Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2026.07

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. The Magnificent Seven (2016) — 7/10
2. Dune: Part Two (2024) — 7/10
3. The Suicide Squad (2021) — 7/10
4. Rick and Morty S08 (2026) — 8/10
5. Perspolis (2007) — 8/10
6. The Witch (2015) — 7/10
7. Your Friend, Nate Bargatze (2024) — 8/10
8. Phantom Thread (2017) — 8/10
9. War Dogs (2016) — 8/10
10. Bon Tschuur Ticino (2023) — 8/10

The Magnificent Seven (2016) — 7/10

The first act was goddamned awful. It was just an over-the-top slaughter meant to hammer home to us how bad Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard) is. He and his men are pure evil. They slaughter civilians in cold blood in the middle of their town for no reason at all. It is just so heavy-handed that I was kind of embarrassed for everyone involved. I’ve seen so much better ways of doing this. This is like showing the alien monster in the first 30 seconds, in full daylight. They could have built up the tension of the evil of Bogue through absence. They chose not to.

This is Emma Cullen’s (Haley Bennett) origin story: Bogue kills her husband right in front of her. She heads out to gather up men who can defend her town. She takes all of the town’s gold with her.

Act two is fun as hell. We get to meet the titular Seven as they’re gathered Chisholm (Denzel Washington) is a warrant officer, replete with all of Denzel’s cool. He first meets Josh Faraday (Chris Pratt), a drunkard, card sharp, and sharpshooter. Faraday wants his horse back and can’t afford it, so he hires himself out to Chisolm. He also just seems to be having fun with life.

Chisholm gets the Mexican Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) to join, offering not to take the bounty from his head but to promise that he won’t be trying to collect it. At the same time, Faraday meets and recruits Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke), who comes with Billy Rocks (Lee Byung-hun), who is a deadly shot but is even deadlier with throwing knives. We’re up to five. They head into the hills to find the famed injun-killer Jack Horne (Vincent D’Onofrio), who is deadly with a thrown hatchet (or tomahawk). Their final recruit is Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier), a lone Comanche whose bow and arrow is incredible.

With the gang all together, they head to rescue the town. They take out the part of Bogue’s army that he’s left behind and they take the town back. The townsfolk are grateful and happy, even though they know that the ill wind of Bogue’s wrath will fall on the them soon enough. The Seven prepare the townsfolk as well as they can, but it’s a Sisyphean challenge. They ask which member had taken part in “the War of Northern Aggression,” which is a term I’d not heard in a long time.

Goodnight loses faith and abandons the others in the middle of the night. Billy has stuck around, though. The others consider absconding but decide to see it through. Emma offers to take Goodnight’s place.

I guess that’s the third act? Or was that all act two? At any rate, the last act is Bogue returning to the town with his army. Oh, hey, look, the TNT-filled trenches remind me of Rambo: Last Blood. There really is nothing new under the sun.

Chisolm does a lot of trick-riding with his beautiful horse. They are all unerring shots. Billy dances in the open, untouchable, deadly. Vincent D’Onofrio is wonderful as his Jack Horne strides corpulently through the thick smoke, “Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me,” all the while hacking away with his blood-soaked hatchet.

Bogue’s army is seemingly endless. No matter how many go down, more appear. The townspeople put up a good fight. Faraday is hit. Vasquez comes to the rescue of his “güero”, which I learned is the Spanish word Güero, which is “[o]ften used as a term of endearment, or an informal way of saying “whitey” in Spanish,” and seems to be friendlier than “gringo.”

Chisholm is a force of nature, as are they all, really.

Goodnight is back, with his unerring aim and news that they have a gatling gun. Bogue finishes loading his gatling gun and it takes out many townspeople but none of our heroes. It is unclear how it would have so much effect from so far outside of town but OK. Like, it is way the fuck outside of town and it seems to have unerring aim inside buildings. On the other hand, Faraday is remarkably agile considering he’s been gutshot, so it’s unreal on both sides.

Horne faces off with the obviously evil and deeply corrupted injun Denali (Jonathan Joss) who fights for Bogue (tribe unknown), “We are giants put on his Earth to rid it of evil and to keep all that is good.” Even though he’s starting to look like a pincushion, he presses forward, then makes his peace with his God and dies.

While Bogue prepares the gatling gun for another round, Emma faces off against Denali and is rescued by Red Harvest, who easily dispatches Denali, caling him “a disgrace” for fighting with Bogue. Goodnight and Billy are in the clock tower, picking off some of the dregs of Bogue’s men.

“Goodnight: This reminds me of what my Daddy used to say.
Billy: What’s that? [rasping a bit from his upper-chest wound]
Goodnight: [hesitates, as if remembering] … Well, maybe daddy used to say a lot of things.
[Both cackle madly.]”

