The Zodiac Killer Project

“The Zodiac Killer Project” is the ultimate test case of what whether the movie imagined is better than the movie made. Because when director Charlie Shackleton lost the rights to California Highway Patrol Officer Lyndon E. Lafferty’s 2012 true-crime book, “The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up,” right before he was about to begin filming a documentary based on it, rather than call the whole project off, he improvised and made something else instead. What emerged is not all that interested in The Zodiac Killer himself, whoever that may or may not have been. When Shackleton’s producer impresses upon him from off screen the need to provide basic details about the serial killer terrorizing California in the seventies, Shackleton laughs and says he’d rather not. It’s not him evading pertinent details but rather demonstrating what he has decided in his new project will be deemed pertinent, and by shrugging off the constraints to which such movies are typically bound, “The Zodiac Killer Project” is one of the fortunate few that is in effect, set free.

Shackleton’s approach is to show locations he had scouted and planned to use for dramatic re-creations of Lafferty’s book while the scenes that would-have-been in voiceover as he had conceived them by using the record of Lafferty’s private investigation as culled from other sources than his book to avoid legal entanglements. In doing so, he probes true crime clichés (deploying familiar sound effects of the genre so relentlessly that they assume a laugh-out-loud comical quality) and how those clichés are utilized to manipulate us, but more than that, by working through the film he wanted to make, he probes his own artistic intentions. And if “The Zodiac Killer Project” demonstrates the spell true crime holds over us, occasional moments when Shackleton wistfully mourns just how good a certain scene might have been, he can’t help but reveal himself as being under its spell too, so much so that I am not quite sure he knows the movie he made is probably better than the one he imagined. 

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

We live in a time where faith can feel hard to maintain and belief in the rational is under siege. So, perhaps it’s no surprise that in his third “Knives Out” whodunit, officially titled “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” writer/director Rian Johnson pits these opposing ideas against one another. He does so via Jed Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), a one-time boxer turned Catholic priest who is assigned to a rural parish led by Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). Despite his pugilistic background, Jed views the church as a place of compassion and understanding whereas Wicks is the one who views faith as akin to an existential fight, circling the wagons of his dwindling but fervent flock against ostensible secular forces. Brolin cuts an intense fundamentalist presence, brought to life through frequent low angles that make it seem as if he is staring down on us from a pulpit, and betraying nothing in an unrelenting stern expression that might be full of the Holy Spirit or just full of it. That question will gradually be answered during a service when he repairs to his usual hiding place just off to the side of the sanctuary to gather himself and then drops dead.

Enter: Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), the world’s greatest detective and the “Knives Out” series’ one recurring character. He does not really even get introduced, he just sort of appears, as if conjured by miracle, though he would be the first to tell you that miracles always have a logical explanation. If Jed is fingered as the suspect in Wicks’s apparent murder, Blanc is convinced of the young priest’s innocence and sets out to prove it, and more than Craig and Ana de Armas in the first “Knives Out” and Craig and Janelle Monae in the second, he and O’Connor make a dynamic team. That’s chiefly because Johnson has written them as investigatory allies but also philosophical opposites, evoked in dueling monologues inside Jed’s church where the priest effuses his belief and Blanc his skepticism. It’s a marvelous sequence of acting, writing, and visual composition, with Biblical lighting cues, walking the perfect line between entertaining melodrama and deeper meaning and leaving you as enthralled by the actors and as moved by the characters. 

It is also “Wake Up Dead Man’s” high point. Though Wicks’s flock is portrayed by some big names (Glenn Close, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, and Jeremy Renner), the characters are never really fleshed out, and aside from a few isolated moments involving Close, never really come to life, dragging the movie down so that you feel its two-and-a-half-hour length a little too much. You also feel the length on account of one too many expository monologues deployed to wrap up a mystery that grows increasingly convoluted and worse, ultimately only seeks to challenge Blanc’s skepticism in service of a fake out, making the whole thing feel cheap. It’s also that “Wake Up Dead Man’s” ostensible main mystery can’t help but spiritually come to feel like a subplot, small potatoes in the face of the bigger questions bouncing back and forth between Jed and Blanc, intrinsically if not inadvertently reminding us that the most interesting mysteries are always the ones that can’t really be solved.

