Dom Sinacola

All war movies are now anti-war movies—that is, if an anti-war movie is measured by the severity of its misery. This is an unceasing human imperative in art: to showcase our species’ darkest atrocities through a transcendent exploration of the suffering those atrocities inflict, but to go even more HAM about it than the last […]

Direct Action has no characters. Someone may appear in one scene, and then, several sequences later, enter the frame again. Maybe. Direct Action never names anyone; it only shows you their hands—picking through a mud-heavy bucket, playing piano, or making a huge mass of dough, the camera locked on the pile of flour and pool […]

Depending on how one wants to categorize ground chuck, at least two people in The Monkey are ground into it. The first is the victim of a horse stampede, and the other becomes a meaty mess via lawnmower.  We learn about the former when a sleeping bag is casually overturned, slopping out smushed man-oatmeal. The […]

With an almost mathematical precision to its pulpiness, The Prosecutor, the latest action-thriller from Hong Kong superstar Donnie Yen, doles out a brutal fight scene every 25 to 30 minutes. Across two brisk hours, violence shifts proportionately between bouts of athletic knuckling, street brawls, shoot-outs, car chases, foot chases, impalings, and pummelings—all spaced out evenly, each […]

Universal Horror remake Wolf Man drops most werewolf lore for a self-contained story about bad dads.

The Brutalist reminds us that where there’s hype, there’s sometimes fire.

We asked our regular film critic Dom Sinacola to revisit his favorite films of 2024. Some he reviewed for us. Others are surprises! Some won’t actually open in Portland til 2025.

Everyone’s been talking about Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point like its the first watchable Xmas movie in decades. Our regular critic Dom Sinacola thinks its even better than that; he included it on his top ten list of films from this year.

We asked our regular film critic Dom Sinacola to revisit his favorite films of 2024. We honestly had no idea he liked Furiosa this much.

Director James Mangold has made a Bob Dylan biopic that unfolds like an Oscar-bait bingo card, with Timothée Chalamet performing a functionally-solid impression of the icon as a rising teen star. Ultimately, “A Complete Unknown” provides no more thought on Dylan than a Wikipedia article.

Gladiator II Is Just Gladiator With Jacked-up Howler Monkeys