There's a basic pattern with David Fincher films. His even-numbered films are good, great, iconic even - Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, The Social Network, Gone Girl; these are the films that people talk about when they talk about Fincher. His odd-numbered films are at best fine, sometimes actively bad - Alien3, The Game, Panic Room, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; I can't imagine ever feeling any pressing need to rewatch any of these films.
Mank is an odd-numbered Fincher film.
[Comments on Mank, and the other seven nominees - Nomadland, Minari, Promising Young Woman, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Judas and the Black Messiah, The Father, and Sound of Metal - after the jump.]
I've been a fan of director Bong Joon-Ho for over 10 years, ever since the one-two punch of seeing his first film, the hilarious Barking Dogs Never Bite (about a man driven to consider killing his neighbour's incessantly barking dog), and then shortly after seeing his then-newest film, Mother (about a woman trying to prove her son's innocence of murder). I didn't immediately realise that these films were from the same director, but as soon as I put that information together, I became a committed fan. He's one of the most fascinating, unexpected filmmakers working today, and when I saw his newest film had won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, that set very high expectations, and I was excited to see whether could live up to them. I've seen it twice now, and as great as his other films are, it's pretty clear that Parasite is his greatest film, at least to date, and it's a perfect display of his skill and his quirks as a film-maker, and his particular thematic obsessions.
[Thoughts on all nine Best Picture nominees – Parasite, 1917, Once Upon A Time In… Hollywood, The Irishman, Marriage Story, Joker, Little Women, Jojo Rabbit, and Ford v Ferrari – after the jump.]
As usual, here is a post collecting my responses to the films of this year's film festival. They were written rather quickly, and posted to my Facebook within a day or two of each film, so I certainly wouldn't call them "reviews". They're just a reflection of my response to the film - how did I feel about them, what did I find myself thinking about when I reflected on the film.
[My thoughts on all 38 of my festival films, after the jump.]
So here's the thing, I have this annoying tendency to put a great deal of effort into writing things for this blog and then, having done all the hard work of actually writing close to 10,000 words, never actually posting the thing because the comparatively easy work of rereading my writing, formatting it, and adding pictures and links, just seems like too much work. (Witness the way I always wait an entire year before posting my reflections on the previous year's film festival films, even though those are literally just reposts of Facebook posts that I had already written.) So this is a post that I finished writing over a year ago, about an event that took place in April 2018. But, having written it all that time ago, I'm only getting around to sharing it now. In posting this I've proofread it, and tweaked a couple of confusing sentences to clarify my point, but otherwise this is exactly the post I would have shared a year ago, had I gone to the effort of sharing this post a year ago. Sorry about the delay.
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So here’s the thing,
A couple of months ago we had a fantastic event running in Wellington – The Jim Henson Retrospectacle, a celebration of the work of Jim Henson with cinema screenings, talks and panel discussions, all centred around a big concert. I was always going to go to the concert (I bought my ticket at the earliest opportunity), and as a movie person I was definitely looking forward to the movie screenings, but I never really considered going to any of the panel discussions until after the screening of The Muppet Movie. Original Muppet Show performer Dave Goelz (who most notably originated and still plays The Great Gonzo) was there, and after the movie he gave a Q&A with the actual Gonzo puppet. As someone whose favourite muppet was Gonzo it was a thrill to actually see this character I’ve loved for as long as I can remember, but I also found Goelz himself to be a fascinating and engaging speaker, and I suddenly realised what a fantastic opportunity this was and how much I would kick myself if I missed out on it. Which is how I found myself unexpectedly spending hundreds of dollars buying tickets to every panel discussion possible. And it was worth every cent.
On the last day, a friend asked if I was going to write a blog post about my experiences. I hadn’t planned to, but the more I thought about it the more I thought it was a good idea – if only to try to capture some of my memories of the event for myself before they fade away into time. So to be clear, these are my recollections. I wasn’t taking notes during the talks, so if I say that someone said something, I mean that I’m paraphrasing what I remember them saying, but memory is unreliable and I could certainly be wrong about what they said. But, to the best of my ability, here is a incomplete record of the Jim Henson Retrospectacle as I experienced it.