Ranking Crimson Tide Supporting Performances

The Will Leitch Newsletter is one of the few Substacks I subscribe to, not least because his divergent interests tend to dovetail with mine, and I have appreciated how so far in 2026, he has not shied away from almost always prefacing whatever he wants to write about with addressing the present American outrages. These are extraordinary times in the worst way and acknowledging it does not feel redundant or sanctimonious but like a necessary refusal to normalize. This country has normalized way too damn much in the last decade and such normalization, I would argue, is a huge part of why we are where we are right now. Even so, such brutal preambles can wear a person out, and a few weeks ago, Leitch introduced his latest lament of the nation by writing, “Believe you me: I’d rather be…ranking Kelly Reichardt movies.” The ensuing week he noted that a reader from Saint Paul, Minnesota, epicenter of the current American crisis, wrote to say that he could really use Leitch ranking Kelly Reichardt movies right now. And so, as Leitch wrote, he scrapped his previously planned post about the American media’s coverage of the current President’s quote-unquote movement during the last ten years to instead rank Richard Linklater movies to clear his head.

To my clear head, well, I’m not going to rank Richard Linklater movies or Kelly Reichardt movies. I love them both, but this blog’s brand is a bit more irregular. And because I’ve had the movie year 1995 on my mind recently because of a post I am planning to have coincide with the upcoming Academy Awards, I’m going to rank supporting actors in that year’s action-thriller “Crimson Tide” in which a submarine captain (Gene Hackman) and his XO (Denzel Washington) battle over whether to launch nuclear missiles with war imminent or to find a way to retrieve a half-finished message that might confirm war has been aborted. And though it is made in the image of its legendary two leads, “Crimson Tide” is in the (more than) middling thriller hall of fame because it is chock full of dudes (and one dog).

Ranking Crimson Tide Supporting Performances

10. Viggo Mortensen. If it seems odd that an actor as accomplished as Mortensen might be so low on this list, well, thing is, the supporting roles as conceived and written in “Crimson Tide” require the actors to infuse a sense of personality more than create a character and Mortensen is more a create-a-character kinda guy. So, he’s fine, he’s perfectly fine, and his laconic voice sounds fantastic aboard a submarine, and he really smokes those cigarettes, it’s just, in this context, I’m looking for something else. 

9. Eric Bruskotter. The role is a little obvious, a lunkhead on the wrong side of things, but boy, does Bruskotter bring that lunkhead to life.

8. Tommy Bush. At the end, there is a small but critical part requiring an actor with enough stature to make you believe he possesses more authority than Gene freaking Hackman which is why “Crimson Tide” fills it with Jason Robards. (It is also why Robards is ineligible for this list.) But there is another small, if less critical, role near the beginning that also requires someone to appear as if he has more stature than Gene freaking Hackman. So, what are you going to do? You don’t have enough in the budget for another Jason Robards. Credit, then, to casting director Victoria Thomas for choosing a seasoned character actor like Bush, and credit to costume designer George L. Little for putting him in some J.T. Walsh glasses, and for Bush just sort of allowing this broader framework to impress the necessary longstanding authority with doing much of anything at all. 

7. Happy Lab. The Jack Russell terrier that is the loyal companion of Hackman’s character gets all the pub, but it’s this dog, as Washington’s canine counterpart, that gets my vote as Best in Show. 

6. Danny Nucci. He was something of a going concern in the 90s, as his Wikipedia entry attests, the first sentence under the career tab noting, “During the 1990s, Nucci played characters who are unceremoniously killed off in three blockbuster films – ‘Eraser,’ ‘The Rock,’ and ‘Titanic.’” Ah, but in “Crimson Tide,” he sticks around to the end, and more than that, does a solid job in evincing the small arc of a petty officer who comes into his own.

5. Matt Craven. For a long time there, in the 90s and even into the aughts, any movie that needed an asshole, whatever the variety, Craven was near the front of the rolodex. I was recently rewatching parts of “A Few Good Men” for obvious reasons and there was Craven, called in for one scene to be the livid military lawyer who’s had it up to here with Tom Cruise and he nails it. And he nails the asshole in “Crimson Tide” too. At the end, right when nuclear war is averted, Craven has his character get this get look (see above) that is a little disappointed, like he would have gone to war to be right. That’s the stuff.