Chisholm and Faraday break cover, with Goodnight and Billy providing cover. Faraday makes a break for the gatling gun. They manage to kill all of his pursuers but the gatling takes them out. Faraday is in the clear, riding alone toward Bogue. He’s hit, taking many of them with him. He drops off the horse. He keeps coming, though they keep hitting him. He pops a cigarette in his mouth. One of the evil men gives him a light. He tips forward before the man can kill him, then pops back up to drop a stick of lit dynamite onto the gatling gun, killing them all.

Bogue lives, though, and enters town, seemingly unafraid. Four of the seven are dead, by my count. Bogue sends his men in to get Chisholm. They fail. It’s Bogue versus Chisholm. Sarsgard is a ludicrous emoter. Like there’s no scenery left because he done chewed it all up. Chisholm shoots Bogue’s gun out of his hand. “Go on. Pick it up. Pick it up!” He shoots him in the back of the leg as he tries to flee. Bogue crawls into a church. Chisholm pursues, then tells him the story of how they’d met before. (Bogue killed his wife, I think? I dunno. Something like that.) But he’s grandstanding too much and Bogue almost gets the drop on him with a pea-shooter in his boot. Emma shoots him dead.

Vasquez and Red Harvest reappear with several horses. Along with Chisholm, they are all that remains of the original seven. There is a beautiful shot of them riding out of town, across a windblown prairie toward a bluff drenched in late-afternoon sun.

I can’t help but be reminded of Silverado and High Plains Drifter, just as two examples of films I’ve recently seen that had nearly the same plot.

It’s a decent movie, even though it’s a little long. The acting is quite good and the script gives the heroes room to shine. The beginning, as noted, was a stupid catastrophe. Shorten it to 90 minutes and you’ve got a great film.

Dune: Part Two (2024) — 7/10

We are back on Arrakis, back in the northern desert with Paul (Timothée Chalamet), Jessica Atreides (Rebecca Ferguson) as well as Paul’s Fremen lover Chani (Zendaya) and tribal leader Stilgar (Javier Bardem), who is more than starting to believe the Paul is the Lisan Al’Gaib.

It’s completely understandable but the focus on keeping the principle characters unmasked is often quite jarring, especially when you consider the environment. The Harkonnen soldiers are uniformly well-equipped and covered. In another scene, Jessica is shown to be unable to control her morning sickness, which is completely unbelievable, as she is a Bene Gesserit who has inviolable control of her body. Neither would she have cried in the desert because she knows that the Fremen consider water too precious to waste on tears.

The Fremen induct Jessica as their new Reverend Mother. The ritual involves drinking the Water of Life, which is a blue fluid with incredible psychoactive properties produced by a Shai Hulud grub when it drowns. It is poisonous to humans and can only be consumed by one, like Jessica, with such control over her body that she can convert the poison back to harmless water. The ritual awakens her unborn daughter Alia, with whom she begins to converse.

Paul goes through several rituals that bring him closer to becoming a Fremen, capped with him calling and riding the biggest goddamned sandworm that anyone has ever seen. He is the Lisan Al-Gaib. Under Paul Muad’dib’s and Stilgar’s leadership, the Fremen—spearheaded by Chani’s elite guard of Fedeykin—put a huge dent into the Harkonnens’ spice-mining operations.

In response, Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) replaces his vicious but ineffectual nephew Rabban (Dave Bautista) with an even more vicious nephew Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), who is smooth-shaven over his entire head, giving him an extremely alien and offputting appearance. Though Jessica claims that she’s managed a miracle—having produced the Kwisatz Haderach in Paul, a generation earlier than the Bene Gesserit had meticulously planned—the Bene Gesserit keep all the angles covered, and send Lady Margot Fenring (Léa Seydoux) to determine whether Feyd-Rautha might be the Kwisatz instead.

Like, seriously? There’s no way. I don’t remember that from the book; the Bene Gesserit wouldn’t have been guessing who it is. They were actually desperate because the bloodline had been thrown into disarray by Jessica; they wouldn’t have just started guessing and hoping. That’s not how they roll.

Reverend Mother Jessica travels south on wormback with some other Fremen to set up base there. Meanwhile Paul reconnects with Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), who has survived as a smuggler, profiting massively from the upswing in black-market spice trade resulting from the Fremen attacks. Feyd-Rautha organizes an attack on Seitch Tabr. Stilgar survives but many do not.

Paul and the others travel South, into the “impenetrable” desert, joining Jessica at an enormous stronghold. Paul drinks from the water of life—the first man to do so and live—cementing people’s belief that he is the Kwisatz Haderach. After recovering, Paul demonstrates his power and ability to lead at a high council of the Fremen

The emperor and all of the Great Houses descend upon Arrakis, with the emperor landing his Sardaukar army and preparing to take Arrakis back from the Fremen. They prepare a battle plan that looks so much like what Iran must have looked like when planning for the U.S./Israeli attack. The Emperor and his Sardaukar look imdomitable—until they are very much not.

The Fremen beat the Emperor six ways to Sunday, with the Fremen Fedeykin tearing through the much-feared Sardaukar like tissue paper. Gurney easily kills Rabban, while Paul personally kills the Baron. He holds back the Great Houses from attacking from space by threatening to destroy all of the spice fields on Arrakis with the Atreides family’s atomic weapons.

