Monday Miniatures: Back to School Means It’s PTA Season

Welcome to Monday Miniatures, where I tell you about some of the stuff I’ve been watching in the past week that I wouldn’t otherwise get to share.

The week of Sept. 15-21, 2025:

Hard Eight, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Boogie Nights, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Magnolia, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Punch-Drunk Love, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

There Will Be Blood, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

How I watched them: Hard Eight and Magnolia - Amazon Prime rentals; Boogie Nights - Paramount+; Punch-Drunk Love - Criterion Channel; There Will Be Blood - DVD

With my most anticipated movie of the fall less than a week away and a series of pieces planned here for the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest feature, now seemed like an opportune time to revisit each of the director’s nine previous films. I will be diving deeper into these films in separate articles later this week, so I’ll reserve comment for that. For now, let it be enough to say that this rewatch has been an absolute delight, Anderson is not only one of our most important but our most deft filmmakers, and my expectations for One Battle After Another could not be higher. 

Images, directed by Robert Altman

How I watched it: Rented DVD from Vidiots

I paired this with There Will Be Blood, which features a dedication to Altman, who was a mentor and inspiration to Anderson. It’s easy to see the influence in their sprawling, kaleidoscopic ensemble pieces like Altman’s Nashville or The Player and Anderson’s Boogie Nights and Magnolia. But even in something more internal and esoteric like Images, you can see the way the camera moves and actors are placed within a scene influencing the filmmaker Anderson would become.

Of course, Images is, itself, heavily influenced by Ingmar Bergam, in particular the Swedish master’s Persona. Altman would revisit this theme of fractured psyches a few years later in the more lauded Three Women, which I found a tad inscrutable. Images is a nervy little thriller with an excellent leading performance from Susannah York, whom I know best from They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? but whom you may recognize from the Christopher Reeve Superman films.

Overall, I  prefer Altman at his biggest and boldest, allowed to paint on his grandest canvases. If nothing else, Images serves as proof of Altman’s wonderful versatility, even at this early middle stage of his lengthy, prolific career.

Malice, directed by Harold Becker

How I watched it: Tubi

What my grandmother would have called hooey, this was the last Aaron Sorkin-penned script I had yet to see, and now having crossed it off the list, I understand how it could have fallen to the bottom of the priority stack. If I could say anything for it, at least in the Sorkin universe, it might not be as bad as Being the Riccardos. At least he followed it up with the unbroken run of The American President, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Social Network, Moneyball, Steve Jobs, and Molly’s Game, while also sneaking in two fantastic television shows (The West Wing and Sports Night; no need to talk about Studio 60).

Sorkin doesn’t deserve all the blame here, as the underbaked script was co-written by Scott Frank, who was nearly three decades away from cementing his own TV legacy with The Queen’s Gambit. The overdirection? That belongs to Harold Becker of VisionQuest and Sea of Love fame. The appalling acting? Lay that at the feet of Nicole Kidman, Bill Pullman, and the usually reliable Bebe Neuwirth. 

Alec Baldwin comes out unscathed with a performance that taps into everything that would come to define the Baldwin on-screen persona: calm, cool arrogance in the face of nearly universal distaste. A year after Glengarry GlenRoss proved Baldwin could be relied upon to deliver chunky monologues about how great he is and much the rest of the world should thank him for that greatness, here, he gets the now-iconic “I am god” monologue. It’s as good as you’ve heard and mostly worth the price of admission.

Beyond that, there’s not much to recommend in this erotic thriller that is neither erotic nor thrilling and a noir pastiche in which the mystery is solved quite accidentally. Everyone involved had done better before and would do better again.

Corman’s World, directed by Alex Stapleton

Piranha, directed by Joe Dante

How I watched them: Corman’s World - Tubi; Piranha - In theaters (Vidiots)

I watched the documentary Corman’s World about legendary producer Roger Corman in anticipation of catching the Corman-produced Piranha at Vidiots, where Dante was on hand to discuss the film. I’ll have more to say about that in a separate piece. The documentary is the exact kind of hagiography one might expect, and that’s not a bad thing. There are worse folks in Hollywood to lionize, after all. We get some great interviews with Dante, Martin Scorsese, and longtime collaborator Jack Nicholson, who credits Corman for giving him work when no one else would.

The thing I wish there were more of: the movies. At the time this film was made in 2011, Corman had literally hundreds of credits to his name. It would be unreasonable to dig too deeply in the span of a 93-minute documentary, but one wishes Stapleton and Co. had zeroed in on a few choice examples, Piranha perhaps foremost among them.

