I think Greta Gerwig being the female equivalent of Phil Lord & Chris Miller, master directors who transform ideas that aren’t theirs into bold cinematic visions that ARE theirs, is a good career path, actually because throughout her filmography, she has shown how she is staying true to her style and themes while experimenting with big-budget fare instead of erasing it entirely. That experimentation is exactly the kind of filmmaking we should aspire to be: Take risks, fully own the ideas you’re working with, and always stay true to yourself.

Also, some of you really need to watch the following movies from the greatest living auteurs:

- Speed Racer

- The Dark Knight

- Skyfall

- The Lego Movie

- Shin Godzilla

- The Last Jedi

- Blade Runner 2049

These movies are the very examples of why artists should be defended for staying true to themselves while making big-budget films.

It’s been fascinating to read the reviews about this movie and I have some theories (albeit based on small sample size): most of white males think this Cruise is “terrific” and this is his best performance ever and it’s Oscar worthy; even more so if they’re a Trump supporter (despite the film’s message being at odds with the theology of Trumpism).

Some who absolutely love the Digger Rockwell performance, hate the Dr. Ganesh performance. I actually think Dr. Ganesh was one of the few redeemable things about this movie.

Some point to that big over the top monologue as the movie’s high point and I see it as just the opposite. That monologue is grandiose in the worst way, just pretentious and unearned; it’s as if it were manufactured, as well as the entire Digger role, to try and get Cruise an Oscar. And he simply doesn’t have the chops or gravitas for a role where it’s essentially him on the screen non-stop for 2 hours and 9 minutes.

The best scene of the movie was actually on the plane when Digger and Ganesh have a conversation and discuss bluefin tuna. Cruise tones it down and actually shows some range and nuance. If there was more of that and less over the top, this movie would be significantly better.

The movie also has Wesley Snipes, Giancarlo Esposito, Spike Lee, Bill Nunn, Charlie Murphy.

Edward Norton is a fantastic actor, but his ego is the reason his Hulk only lasted one movie.

On The Incredible Hulk (2008), he demanded to rewrite the entire script, fought with director Louis Leterrier daily, and wanted final cut privilege. He wanted to turn a simple monster movie into a dark, Nolan-style character study about trauma and duality. Marvel just wanted to set up The Avengers.

you can feel that ego in his performance. He’s always acting. Always brooding, always trying to look tortured and serious. He never understood that Bruce Banner isn’t the star of the show — Hulk is.

mark Ruffalo understood that immediately. He came in, played Banner as a likable, nervous team player. Norton came in thinking he was the main character of the whole MCU.

brilliant actor. Terrible collaborator. That’s why this is his only Hulk movie

There are some movies that have the power to genuinely change your brain chemistry and fix your biases.

I got thinking about this because one of my colleagues used to absolutely hate the idea of having kids. She thought they were just a loud nuisance and wanted nothing to do with them. But then she watched a specific movie, and it completely flipped a switch for her. Now she actually loves kids and views them in a totally different light.

It made me realize how rare it is for a piece of media to actually shift your core perspective like that.

Have you ever watched a film that made you completely change your mind about a hobby, a type of person, a lifestyle, or a concept that you used to dislike or avoid? What was the movie, and what was the specific thing it made you start appreciating?

First 'Fall' movie was great, I enjoy survival of the fittest type movies and I think about it every now and then.

The whole motivation to climb was that MC, Becky's husband died from a climbing accident and her friend Shiloh encourages her to climb again to move on and doing it for the dead - kind of energy.

Comes 'Fall 2', they introduces Shiloh's younger sister - Jax and friend, Luce (young Lady Danbury?!), who basically are Becky and Shiloh respectively. Jax - who's a worrier like Becky. And Luce - an energetic adrenaline junkie like Shiloh, encourages Jax to go on a deadly climb to live out the sister's dream of doing other things on her bucket list that she never got to do to move on and make the sister proud.
(I know they aren't friends exactly, but that's the twist)

It's the exact same reason with similar character archetypes.

Also, the initial 4000 feet they had to climb, according to Google would have taken 2 - 3.5h, and they're doing that with bare hands on rusty iron ladders? Sounds like a tetanus shot appointment.