As usual, as we come up to this year's film festival (less than a week to go!), I remember that I never got around to posting my responses to last year's festival films. So here they are. These were originally posts on Facebook that I wrote after watching each of the films at the film festival, recording my immediate thoughts on each of the films I saw. These are not reviews - although I admit that in posting them I certainly hope that my comments on the films I liked will encourage people to seek them out - but are more an attempt to try to capture my responses to the film, so that in future years when I remember a particular film I can have something to refer to to recall how I felt about it at the time. It also forces me to actively reflect on each film, rather than just going from film to film without really engaging with each of them.
Please bear in mind, these are not crafted, but rather impulsively written. Seeing them all collected together, I can see the writing tics that I resort to far too much.
[My reactions to all 40 films I saw at the 2018 festival come after the jump.]
Thursday morning, I posted a comment on Facebook: “Preparing myself for the most stressful day of the year.” Film Festival tickets were going on sale, and remembering the last few years fighting with a website that was constantly crashing or failing in one way or another, I was resigned to another few hours of frustration as I tried to secure my tickets.
It wasn’t a promising start. As in the past few years, I broke my purchases up into smaller groups, in order to minimise the risk of the website crashing right as I was finishing a massive purchase. I selected my first group of films, went through to the page where I told them how many tickets I wanted for each film, went to progress, and... nothing. Just a screen with three dots cycling around. I was sitting there waiting for several minutes until I remembered that last year there had been some advice about not using Internet Explorer on the site. I pulled up the site on Chrome, and it actually worked. Yay!
That is, until I tried to select my seats, to avoid the automatic seat allocation (which is always rubbish). My first seat selection worked perfectly. But my second seat selection actually changed my first, so I was sitting in the same seat for both films, even though the second film was already selling well and my seat was much worse for that film than the first. I tried to fix the seat for the first film, but just got caught in a cycle where I would select a seat, click OK, and return to the same seat selection screen. I closed out of it, and went back in. Same result – getting the tickets was perfect, selecting the seats was non-functional. Then when I closed out, I found myself logged out of the festival website. Memories of past years, of the site logging me out and not letting me back in, flooded my memory. But I was surprised to be able to log back in quite easily. By now I could see the major setpiece screenings were already selling well, even though tickets had only been on sale for 10 or 15 minutes, so I decided to abandon the seat selection and just take what they give me. It worked; half an hour after tickets went on sale, I had all of my tickets purchased. I’m not happy with some of my seats, particularly in the smallest screens – I prefer to be centred to the screen, and most of my films in those smallest screens find me sitting quite sharply to one side or the other, making the angle to the screen quite bad – but I can live with it, especially since the purchasing experience was otherwise really smooth.
Good work, film festival website people. While there’s still work to allow people to decide for themselves where they would prefer to sit, the preparation for the peak demand when tickets went on sale was finally perfect. And for that I am grateful.
[EDIT - And a week later they announced a screening of Midsommar, the new horror film from Ari Aster, director of Hereditary. Midsommar has been getting a lot of fantastic buzz, so I was very excited by the announcement. It should be a fun experience with a full Embassy crowd.]
Last week my favourite podcast, Battleship Pretention, released an episode covering the work of the late Agnes Varda. Listening to the episode, I realised I've never seen any of her films, so it was a wonderful surprise to open the festival programme two days later to find they had scheduled a retrospective of five of her films, including two films (Daguerreotypes and Le Bonheur) cited by one of the show's hosts as his favourite Varda films. (Add to that the film society's upcoming screening of Faces Places, and I'm going to rapidly become a Varda expert.)
The classic film selection this year is quite exciting.
* I rewatched Kind Hearts and Coronets only a few months ago, but it's such a gloriously fun and funny film, with an incredible performance by Alec Guinness, that I'm not going to complain about watching it again on the big screen.
* I'm also excited by the screening of Apocalypse Now: Final Cut. I saw Apocalypse Now Redux at the film festival in 2002, and while it's a wonderful cinematic experience, the Redux version is just too long and bloated, with the French Plantation scene in particular just feeling prolonged and aimless at exactly the wrong time in the film. Hopefully this Final Cut will be a good middle-ground between the too-short original cut and the too-long Redux edit.