Corman was well known for his ability to shoot quickly on tight budgets, but it would have been fascinating to highlight more of the specifics on how he accomplished that. Instead, the film focuses more on Corman’s status as the father of the New Hollywood movement, giving directors like Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and more their early shots at filmmaking. It’s a fair focus, but it ultimately means the film settles for surface-level appreciation rather than rigorous study.

12:08 East of Bucharest, directed by Corneliu Porumboiu

How I watched it: Rented DVD from Vidiots

A key film in the Romanian New Wave, this comes a year after The Death of Mr. Lazarescu put the nation’s cinema on the map at Cannes and a year before the Palme d’Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days conquered the Croisette. Porumboiu’s film is perhaps smaller in scope than either of those two efforts, but it is no less ambitious.

The original Romanian title of the film literally translates to “Was it or wasn’t it?” As the film ultimately makes clear, the question refers to whether the small town of Vaslui was involved in the 1989 revolution that deposed dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The 12:08 of the international title refers to the time of day when Ceausescu gave up power. Up for debate is whether the people of Vaslui protested in the streets before 12:08 p.m. or celebrated in the streets after in the safety of a nation free of its dictator.

Porumboiu uses his characters to ask vital questions about who benefits from a revolution, who gets left behind, and what any of it means anyway. It is an incontrovertible good that Ceausescu was removed from power, but it is fair to ask what kind of nation should spring up instead.

The Man Without a Past, directed by Aki Kaurismaki

How I watched it: Rented DVD from Vidiots

This was probably the most popular Kaurismaki title I had yet to see, and it may be my favorite of all his films, or at least right up there with Le Havre and Fallen Leaves. Kaurismaki is the ultimate humanist in that in his best works, the vast majority of people are decent and kind, while systems and bureaucracies serve to oppress and deny.

Here, a man played by Markku Peltola arrives in Helsinki via train and is immediately mugged and beaten within an inch of his life. As a result, he develops amnesia. So, with no identification and no memory, he begins to slip through the cracks of society. The community members around him, many of whom find themselves also forgotten by society, become his saving grace.

At every turn, he is thwarted in his attempts to apply for benefits, to find work, to navigate the legal system simply because has no name and no past. It is not enough that he is a human being, alive and real, sitting right before you. Systems are not set up for this, and it should come as little surprise that it takes a human to understand humanity. As our economic and political leaders further push algorithms and artificial intelligence on us, we would do well to remember this lesson.

New movie review: Steve Jobs

Michael Fassbender stars as Steve Jobs in director Danny Boyle's new film Steve Jobs.

Apple founder Steve Jobs is a hard character to pin down. Some want to paint him as a god of the tech industry, a forward-thinking innovator, and a full-stop genius. Others think of him as closer to the devil, a temperamental tyrant, and a fraud who was not responsible for half the things for which he gets credit. As ever, the truth is likely somewhere between the two extremes, but death has a polarizing effect on the way we interpret the legacies of prominent figures. Look at Ronald Reagan.

Since his death from cancer in 2011, the company he founded has only grown in power, influence, and ubiquity, and there have been countless attempts to place Jobs’ contributions to the culture in a larger context. They feature titles such as Genius by Design and How Steve Jobs Changed the World. In many cases, though, they are just his name followed by a colon and some positive or negative descriptor, depending on the point the makers want to communicate.

For the new film from director Danny Boyle and writer Aaron Sorkin, the filmmakers drop the descriptor. It is just Steve Jobs. It gives the impression this will be the definitive portrait of the man and his machines, but it is not that, nor does it try to be. Instead, Sorkin’s script is broken down into three snapshots of Jobs’ life – or rather, his career, following as it does three product launches that define the arc of his time with Apple.

Sorkin is an undeniably good writer, and he has given us a slew of great television shows (The West Wing; Sports Night; The Newsroom) and films (A Few Good Men; An American President; The Social Network). As ever, his dialogue crackles with the humor and intelligence for which he is known. The problem is that the snapshot structure does not work for telling this story. There is simultaneously too much condensed into these three moments and too much left out.

To the first point, by sticking rigidly to this structure, save for two brief flashback sequences, Sorkin must include everything he wants us to know about Jobs in dialogue set on just three days in his life. There are five or six main characters, and each one’s story has a beginning, middle, and end, but because we are seeing only three specific days, each character arc happens on the same contrived timeline.