Paul defeats Feyd-Rautha in single combat, winning the empire, I guess? The houses don’t accept this, so the Fremen, who are pretty awesome at home, in the sand, get into spaceships and take the fight to them, in space? Like, does that make sense? Oh, yeah, Paul also gets to marry Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh). Chani leaves in a huff on a sandworm, which is just ridiculous.

This film is a great watch right now, as we end the fourth week of the slow-motion collapse of the U.S. empire as it dashes itself upon the shores of seemingly impregnable Iran. The level of miscalculation and subsequent capitulation in reality and in the film is very similar.

The Suicide Squad (2021) — 7/10

I hadn’t seen this before but I had watched the nearly identically named Suicide Squad in 2018.

Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) runs the Suicide Squad. She is a bitch on wheels. She works for the government in a shadowy organization that isn’t the CIA but is very much like the CIA. The nation of Corto Maltese has overthrown its U.S.-imposed regime and Amanda is charged with righting that terrible, terrible wrong. More specifically, they must destroy the scientific-research laboratory called Jötunheim, which would be, like, a weird name for a laboratory in South America if you didn’t know that we are all still making jokes about the Nazis having fled to and flourished to several countries on that continent after their ignominious defeat.

Anyway, the initial strike team of dipshits includes Savant (Michael Rooker), T.D.K. (Nathan Fillion), and Blackguard (Pete Davidson). They are all slaughtered nearly immediately upon making landfall, because they are truly terrible at their jobs. Just laughably bad. Their performance in the short-lived battle explains why they are called the Suicide Squad. Only Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) and Colonel Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) survive.

A second team that is somewhat less suicidal and comprises Bloodsport (Idris Elba), Peacemaker (John Cena), King Shark (Sylvester Stallone), Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), and Ratcatcher (Daniela Melchior). Here’s a quick rundown of the powers, I guess, because maybe it will be important:

• Peacemaker is a deadly shot and a hardcore jingoist with a very U.S.-American definition of “peace”.

• Bloodsport is also a deadly shot, a bit egocentric, but not nearly the asshole that Peacemaker is. He is a bit more philosophical than the others.

  “I was happy, floating, staring at the stars.”

• Rick Flag is strong, fit, and well-trained in hand-to-hand combat, with an affinity for weapons but doesn’t otherwise seem to have any superpowers.
• King Shark is superhumanly strong and nearly impervious to harm, able to bounce back from what appear to be mortal injuries.
• Polka-Dot Man barfs up energy dots whose power increases with his anger. His power scales up when the plot demands it.
• Ratcatcher commands an army of rats, which the plot also demands is a power that scales to being able to tackle interdimensional beings.
• Harley Quinn is a madwoman who is not only extremely fit, fast, and highly skilled in hand-to-hand combat but also seems to be able to make a weapon out of anything and never seems to get tired.

After a brief love affair, Harley Quinn murders Presidente General Silvio Luna (Juan Diego Botto). A lot of other stuff happens in their quest to destroy Jötunheim, which they eventually do in spectacular fashion. The main reason the lab existed was to house Starro the Conqueror, an extraterrestrial (-dimensional?) being that looks like a giant starfish. It escapes and grows and zombifies people with its mini-starfish-adherents and just generally causes chaos in the capital city of a country poor enough that it probably didn’t need the extra hassle of having its main center of commerce flattened to the ground by an organization that will deny that it had ever been there.

This is a very cleverly funny and lovingly filmed movie. The titles are cute, especially the one that spells Jötunheim with various jutting bits on top of the building. The practical effects are quite good as well, especially in the lab below-ground at Jötunheim..

There were some nice cinematic choises, like the cool fight that starts off filmed as a reflection in Peacemaker’s helmet. Or the end was also interesting, with Peacemaker taking out Colonel Rick Flag with a piece of bath tile that he jams through his heart.

The wackiness kept ramping up but it honestly remained relatively coherent. I’d watch it again.

Rick and Morty S08 (2026) — 8/10

I started watching this series in 2017, four years after the first season aired. I’ve written reviews of all of the seasons, which seems a little obsessive but that’s kind of my thing, I guess.

• 2017 (9/10): S01 & S02
• 2017 (10/10): S03
• 2021 (10/10): S04
• 2022 (10/10): S05
• 2022 (8/10): S06
• 2024 (8/10): S07

