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A candy-coated, video game culture fever dream. You just don’t see productions like this anymore. Pyrotechnics up the wazoo. Bleeding-heart earnestness mixed with high camp. The Last of Us Season 2 found dead on arrival in 1994.

I’m a simple man: I miss 90-minute action movies shot on film, with cool fight choreography that isn’t muddied in the edit.

I think there are only four shots in this movie that are properly lit. Many of Disney’s worst tendencies—namely, letting nostalgia and fan service drive the writing—are on full display here. It might be the most “directed-by-committee” film of all time.

To me, this is essentially the first Star Wars prequel—the moment when Lucas, the once-humble and uncertain visionary, begins to be overtaken by an uncompromising egotism that’s both daring and misguided. The storytelling choices range from charmingly goofy (a tribe of teddy bears being the key to foiling the Emperor’s plans) to outright disturbing (rewriting Leia to be Luke’s sister). Even as a film more flawed than Empire or A New Hope, Return of the Jedi remains an undeniable special effects masterpiece—and it’s still the best-looking Star Wars movie not named The Empire Strikes Back. It’s easy to take that for granted, even when the storytelling doesn’t always pay off. Also, the speeder bike sequence is still my favorite action scene in the entire saga.

It's still the artistic peak of both Star Wars and the sci-fi fantasy genre in film. It will never be this good again.

That said, the kiss between Luke and Leia is more shocking than anything in the prequels.

I think I took for granted that this is the greatest special effects masterpiece in the history of film. George Lucas invented a new way of thinking about movies, creating a means to disappear into another world with its own lore and metaphysics. The choices in set design, costumes, and editing techniques are all so inspired. There's so much creativity and imagination in every frame that it's still mind-boggling. It’s the ultimate movie.

The Phantom Menace is the CGI blockbuster spectacle, Attack of the Clones is the GameCube video game, and Revenge of the Sith is the full-on descent into hell—a relentless depiction of fascist takeover, played to the ecstatic grandeur of John Williams’ score. It’s absolutely insane that this was billed as a children’s movie. 

For the longest time, I thought the final fight between Anakin and Obi-Wan was self-indulgent and overlong, but now I think it’s high space opera. The stilted dialogue and George Lucas’s obsession with green screens no longer bother me like they used to. The rough edges make it feel more like the opus of one man’s uncompromising vision.

While The Phantom Menace is George Lucas aiming to create a groundbreaking CGI franchise blockbuster, Attack of the Clones finds him going all-in on the question: "What if you green-screened an entire movie?" Watching it is like observing a mad scientist at work—some experiments explode, others succeed gloriously. It’s a warning against fascism, an extended GameCube cutscene, and an epic space opera all at once. A gorgeous tribute to John Ford’s The Searchers can coexist in the same film as Yoda turning into a Mortal Kombat character. The love story is both unbelievably contrived and achingly poetic. There are images both beautiful and hideous. I hate it—and I love it.

This is essentially George Lucas boldly—and clumsily—inventing the modern CGI blockbuster in real time. It’s truly the product of a deranged visionary who ionately believes in the power of new technology. With that energy, you get abominations like Jar Jar Binks, but you also get two or three of the greatest and most influential action set pieces of the past 30 years. I'm ready to stop worrying and embrace it, flaws and all.

The way Jackie Chan and Maggie Cheung look at each other in this—Wong Kar-Wai could never.

I don't think anyone on the planet understands what the movies are about better than Jackie Chan.

A lot of people toss around names like James Cameron and John McTiernan when identifying the best action filmmaker of the 1980s, and honestly, I don't know why there's even a debate when Jackie Chan exists. Someone should send a copy of this to Buster Keaton in the afterlife for his enjoyment.

I felt like watching a dumb comedy, and this is certainly one of those. It got the job done.

This is very much a film that could only have been made in the early 1970s. The last 25 minutes consist of some of the most iconic images you've ever seen. Cinema would not be the same without Bruce Lee.

While not nearly as shocking, subversive, or horrifying as the advertising suggests, the film mostly makes up for it with its dark humor and a powerhouse performance from Sophie Thatcher. I had a good time with this one.

A lot of people call Cronenberg the king of body horror, but what if I told you he’s also a top five psychological horror director?

I loved the Gesaffelstein needle drops.

Call me old school, but I really think we need to return to weighty, grounded violence using real squibs. This muddy, fake, overly choreographed digital slop has run its course.

I don’t understand this movie. I also perfectly understand it. Two things can be true at the same time. 

I love and appreciate PTA for spending the goodwill he amassed from There Will Be Blood and The Master to make one dedicated to the hippies and stoners of the world.

Movie violence at its finest, showcasing the best guns and gore the industry has to offer. If it were made today, it would be nearly twice as long, diluted with muddy digital gore and cgi muzzle flashes, and devoid of any visual style. We have to go back.

I was afraid my first viewing was a fluke and that I was just in a good mood. Alas, it was just as good the second time. There are 17,000 parallel universes out there where this was a disaster, but luckily, we landed in a rare timeline where it works spectacularly.

