The Mandalorian and Grogu (henceforth abbreviated to ManGu) is almost an experimental film by Star Wars standards, a blockbuster franchise that has always been a junk drawer of cultural odds and ends. This new installment is inspired by regular Lucas obsessions, like Japanese samurai movies and Flash Gordon. But director Jon Favreau brings Robert Altman energy to a galaxy far, far away.

At worst, ManGu reeks of corporate strategy. Baby Yoda merchandise isn’t going to move itself. There are a few Star Wars shoutouts. Chewie’s favorite chess game! Jabba’s (sexy?) son! Look at that-that, it’s an AT-AT! Pedro Pascal’s mustachioed mug shows up for five ho-hum minutes. Sigourney Weaver is a pro, patiently enduring X-position. The monster-to-human ratio is, easily, 5 to 1. ManGu is at its best when an adopted goblin son silently cares for his sick knight-errant father. There’s a nifty reference to Night of the Hunter, too.

New 150 Word Review: ‘Blue Heron’ (2025)

New 150 Word Review: ‘The Ox-Bow Incident’ (1943)

New 150 Word Review: ‘Strictly Ballroom’ (1992)

Advice For Men: Wander around a thrift store

New 150 Word Review: ‘The Bridge On The River Kwai’ (1957)

Memories are alive. They whisper to us. And sometimes lie. Blue Heron is director/writer Sophy Romvari’s debut, an entrancing semi-autobiographical drama about a blended immigrant family moving from Hungary to Vancouver Island in the late 90s. Romvari tells a simple story of people doing the best they can.

Iringó Réti is the mother, whose teenage son from a previous marriage suffers from mental illnesses that make him difficult to manage and understand. Ádám Tompa is the father, quiet, gentle, and he sees all. They have three children together, including young Sasha, who also sees all: her brother is troubled, and her parents don’t know what to do. The movie’s most affecting performance is Edik Beddoes as Jeremy, the oldest. He’s full of pain and violence, a young man who is still a scared boy. Blue Heron manages to observe pain from afar while remaining compassionate. The third act is devastating.

This is a surprisingly grim and ugly western, which is also the reason it’s one of the genre’s best. Henry Fonda plays a cowboy who just wants a drink in a small, podunk town. His old flame lives there, too, or used to, at least. While at the town’s only saloon, Fonda’s character and his partner, a quiet Harry Morgan, get caught up in a fever: a local rancher has been murdered, and a lynch mob is quickly formed. The townspeople fall upon three men they immediately suspect of murder, and decide to hang, the law be damned.

The Ox-Bow Incident resembles the classic 1957 courtroom drama 12 Angry Men, but it’s darker. Crueler. What started out as a call for justice turns into bloodlust. Fonda’s character knows better, but knowing better isn’t always enough. No one plays exhausted, decent, world-weary everyman like Fonda. The rest of the cast? Memorable.

I am a Baz Luhrmann apologist: I love all of his frenetic, in-your-face pop-music operas. But this might be his best, the most intense, and genuine expression of what makes him tick as an artist. Strictly Ballroom is a combination rom-com-slash-” we must dance!” movie, like Dirty Dancing or Footloose, set in the world of amateur competitive ballroom dancing in Australia.

Scott is being groomed for greatness, but he wants to dance his original steps, not the ones mandated by the conservative fuddy-duddys who run Sydney’s biggest ballroom contest. No one believes in him, except for Fran, the Ugly Duckling, daughter of Argentinian immigrants. Paul Mercurio’s Scott is a humorless diva who learns his steps were missing love. Tara Morice is a down-to-Earth princess as Fran. Barry Otto’s Doug, Scott’s mousy father, breaks hearts with his quivering, saucer-like eyes. The villains are flamboyant and two-dimensional. They also have ridiculous hair.

Director David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai is, at heart, an anti-war movie about two flawed, stubborn enemies, both representing great but opposing colonial powers, learning, through pain and struggle, how much they have in common. And in the middle, a cynical American who just wants to go home.

This movie belongs to Alec Guinness’s Colonel Nicholson, a by-the-books British officer who will not bend. He is magnificent, but so are his co-stars, including Sessue Hayakawa as Colonel Saito, the Japanese commander. As the American who DGAF, William Holden gives another one of his great performances. He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard.