+ As someone who have slid down wooden stairs due to it being to wet from the rain and hurt my back, the worn down wooden planks attached to the side of a mountain 4000 feet in the air and it starts raining + an earthquake? I would just die right there.

Just finished watching this masterpiece and I was left speechless. So simple story yet touching in so many ways. The cinematography and the music is perfect. Every shot feels like a picture that you can hang on a wall. Really surprised why Netflix didn't market this movie more.

Could be one of the most disturbing films I ever watched. At the end I was sitting there stunned. Throughout the film I kept thinking we need to get Joan Crawford in there to give him a good whopping. The funny thing about this film is that Ezra Miller who played Teen Kevin really is fucked up today. You can look it up, drugs, arrests, robbery, assault are a few of his charged alongside general weirdness.

I have to give this a 92/100. Brilliant acting and a somewhat convincing story. One of those films that can ruin you for a few days.

I want to watch some movies and maybe ur favorite one is one of the best*

Hey Y'all , today is day 12 of watching a horror themed movie every night until Halloween 🕷️.

This is the review for the movie I watched for Oct 12th .

Today I watched Villains (2019)

I had never heard of this movie before but I kept seeing it on Tubi so I figured I'd watch it. This movie exceeded my expectations in multiple ways (I did not think I was going to cry with this movie. I thought I was going to get scared and laugh but no I guess it was time for me to cry.)This movie was very good

Little synopsis: Two (out of desperation)amateur criminals decide to break into a house after their car breaks down.They soon grow to regret that decision after they realize the homeowners have a terrible Dark secret.

Where I watched: Tubi

Genre:Horror (technically if you look at streaming services and what they call this movie they call it a horror comedy but to me it just felt like horror that had some comedy)

Rating: 9/10

What I liked about this movie:

- The call backs were very emotional and done very well .There was a call back in this movie that made me cry that I didn't expect for me to cry at because when it was first on screen I literally laughed my ass off (this movie had no right being this emotional)

- the acting was very good

- the main protagonist as a couple were very cute and very sweet and I loved them

- the antagonist couple were psychotically Very good together , You could tell they genuinely loved each other but they were just batshit insane and that's fun to watch.

- I did not expect to cry this much at a movie I thought was a horror comedy

- The Premise was done in a way that I didn't expect and I liked it a lot

- the little girl in the movie was such a good actor too (she was also adorable)

- George (who is one of the antagonists played by Jeffrey Donovan) scared me and made me so unsettled

- I didn't expect this movie to be as unsettling or scary as it was some of the scenes truly made me uncomfortable

- The twist midway through the movie about the reason why Gloria (the other antagonist played by Kyra Sedgwick) did some of the things she was doing truly made me so uncomfortable to the point I had to get out of my chair and walk away because it made me so unsettled , I felt a little nauseous having to watch the rest of the scene (by the way, this is not a gory movie at all and there was no blood and no gore in this scene at all.I would say there is a less than usual amount of blood(and definitely Gore ) in this movie than other horror movies i've seen this October, it was just the fact that what she was doing had such a weird and disgusting reasoning. I'm not going to say what it is because y'all should figure it out for yourselves. Watch the movie).

- Again awesome acting from everybody just such great acting.

- Every character was so interesting to watch

- The protagonists were likable

- The antagonists were very interesting and very scary

- The comedy (though there is not much/ enough in this movie in my opinion for me to call it a horror comedy) was still very good and very funny.

- The atmosphere is great and truly made me immersed

- Also the practical effects in this movie (though only used once) was very good and realistic to me

• Bill Skarsgard and Maika Monroe had great chemistry

• Jeffrey Donovan and Kyra Sedgwick had awesome chemistry as well

My gripes with this movie(I don't have many):

- I wished that we got more backstory on some of the characters like the reasoning to why the two antagonists started hurting people(it's not really needed but I felt like it would have made the movie a little better but still a great movie).

Would I watch this movie again?:

Yes, absolutely it's a wonderful movie, and such a good time spent, I love this movie. I recommend everybody watch this at least once .

‘Government House, please. But I’m not in a hurry. Just take me for a ride…’

After two failed attempts at trying to do the full 25 Bond films, it’s time for another go, not least because the first three Connery films got little more than off-the-cuff mentions from me back in 2024, and sniffy ones at that. I might not have gotten any smarter in the last two years, but I’d like to think I’m less smug, so that’s always a good thing.

