In THE ACCOUNTANT2 – yes, that’s the onscreen title – Ben Affleck (DAREDEVIL) returns to his brilliantly ludicrous role of Christian “The Accountant” Wolff (Chris for short), autistic math genius raised in the martial arts who works as a forensic accountant for the mob and on the side helps people with their taxes or with things that require shooting people. In this one part 1 supporting character Ray King (J.K. Simmons, DARK SKIES) is nervously waiting at a bar to meet with a legendary assassin called Anaïs (Daniella Pineda, JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM/DOMINION) when unknown gunmen ambush them and kill him. If I had remembered that he was just a guy from the Treasury Department and not some underworld friend of Chris’ I would’ve gotten a kick out of how good of a fight he puts up. But the scene is kind of upsetting because there are so many bystanders running away screaming and it reminds me of a mass shooting.
Anyway he manages to write “FIND THE ACCOUNTANT” on his arm before he dies, so another part 1 character, Treasury agent Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson, COLOMBIANA), does just that while trying to figure out what her boss was working on and finish the case. One cool gimmick is that Ray’s landlords cleaned the apartment, pulling down his wall of photos, receipts and tax documents related to the case and dumping them in a box. She hangs them back up in an order that seems logical to her, then falls asleep and Chris completely rearranges them into what looks like a bizarre pattern, but of course he’s figured out what ever little piece of it means. (read the rest of this shit…)

SINNERS is the first original story from writer/director Ryan Coogler. Not that it matters. After the true story of FRUITVALE STATION he added to fictional worlds and characters created by other people –
O’DESSA is a pretty cool dystopian musical that Searchlight Pictures released straight to Hulu last month. The story involves love and music in the face of fascism – probly not anything anybody would be interested in these days. It’s pretty slick mainstream entertainment, but kind of a cousin to
Recently I rewatched 
URBAN VENGEANCE, not be confused with Seagal’s 
HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE (2022) is about a group of young people who have determined, quite reasonably, that the only voice they really have in stopping an oil company from poisoning their communities and exacerbating climate change is if they figure out how to sabotage their infrastructure enough to disrupt their business and make it less profitable. So that’s what they’re ready to do. They all rendezvous at a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, West Texas, some meeting for the first time, but they all know the plan, and they get to it.
G20 is not a DIE-HARD-on-a-______ movie – it’s an
MEMOIR OF A SNAIL is a stop motion movie, not trying to be edgy but not appropriate for (most) kids, kind of like a pretty dark indie comedy, except done with clay figures. I haven’t seen MARY AND MAX, the previous feature from writer/director Adam Elliot, so I don’t know how similar or dissimilar they are, but from my experience this is a very unique use of the medium, constantly narrated, and full of quirky novelistic detail and digressions.
Y2K is a 2024 horror comedy that’s the directorial debut of Kyle Mooney. You may or may not know Mooney as a Saturday Night Live cast member from 2013 to 2022, but he also co-wrote and starred in a weird movie called BRIGSBY BEAR (2017) and I would highly recommend Saturday Morning All Star Hits! (S.M.A.S.H.!), an eight episode parody of ‘90s children’s programming he co-created in 2021. This shares with those a surface appearance of millennial nostalgia but with such specific pop cultural observations and such weird comedy ideas that it never feels like “Hey, remember that!?” in a bad way. The joke isn’t ha, we used to have VHS, it’s that an evil VCR kills somebody by ejecting a dubbed and hand-labelled VARSITY BLUES at their head.
Watching 

