1. The Summer of All Fears starts with Summer and Morty trapped in a world where everything is based on phone chargers because Rick has put them into a matrix as punishment for having failed to return a phone charger. They spend decades there, growing strong, both mentally and physically. They try to take revenge on Rick and, while it initially works—and he is proud of them—he eventually turns the tables and puts them in their place.
2. Valkyrick is a complicated Rick & Space Beth joint. She’s in some sort of group of superheroes and gets kicked out but is reinstated when she and Rick save the galaxy from gross, super-soldier insects. It’s better than I’ve made it sound but it’s not in the top 1/3 of episodes.
3. The Rick, The Mort & The Ugly is a classic Rick & Morty joint, with a lot of clones and alternate timelines, where some of the clones are trying to rebuild the Citadel. So many western tropes.
4. Just when I thought that they’d gotten rid of him comes The Last Temptation of Jerry, which is a big-time Jerry episode. He kills the Easter Bunny and there turns out to have been a curse in which whoever kills the Easter Bunny becomes the Easter Bunny because the Easter Bunny is actually an alien that generates a ton of pheromones and causes huge orgies and overpopulation, etc. etc. It doesn’t stay that way, of course, because they manage to cure Jerry—though only after everyone else in the family briefly becomes the Easter Bunny.
5. Cryo Mort a Rickver has Rick and Morty in space, “scavenging”. It’s in quotes because this is Rick and scavenging means stealing whatever isn’t nailed down. It’s piracy. Rick gets away with it because he’s the smartest with the best tech. The ship that they board ends up having two groups: the “Takeys” and the “Makeys” and its kind of about socialism vs. libertarianism. No-one ends up getting the treasure because, let’s face it, everyone’s an asshole and no-one deserves it. The end.
6. The Curicksous Case of Bethjamin Button is a Beth and Space Beth joint, where they use a de-aging machine to turn themselves into evil little 10-year-old girls. Rick, Morty, Summer, and Jerry are at a theme park called “Earth Park,” which is cheesy and boring but that’s only because the older, much-more dangerous version was closed down. But Rick frees the original proprietor, who unleashes an army of mutants on the new version of the park. The girls use the aging machine on Rick to super-age him and almost kill him, for which he’s super-proud of them.
7. Ricker than Fiction is a metaphor about making movies in Hollywood these days. The family’s at home watching installment number umpteen of a movie franchise that’s gotten far too long in the tooth. Rick and Morty steal the script for the next installment from James Gunn, and feed it to the “Movie-lizer” after making a few hasty edits. This goes predictably sideways, and they’re sucked into the machine and forced to act their way to a proper ending, … um … Jumanji-style. Jerry—of all people—comes to the rescue.
8. Nomortland is a Jerry joint, with more Jerries than you can count strewn across a multiverse created by the detritus of Rick’s wormholes. All’s well that ends well.
9. Morty Daddy is a story involving Morty’s shitty son and a bunch of pre-cogs that run a restaurant without menus but that Summer somehow ends up being disappointed in anyway. So they kidnap a pre-cog or two and there’s also something about saving the world of Garbtopia, which is a dimensional warp where Rick throws everything he doesn’t need anymore.
10. Hot Rick is a story of closure for Rick as the season finale. He’s still held back from moving on with his life by memories of his dead wife Diane. She’s gone for good as she’s been eradicated from every possible reality in the multiverse. His memories of her are all she has. There is a lot of transferring of memories and personae from Rick to Jerry to Beth and on and on. Rick ends up freeing both Memory Diane and Memory Rick so that they can live happily ever … and Rick can move on, whatever that means for someone like Rick Sanchez.

Perspolis (2007) — 8/10

Marjane (Chiara Mastroianni) is at the Orly airport, preparing to return to Iran for the first time after a long absence. Most of the film takes place as a flashback, starting from just before the 1979 revolution that deposed the tyrannical Shah Pahlavi and his notorious Savak secret police. Marjane is old enough to have the revolutionary spirit but too young to attend the rallies. Several of her family members bring back news from the front lines, though. Some, like her uncle Anouche (François Jerosme), serve time in prison for thoughtcrime.

What follows is, unfortunately, not much better, with the revolutionary Islamic forces quickly devolving from a people’s revolution to an oppressive regime, with an emphasis on curtailing rights and privileges for women, particularly in how they are required to dress and act (“modestly,” of course, so as not to arouse the baser instincts of men, helpless before their biology).

With the U.S.-funded, -armed, and -encouraged attack by Iraq on Iran in 1980—not even a year after the revolution—Iran’s government descends even further into authoritarianism, riding the wave of national fervor engendered by a desire to expel the invader to clamp down even more on people’s private lives. For Marjane’s family, there is little difference between the Savak of the Shah and the police of the revolution.

An uncle takes ill and must fly to England for surgery that is not available in Iran, but the government denies him egress. Marjane meets and learns of others involved in communist agitation or in other forms of resistance. By the end of this part of the flashback, everyone is gone, either having succumbed to illness, having fled, or having been executed for thoughtcrime.

Marjane grows into a Western-leaning young lady, chafing at the headscarf, listening to black-market heavy-metal music, and being a contrarian at school. The latter gets her expelled and her parents—la Mère (Catherine Deneuve) and la Père (Simon Abkarian)—ship her off to a French boarding school in Vienna, using the fake passport she’d obtained earlier. She doesn’t fit in there either, moving through a boarding house run by Catholic nuns, and ends up renting a room from the odd Frau Schloss.

