Dom Sinacola

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

Megalopolis is the career-culminating passion project of Francis Ford Coppola, a director whose over 50 years of filmmaking have set his name in stone. This time—more than 13 years since his previously, mostly self-financed ghost story Twixt—he borrowed the full $120 million budget for Megalopolis against the 25 percent stake he owns in the fifth […]

At the center of Evil Does Not Exist—the latest narrative feature from Japanese writer-director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car)—a town hall meeting unfolds. As is the nature of most town hall meetings, the intent is to gather feedback, in this case from the locals of Mizubiki village, a rural community just a few hours outside […]

Like Gabrielle waiting for the metaphorical “beast” to swallow her whole, with a Bertrand Bonello joint you’re always prepared for something to happen, for the whole film to veer into terrain both surreal and unsettling.

Like Léa Seydoux waiting for the metaphorical “beast” to swallow her whole, with a Bertrand Bonello joint you’re always prepared for something to happen, for the whole film to veer into terrain both surreal and unsettling.

a movie that is both a period piece and a critique of period pieces

Bertrand Bonello crammed so much into The Beast, that it threatens to tear at the seams, but Seydoux’s and MacKay’s chemistry holds it together.

We go to the movies to watch people get hurt. There is no shame in this; human beings have a built-in urge to witness pain. Whether it’s emotional or physical, we line up at the theater to see our collective trauma made big and loud. From Buster Keaton breaking his neck on Sherlock, Jr., to […]

Dune: Part Two is large. This is nothing new—Dune: Part One was large too. Largeness is much of the point of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films, based on Frank Herbert’s 1965 chode of a sci-fi novel, which was inspired by the author’s stint studying the ecology of sand dunes near Florence, Oregon, plus several mushroom trips. […]