Yeah Dude, Okay

Film Collection: Dishonored

September 21st, 2026

Directed by Josef von Sternberg
Written by Daniel N. Rubin
1931 | 91 minutes | English
Criterion Blu-Ray

Marlene Dietrich, Victor McLaglen, Gustav von Seyffertitz, Warner Oland, Lew Cody, Barry Norton

What it’s about: In Vienna, 1915, Marie Kolverer (Dietrich), a war widow and talented pianist, now working as a streetwalker, is recruited by the Chief of the Austrian Secret Service (von Seyffertitz) to gather evidence on Von Hindau (Oland), a traitor in the army, responsible for leaking intel and causing recent defeats. She succeeds, and in the process, is put onto the grinning, dashing Colonel Kranau (McLaglen), himself a more experienced Russian spy infiltrating Austria undercover. Kranau escapes her grasp, but learns of her next assignment, rooting out attack plans from a town on the Polish front, and pursues her there, furthering an eroticized game of cat-and-mouse with deadly consequences.

Reflections: In Laura Mulvey’s landmark 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” she specifically calls out Josef von Sternberg–in particular, the cycle of six films he made with Marlene Dietrich, of which this was the third–arguing that he “produces the ultimate fetish, taking it to the point where the powerful look of the male protagonist (characteristic of traditional narrative film) is broken in favor of the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator.” This was a first-time watch and, having seen it, she’s absolutely right. And that is still kind of the magic of this movie.

It hinges entirely on observing Dietrich’s carefully unknowable presence. She announces at the start of the film that she fears neither life nor death, and her ultimate downfall reads like a triumph against the (masculine) characters and forces that would exploit, control and categorize her. But her true feelings and motives are hidden behind this intentionally beguiling artifice. The way her eyes dart around or how she draws out her “yeeeess” when she responds to questions feels studied, in a way that flattens actress and character. Sternberg envelops this disaffected, evasive portrait in shadows and gauze, dressing her in amazing outfits–the costume ball scene is what I’m referring to here–and letting her fill the frame, in full or in close-up pieces. The spy-thriller narrative (conceived by Sternberg and realized on the page by Rubin) is interesting enough a framework to put this all on. And the other actors do fine jobs reacting to and reflecting her–McLaglen is all condescending, rakish grins, granting her power as if despite himself, safety and adversary rolled together. And Seyffertitz conveys a mixture of paternal fascination and disgust that’s ripe for interrogation. But this is a star vehicle and therein lies its fascination nearly a century later.

The artifice and melodrama are part of the point–this is a film meant to exude glamor and style, and it does. There’s some spies doing cool spy stuff, but the experience of watching it isn’t about the particulars of the plot; it’s about the plight of the tragic heroine, both doomed by the narrative and coolly transcendent of it, infused with a pre-code implied sexuality and dripping in Old Hollywood glamour. And that is a rich and enjoyable cocktail, if it’s what you’re prepared to get.
Film Collection: Duel

September 20th, 2026

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Richard Matheson
1972 | 90 minutes | English
DVD

Dennis Weaver, Carey Loftin, Jacqueline Scott, Eddie Firestone, Lou Frizzell, Eugene Dynarski, Lucille Benson, Tim Herbert, Charles Seel, Shirley O’Hara, Amy Douglass, Alexander Lockwood, Dick Whittington

What it’s about: One morning, David Mann (Weaver) sets out on a trip from L.A. to meet an out-of-town client for his unspecified business. Already a little on edge and emasculated after not standing up for his wife (Scott) at a party the previous night, and impatient to get the important meeting finished, he gets cocky and passes a rusted-out tanker on one of California’s back-country desert highways. This sets off a cat-and-mouse game, as the unseen driver of the tanker refuses to let the incident go, hunting David down the road with increasing aggression. Unable to lose his pursuer or summon help, David is forced to rely on his wits and his engine to escape the relentless, unfathomable assault.

