is a blog about design, technology and culture written by Khoi Vinh, and has been more or less continuously published since December 2000 in New York City. Khoi is currently Principal Designer at Adobe. Previously, Khoi was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired in 2013), Design Director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. He is the author of “How They Got There: Interviews with Digital Designers About Their Careers”and “Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design,” and was named one of Fast Company’s “fifty most influential designers in America.” Khoi lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn with his wife and three children.
Though I often post these roundups of movies I’ve watched the previous month much later than I would like, I actually do start writing them almost immediately after the month ends. Inevitably though I get waylaid by the usual distractions of living life. For this post on February’s movies my first draft was in early March, which now feels like practically a lifetime ago already. In the few short weeks since, COVID-19 came to our towns and neighborhoods insistently and undeniably, shutting down most of the country and forcing change on the fundamental behaviors of society itself.
You can’t even go see a movie at the theater anymore since they’ve basically all closed for the foreseeable future (with potentially dire consequences for the industry). In fact, the week before last, as businesses everywhere were closing their doors, my wife and I had two tickets to go see “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” for a weekend date. All week long we held out hope that we’d be able to make it to the show, but on that Friday the entire theater chain suspended operations.
Missing one movie is a disappointment but the loss of moviegoing is a particularly painful change for me. Despite my busy schedule I’ve always tried to get out to theaters at least once a month and it’s rare that I miss that goal. I’m in love with movies in general but also just passionate about the physicality of cineplexes: the huge screens and immersive sound; the deep, uninterrupted focus that audiences give to a film; the smell of popcorn; and of course that unquantifiable social magic of experiencing a film with a roomful of strangers and feeling their reactions in real time, alongside my own.
I’m not adding anything new to the advocacy of movie theaters here, I know. Cinephiles have been rattling off these same recommendations forever and even doing so with elevated urgency over the past decade as streaming media has emerged. Nevertheless theater attendance has declined steadily and depressingly. The end of the road for moviegoing has felt like it was coming for a long time before even coronavirus was a thing.
In a world where most of us have been watching movies on our phones anyway—and maybe even preferring to anesthetize ourselves with repeat viewings of “Friends” instead of accessing the wealth of diverse historical and contemporary film that streaming media offers—I’m not particularly certain that many folks will miss the cineplex. Some will, I’m sure, but I think most of us will be more eager to dine again at that favorite restaurant or knock back a few at the local bar. Of course we can eat or even play mixologist at home during this “shelter in place” era for however long it’s going to last, but in most cases food or drink at public establishments is an order of magnitude more vivid, and certainly more social than those at-home versions of the same core activities. By contrast, for most people movies deliver more or less the same value whether you watch them on the toilet or in a theater. In fact in a theater you’d be sitting in a dark room where it’s socially forbidden to even talk to your companion anyway, which seems unlikely to feel like much of an upgrade when all of this social distancing is over.
Whether or not that turns out to be true, for the time being the best that we can do is appreciate movies, if not moviegoing. There are a million TV shows to watch and rewatch on Netflix of course, but in this time where we looked to filmed entertainment for comfort more than ever, there’s still something special about the idea of a real movie. With the exception of the more egregiously shallow franchises, movies are by and large a good faith attempt at delivering something truly special, executed to the maximum of the director, cast and crew’s abilities, and brought to a concise, compelling conclusion. That doesn’t always happen, of course, but even when they fail, there’s something ineffable in the trying, a sense that something truly unique was attempted.
One very minor bit of silver lining in this terrible pandemic is the fact that there are a few “real” movies that had been slated to appear (or in fact had already debuted) in theaters that studios have since fast tracked for digital rental. They are a mixed bag in terms of quality so the premium rental fee of US$20 t they’re charging may not always seem like much of a bargain. But as it happens I caught one of them in theaters in February: “Emma.,” a new adaptation of Jane Austen’s immortal comic novel, and I can tell you that it’s well worth the cost of admission, so to speak.
You could say that first-time director Autumn de Wilde has a little bit of an advantage here with ”Emma“ in that the basic narrative of her film, as conceived by Austen, is practically impervious to slovenly execution. Nevertheless, de Wilde directs the hell out of this movie; nearly every frame is gorgeously composed and thoughtful. And more than that, the cast is uniformly excellent and their performances are deeply felt. The climactic scene, where an unwise quip devastates practically the entire cast of characters, is so effectively shocking that I could practically feel the whole audience in my theater cringing with empathetic discomfiture.
