TO CATCH A THIEF dir. Alfred Hitchcock (1955)

Just so damnably winsome.

DUNKIRK dir. Christopher Nolan (2017)

Managed to screw up seeing this in Omnimax 70mm by stopping for ice cream first, underestimating that St. Louis would show up. So I think it was a very fine film, but also I was halfway up, on an aisle, and couldn't tell if a ship was sinking or not (it usually was.)

The Sea and Air chapters were terrific and my only hesitation with dowsing it in holy water and crowning it with laurels is the role Kenneth Branagh plays.  He's in a lesser movie.  It's not especially his fault, dialogue is Nolan's Achille's Heel.  But c'mon man, push back! He was like a strange Our Town narrator character, which I guess could be meta if you want.

SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING dir. Jon Watts (2017)

I really didn't think I'd ever love an MCU movie but the bastards got me.



Michael Keaton was in the two best superhero movies since I was born, three if you count BIRDMAN, just saying.

MASTER OF NONE S2 (2017)

The romance with Italy was great.  The romance with the Italian was not.

FARGO S3 (2017)

Less fun than its predecessors, but I think more important. They created a villain who maps precisely on how actual evil operates like today: sociopathic determination to extract wealth at any cost, and use the existing infrastructure and good will of ordinary people against them.  David Thewlis is bone-chillingly vile. Carrie Coon plays it quiet and straight, with soul, like a Bill Evans solo album, and deserves so much work after this.  The struggle of the Ewan McGregor brothers place it within the literary timeline stretching back to Genesis. A profound, perfectly executed fable for our modern times, ended with grandmaster confidence.



We live in a time of convoluted predation; fractions of blood by vampire bats. Humans are volitional predators who've killed all else so cannibalism remains. Our society is dying because the herbivores refuse to band together against the carnivores, and pretend evil like this is either imaginary or inevitable, intractable, the cost of doing business.