The Japanese need a bridge built. The British POWs refuse to be broken. A compromise is reached, and madness ensues. There is no WWII romanticism here. The visual and emotional scale is profound. This is one of Lean’s perfect movies, along with Lawrence of Arabia.

Art is a tug-of-war that happens between generations, mentors and proteges, up-and-comers and has-beens. In The Christophers, a blunt little comedy, two painters trade barbs and cultivate connections: one a fallen master, wealthy and alone, the other, a never-was, disillusions, bitter, an occasional forger of others’ work.

She’s played with quiet intensity by Michaela Coel, hired by ungrateful, talentless children to finish the lost great works of their father, Julian Sklar, a former pop art great, portrayed with lion-in-winter gusto by Ian McKellen. Coel and McKellen make a fine pair; they’re both so dignified on the outside, but you can tell their internal wells run deep. It is a pleasure to watch them parry and thrust and slowly grow to respect one another. This is a smart, heartfelt duet directed by Steven Soderbergh, who churns out at least one clever, subtly inventive movie for adults every year, and thank God.

New 150 Word Review: ‘They Will Kill You’ (2026)

New 150 Word Reviews: ‘Johnny Guitar’ (1954)

New 150 Word Review: ‘My Father’s Shadow’ (2025)

New 150 Word Reviews: ‘The International’ (2009)

Advice For Men: Pick a favorite sword

New 150 Word Review: ‘In The Name Of The Father’ (1993)

New 150 Word Review: ‘Close Encounters Of The Third Kind’ (1977)

Director Jim Sheridan’s true-life drama about two men accused of a crime they didn’t commit is emotional TNT. In The Name Of The Father blends political drama with a prison movie, and ends with something unique: an original courtroom scene. This is one of Daniel Day-Lewis’ finest performances as Gerry Conlan, a young Irish loser who gets blamed for an IRA bombing in London. When we first meet Day-Lewis’ character, he’s an immature brat, and then he suffers for the next 15 years, and finds an inner strength he didn’t know he had.

But this isn’t just Day-Lewis’ show: Pete Postlethwaite plays his quiet father who is also imprisoned along with his son. The man loves his son, and their relationship is painful and beautiful to watch. Emma Thompson plays the British lawyer who knows the Conlons and three others are the victims of crooked cops looking for a scapegoat.

Has there ever been a sillier, bloodier, action-horror-comedy? The answer is yes, but you have to go back a few decades, and the director is probably Sam Raimi. They Will Kill You isn’t a perfect movie, but its heart is in the right place: ripped out, and thrown on the floor, bloody and beating.

Director and co-writer Kirill Sokolov is inspired by everything from Aliens and Oldboy to Hereditary and John Wick, and even cartoons like Woody Woodpecker. How is the violence? Great question: blood sprays everywhere. People are chopped, skewered, and decapitated. There’s an eyeball with a mind of its own, too.

Zazie Beetz is a human spring of energy; she’s funny and ferocious as a stranger who answers a job ad for a housekeeper at a fancy high-rise. The tenants aren’t who she thinks they are, and vice versa. Patricia Arquette is the villain. Like Beetz, she’s flawless.

A father, desperate for work and rarely home, takes his two sons, ages 9 and 11, on an impromptu trip to the big city on the day of a rigged election.

My Father’s Shadow is an intimate family drama, but it’s also about Nigeria in the early 90s, when an authoritarian regime was strangling its people. Akinola Davies’ direction is raw, haunting; he fills every moment with intimate emotional textures. This is a deeply felt political portrait, too, universal and specific.

The sons, played by real-life siblings Godwin Chiemerie Egbo and Chibuike Marvelous Egbo, are in awe of their father, but they are no longer children, and the world of adults is more dangerous than they expected. Who should they trust? As their father, Sope Dirisu, is tender and flawed, he loves his boys. Lagos is a character, too, a chaotic city full of strivers and soldiers ready to shoot.