* I've never seen the other two classic films showing. I've heard great things about Koyaanisqatsi, which pairs documentary footage from around the world with a legendary score by Philip Glass to form a film that abandons any type of storytelling and that is primarily about being an experience for the audience, so seeing this on the big screen should be ideal. And then there's Andrei Rublev. This will be my fifth film by Andrei Tarkovsky, and I haven't really cared for any of his other works that I've seen (including Stalker, which screened in the festival back in 2017), but I always live in hope of discovering something I've never seen before and understanding why a filmmaker like Tarkovsky is so revered.
Usually there are a few films that I was hoping the festival would be showing but that never make it onto the schedule. However this year, I can't think of anything missing; every film I looked for makes an appearance in the programme.
* I was most excited to see the Japanese film We Are Little Zombies listed, even if only for a single screening. It's supposed to be an utterly joyous experience about teen orphans forming a pop band, and was literally the first film I checked for when I got my programme.
* I was pleased when Under the Silver Lake was one of the first announcements. The reviews have mostly been mixed-to-negative, but some people really like it, and there's something appealing to me about a film that can be so divisive (plus I loved It Follows). I'm curious to see which way I fall.
* There's an Aretha Franklin concert film called Amazing Grace, with footage shot close to 50 years ago but unavailable for all this time because of technical problems that could only now be resolved. It's supposed to be an incredible experience, and I'm excited to hear it with a fantastic cinema sound system.
* I've been hearing great things about High Life, an introspective science-fiction film that is the first English-language movie from Claire Denis. It sounds like a strange, fragmented story that has been compared to 2001 (which I love) and Solaris (which I don't). Should be interesting.
* As a fan of both the Victor Hugo book and the musical, I'm curious about Les Misérables, a film that is apparently not a retelling of the original story, but that instead tells a wholly new story exploring the same themes as the original but in a modern context.
* I was fascinated by the previous films of Peter Strickland (the horror film Berberian Sound Studio, in which the gore was kept off screen while we watch the sound effects artist creating the sound of people being torn apart, and the lesbian BDSM-inflected chamber drama The Duke of Burgundy). Peter Strickland makes bizarre, fascinating, personal films; had any other filmmaker made a film about a demonic dress I probably would have dismissed it, but when Strickland makes In Fabric, I'm curious.
* I was a bit uncertain whether to add The Nightingale to my schedule. It's supposed to be really good, and I did love Jennifer Kent's previous film The Babadook, but the stories about walkouts due to the number of rape scenes gave me pause. I've decided to trust that the fact it was written and directed by a woman means that there's care and consideration in the inclusion of those scenes.
* I'm glad to finally see Apollo 11, a documentary about the moon landing compiled from footage that was shot at the time on large format 70mm film and was then misplaced and lost, kept in pristine condition. It's a shame I won't get to see it on the IMAX screen, since that was apparently an incredible experience, but it will still be exciting to see the film on the big screen.
* People seem to really love the Awkwafina comedy The Farewell. I'm yet to get the Awkwafina thing, since I've found her annoying when I've seen her in other films, but this film seems to call for more nuance and subtlety than her usual oversized characters, and I'm hoping she can deliver that.
It's going to be a rough film festival. After the Paramount closed 18 months ago, it seemed like the festival would be badly affected by the loss of one of its main central city venues, so it was fantastic when Reading Courtenay made itself available as a venue, significantly adding to the number of screens within walking distance of each other. But now Reading Courtenay is closed as an earthquake risk, and they've had to spread the festival out even wider to find venues. I was glad to see them add the Lighthouse Cuba as a centre city venue. I have no idea what the City Gallery is like as a movie theatre, but I'm going to find out. They're even having screenings in Porirua; I have a couple of days where I have to rush from work all the way out to Porirua (in rush hour) for an early evening screening, before driving back into town to catch my second film of the night. That will be stressful, and exhausting. But hopefully it will be worth it.
[EDIT - And sadly, something came up last minute that meant that I had to cancel one night's screenings. I didn't mind missing Le Bonheur too much, since it is an classic film and therefore easily accessible elsewhere. I was more disappointed about missing Long Day's Journey into Night, since it seems like a title unlikely to get a theatrical release, and since it's a 3D film watching it at home won't have the same effect without a 3D TV.]
