Ari Aster. Eddington.

 Weird and too long, it is still a wonderful movie. The movie shows an American dysfunction of the Trump era much better than the misguided (or decimated by censors) Alex Garland's "Civil War". The only defect is that Joaquin Phoenix playing asthmatic sheriff and would-be mayor imitates lisp so much that half of his monologues are barely heard.

Elio.

     

       Visually appealing and inventive, especially when alien lifeforms are concerned movie, which is pasted from already existent storylines (are not all storylines exhausted at this day and age?). For instance a conflict between a brutal, but loving father and a tender son was a centerpiece of "Shark Tale" where it was probably a coded language for gaiety. The pangs of adolescence were a part of great number of cartoons, for instance a brilliant "Inside Out". 

The Phoenician Scheme by Wes Anderson.

   

      The problem with Wes Anderson as is with his youth pal Noah Baumbach (and P. T. A. Anderson) is that they rarely leave their comfort zone with their subsequent movies turn into a replica of their previous masterpieces. 

    Great acting talents (Hanks, Johansson, Amalric, Cumberbatch) are wasted in the remaking of his well-beaten tropes. Cumberbatch is especially pathetic in his faux beard, obviously designed haphazardly for him not to look, well, like Benedict Cumberbatch. 

          

Accountant-2 and Fight or Flight

   

      Continuing my tradition of dual reviews I enter two decently rated thrillers: Accountant-2 and Fight or Flight. Accountant-2 -- bright characters, especially the brother of the protagonist, and believable villains. Also fair dose of ambivalence. Fight or Flight -- none of the above. 

Both movies deliberately end in the way to propose a sequel. 

Nocturnes.

      

       A wonderful and boring movie. I went to see it thinking that it will be a new "March of the Penguins" but nobody is marches. There is no storyline, only an endless search for one kind of moths, the tiger moths. Their settlement with elevation must indicate how the local biome reacts on rising temperatures. 

Oscar nominated shorts. Animation.

   

     This years' animation shorts are a revenge for incomparable Flow. Only one, an Iranian cartoon, "In the Shadow of the Cypress" (cypress is nowhere to be found) has some semblance of meaning. Two Dutch cartoons are in the running. The only distinction in both is p. joke. 

The end of something

      

      Physics Nobelist Hans Bethe once noticed that what is left of the development of human culture is science only. He observed that most what literature could say about human condition was already said between the Bible, Homer and Shakespeare. And philosophy -- beginning with the Greeks and ending with Kant, with only science, which is currently unfinished. 

    Truly, all the human stories are so well treaded that Hollywood resuscitated Cinderella story in 1990 with only hint of sex and in 2024 with a full blown intercourse. Parts and parcels of the Odyssey were filmed by Coen brothers and, this year, by some unknown Latvian as the "Flow". Does it portend the end?