4. George Dzundza. More than the other supporting characters, Dzundza’s is written with a sense of ethical and moral complication, and he carries it with great anguish. 

3. Marcello Thedford. Yes, reader, you might notice Steve Zahn in the background of this shot, and he is not the only known quantity in a smaller role. There is also Ryan Phillippe, Scott Grimes, and Rick Schroder. None of them, though, leave as big an impression as Thedford. Not just in this pictured moment where he does a little dance-karaoke to Martha and the Vandellas, but in an earlier scene where he expresses true geniality toward the Gandolfini and Mortensen characters right before they have fun with him by dressing him down. There are precious few moments of levity in “Crimson Tide” and quite possibly the two best involve Thedford.  

2. James Gandolfini. As with virtually all his pre-“Sopranos” work, you could see Gandolfini already had “it” in “Crimson Tide,” clear as day, by which I mean both an electricity and an intensity. Whether it’s believable behavior for a naval supply officer or not, I don’t really care, but when the stuff hits the fan, I love how he plays the part as something like a sneering prizefighter trying to goad you into throwing a punch after the bell. His single best moment, though, comes before the stuff hits the fan during an officer meal when Hackman’s character superciliously asks Washington’s to summarize his thoughts on the nature of war and Gandolfini smirks (see above) in this way that implies “Ok, hotshot, show me whatcha got” with more animosity than most characters get when they are throwing a punch. 

1. Richard Valeriani. There are a thousand things I love about this movie, but one of the things I love most is that it frames its big introductory chunk of exposition as a faux CNN report filed from the deck of an aircraft carrier by the real-life reporter Richard Valeriani. That’s inspired. Valeriani was on Nixon’s enemies list, his wife Kathie Berlin told The New York Times when her husband died in 2018, and he kicked off one of the greatest (more than) middling thrillers ever made. What a career.

Streets of Minneapolis

Bruce Springsteen’s Oscar-winning theme for “Streets of Philadelphia” (1993) was so memorable because it was a hymn for America as the opening credits montage that director Jonathan Demme laid out under it evoked. Springsteen’s “Streets of Minneapolis,” on the other hand, written, recorded, and released in the span of the last five days, is not a hymn. When the band comes in, it reminds me of something off his 2012 record “Wrecking Ball,” which was a protest album, and “Streets of Minneapolis” is a full-throated protest song, though without even a hint of nuance or subtext. Now, there is a school of thought that protest music is better without a flagrant message, without “lyrics that are afraid to admit to the element of uncertainty and unpredictability that gives art,” as the esteemed Greil Marcus has written, “the tension that opens up the senses.” That’s what Springsteen did in another protest song, 2001’s “American Skin (41 Shots).” A reaction to the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, Springsteen utilized multiple viewpoints and invoked empathy for all involved, allowing for just the sort of tension to which Marcus refers, so much so that “American Skin (41 Shots)” was inevitably misread like “Born in the U.S.A.” two decades before it. And in the wake of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, whose names he uses in “Streets of Minneapolis” rather than changing them as he did with Diallo’s, Springsteen decided such tension would not be an effective tool. Though he occasionally editorializes, like calling the President a King, for the most part, in the manner of Minnesota’s own Hüsker Dü once filing an objection with the state of the nation by imploring us to, simply, “Turn on the News,” I hear Springsteen turning on the news and, simply, writing about what he sees unfolding on the streets of Minneapolis. There is no uncertainty in the streets of Minneapolis, no real tension between what is happening and what the administration wants you to believe is happening, not even if White House Spokesperson Abigail Jackson predictably deemed it a song with “inaccurate information.” Indeed, that only goes to show that sometimes protest music has no choice but to tell it exactly how it fucking is.   

