committed to its own logic. In real life, we probably already know these characters. Whether we recognize them as such is another matter.

    7.5/10

  • Hamnet (2025)

    A thoughtful elegy that ends as a plea for significance.

    Hamnet is intermittently compelling while you’re watching it, but I don’t think the world will ultimately care very much. The first half works surprisingly well, unfolding with a meditative patience that recalls the style of Chloé Zhao—a comparison that will excite the half of the audience that tolerated Nomadland and bore everyone else senseless. There’s a quiet confidence early on, an observational calm that treats grief as a lived condition rather than a dramatic event. For a while, Hamnet feels like it knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be.

    That confidence collapses by the end. Some have positioned Hamnet as the “real” Shakespeare in Love, but that comparison only highlights how much that film got right. Hamnet can’t decide how its characters are supposed to exist: they often speak like modern people who binge Outlander, then suddenly shift into scenes written in full Shakespearean verse. The tonal whiplash is baffling. Are we meant to believe the audience can’t handle period language—except when it’s convenient?

    The final act fails outright. Leaning on Adagio for Strings—arguably the most famously depressing piece of music ever written—to sell Shakespearean tragedy feels desperate, not profound. The camera lingers on Jessie Buckley’s face for so long that people around me literally fell asleep, and the staging of the finale makes entering the center of the Globe Theatre feel about as casual as finding a spot near the stage at a rock concert. I liked too much of Hamnet to recommend against seeing it, but I give a thumbs down to the very elements most people seem to admire.

    6/10

  • Zootopia 2 (2025)

    A Disney sequel with jokes, momentum, and—miracle of miracles—reason to exist.

    Zootopia 2 benefits enormously from revisiting Zootopia, which has aged surprisingly well—far better than Moana, which now feels small and oddly muted, like a would-be epic propped up by great songs. The problem with Moana as a franchise is structural: it barely has characters. There’s Moana, her stern father, her dead grandmother, Maui, a chicken, and the ocean. That’s not a world; it’s a fable. Moana 2 clearly had no idea where to take those pieces next, and the result felt pointless. (Also: why did no one ever eat the chicken?) Disney’s recent sequel strategy has been so uninspired that it briefly makes you wonder whether they should stay out of theatrical follow-ups altogether.

    Or maybe not. Zootopia 2 is fun, clever, and densely packed with jokes. The original film had a deceptively simple premise with plenty of room to grow, and this sequel smartly picks up only a week after the first movie ends. That initially sounds odd, but it works: the film plays like episode two of a disposable detective TV show that accidentally became excellent. Unlike Moana 2, which has four credited screenwriters, Zootopia 2 comes from a single writer, Jared Bush, who also co-directs. That cohesion matters. Even when the movie settles into procedural rhythms, it feels confident—like an artist cracking himself up, testing ideas, and trusting his own instincts. It’s lighter than the original, but refreshingly aware of what made the first one work.

    8/10

  • Sentimental Value (2025)

    Family ily estrangement, artistic legacy, and the limits of self-mythology.

    Sentimental Value (2025) review

    Sentimental Value is another deceptively slight movie about coping with tragic loss, but one that feels far more likely to linger. Stellan Skarsgård plays Gustav Borg, a Lars von Trier–like director who hasn’t made a film in over a decade and now feels pressure to deliver one final artistic statement before he dies. His daughters have long since stopped needing him, and the distance feels permanent. Gustav is the kind of man who only loves punishing, perverse cinema—to the extent that he thinks DVDs of Irreversible and The Piano Teacher would be appropriate gifts for a twelve-year-old’s birthday.

    Movies about filmmakers rarely thrill me—they tend to be self-congratulatory, and therefore less honest—but this one is handled with restraint and surprising humility. The central question cuts deep: how do you convince anyone your story is worth hearing when you’ve spent a lifetime showing no interest in listening to others? Elle Fanning plays one of his collaborators, and even she seems uncertain whether this man’s vision deserves her faith. And honestly: why isn’t she already regarded as one of the finest actors of her generation?

    Sentimental Value comes and goes for me a little. It says something real, and I don’t doubt that it matters, but it didn’t stay with me in quite the way The Worst Person in the World did, which felt like the movie I’d want all my friends to watch when I die. That film felt big—about terminal illness, infidelity, and the stories people tell themselves about their own lives. Sentimental Value feels smaller by comparison, more about famous people having problems that will probably never apply to me. My boyfriend loves it. I admired it. I’m just not sure how much I’ll think about it later.