Reflections: This film, adapted by Matheson from his own short story, started life as an ABC Movie of the Week in November 1971, before being slightly expanded by about 16 minutes and released theatrically the next year, making it the official film debut of Steven Spielberg. While that’s the main reason it’s notable, it’s a showcase for the hotshot’s talent, wringing an effective psychological horror out of a minimalist premise and shoestring budget. Even though 75% of the movie is the same two vehicles driving through drab, brown landscapes, the camera setups and edits keep things fresh, relaxing and escalating tension seemingly effortlessly. And it’s not hard to see the self-insert kid from The Fabelmans crashing his trains, all grown up here and having a blast hurling around the big, muscular machines.

More on Matheson’s end of things, the story’s horror revolves around a particular kind of male anxiety. David’s insecurity is made manifest in the truck–a larger, more powerful, more masculine vehicle. This embodiment of toxic masculinity (literally, spewing smoke) cannot be reasoned with, placated, even truly identified, but it can do things he can’t, such as rescue a trapped schoolbus, leaving him useless and defenseless. There is also a reversal taking place–he tries to brush off his wife’s concern that a colleague “practically tried to rape me a the party,” only to then find himself targeted by predator who will not take no for an answer. And Weaver quietly leans into this thematic aspect in his performance, playing David as physically timid and with an almost effeminate whine to his internal monologues. (Also, his last name is Mann. Just saying.)

More than just a historical curiosity, this is a great example of the kind of petri-dish stuff that was happening in the New Hollywood era: a young director being given a shot on a modest B-picture TV movie and knocking it out of the park. I don’t wanna oversell it–it is what it is, but if you’re a fan of that kind of grindhouse-adjacent vibe (less sleaze here, but a lot of sweat and oil and dust and grime) or of ’70s-style paranoid/psychological thrillers, this is definitely worth tracking down.
Film Collection: Weird Science

September 20th, 2026

Directed by John Hughes
Written by John Hughes
1985 | 93 minutes | English
DVD

Anthony Michael Hall, Ilan Mitchell-Smith, Kelly LeBrock, Bill Paxton, Suzanne Snyder, Judie Aronson, Robert Downey Jr, Robert Rusler, Vernon Wells, Britt Leach, Barbara Lang, Michael Berryman

What it’s about: Gary (Hall) and Wyatt (Mitchell-Smith) are nerds. They don’t have friends, have no luck with girls, get pantsed and otherwise tormented on a regular basis. But one weekend, when Wyatt’s parents are away, Gary gets the idea to use Wyatt’s computer to construct a simulation of the perfect woman. Some Frankenstein lightning later, and the result is Lisa (LeBrock), a knockout babe whose sole purpose in existence is to boost the pair’s confidence and show them a good time. But even though Lisa is loyal, she’s not exactly controllable, and her ability to alter reality quickly begins to run amok, creating an escalating disaster that the boys must resolve before Wyatt’s parents get home.

Reflections: I haven’t seen this since I was about the age of the kids in it. On the one hand, there is a lot that is–let’s say, problematic–about this movie. On the other hand, a tale of adolescent male fantasy fueled by uncontrollable technology wreaking havoc on the world has a certain ring to it in the present moment. I don’t know how I feel about it, afterwards: whether everything is too easy and too celebratory of its insensitivity, or whether that’s the point, because it’s ultimately a kid’s movie and a kind of fairytale, where characters act in broad dumb ways explicitly so they can learn a lesson. And it is a fantasy–it leans far more on the “weird” part of the title than the “science” part, and logic is well and gone out the window by the time Wyatt’s sadistic older brother Chet (Paxton, having a hoot) gets turned into a farting sludge monster in an awesomely-cheesy ’80s practical effect. This is the world of a Reagan-era teen boy daydream, for better or for worse.

If one were inclined to be academic about it, there is some anxiety about that Reagan era at work in the subtext here. The same new-fangled, unfathomable technology that conjures Lisa from a Barbie doll also summons a warhead from a Time magazine cover. We watch as status-symbol cars she creates for the boys vanish into empty nothing in order to make things right. For as neat and tidy as it all turns out, ending with a literal wink to the camera, the film seems plainly aware of the unreality of that and consistently, if quietly, expresses discomfort with the “yuppie tough-guy chick magnet” image the boys are trying to imitate. That unreality is embraced on every level. The boys all mug for the camera, the adult figures are all exaggerated caricatures of disapproving dowdiness, the visuals embrace slapstick fantasy at every turn. This is Hughes at his most absurd. But RDJ gets to play a twitchy meathead and LeBrock makes her weird part work surprisingly well, considering. And the Oingo Boingo theme song rules.