The Last College Football Post of the Season

If it felt like the biggest moment in the 2025 college football season when it happened, in retrospect, it was even bigger, the one preserving the Indiana Hoosiers’ immaculate season, helping to ensure they would become the first and only other team in the sport to finish 16-0 since Yale in 1894 when the Bulldogs walloped the likes of Tufts, Trinity (CT), and the Volunteer (NY) Athletic Association. Trailing Penn State on the road by four points with 36 seconds left and facing 3rd and goal, Indiana wide receiver Omar Cooper Jr. caught quarterback Fernando Mendoza’s game-winning touchdown pass in the back of the end zone, a prosaic description of a catch so remarkable that it truly sounded like Fox play-by-play announcer Gus Johnson had suddenly been confronted with a multitude of the heavenly host. It’s the most natural thing in the world to see such a thing and reactively declare, “That’s the greatest catch I’ve ever seen,” to reach for hyperbole first and let hindsight come later. The thing was, even in hindsight the play demanded hyperbole. He caught that? By managing to get both feet in bounds? While being (legally) pushed out of bounds by the defender? We live in an era of outrageous athleticism and specialized wide receiver gloves that have turned incredible one-handed catches into a dime a dozen, almost. No one, however, has done what Cooper did, in his unbelievable body control, seeming to levitate like Chow Yun-Fat and Zhang Ziyi atop the trees in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” 

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There has never been a college football season like 2025. I mean that literally. Indiana, the all-time losingest major CFB program entering the season, won its first national championship. In addition, 2025 marked the first one that schools were able to pay their players directly by allowing them to share in the revenue their feats of strength have been helping to generate for decades. It is unquestionable progress even if that progress has blurred the lines between college and professional football to virtually nothing as the ability to compensate players taken in tandem with the so-called transfer portal have in effect created something like unregulated free agency. And if that means modern college football often resembles the worst parts of the NBA, where transactions and front office maneuvering drive discourse more than the games themselves, you can’t be mad at the nominal student athletes. The powers-that-be have been reaping the profits and breaking their contracts for years; now, finally, the players are gettin’ theirs. 

The author, journalist, and all-around college football fanatic Michael Weinreb has frequently noted how the sport tends to reflect America, and so, it only makes sense that given how present-day America feels as if it is spinning off its axis, so, too, does college football. The season has become too long, conferences rarely make historical or geographic sense, and the whole enterprise increasingly feels as if we really are all just rooting for laundry. That axis-spinning sensation was only exacerbated by the second season of the 12-team playoff, one that has all but rendered conference championships moot as these nonsensical confederations are now so overcrowded a true round-robin format is often impossible, necessitating arcane tiebreakers. That is how a 7-5 Duke team played for the ACC title rather than 10-2 Miami, and though Duke subsequently won the conference championship in an upset over Virginia, Miami was, nevertheless, selected for the playoff, and advanced to the national championship game, while the ACC champs went to the Sun Bowl. Did you follow all that? (I did not even mention that Miami just signed Duke’s quarterback Darian Mensah from the transfer portal and that now Duke is suing Mensah for breaking his NIL contract and does Mensah still get to keep his ACC Championship ring?) 

Once, going to a bowl game was cause for celebration, but now these utterly unique postseason exhibitions are mere television inventory, consolation prizes some teams are not even interested in accepting. Both Iowa State and Kansas State said thanks but no thanks and when Notre Dame was not selected for the playoff, they declined a bowl game invitation too, leading so many who had spent the entire season framing it strictly through the prism of the playoff while reducing bowl games to gum on their shoe to hypocritically scold the Fighting Irish for treating bowl games the exact same way. As the idiom goes, pick a lane!

Notre Dame’s decision shone a harsh light on just how much the 12-team playoff has altered not just what is most important within the sport but everyone’s expectations surrounding it. Used to be, success in this sport could be more relative, which is one of the reasons I fell in love with it. Even though college football has 136 teams and only 12 slots to go around for its postseason tournament, the new mentality too often is playoff or bust, one intensified by revenue sharing and the transfer portal evening the playing field. Indeed, Indiana is Exhibit A. If the woebegone Hoosiers could flip the script in 2 years, why, so many teams no doubt wonder, can’t we do the same? It spurred a rash of mid-season coach firings, both bluebloods and non-bluebloods alike, and the market’s most desirable candidate, University of Mississippi head coach Lane Kiffin, was a social media savvy narcissist who was only too happy to play it up. More than the Heisman Trophy race, really, the Kiffin saga became the season’s ultimate subplot, effectively transforming him into the sport’s main character, right down to the end as his team made the playoff and the decision of whether he would stay or go (he went, taking the LSU job) took center stage. 

