Calling this The Substance for men is so reductive and unfunny. I related to that film a lot for its discourse on split identity, which I related to not so much on the basis of ageism or sexism but about masking my neurodivergence. This film is so much more explicit about this and verbalizes a dilemma that I've been dealing with a lot recently: how am I supposed to love myself if the world expects me to be ashamed of…

Genuinely, I have never felt more autistic while watching a movie than when watching this in a theater full of people laughing at seemingly random intervals. Character enters a scene, laughter. Hard cut to a different character with an entirely neutral expression, laughter. Two characters sharing a painful awkward silence, laughter. Totally obnoxious and just baffling because I didn't really find this funny at all. It's a fatally straightforward movie, frustratingly vague about the inner lives of its characters, which…

This is the 100th movie I've logged this year. Figures.

I really don't get it. Solid performances and a really great score, but the writing was just...ugh. It was anticlimactic and it felt too short. I'm beginning to think Paul Thomas Anderson is one of those directors that just doesn't understand how to write women. What is Emily Watson's character if not "woman who is attracted to main character"? Why does she like him? What do they have in common?…

It's a gay age gap movie that actually interrogates what that means. There's an amazing cut in this movie where it moves from Baby's friends voguing in the park (young, Black, trans or gender nonconforming) to a group of men dancing at a nightclub (old, white, relatively normative). The juxtaposition is so clear and fascinating, particularly where it comes to age. Baby has a somewhat infuriating conversation with an older partner at one point where the partner is completely disconnected…