Joan Crawford has never been fiercer as Vienna, the gorgeopus owner of a saloon and casino. She only has eyes for one cowpoke, mind you, but she’s not waiting for him, if you know what I mean. Johnny Guitar is a helluva western about what all good westerns are about: freedom, law, and desperados. America is a country where hard work is rewarded until you get in the way of someone rich.

Sterling Hayden, tightly-wound in Kubrick’s The Killing, is the title character, a slow-moving guitar player who’s pretty good with a six-shooter. Everyone’s got a nickname in the West: Scott Bradley’s Dancin’ Kid could be a bad guy, depending on the day, but he loves Vienna something fierce. The real standout is Mercedes McCambridge as villainous Emma, a local rancher and banker who hates Vienna’s guts. McCambridge’s smile radiates contempt; she’s especially demented ordering around a weak-kneed lynch mob.

From The Archive: ‘Winchester ‘73’ (1950)

Few actors convey grizzled, righteous sincerity with the same sincere intensity as Clive Owen, whose gritty powers peaked in 2006’s Children of Men. But he still had plenty of juice left over for director Tom Tykwer’s The International, a cerebral, le Carré-esque corporate thriller full of tense conversations in offices and plenty of paperwork.

Naomi Watts co-stars as a Manhattan DA investigating a crooked international bank. She’s helped by Owen’s character, an Interpol detective, who gets too close to a vast criminal conspiracy. The baddies are a rogues’ gallery of dirty Eurotrash bankers and their toadies, including Armin Mueller-Stahl and Ulrich Thomsen. There’s a lot of breathless exposition, but halfway through the movie, suddenly, there’s an incredible shootout inside the Guggenheim Museum that’s everything you could ever want in an action setpiece. An earlier assassination scene in a crowd that is also superb, The Day of the Jackal-level political mayhem.

From The Archive: ‘The Day Of The Jackal’ (1973)

Close Encounters Of The Third Kind is one of Spielberg’s best. This sci-fi drama harmonizes with Spielberg’s filmmaking peers of the time: Coppola, Scorsese, Friedkin, and Altman, to name a few. It’s paranoid, spiritual, and realistic in all the ways American movies were in the 70s. This is about UFOs, yes, but it’s also about the madness of religion.

Richard Dreyfuss is heartbreaking as a young father whose life is turned inside out by a mysterious force, a ball of light that could be supernatural or extraterrestrial. His character has an inner child, and that inner child is impulsive and restless. Melinda Dillon is a single mom living a nightmare. For some reason, the U.S. government puts a charming French scientist in charge of first contact with aliens. Thankfully, that scientist is a very charming and inscrutable, Francois Truffaut, the great New Wave director. The aliens aren’t cute like E.T.

I am learning to forgive myself for being wrong. Here’s an example: when I first saw 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story in the theater, I dismissed it as a misfire, and I was not alone in that opinion. At the time, the critics weren’t seduced by the adventures of a young Han Solo, and there just wasn’t enough excitement for this would-be franchise. Solo became the first big-screen Star Wars flop.

There are all sorts of reasons why this came to be. The movie had a troubled production history: The original directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, were fired, and Hollywood heavyweight Ron Howard was brought in to save the shoot. The gossip was that the former directors were trying to turn the Disney intellectual property into a sci-fi buddy comedy. (Thankfully, some of the humor remains. Solo is also the funniest Star Wars movie.)

And that wasn’t the only gossip: nasty rumors swirled around the press that Alden Ehrenreich, the actor cast to fill Harrison Ford’s boots, couldn’t act.

Another factor in the lack of enthusiasm for Solo was probably Star Wars overload. The previous two years saw the sequel to Star Wars: The Force Awakens and another standalone prequel, Rogue One. George Lucas’s space opera is one of the most popular and lucrative movie franchises in history, but there can indeed be too much of a good thing.

But back to forgiving myself. I was too caught up in the gossip and buzz when I first watched Solo because, actually, it is a very good movie. I italicized that ‘actually’ because I wanted to emphasize that word. I was wrong, you understand.

In my recently revised opinion, Solo is the third-best Star Wars movie. Why? Because it’s the Star Wars movie with the least franchise baggage, even though, in addition to Han, we get to meet original series favorites like Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian. Yes, there’s also a cameo that references the original prequels. But other than those nostalgic call-outs, this is a fun, inventive, action-packed galactic western. That’s it.

