As the saying goes, the internet is made of cats.  Which is true because it’s the best way for cat lovers to both share and watch videos starring their favorite animals.  Since there are so many videos of cats doing inexplicable things that anyone can readily watch on their phone, how does one explain the ongoing popularity of the CatVideoFest film series?  (It began in 2019, and after a Covid lull has steadily grown over the past five years.)  To paraphrase Homer Simpson, why would people pay to watch something they can already watch for free?

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There are two things I admire about Christopher Nolan.  First, he’s never made the same movie twice (outside of the Batman trilogy).  He’s Kubrick-ian in that way, setting out to make the best movie in every genre he visits.  Second, he relishes large-scale storytelling.  Like his peer Denis Villeneuve, he loves painting on the biggest canvas possible.  Taken together, it makes perfect sense that Nolan would tackle The Odyssey, an epic tale in a genre he hadn’t conquered yet.  That said, the movie contains all of the narrative and stylistic touches you’d expect from a Nolan film, right down to the “what did he say?” moments of dialog dialog.

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I wish I had more time to watch movies than I do.  The list of them I’d be ashamed to admit I’ve never seen is quite long and grows by the day.  For example, when Brian Wilson, the former leader of the Beach Boys, died in 2025, memorial articles referenced Love & Mercy, which came out ten years prior.  Wilson’s passing finally motivated me to see the film, which had been routinely praised for its performances by Paul Dano and John Cusack.  That praise was well-deserved, because the movie is one of the best biopics about a musician I’ve seen.

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If you talk to anyone who’s eighty years-old or older, I bet they’d have an interesting story to tell.  That person would have met some interesting people, seen and done things that few others had, witnessed great change over time and experienced every emotion under the sun, only to admit they have more questions than answers.  That’s Train Dreams in a nutshell, a tale of an unremarkable man who built railroads and bridges to support his family, only to find everything that mattered to him gone in an instant.  While his story is uniquely his, he’s also an everyman who forces us to reckon with life as we know it.

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I like to think I’m a funny guy.  That being said, I’ve never once considered going on stage on open mic night.  Not only do you need to be fearless, you have to get total strangers to laugh at your jokes while they’re busy getting drunk.  Maybe this is why the movie has a character everyone refers to as “Balls”.  You gotta have balls to be a performer, figuratively for ladies, of course.  And while the amateur stand-up comedian at the center of Is This Thing On? is both funny and ballsy, the movie isn’t the story of him becoming famous.  It’s about what drove him to write his name on the call sheet to begin with.

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In the old days, people who sought out back-alley bargains knew what they were getting.  In the era of digital commerce, however, buyers only know a seller’s user name and can’t tell whether what’s for sale is legitimate or not until a package arrives.  Conversely, sellers don’t know who they’re scamming or how their victims will react to being swindled.  Cloud takes a harsh look at the perils of ecommerce in the cloud era, where new-fangled criminality hides behind anonymity and revenge is sought through on-line doxxing forums.  It’s a canny, secretive film that progressively builds towards a shocking climax.

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