March 2026 [16-22]
Kolya, Birdman, Moonlight, No Other Choice, Splitsville
- Kolya [1996] - 58
Winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Language [now called “International”] Film at the 69th [heh] Oscars, Kolya is a movie that leans so heavily on its historical context that it forgets to tell a compelling story along the way. Part 2002’s About a Boy and part 2006’s International Oscar winner, The Lives of Others, Kolya is about a serial bachelor cellist who gets saddled with his arranged marriage-for-citizenship bride’s son after she runs off to Germany from a 1988 Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, and you can probably guess the next several events from there until credits. This is one of those “too” movies for me. Too many plots, too little development of said plots, and too much reliance on outside knowledge rather than contextualization. I’m sure that, for either modern buffs, or in-the-know folk 1996 folk, there’s elements of this movie that will be obvious, compelling, or both, but as a mostly uninformed viewer in 2026, Kolya is twice as often narratively bereft as its purported genre of “comedy/drama” allows it to be funny or moving.
- Birdman [2014] - 88
With a crew of four writers, Birdman has a crew list that, at first blush, might look like a mess waiting to fall apart. Good thing we never judge anything at first blush… Winning the same number of Oscars as it has said writers [to include Best Picture] and nominated for an additional five, Birdman is an absolute feat of filmmaking, performance, and music. Michael Keaton, Edward Norton, Zach Galifianakis, Emma Stone, Andrea Riseborough… The list goes on, are all at career most-interesting-to-best, as director Alejandro G. Iñárritu stitches together a 2-hour oner that is simultaneously inspiring, enthralling, and exhausting all at once. Managing to make a film feel like a play [in a good way] is a very difficult task, and doing so by presenting the whole thing as a single take is nothing short of herculean. While not perfect [but what is], Birdman is a movie you should absolutely seek out if you’ve somehow forgotten to watch it for 12-years like I did.
- Moonlight [2016] - 78
Revisiting 2016’s Best Picture winner, Moonlight, I still feel similarly to how I remember feeling when I originally saw it in theaters: “Alright, I get it”. I appreciate a lot of the filmmaking Barry Jenkins has put on here to adapt Tarell Alvin McCraney's play, and find many of Moonlight’s images moving, serene, painful, and powerful, but I’m not sure it does enough with its overall narrative to engage me into understanding a world I’m neither a part of or necessarily adjacent to. Though everyone’s performances are captivating and worthy of award themselves, this is a story that’s so lived in, if you haven’t, I don’t think that it offers enough to make you feel like you have. It’s a weird criticism, but Moonlight’s authenticity almost works against it in some ways; Almost too real, making the characters too easy to disengage from. I don’t know, I can think of a number of reasons a story like this wouldn’t connect with me personally, but I do see and appreciate a lot of the artistry behind it either way.
- No Other Choice [2025] - 90
There were a few snubs at this years Oscars, but I don’t think anything was left behind quite as much as Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice. What the hell happened here? No Other Choice is such an obvious shoo-in for Director, Sound, Score, Editing, Picture, Cinematography, Screenplay, International, Performances… I am shocked that the smartest, meanest, and most clever screenplay I’ve seen in a while was completely ignored. This is a movie that you should not only make time to see, but one you should make time to see like… Right now. While I do think that No Other Choice suffers from things I find common across Korean cinema — it’s long at 2:19, there’s like 20 different plots, too much comedy for my tastes — my longtime friend put it best: “There was nothing in that story that didn't come back later or communicate something, and the resolution was bigger than just the character story; it was talking about so much more. The drama and the emotional stuff was super delicately balanced and not overbearing or too dramatic. The visuals themselves… Oh man. Fuck the Oscars.” #cinema
- Splitsville [2025] - 88
Now, coming off of my “too much comedy for my tastes” comment above, this is going to be a weird statement: Splitsville is the funniest goddamn thing I have seen in an incredibly long time and likely a top 20 film for my year. I put off watching this for a while because the genre, as Google depicts it, “romantic comedy” is so entirely unappealing to me that I’d actually almost deleted it from my list more than once. The other night, however, I decided to just go for it… And oh man am I glad I did. Speaking of Oscar snubs… Splitsville is a movie that should be getting recognized for incredible direction, some genuinely amazing cinematography and editing, and such clever music choices that I am both shocked and appalled to see it ignored by the big show. As mentioned above, I guess, “Fuck the Oscars”. While I have my criticisms of how this film handles its core concept and actually find it potentially a little problematic at times, it is, at the end of the day, a comedy and, if treated as such, my complaints are a desire for depth more than critical faults. This movie is funny, impressive, and worth your time in so so many ways.