Movies are contrivances, but this stretches credulity. By the time Jobs points out how every product launch, it seems like everyone goes to the same bar, gets drunk, and tells him what they really think, you just get angry at Sorkin for clearly being aware of this flaw but taking no steps to address it.

Michael Stuhlbarg, Fassbender, and Kate Winslet in Steve Jobs.

Conversely, the movie is fairly empty when it comes to Jobs’ work. By choosing to show us only these product launches – the Macintosh, the NEXT, and the iMac, respectively – Sorkin fails to explore Jobs’ creative process. It is the ultimate tell-not-show movie as we hear in dialogue over and over how brilliant he is but never actually see that brilliance in action. Some of this falls on Boyle’s doorstep, but the density of Sorkin’s script leaves little room to play with form.

Boyle is an excellent director, but this is his most restrained and constricted film – an assessment that includes 127 Hours, about a man literally trapped in one spot for nearly the duration of the film. Gone for most of the runtime is Boyle’s usual flair for dramatic camera movement and clever, propulsive editing. It feels almost workmanlike, which is unfortunate because the best part of Boyle’s films has always been the directorial stamp he places on them.

However, where Sorkin’s work constrains the director to a degree, his words give all the performers the chance to soar, none more than Michael Fassbender as Jobs. Fassbender is a wonderful, chameleon-like actor who has shown his range in projects as diverse as 12 Years a Slave, Shame, the X-Men films, and Frank. As Jobs, he finds a new part to play – the petulant genius – and he is astounding. Though Fassbender little resembles Jobs nor really sounds like him, he discovers the character of Jobs. His performance is less an imitation of the man than an interpretation, and it works beautifully.

Fassbender, a longtime stage actor with a facility for language that helps tremendously with Sorkin’s dialogue, is by turns menacing and gentle. He thankfully avoids the pitfalls so many other actors fall into when portraying tech geniuses – often playing them as somewhere on the autism spectrum – and instead builds brick by brick the figure of a confident, volatile icon. Nothing in the film would work without the steady, grounded work of Fassbender. The film necessarily revolves around Jobs, like a hurricane, and Fassbender is the perfectly calm eye at the center of the storm.

Jeff Daniels in Steve Jobs.

The rest of the cast swirling around him is stellar as well, beginning with Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, Jobs’ head of marketing and closest confidant. Hoffman is the film’s moral center and the one person in Jobs’ life with the wherewithal to stand up to him as she stands by him. Winslet matches Fassbender beat for beat and is able to project strength even as she shows warmth.

As former Apple CEO John Sculley, Jeff Daniels is given a fairly obvious archetype to play in Jobs’ father figure, but Daniels finds nuance and shading in the two men’s relationship that is not strictly on the page. In the middle section, the film’s best sequence has Sculley asking Jobs why the world thinks he fired his protégé from Apple.

It is one of the only scenes where Boyle is able to liven up the proceedings with a series of rapid-fire edits between their present-day argument and Jobs’ removal from Apple, the film’s only extended flashback. The editing ramps up the tension, while Daniels and Fassbender bring energy and passion to the conversation. Sculley is the only person in the film Jobs consistently out-maneuvers, and Daniels finds in Sculley a beaten man who refuses to go down without a fight.

In the “character actors who deserve to work more” category, we have Michael Stuhlbarg and Katherine Waterston in small but pivotal roles as Jobs’ employee and ex-girlfriend, respectively. Stuhlbarg, who was excellent in this year’s Pawn Sacrifice and will also appear in Trumbo, is one of my favorite actors and one of Hollywood’s best reactors. His changes in expression say a hundred things his words never could, and his character’s hurt silences are among the most affecting moments in the film.

Waterston, who was tremendous in last year’s Inherent Vice and the best thing about the Alex Ross Perry misfire Queen of Earth this year, stuns in a few brief scenes as the mother of Jobs’ daughter. As written, she is all fire and fury, but Waterston is able to create levels of sorrow and repressed rage that even Sorkin may have missed.

What we are left with is an often brilliant, sometimes frustrating film about an often brilliant, sometimes frustrating man. Boyle perhaps does not do enough as a director to rein in Sorkin’s more writerly tendencies, but the performances are so magical that it is impossible to look away. By refusing to take a clear stance on the man or his work, Steve Jobs functions more like a Rorschach test for viewers. You will see in Jobs what you want to see in him – saint or sinner, paragon or pretender – but the film’s real achievement is that no matter what you see, afterward, you are more likely to see a human.

See it? Yes.