Han is an outlaw with a heart of gold. He’s in love with Emilia Clark’s Qi’ra, the right hand of an evil gang leader. There’s a train heist, a double-cross, and a face-to-face laser gun quick-draw shootout. I had never planned on seeing this failed blockbuster again, but then, this weekend, I randomly put on Solo while scrolling through Disney +, as if guided by the Force. (Yes, I know it was an algorithm, but let me have some fun.)

And by the time we’re introduced to Lando’s closet of multi-colored capes on the Millennium Falcon, I realized that in 2018, I was younger. Less… wise. More impulsive. I’ve grown as a human being since then.

We were given Donald Glover as flamboyant flimflam man Lando Calrissian and didn’t know what to do with him. When I write ‘we’, I mean ‘society.’ His Lando is cocky and insecure, charming and selfish, all at once. A true charismatic rogue. His scenes with Han are tense and awkward, hinting at years of conflict ahead between the two uneasy friends.

I’d also add that there’s a natural chemistry between Han and Lando in Solo. Of course, Glover is a world-class talent, but chemistry is a two-way street. That isn’t the strongest metaphor, but I will forge ahead to my next point. The rumors of Alden Ehrenreich’s acting were unwarranted. He pulled the role off: he couldn’t impersonate Harrison Ford. Instead, Ehrenreich pays homage to Ford’s smirking world-weary smuggler while also imbuing twentysomething Han with a tenderness that Ford never gave the character.

Solo also features the kinkiest moment in the entire history of the franchise. It comes during a brief scene between Clark’s Qi’ra and Lando’s droid, the revolutionary L3, voiced by Fleabag creator and superstar-in-general Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The droid shares with Qi’ra that a romantic relationship with Lando is out of the question. The droid doesn’t have those kinds of feelings for the scoundrel. Qi’ra asks how that would even work in the first place, to which L3 responds, almost wistfully, “Oh, it works.”

Does it? I mean, it does? How? How does it work? I want to know how it works.

There's a slyly political droid rebellion — played for laughs and also subversive — alongside nonstop pew-pews, impossible escapes, and hyperspace jumps. Did I mention there's a Cthulhu? No? Did I mention there's a moment that explains where Han's iconic blaster comes from, and it's unnecessary but also awesome?

There you have it. I have forgiven myself.

The best Star Wars movie is The Empire Strikes Back. I don’t think that is a controversial opinion. In retrospect, the fifth chapter in the series is an oddly structured, truly bizarre adventure with a famously unhappy ending. I’m serious, the movie is admirably strange: in order to keep boy hero Luke Skywalker from freezing to death on a snowy planet, his bestie Han Solo slices open the belly of a giant woolly lizard-kangaroo with Luke’s lightsaber and stuffs him into the thing’s piping hot guts.

The Empire Strikes Back introduced audiences to Billy Dee Williams’ dashing Lando Calrissian and Ugnaughts, waist-high pig men who were finally given their due in Disney +’s hit Star Wars series The Mandalorian. There is one of the greatest plot reveals in The Empire Strikes Back, too, when, spoiler alert, you-know-who says that thing, and then whatshisname screams, “Nooo!”

The Empire Strikes Back is epic, but the second-best Star Wars film is The Last Jedi, and I look forward to overly negative comments from fans who hate this movie the way fanatics hate heretics or teenagers hate curfew. The movie is a still-smoldering battlefield in the culture war, which is like a war, only no one gets hurt unless we’re talking about feelings.

The Last Jedi is also oddly structured and bizarre. The ambition in The Last Jedi is staggering, especially for a massively profitable corporate entertainment. The movie features a planet full of fat cats who supply all the laser guns for all the wars in the stars! In a flash, The Last Jedi answers a question no one has ever asked: Where exactly does blue milk come from? And it also delivers one of my favorite lightsaber fights, as the twisted grandson of Darth Vader and a powerful nobody team up to take on a gang of Jedi killers. Director Rian Johnson understood Luke’s journey; he made Obi-Wan proud.