From the opening gunbarrel (which, to my money, doesn’t actually feature Bond himself? Perhaps I really do need to wear my glasses) and then onto the theme tune and title sequence, it’s clear that however many small parts of the brand came later, the core idea was a good’n from the get-go; those dancing, sensual silhouettes a series staple from minute one. The fact that we come out of those titles in sunny Jamaica with calypso playing, though, lets us know that there’ll be some tongue-in-cheek fun ahead. Fans of the Craig films might’ve been expecting something a little darker (like the first shot of London, which does come later, shrouded in the night). I certainly was, having started with the Craigs and worked my way back. 

From what I’ve seen of Bond so far (all of Craig, all of Connery and the strange case of OHMSS), I really struggle to think of another film in the series that has the same sense of place as this very first one. Sure, Casino Royale is named after its central location, but we’re only in Montenegro for the second act, otherwise scrambling through airports or Venetian canals. The brilliant use of appropriate tunes like Three Blind Mice and Jump Up! Jump Up! (both of which are still on my Spotify playlist) seat the action into the setting really well, laying out the blueprint for later jetsetter adventures that would take Bond all over the world in the span of two hours.

Underneath the Mango Tree shares a special case with We Have All the Time in the World as another Bond song that never was. As with On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the main theme for this movie is supposedly just Barry’s orchestration, the classic Bond suite, but who cares about what’s official and what’s not, eh? When Bond looks through his drawers in a later film (is it You Only Live Twice?) we get the Mango song when he spots some Dr. No related memorabilia, so that it surely has to count…

The tune works well alongside Ursula Andress’ Honey Ryder. Despite creepy Sylvia Trench (who kisses with her eyes open) and that shady assistant coming first, Honey really is the original Bond girl through and through. I always remembered her coming in quite near the end, but she’s with Bond and Quarrel (oh, lovely Quarrel - he could’ve just been a local knowledge cipher, but John Kitzmiller plays him with warmth!) from the second half onwards. This is my third time seeing Dr. No, but I’d never quite clocked the depth of that conversation she and Bond share about her past - there are revelations there that you wouldn’t expect given the franchise’s reputation for poor female characterisation. She’s still not going to win awards for her fully-roundedness, but there’s more to her than you might think.

That’s rather the watch word through all of this first adventure. While I criticised it in the past for being slow-paced, I’m fairly certain I was the problem there. It’s pitched at a different pace than its modern equivalents, of course, but the first half especially zips along really nicely with all the gags and grit you’d expect. The campier aspects shine through near the end, which are a welcome sight - that’s Bond to a tee, in my eyes - but there’s a good sense of looming threat until things descend into a hazmat-suited fistfight over a vaguely radioactive pool.

Professor Dent walking into that silent room and being made to wait until No’s voice booms over the intercom does a lot to establish a presence for a villain, and while the sight of a white guy playing Chinese (okay, half-Chinese) is a little disconcerting as far as big reveals go, Joseph Wiseman and Connery do get a little duologue to spar off with one another. Props to Dr. No for just chucking subtlety out the window and confessing to being a SPECTRE agent - he must’ve learned that from the Richard E. Grant school of Celebrity Traitors, where his mentor was always happy to lend a hand (or two).

It feels almost heinous to only mention Connery at the very end of a review, but that’s only because so much has already been said about him that I hardly know what new ground I can chip in with. I haven’t seen every Bond in action - at the moment, of the three I’ve seen, Craig has to be my favourite just based on his range and the arc his Bond goes on over those five films - but Connery has an ease and a class to him that feels rather unmatched since. He can be charming; he can be firm, he can do both at the same time and introduce himself while lighting a cigarette with his other hand.

He quips, kills and wiggles his way out of all kinds of dangers here, to the point where, by the end, he becomes a Proto-John McClane crawling through a grungy water slide, but he carries an air of confidence that is really intriguing to watch. I’ll have to see where things go from here - I remember his Bond being pretty badly behaved at other points in his tenure - but, in keeping with the film as a whole, this was a strong start for his Bond right here.

