I watched six movies last week:

• The Detective is largely remembered as a trivia point nowadays, a movie based on a novel whose sequel then went on to inspire Die Hard—which is kind of a shame, because it’s pretty good all on its own. (There’s also no real point of comparison beyond Frank Sinatra also playing a New York cop.) Sinatra’s good in the movie, which, especially for 1968, takes an honest look at issues like police corruption, and while hardly flawless and certainly a little dated, is fairly progressive for the time.
• 1979’s Salem’s Lot is far from perfect—it’s rushed in its second half and limited by its 1970s TV budget—but it’s genuinely scary, works really well when it remembers to take its time, and fundamentally understands King’s novel in a way the 2024 version very much did not.
• Killer of Sheep is a lyrical slice-of-life in a community.

• The pieces, when they start to come together in The Dry, fit, but not in the most satisfying ways, and I’m not sure it ever really gels as a mystery. But the movie has a real sense of place and its characters, of old traumas buried and dug back up.
• The Perfect Neighbor does a remarkable job of piecing together existing footage to tell its tragic story. It’s not a fun watch, even if you’re unfamiliar with the tragedy it’s spiraling towards, but it is a sad document of this American moment.
• I think it’s delightful that Toby Poser, John Adams, and their daughters Lulu and Zelda make horror movies together. And I think it’s terrific that so many of those movies are so interesting and creepy. Mother of Flies is no exception, though perhaps expect more strange and unsettling imagery than any real scares. I don’t think it’s their best, but it grows on you.

I also re-watched The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, which is a lot of fun, thanks largely to great performances by Matthau and Shaw, and The Visitor, which is, well, a thing that exists.

I watched six movies last week:

• The Wild Life invites—and greatly suffers from—comparison to Cameron Crowe’s previous high school comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
• Man of the Moment has its moments.
• It’s interesting seeing film noir tropes filtered through a Norwegian sensibility in Death Is a Caress. It’s not that interesting—I wouldn’t say the story really holds together particularly well here—but it’s just enough like and unlike Hollywood ’40s noir to keep you wondering.

• There’s just enough in Bone Lake to suggest that several of the people involved will go on someday to make a good movie. I don’t want to oversell it and suggest the acting and direction are necessarily good, but they show a lot more promise than the script, which trades on the most obvious (and yet also unbelievable) twists.
• Beast is raw around all its edges. Sometimes, like in Jessie Buckley’s primal scream of a performance, that works very well.
• 2021’s Black Phone never felt like a movie that could bear the weight of a sequel, and here comes to Black Phone 2 to prove that point. It’s an admirable attempt, visually chilling and honest about what actually living through the events of the first film would have done to the characters. Everyone involved is trying their best. And yet it’s also kind of an overlong, exposition-heavy exercise that lays more lore upon the framework of the first (decent but also forgettable) movie than it can stand.

I also rewatched The Dunwich Horror, which I didn’t remember well from a few years ago but really quite enjoyed this time around. It’s more than a little cheesy and silly, very much like Roger Corman’s earlier Edgar Allen Poe adaptations, but for Lovecraft, and I enjoyed it very much on that level.

I watched 7 movies last week:

• Jay Kelly is frustrating, because while it’s reasonably well written and acted, it’s also very shallow. Clooney coasts on his charm, and he’s well paired with Sandler, but the movie doesn’t have a lot to say beyond “famous people are kinda weird, huh?” There’s potential here, to actually invesigate the sadness beneath that charm—I don’t want to disqualify the movie simply because it maybe asks you to feel sorry for a wildly famous and rich character—but the movie stops short of really doing that.
• Ghostkeeper doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and you really have to guess at what’s happening near the end, but it really turns its cheapness and simple location into real virtues for a while, with a surprisingly creepy and haunted feel.
• Diary of a Mad Housewife wouldn’t work at all without the central performance by Carrie Snodgrass. It doesn’t always work very well even with it—the movie is dated and often cartoonish—but she’s easily the best reason to watch.
• Silkwood doesn’t fall into any of the traps or cliches of a thriller, and that’s dow to Mike Nichols’ direction and the peformances, espeically Meryl Streep, which just allow us to observe these characters and this story.

• Stallone’s Judge Dredd isn’t very good, but it also isn’t bad enough to be very interesting. It’s 90 minutes of a lot of shouting, some decent but underused set design, and not much else.
• Give Hallow Road credit, it’s very tense for most of its runtime. And that might have been entertaining enough, if the movie had just been a short claustrophobic psychological drama. But, as Matt Zoller Seitz writes, the movie then swerves into “trying on various genre identities to see how they feel,” and none of them feel particularly good. There’s a taut thriller wrestling with moral decisions hiding underneath it all—not necessarily a novel morality play, but an entertaining one, at least—but it crashes into whatever it is by the end.
• Eddie Muller reportedly said that Edmond O’Brien’s performance in D.O.A. “had more animation than Daffy Duck.” He wasn’t wrong. I don’t think the character or story work at all, beyond the basic twist of a man investigating his own murder, but O’Brien’s over-the-top performance is the main compelling reason to keep watching.