[Full transparency: I applauded during the General Leia Organa, Space-Proof Warrior Mary Poppins scene. I know there are dudes (and it’s mostly dudes) who laughed when Leia finally used her powers. I was not one.]

The Empire Strikes Back and The Last Jedi are the first and second-best movies in the Star Wars saga because they’re the movies that want to surprise audiences the most, and both do. In their ways, they evolved the franchise formula.

Solo is the third-best because of the opposite reason. It doesn’t exist to break the rules; it plays by and with them. Solo is the platonic ideal of Lucas’ vision. It knows the secret beating heart of Star Wars is a simple story about a hero looking starward a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. It is everything thrilling about Star Wars in a single two-hour package. It does not try to smash the formula; it honors the formula. Watch it if you haven’t, or rewatch it. Let me know what you think. But spare me The Last Jedi rants. I’ve heard ’em all.

New 150 Word Review: ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ (2026)

Essay: Life During ‘Star Wars’

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a “legacy sequel,” which is another way of saying “cash grab,” and there’s nothing wrong with making a few hundred million bucks revisiting characters and plots from beloved movies decades later, starring leads who still look fabulous. But this follow-up to the 2006 hit starring Anne Hathaway as an idealistic journalist who finds herself working for a fashion magazine run by Meryl Streep’s imposing editor-in-chief is also a sort of corporate post-apocalypse. Twenty years later, the media industry is shattering. Hathaway’s do-gooder is a serious reporter who gets laid off and needs a job. Again. Meanwhile, Miranda Priestly’s empire is in decline. This is a comedy! With fashion. There’s also an unintentional sadness hanging over everything. You can’t go home again. Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt return as amusing, familiar caricatures. It’s too bad KT Tunstall’s upbeat one-hit wonder “Suddenly I See” wasn’t reprised.

There are, surprisingly, many great movies about radio, like Oliver Stone’s prescient 1988 adaptation of Eric Bogosian’s play Talk Radio, starring a dynamite Bogosian spitting into a mic. The low-budget horror movie Undertone is also about radio’s blockbuster offspring, podcasts, specifically, a podcast about “all things creepy.” Do listeners call in to pre-recorded podcasts? Don’t ask those kinds of questions, and everything will be fine.

Writer/director Ian Tuason takes his time telling a spooky story of a lonely woman recording episodes while watching over her dying mother. When her cohost, a cheerful, caring disembodied voice, shares “found audio” of a couple’s encounter with supernatural forces, things slowly start to implode. As the podcaster, Nina Kiri wears her character’s unhappiness like a veil. There is no gore or jump scares, just dread and shadows and something, someone, lurking behind you. The sound design is phenomenal; intense, unsettling, at times, claustrophobic.

New 150 Word Review: ‘The Stranger’ (2026)

New 150 Word Review: ‘Slap Shot’ (1977)

New 150 Word Review: ‘Hour Of The Wolf’ (1968)

Advice For Men: Never Swipe

Director François Ozon’s gorgeous, mostly faithful black-and-white adaptation of Albert Camus’ absurdist novel The Stranger, about a young, seemingly soulless Frenchman, is in dialogue with Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 neorealist masterpiece The Battle of Algiers, about the Algerian fight for independence, which gives this work about grief and apathy a sharper political focus.

Benjamin Voisin delivers a clever performance as our aloof hero, Meursault, who does not weep at his mother’s funeral, nor defend himself while standing trial for murder. He is emotionally distant, which is predictable; this is Camus, after all. But he’s also sad, and annoying, and, sometimes, ridiculous. Rebecca Marder’s character loves Meursault, but one should never give one’s heart to an existentialist. Ozon’s Algiers is an ancient, sun-dappled city darkened by the French, who do as they please. The pace is steady, hypnotic, inevitable. It’s no surprise Muersalt accepts his fate. When the time comes, will you?

Slap Shot was an unexpected, late-career role for aging icon Paul Newman, the intense, All-American actor with gorgeous blue eyes. He plays a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, homophobic, fifty-something coach of a flailing minor ice hockey team in a dying rust belt town.