I actually took my ten-year old daughter with me to see “Emma.” and she found it a bit talky and short on action, but pronounced it “good” enough. Of course fifth graders and period films are not always great matches, so the fact that she recognized the film’s virtues at all is a very favorable outcome, by my reckoning. For my part, as we were walking out of the theater, I knew right away that this would be the kind of movie that would reward her on repeat viewings; as she gets older and hopefully decides to revisit it, more and more of its sharp witticisms and subtle storytelling will reveal themselves to her. That’s what good movies do, of course. Now looking back I realize that “Emma” was the last theatrical outing that she and I would share before the onset of COVID-19, and possibly the last movie we’ll get to see together in theaters for quite a long time. It was a wonderful choice.
Here is the full list of all twenty-four movies I watched last month.
“Paddington 2” (2017) ★★★½ Rewatched. This is a very entertaining movie.
In this bizarre era we’re living through, it might seem inappropriate to spend time reminiscing about the past but I personally can’t resist at least a little bit of that as an escape from all the anxiety. “Do You Compute?,” a new book by Ryan Mungia and Steven Heller, offers a particularly interesting form of nostalgia in that it both recalls a time when life was simpler and offers us an opportunity to reconsider the cultural ideas that led to the many technologically borne pre-COVID-19 challenges that, of course, we still must contend with one day.
“Do You Compute?” is a graphic retrospective on how technology was marketed in the last century, “from the Atomic Age to the Y2K Bug.” It’s a beautiful compendium of more than three-hundred vintage advertisements that look back on the visual language that countless technology companies, most now defunct, once employed to sell the world on the promise of digital technology.
What’s surprising to see is how the prevailing trend for marketing computers in their first few decades of commercial availability was to present them in an almost studiously unremarkable fashion. Once you look past the bemusing post-War, pre-Modernist visual elements—the hand-painted illustrations, superfluous atom shapes, and diner-like patterns—it becomes apparent that these ads were pretty boring. This was of course due in no small part to the trepidation with which society regarded technology for many decades. The “pitch” for these ancient computers centered on the pure utility and added capabilities they offered large organizations. They were also very careful not to oversell the transformative potential of their product so as not to trigger the common public fear of eventually being replaced by machines. In many ways these ads were indistinguishable from marketing for appliances or tools of any sort, and that quotidian nature was a first step towards paving the way for societal acceptance.
In the latter part of the century, as technology made greater inroads into more and more areas of society, it’s fascinating to see how the advertising became moderately more adventurous, at least visually. This was in keeping with the way advertising evolved in the sixties and seventies of course, but not coincidentally that progression was also followed soon after by the shift from large, room-sized computers to so-called microcomputers. That revolution effectively upended marketers’ ability to rely on the public’s natural association of bigger with better, necessitating newer approaches. In some cases more abstract, graphically playful portrayals of the potential of the technology were favored, and in other cases more humorous, even comedic interpretations of what computers could do became popular.
What’s clear in retrospect is that broadening of the vocabulary of tech marketing effectively cleared away the old language of computers as business appliances and allowed them to be rendered as something closer to accessories, or rather positioned as integral, must-have elements for a new way of working, living and playing. This is particularly true in the video game ads included in the book, which marketed the technology as both ownable by everyday consumers and also as portals to a “Star Wars”-like vision of space age possibility, despite their underpowered graphical horsepower.
Despite the promise of its subtitle, the last section of “Do You Compute?,” which focuses on the 1990s, doesn’t actually spend a lot of time on the Y2K crisis that preoccupied popular technology in that decade. But what it does show is how the vocabulary of tech marketing really fractured in that era as a consequence of tech’s increasingly successful invasion of every quarter of life. In many ways the ads shown in this section are unremarkable in a new way; where earlier tech marketing looked indistinguishable from business marketing, by the end of the century it looked indistinguishable from the marketing for whatever industry a given tech product was trying to penetrate.