A few years ago, I saw a screening of the 1954 Judy Garland/James Mason version of A Star Is Born. And I thought the film, a story of a drunk Hollywood star on the decline who meets a young talented woman and helps her start her career only to see her stardom eclipse his, was great. Then last year, when the buzz around the new Bradley Cooper/Lady Gaga version started, I decided it would be an interesting exercise to actually sit down and watch all of the previous Star Is Borns to prepare for the new version. And it is genuinely fascinating to see how this one story grows and changes over time, reflecting changes in cultural tastes and in societal views, while remaining recognisably the same.
In the original 1937 film with Janet Gaynor and Frederic March (and which I understand bears heavy similarity to 1932’s What Price Hollywood?), the core plot is established, and it’s surprising how largely untouched that plotting goes throughout the different versions. The main difference is the absence of music, which is a big issue – instead she’s just an actor, and we’re supposed to believe that Norman Maine sees her star appeal and talent as an actress based solely on her serving at a party, which doesn’t play very believably (and which seems even more of a contrivance when you remember that the film actually makes a joke out of her trying to serve people in a way that shows her acting skills). The 1954 remake with Judy Garland and James Mason introduced music to the story, which was the thing that revolutionised these films; it may be hard to see someone’s acting ability or star appeal from watching them serve food, but anyone who hears Judy Garland sing would instantly know she has genuine talent even if she is an unknown. With this film, she’s still an film star, but since this is the period of big-budget Hollywood musicals, that’s the type of film she makes, and this becomes a vehicle to include song-and-dance sequences from all of the films she makes. But other than that, the film is pretty damned close to the original; it seemed to me that many scenes in the '54 would play out with near-identical dialogue as in the '37. By the 70s the era of major movie musicals is over, and so the 1976 version with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson adopts the idea of her being a recording star instead, an approach that gives the story sufficient flexibility that it can change with the time and styles; I’d be shocked if any future Star Is Borns return to a Hollywood movie star setting. But while the 1976 version may have arrived at the ultmate form of the story, it is a flawed film – it is better than its poor reputation, but it is easily the least of the films.
And now we have the 2018 version with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga. There was a lot of buzz around the film, and for a long time it was widely viewed as the frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar; that buzz died down, and at this point it seems certain that it will be one of the Best Picture nominees that come up short.
[Comments on the 2018 A Star Is Born, and the seven other Best Picture nominees – Roma, The Favourite, Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Vice, Green Book, and Bohemian Rhapsody – after the jump]
As happens each year, the upcoming arrival of this year's film festival has finally prompted me to post my responses to the films I saw at last year's festival. As always, these were my initial responses, many of them written very quickly on my phone while waiting for my next screening, and all of them written within a day or two of seeing the film. So these are very rough and immediate reflections that I have left essentially as they were.
Film festival tickets went on sale today and, as in the past two years, I decided to not stand in the cold for four hours waiting, instead trying to book my tickets online. After last year’s mess, I made the decision to book tickets ten at a time, in the hope that a ten-film order might be faster and easier to process, and in the knowledge that having the ticket system crash on you on your ninth film is less frustrating than having it crash on your thirtieth film.
It all seemed to start out well – I got through the initial screen cleanly, I selected my first ten films, went through, and got a Creating Order screen, which stayed cycling for 15 or 20 minutes. At that point I figured it wasn’t going to happen, tried again, and again, several times, each time getting stuck on that one screen. Then I discovered the tickets were down full-stop – the festival tweeted that they’d paused online bookings for the next 15 minutes to try to fix things. And then at noon, just over an hour after the “15 minute pause” started, they were finally back online. And from that point, it was smooth sailing – I was able to purchase all of my tickets pretty easily. (Hopefully the improvement wasn’t just because people just gave up trying, and that the fixes they put in place worked and can be implemented next year.)
But considering it took 2½ hours for me to make my purchases, the whole experience was weirdly stress-free. Unlike last year, where the system kept making me think I was getting somewhere in purchasing my tickets and then would drop out causing me to have wasted all that effort, this year because I kept finding myself stuck on the early screens before I could even get through to my seat selections I never had that all-that-time-wasted experience I had last year. And when they actually took ticketing down, that was even better – at least if no-one is able to buy tickets then I don’t need to stress about the good seats selling out. Plus I was able to actually do some work while I was waiting, which was satisfying. So unlike last year where I was just a bundle of nerves by the end of the process, this year I was pretty much fine.
