Munich

Meets the minimum requirement for any work dealing with the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is to recognise the situation's complexity - moral and otherwise - and the cycle of violence that accompanies it. I did feel a bit morally queasy during Munich's first hour or so, until it became clear that the film's program did indeed extend in that way, after which I was able to give myself over more fully to the suspense of its plot and the growing toll taken on Eric Bana's Avner by his actions as he faces questions of conscience, family and home in pursuing the plotters of the titular massacre.

Drive-By Truckers - The New OK

A pretty good all-round Drive-By Truckers record, released this year, that never gets to really great heights except on the soulful "Tough to Let Go" which really nails it.

The Big Lebowski

I never watched this one before somehow. I guess I'm too late to it; I found it diverting but not much more.

Tenet

As distinctively Nolan-esque as all of his films - in style, theme and treatment - and with some of the strengths of his best, Tenet nonetheless didn't completely do it for me. 

Hard not to compare it to those others, and by that yardstick, Tenet doesn't have quite the interlocked high-concept and character-based (emotional) dimensions of The Prestige, Inception and Interstellar, the combination of sheer excitement and moral texture in his Batman films, the satisfying neatness of Memento as well as a couple of those others, or the same sustained sense of stature and charisma about all of its characters. The one I haven't mentioned there is Dunkirk (my memories of Insomnia are vague), which I still look back on as an impressive but maybe my least favourite of his; interestingly, it - like Tenet - is also an overt take on genre, in that case war as opposed to spy.

Having said that, it was still a very good watch, with plenty of intrigue, a lot of action, some characteristically great set pieces, an intricate - and difficult to follow - construction, and plenty of uncertainty about where it was going and how it would get there, with all of its central performances highly watchable (especially charming is Robert Pattinson - it's a bit remarkable that the two principals of Twilight have turned out to be two of the most interesting, and maybe best, of their generation of actors). 

(w/ R)

Jessie Ware - What's Your Pleasure?

Takes aim for the dancefloor, and while there's bits I like, there are no real standouts in the vein that each of Ware's three excellent previous albums offered.

(Devotion; Tough Love; Glasshouse)

The Dark Knight Rises

Unsurprisingly a bit thinner after multiple rewatches but then again there's a reason I've been moved to watch it that many times!

Inglourious Basterds

As suspected, not as good on a revisit as I'd come to think of it as over the years since I previously watched it, but still packs something of a punch - and maybe watching on a big screen might have made a particularly large difference with this one.

Fleet Foxes - Shore

On initial listens, Shore suffers by being so evidently a Fleet Foxes album (years after I last listened to a new record of theirs, it's like they never went away) and also by being so uniform in its texture and quality - both of which tend to cause the individual songs to blur together. Luckily, on repeated listens, it turns out to be excellent, and if there aren't any real individual stand-out moments (closest are maybe "Sunblind" and "Maestranza"), that matters less when the whole is sustained at such a high level of quality.

The Nice Guys

Is there something about the 1970s, and especially its seedier elements, that makes the decade especially conducive to cinematic look-backs? Think Boogie Nights, American Hustle, Inherent Vice - a trio of truly great films, with two of them admittedly having the leg-up of being directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The Nice Guys isn't in their league, but it shares with the two PTA ones a Los Angeles setting, and with all three a mood which feels just very suited to the movies. Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe are a good double act, with both showing pretty fair comic moves; Margaret Qualley shows up in what in retrospect could have been an audition for her turn in the 1969-set Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; and scenes are stolen by Angourie Rice as Gosling's precocious PI daughter.