This progression, from business appliance to personal accessory to ubiquity, is what “Do You Compute?” illustrates best. It shows the long and winding road that we traveled on in the last century, before we all merged onto the “superhighway” of the past two decades. The book is a useful reminder that while we think of technology itself as being what drives change, the way that technology is sold—the language that marketers use to ingratiate it into our lives—plays an essential role as well. Seeing all of these ads collected in one place gave me a perspective on where we are today that I hadn’t had before, which is maybe both the best recommendation I can make for it and my biggest criticism: when I got to the end of the book, I just wanted to see what happened next. On second thought, maybe the authors were wise to stop where they did.
“Do You Compute?” is available from Hat & Beard Press and Amazon. More information at doyoucomputebook.com. Some page spreads from the book and details of some ads follow below.
It was unseasonably warm and bright in Brooklyn at the end of the workday yesterday, so I took myself for a walk around the neighborhood. Like a lot of people I’ve been working from home for the past week and a half, spending most of each day on video conferences with colleagues from all over the country. And like a lot of people, I’ve been reading far too much about COVID-19, habitually refreshing the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post and dozens of other news sources too, clicking through to any article that promised to shed some additional light on the nature of this novel coronavirus, any expert opinions on how the near future might play out.
By five o’clock I felt cooped up and in need of fresh air. When I got outside, the sun was casting a gentle warmth onto the brownstones and parked cars and trees still naked from the winter. And onto the people, too! There were people out and about, some solo, some walking their dogs, some strolling in pairs, some even hanging out in small groups. They were shooting the breeze, checking their phones, carrying groceries home, laughing and joking. I walked past a hair salon where three stylists were tending to two women, a takeout joint with a line of hungry workers that spilled out to the sidewalk, a dollar store where someone was rummaging through a bin of bootleg DVDs, and a bar with outdoor seating, fully occupied.
It was so quotidian, so remarkably unremarkable. In fact, it was about ten minutes into my walk before I realized that I found it kind of shocking. It was all so…normal.
By contrast, life hasn’t felt normal to me for days and days. I’ve been thinking and overthinking all things COVID-19 more or less constantly, to the point where every surface outside our home now looks fraught with danger. There are bottles of hand sanitizer and packages of disinfecting wipes stashed all over the house. Earlier in the day I’d canceled movie tickets for that evening and made plans to drive our babysitter all the way home to Queens rather than let her risk the subway. The subway! I’ve always loved the subway and would rather take it just about anywhere than drive, but I’d come to think of it as off limits, as having effectively become a circulatory system for the virus. To me, living felt already transformed, utterly upended and vastly different from even a month ago, and so did the city. Images from Wuhan, China that I saw in February have stayed with me, especially drone video footage of the eerie, post-humanity calm and emptiness of a city under lockdown. In my mind, that was what New York would become before too long.
But not all of my fellow New Yorkers see it that way, apparently. Judging from appearances, there was almost a nonchalance in the air as I walked around Crown Heights, where I live. People just did not seem to care, or at least it was hard to decipher any bit of care on their faces. I began to think: maybe living hadn’t changed after all, and maybe the city hadn’t either. The buildings, the cars, the pedestrians, the pets, everything looked untouched by this massive anxiety rattling across the media and echoing inside my head.
At one point I felt a bit peckish so I turned into a bodega for a snack, passing through the front doors just behind a young dude dressed in normcore regalia and reciting hip-hop lyrics out loud. Inside there was a short line of customers waiting to pay for yogurt, potato chips, a bottle of laundry detergent and more of the stuff you buy when you’re just going about your life. I picked up a bag of salt-and-pepper flavored potato chips (best chips ever) and got in line.
Then I watched as the cashier rang up the customers in front of me, and I saw how he would take cash from each of them, put it into his register, then pull out change, all with his bare hands, over and over. And I saw how the other customers were biting their fingernails or stroking their hair, scratching their jaws or blithely picking up and putting down products on the shelves. It was like suddenly seeing the code layer of the Matrix except with germs, and I looked down at the bag of chips I was holding and thought about who and how many might have handled it before me.
When I got to the counter I pulled out three dollar bills from my wallet and told the cashier to keep the change, and I walked out into the beautiful open air again. But I felt different now, less impressed by the neighborhood’s operational normalcy. I was thinking now of the germs on the bag, and the germs on my jacket where I’d held it under my arm, and also how I’d handled my wallet with the hand that I’d used to pick up the bag. I was also thinking about getting home and how I might be able to get in the door while touching as few surfaces as possible, and how I’d have to wipe down the door handle and wash my hands and maybe even use sanitizer on the bag of chips.
