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Posted inMovies & TV

The Mercury’s Favorite Movies of 2024

Film critic Dom Sinacola on his 10 favorite features of 2024 and where you can watch them.
Avatar photo 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.

Posted inMovies & TV

A Complete Unknown Satisfies Only Your Lowest Expectations for a Bob Dylan Biopic

Director James Mangold’s latest bit of Oscar bait has the vibrancy and depth of a Wikipedia article.
Avatar photo Dom Sinacola

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.

Posted inMovies & TV

Queer Is a Romance with a Dead Wife Problem

Director Luca Guadagino is out to make William Burroughs romantic. He mostly succeeds.
Avatar photo HR Smith

Luca Guadagnino is a great editor of other people’s love stories. With this past spring’s Challengers, he took a fairly basic screenplay about tennis bros and queered it up to 11. In Bones and All (2022) he edited down an often-bratty young adult novel into a luminously gory homage to William Eggleston’s photographs of American landscapes. In Call […]

Posted inMovies & TV

Film Review: In Heretic and Don’t Move Meek Heroines Fawn and Freeze

This fall, femmes find new ways to survive.
Avatar photo Suzette Smith

Much has been made of Brit cinema heartthrob Hugh Grant’s heel turn in A24’s suspenseful horror film Heretic. It’s as if someone actually started listening to the actor, who has loudly proclaimed for decades that his bashful grimaces and hair shakes—found in iconic hits like Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Love, Actually—are just mannerisms […]

Posted inHoliday Guide 2024 🎅

Season’s Reelings:
Your 2024 Holiday Movie Guide

Spend time NOT talking to family with our preview
of the holidays’ most-hyped new releases.
Avatar photo Dom Sinacola

  [Editor’s note: Read all our holly jolly HOLIDAY GUIDE articles here. Looking for a print copy? Good! You can find it in more than 500 spots across Portland with this handy map!]   Holidays are usually meant for time with family, which is obviously why so many people elect to go to the movies […]

Posted inMovies & TV

Allee Willis: Creative Force, ‘Dangerous Woman,’ Songwriter Behind Friends Theme

A new documentary The World According to Allee Willis reveals your favorite artists’ favorite artist.
Avatar photo Melissa Locker

Allee Willis was your favorite artists’ favorite artist decades before Chappell Roan.

Allee Willis was a truly fascinating, wildly-creative artist who worked almost exclusively behind the scenes. She was your favorite artists’ favorite artist decades before Chappell Roan.

Allee Willis: creative force behind the Friends TV Show Theme, Dangerous Woman to Soviet newspapers
Allee Willis: Creative Force, Dangerous Woman, Queer Songwriter Behind Friends’ Theme
Further Proof That Friends Is Queer-Coded

Posted inMovies & TV

Megalopolis is Francis Ford Coppola’s Gloriously Dumb and Luminous Opus

When it’s truly singing, the infectious film gestures at the passion and poetry that come from an artist with nothing left to prove.
Avatar photo Dom Sinacola

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 […]

Posted inMovies & TV

Film Review: My Old Ass Is a Horny Teen Sex Comedy Meets Time Travel Tearjerker

It’s Fall! So here’s your pansexual Hallmark movie.
Avatar photo HR Smith

At a September preview of My Old Ass, writer and director Megan Park said she originally intended to end the film with a crane shot pulling out of a cranberry bog to reveal a giant penis made of cranberries. “3,000 pounds of frozen cranberry dick,” said Park, smugly. “It was iconic.”  It’s good Park didn’t […]

Posted inMovies & TV

Evil Does Not Exist Is About Glamping and Other Forces Beyond Our Control

The new film from Drive My Car director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi strays from the clean conservationist message that would typically accompany such beautiful cinema of the natural world.
Avatar photo Dom Sinacola

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 […]

Posted inMovies & TV

The Hype About The People’s Joker Is Entirely Warranted

The hilarious debut feature from Vera Drew parodies comic book icons to tell a trans coming out story.
Avatar photo Robert Ham

The hilarious debut film feature from Vera Drew, The People’s Joker, packs a lot into its 92-minute runtime—action, animation, DC comic parody deep cuts, some truly vicious and necessary jabs at some of SNL’s current stars, and a healthy scattering of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it asides. There’s been a lot of hype surrounding the pop culture parody coming of age film, but it’s entirely warranted.

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