Ah, but that’s the thing about college football. Lane Kiffin might have been a black hole, but he could not swallow the sport, and though anyone who watched a Mississippi game during the season knew their success stemmed as much from their quarterback, the jauntily named Ferris State transfer Trinidad Chambliss, in their breathtaking Sugar Bowl quarterfinal clash with Georgia, Chambliss reclaimed the spotlight for his team as absolutely as the Virginia student body swarmed its field in the instantaneous aftermath of their beloved Cavaliers equally breathtaking (then) upset of Florida State in September. Chambliss had big numbers but more than that, he had big plays, reaching the quarterbacking zenith where the burden of what’s at stake surrenders to the joy of performance. The game went late into the January 1st night, awakening echoes of glorious New Years Days of old, and ended with what was tantamount to a Twilight Zone episode.

All the college football sickos who stayed up to watch the end of the Hawaii Bowl on Christmas Eve night, meanwhile, can provide the umpteenth reminder that something ostensibly meaningless can feel like nothing in the world matters more, and the though Indiana and Ohio State 1 versus 2 B1G title tilt was just a prelude to the playoff and not an (un)officially designated Game of the Century, it felt like a Game of the Century, nevertheless. I wouldn’t have thought it could be topped, but the national championship game did, a title fight in which defenses owned the first half, forcing the offenses to up the ante up in a slobberknocker of a second half in which the referees essentially swallowed their whistles whole, living the ideal of Letting Them Play, and Indiana demonstrated true greatness by overcoming extraordinary pressure from a valiant Miami defense to find a way by playing how they had all season long – unafraid.

That fearlessness stemmed from head coach Curt Cignetti’s glowering bravado, but it also stemmed from the confident exuberance of Mendoza, and you saw both in the game’s biggest play when leading 17-14 early in the 4th quarter and facing a 4th down and 4 at Miami’s 12, Indiana eschewed settling for a field goal to have Mendoza run a delayed draw up the middle. Can you have your Heisman Moment after you have already won the Heisman? I guess so, because Mendoza did, as his 12-yard run to the promised land was like Willie Beamen’s run at the end of “Any Given Sunday” but if it had been done by a lanky quarterback from the 30s or 40s, like Sammy Baugh, the kind of gridiron maneuver that typically works best when you’re 9 years old and slaloming through imaginary defenders in your backyard. Instead, the Heisman Trophy winner manifested that imaginary play in real life. As he dove, stretching the ball across the goal line, it felt a lot like Omar Cooper Jr.’s catch back in November. There is so much outside noise in college football these days, but those few seconds when they were in the air, Mendoza and Cooper and the game itself seemed to hover above it, impervious. 

A Few Quicks Thoughts on the Oscar Nominations

Though I don’t anticipate the Oscar nominations with the same zest as I once did, I still enjoy the festive hullabaloo and am so glad they continue announcing them before sunrise (PT) to ensure the whole thing maintains that Christmas morning-like sensation. The current state of American affairs, though, left me feeling underwhelmed this year, even if it was a good one for movies, and a work obligation made it difficult to react to the announcements in real time. But when I finally sat down to give the nominations thorough consideration, I found myself with at least seven things to say.

A Few Quicks Thoughts on the Oscar Nominations

1.) I guess after its unexpected nomination for Best Picture, which I have no doubt has to do with some kind of back room politicking, I’ll have to find the time to watch “F1,” but like Miles Raymond and merlot, I am not watching “Bugonia.” I’m not even anti-Yorgos; I like some of his movies! It’s just...I needed a year off from him, I really did, and even more than that, I wish Emma Stone would stop working with him for a while and so I refuse to encourage her.