[EDIT - After the festival started, they had a late confirmation of another film, Prince: Sign O' The Times, which pushes me up to 40 films, a nice round number and far above my previous record of 36.]
Until a couple of years ago, I kept having clashes that stopped me from seeing the Hirokazu Kore-eda films, until I finally saw Our Little Sister a few years ago and decided I need to never miss his film ever again. This year, the festival has two films from him; another one of his slice-of-life family dramas, the Palme d’Or winner Shoplifters, as well as the legal thriller The Third Murder. Shoplifters should be great – it seems perfectly in line with the type of film he makes so incredibly well – but I’m almost more curious about The Third Murder, since that’s a type of film that really demands a lot of tension and suspense and that’s not really something I’ve seen in any of the Kore-eda films I’ve seen to date. I’m excited to see how he does.
The other film I’m most anticipating is the new film from Paul Schrader, First Reformed. Looking at his filmography, I realised that I’ve never actually seen any of his directorial efforts, although I am a fan of his work writing for Scorsese. He’s probably best known for writing Taxi Driver, so I’m intrigued by the fact that pretty much every time I hear the film referenced they always compare it to that film, suggesting it’s as though Travis Bickle were a Protestant minister. A lot of people I respect have rated the film very highly, so I’m anticipating something special.
I’m also really excited by You Were Never Really Here, the new film from Lynne Ramsey with Joaquin Phoenix as a veteran hired to rescue a kidnapped girl. I’d been extremely impressed by Ramsey’s previous film We Need To Talk About Kevin – that film demanded she navigate very delicately around a lot of sensitive and devastating issues, and she managed to explore that film’s central incident of violence while staying true to the horrific act that it was – and so I’m curious to see her exploring what seems to be the space occupied by films like Taken.
I’ve consciously chosen to avoid knowing anything about Leave No Trace, the new Debra Granik film. Winter’s Bone was my favourite film of 2010, an absolute masterpiece, and so I was just satisfied to hear that the response to her new work has been strongly positive as well. It’s been hard to avoid knowing anything about the film – especially since New Zealand actress Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie is one of the leads, which means every Kiwi media outlet is publishing articles announcing how she will break out in the same way Jennifer Lawrence did after Winter’s Bone – but I’ve achieved it. I’m excited to sit down and discover what the film actually is.
As someone whose favourite film is Vertigo, I’m curious about The Green Fog, the new film from Guy Madden (whose work is a real blind spot for me) that apparently uses footage from various movies shot in San Francisco to create what sounds almost like a constructed remake of Hitchcock's greatest film. I don’t know what that will be like, but I’m curious.
There are quite a few documentaries that I’ve heard very good things about. I’m particularly excited about Filmworker, the documentary about Leon Vitali. I’ve known about Vitali for years – he’s a former actor who, after working with Kubrick on Barry Lyndon, decided to leave acting and dedicate his life to being Kubrick’s assistant, doing everything from checking film prints to being acting coach to Danny Lloyd on The Shining, and he’s continued to represent Kubrick’s wishes long after the man died – but he’s someone I don’t really know much about, so that should be fascinating. Similarly, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story – telling the life story of one of the woman who, in addition to being one of the great beautifies of classic Hollywood, was a genius inventor whose work was vital as a precursor to technologies like wifi – is supposed to be excellent. I’ve heard good things about Three Identical Strangers, about three triplets separated at birth who learn of each other’s existence. Science Fair is supposed to be nicely heartwarming, with obvious comparisons to the spelling bee documentary Spellbound. Ian McKellan is an engaging and entertaining speaker, so his interview-documentary will hopefully be fun. And while it’s not a documentary, American Animals apparently does some interesting work incorporating the remembrances of the actual people involved in the true story into the dramatisation; reviews have been mixed, but I liked Bart Layton’s earlier documentary The Imposter, so I’m willing to be hopeful.
Weirdly there are a couple of horse films that feature prominently in my schedule. It’s not really something that would ordinarily appeal to me, but the reviews have been so overwhelmingly positive for both Lean On Pete (a boy-and-his-horse type of story) and The Rider (about a rodeo rider who suffers serious head injuries) that I decided I had to see them both. Indeed, there was a significant amount of effort juggling all of my screenings around to find a way to make a screening of The Rider fit.