    8.5/10

  • Song Sung Blue (2025)

    A gentle love story about music, missed chances, and making the most of the time we have.
    Song Sun Blue (2025) review

    Song Sung Blue feels like exactly the kind of movie that would play the Heartland Film Festival, doesn’t it? Let me check… okay, it didn’t. But they gave it some sort of award anyway. You can almost hear the thought process: “We’re not letting a movie this modest—and this transparently engineered to make audiences cry—go by without our name attached to it.”

    And yet.

    This is actually a very sweet love story about two people dealing with genuinely relatable problems—at least to me. Kate Hudson does her own singing, and she sounds great: exactly like an extremely talented performer who can’t quite turn that talent into a full career.

    The real pang here is that Hugh Jackman never played Neil Diamond in a biopic. He looks and sounds uncannily like him. That said, I can’t imagine there’s a story we urgently need to see about a 60-year-old Neil Diamond—and, truth be told, this story didn’t strictly need to be told either.

    But it was told, and it’s very sweet. The film gently reminds us of the importance of making the most of our lives while we still have time on Earth. I’m glad to have this one available for people grieving the loss of family members.

    7/10

  • Train Dreams (2025)

    A somber meditation on solitude, memory, and the slow passing of a life.

    Train Dreams

    Train Dreams may be one of the most somber movies ever made. For comparison, I thought of films like Bringing Out the Dead, Palindromes, and Synecdoche, New York—all famously bleak works that offer little to no emotional reprieve. This film is quieter, sadder, and somehow lonelier still.

    It captures the immensity of solitude: what it feels like to be briefly, modestly happy; to watch that happiness erode; and then to wake up one day and realize the world has kept moving without you—that you may be the only truly sad person left in it. The performances are restrained and affecting, communicating grief and endurance without overt dramatics.

    Still, the film’s devotion to mood comes at a cost. It often feels less like a story unfolding than an emotional state being sustained, and at times it nearly forgets to become a story at all.

    8/10

  • Recent Movie Roundup: Part 2

    Talking Animals, Shakespeare, and Amazonian Aliens.

    At some point these stopped being short reviews and started turning into whatever this is. I’m fine with that. Here are the next three movies, in the order I watched them.

    Here you go:


    Zootopia 2

    Zootopia 2 benefits enormously from revisiting Zootopia, which has aged surprisingly well—far better than Moana, which now feels small and oddly muted, like a wannabe epic propped up by great songs. The problem with Moana as a franchise is structural: it barely has characters. There’s Moana, her stern father, her dead grandmother, Maui, a chicken, and the ocean. That’s not a world; it’s a fable. Moana 2 clearly didn’t know where to take those pieces next, and the result felt pointless. (Also: why did no one ever eat the chicken?) Disney’s recent sequel strategy has been so uninspired that it briefly makes you wonder whether they should just stay out of theatrical sequels altogether.

    Or maybe not. Zootopia 2 is fun, clever, and densely packed with jokes. The original film had a deceptively simple premise that left room to grow, and this sequel smartly picks up only a week after the first movie ends. It initially feels odd, but it works—the film plays like episode two of a throwaway detective TV show that accidentally became excellent. Unlike Moana 2, which lists four credited screenwriters, Zootopia 2 is written by a single voice: Jared Bush, who also co-directs. That cohesion matters. Even when the movie leans into procedural rhythms, it feels confident—like an artist cracking jokes, experimenting and laughing at his own instincts. It’s lighter than the original, but boldly understands its own strengths.

    8/10.


    Hamnet

    Hamnet is intermittently compelling while you’re watching it, but I don’t think the world will ultimately care very much. The first half works surprisingly well, unfolding with a meditative patience that recalls the style of Chloé Zhao—a comparison that will excite the half of the audience that tolerated Nomadland and bore everyone else senseless. There’s a quiet confidence early on, an observational calm that suggests grief as a lived condition rather than a dramatic event. For a while, Hamnet feels like it knows exactly what kind of movie it wants to be.

