First Cow. A decidedly unconventional Western story (welcome to the multicultural 19th-century Oregon Territory!), an anti-capitalist story, a story of simple survival and small pleasures. I would have liked the film to have slightly more momentum, but the score and the scenery, as the the movie's quiet and small--but for all that, emotionally enormous--tragedy unfolds, was frequently captivating nonetheless. I love that so much was left to the viewer, and not just in the ending; even without having read the book, you can tell this is a deeply literate adaption, not allowing the story-telling tricks of the cinema to tell more of a story than is on the page.
Godzilla: Minus One. Is it an apology for World War II? A revisionist history? A what-if fantasy? Whatever it was, the way this superb, hammy, utterly melodramatic movie leaned hard into updating and re-imagining the trauma and guilt and horror of WWII for the Japanese people, with token narrative throw-aways to somehow contextualize the whole thing as taking place in the midst of MacArthur's occupation of Japan and the beginnings of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, was simply marvelous. Put yourself in mind of the 1954 original, with its sadness and earnestness, and the desperate, romantic hopefulness of this version will seem well-earned. Godzilla always was, and always will be, best when considered incomprehensible enormity, something that makes no sense on its own terms but something that human science and human sacrifice can succeed against, so long as all the usual bastards don't get in the way.
Killers of the Flower Moon. A tremendous movie, one that, in my opinion, makes entirely justified use of its massive running time; with only one partial exception (the long burn scene at the Hale ranch), I don't think I was aware of the passage of time all the way through. Scorsese's direction of the film is brilliant; completely aside from visually arresting costuming, set design, and cinematography, he oversaw the creation of a film that is not structured like, and doesn't play out like, a horror film, and yet for a good two hours of its running time, between its musical cues and staging, it absolutely felt like a horror film, even while also being captivating Western and tragic study of evil, endurance, and plain gross capitalist stupidity. A friend and I spent 40 minutes talking about the movie afterwards in an empty, post-midnight parking lot, deconstructing it all (including the audacious, but in retrospect I think defensible, ending), and we could have stayed longer. I was a big fan of The Irishman, Scorsese's other recent 3+ hour movie, but this is an even greater accomplishment in almost every way.
Sound of Metal. An engrossing, fascinating, completely believable story of a musician losing his hearing. The final sequence of the movie, after our main character leaves the home for the deaf and attempts to reunite with his girlfriend, seemed slightly less organic, slightly more rushed to hit all the required story-telling beats than everything that came before, in which every step both logically followed what came before and yet was a surprise--kind of like life! But overall, the whole thing was quite wonderful, deeply honest and, as a matter of sound editing, brilliantly creative in its depiction of the world of the deaf. A must see.
