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Why did a movie about a poetry teacher wreck me?
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Why did a movie about a poetry teacher wreck me?

La La Land is one of the most visually beautiful films of the last decade. It is also, on honest inspection, a film about two people who are so consumed by their own ambitions that their relationship was always going to be a casualty of those ambitions. The tragedy is not that they could not be together. It is that neither of them genuinely tried.

I was a kid obsessed with ships. Not just Titanic. All of them. Britannic, Lusitania, Olympic. I built entire worlds in my head from grainy photographs and library books. Then James Cameron made a film that put all of it on screen, and added a love story so devastating that the ocean itself felt like it was grieving. I have never fully recovered.

Parasite is a very good film. It is also the beneficiary of one of the most inflated critical reputations in recent Oscar history, propped up partly by the specific way Western audiences respond to foreign language cinema. Let us have the honest conversation nobody wants to have.

Martin Scorsese's three-hour cocaine spiral is visually intoxicating, DiCaprio is electric, and Margot Robbie announces herself to the world. It is also morally evasive, narratively repetitive, and nowhere near the masterpiece its most devoted admirers insist it is. Let us talk about all of it.

Christopher Nolan has made spectacles before. He has made thrillers, heist films, war epics, and time-bending puzzles. But with Oppenheimer, he has made something rarer: a film that genuinely haunts you. Not because of what it shows. Because of what it asks.

Money Heist is a heist thriller that became a global phenomenon. But its greatest achievement is not the heist, the masks, or the anthem. It is a dying man in a tailored suit who is simultaneously the most monstrous and most magnetic character on television. Berlin deserved better than the show gave him. He also deserved exactly what he got.