The semi-stability she “enjoys” is ephemeral. A seemingly nice boyfriend Markus ends up cheating on her in their own bed, and Frau Schloss spuriously accuses Marjane of stealing from her. She’s on her own again, in Vienna, a city where she barely speaks the language, though she is fluent in Farsi and French, and can speak English quite well. Lacking any means of support or a job, she ends up living on the streets for months, not only contracting bronchitis but also falling prey to a group of opportunistic men at least once (though this is only very vaguely hinted at with a second or two of animation).

She awakens in a hospital and calls her family in Iran. After eight years, the Iraqi attack on Iran has ended with Iran having repulsed the invader. Marjane’s family welcomes her back, asking few questions, though they see that her life abroad had not been easy. Even back in Iran, she remains depressed and attempts suicide. This low jolts her to a renewed lust for life. She returns to university and begins dating Reza, whom she ends up marrying, though only briefly.

She continues to agitate against the unfair treatment of women, incurring fines for herself and her family. The police raid an illegal party and detain her, along with the other women. The men flee across the rooftops, with one of them, Nima, falling to his death when he fails to make the leap between two buildings. At one point, she lies about a man ogling her to avoid being detained by police. Her grandmother is disappointed by her perfidy, telling her that, if nothing else, she should retain her integrity—“do not lie to protect yourself at others’ expense.”

Marjane decides to leave again; Iran cannot be saved from itself. Her mother encourages her, going so far as to forbid her from ever returning to that dark place. Her grandmother dies soon after she leaves.

We finally exit the flashbacks and return to Marjane at Orly airport, where she decides for good not to return to Tehran. In the taxi, the driver asks where she’s coming from, to which she responds “Iran”, which is the truest, most integral answer in that situation. Her grandmother finally would have been proud.

I gave it an extra star for being just the right film to watch right now, as the U.S. is, once again, shelling the living Christ out of Tehran. Less than a week later, I was discussing the film with the teenaged daughter of a childhood friend, who’d recently read the graphic novel in school. That was quite serendipitous. She said she’s read a graphic novel about a girl from Iran and I was able to guess “Persepolis?” to her delight and astonishment.

I watched it in the original French with German subtitles.

The Witch (2015) — 7/10

So this is a David Eggers joint, which means it’s going to be equal parts good and weird. The movie is set in 1630s New England—exact location unspecified—and jumps right into the story: William (Ralph Ineson) and his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie) are banned from a Puritan settlement for some unspecified religious reason. They had traveled all the way from England for their religion and it has to be a pretty big blow to be banished from the community you’d hoped to join. Anyway, they are not great at running their farm on their own and tensions rise. They have five children (!):

• Tomasin (Anya Taylor Joy) is the oldest and the absolute witchiest-looking. Joy’s improbably widely set eyes lend her face an eerie quality and, depending on the light and angle, she looks either 12 years old or 20. She does her chores and gets constantly verbally shit on by her own mother for not doing enough.
• Samuel (Athan Conrad Dube) is the newest member, still a baby, and largely charged to Tomasin, who loves him and cares for him as if he were her own.
• Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) is the oldest male child, taken under the wing and tutelage of his father, who’s struggling with his farm but still trying to show his son that he can handle it.
• The twins Mercy (Ellie Grainger) and Jonas (Lucas Dawson) are brilliantly written and brilliantly acted as devious and ceaselessly provocative. They sing their songs and don’t do much of anything—they’re still too young—so they only get up to mischief, keeping tensions high.

Early into their banishment, Tomasin is watching Samuel by the edge of the woods and takes her eyes off of him for what she believes to be only a few seconds. But when she looks back to his swaddling cloth, it is empty. He’s been snatched. He’s gone. Tomasin is in deep, deep shit.

Mother Katherine pretty goes off the deep end, utterly unequipped for a loss of this magnitude. She prays feverishly to her God, though he’s seemingly abandoned her, and cannot but be resentful of Tomasin. Father William insists that a wolf took Samuel and heads into the deep, dark woods with Caleb to hunt it. He confesses that he’d sold Katherine’s most precious heirloom, a cup, in exchange for the hunting supplies. This is important because the missing cup becomes the wedge that prises open an even wider gulf of animosity between Katherine and Tomasin, who is helpless before the wrath of her mother, gripped as she is by her guilt for having lost Samuel.

Meanwhile, Mercy and Jonas sing their silly songs about their friend Black Phillip, a black goat that lives on the farm. They joke and sing about it talking to them.

Thomasin enters the woods with Caleb and their dog Fowler. Things go very sideways as first Fowler is lost, and then Thomasin is thrown from her horse and knocked out. Caleb finds his disemboweled dog, and then stumbles further into the woods until he discovers the witch’s hovel—she (Sarah Stephens) is real and she is gorgeous. Caleb has no chance. Thomasin stumbles back, incurring more of Katherine’s wrath until William is forced to admit that he’d introduced Caleb to the woods.

