Tragedy is the oldest story shape: watching someone fall and understanding exactly why. These reviews and essays cover tragedy in film and fiction, and what the form still teaches about consequence and character.
1970sSeptember 11, 2026
The Pyx (1973) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A Canadian film in which a woman falls from a Montreal balcony and the investigation runs backward through her last days, intercut, with Karen Black singing her own…
1970sSeptember 11, 2026
Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Diane Keaton plays a teacher of deaf children who spends her nights in bars, in a film that is genuinely good for ninety minutes and then…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
Brokeback Mountain (2005) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two men herd sheep on a Wyoming mountain in 1963 and spend the next twenty years failing to have a life. Ang Lee won Best Director and the…
1990sSeptember 11, 2026
Leaving Las Vegas (1995) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A man goes to Las Vegas to drink himself to death and states the plan in the first twenty minutes. Mike Figgis shot it for around four…
2010sSeptember 11, 2026
Judy (2019) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Renee Zellweger won Best Actress for a technically accomplished transformation inside a film that exists to contain it, covering Judy Garland's five-week London run five months before her death.
1990sSeptember 11, 2026
Philadelphia (1993) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The first major studio film about AIDS, made deliberately as a courtroom drama so that a mainstream audience would watch it, and Tom Hanks won Best Actor over Daniel…
1990sSeptember 11, 2026
Life is Beautiful (1998) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Roberto Benigni made a comedy about a father convincing his son that a concentration camp is a game, won Best Actor, and produced the most divisive film…
1980sSeptember 11, 2026
Ordinary People (1980) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Robert Redford's first film as director is a carefully observed drama about a family that cannot discuss a death, and it won Best Picture and Director over Raging…
2010sSeptember 11, 2026
Marriage Story (2019) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two people who like each other are put through a divorce by a legal process neither of them wanted to use, in a film that opens with both…
2020sSeptember 11, 2026
Elvis (2022) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Austin Butler is genuinely extraordinary and the film around him is narrated by his manager, edited at about four cuts a second for the first hour, and structured as…
2020sSeptember 11, 2026
Babylon (2022) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. It does not belong on a page called Modern Movie Slop and I am reviewing it here because that is where it was ranked. It is a three-hour failure…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
Monster (2003) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Charlize Theron gained weight, wore prosthetic teeth and won an Academy Award, and the performance underneath all of that is better than the transformation it became famous for. The…
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