The crux of what made John Hughes successful as a creator was that he took young people seriously in a way that not much film storytelling had before him–he was willing to tackle subjects in a way that wasn’t a squeaky clean, Andy Griffith version of childhood, but had more real emotion in it than, I dunno, Porky’s or whatever. With that in mind, I think it makes sense that a lot of aspects of his movies haven’t aged well, culturally. The process of forming an identity starts from seeking connections in this very primal, clumsy place, and the lesson here is ultimately that human connection requires vulnerability and that no technology can shortcut that, which I think is still very much worth something. Just bring a hefty grain of salt.
Film Collection: Project A

September 19th, 2026

Directed by Jackie Chan
Written by Jackie Chan & Edward Tang
1983 | 105 minutes | Cantonese
DVD, English-dub version

Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao, Kwan Hoi-san, Dick Wei, Lee Hoi-san, Mars
(David A. Thomas, Fred Tatasciore, Jennifer Paz, Danny Trejo, Michael Sorich, Tom Konkle, Keith Ferguson)

What it’s about: Sgt. “Dragon” Ma Yue Lung (Chan) is an officer with Hong Kong’s Marine Police around the turn of the 20th century. Upset by corruption in law enforcement, he quits his official job, but hooks up with his old friend Zhou “Fats” Yifei (Hung), a small-time thief, to intercept a load of weapons being sold from the military, through local gangsters, to leader of a notorious pirate crew, Lor Sam Pao (Wei). The incensed pirates take hostage the passengers of a ship, including an important official, and demand the rifles back as a ransom payment, but Ma convinces Captain Chi (Kwan Hoi-san) to reinstate him and let him pose as a gangster, leading a squad of cops to infiltrate the pirate’s hideout and perform a rescue operation.

Reflections: As a rule, I prefer watching movies in their original language, but I picked this up in a thrift store not long ago out of a sense of nostalgia. When I was a teenager, my mom went through a phase with Jackie Chan and Hong Kong cinema and watching this–the dubbed version in particular–brings up a lot of that nostalgic charm. The dubbing is generally not great (although Danny Trejo’s chilled-out take on Wei’s pirate lord kind of rules) and I think it does muddle the storyline somewhat, but the strengths of a Jackie Chan movie are in the physical comedy and inventive stuntwork and those shine through, regardless.

The plot, indeed, does feel like a boys-own-adventure mashup of martial arts action and pirates, which was a rather novel idea at the time. As a director, Chan has a lot of fun with the period style–watching Hung beating up guys in a top hat on floating timber, or the elaborate bicycle chase and clock-tower fight all make the most of the roughly Victorian/Edwardian colonial era atmosphere. And the action itself finds Chan at a confident point in his career–already a massive star in Asia and beginning to make Hollywood inroads. He throws himself off buildings, swings from chandeliers, and delivers wild gags, surrounding himself with other stars of the Hong Kong action scene, capturing it all with an efficient flourish and solidifying himself with an international hit.

This is a movie made for Saturday afternoons–a lot of high energy fun that isn’t trying to take itself very seriously. If one isn’t in the mood for that kind of thing, there’s nothing here that transcends that, but there’s still a lot to be said for the prowess, joy of movement, spectacle, and imagination on display. It’s one of the better Jackie Chan movies I’ve seen and a good time kicking back to for some escapist laughs.
Film Collection: Jackie Brown

September 19th, 2026

Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Written by Quentin Tarantino
1997 | 154 minutes | English
DVD

Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Bridget Fonda, Michael Keaton, Robert DeNiro, Michael Bowen, Chris Tucker, LisaGay Hamilton

What it’s about: Returning from her regular route between L.A. and Cabo, worn-down flight attendant Jackie Brown (Grier) is busted by ATF agent Ray Nicolette (Keaton) carrying an undeclared $50,000. The owner of that money, a small-time weapons dealer named Ordell Robbie (Jackson), hires world-weary bail bondsman Max Cherry (Forster) to get Jackie out because he needs her to get his half-million in profits from Mexico to the US. Now under pressure, Ordell and Jackie concoct a scheme which involves his twitchy old partner Louis (DeNiro) and wily stoner “surfer girl” Melanie (Fonda) to get the money through under the nose of the cops. But Jackie and Max form an unexpected bond and he helps her with an alternate plan to play both sides and finally walk away with something for herself.

