Last week, I watched 9 movies:

• It’s not so much that Gladiator II can’t escape the shadow of the first film, it’s that it has no apparent desire to ever do so. Denzel Washington seems to be having fun, and Paul Mescal acquits himself well, but it’s difficult to see what, if anything, is the point of it all.
• Crossing is told with real compassion for its characters, even when we don’t understand, or even necessarily like them.
• I found it a little difficult to really connect with Kurosawa’s High and Low, at least as a suspenseful police procedural, but the film puts its main character, played by incomparable Toshiro Mifune, in an interesting ethical dilemma.

• Belle de Jour perhaps seemed more shocking in 1967 than it does almost 60 years later, but there is almost a quaintness to it now. That said, Catherine Deneuve remains coldly captivating, and there are intriguing surrealistic touches throughout.
• There are some interesting cinematic choices in The Picture of Dorian Gray—is it a spoiler to say that the portrait, when it’s finally seen, is photographed in color?—that I’m not entirely sure work. But the movie is always engaging.
• The Gorge is just so incredibly boring. The movie takes a ludicrous, but potentially fun, premise and does practically nothing with it, squandering also whatever chemistry the two leads have together.

• Cecil B. Demented works better in concept than execution, though there are amateurish charms to any John Waters movie.
• Of the “guy dies but returns to Earth as a guardian angel or ghost” subgenre of romantic comedy, I think I’ll take Her Comes Mr. Jordan (and its remakes) or A Matter of Life and Death over A Guy Named Joe, which is pleasant enough, thanks largely to Spencer Tracy’s charms, but takes much too long to get going, and doesn’t have much of anywhere to go when it finally does so.
• Return of the Living Dead III isn’t perfect. All of the real character development is left to the actors, and the movie is much grimmer in tone than the other two films in the series. But there’s some good creature work, interesting body horror, and at least a couple of surprisingly good performances.

I also rewatched both The Blues Brothers and The Warrirors, instead of watching the Super Bowl, which, the halftime show notwithstanding, feels like the better choice.

Last week, I watched 6 movies:

• Brigadoon is fine. The leads are good together, and I like the weirdly curmudgeonly turn by Van Johnson, but the whole thing does feel a little flat.
• Down with Love is fun enough. Roger Ebert said it was “no better or worse than the movies that inspired it, but that is a compliment, I think.” And I think he was probably right.
• Conclave is a lot of fun, with a collection of really strong performances.

• The Notebook rests mostly on the shoulders of the performances, particularly from Rachel McAdams. The love story itself isn’t much to write home about, as much as the framing story and attempts at period details try to lend it some gravitas.
• We Live in Time is another example of how great performances can lend so much weight to an otherwise incredibly shallow story. I’m not sure the story here is all that compelling, and the decision to tell it nonlinearly often feels like just a gimmick, but Garfield and Pugh keep you engaged.
• 1931’s Cimarron is often cited on lists of the most undeserving Academy Award winners, and I Wish I could say that claim was untrue. But the movie is badly dated, full of offensive racist stereotypes, poorly straddling the silent and sound era, and moreover exceptionally boring.

I also rewatched Gladiator, which I enjoyed, but which I probably won’t feel a need to watch again for another twenty-five years.

Last week, I watched 6 movies:

• The marketing for Pieces proclaimed the movie to be “exactly what you think it is.” And if what you think it is, is bad, then you’d be right. Poorly dubbed, lazily plotted, not even a little bit fun or surprising—not even if all you want is an “exactly what you think it is” no-brain slasher movie.
• The Passenger is slow, almost meandering, and I never really got a handle on why Jack Nicholson’s character was doing the things he was doing. But I also feel that’s deliberate, that his motives are alien even to himself, and I was nevertheless pulled into the quiet rhythms of the movie.
• A Quiet Place Day: Day One has no right being any good, much less as good as it is. A lot of that’s the very simple take it has on this story, not trying to reinvent what we already know, or even necessarily add to it, but letting us see it through other characters’ eyes. It’s helped enormously by the performances, particularly by Lupita Nyong’o, but it’s also a really well directed film about human connection even in the face of inexplicable fear and tragedy. I would never have expected the director of Pig to make a Quiet Place prequel, but this is everything I could have hoped for from that venture.

