Category Archives: Reviews

’Battle’ A Hefty Blast


buy cheap Latuda online Paul Thomas Anderson may have dropped the year’s most dangerous film.

modulo It feels like the director got a little bit drunk and binged movies by Quentin Tarantino and Stanley Kubrick. One Battle After Another plays as a black comic action thriller about revolution, corruption, and the cost of devotion, but beneath the gunfire sits a father trying to keep hold of his daughter and whatever is left of his ideals.

Bob Ferguson, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, once walked away from the radical world that shaped him. That retreat ends as soon as Willa is pulled into the long shadow he tried to outrun.

The movie’s early trouble comes fast. For the first half hour, Anderson leans on a charged scene between Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills and Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw. The motel scene between them is brazen, hungry, and pitched at a height that strains belief. The power dynamic never quite finds natural footing, and the moment rushes through a psychological turn that the actors work hard to sell.

Yet that scene sits at the center of the plot. Lockjaw’s obsession begins there. Perfidia’s gamble begins there. The entire chain of consequences sparks off that uneasy interaction.

Once the film moves past that hurdle, though, Anderson finds the pulse. When the plot folds back onto Bob and Willa on the run, the movie snaps into its true shape.

The action carries weight and real tension. The shootouts and raids feel earned rather than decorative. The story settles into a chase that blends political paranoia with a bruised parent’s panic.

The father-daughter thread, brief in shared screen time but heavy in emotion, sharpens into the film’s core. You feel years of regret and unfinished sentences between DiCaprio (who is aging with remarkable grace) and Chase Infiniti every time the camera gives them a quiet beat.

The runtime asks a lot. At 162 minutes, the film carries scenes that could shed a few beats without losing power. But Anderson fills the excess with character work worth watching.

These moments turn the story from thriller to something more personal. The cost of belief. The damage of loyalty. The way old ideals echo through the people who never asked to inherit them.

Jonny Greenwood’s score binds the film with a mix of tension and mournful beauty. The camera holds faces long enough to let the actors earn their turns. The landscapes look scorched and alive.

By the final act, Anderson ties the threads with force. Past sins collide with present violence. The film lands as a contemporary reckoning, and unwittingly prescient in its take on the blending of police with military power.

It’s too long and a little preachy, but, flaws and all, One Battle After Another stands as one of the year’s strongest contenders. It belongs squarely in the Best Picture race.

And Penn should run the awards circuit in that haircut.

’Frankenstein’ Not Quite Sum of Its Parts

Guillermo del Toro has never met a monster he didn’t love.

His Frankenstein, now streaming on Netflix, is a love letter to the misunderstood and the malformed, a visual sonnet draped in fog and candlelight. It looks extraordinary. It feels monumental.

Yet somewhere inside all that grandeur, the heart seems faint.

Oscar Isaac gives Victor Frankenstein an elegant mania, a man cracked by ambition and remorse. Jacob Elordi’s Creature moves like a wounded stag, huge yet careful, his face a map of awe and confusion. Mia Goth’s Elizabeth softens every room she enters. The cast performs with precision and poise, a company that knows its world is painted in tragedy.

The film’s look astonishes. Dan Laustsen’s cinematography turns stone to smoke, shadow to velvet. Lamps bleed gold. Snow drifts in slow suspension.

For a while, that beauty carries the story. But then the pulse starts to fade.

Scenes stretch longer than they should. The film, over two and a half hours, begins to labor under its own weight. Its elegance overshadows its urgency.

The deeper fault lives in the spirit. Frankenstein wants sorrow and awe, and it earns both.

But true horror breathes colder air. Last year’s Nosferatu, Robert Eggers’s fevered hymn of shadow, plague, and lust, captured the era it reached for. It felt carved from early cinema.

Frankenstein follows another path. It mourns rather than terrifies. Elordi speaks through gesture and breath, his Creature learning love and loss simultaneously. Isaac lets guilt bloom, then hides it beneath control. Their shared scenes hum with voltage, often literally.

Sound gives the world body. Wind grinds over stone. Sparks snap from coils. Heartbeats rise beneath strings. You can feel the room’s pulse.

Del Toro still finds grace in corners. A candle gutters at the right moment. A child’s toy rests where it shouldn’t. His world feels tended, handmade, personal. No one directs wonder like he does, and no one finds such kindness in monsters.

The film’s finest passage unfolds in snow. The Creature learns cold, solitude, and small mercy. The camera gives him space to build a soul. Those minutes achieve what the long middle never quite sustains.

Frankenstein becomes a painting rather than a pulse. It reminds you how gifted del Toro remains, but also how indulgence can dull even a master’s edge.

The film’s beauty glows like a cathedral, every corner perfect and patient. The story inside that cathedral feels funereal, as if the soul it once housed has quietly slipped away.

It’s a grand, gorgeous vision. It just never quite comes to life.

’The Chair Company’ Reclines to Cringe Gold


Tim Robinson makes agony feel like art.

His new HBO series, The Chair Company, turns everyday office life into a study in discomfort. It’s part corporate comedy, part fever dream, and all Robinson, a performer who can wring laughter from a pause and panic from a smile.

He plays Ron Trosper, a mid-level employee at a furniture company that seems both ordinary and deeply strange. The job looks routine, but the tension inside every meeting, hallway, and lunchroom feels oddly alive.

Robinson feeds on that tension. He treats politeness as pressure, awkwardness as poetry. Each glance, each nervous cough, builds until you can almost feel the walls close in.

Few comedians understand humiliation like he does. Most chase jokes. Robinson chases the silence after them. He has a gift for the long beat, the half sentence that collapses under its own weight, the look that lasts too long.

Every episode of The Chair Company becomes an endurance test for empathy. You root for him, you cringe for him, and you can’t turn away.

The supporting cast plays it straight. Lake Bell as Barb Trosper anchors Ron’s personal world, Sophia Lillis as Natalie Trosper matches his strain in the family rhythms, Will Price as Seth Trosper reflects the generational gap he can’t bridge, Joseph Tudisco as Mike Santini becomes an unlikely ally in the mess.

Their restraint highlights Robinson’s unraveling so the awkwardness lands harder. The results feel real, like a memory you wish you could forget.

Director Andrew Gaynord shoots the show with a quiet rhythm that suits Robinson’s chaos. The lighting hums with gray unease. The office walls feel too close. The air itself seems stale. Out of that dullness comes something explosive.

Each episode builds toward a small disaster: a presentation that collapses, a team-building exercise that implodes, a meeting that stretches into madness.

Robinson commits completely. His eyes twitch with suppressed fear, his voice trembles under fake confidence, his entire body becomes an instrument of discomfort.

Cringe comedy demands precision. Too much cruelty breaks it. Too much self-awareness dulls it.

Robinson understands that embarrassment can be both tragic and funny, that laughter often hides sympathy. His character never tries to be absurd. He simply tries too hard to be normal.

There’s one caveat: sometimes the cringe cuts deep enough to make you physically react. There are moments when you shift in your seat or look away. But that reaction proves the show’s power. Robinson’s discomfort becomes yours. It feels shared, and that shared pain creates a strange form of joy.

The Chair Company does what few comedies attempt. It turns human weakness into something beautiful. It finds rhythm in failure, grace in self-doubt, and truth in the absurd theatre of office life.

Robinson doesn’t just play a character. He plays a condition, one that feels familiar to anyone who has ever said the wrong thing at the wrong time and kept talking anyway.

It’s the year’s most uncomfortable show. And one of the funniest.