Reflections: His third feature and follow-up to the smash success of Pulp Fiction, this is the only one of Tarantino’s mainline films to be an adaptation of an outside work, in this case Elmore Leonard’s 1992 novel Rum Punch. And it’s my favorite of his films because having that boundary to work with curbs some of Tarantino’s more obnoxious instincts and ends up delivering his most emotionally grounded filmmaking, centered around a powerhouse performance from Pam Grier. She oozes cool in every frame, but gives Jackie dimension and depth beyond Tarantino’s usual comic-book aesthetic–the scene in which she and Max talk over coffee about aging and starting over is one of the most heartfelt moments in any of his movies.

Everything around her is a talented filmmaker doing what he does best. The whole thing is an homage to ’70s crime and blaxploitation films, but is filled with other cinematic nods and references (eg: the opening sequence mirroring The Graduate). The music is fantastic, with Johnny Cash and The Grass Roots peppered into classic soul. The dialogue is sharp and witty, and the other actors are all luxuriating and chewing on it–Jackson’s jovial menace, Forster’s man of deep feelings and few words, and DeNiro giving an off-balance, restrained, and somewhat unexpected side turn. The pace is breezy, but the structure is interesting, weaving through a complex plot and showing the final money-exchange sequence three times from different points of view.

It is still very much a Tarantino movie, with all that entails–the long running time, casual violence, awkward racial elements, Boomer-era pop culture obsessions, new-wave inspired editing, and so on. But it’s the least show-offy, the one where he’s out of his own way the most, and is worth watching even for those who aren’t fans of his more indulgent and more heavily-discussed movies. A cool, sophisticated thriller with a melancholy edge and a lot of badass personality, a self-aware, career-best performance from Grier, and a willingness not to underestimate its audience, this stands out not only in its director’s oeuvre, but as one of the best crime films of the ’90s.
Film Collection: The Savages

September 18th, 2026

Directed by Tamara Jenkins
Written by Tamara Jenkins
2007 | 114 minutes | English
DVD

Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Philip Bosco, Peter Friedmann, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Cara Seymour, Debra Monk, David Zayas, Margot Martindale, Guy Boyd, Rosemary Murphy, Tonye Patano

What it’s about: Wendy Savage (Linney) and her brother Jon (Hoffman) were abandoned by their abusive father Lenny (Bosco) to an absent mother as children and haven’t spoken to the old man in a long time. But the woman he’s been living with dies and her family kicks him out of their house as he’s also experiencing a decline in health and the onset of dementia and it’s up to his estranged children to handle the situation. Neither is prepared: Wendy is working temp-jobs to fund herself as a playwright and is unhealthily invested in the affair she’s having with her married neighbor (Friedman). And Jon’s long-term girlfriend (Seymour) is moving back to Poland because he’s intimidated by marriage and is, instead, throwing himself into a mess of a book on Bertolt Brecht.

Reflections: I saw this around its release and I know I enjoyed it, but I remembered nothing about it. Watching it again almost twenty years later–now the same age as Jon in the film–it is a different beast. At several points, Wendy worries her play will come off as “middle-class whining,” and from an uncharitable point of view, the film is that: it’s a relatively low-stakes family drama about New York intellectual types–college professors, kinda pathetic adultery, a certain wash of middle-aged sentimentality. But Jenkins’s Oscar-nominated script is deft enough to breathe some life into cliches the characters themselves are fully aware of and touch a nerve that feels real.