Caleb returns that night, naked and feverishly ill, stumbling in out of the darkness, clearly under the grip of a witch’s curse. Katherine tries to exorcise him but he dies after coughing up a whole apple. The twins Mercy and Jonas taunt Thomasin, accusing her of witchcraft. She retorts that they are witches, in cahoots with their Black Phillip. William locks them all in the goat barn for the night.

It is not a good night. The witch (Bathsheba Garnett) descends on the stable, attacking the twins, killing all of the animals, and sparing Thomasin. William finds her unconscious and covered in blood. Before he can do more than judge her, Black Phillip appears and gores William to death. Katherine appears—having spent the night in a fevered dream, nursing a crow who she imagined to be Samuel, but which was really pecking her breasts bloody—and lights into Thomasina, trying to strangle her. Two can play that game and Thomasina overpowers Katherine to put down the last surviving member of her family.

Thomasina turns to Black Phillip. He speaks. He guides her, naked, through the woods to a coven cavorting around a bonfire. Laughing, she rises into the sky, above the treetops, laughing. The end.

Your Friend, Nate Bargatze (2024) — 8/10

He does his helpless-guy schtick pretty well. I don’t really like arena-style stand-up comedy. His pace has always been slow but, in this format, it’s gotten positively glacial. A quicker-tongued comic would have done it in 40 minutes flat.

I gave it an extra point because things picked up significantly in the last twenty minutes.

Quotes below were taken from Your Friend, Nate Bargatze (2024) | Transcript (Scraps from the Loft).

On overestimating the leverage conferred by doing laundry

“My mom did my dad’s laundry growing up, so I thought all wives do husbands’ laundry. And I’ve always done my own, and to be honest, I felt it had been forgotten about over these past 17 years. The sacrifice I was making that other husbands didn’t have to make.

“One day, I was driving home and it popped in my head, and I was like, “All right, I’ll bring that up.” I mean, I didn’t bring it up that day, you know? I was like, I’m sure there will be a time where we’ll be in some fight, I’ll be losing this fight… and then, I mean, I just come, I’m like, “I do my own laundry!” She’s like, “Fight’s over!” “You win. I forgot how good I got it.”

“So I sit on it for, like, six months, like a long… [laughs] We finally get in a fight. I don’t remember what the fight was about. Nothing. I don’t know. It wasn’t laundry. I remember that. So, I’m losing this fight. And so, in my head I’m like, “This is it.” I mean, honestly, I was sad to see it go. That’s how good I felt. I felt bad for her. I mean… I was like, “She thinks she’s winning this fight.” “I’m about to drop a bomb on her right now.”

“So just out of nowhere, I just go, “I do my own laundry!” And I said it like, “They don’t make them like this no more.” I was shocked that it started a second fight I never saw coming.”

On being cheap

“She’s the cheaper one of us, as well. Not in a bad way, you know. She likes the lights being off. Turn the lights off, you know, save money. Turn the… Get the lights. All the lights off, it’s a fun time, being in that environment. Turn the light on, find your seat. Get a stick, knock the light back off. Sit in the dark and be sad and just be… just sad all day. But you’re saving nickels upon nickels. Right when I get in bed, “You turn that light off?” “I can’t tell if that’s on.” “Well, get out of bed, turn it off.” Eighty years, we’ll give our daughter the $37 from all the nickels we saved.”

On getting scammed

“Recently, I was walking to my car and I had a college kid come up and he was raising money, uh… You know, for nature. Or it was for Earth. It was nature and Earth. Uh… I don’t know. He used real words. But it was, you know, basically… I felt he even looked at me, like, “It’s going to Earth.” I was like, “Yeah. Well, Earth is going through it right now.” So… He was telling me everything Earth is going through. You know, it’s pollution. He said, “Our water’s being poisoned.” You know, I said, “Not on my watch, but I understand.”

“I think I was buying a tree, I don’t really know. But I tried to give him cash and he was like, “Oh, you got to do a credit card.” I was like, “Okay.” So, I give a random iPad all my family information. It was $75. So he, like, swipes the card, and then after it goes through, he goes, “Just so you know, it’s a monthly charge.”

“Yeah. He told me after. And he was like, “Look, you can cancel it on the website.” I was like, “I don’t know what’s going on right now.” He goes, “Put your email down for the receipt.” I was like, “All right.” I just put my wife’s email address down. Guess who’s going to put a stop to this real fast?

“She’ll have that tree cut down tomorrow. I called her, ’cause I have to call her when I sign us up for stuff, and… [chuckles] She answered the phone, just goes, “I’m on it.” Hung up.”

On getting a new roof

“She runs everything. She does stuff, doesn’t tell me. We got a new roof, and I did not know that. A whole new roof, I found out from my neighbors. They were like, “How’s that new roof going?” I go, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” And they go, “You didn’t know you got a new roof?” I go, “No, I did not.”

“And then I had to go get her, I was like, “You gotta go talk about that new roof you didn’t tell me about.” “I looked like an idiot out there.””

