Heart of the Beast of Mossy Bottom

I keep calling this The Man and His Dog, even though it actually has this much much sillier title Heart of the Beast, a title I've had trouble remembering since I first saw the trailer. 

 David Ayer's movie really works. It's a solid man-in-nature thing, and instead of the man being alone or with a human best friend, he's with his canine best friend, and the two take care of each other beautifully. I found this movie exciting and enjoyable throughout. It has beautiful shots of the natural world, and Brad Pitt and his dog are both a pleasure to watch. 

 I didn't like one of this movie's central political premises, though. Heart of the Beast is framed by the violence of the US American war machine, and I don't really understand what that's about. Both the dog and Pitt's character are combat veterans, and they've experienced a great deal of modern warfare in what looked like one of the US's most recent imperial wars. This is fine, as far as it goes, and it's clear why Pitt and his pup would want to leave all that behind and escape to the beauty of the Alaskan wilderness where Heart of the Beast is set. But the movie also takes for granted that the experience of modern warfare is somehow comparable to or equivalent with the experience of being alone in nature at the mercy of the elements and the local megafauna. This strikes me as a deeply disingenuous point of view. US bombs are actively destroying wildernesses, habitats, and the natural world, and the US military and its ballistic systems have been doing this for nearly a century.

Unrelated except for the fact that its title makes a fun Wheel of Fortune-style Before and After is Shaun the Sheep: the Beast of Mossy Bottom:

It's pleasant, and I laughed out loud many times. Something about the silence of all of the characters, though, starts to feel boring, and both me and my companion fell asleep at different times in the movie and each missed about 5 minutes (we compared notes afterward to make sense of the film). Honestly, though, it was a nice nap, and the world of Mossy Bottom and Shaun the Sheep is pretty delightful.

For the record, this movie's onscreen title is simply The Beast of Mossy Bottom. It seems like internet databases like IMDb and TMDB all use the titles on posters now instead of using the titles that actually appear on screen (cf. The Mandalorian and Grogu, Wicked: Part One). This seems odd to me, but oh well.

Primetime (2026) / Predators (2025)

I think I loved Primetime. I was very into its cold, cold '90s color scheme and approach to video and light, and the acting was excellent. In many ways it was styled like something unhinged and surrealist, even though it stays in the real world and never strays into that territory. The whole plot is so vicious, though, and the story of To Catch a Predator so insane, self-serving, and terrible, that watching Primetime always does feel surreal. 

I loved the performances: Robert Pattinson, Merritt Wever (who I don't think I've ever seen in anything before), and Skyler Gisondo are great. (In fact, they're better than great, and Oscar nominations for some of them seem like they really ought to arrive.) And it's always a fun time when Bokeem Woodbine is onscreen. 

For me, Primetime took a really different tack than David Osit's 2025 documentary Predators, which covers much of the same material as Primetime. When I saw Predators earlier this year I found myself filled with rage. 

I assume that Predators—like, I suppose, Primetime—is polarizing subject matter, and so I figure plenty of other viewers will not agree with me, but I think these Chris Hansen shows, the Chris Hansen imitators, and Hansen himself are the lowest of the low. These guys are moralizers who are peddling fear and terror to US American audiences by invoking the fantasy of the vulnerable child (no actual children ever appear anywhere) while disavowing the operations of desire that are at work in themselves. One of Predators' insights is that people want to watch To Catch a Predator and its copycats because they want to feel better about themselves, to place themselves on a moral high ground above people they imagine to be morally irredeemable. It strikes me that a person has to be pretty morally bankrupt already if the only way one can feel superior is to compare oneself to an exploiter of children.

My gripes with Predators were threefold: 1) Osit isn't nearly as hard as he should be on To Catch a Predator; 2) there isn't enough of a critique of sex offender legislation in the film; and 3) there is zero differentiation in the film between "stranger danger" and child predation happening within families or at home (the latter in fact gets no mention at all).

But Lance Oppenheim's approach in Primetime is completely different. Mostly I appreciated that the tack  Oppenheim takes toward Chris Hansen and his merry band. Primetime never once treats these folks as anything other than people making television and attempting to get good ratings. They're not remotely moral crusaders; they're craven television producers and nothing more, and Hansen in particular relishes the language of the men he is busy setting up. The one exception is Matthew Maher's Xavier Von Erck—the guy who founded "Perverted Justice"—who emerges in Primetime as a twisted engine of desire, driving things by spending hours online attempting to seduce other men.