    That confidence collapses by the end. Some have positioned Hamnet as the “real” Shakespeare in Love, but that comparison only highlights how much that film got right. Hamnet can’t decide how its characters should exist: they often speak like modern people who binge Outlander, then suddenly shift into scenes written in full Shakespearean verse. The tonal whiplash is baffling. Are we meant to believe the audience can’t handle period language—except when it’s convenient? The final act fails outright. Leaning on Adagio for Strings—arguably the most famously depressing piece of music ever written—to sell Shakespearean tragedy feels desperate, not profound. The camera lingers on Jessie Buckley’s face for so long that people around me literally fell asleep, and the staging of the finale makes entering the center of the Globe Theatre feel about as casual as finding a spot near the stage at a rock concert. I liked too much of Hamnet to recommend against seeing it—but I give a thumbs down to the very elements most people seem to praise. 6/10.


    Bugonia

    Is Bugonia a place? A character’s name? Apparently, it has something to do with Greek mythology and bees. I’ve always thought that if the human race died, it would have something to do with colony collapse disorder. I just never imagined it could really happen—or look quite like this.

    Emma Stone plays Michelle, an executive at a vast, vaguely defined conglomerate—something like Amazon filtered through the pharmaceutical industry. She delivers corporate edicts that sound humane while being quietly coercive, the kind of language designed to make people work harder for less while thanking management for the privilege. Stress is treated as a given. Burnout is reframed as responsibility. Somewhere in the background, the bees are dying.

    There’s enough good in Bugonia to almost compensate for Yorgos Lanthimos’s increasingly questionable sense of humor. The film has the shape and texture of something very familiar—procedural, paranoid, vicious. With only minor adjustments, it could easily pass for a season of Fargo. The score and cinematography are immaculate, the performances relatably absurd. Everything feels carefully built. It might even feel like a masterpiece—right up until it decides not to be one. But what’s the fun in that?

    The Oscar buzz around Stone feels less about nuance than about her continued commitment to being Lanthimos’s most pliable collaborator (yes, she really shaved her head for this). The film flirts with weighty ideas—mental illness, institutional power, corporate systems managing human behavior—in ways that feel unnerving and recognizable. But it keeps shifting, nudging, testing how much disbelief the audience is willing to suspend.

    The whole thing plays like a meticulously structured Upright Citizens Brigade sketch that refuses to announce where the joke is—or when it’s over. I understood what it was doing. I admired the confidence. This could have been No Country for Old Men or The Silence of the Lambs. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that it was laughing at a version of the movie I would have liked better.

    Bugonia is handsome and deeply committed to its own logic. In real life, we probably already know these characters. Whether we recognize them as such is another matter.

    7.5/10

    This will all continue in a third and final-ish part.

  • Day 4: Eraserhead (1977)

    Goal: Find a horror movie I am embarrassed to have never seen.


    Eraserhead (1977)

    What I know about it:
    A black and white horror movie from the same guy that did Twin Peaks and Mulholland Dr. RIP. This has a very strange trailer that I can’t remember, and I saw it last week. Long static shots of a guy with a high-cut hairstyle looking blankly at the camera. Ok, now I’ll read the premise on IMDb.

    So this is a survival movie. “Henry Spencer tries to survive the screams of his newborn mutant child.” Shouldn’t those adjectives be in reverse order? Does Henry have a mutant newborn child, or does he have a newborn mutant child? Describing the child like that makes it sound like some sort of irregular baseball card, or like he came with a set of superhero clothes. “Mutant Child here! Now with a detachable umbilical cord and noise chip!”

    As someone who regularly saw the grosses for midnight movies nationwide, this was one of the standards, particularly in New York and California. If you specifically like watching cult or midnight films, you have already knocked this off your list long ago. I don’t know what it is, but it’s the type of movie that I want to know as little about as possible.


    —

    After the movie:
    Hair in the 1970s. You couldn’t mess with it. Today, if someone looked in the mirror and said, “You know, my hair kind of looks like a pencil eraser,” they would then get clippers and a pair of scissors and cut it down until it seems like the average length trending right now. But in 1976, that length was inches, which equated to a white man afro on some unlucky men. So all you could do was look out the bedroom window from the fetal position and sulk.


    The terminology “newborn mutant baby” is definitely accurate. It isn’t a mutated normal baby. It is a normal mutant baby, with a head that looks curiously like a human elbow. David Lynch deserves some sort of medal for comedy for playing such a long game for such a minor joke. Blink and you’ll miss it.