I’ve never been much of a germaphobe, but I was thinking of my kids now and my wife too, and feeling vulnerable for our family in a way I’d never felt before. There are so many avenues for the coronavirus to take into any of our homes; letting down your guard on even one of them on a careless afternoon, regardless of how vigilant you might have been for days and days, seems like an invitation to catastrophe. As I walked home, I held the bag at a distance from me, by one corner, with just two fingers, feeling slightly foolish and half hoping no one would notice my anxiety. But I was also thinking to myself that the chips hardly seemed worth it anymore.
The Taj Mahal, a study in extreme symmetry. The structure itself, built from non-porous Indian marble, is built with painstaking exactitude to be almost perfectly symmetrical. The landmark’s grounds follow suit, with surrounding buildings constructed as much to complement the symmetry as to serve as gateways to the mausoleum. I got to see this breathtaking landmark—and to take this picture—for the first time about a week ago, on a six-day visit to India for work.
Yes it’s the last day of February, but I’m posting this roundup of what I watched in January anyway. Early in the month I got out to theaters to see “1917” and “Little Women,” both on the same day, and both worthwhile investments of time.
I went into “1917” with a healthy amount of skepticism about the movie’s conceit of a single, uninterrupted shot, based partly on its inherently gimmicky nature and also the fact that Sam Mendes’s movies have always struck me as shallow. But I was pleasantly surprised by how “1917” delivered a genuinely affecting emotional wallop that mostly redeems its “video game” premise.
On the other hand, I had the inverse experience with “Little Women.” I went into it with high hopes based on director Greta Gerwig’s previous outing, “Lady Bird,” which I found to be nearly flawless. But I found this adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s immortal novel to be surprisingly misshapen, and marred by ill-advised casting. For a creative talent who seems so independent by nature, Gerwig’s take on “Little Women” just felt disappointingly Hollywood-esque.
In total, I watched sixteen movies in January, including several by Ingmar Bergman. I’m trying to make my way through “Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema,” a massive boxed set comprising thirty-nine films across thirty Blu-Ray discs. I have to admit knowing very little about this legendary director before starting this exercise; I’d only ever previously seen “The Seventh Seal” and “Scenes from a Marriage.” It’s going to take me all year to finish it, but I’m enjoying every minute.
Here’s the full list.
“Beirut” (2018) ★★ The bones of a complex script smothered in Hollywood clichés.
The logline for the podcast “3 Clips” plants the show firmly in meta territory: it bills itself as “a podcast for marketers who podcast.” If you don’t consider yourself a marketer or someone interested in the meta-narrative of marketing then you may have a less than enthusiastic reaction. But that pitch actually belies the rich insight that “3 Clips” offers anyone who just enjoys podcasts or is curious about their production, whether marketing-oriented or not. Even better: the most recent episode breaks down an episode of “Wireframe,” the podcast about design that I’ve hosted for two seasons now.
The basic hook of “3 Clips” is: take an episode of a podcast like “Wireframe”—that is, a show produced by a brand that is trying to create a compelling listening experience beyond just advertising its wares—and pull it apart to see what works and what doesn’t. The hosts Jay Acunzo and Molly Donovan examine everything from the first impressions that the show generates when each episode starts playing to the style and character of the content to the “defensibility” of the subject matter, and much more.
Described another way, Acunzo and Donovan train a critical lens on the design of podcasts, a concept that I have to admit I was only dimly aware of when I first started working with Gimlet Creative on “Wireframe” about two years ago. It didn’t take long though for me to realize that a good podcast in many ways relies on the same approach that we designers bring to the problems we solve. Both focus on people, on details and sequencing and flow, and both are highly iterative.
That last detail was particularly revealing for me. Gimlet’s approach to audio, as heard on shows like “Reply All,” sounds so relaxed and effortless that it was eye-opening to learn how much revision and reworking go into every recorded minute. Each episode of “Wireframe” went through at least three or four major revisions, with input from everyone on the team, and countless hours of polishing and tweaking.
