Support Smart, Local Journalism
Make a Small Monthly Donation

Posted inMovies & TV

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Is Not a Matter for Another Time

A long review of a long movie based on a long book from a long time ago.

Time has always been an obsession for director Christopher Nolan. In one of his earliest films, Memento (1999), time means nothing to a man with no short-term memory. In Inception (2010), dreams constrict and warp time as much as space travel does in Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), while in Tenet (2020), time literally goes backwards.  Dunkirk […]

Posted inMovies & TV

The Death of Robin Hood Is a Dull Act of Myth-Killing

Michael Sarnoski’s retelling of the Robin Hood story is remarkably restrained and really boring because of it.

The end of Michael Sarnoski’s third full-length feature is in its title: The Death of Robin Hood. We wait it out. We know the iconic intellectual property—the man called Robin Hood—will die, and then he does. Then the film is over; its inevitable and straightforward. Fortunately, Sarnoski is comfortable with inevitability—something we might recall from […]

Posted inMovies & TV

A Blue Heron Under the Influence

Sophy Romvari’s heart-wrenching debut docudrama is autofiction for the screen.

Canadian writer-director Sophy Romvari’s debut feature, the luminous Blue Heron, is revelatory—even as it intentionally offers no revelations. If you saw Romvari’s 2020 short film Still Processing (all her shorts are on the Criterion Channel), you’ve observed the director’s careful application of context, bringing the audience to understand the extent of her family’s grief without […]

Posted inMovies & TV

The Christophers Is Another Small Masterwork by Steven Soderbergh

He says his next two movies will be made with AI, so enjoy it while it lasts.

Steven Soderbergh has directed 11 features since 2017—which was the year blue collar caper Logan Lucky sprung the director from a self-imposed retirement.  This bountiful run includes shot-in-secret-on-an-iPhone thriller Unsane (2018), thoughtful exotic dancer threequel Magic Mike’s Last Dance (2023), bone-shaking ghost story Presence (2024), bone-dry spy story Black Bag (2025), and now The Christophers, […]

Posted inMovies & TV

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Is a Divine Act of Asset Management

A review born of both immense respect and ennui-ridden derision.

In 2023’s The Super Mario Bros Movie, audiences followed two Brooklyn plumber-brothers through a big green pipe to another dimension where anthropomorphic toadstool citizenry lived under the benevolent rule of a once-orphaned woman named Peach (voiced by Anya Taylor-Joy). Now in 2026, with the general conceit of the Mushroom Kingdom established, the sequel, The Super […]

Posted inMovies & TV

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie the Mercury Review

The latest entry in Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s high-spirited satire of their own lives is a funny big budget time travel misadventure.

For nearly 20 years, Torontonian best friends Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol have chronicled the everyday existences of Torontonian best friends Matt (Johnson) and Jay (McCarrol) as they attempt to book a show for their band, Nirvanna the Band, at local venue the Rivoli. Granted, they’ve never acknowledged that their band name might be a […]

Posted inMovies & TV

Bi Gan’s Resurrection Revives 100 Years of Movie-Making for One Long Dream

Dream logic takes over in the Chinese writer-director’s latest technical marvel.

Chinese writer-director Bi Gan believes that filmmaking can capture his wildest dreams. Resurrection is his attempt to convince you that it can capture yours too. It’s ambitious to make a movie about how making movies is like harvesting dreams, projecting viewers’ inner lives back at them, often to visceral, abstract, and sometimes tummy-hurting ends. This is […]

Posted inMovies & TV

The Mercury’s 10 Favorite Movies of 2025

The best movies of 2025 are at war with the machine, data centers, and helplessness. What a relief.

Of the many exceptional movies I saw in 2025—10 of which I have listed below—the majority of them were available to catch in a Portland theater. The thriving ecosystem of independently-owned cinemas spread across our city is near inimitable, especially given our glut of centenarian show houses. While monster studios continue to eat each other, […]

Gift this article