2.) “Sinners” setting the record for all-time nominations, which it would have done even without the rightful nod for the new Casting category, is a genuine feel-good moment for Hollywood. And so, in its own way, is “Wicked Part 2: The Search for More Money” getting skunked. It’s good because maybe that will be a lesson to suddenly wary producers about over-leveraging their product, and it’s good because this year’s Oscar ceremony will not have to be a continuation of the “Wicked” marketing campaign. Ding dong, that shit is dead.

3.) I’m not sure what will win the inaugural casting award, but I’ll be rooting for “The Secret Agent.” The Brazilian genre-twister that was also nominated for Best Picture and Best International Feature is a bounty of distinctive faces and personalities. 

4.) Oscar nomination day is a day for celebrating, yes, but it is also a day for complaining and here is my grievance: two days ago, I said that if Colleen Atwood did not win the Oscar for Best Costume Design, I was going to be pissed, and hey, guess what, she didn’t even get nominated. She’s won before, so she’s square, but still; I’m not sure any movie did any of its crafts better than “One Battle After Another” did costume design. And though the movie’s timeline is purposely fuzzy, it is contemporary, and that, I assume, considering all the other nominees, is the issue, as it so often is in this category – they so rarely nominate contemporary films because I feel like contemporary costume design does not leap off the screen in the same way. I hope Leo wears his bathrobe and Terminator X glasses to the ceremony in protest.

5.) Ok. Enough complaining. Amy Madigan landing her first nomination and first in 40 years for Supporting Actress in “Weapons” would take the cake if it wasn’t for Delroy Lindo landing his first nomination ever for Supporting Actor in “Sinners.” That guy makes everything he’s in just a little bit better. And though I suspect neither of them will win, getting to bask in the promotional circuit for the next month-and-a-half will be victory enough. I hope they enjoy the ride. 

6.) Rose Byrne also scored her first nomination for Best Actress in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” deservedly, because she carries that movie in so many ways, and in the one official year-end vote I have, I voted for her. I’m sure she won’t win either, but I’m so happy for her, nevertheless. What can I say, it’s the Bulgarian clown in me. 

7.) I’m not making predictions, here or later, but if there is anyone out of whole list that I would like to see win, well, it’s an obvious one: Paul Thomas Anderson for Best Director. It’s richly deserved for “One Battle After Another”; it’s overdue, anyway, in the grand scheme of things; it’s time.

Only Murders in the Building: S5 E8

When it premiered in 2021, Hulu’s series “Only Murders in the Building” sought to capitalize on the booming true crime podcast industry by having three strangers in the fictional Upper West Side Manhattan apartment building the Arconia — Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short), and Mabel (Selena Gomez) — join forces to solve a murder on the swank premises while creating a hit podcast about it. As the show has continued, however, and become as much about style as structure, the podcast itself has waned in importance. Indeed, last year’s Season 5 engineered a way to essentially do away with the podcast altogether. That might sound strange, but I don’t mind a show recognizing it has outgrown its gimmick and focusing on other things, like the chemistry between its star trio that with each passing season has tightened into something delightful and even moving. The best scene in Episode 8, Cuckoo Chicks, my favorite episode of Season 5, finds Charles, Oliver, and Mabel as well as the two honorary members of their crime-solving team, Oliver’s new wife Loretta (Meryl Streep) and NYPD Detective Williams (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) just sitting around a table talking. More of that, I thought! “My Dinner With Andre” as “Dips at the Arconia!” 

Now, it is also true that “Only Murders in the Building” has become as much a platform for big name guest stars as a narrative murder mystery, but it has worked wonders in this context, nevertheless, a serialized TV version of the misunderstood meta gem “Ocean’s Twelve” in so much as it is a bunch of famous people getting together to have a good time on camera. Look no further than the Eastern Europe accent Streep deploys in Episode 8 when her character impersonates a psychic. She is the master of accents, after all, and as My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife theorized, the writers probably just wanted to engineer a way for her to use one. What’s more, Streep employs the accent to unwittingly interrogate one of the season’s murder suspects, the billionaire hotel magnate Camila White, and played by Renee Zellweger. And that means “Only Murders in the Building” also engineered the most unlikely “One True Thing” reunion possible. Why there is even a split-second where Meryl Streep impersonates Renee Zellweger. It’s worth a Hulu Free Trial all on its own.

Time flies when you’re watching movies.