But the real star of director George Roy Hill’s crude but unblinking boys-will-be-boys comedy is Academy Award-winning writer Nancy Dowd’s profane screenplay, loosely based on her brother’s experiences on the ice. She is compassionate and honest; the emotionally stunted men she writes about are fueled by testosterone, cheap beer, and bloodlust. The team is saved by a trio of teenage brothers who are violent thugs on ice and immediately popular. Give the people what they want! Grown men beating the hell out of each other! Dowd writes about toxic masculinity decades before the term was coined. The ending is wonderfully sad. Some dudes don’t know what’s good for them.

One should never, ever accept an invitation to a party hosted by fashionable aging aristocrats in a castle on the other side of the island, is one of the many lessons in director Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, often described as the master filmmaker’s “only” horror movie. It transcends the genre, though; it is a dream, a vision of marriage and desire that slowly melts into a cold, sweaty nightmare.

Max von Sydow is Johan, a philandering painter with a secret and the captivating Liv Ullmann is his devoted, pregnant, wife. Her heart is full, his is empty. They live an impoverished life on a remote , haunted island. Never marry an artist is another lesson. Hour of the Wolf glows with life; the close-ups are stunning. There are unforgettable, surreal moments: an eyeball dropped in a wine glass. A cuckold standing on the celing. Why is everyone grinning?

I think it was Marx who first suggested that history plays out twice, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Karl, not Groucho, by the way.

This also applies to the 2014 movie Whiplash, which critics cheered and won veteran character actor JK Simmons a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. The movie made the career of its then-29-year-old director, Damien Chazelle, whose follow-up, the neo-musical La La Land, was mistakenly awarded the 2017 Best Picture Oscar. (His last movie, 2022’s Babylon, a frenetic Old Hollywood tragicomedy, was dismissed, even mocked, but it could be a masterpiece? Ah, well, that’s another essay.)

When I first saw Whiplash in the movie theater, I was riveted. Watching the story of a toxic relationship between an abusive teacher and a brilliant student was torturous. Their scenes together were tense, to say the least. And I distinctly remember enjoying it? I spent the entire movie clenching my fists as JK Simmons’ muscular loudmouth conservatory jazz band teacher torments Miles Teller’s determined young student drummer.

Simmons’ character believes that musicians have to be pushed beyond their limits in order to be great, and Teller wants nothing more than to be one of the greats, like a modern-day Buddy Rich.

But I rewatched Whiplash recently, and all I saw was a movie about the two most talented jazz musicians in New York City, a pair of white dudes.

I don’t know what compelled me to stream Whiplash. I think there was a part of me that couldn’t believe that movie was as talked about as it was back in 2014. Did we really applaud a movie that combined enhanced interrogation techniques and music school?

The whole movie is a testosterone-spiced brawl between fellas with weak chins. What I once thought was harrowing is now laughable. JK Simmons’ homophobic zingers don’t sound quite right coming out of that actor’s mouth, and I chuckled to myself when Miles Teller’s fingers started bleeding because he’s playing the drums with such power and passion.

Whiplash asks the audience to accept Miles Teller’s character as the next Charlie “Bird” Parker and that Simmons’ psycho teacher is the man to mold him into that legend. But is Teller’s drummer any good? The answer is: you have to take the filmmaker’s word for it.

But Whiplash is funny if you indulge one small idea: what if Teller and Simmons’ characters are actually talentless? Or if not talentless, then just… average. They spend the whole movie sweating and shouting and makin’ jazz tunes, and the audience is left to assume they’re both the best of the best, but what if that assumption is wrong?

What if the jazz world thinks those two are, simply, mediocre? The movie is more enjoyable if you toy with that hypothetical.

At first, I thought Whiplash was about a battle of the wills, but it’s not, really. It’s a feature-length slap fight. A mash note to machismo. This is the most serious movie in the world about dudes beating their chests like hairless gorillas. I don’t know if Chazelle knew this when he was making it. I don’t think so. I think he thought he was making the most badass movie possible about cool jazz cats.