She is aided greatly in this by the presence of Linney and Hoffman, both sinking their teeth into meaty performances (and both also award-nominated, her for an Oscar and him for a Golden Globe). They project an ease with each other that swings between affection and resentment in tiny ways from moment to moment and gives both characters a kind of weary dignity. While the movie leans mostly on the two of them, the supporting cast, in particular Bosco capturing Lenny’s anger fading into confusion and despair, also feels rich and natural. And the film’s visual and aural sensibility, moving from the artificial-feeling sunniness of Arizona to the cozy gloom of Buffalo, peppered with old-time pop songs and Stephen Trask’s minor-key main theme, create a vibe that supports the intimate smallness of the drama.

And what resonates with me now is exactly that smallness, the ordinariness of all of it. As Jon ungraciously shouts at Wendy in a nursing home parking lot, death comes for all of us and it’s often messy and gross when it does. Watching our parents die and being forced by that to reckon with our own mortality and accountability is a deeply broad human experience, and Jenkins is grappling it with an intelligence and honesty that rings true, even if one isn’t as much of a sucker for the campus-novel flavor of the particulars as I admittedly kind of am.
Film Collection: The Lady Vanishes

September 17th, 2026

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by Sidney Gilliat & Frank Launder
1938 | 97 minutes | English, German, Italian, French
DVD

Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Paul Lukas, May Whitty, Cecil Parker, Linden Travers, Naunton Wayne, Basil Radford, Mary Clare, Emile Boreo

What it’s about: An avalanche in the fictional nation of Bandrika strands a group of foreign travelers into an overcrowded hotel. Among them is Iris Henderson (Lockwood), a young Englishwoman headed back to London to get married. During the stay, she runs afoul of Gilbert Redman, a fellow Brit and ethnomusicologist with a bit of a cheeky streak and a penchant for making noise. At first, they dislike each other, but boarding the train the next morning, Iris has a strange experience. A potted plant falls and knocks her on the head and the elderly and kind Miss Froy (Whitty) looks after her for a bit, but when Iris awakens from a brief nap, Miss Froy is gone and no one but Gilbert seems to believe Iris’s insistence that she existed in the first place.

Reflections: A stone-cold mystery-comedy classic, Hitchcock’s biggest hit to date, and the film that convinced David O. Selznick to bring him to America, this movie has lost none of its appeal in nearly 90 years. It takes the spine of Ethel Lina White’s 1936 novel The Wheel Spins, but invents much of its story whole-cloth from some of the director’s characteristic fascinations: ordinary people pulled into shadowy conspiracies, an ambient menace with the threat of violence, and a set of eccentric characters drawn with an acid English wit. Two of the latter–Caldicott and Charters (Wayne and Radford, respectively), a pair of blasé, cricked-obsessed gentlemen, actually spun off into a popular duo that appeared in several other films, including Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich (1940).

The story takes a little while to get going, but once the central mystery kicks in, it stays involving even as it becomes increasingly absurd. Lockwood’s Iris gives it momentum; set up as a girl who believes she’s seen it all, she sells a fascinated, frustrated curiosity rooted in that self-confidence. And Redgrave’s Gilbert has a rogue’s charm from the moment he appears onscreen, obnoxiously tooting on a clarinet, giving the film much of its wit with his running string of sly remarks on the unfolding investigation (“Faint heart never found old lady” and such). The puzzle pieces of the plot are engineered masterfully around them–the big picture of the answer doesn’t matter that much, but the small details that add up to it do and Hitchock absolutely understood how to roll out twists and payoffs in ways that are clear and exciting. Although the tone is mostly light, the situation never become stale or comfortable, including in the early scenes where things feel slightly off even before the action really begins and culminating in a rousing standoff where the final pieces come into focus.

I’ve seen it before, but had forgotten enough of the details that it hooked me. It’s definitely a film of its time, but there is a certain elegance and charm to that. And in lesser hands, it could all very easily feel ridiculous, but the deft touch of the director and the magnetism of the stars go a long way in selling it. And the ride is genuinely funny in a droll, old-fashioned way. It’s not on the artistic level of Hitchock’s later work, but it’s a solid, enjoyable thriller with a lot of great style.
Film Collection: Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday

September 16th, 2026

Directed by Jacques Tati
Written by Jacques Tati & Henri Marquet
1953 | 87 minutes | French, English
Criterion Blu-Ray, reedited/restored cut