Oh, and this is the part where I offhandedly mention the tropical base with its glorious 60s futurism design. I love Bond bases - especially island bases - and while variety is nice, there’s always the faintest disappointment when I realise the third act isn’t going to culminate with a showdown in the reactor core of some zany HQ…

And while he’s not my favourite Leiter, this is still an underrated Leiter - fruity sunglasses aside.

Okay, I really will be off now…

Film #1 of 25 in the James Bond series.

If The Social Network was all about gaining insight into the people behind the social media behemoth, The Social Reckoning is the outside perspective. Namely, what are the long-term consequences of the creation of Facebook and its evolution.

However this shift in perspective is a fundamental flaw to The Social Reckoning.

The main casualty of the shift in focus is the character of Mark Zuckerberg (now played by Jeremy Strong after Jesse Eisenberg refused to return to the character). Strong has demonstrated his credentials at playing morally-questionable, affluent characters with a richness of interiority and depth, but here those talents are utterly wasted. The character of Zuckerberg is now reduced to simply that of a profit-driven, callous CEO, and is so one-dimensional that Strong simply can't muster any depth to his performance despite his best efforts. You could argue this portrayal of Zuckerberg might be realistic, but it makes for a determinedly less interesting on-screen presence in comparison to that which was in The Social Network.

In the hands a more accomplished director, the shortcomings of a pretty average script could've been overcome. But the harsh reality is that for all of his talent as a screenwriter, Sorkin is a decidedly average director. The end product of The Social Reckoning is a film that feels extremely procedural and lacking in any real directorial flair in its filmmaking. For a film about such an important subject, this plays everything far too safe to hold any real weight.

The Social Reckoning isn’t necessarily a bad film. It’s just an unremarkable one.

Full review: https://widescreenmemory.wordpress.com/2026/10/12/the-social-reckoning-review/

The biggest challenge the filmmakers had in Verity is in convincing us that Dakota Johnson’s character is depressed, unmoored and even a bit shy.  They attempt to do so by obscuring Johnson’s beauty with a very humble wardrobe consisting of baggy denim jeans and dark colored blouses.  She also wears minimal makeup.  I didn’t buy it for a second, because Johnson is ravishing in any outfit.  At one point the director admits the futility of it all and includes a gratuitous shot of her in her underwear.  The point being, Johnson can’t pass for a starving artist, so why bother trying?

The filmmakers do make good use of Johnson's languid personality to explain why her character Lowen is stuck in neutral.  It boils down to a lack of drive and passion.  Since Johnson is listed as an executive producer I believe she thought Lowen was perfect for her.  People often mock Johnson’s acting as boarding on narcoleptic, and she does seem to be acting from another dimension than the rest of the cast.  With that in mind, a movie has to embrace her detached qualities or it will fail.  Verity does this by making her acting style central to her character.  Johnson has a range and when she stays within it, she’s quite good.  It certainly helps that the camera loves her, and the movie obliges our voyeurism with the occasional eyeful.

The best performance in the movie belongs to Anne Hathaway, who snarls while delivering her juicy dialog.  She’s having a blast playing a classic femme fatale, and her scenes are the highpoint of the movie.  For reasons unknown, Johnson and Josh Hartnett never meet her level of sensuality.  Hartnett looks handsome and gives a decent performance here, but there’s no edge to what Hartnett does, no hint of danger.  After a few early sexy scenes, he’s reduced to being a bland PG dad.

Having Hathaway play the villain was smart because Hathaway’s emotionally-centered acting style contrasts nicely with Johnson’s low-energy delivery.  It's a pairing that should have generated sparks, but it doesn’t because Hathaway’s character spends most of the movie in a coma or in flashbacks.

With all of the above taken into account, it’s no wonder that Verity fails at being an erotic thriller.  Johnson and Hartnett have no chemistry.  Hathaway understands the assignment and vamps things up nicely, dragging Hartnett along in her wake, but it’s not enough.  The eroticism on display never rises above being tepid.

Interestingly enough, Verity is much better as an examination of the power the written word has on the reader.  Colleen Hoover, author of the source novel, is having a lot of fun playing up her own image as a writer of trashy novels.  Like Verity, she knows she’s not creating great art but recognizes how transportive her stories can be.  Readers of Hoover’s books want to be manipulated, and she’s happy to oblige.  While Verity doesn’t offer anything new about the relationship between authors and their fans, what it does say is intriguing enough to make up for what the movie lacks.

