played by Benedict Cumberbatch, roughly castrates a bull with a knife, then with his bare hands. This is maybe a representative scene for much of the tense hypermasculinity/repressed sexuality at play in the movie, or maybe it's a way of showing the violence that Phil is capable of. It's a taut, tight, suspenseful Western -- with a twist ending (that we very helpfully spoil!).

Is The Pizzagate Massacre the best movie about the Trump era, as this Vice News article contends? We say....possibly?

Squid game, it turns out, is not a show about having a good time eating calamari, but a murderous series of increasingly violent competitions that serves as an allegory about global capitalism and the bone-crushing misery it inflicts on the 99%.

es Anderson's newest quirky romp, The French Dispatch. We were not fans at all.

Dune. DUNE!! We've been waiting to watch this one and whoo boy, do we have things to say. We get deep into Denis Villeneuve's top-notch world-building, the ecstatic experience of surrendering to beauty, the huge problem of the chosen one savior narrative, space witches, sandworms, climate disaster, and Timothee Chalamet's jawline. One of our big takeaways - there are no good imperialists!

There are very many bad hairstyles in Ridley Scott's The Last Duel. Our preliminary judgement puts Ben Affleck's bleached blonde number (in his role as Pierre d'Alencon) as the worst, but Matt Damon's mullet is a close second.

Inside is a discomforting and very funny field trip into the head of the comedian over the course of the pandemic. It's a musical comedy special (emphasis on musical) and the songs actually had us LOLing. The serious moments are very, very serious -- even grave -- and the wild tonal swings from hilarity to despair to absurdity to hope really reflect the emotional roller coaster that was 2020. Highlights: "Face Time with My Mom (Tonight)," "Welcome to the Internet," the sketch where he's a Twitch user playing the video game that is his life and he makes his player cry a lot.

an we leave it at that? [Editor: No.] Ok, well...the movie is a visually arresting, moody, evocative, quietly exhilarating, poetic-but-not-surreal dreamscape in which a man searches for his long-lost lover through rubble, rain, and ruin. It's what happens when time collapses into the life of one lit sparkler. And its climax is an hour-long continuous shot!!

Black waves teeming with salt foam to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs til ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more - only when he, crowned in cockle shells with slitherin' tentacle tail and steaming beard take up his fell be-finned arm, his coral-tine trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest and plunges right through yer gullet, bursting ye