Jacques Tati, Nathalie Pascaud, Micheline Rolla, Valentine Camax, Louis Perrault, André Dubois, Lucien Frégis, Raymond Carl, René Lacourt, Marguerite Gérard, Suzy Willy, Georges Adlin

What it’s about: Among a group of beachgoing tourists descending upon a seaside town on France’s northern coast is Monsieur Hulot (Tati). Towering and clumsy, but formal and timid, he seems to have difficulty fitting into either the physical space or the social order around him as he stumbles from incident to incident. He putters about in his weird little backfiring car, falling in with a scouting group, experiencing a kayaking misadventure, dominating a tennis match with an unusual technique, accidentally participating in a funeral, and so on. The holiday culminates in an impromptu fireworks display the night before everyone returns to their ordinary lives.

Reflections: A first-time watch, but not my first exposure to Tati, so I had a sense of what I was in for. The film makes clever use of sound, but its core sensibility is drawn from silent comedy–not for nothing did Tati start his career as a mime. Dialogue is sparse–indeed, an early gag featuring announcements over a train-station loudspeaker electronically mangled to incomprehensibility warns the audience not to rely on language–and the film leans almost wholly on often-elaborate physical, visual gags. For all his gentility, Hulot is fundamentally a disturbance to the machinery of everything around him and words, exposition, or plot mechanics are all incidental to the almost visceral pleasure of just watching that play out.

This is a canon film that’s been analyzed to death–I remember reading Bazin’s breathless praise in grad school–but there is a lot going on here. Tati was a sharp observer of post-war France and there are a lot of thematic ideas one could point to through that lens: while the other characters have clear backstories and social roles, Hulot himself is a undefined cypher, suggesting a culture grappling with an unknown identity in the wake of occupation and devastation. Or the way in which echoes of the war reverberate through the old veteran (Dubois) and his reminiscences or the pseudo-bombing attack of the whole fireworks escapade and the kind of reclamation and neutralization of that. Or the film’s weird pacing–the way it’s kind of suspended, following meandering side-paths and anticipating the Nouvelle Vague’s fractured relationship to cinematic time. Or the whole “scatterbrained angel” aspect–how Hulot presents a humor completely without cruelty in a way that stood out in its time and reflected a kind of midcentury modernist, Utopian outlook.

All of that is there, but you don’t actually have to care about any of it to enjoy this. It reminds me of the kind of movie my mom would show me as a kid–something that both a 7-year-old and a 70-year-old could find funny, but with a classic sense of sophistication to it. It is a movie from the ’50s, it’s not gonna grab your attention and pummel your dopamine receptors, but it’s fun and smart, and has a kind of warm-hearted sweetness to it that not only holds up, but goes a long way in our current world.
Film Collection: Napoleon Dynamite

September 15th, 2026

Directed by Jared Hess
Written by Jared Hess & Jerusha Hess
2004 | 95 minutes | English
DVD

Jon Heder, Efren Ramirez, Tina Majorino, Diedrich Bader, Jon Gries, Aaron Ruell, Haylie Duff, Emily Kennard, Shondrella Avery, Sandy Martin

What it’s about: This slice-of-life style narrative follows the eponymous Napoleon (Hess), a teenager in Preston, a small town in southern Idaho. When his grandmother (Martin) injures her coccyx in an ATV accident at the dunes, his Uncle Rico (Gries) comes to stay with Napoleon and his older brother Kip (Ruell). As Rico dreams of past football glory, he gets Kip involved in selling tupperware so Kip can make money to bring his online girlfriend LaFawnduh (Avery) to Idaho to meet IRL. Meanwhile, Napoleon befriends Pedro (Ramirez), a new student from Mexico who has eyes on the class presidency, and encounters Deb (Majorino), an equally awkward, industrious girl who runs a glamour photography business.

Reflections: This movie hit a nerve when it came out, becoming kind of an iconic touchstone of a certain hip millennial whimsy. And coming back to it, it does still read that way–the closest analogue I can think of is like a rural farm-town version of Wes Anderson. The performances are stylized in a particular way, a kind of slow deadpan. The production design is elaborate and very intentional, capturing and only lightly exaggerating a time and place in a wash of textures and patterns and little details. And the movie takes its time drawing out the landscape and environment with quietly lush composition and lingering on a number of on-point needle drops.