Tuner (2025)

Daniel Roher's Tuner is surprisingly good. It’s a strong thriller with sound as its central element. The sound in Tuner is amazing. It’s a storytelling element that really allows the audience to identify with the protagonist and experience his pain and curiosity and vulnerability. I loved the music, too. Will Bates composed a lot of music for this. Marius de Vries is responsible for other music, I think: it’s not a score per se—the soundtrack is more jazz inflected than anything else—but he’s done thrilling work with the diegetic music in this film. 

I thought this was very well cast too. Dustin Hoffman is the perfect person to cast in this, and Leo Woodall (who I don’t think I’ve seen in anything before) is really excellent. 

The all important feature here though is the screenplay. In many ways it is conventional, but the writing is so good and the characters so well realized, that the whole thing feels novel.

The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)

I checked my watch so many times.

The Mandalorian and Grogu was interesting for several minutes—maybe a quarter of an hour or so—when the helmet was off; we finally got some emotion from the protagonist. A short list of other things I liked:

The monsters in that pit were cool, as was the poisonous pink Cthulhu thing, plus it was in the water.

I liked Jeremy Allen White's character for the most part, although he has no depth whatsoever: I think he said "I'm not like my dad" about five separate times. 

There is a short but cool chase sequence after he escapes the fighting pit.

Mostly, though, this feels like something all of us have seen before. And if the Mandalorian was supposed to be somehow morally ambiguous (I thought I read that somewhere), what we get in this film is very, very clear good vs. very, very clear evil.

Also, PG-13 movies are an outrage. This movie is filled with violence from start to finish. Some of it is committed for almost no reason at all. The Mandalorian shoots up a bar to get someone's attention, killing (one presumes) many people. But it's PG-13 so we never see anyone suffer or die, we can just enjoy all the shooting and punching and kicking and stabbing without reckoning with the pain that might cause to the actual bodies of humans and animals. Fun for the whole family!

Disclosure Day (2026)

Disclosure Day is really good for a while. It’s mysterious and a little quirky, and Emily Blunt is stellar. Then the movie takes a really dumb turn toward religion, “empathy”, and saccharine Spielberg nonsense. This starts during Jane and Daniel’s discussion about whether people will stop believing in gods if they know there are aliens (pro tip: lots of people already don’t believe in gods), it continues with Jane’s unsubtle stigmata and her asinine call to her nun-friend, and it's truly brought home with an absurd monologue Colman Domingo is forced to deliver about how empathy is the solution to WWIII, an idea that Spielberg apparently actually believes. 

It’s a shame this went south, because I was having a good time for a while. In many ways, I think this is a more personal film for Spielberg than The Fabelmans. Disclosure Day actually explores the big questions that Spielberg has been asking in his films since the late 1970s. To wit: 

• How would knowing about alien life affect how we see one another? 
• Could it stop violence on earth or would it exacerbate it? 
• Would it take the place of a belief in a higher power? 
• Is believing in aliens the same thing as believing in a god? 
• How do we reconcile feelings of faith, certainty we know in our bodies, with the skepticism of those around us? 

These are deeply personal questions for Spielberg, and so I think he’s made quite a personal movie. I wish those questions were of more interest to me… If they were, I might have enjoyed where his movie went a bit more than I did. 

Side note: An actress named Courtney Grace plays a New York NBC anchor in the film’s final act who tells the world about what she’s seeing in the footage, and she gives an incredible performance. Cast her in everything, please.

Supergirl (2026)

Supergirl isn't hateful or anything; indeed Milly Alcock is quite charming, but the script is absolute nonsense. Even the real stakes that the movie sets up—Supergirl's dog will die in three days if she doesn't get the antidote—are obviously not a real motivation for the film's protagonist, since she clearly could have gotten the antidote numerous times from the dozens of brigands she beats up (it's preposterous there there would be only one vial of the stuff being carried by the main baddie).

Unfortunately, Supergirl is also another offensively PG-13 violence-fest, in which hundreds of acts of violence are committed yet not one drop of blood appears onscreen. At one point, Kara even touches her head and says "I'm bleeding": in fact, she is not. There's no blood to see here. People don't actually get hurt in this movie. They just stop fighting. It's violence without consequences.

Matthias Schoenaerts is excellent as always, and Jason Momoa is fun. I also really liked Emily Piggford in a small role. And I love me some David Krumholtz, who speaks Kryptonian for his entire part.