I’m generally not a big music person, and wouldn’t ordinarily seek out concert documentaries, but I did really enjoy seeing Woodstock at the Embassy a couple of years ago – seeing a music film like that in the cinema, with not just the big screen but also the big sound, is the best way to experience those movies – so seeing Monterey Pop was an easy choice.
And then there are all the films that just seem interesting. Jafar Panahi continues to thumb his nose at the Iranian authorities that tried to ban him from making movies with his latest “this isn’t actual movie” movie 3 Faces. A documentary about a fireworks festival (Brimstone & Glory) should at least be a nice spectacle on the big screen. I probably would have overlooked Woman at War, but a few weeks ago the film society screened the director’s earlier film Of Horses and Men, which was so fantastic that the need to see his new film became pressing. And The Guilty sounds like it could be fun – a thriller that takes place entirely in an emergency call centre with our hero trying to help one of his callers.
Once again the classic film section is disappointing, with only one film that really holds any interest for me at all. But that one film is Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, which is fantastic. I’ve only seen it once, a number of years ago when it had a Saturday afternoon screening at the film archive. It’s a great film, but that was not the best environment to see the film, so I’m excited to see it at the Embassy. My big disappointment in the retro section was that Raise the Red Lantern, screening in Auckland, isn’t going to be shown down here; when I’d heard that Yimou’s film was screening in the festival I was thrilled as I’d never seen it, so was understandably disappointed to realise the screening was from a 35mm print, as we no longer have any 35mm projectors in Wellington to show the film.
I feel like it’s a pretty strong festival this year. I’m very happy with my film selections, although as always there are a few films I’m gutted I couldn’t make fit (most notably Lucky, the final film starring Harry Dean Stanton). The big thing to me is that pretty much every film I was hoping would be in the festival is in the festival – unlike past years where I’ve been disappointed by just how many films I’ve thought might make the festival but that never screened, this year there are really only two films I had thought might make it. I guess I knew The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was never going to screen – the middling reviews from Cannes and the legal action killed any hope of that happening – but it would have been nice to see the finalised film in the festival since Lost In La Mancha, the documentary about Gilliam’s earlier effort to film the story, was part of the festival 15 years ago. And I’d seen such a strong response to Anton Yelchin’s final film Thoroughbreds, the comedy about two teenage girls planning to murder one of their stepfathers, that I thought that had a good chance of making it as well. Oh well – hopefully I’ll get a chance to see these films on the big screen later.
But those few disappointments aside, it looks like it should be a good festival. Less than three weeks to go.
Back in the years where there were five Best Picture nominees, there was almost always a significant amount of overlap between the Picture nominees and the Director nominees; while it was common for one of the Picture nominees to not have a Director nomination and vice versa, usually you could rely on those awards sharing four out of the five nominations. And that overlap is why, ever since the Academy increased the number of its Picture nominees, I’ve always internally thought of the Director nominees as the “actual” Picture nominees, and the other films are the also-rans. It doesn’t always hold – Argo won Picture without a Director nomination, and this year Three Billboards seems to have a real chance to win despite Martin McDonagh not having been recognised – but for the most part it holds.
Which is why I find the Director nominees so fascinating. I’ve seen a lot of attention focused on the nature of the Director nominees – two first-time directors in Gerwig and Peele and two long-time acclaimed directors who have never before been nominated in Del Toro and Nolan, as well as PT Anderson who is one of our great artists and who has never won. But what I found exciting was the level of involvement these filmmakers had with the film. Each of those films was written by their directors – The Shape of Water was co-written by Del Toro, while the other four films’ directors have sole writing credits. (You can also add Three Billboards in here as well – while the film doesn’t have a Director nomination, Martin McDonagh was the screenwriter on that Picture nominee.) In other words, none of these films are works for hire; these are all films that are intensely personal and shaped and moulded and made by their director into a unique expression of the person they are. Which is not to criticise directors like Spielberg or Guadagnino or Wright, who found scripts that spoke to them and worked hard to make those films theirs. But these five films particular feel specific and intimate and real.
[Comments on Lady Bird, The Shape of Water, Phantom Thread, Get Out, Dunkirk, Darkest Hour, Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Post, and Call Me By Your Name after the jump]