Director Michael Showalter (Wet Hot American Summer) seems like an odd choice for the material. He directed the Hathaway May-December romance The Idea of You, which likely led to this gig.  Comedy directors can make sexy thrillers, like Paul Feig (A Simple Favor, Housemaid).  Showalter does what he can with the material, and the movie is decently paced and looks great.  But he’s hamstrung by the flashback-heavy narrative structure, leading actors who don’t mesh and an overall lack of sexual tension in the movie itself.

Verity is the rare sexy thriller that offers little of either despite having three handsome leads at its disposal.  It works best as a commentary on how even trashy writing can make the truth elusive and slippery. That and Anne Hathaway’s performance keep things interesting.  Mildly recommended.

More here: https://detroitcineaste.net/2026/10/13/verity-movie-review-analysis-dakota-johnson-anne-hathaway-josh-hartnett/

Hi

I’m producing a fashion film and I need some help for target market research

If you could please help me out by answering a few questions, your responses would be valued greatly

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdKNdFwY_u18XoJDrkiLuITgzqTT6R0O5weLn7Ie_eu581EZQ/viewform?usp=publish-editor

I'm an Animation & VFX student doing my dissertation on different styles of 3D animation.

I'd love to hear from both everyday viewers and artists/animators! Do you prefer stylized animation that looks like drawings or comics, or more realistic-looking 3D?

If you have 2 minutes, please fill out my anonymous survey. All opinions are welcome, even if you have no experience in animation!

👉 Survey link: [https://forms.gle/ivohwdGggPwJRB1g9]

Thanks so much for helping out! ❤️

For your consideration: Dave Bautista in Knock at the Cabin

Ever since this year's Cannes Film Festival where Los Jarvis (Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calco) won Best Director, La Bola Negra has been frequently cited as among one of the year's very best and deemed a frontrunner for next year's Academy Awards. Fortunately for La Bola Negra, the early critical appraise is indeed warranted. And then some. This is a truly towering piece of cinema. Based from Spanish playwright Federico Lorca's lost work of the same name, La Bola Negra is an exploration of Spanish queer and artistic history that fell victim to the Spanish Civil War. This is not simply an adaptation, but a mediation on all that has been lost throughout both communities due to suppression and violence and how the effects of this are still felt through both communities today

The craft on display throughout La Bola Negra is nothing short of breathtaking. The vision of Los Jarvis is full realised in every department. The lighting and cinematography conjures some of the most striking images seen on screen this year. The interweaving of music throughout is at times euphoric and celebratory, and at others mesmerising in its tenderness. Certain sections have dance and theatre performance choreographed into the narrative that feel effortless and have you as engrossed as any dramatic set piece. Yet at its heart is a script so beautifully synthesised to rightly afford moments of reflection and space for the characters to exist as they would in the real world.

This isn't to say La Bola Negra is perfect. It is fantastic, but the film certainly lags in the middle for an extended stretch. It is at this point in the narrative where the central mystery of how each character intertwines with one another starts to reveal itself. The section certainly felt clunky compared the effortlessness that is on display either side of it, and the result is a portion of the film that can be on the one hand hard to keep up with and on the other distracting from the emotional core of the narrative. Fortunately, the clunkiness subsides and the final stretch of La Bola Negra returns to the high bar it sets throughout the first hour.

La Bola Negra is the real deal. It is a breathtaking reclamation of lost history and one of the year's most remarkable films. I absolutely adore this film.

Don’t wait for this to hit Netflix. See it on the big screen as it deserves.

Full review: https://widescreenmemory.wordpress.com/2026/10/12/la-bola-negra-review/

TLDR: I give it a 9 out of 10. It delivers a comedic satire, eerily prophetic about media cynicism where Peter Finch delivers an unforgettable, unhinged masterpiece, "I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GONNA TAKE IT ANYMORE!"