He-Man

Masters of the Universe is so much better than it ought to be. The trick that Travis Knight's film manages to pull off is that it takes an ironic view toward He-Man and his universe while at the same time it revels in it. It's a clever ploy that doesn't always work, but works most of the time. The film, for example, constantly refers to the entire world of Eternia or whatever it's called as something invented by a ten-year-old. He-Man, Goddess Lady, Ram-Man, Fisto... it ends up being a series of very funny dad-jokes actually, and Idris Elba gives a really hilarious performance at the movie's center. 

Nicholas Galitzine is good, and (I can't believe I'm gonna say this but) Jared Leto is very, very funny—even though I couldn't have told you it was him. 

One very significant gripe: There wasn't nearly enough of that green tiger for my taste. I love big cats, especially when they're magical (I still think about that tiger in K-Pop Demon Hunters), and poor Cringer was criminally underused.

Deux Procureurs (2025)

Sergei Loznitsa's Two Prosecutors is an incisive and difficult-to-watch but compelling exploration of the banality of evil. This is not a thriller, really. What it is, instead, is an examination of a set of choices that fascism makes possible. The acting here is uniformly good—the eponymous two prosecutors are excellent—and the score is haunting and intriguing. This is a powerful screenplay and it's filmed well, though I admired Two Prosecutors more than I enjoyed it.

Grass Onion

You people all need to get it together. What is with the high rating on Letterboxd and all of the personal recommendations I got for this cookie cutter corporate nonsense throwback to Babe?

Baby, those talking barnyard animals were thirty years ago. And this is what they come up with? The fourth Benoit Blanc movie: Knives Out to Pasture. 

Dial M for Meadow. Mutton on the Orient Express. Heifer on the Nile. 

This should have gone straight to Netflix. Sentimental-ass talking sheep.

L'Étranger

François Ozon's L'Étranger (الغريب) is a faithful adaptation of Camus's novel, except that Ozon has turned much more of an emphasis on the colonial setting. I've always held that Existential and Absurdist writers—Beckett, Kafka, Ionesco, Camus, and others in this group—were deeply political. There is a tendency in criticism of this group of writers to focus on "the human", on "existence", on "the modern" (the exceptions here are Sartre and Havel and Mrożek; their politics were always apparent, evidently). But it seems to me that politics is never far from the minds of all of these authors, and politics are everywhere in Camus's novel, so I think Ozon's emphasis makes great sense. (Indeed, Camus's title, in French, might just as well mean The Foreigner as The Stranger.) 

I hadn't read The Stranger before this week—it seems crazy, I know; everyone has read it! But I went to religious schools until college, and Camus was not on our reading lists next to the New Testament. I have, however, read two or three of Camus's plays, and, of course, his essays on Sisyphus and on violence. But I loved this novel. I can see why it's such a classic.

As always, Ozon has made a sensual, deeply sexy film, with lush production design and gorgeous photography. The way the camera lingers on the man Meursault kills is wildly intriguing, and it feels like something dangerous the film adds to the narrative. This is a very, very good adaptation. Benjamin Voisin, Rebecca Marder, and Pierre Lotin (who have all been in Ozon movies before) are all great. And Swann Arlaud is fantastic as the misguided clergyman. 

I want also to share that Ozon’s film illuminated a moment for me from the novel that I hadn’t noticed before. When Marie comes to visit Meursault in the prison, and the two of them have to yell to speak to one another across the bars, there’s a young man and his mother standing next to them. They don’t say a word; they just look at one another. Until the guards force them to depart, then the boy says “Goodbye, Maman”, and the lady gives him a slow wave. It’s a small moment in L’Étranger that I didn’t notice much. In Ozon’s film this moment devastated me. Maman, is, of course, how Meursault always refers to his deceased mother, and in the film it seemed to articulate something Meursault hadn’t quite yet said. Goodbye, Maman. Tears immediately sprang to my eyes when this happened in the film. It’s a gorgeous little moment.

Totoro

My friend Michael and I both decided to watch My Neighbor Totoro last night for the first time. Michael is on a Japanese animation kick, and I'm going to see the stage production of My Neighbour Totoro in London in June and wanted to be prepared. Then we texted about it the next day. Here's what we said.

Michael: Just finished. I thought it was delightful.

Aaron: Yes, it was!! I love that cat bus. There was a little too much screaming little girls.

Michael: Oh I thought the whole time the screaming was going to be a fight for you.

Aaron: Little girls really do not need to scream that much. Hush up.

Michael: I was so immediately taken with Totoro, his little sprites, and their bus cat.

Aaron: Love that Totoro. And love his little leaf hat.

