Category: movies

Read the credits after you watch a movie. Aren’t you amazed at how many people were paid to contribute to creating it? These are good times indeed.

Anastasia (1997)

According to Wikipedia, there was a 1956 movie based on a 1952 French play based on the idea that Anastasia survived. Also, the phenomenon of people claiming/pretending to be Anastasia is real, and the play is based on the most famous of these. (The story continues to evolve: a 2016 stage musical included some of the same songs and characters, but substituted or added others.)

The rags-to-riches plot of this 1997 movie makes it feel like a standard Cinderella tale, but now that I think about it, the story may be more like Pygmalion (or My Fair Lady): a man fabricates an identity for a woman, then falls in love with her. That arc fits better with the 50s versions, though: in the 90s cartoon, the woman really was a princess all along. (Edit: It’s not my imagination… again, according to Wikipedia, they actually considered adapting My Fair Lady and deliberately took elements of Pygmalion. But I noticed the similarity myself.)

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Tron: Ares (2025)

Welcome to a movie with no character arcs whatsoever! Sit back, relax, look at the pretty colors, and succumb to the nostalgia. (I hope you like Nine Inch Nails.)

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Now You See Me (trilogy)

The three Now You See Me movies are heist stories where the criminals in question are professional masters of deception—and possibly also of petty theft, burglary, and extortion. But as it turns out, the “Four Horsemen” are stealing for an arguably just cause, rather than personal gain, although of course their primary motivation seems to be that they really enjoy fooling people. After all, that’s why they’re magicians.

That’s why, at some level, I don’t like them. But I still like these movies. (Go figure.)

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The Odyssey (2026)

As we’ve established elsewhere, I don’t much like tricksters, and The Odyssey is the story of the trickster Odysseus. But I would much have preferred the actual story of the trickster Odysseus to whatever you want to say Christopher Nolan gave us instead.

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Through Rocks and Clouds (2024)

This movie, set in Peru and with mainly Quechua (not Spanish) dialog, reminded me of Mongolian Ping Pong (2005) because the pacing was slow, and both feature a young boy from a herding culture against the backdrop of an immense natural landscape. However, the relevant landscape in Mongolia was flat, and the relevant landscape in Peru was… not.

The boy, Feliciano, seems to spend all his time outside with his dog (Rambo), his own alpaca (Ronaldo), and a small herd of other alpacas. He loves soccer and hopes Peru can qualify for the World Cup. He breaks into a one-room schoolhouse where he used to go to school, but it seems nobody goes to school there now. There seems to have been a shift away from traditional herding culture; some of the townspeople have jobs related to the local mine, and one of them even has a shiny pickup truck. The mine seems to be polluting the lake, though, and that’s not the end of the townspeople’s problems. Meanwhile, there’s a kind of buffalo spirit watching over Feliciano…

Bambi (1942)

One of my favorite movies ever is Disney’s Lion King (1994). I know the music and the script inside out. So when I watched Bambi in 2021, and again when I watched it recently, I was struck by how similar Bambi is to The Lion King. Both movies follow a princely main character through the major stages of his life.

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Toy Story 5 (2026)

The devices. They’re everywhere. Too much of a good thing isn’t a good thing. We all need creativity and imagination, our kids most especially. Are we losing it? Yeah, apparently so. Do not go gentle into that good night, says Pixar!

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The BBC Jane Austen Collection (1972–1995)

Between June 2024 and June 2026, I watched all six of the Jane Austen adaptations in this particular box set, which includes:

  • Emma (1972)
  • Sense and Sensibility (1981)
  • Mansfield Park (1983)
  • Northanger Abbey (1987)
  • Pride and Prejudice (1995)
  • Persuasion (1995)

Most of these adaptations struck me as boring, fussy and strident like a stage performance, or terribly incomplete.

More on various other adaptations below.

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Gattaca (1997)

The movie Gattaca combines many things successfully. For one thing, visually, it is a retrostylized future with buildings, clothes, and cars designed to look like those of the past. For another, the society has several types of advanced technology: rocket science, embryology, DNA forensics, and electric cars, which, well, we have too, just not as good as theirs.

But do we want biotech as good as theirs? I mean, look what they did with it: Gattaca depicts a dystopia where people with unfavorable “in-valid” DNA sequences are consistently excluded from social and career opportunities.

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Thank You For Banking with Us (2024)

When I’m on a long flight, I try to watch a movie or two from the entertainment system that I never would have heard of any other way, and this Palestinian black comedy is one example.

“When their father passes away leaving a large sum of money in the bank, two sisters put their differences aside and join forces against Sharia law, according to which their brother has the right to take double what they are entitled to.”

If you think it’s hard being a woman in general, try being a woman in Palestine… in this depiction, all the family and economic relationships are tilted against the women. The ambulance staff at first even refuse to state whether their father, who is lying in bed unresponsive, has died because no other male is present. I mean it’s like, a woman is still an adult, right?

In case you’re curious, the two sisters do manage to claim the inheritance for themselves; that’s not really a spoiler because it very much matters for the overall effect of the film how they try to manage it, and how they succeed… Do they enlist the help of someone’s boyfriend, husband, or son? Do they impersonate their dead father, or their undeserving distant brother, or some other male? Do they march into the bank with masks and a stolen gun and threaten the bank teller? Do they launch a protest campaign and achieve policy change? Do they just walk up to a series of ATMs and take out a thousand dollars 150 times over the course of a week?