9/10 is my rating for the 1976 film, "Network." The acting was top-notch, and while there are a few pacing issues that make it feel like a slog in places, it largely feels intentional. As a satirical comedy, it’s remarkably funny, feeling like an ancestor to films like Idiocracy, growing closer to reality by the day. Going in completely blind made the experience even better, and Peter Finch shines as the "mad prophet of the airwaves," backed by phenomenal performances from Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall. The ending discussion about what to do with their fallen prophet is one of the funniest scenes for me: just kill the poor bastard on live TV and replace it with a live recap of the day’s tragedies or something lol

Though the camera work occasionally shows its age, it's easy to forgive a 1976 production of this caliber. I really enjoyed this movie, especially as a period piece and with the lovely knowledge of foresight, wondering what a modern-day adaptation might look like, though it would be impossible to match this level of lunacy with modern social media. Not because it would be hard to show lunacy, but because it would be hard to convey satire since lunacy keeps becoming more and more common it seems. Ultimately, “Network” (1976) easily earns its 9/10 and a spot among my highest-rated films.

I am not a MCU fan by any stretch of the imagination. For the last 7 years, I viewed The Avengers (2012), Age of Ultron, and Infinity War as nothing more than flashy, high-budget popcorn spectacles with maybe two or three decent scenes. Yesterday, a random YouTube clip caught my eye, and on a whim, I decided to sit down and watch all three hours of Endgame.

I was in absolute existential shock for the first two hours. Unlike any other MCU film, this one actually has a haunting, tangible atmosphere. The actors are actually acting, inducing genuine empathy right from the opening frame. It felt like real cinema—approaching the dramatic weight of something like The Lord of the Rings.

But as the third act rolls in, the writing completely derails. The sheer idiocy grows exponentially, delivering three massive narrative betrayals that completely destroy the characters' arcs, logic, and the movie's established tone.

1. The Vormir Swap: Metaphysical Infidelity & Bad Psychology

The worst offender is the Soul Stone scene with Natasha and Clint. For five years, Clint was Ronin—a bloodthirsty, traumatized serial killer slaughtering low-level cartel thugs and leaving zero witnesses. He is a broken man drowning in blood.

They arrive on Vormir, face-to-face with the Red Skull, who acts as a personification of impartial, unyielding Death. The rule is absolute: A soul for a soul. You must sacrifice what you love most. Clint, seeking redemption and wanting to save his erased family, tries to jump. It makes perfect psychological sense for a desperate father. But the writers decided a logical sacrifice was too "patriarchal," so Natasha jumps instead.

And the Soul Stone actually works.

This implies that Clint loved Natasha more than—or equal to—his own wife and three children. Human psychology does not work this way. Clint was explicitly established as a textbook-perfect family man. Are we supposed to believe that this tactical spy is suddenly more precious to his soul than the memory of his erased children? This scene is deeply cynical. It either turns Clint into a literal madman or a metaphysical adulterer who spent five years butchering people just to look edgy in front of his work colleague.

1. Captain America: The Patriot Who Chose To Serve HYDRA

Setting aside the incredibly low-brow, redneck-tier "America's ass" jokes, Cap’s ending is an absolute moral collapse. Steve Rogers is not a whiny, self-absorbed teenager; he is a beacon of justice who literally tore the Avengers apart in Civil War to protect what is right.

And yet, he goes back in time and decides to stay in the past with Peggy Carter. Why? If he wanted to be with her so badly, why not just bring her into the technologically advanced 21st century? Instead, he stays in a timeline where he knows his best friend Bucky is being tortured and brainwashed by HYDRA. He stays in a timeline where he knows HYDRA is infiltrating S.H.I.E.L.D. right under his wife's nose, and where Tony Stark’s parents are destined to be murdered.

The ultimate symbol of American righteousness chooses to sit on a porch, drink tea, and ignore absolute evil right next door just to close a personal romantic emotional loop. Realistically, HYDRA would have found him out instantly, meaning the legendary Captain America de facto spent decades complicit with nazi terrorists. It completely destroys the spirit of the character.

1. Morgan Stark: The Robo-Child

Tony Stark’s ultimate sacrifice was shot beautifully, respectfully, and with immense grief. But the way they handled his daughter, Morgan, at the funeral completely took me out of the movie.

The girl acts like she’s completely indifferent to her father's death. She watches a final, heartbreaking holographic farewell from her dad, and immediately after, she is casually, cheerfully asking Happy Hogan for cheeseburgers. This isn't how children react to losing a loving parent. Even infants scream and cry when they sense that kind of loss and maternal grief. Children don't just shut off into a cheerful vacuum. It was a lazy, emotionally tone-deaf script choice used solely to force a cheap, nostalgic callback to the first Iron Man film, prioritizing fan-service over basic human realism.