    I watched this with Josh, who seemed to mostly agree with me on Dead Calm. With Eraserhead, he realized it was boring and considered leaving 30 minutes in. “This movie is just *dull*. People in 1977 watched this because there wasn’t anything else to do.” He never left the room and watched the screen the entire time. He said he kept waiting for it to get better, although I think just enough new things happened to—not keep him interested, maybe—but to keep him from becoming bored out of his mind.

    I realized while watching this: mostly, this was an extremely influential movie for certain directors. It is clear that Barton Fink, which won the Palme d’Or in 1991, was about 70% Eraserhead when the Coen Brothers thought out what to do for their fourth feature film. Is it a drama? Thriller? Comedy? The decision to give it the biggest award was unanimous, which is as if they were saying, “Bravo. We saw Eraserhead, too.”


    This was pre–the mutated creature film boom of the late 70s and 80s, from directors David Cronenberg, John Carpenter, Joe Dante, Ridley Scott, et al. The stop-motion and practical effects were influential on many 1980s films. David Lynch figured out how to take the effects used in Jason and the Argonauts and claymation movies and do them on a next-to-nothing budget. The sequences don’t last long, but the effect feels straight out of Beetlejuice a decade later. The body imagery, which includes a rib cage split open, feels right out of John Carpenter’s The Thing.

    If the film is about anything, it is the crushing routine and existence of working-class, industrialized city life. Henry Spencer lies down and looks out his bedroom window, and then we cut to his perspective and see what it is he sees. When someone’s bedroom has a contender for “world’s worst view,” I always think, “How did he get stuck here? Henry must be the worst person alive at finding a job. Or the worst at finding an apartment.”


    I always assumed Angelo Badalamenti specialized in 1950s jukebox-style music, which is where the strange lounge act aesthetic came from in Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, et al. But no. That seems to mostly be Lynch’s idea as the origin point. The song here, “In Heaven,” was mostly written by the man himself. I like to think he started with this idea just to find something absurd to be “the mutant squish-y” song, and then he just decided to keep that style and really commit. The Twin Peaks aesthetic started here, in this bizarre, dark horror movie that no one was supposed to see.

    Because Eraserhead is must-see cinema. For anyone who grew to love David Lynch for Twin Peaks or Mulholland Dr., this is where a surprising amount of his craft was first seen. I could name 30 movies now considered classics released in the next 20 years that were directly indebted to Eraserhead. The entire 1980s cult movie genre was trying to be the next Eraserhead!

    9/10

  • Serpico (1973)

    My 27 movie A-Z film-a-thon: day 20.

    Serpico (1973)

    Serpico is life summarized. If I could recommend it to one group, it’d be college-aged people considering law enforcement. This should be required viewing. It’s a true story — and it feels like one.
    The effect is sobering. Serpico isn’t a saint; he just sticks to a couple of moral rules, and for that, he’s targeted. Mostly, he’s punished for being a nonconformist who won’t take bribes. Turns out that’s a real problem.

    There’s one scene that nearly derailed the film for me. Early on, Serpico stumbles on a group of young Black men assaulting a woman. It’s brief and has no impact on the story. I initially excused it as something that “probably happened.” But it didn’t. It’s not in Serpico’s memoir and appears to be completely invented. That makes its inclusion worse. It plays into a racist stereotype under the guise of “filling in context.” This isn’t harmless background — it’s racially charged mythmaking.

    Structurally, the movie is messy. It jumps between years, jobs, and relationships with little concern for narrative momentum. The fabricated scene I mentioned only exists to make Serpico look sympathetic — even to a rapist. He helps the man, walks him to a café, and threatens to shoot him if he runs. It’s absurd and undermines the film’s credibility.

    And that’s the problem: if this film invents major scenes, how much can we trust the rest? So much of the runtime is spent on relationships and moments that never happened. Serpico’s partner leaving him in the bathtub to marry someone else? Pure invention. These scenes feel like homework: are they fair to minorities, to Serpico, to the police?

    Still, the core story remains: Serpico faced relentless pressure to conform, constant harassment, baseless rumors, and professional roadblocks. He did the right thing, and it made his career stagnant and his personal life chaotic.

    The film feels endless by design. That’s part of the truth it captures: being a good cop in a corrupt system leads to isolation, thanklessness, and futility. No promotions, no recognition, no peace.

    Serpico is not a great film. Its liberties are frustrating. But it’s essential viewing. If someone sees this and still wants to be a cop, maybe — just maybe — that’s the kind of person we need.

    7.5/10