On not aging gracefully

“If you see an old married couple, like, 80-year-old… They’re 80, the wife is just… She’s with it. And her husband’s like, “Where are we at right now?” Like, he… I mean, our brains fall off a cliff, dude. Like, they’re… The only reason he’s out is because she’s like, “You better get out and let people see you a little bit.” It’s like some zookeeper walking some old gorilla around. “Let the kids touch you.” Everybody’s trying to feed him. “Don’t feed him that.” “I think he wants it.” “He definitely wants it. He’s too dumb to know he can’t have it.””

On the improvement in health care

“[…] my great-aunt Helen from the ’30s. She’s deaf. They didn’t know she was deaf back then. The doctors, they had no idea. They were baffled. That’s how… That’s how good doctors were back then. They just said… They looked at her as they smoked in her face. These were real doctors. They were like, “I don’t know.” “She’s rude. I’ll tell you that.””

On high-diving donkeys

“I mean, I think what I saw growing up… I mean, we would go watch… My dad’s a magician. So we would go watch my dad do magic at the Wilson County Fair. County fairs are great. If you never… They’re still going around. I don’t think the government knows about them, but… I mean, we ride these rides that were on the interstate an hour ago.

“So we would go watch my dad. So my dad would do magic. Right next to him, they had a donkey jumping off a high dive into a pool. So pretty hard to keep everybody’s attention. When my dad is like, “Is this your card?” And everybody’s like, “This donkey’s about to jump off this high dive.” That’s something you don’t think you wanna see, till it’s up there. And I use the word “jump” very loosely. These donkeys are falling off this high dive. But you can’t put that on the sign, you know? “You gonna watch a donkey fall off a high dive?” “No.” “Okay.” “What if he jumped?” “Well, at least he’s into it.””

On how it would never occur to a woman to fight an orangutan

“Another one PETA had to shut down, this was again, like, the 1980s. I was alive. You could fight an orangutan at a fair. They would have an orangutan just sitting in a boxing ring and guys would pay to fight it. And I say “guys,” because I just can’t imagine one woman ever fought this orangutan. I think you can put an orangutan in a room with a thousand women, and when they walked out, like, “Did anybody fight it?” “It never crossed our mind to fight it.””

On witches and pilgrims

“I look at my daughter, and I have more in common with a Pilgrim. And Pilgrims believed in witches. Little side note, I would like to say, I think the witch phase was the toughest phase for women to have to go through. Not to get serious, but a lot of people say voting. I disagree. I think it’s witch, then voting. I think it’s witch, pretty big gap, then, you know, voting. You jaywalk back then, the whole town’s like, “There’s a witch.” You’re like, “Here we go. Here we go!” And I’ll give it to ’em, because they could’ve flown away, but none of them ever did.”

Phantom Thread (2017) — 8/10

Paul Thomas Anderson directed this slow-moving and gorgeous film about a famous tailor in 1950s London Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), who created dresses for stars, the wealthy, and royalty. This is not a true story. Though there were couturiers like him, he never existed.

He is a fastidious man, wholly dedicated to his work. He and his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) run a small empire at their stately home in London, ruling his staff reasonably politely but also relatively ruthlessly. He brooks no deviation from the way he prefers his life. Cyril ensures that he experiences no bumps or disturbances in his life, so that his brilliance can draw the success of the business forward.

On a weekend retreat, he meets Alma (Vicky Krieps) working as a waitress at the seaside inn where he stops. He is immediately enchanted, which seems odd, considering his personality. She flirts right back and seems quite at ease with what is very clearly a socially stunted person. He is attractive and she finds him charming. They soon move in together, with Alma as Reynolds’s model, muse, and lover.

This briefest of honeymoon phases doesn’t last long as Reynolds is not just set in his ways but a slave to them. When Alma surprises him with a dinner, he terms it an “ambush”, raising her ire. She poisons his tea. He becomes deathly ill but she nurses him back to health. Reynolds seems to know what has happened but takes it more as a sign that he needs to change. He makes the rash decision to marry Alma, to which she hesitantly concurs. They honeymoon in Switzerland, as much as such a buttoned-down couple can be said to “honeymoon.”

Soon after, though, the old Reynolds is back, blaming Alma for his woes as his fashion house flounders and gives way to more-modern competitors. Their straits are not quite dire enough that they can’t get away to his country home, though. She makes him another dinner, this time poisoning an omelette with the same mushrooms that she’d used, years earlier, to spike his tea. This time, she tells him what she’s doing and he seems to participate, whether it be because he knows he will not be able to acquiesce to what he knows is best for him—a life with Alma—or because he is so bloody-minded that he thinks he will not be affected a second time, or both, is not 100% clear. I think it’s because he is a deeply odd person who can only find peace in a relationship when one or the other person is clearly dominant—it doesn’t seem to matter to him which.

Fade out on Alma nursing Reynolds back to health in their country home while she dreams of an even more happily married, child-filled, and prosperous future.