Just as designers can look at an app or website and see telltale details of the craft that “normal” people are oblivious to, Acunzo and Donovan can effectively x-ray podcasts and identify the intentions hidden beneath the surface. In this episode they cannily pick up on the many editorial structures and subtle audio cues that underpin “Wireframe,” crucial narrative affordances that Gimlet brought to bear.
Acunzo and Donovan also unsparingly appraise the hosting, citing my audio narration as sounding stilted or read rather than spoken, to which I say, “Fair.” Through two seasons of the show, I’ve felt that my own journey has been to get more and more comfortable as a voice, and less and less formal. That has been a struggle for sure, as hosting a show like this is like no other medium I’ve worked in before; it’s meant to be both performative and unassuming, authoritative yet friendly, instructive yet spontaneous. There’s no formula to it except to sound like yourself, but maybe the most engaging version of yourself that you can imagine—casually.
I have to admit, listening to Acunzo and Donovan evaluate my audio skills was only marginally less painful than chewing a mouthful of tacks. But it’s hard to argue with the depth of their insight and the clarity of their assessment. Ultimately what they’re doing is applying incisive, articulate, accessible critical thinking to the podcast form, which is a gift to the medium itself. I learned a master class’s worth of lessons from listening to it, and consider it a privilege that they trained their lens on “Wireframe.”
Just reading about the progression of the coronavirus is frightening enough, but it sent a new kind of chill down my spine to watch this drone footage of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, on lockdown. Eerily empty, it feels like a snapshot of humanity in the past tense, with all the trappings of a built society lingering uselessly after the removal of people. Here and there, you’ll spot a few lonely souls on the streets, driving or even biking to some lonely destination, but in a way that makes it even spookier, like continued echo of desperation. I can only imagine what the residents of Wuhan are feeling, essentially marooned in their own dwellings.
December seems like a long time ago but I’m only now recapping my movie watching for that month—and for all of last year. Time flies.
Amid a bunch of travel, I watched twenty-four films and got out to the theaters five times. One of those excursions was to see “The Rise of Skywalker”—some coworkers had a free ticket, so I figured what the heck? After the previous two installments in this franchise, I’d already mostly given up on “Star Wars” ever offering anything of redeeming cinematic value, but this undercut even my already low expectations—a true stinker.
Out of some kind of misplaced loyalty to the notion of “Star Wars” that I still recall fondly from my youth, I went back to see if I could possibly rediscover something likable about the “The Last Jedi,” but no dice—I couldn’t even get past the first thirty minutes. Mostly I was awed by the fact that such a misshapen mess could have come from the same writer and director, Rian Johnson, who just gave us “Knives Out,” which is practically the exact inverse: a taut, hilarious, economical little mystery-comedy. Johnson’s films rarely demand much in the way of thinking on the part of viewers but this contemporary whodunit works harder and more conscientiously than most films in recent memory to take its audience on a true joyride. It was one of the best things I saw all year.
Speaking of bests of the year, I was feeling kind of bad about having gotten all the way to the end of January without having recapped my favorites of 2019. But then I looked back at last year’s list and saw that I didn’t get to my overview of 2018 until February 2019 anyway. So expect that soonish.
Here are all twenty-four films I watched in December.
“Okja” (2017) ★★½ Very respectable until the English-speaking actors start acting.
“The Wolf’s Call” (2019) ★★★½ A French “Hunt for Red October” and a solid dad movie.
“Rounders” (1998) ★★★★ Rewatched. I didn’t realize how good this script was.
“Thirst” (2009) ★★ There hasn’t been a truly decent vampire movie in decades.
“Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” (2016) ★★★ Rewatched. The only worthwhile installment since, well, “The Empire Strikes Back.”
“Knives Out” (2019) ★★★★ One hundred percent pure entertainment.
“Marriage Story” (2019) ★★★½ Impeccably directed but distractingly preoccupied with lives of privilege.
“Uncut Gems” (2019) ★★★★ More successfully distortive than most fantasy movies, and also happens to finally solve the question of what to do with the Adam Sandler persona.
As a Christmas gift to you, I direct your attention to singer-songwriter Joel Alme’s “Waiting for the Bells,” a beautiful, nearly forgotten album from the very beginning of this decade that we’re about to close out. It’s not expressly a Christmas album, but its eleven tracks achieve that fine balance of celebration and melancholy that you hear in Darlene Love’s immortal “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” the best Christmas song ever recorded, so for that reason I think of it as holiday fare.