Michael: I didn't expect the plot to go in the direction it did. I expected more fantastical adventure and this was pastoral life interrupted by childhood fear. I also assumed Totoro would be a very different character. I can't remember the word for it, but his actions didn't seem to make normal sense. He was following his own whims and if he wanted to fly around on a top then baby, he was gonna. On a personal viewing level, it mattered a lot to me that the dad especially didn't scoff at the kids when they were insistent they saw Totoro. He honored it and said ok we better go show some respect!

Aaron: Your analysis here is wonderful. You're very right and I hadn't thought of all of this.

Michael: Tell me how it landed for you.

Aaron: In my viewing of kids movies recently I've been very preoccupied with the attitude the film takes. Most kids movies are not about the experience of being a child at all; they're about parenting. Totoro splits the difference by having two kids of different ages. 

Michael: This felt almost completely about the childhood experience. You're so right in the way the parental experience is so commonly the background reasoning behind plotting. 

Aaron: And Totoro himself is not the focus of this movie. The first supernatural figure we meet is the soot-mites, actually. And if we consider things that way, then the movie is much more about finding pleasure in the haunted house, learning to love ghosts, staying open to wonder and terror. Totoro appears at the bus stop when they're scared and lonely. He is a kind of embodiment of the scary figure in the dark or in the forest. But as it turns out, he's cuddly and helpful and magically gifted. (Contrast with the way Americans think about Jesus when they're kids.)

Michael: Oh that's such a good way to frame him. That lines up better with my surprise about him. He's unknowable, but it turns out to at least be in a fun way.

Aaron: What I love about Totoro (and maybe Miyazaki more generally) is its approach to the mysterious and unknown. He asks the child to head toward what scares her. In this case her mother's illness and a new house and her sister's absence.

Michael: I see that in a lot of his other work too. And the films don't demand the characters face those fears without flinching. The characters are allowed their breakdowns and acknowledgment of how overwhelming it all is. 

Guilty Bystander (1950)

It seems like most of the reviews on Letterboxd and other places say that Guilty Bystander is middling or disappointing. I feel precisely the opposite about Joseph Lerner's weird little film noir. In fact, it fairly blew me away. I don't think I've seen a noir quite this seedy before. The only thing I can compare it to for nihilism is Blast of Silence and that's from 1961 not 1950. The flophouses, the warehouses, and the bars in this are frankly disgusting. Even the bannisters are covered in some kind of muck, as we learn in one of the film's first moments; in Guilty Bystander cigarettes fall lazily from characters' mouths onto floors, and no one even stubs them out. This film is set in the underbelly of underbellies. There's an extraordinary fight sequence in which our anti-hero has to wrestle a guy with one arm because he's been shot. It's bracingly realistic, almost tedious. Guilty Bystander is no studio picture.

The acting is not great, however. J. Edward Bromberg gives a kind of low-rent Peter Lorre that works fine, but Faye Emerson is quite boring (one never truly believes she might be part of a double cross), and Mary Boland should really be a lot better than she is. But Kay Medford does excellent work here, and Sam Levene and Harry Landers are great in their smaller parts. Zachary Scott... well I don't think I've decided how I feel about him yet, mostly because I hate his mustache, but I think he might be good in this.

Guilty Bystander was restored from a print—apparently no negative exists anymore—through funding from Nicolas Winding Refn. I'm so glad it was. This is B-movie gold, and I found it to be a compelling portrait of New York petty crime. I don't think I've seen anything quite like it. 

Hamlet (2025)

I confess that as much as I love Riz Ahmed, I found this Hamlet baffling and frequently downright boring.

I’ll start with things I thought worked well. The play within the play, “The Mousetrap”, was really cool. It was intriguingly filmed and it was innovatively staged. I also loved the way Gertrude chose to drink the poison in the play’s fifth act. I loved the way the ghost spoke Hindi but Hamlet answered him in English.

Otherwise, however, I didn’t think this adaptation made much sense at all. We are in England but Elsinore is some sort of corporation or something, maybe a bank? And Fortinbras is the leader of a kind of occupy movement. Or something? Unclear. And anyway, the politics here have nothing to do with what happens in the story; they’re only decoration—a nod to a politics that Hamlet itself cannot deliver (being, after all, 425 years old and concerned with politics in Elizabethan England and not the one ruled by Charles III). 

This Hamlet (हेमलेट) dispenses with Horatio, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, dividing their lines up between Laertes, Polonius, Ophelia, and Hamlet himself. This made for confusing character development to say the least. I wasn’t sure why anyone was doing anything in this. 

