I watched 6 movies last week:

• There’s a thick thread of melancholy running through An Autumn Afternoon. But then, there’s melancholy in almost all of Ozu’s movies, and he explores many of the same themes—the passing of a generation, love and marriage—with the same quiet grace that he does elsewhere. I don’t know that this is his most melancholic, or if it’s just the knowledge that it was also his last film, made the year after his mother died, and the year before he did.
• Zabriskie Point undeniably is widely considered Michelangelo Antonioni’s worst film. And while it sometimes looks undeniably good, with the director’s meticulous eye for visual composition and cinematography, the critics at the time—like Roger Ebert, who called it “such a silly and stupid movie”—were absolutely right.
• Mr. Vampire is just such delightfully silly fun.

• Touki Bouki is perhaps most interesting as a time capsule to early 1970s Senegal, but the direction and editing is often daring and engaging all on its own.
• There are some real ways in which Girl with Hyacinths, and the tropes that it plays with, are very dated. And yet, for a movie made in 1950, it’s exceptionally daring, treating these subjects, beginning with suicide, very honestly and humanely. If this were an American film of that era, I would be shocked by its candor and compassion—to say nothing of its flouting of the Hays’ Code.
• The mythologizing and worldbuilding of the Predatorfranchise is possibly the worst thing about it, second only to the insistence on connecting it to the mythologizing and worldbuilding of the Alien franchise. And yet, while Predator: Badlands does both of those things, it’s overall very entertaining—knowing when not to take itself too seriously, offering some fun action set-pieces, and actually having a beginning, middle, and end.

I also rewatched Memoirs of an Invisible Man, which I think is far from perfect, but I think also underrated. Chevy Chase, however difficult he reportedly was to work with, is genuinely good in the movie, and certainly his instinct that the less comedic elements in the story were the more compelling ones was spot on, even if it often put him at odds with a lot of other people involved in developing the script.

I also rewatched Curse of the Crimson Altar (aka The Crimson Cult), even though it’s only been three months since I first saw it. My opinion remains unchanged: it’s not a very good movie, largely boring, but occasionally Christopher Lee or Boris Karloff pops out, and that’s nice.

I read 12 books in January:

• The Carter of La Providence by Georges Simenon
• Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing with David Naimon
• Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker
• Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
• Elevation by Stephen King
• The Man Who Japed by Philip K. Dick
• Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou
• Absolute Batman Vol 1: The Zoo by Scott Snyder et al.
• Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre
• What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
• Time and Again by Jack Finney
• The Flash: Book One by Mark Waid et al.

I read 39 short stories in January. These were my favorites:

• “The Sun Globe” by Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw (PodCastle)
• “Give a Dog a Bone” by Richard E. Dansky (PseudoPod)
• “The Versions of Yourself That You’re Better Off Without” by Aimee Ogden (Nightmare)
• “Body? Glass” by Osahon Ize-Iyamu (Nightmare)
• “Stairs for Mermaids” by MM Schreier (Flash Fiction Online)
• “The Doorkeepers” by A.T. Greenblatt (Uncanny)
• “Sing” by Jules Bly (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
• “Mother’s Hip” by Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff (Lightspeed)
• “The Orchard Village Catalog” by Parker Peevyhouse (Strange Horizons)
• “The Stars You Can’t See by Looking Directly” by Samatha Murray (Clarkesworld)
• “Speaking for Those With Obsidian Tongues” by Wendy Nikel (Small Wonders)
• “The Spindle of Necessity” by B. Pladek (Strange Horizons)
• “Symbiote” by Diana T. Chiu-Chu (kh?ré?)
• “Baron Quits the Payloaders” by Renan Bernardo (Escape Pod)
• “The Peculiarities of Hunger” by Woody Dismukes (kh?ré?)
• “Joiner and Rust” by Lavie Tidhar (Reactor)

I watched 6 movies last week:

• Black Fury is a well directed and rousing story of union solidarity, but Paul Muni’s terrific performance really takes center stage.
• Give everyone involved in The Werewolf of Washington this much credit, they’re all in on the joke. I just don’t think it’s an especially funny joke.
• Nia DaCosta’s lush and sensual Hedda feels very much like a reimagining of the original Ibsen play that it almost doesn’t matter how little I remember of that one production I saw back in college.

• They should have sent a poet. I knew Andrea Gibson’s poetry only in passing, having seen them perform their 2023 poem “MAGA Hat in the Chemo Room.” But their final years, captured so soulfully and beautifully in Come See Me in the Good Light make me understand the beauty of language and life that I was missing.
• The Sorcerers feels a little cheaply made, a goofy but interesting idea fleshed out only insofar as the budget and performances will allow.
• I can see why The Trail might seem too slow and not scary to a lot of people, but I thought it worked really well, especially with what was obviously almost no budget. The movie isn’t necessarily subtle in being a metaphor for trauma and its lingering fear, but I think that simplicity actually works very much in its favor.

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.