• It’s difficult to talk about Magpie without talking about the twists—even hinting that there are twists might be going a little too far—but they’re clever and fun, even if the film maybe doesn’t do entirely enough to earn them or its ending.
• The Tuskegee Airmen can’t entirely shake its TV movie budgets, especially in the aerial dogfights, and there is occasionally the “well, we cured racism then” feel you can sometimes get with movies like this. (If only the filmmakers had known.) But it remains a really important story, and the movie has some very strong performances, especially from Laurence Fishburne and Andre Braugher.
• The Order left me a little cold, despite some terrific tension and strong performances.

I also rewatched The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, which I saw much too late for it to be one of my own go-to cult movies, but which is delightfully strange and silly nonetheless.

Last week, I watched 9 movies:

• There’s something to be said for the way Roger Ebert described The Day of the Locust, as a film that “misplaces its concern with its characters.” There’s a lot that works about the movie, but I don’t think Ebert is wrong that “We begin to sense that they’re marching around in response to the requirements of the story, instead of leading lives of their own. And so we stop worrying about them, because they’re doomed anyway and not always because of their own shortcoming.”
• A Real Pain is a deeply affecting look at human connection, and the limits of it. There are some quiet, deliberate moments in this film that are going to stick with me a long time.
• Roger Ebert called Lucky Lady “a big, expensive, good-looking flop of a movie.” A cast that’s not put to much good use tries their best, but this is like the very definition of forgettable.

• The core of The Naked Civil Service is Crisp’s humor and John Hurt’s great performance.
• The Protagonists is deliberately odd enough to be occasionally interesting, but it’s hard to see what, if anything, that oddness is in service of.
• I find myself much more interested in the scattered scenes of Brian Keith’s Teddy Roosevelt in The Wind and the Lion than in anything between the film’s ostensible leads. And that’s even leaving aside the film’s dubious historical accuracy or the questionable nature of Sean Connery playing a Berber chieftain.

• Nosferatu is often stunning and unsettling in equal measure.
• Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly is both stark and haunting, with a remarkable performance from Harriet Andersson.
• Peter Cushing once called The Blood Beast Terror the worst movie he’d ever made. Well, when you’re right, you’re right. The movie isn’t unpleasantly bad to watch—indeed, I had a great deal of fun watching it as part of #horrorwatch on Bluesky—and Cushing acquits reasonably himself well. But it’s so goofily and poorly plotted, taking these weird side routes and uninteresting digressions. It’s can be enjoyably bad, but it’s bad nonetheless.

Last week, I watched 6 movies:

• Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl doesn’t reinvent the wheel of Aardman cozy sight gags, but it’s a lot of real silly fun.
• The Wild Robot is lovely and clever and heartfelt.
• Elemental has some clever moments, and it’s heartfelt when it leans into its story of the children of immigrants, but the worldbuilding feels like it’s trying too hard and never quite comes together.

• Flow isn’t photorealistic—there’s never any confusion that these images were animated in a computer, and there’s a dreamy, surreal quality to almost everything—but the animals nonetheless feel incredibly real, more true to their individual natures than anthropomorphized, and it’s incredibly compelling and moving film because of that.
• I’m not sure that Suzume is as visually thrilling as some of Makoto Shinkai’s other films, but there’s a beautifully strange story here nonetheless.
• There’s a lot of humor in Transformers One, and the voice cast does a mostly admirable job, even if the celebrity voices do get a little distracting sometimes. But the story beats, and how the movie races through them, are incredibly predictable, and the movie doesn’t do enough that’s interesting or surprising with this potentially interesting prequel.

I also rewatched The Iron Giant, which is as lovely (if not more so) than I remember it. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but: you don’t have to be a gun.