The plot never has much momentum and the stakes are never very high. This is a film more interested in just observing a character and it centers on Heder’s eccentric performance. Napoleon is surly and put-upon, legitimately talented in a number of ways, but also oddly oblivious and deluded, cluelessly self-centered but genuinely caring. He’s one of the truest distillations of the weirdo-nerd kid in cinema. And, despite the cultural specificity of the film as a whole, his nerdishness isn’t tied to any kind of pop cultural trope; like the movie around him, he exists in his own world, but his challenges and dreams, and those of the oddballs in his orbit, feel larger than that world.

This is another movie that, because I was there for its moment (I was 19 when this was released, and it was very much to my taste at the time), I’m curious how people not of that era do or don’t relate to it. But watching it for the first time in a decade or so, I still found myself charmed. There are moments that make me cackle because of the ways in which they’re familiar more than anything, but it’s a mellow, restrained movie with a genuine empathy for all its subjects, even the popular kids. And when Napoleon urges Pedro before his big speech, “just listen to your heart; that’s what I do,” he sells it without being cheesy because you believe him.
Film Collection: Shin Godzilla

September 15th, 2026

Directed by Hideaki Anno & Shinji Higuchi
Written by Hideaki Anno
2016 | 120 minutes | Japanese, English
DVD

Hiroki Hasegawa, Yutaka Takenouchi, Satomi Ishihara, Mikako Ichikawa, Ren Osugi, Isshin Onudo, Kyusaku Shimada, Jun Kunimura, Issey Takahashi, Kimiko Yo, Kanji Tsuda, Sei Hiraizumi, Akira Emoto

What it’s about: A take on Godzilla that presents as a modern disaster procedural, things kick off when the Japanese government discovers a heat anomaly in Tokyo Bay that has damaged a traffic tunnel. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Rando Yaguchi (Hasegawa) and his belief that it’s being caused by a living creature are laughed off until an amphibious form of Godzilla makes landfall in Shinagawa. It retreats to the water after only a couple hours but the attack causes massive devastation and creates a tense political mess, both within Tokyo and with interested foreign nations, the US in particular. When the mature and aggressive Godzilla reappears, the situation becomes a race between nuclear-armed and reactionary governments and Yaguchi, leading a crack team of scientists searching for alternative ideas.

Reflections: It seems improbable that a movie which is about 75% government meetings would rule this hard, but it does. Part of that is down to the way it moves–characters speak in mostly dry, official language, but there are a lot of them, talking quickly, shooting ideas up and down and throwing out complications at a sweeping clip. This is helped along by mockumentary and found-footage elements: bodycam footage, news broadcasts, etc., which break up the atmosphere and ground the abstract discussions in the outside world. And when Godzilla does appear or make a move, the design is otherworldly and gross and the way it’s shot looks tactile and surreal. It’s a very talky movie, but it grabs the audience quickly and never lets go.

It’s hard to talk about characters or performance–partially because the sheer number of them and the detached style of the film make them hard to keep track of, and partially because I suspect this is a movie that does a lot with the specifics of its language and with small, cultural nuances I wouldn’t pick up on. The portrayal of the American characters is fun, though, and there are personalities that stand out: the American official/senator’s daughter with a Japanese grandmother, a cowboy negotiation style, and presidential ambitions; the socially blunt lady scientist, not afraid to tell her colleague he smells bad; the elderly general seeing a sign of the times in his soggy noodles, and so on.

Godzilla as a figure exists as a cultural reaction to postwar nuclear trauma, and watching this, it feels clear that there is a similar working-through of the Fukushima disaster here–while I’m not familiar with Japanese politics surrounding that incident, an overall sense of criticism of a bureaucratic response with misplaced priorities is palpable in watching Yaguchi and the others wrestle with the system as they respond to something it was never designed to handle. But even without knowing all the specifics, Anno and Higuchi clearly understand the core of what Godzilla represents and deliver possibly the sharpest, most “realistic” Godzilla film ever and arguably the best since the original.