Like his fellow Swede Jens Lekman, Alme specializes in hooky pop music with a literate, brainy twist. But “Waiting for the Bells,” in my view, far exceeds anything that the more successful Lekman ever achieved. Its concise, thirty-two minute runtime features an unbroken string of impeccable song craft, delivered with Alme’s unique crooning vocal style, which balances searing rawness and classical crooning. You can get a taste of it in the video for “If You Got Somebody Waiting,” embedded above.
“Bells” was the musician’s second album, and he was able to secure grant money from the Swedish Arts Council for its production. The results are tastefully lavish string and brass arrangements, and a soaring, Phil Spector-esque quality that give it an irresistible immediacy. The fact that the music listening public largely did resist it, though, almost underscores its timelessness; it’s not quite an album from another time, but rather an album from no particular time. I dearly cherish it and listen to it almost continuously, and I think you may find yourself doing the same if you give it a chance. Happy holidays.
There’s a lot packed into Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” even beyond its generous three and a half-hour runtime. It would almost be enough that it gives us a tour of decades of gangster lore at the intersection of American politics, but there’s also complex and quite eloquent contemplations on the nature of violence and regret; exquisite recreations of mid-century urban landscapes; and, unavoidably, large scale CG-driven de-aging of its central performers. Scorsese, as ever, brings it all together with the grace of a master; few directors can paint with such nuanced detail in such consistent a manner across canvases as wide in scope.
I got to catch a screening during the movie’s limited theatrical release, and felt fortunate for having been able to experience Scorsese’s vision uninterrupted, in the immersive cocoon of a dark cinema. It’s a rich text, worth seeing in any context, but I have to confess that it also felt somewhat…inessential. “The Irishman” offers a new, more pensive perspective on Scorsese’s longstanding preoccupations with the dark side of American exceptionalism, but it’s still a gangster movie, still a meditation on mafioso codes; still a revival of that same mid-century, mid-Atlantic, Italian-American milieu. I’m game for revisiting this territory as much as anyone, but after, “Silence,” Scorsese’s shockingly unsparing look at the persistence of faith in the face of brutality, “The Irishman” seems like a regression. Scorses does illuminate new dimensions of gangsterism with this movie; it’s just not as rich and new a territory as he is capable of.
That said, no one can accuse the director of shying away from the new when it comes to digitally de-aging his performers. That creative decision is at the heart of the film; it allows Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci, particularly, to deliver performances along a chronological range that may be unprecedented, thereby allowing Scorsese to race freely up and down the decades as he sees fit. Opinions are divided on the effectiveness of the retouching but for me, when combined with the overfamiliarity of the subject matter, it was too much, too distracting. The technology is simply not there yet; DeNiro, particularly, never looks younger than fifty, even when the script pointedly refers to him as “kid.” I kept wishing that the director had simply cast another actor to play DeNiro’s character at younger ages, much as I kept wishing that Scorsese had chosen to tell a different story.
In addition to “The Irishman,” I saw fifteen other movies last month, including “Parasite,” which I also managed to see in theaters and which I also found to be somewhat less satisfying than the glowing critical consensus promised. The first three-quarters of Bong Joon-Ho’s class and morality drama (with a horror film stashed inside of it, sort of like a toy surprise inside a candy box) is almost perfect and the director could have easily called it quits at that point and declared victory. But in the last segment he scrambles to pay off what came before, hastily gathering back together all of his principal characters to essentially face off one another in a not entirely convincing way, and then stretching credulity even further with a far-fetched denouement. Again, I found myself wishing he’d gone another way.
“Mother” (2009) ★★★★ So emotionally true it’s harrowing.
“The Killing” (1956) ★★★★★ Rewatched. My favorite Kubrick work; a definitive text for every heist movie that followed.
“Ford v Ferrari” (2018) ★★★ Perfectly fine but it’s easy to imagine what it could’ve been in the hands of a more distinctive directorial talent than James Mangold.
“Do the Right Thing” (1989) ★★★★½ Rewatched. Electrifyingly urgent, even thirty years later.
“Suspiria” (2018) ★½ Shallow ideas dressed up with high class pretensions.
“Chris Claremont’s X-Men” (2018) ★★ A look back to when comics grew up, before the rest of the world noticed.
