To paraphrase a quote, I am less interested in Lydia Tár’s dreams than in the near certainty that the Társ of the real world don’t make it out of Staten Island. Art is the opposite of rent. Artists need money to live and time to create, as do audiences in order to attend.

It is perhaps no surprise that James Cameron’s Avatar films—respectively the first and third highest grossing film of all time—fail to offer an imagination which exceeds the banal territories of capitalism. But, through their lip-service and surface-level ‘critique’ of it, the films show us precisely the way contemporary capitalism operates.

Ann Turner’s poignant, eerie Cold War coming-of-age film Celia captures a period in Australian history that is glaringly absent from the national collective memory.

Watching noir all month, in its many transcontinental variants from the past eighty-odd years, really is a fantastic thing to do. I’m finding connections between films that aren’t obvious, or that might not appear to me without the benefit of such programming and framing.

The monster contains multitudes, but no one referent exhausts it of its capacity to refer to something else, because the core of its being is outside our frames of reference. One of the thrills of Nope, as a work of weird fiction, is wondering just how much of our stories, our world, is similarly beyond our grasp.

Purity and sacrifice—the religious tenets of good motherhood—still course through representations of the maternal on-screen, just as they continue to weave their way through the dynamics of motherhood in reality, the political implications more fraught than ever.

In that moment the audience and Emerald are each abolitionists, and in that moment at the Blacktown drive-in where I witnessed Nope, everyone in that carpark, however briefly, behind their tinted car windows, desired the absence of police, for the police to fuck right off, and in the infinite violent possibilities invoked by Peele, we all wanted to see the police, the dutiful henchmen of capital that they are, gone for good.

If, as Andrew Todd has written, Sony’s recent Morbius was the triumph of intellectual property over storytelling, Disney’s Lightyear is intellectual property as storytelling. It is the story of a toy, written by people who don’t know that toys come alive. It is a movie that exists solely because of its franchise yet narrows its imaginary boundaries.

The multiverse can have deeper implications when the interests in self-conscious play and knotty conception are probed for a more consequential social commentary. While neither a flawless execution of the cinematic multiverse nor an exhaustive exploration of identity and inequality, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a productive example of this balance.

In these films Jane Campion’s creed seems to be one of love, too, but a love that—distinct from the Romantic ideal—unfurls within the mucky ecstasy of the venal and the sublime. Her characters come together like waves onto rocks; their bodies tell the story.

Sony’s pickle is that Spider-Man doesn't have the sidekick roster of a Batman or rotating teammates of the X-Men: so in order to keep producing content, the studio must dive into the rogues gallery and make movies about villains. And Michael Morbius is a character so far down the villain totem pole that the very announcement of the project garnered snickers from fans instead of excitement.

The French Dispatch is Wes Anderson’s most overtly ‘historical’ film to date. It is also his most Wes Anderson. His longstanding tendency toward narrative detours and aesthetic pastiche finds here its most fitting form in a kind of fragmented, nesting doll format, intended to resemble an issue of a magazine.

While it may be sensible in our climate-threatened world to regard cars as unrestrainable pests choking and exhausting the planet, cars are routinely celebrated in popular cinema as portals for escaping drab reality, their sleek bright surfaces offer a glistening promise of transcendence. Yet Titane conveys a passion for automobiles surging beyond mere commodity fetishism, and an acute hostility toward people.

What unites The Conversation and Leave No Trace is the shared desire of their protagonists to evade particular forms of capture. This desire to live off-the-grid is, inherently, a rejection of the terms of the world as-is, and the limited possibilities of life lived on those terms. It’s a practice of resistance, skirting systems of power by refusing to be made legible within them.

In WILLY'S WONDERLAND, we are confronted with two nightmares: being trapped in a children’s entertainment venue inhabited by haunted animatronic characters; and the torment of living as hostages, held captive by capital. The film’s strength lies in its ability to convey us from the first of these horrors to the second.

Indulging in cinematic spaces like these – loft apartments occupied by single artist types – is a salve amidst the current housing crisis in Australia. These viewing habits, the enthusiastic study of filmic trips, have become my guilty pleasure as I grit my teeth through another brutal winter.