Endgame could have been the greatest blockbuster of our generation. The cinematography, the pacing of the grief, and the bleak lighting of the first half were phenomenal. But the writers ultimately sacrificed structural logic, established lore, and fundamental human psychology just to chase flashy memes, nostalgic callbacks, and corporate contract terminations.

For Hugh, it’s the Prestige and the X-Men movies and for Josh Hutcherson, it’s the Hunger Games movies. For Hiroyuki, it’s John Wick 4, Rush Hour 3, The Wolverine, and Avengers: Endgame

I was excited to see a theatrical documentary from Wilson, and expected something witty, surprising and slightly weird. I didn't expect something dull, but unfortunately "The History of Concrete" is weirdly dull and uninspired. It may work a lot better on streaming.

My review: **½ of *****

FULL REVIEW is below, after the poster image.

Believe me, I know what it looks like from the outside to see me with a book or a magazine or—far, far worse, I think—my phone. My husband tells me often: I get too absorbed. I've always been that way, from the moment I could read (at age 3, allegedly, my parents claim): when the term "rabbit hole" was used only to describe where Alice went, I fell down them constantly.

Cereal boxes, Yellow Pages, TV listings, classified ads, Reader's Digests, whatever I had at hand was good enough for me to read, which I did, constantly. The summer my mom volunteered me to clean up a neighbor's home stacked with old newspapers, no one realized the end result would be that I read them much more than I threw them away.

All of which made me, I thought, an ideal audience for John Wilson's documentary The History of Concrete, which I knew purported to be almost anything but. I assumed Wilson, in his funny, nasally voice, would begin in one place and much, much, much later wind up somewhere so entirely different that the result would be fascinating for a non-linear, information-absorbing brain like mine.

Indeed, the movie does exactly that, tracing a long, circuitous route of facts, weirdnesses and odd personalities to get wherever it might or might not be going. The trouble is, none of it is particularly fascinating.

[Over on Letterboxd](#) (I'd be happy if you followed me), I gave The History of Concrete three stars the night I saw it, when I felt a little more pleased with it than I turned out to be. Sometimes it takes a while to know how a film is going to work on you, or if it's going to work on you. And that was the problem with The History of Concrete: the morning after seeing it, I forgot about it. I forgot even to write this review.

It's all a little too smug, a little too pleased with itself as it careens from one idea to the next. James Burke famously did that in the 1970s series Connections ([to start you down your own rabbit hole, here's that series on YouTube](#), but don't say I didn't warn you). The brilliant writer Susan Orlean did it in her astonishing, revelatory book [The Library Book](#), which claims to be about a fire at the Los Angeles Public Library and turns out to be about libraries and, well, a whole lot of other things. Like, a dizzying array of other things.

That's a little of what I hoped The History of Concrete might be. Alas, it's not like those things. It's scattershot. It's flippant. It finds an interesting subject then goes out of its way to avoid it. Yes, it ends up in quite an odd place, chronicling the loves and losses of a cover-band singer, but it feels arbitrary and forced.

Sometimes it's funny. Sometimes it's even intriguing and disturbing, like when it veers into the strange world of tattoo preservation — actually preserving a dead person's skin and the tattoo that was on it. And that winds up in a place that might make The Golden Girls' Sophia Petrillo cry: talking about the death of Chef Boyardee.

If The History of Concrete had trusted itself more to be genuinely curious about these subjects and where they led, it might have been worth the effort. As such, it may wind up playing much better on TV than in the movie theater. In the movie theater, we're stuck watching it all unfold. I'm usually one of the world's biggest proponents of seeing movies in a movie theater for precisely the reason that betrays The History of Concrete: you have to watch. Or go to sleep. Or leave. The choices are limited, unless you have no manners. (And let's not get into that right now.)

But on TV, on streaming, you'll be able to sit there with phone in hand, Googling everything Wilson says, falling down your own rabbit holes while paying half-attention to this documentary that should have been a lot better. So, when it's on streaming, do watch it. You may learn something. Just likely not from the movie.

***

If you're interested, you can always read more of my reviews and writing about movies at my blog at www.thereinthedark.blogspot.com

I know which one I’m going to watch tonight though.