We are not rational animals, we are animals that must work to be rational

Tag: streamgems

  • Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus

    I won’t pretend this is a movie for everyone. You need to like modern classical music or I suspect you will find this film interminable and probably sleep inducing. But if you check that box, Opus is an intimate private piano recital in your living room. It’s a 1hr 40minute concert with nothing but Sakamoto…

  • Inside Out 2

    Inside Out 2

    My children grew up with Pixar and they carry with them the natural love we have for the things we cherished when young. But it’s not as if taking my daughters to Pixar movies was some kind of penance. Between 1999 when my first daughter was born and 2010, Pixar produced one of the greatest…

  • The Blue Angels

    Can a documentary that is exactly what you expected ever be good? The Blue Angels is here to answer that question – at least if you love spectacular flying and wildly gung-ho fliers. All that’s missing is the Top Gun Anthem and Take My Breath Away. But hey, you do get “The Blue Angel Creed”…

  • American Fiction

    It would be hard to imagine a more convincing send-up of modern leftist attitudes on race than American Fiction. Every moment of the plot that focuses on My Pafology (or Fuck as it comes to be called) is laugh out loud funny and spot on. Cutting without being cruel and only occasionally a bit broad,…

  • Heat

    In some alternate, happier Michael Mann universe, Robert De Niro just keeps driving to LAX and Pacino has the shootout with Kevin Gage’s Waingro. Justice wouldn’t be served, but I’d like that ending very much – and not just because it would be so unexpected. But even if we all know that De Niro and…

  • Tetris

    Not quite as elegant or compelling as the game itself, the origin story nevertheless manages to tell a fascinating and surprisingly sweet tale of gamesmanship and devotion to craft. Yes, the closing sequences in Russia border on farce and do the movie a disservice, but the essence of the story, much like the game, is…

  • The Day of the Jackal

    As the elaborate cat-and-mouse game unfolds, it’s never quite clear who is the hunted and who the hunter. The Jackal (a brilliant Edward Fox as a professional assassin) is stalking de Gaulle. And the entire French government is stalking the Jackal. I suppose one knows that de Gaulle isn’t going to die, but what makes…

  • It’s Quieter in the Twilight

    Fifteen billion miles from Earth, the Voyager spacecraft glide outward into the vast of interstellar space. They are still working, still communicating, but with power levels in a long, slow decline toward final dysfunction. While in Pasadena, a dozen or so aging engineers, programmers and scientists – the sort of people one NEVER sees on…

  • Annie Hall

    As in most great movie romances, the lovers in Annie Hall do not end up together. Jane Austen may assure us that well-suited, rational lovers can live with as much chance of happiness together as it is possible to have, but we tend to believe that the essence of great romance is in its loss.…

  • 13 Assassins

    Whichever version you choose to watch of 13 Assassins, you won’t go wrong. The new version is faster, bloodier and more visually striking. The old version has the same great story beats and is even more perfectly Japanese. Not to be missed by anyone who enjoys Samurai movies (and who doesn’t?). (Prime)