This first essay contains mild spoilers for the films We're All Going to the World's Fair and Eighth Grade. In the latest Mission Impossible film, Tom Cruise’s super-spy Ethan Hunt is faced with the most catastrophic threat to his existence yet: a sentient AI supercomputer named “The Entity”, which those involved are worried will reshape …
Continue reading "“The Internet on Film” + “Thinking about Version Differences”"
This is the second part in a short series of reviews of Murakami adaptations, and contains spoilers for both the short story and film adaptation of “Burning”. I would recommend either reading or watching before reading this. Thank you. Lee Chang-dong, a South Korean auteur and one of the leading members of the Korean New Wave, …
This is the first part in a short series of reviews of Murakami adaptations, and contains slight spoilers for both the short story and film adaptation of "Tony Takitani". I would recommend either reading or watching before reading this. Thank you. Published in The New Yorker in April 2002, “Tony Takitani” isn’t one of Japanese …
Most years I dedicate separate posts to my year end round up, but I’m going to ditch that for a slightly more holistic post this year – mainly because, and I’m being totally honest here - I didn’t watch nearly enough TV or play enough video games to separate them into their own lists this …
This post contains full spoilers for both The Rehearsal and Nope, and I would recommend watching both before reading. Thanks! When I was at middle school, one of the popular activities during free periods was r/5050, a subreddit that presented a kind of gamble with each link - when you clicked, you’d either see something …
Just a short post this month to announce the latest edition of the toatali media empire; "the toatali review"; a substack addition to the main blog. I've been thinking about doing something like this for a while, but only finally worked up the effort. The idea is to have a place for more frequent, more …
This post contains full spoilers for Elden Ring, as well as minor spoilers for Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Sekiro. Thanks for reading! I think any proper review of Elden Ring has to take into account, at least in some way, the writer’s relationship to the previous games of FromSoftware. This is because, as I will hopefully convince you …
This post contains full spoilers for Red Rocket, as well as minor spoilers for Uncut Gems & The Wolf of Wall Street. Thanks for reading! Earlier this year, filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson generated conversation with his latest film Licorice Pizza, a love story between an older girl and a younger boy. The film, which depicts …
For years, I’ve been trying to think about what makes certain moments in games work. Part of the joy of criticism is that kind of self-reflection; why does x scene, film or video game work for me where another one doesn’t - and what does that reflect about what works for me about media? Sometimes …
It’s been a good year at the cinema – following the stall of 2020, when films found themselves delayed by the pandemic, this year truly feels like a revival. Being able to watch films on the big screen again is a welcome relief, but it does bring back one annoying thing – country-specific film release …
Toatali Reviews 