My review would just be a series of gushing hyperboles, so I’m going to bow out of reviewing this one.

This is the work of a guy who's obsessed with Nick Cave and Columbo, and he's on a mission to make sure the whole world knows it.

“You’ve made a career out of bodies.”

A messy conspiracy thriller where the messiness is a feature, not a flaw, The Shrouds is bound to alienate viewers who take what’s on-screen too literally. It’s a self-reflexive work that isn’t explicitly about the conspiracy or the plot, but rather about how conspiracy itself can be used as a means of coping with grief—specifically, the real-life grief of David Cronenberg as he watched his wife of nearly 40 years away. The slow, inevitable encroachment of modern technology permeates both the film and the grieving process, rendering loss as alien and disorienting as the television screen in Videodrome.

And ultimately, this is a film about Cronenberg himself—down to the black suit with white tennis shoes, his unapologetic Tesla fetish, and his sensual love for the body. It’s an honest look at where Cronenberg is in his life.

That’s the point a lot of people are missing: Cronenberg’s last two films, Crimes of the Future and The Shrouds, form a spiritual duology about David Cronenberg. Watching either film in a vacuum, without the added context of his life, his persona, his themes, and his body of work, is going to yield inadequate results. The beauty of Crimes of the Future lies in seeing Cronenberg revisit the themes he’s known for and reconfigure them for the 21st century—especially in his newfound optimism about our capacity to transform and evolve. The Shrouds operates on the other end of the spectrum: it’s Cronenberg’s pain as he navigates a way forward without his wife. If Crimes of the Future is about Cronenberg’s art, then The Shrouds is about Cronenberg’s life.

It’s also a film about being haunted by your loved one long after they’re gone. Cronenberg, through his proxy Karsh, searches for reasons why his wife died, but he’s also seeing her everywhere he looks. She takes many forms throughout the film—in virtual space, in doppelgängers, in dreams—and the conspiracy at the center dovetails poignantly with the theme of searching. The film is richly layered in how it uses genre and plot mechanics as thematic manifestations of the grieving process.

I’ve seen The Shrouds a few times now, and with each viewing I find a new angle to ire. It balances tones of humor, sorrow, detachment, transcendence, and menace in a way only Cronenberg could pull off. It’s a film where the off-putting camp of a koala bear avatar of your dead wife (yes, you read that right) can exist alongside aching nightmares of helplessly watching your wife’s body succumb to terminal illness. It’s no wonder the film’s reception has been so divisive; a Cronenberg film hasn’t felt this unconventional, strange, thorny, and complicated since Crash.

I watched The Shrouds in the same year as David Lynch’s death, and its cosmic symbolism didn’t escape me. The Shrouds functions as a funeral rite for the kind of maverick cinema I most associate with the two Davids. They are my two favorite directors, and each work they made offered me a path forward for the possibilities of North American cinema—something none of their contemporaries truly accomplished. I’m saddened that The Shrouds might mark the end of the journey, but its release made me realize that these two masters existed, and they made art in my lifetime.

I lived when they lived.

I’ll see them wherever I go.

John Carpenter’s Men in Black

If you told me the celluloid was made of fire, I would believe you.

Ooof, hardest I’ve cried watching a movie in a couple years.

It’s hard not to quietly weep during this one.

Film noir stripped down to its bare, nightmarish essence. This isn’t about plot or character development—this is about Lou Reed tearing through the speakers as light shimmers on a luminous femme fatale. Pure light and sound, completely unhampered by the laws of filmmaking—where some of the most horrifying moments imaginable are followed by Gary Busey and Richard Pryor rolling onto the set to throw the tone off balance all over again. I probably would’ve hated it too if I’d seen it in the ’90s.

The greatest film ever made about the perception of reality. The final scene is so genuinely painful and breathtaking every time. I’m absolutely speechless. There are days when I think this might be my favorite film.

Truly a one-of-a-kind slice of hard ’80s science fiction—we're never going to get something like this again. It brims with ideas that remain eerily prescient, including a fully articulated manifesto on how media shapes our reality, all filtered through some of the most unsettling imagery ever committed to film. Yet Cronenberg offsets the horror with a lo-fi camp aesthetic that could only have emerged from its time, crafting a vibe unmistakably his own. Though he has no shortage of (often brilliant) imitators, none have managed to replicate the rich, volatile cocktail of tones that define his best films. Videodrome is one of them.

I can see why so many people love this—for the Possession-infused performances, capital-C cinephilia, and gnarly feel-bad vibes alone. But as someone who loves dance and rave culture and has found a lot of therapy and joy in it, I found this completely full of shit. The film’s worldview is far more reactionary and conservative than it pretends to be. The EDM community deserves better than this.

One of the most striking depictions of depression I’ve seen, capturing even the soul-crushing emptiness of all-inclusive resorts.

I don’t think this movie gets enough credit for inventing an entire visual language for what it’s going for.

An endlessly rewatchable experimental film starring two beautiful women, loaded with sexual tension and the most stunning close-ups you’ve ever seen, and open to 70 different interpretations—all while barely hitting 80 minutes. We used to make real movies!