The screenplay is a real head-scratcher throughout. Some lines are invented from whole cloth—a fine choice, honestly, but I kept wondering why they kept any of the original text at all? The screenwriter (or director?) obviously found the Shakespeare lacking at so many points. Lines are altered, made (apparently) easier to understand (for whom? And really?). But why? Why does “the proud man’s contumely” need to be replaced by a newer phrase whereas “who would fardels bear” doesn’t? This happens dozens of times. Why replace one word or phrase but not another? Why change "when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin" to "when he himself might his quiet end make with a dull dagger"? Is quiet end so much clearer to newer ears? It's not; it sounds just as weird.

This 17th century language already doesn’t make any sense in 21st century English, so just commit to it! Or go ahead and rewrite the whole thing! Call it a translation. Set it in an England ruled by the formerly colonized. Or get a budget together and set it in the Mughal empire. Do anything you like! But this kind of patchwork Shakespeare, I find confusing. The new words don’t make the play any clearer, and to my own ears, these stray words that Shakespeare didn't write are constant reminders that what we are hearing isn’t actually the play at all. 

And don't get me started on the fact that they kept in the absurd "that's a fair thought to lie between maid's legs / Nothing" joke from act three. Why? Ahmed performs this (with the help of a phallus–microphone) with the kind of  hammy level of indication I'd expect in a first-year Shakespeare studio or a bad college production. Cringe-worthy stuff.

How does this Hamlet end, you ask? There’s no sword-fighting; Laertes and Hamlet just sort of look at each other and cry. There’s barely a confrontation! Why does Hamlet kill Laertes? I don’t get it. 

And then, of course, the film chooses as its final words… an invented non-Shakespearean line. And a very strange one at that: the king says "I loved your father". This is the most important line in the film? It's how Aneil Karia has decided to end things? Is the implication that perhaps the king didn't kill Hamlet's father after all? Are we supposed to be unsettled with ambiguity like with the ending of Lee Chang-dong's Burning? But if so, why has the king tried (successfully) to kill Hamlet? Why did he freak out during "The Mousetrap"? I just didn't understand this.

I wish they had just taken the entire text of Shakespeare’s play and given it a rewrite. Just make a whole new script; use the plot of Hamlet and make it do what you want it to do and do that well. Instead, we get a faux fidelity to the Shakespearean original that isn't faithful at all: a no-fear Shakespeare and a nearly incomprehensible plot.

How to Make a Killing (2026)

John Patton Ford's movie should have been so much more fun. Zach Woods, Topher Grace, and Ed Harris seemed to know what movie they were in—and this was the real potential of How to Make a Killing: a series of hilarious and flamboyant heirs that our hero kills off in various humorous ways before he kills the big bad at the top.

Unfortunately that isn't how How to Make a Killing shakes out. Ford has overburdened his comedy-thriller with loads and loads of sentiment and moralizing. It felt like I was watching a movie made in the 1980s when Hollywood apparently thought that all of the capitalists who voted for Reagan need to be told that what "really matters" is family and having someone to love you, and that money isn't everything if you can't enjoy it. Giving this film a moral center corrupted this movie from the inside out.

But the real killer here is that How to Make a Killing just isn't very much fun despite the obviously winning presence of Glen Powell. Topher Grace and Zach Woods get some good laughs here, but although it was not his fault at all, this was a dreary Glen Powell vehicle and didn't live up to its considerable promise.

The Drama (2026)

Kristoffer Borgli's film is a romantic comedy, first and foremost. And it works very well as that, with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. (Jeremy Levick had me cackling.)

The Drama tries for something more than this, though, and it mostly succeeds, skewering today’s culture of moral superiority. It also manages to be a really intriguing critique of our American eroticization and affection for guns and gun violence. I’m not sure the film does more than open these topics, but I guess I’m not sure it needs to. 

I certainly haven’t left a theatre talking with my companions quite this much in a while. It gave us lots to chew on: What would you do? How would you feel? Why didn't he recover more quickly? We would feel very differently if it was him and not her, wouldn't we? 

The one thing that I think we can all agree on is that Alana Haim’s character is the worst person—and the worst thing that character did is much worse than the worst thing anyone else did. I am of two minds about the horribleness of Alana Haim's character, though. On the one hand, it feels good to feel morally superior to her. She's just so awful, and so clearly in the wrong about everything. On the other, it seems to me that one of the film's central points is, perhaps, that we ought not to be so invested in moral superiority as such.

In any case, I quite enjoyed The Drama. It's worth seeing and it's worth talking about.