The acting is brilliant, though reserved and absolutely not bombastic: par for the course for Day-Lewis, who has made a career of quietly inhabiting his roles to the point where you think he’s not even acting; he just is that person on the screen. Manville and Krieps are also very good, of course, and Anderson’s direction is meticulous and .his cinematography gorgeous. He also wrote the story, as he’d done for so many other films before (Boogie Nights, Licorice Pizza, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, The Master and Inherent Vice). I liked this one more than some of the others.

War Dogs (2016) — 8/10

David Packouz (Miles Teller) is a massage therapist in Miami Beach. He is desperately looking for something else to do. At a funeral, he meets back up with Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill). They are old school chums and the same age but Efraim looks and acts at least 10 years older. He doesn’t give a shit about anything, unlike David, who is at least somewhat interested in playing by the rules. They score some grass and get high. David returns to his apartment to his girlfriend Iz (Ana de Armas).

Efraim has upgraded his business to selling weapons and other gear to the Pentagon.

“Efraim Diveroli: Everyone’s fighting over the same pie and ignoring the crumbs. I live on crumbs. Like a rat.”

David and Iz are pregnant. He needs a plan. Efraim hires him and gives him a crash course in arms-dealing. Ralph Slutsky (Kevin Pollak) gives them seed money and they kick back a quarter to him.

They get a big deal to deliver a large load of Beretta pistols to Iraq but it gets hung up in Jordan. David and Efraim fly to Jordan to figure things out on the ground. They work with locals through an 11-year-old translator and manage to get not just the permit to transfer the weapons … but the weapons themselves, loaded onto a truck.

They travel with “Jordan’s best smuggler” 800km into Iraq to deliver the weapons to Baghdad. What are the odds that they make it? 50/50 says their driver. Efraim just laughingly assumes that he doesn’t know what “50/50” means. He’s also excited that gasoline is free.

They are stopped at a checkpoint but get through by trading a couple of cartons of cigarettes. They awaken in what looks like an abandoned gas station the next morning. Their driver is getting gasoline but rebels arrive to chase them out of there. They get away with an empty gas tank and a full gas can, rescued at the last second by a U.S. helicopter.

They deliver the guns to the U.S. Colonel and get their $2.8M. Cash. Taken from giant pallets of cash containing $12B, supposedly confiscated from Saddam Hussein, “The Godfather.”

They are rich. They expand their business.

They find a contract—on a publicly available web site, as required by law—to deliver a tremendous amount of munitions and weapons to Afghanistan, to arm the Mujahideen. They head to Vegas to procure armaments but quickly discover that they are completely out of their depth as far as logistics to Afghanistan is concerned.

They meet Henry Girard (Bradley Cooper) in Vegas, who says that he can get everything for them, much of it from Albania. Why doesn’t he fulfill the contract himself? Because he’s on the terrorist watchlist.

So, off to Tirana, Albania. Christ they make it look so sad and dirty.

126M AK47 bullets. 30-40 years old.

They are encouraged to test the ammunition. It works.

They make an offer of $300M. Five months later, they get confirmation that their bid has been accepted.

Now the work begins. They had to fake three years of bookkeeping and then had to interview with the government. They showed up high. They discover that they’d gotten the contract because they’d underbid the next-lowest offer by 20%. Efraim is shattered to learn that he left so much money on the table.

David is in Albania again, trying to close the deal and deliver the munitions. One problem: the munitions are there, but they’re Chinese. The Pentagon cannot take delivery of munitions from China.

Efraim has an idea: they will have to get illegal. They will repack the munitions into boxes that don’t show that the munitions came from China. They sell the idea to locals by telling them that they want to repack it because of weight. They’ll do it for $100K. It will take eight weeks.

180 tons of ammo. Lower transport costs. More profit.

Efraim finds out that Henry Girard is making a lot of money on the deal and isn’t happy with it. He wants to cut him out of the deal because he can’t stand even missing out on a single penny, despite the fact that they stand to make hundreds of millions of dollars.

David talks him down, but Efraim has other ideas. He seems to be thinking of cutting out David as well.

In the night, masked thugs break into David’s hotel room and kidnap him. It’s Henry, making a point that they better knock it off. Efraim hasn’t paid their contacts in Albania. Their main contact Bashkim (JB Blanc) has disappeared. The wheels are coming off this thing a bit. David flies back to Iz and confesses everything.

He goes to war with Efraim. He wants out. Efraim has taken the only copy of the contract and is laughing at him.

The guy in Albania turns them in because they’d never paid him. They’re both taken in by the FBI. Efraim gets four years; David gets seven months house arrest.

David is back at work as a masseur. One day, his client is Girard. He pays David a whole bunch of hush money to keep any further details about the deal from coming out.

This was a lot better than expected and it tells an important story that is increasingly relevant as the world descends even more into war than it already had. These contracts continue. Jonah Hill was, as he often is, a revelation. Miles Teller was quite good as well.

I watched it in German.

Bon Tschuur Ticino (2023) — 8/10

I watched and reviewed this in 2024. The review stands.

Watched it with Pascal and Kath in all of the original languages (Swiss German, German, Italian, French, and English).