Am I being too harsh? Maybe. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood this time for a movie about empty conflict. I was, however, in the mood for a movie that made sense, and the locker room cruelty of Whiplash just didn’t make sense for me, at least at this point in my life. These two characters have no inner life. Their motivations are… childish, really. The drama itself is contrived. As a boxing match, Whiplash didn’t connect with me that way; I remember it connecting with me once, though. It also didn’t strike me as a particularly credible examination of an abusive relationship. The climax of the movie even suggests that, yes, emotional terror can make someone better at… improvisational boogie-woogie?

Whiplash has wannabe Glengarry Glen Ross energy, another movie about dudes abusing dudes. But the stakes are higher in David Mamet’s portrait of sweat-stained salesmen barking at each other. The losers in Glengarry Glen Ross better sell, or they’re going to get shit-canned. It’s not like Teller’s character’s hands are going to get broken with hammers like in the gangster movie Casino. I think the worst thing that can happen to him is that he has to find a new jazz band. And I’m pretty sure there is more than one jazz band in NYC? The stakes in Whiplash are small apples.

If the jazz world is super cutthroat, that’s not properly dramatized. I’d love to have seen that. I doubt the jazz scene is Game of Trombones, though. The guys I know who talk about Bird and Mingus and Coltrane all the time seem super nice.

But the driving theme of Whiplash has nothing to do with music or musicians. It has to do with male egos utterly detached from reality. Which is fine, but that theme should never be taken seriously. Have you ever seen a man so furious that he punches a wall? That shit is pure uncut comedy.

So Whiplash does not hold up. It doesn’t help that 2014 was a thousand internet years ago. At the time, I think, Chazelle thought he was exploring men behaving badly, but it was a superficial study. Weak, half-hearted. The young filmmaker was too fascinated by the dark power of emotional violence. Even Teller’s character is romantically written, a driven kid from a small family who wants to be big. Big! Big, I tell ya!

I don’t think all-consuming ambition is gender-specific, but men are obsessed with being the best at whatever is in front of them. Darts, farts, chugging beers. It’s part of our cultural training. Hormones help, but American boys are commanded to compete from the moment they stop sucking on Legos.

I think dreaming of being the GOAT is a very manly delusion. To be a man is to constantly prove your value, and society is very adamant about what that means: men achieve, they strive, they make money and compete, they win, at all costs. And if they can’t do that, instead of accepting failure, they act like total rage donkeys and deny, deny, deny.

There was a time, too, I wanted to be one of the greats, but I am not great at anything. I can nap almost anywhere—airports, buses, sitting on a folding chair during a middle-school recital. That’s a talent, but I wouldn’t say I’m great at dozing off. I would have settled for being great at anything, honestly. My accountant is great at finding deductions, and I envy him. I don’t even think I’m a great newsletter-writer-whatever-this-is. But this fantasy feeds the belief that men are supposed to be bosses, number ones, apex predator kings who scream and push other men towards excellence. It’s absurd.

The world of Whiplash suggests, somewhere, a veteran competitive eater who looks like JK Simmons is screaming at his mentor, who can’t suck the meat off hot wings fast enough. Right now, a buff wellness startup founder is berating a marketing associate for an underperforming Instagram post. Whiplash, but it’s Yoda telling Luke he’s a pussy.

New 150 Word Review: ‘Shiva, Baby’ (2021)

New 150 Word Review: ‘Michael Clayton’ (2007)

New 150 Word Review: ‘The Misfits’ (1961)

This 77-minute-long comedy is also a nail-biting thriller about a young college woman navigating the shiva of a distant relative attended by her smothering parents, an ex-girlfriend, a married man who pays her for sex, and a small army of weight-obsessed yentas. She’s trapped in a house full of emotional terrorists. It took me two hours to watch Shiva Baby because I kept pausing it so I could get up and walk around, breathe, and shake off the anxiety.

As Danielle, Rachel Sennott is awkward perfection. Is she likable? No. Am I likable? Not always. Her Danielle is a relatable mix of fragile and defiant, a woman torn between eating all the bagels and none of the bagels. Written and directed by Emma Seligman, Shiva, Baby is a claustrophobic cringefest that is almost unbearable until Seligman pulls off a surprise, warmhearted ending: the dead can’t forgive, but the living can.

Retro 150 Word Review: ‘Bottoms’ (2023)