I also re(re)watched the delightfully gory Re-Animator.

Last week, which spanned the end of one year and the beginning of another, and also marked the end of my long winter vacation, I watched 8 movies:

• Rose Byrne is exceptional in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which smartly keeps you completely trapped inside her character’s point of view and her depression—to the point that for most of the running time, you don’t even see, only hear, the child she shares many of her scenes with. It’s not an especially fun movie, but that’s kind of the point.
• Holiday would be just pleasantly forgettable, were it not for the added charms of Hepburn and Grant. It’s not the best of their pairings, but it’s very entertaining nonetheless.
• Dwayne Johnson is genuinely good in a The Smashing Machine, but with all due respect to Mark Kerr, the movie never truly makes a good argument for why his story needs to be told. A late-credits title card comes close, when it suggests that Kerr and others like him built a sport that hardly remembers their names, but should, but the movie itself is so adamant about avoiding cliches that it’s told at such a distance and barely scratches the surface.
• The Key isn’t either star William Powell or director Michael Curtiz’s best, but the two combined make it worth watching.

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• I take no pleasure in saying this, but Spinal Tap II: The End Continues was one of my least favorite movies in 2025. That’s a shame, not just because of my fondness for the original, or sadness over director Rob Reiner’s untimely death, but because I think it’s heart is in the right place. But the fact remains that the movie did not make me laugh even once.
• Terror of Mechagodzilla does exactly what it says on the tin. Most of what it says is written in Japanese, however, so I’m not entirely sure I have it translated right. It’s all a bit goofy, which I think is honestly how I prefer kaiju films of this era.
• You could do a lot worse than Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in a Howard Hawks movie, as Only Angels Have Wings makes very clear.
• Sholay is tonally all over the map, but that seems very much by design. It’s bold and silly and a lot of fun.

I also rewatched the Before Trilogy—Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight—even though I’d rewatched the middle film just last year. They remain delightful and thoughtful and worth rewatching. I also rewatched Mike Flanagan’s first movie Absentia, which feels very much like the crowdfunded debut film that it is, but also works exceptionally well, with smart direction, good acting, and an intriguing premise.

I watched a dozen movies last week:

• The Mastermind is, I suppose, a deconstruction of the heist movie, in that the heist, and even the motives for it, are of less interest to writer/director Kelly Reichardt than the quiet collapse of the inevitable aftermath. It’s not necessarily my favorite of Reichardt’s films, but only because she’s made so many good ones.
• I’m not overly familiar with Vanity Fair, the novel or film adaptations, or the character of Becky Sharp first portrayed there. She threatens to be a little one-note here, were it not for the very winning (and Oscar-nominated) performance by Miriam Hopkins.
• Ball of Fire is dated and corny as all get out, but it’s also a charmingly goofy riff on Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
• Jennifer Lawrence’s descent into madness in Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love is never entirely explained, but that’s precisely why the film works so well. It’s raw and emotional and seen through Lawrence’s genuinely bravura performance.

• I’ve seen worse movies than Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. I’ve maybe even seen worse movies in the same series. But this was such a remarkably weak note to end everything on. The film is full of silly exposition, clips from the rest of the franchise, and a not very successful attempt to tie the series together in neat cinematic-universe bow—all while being surprisingly light on fun action set-pieces.
• The considerable charms of its cast—particularly Grace Kelly—notwithstanding, High Society is surprisingly bad. It lacks the sharp screwball comedy dialogue of The Philadelphia Story, on which it’s ostensibly based, its plot is overly confused and convoluted, and the one new thing it’s supposed to be bringing to the table, namely the musical numbers, aren’t particularly good.
• Sentimental Value is such a beautiful and human story of family and depression, of art’s ability (and failure) to combat it, and it’s full of wonderful performances.
• I’m starting to worry, because with The Running Man, the number of Edgar Wright movies I don’t like is starting to approach the number of his films that I genuinely love. I didn’t particularly enjoy his last movie, Last Night in Soho, but at least that was still stylish and distinctive, whereas this one is so anonymously directed, full of plot holes and poorly conceived set-pieces, and it’s hard to understand what anyone involved was bringing to the table.

• Joy House is more than a little odd, and on paper its plot would likely seem ridiculous, but it benefits enormously from Alain Delon and Jane Fonda, and a decent sense of style.
• There’s a moment near the end, an admirably big swing, in Bugonia that maybe lost me a little, and that possibly undermines everything else the movie up until then seemed to be doing, but it’s an interesting ride all the way.
• Although it’s Hitchcock’s (and maybe England’s) first talkie, Blackmail behaves much more like a silent film, and fully is one for long stretches. That’s not infrequently to the movie’s benefit, since Anny Ondra has a remarkably expressive face perhaps better at conveying strong emotion than delivering the film’s dialogue, and there are many expertly framed shots that don’t really require any sound.
• For a movie about such heady topics as assault and depression, Sorry, Baby is a wonderfully warm and funny film, and a remarkably self-assured debut from writer/director/star Eva Victor.

I also rewatched the delightful A Matter of Life and Death. It’s maybe not my favorite of Powell and Pressburger’s movies, but it’s easily in the top five.