I watched another 6 movies last week:

• Not to over-sell it or anything, but David Lean’s Great Expectations may be the best literary adaptation ever.
• I just don’t think Goddard films are for me. Weekend is certainly interesting, and I can respect what I think it’s trying to do and say, but Goddard’s films have almost always left me cold. “There are some other strange things,” wrote Roger Ebert in his own review, and that’s about all I can say for it.
• I loved The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice. It’s so simple, so natural—even if the camerawork is almost flashy by Ozu standards—and while Tokyo Story is probably still my favorite Ozu, this was just lovely.

• Machine Gun McCain isn’t very good, largely dull and poorly dubbed, but there are some moments, particularly the brief performances by Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands, that almost shine.
• The Cranes Are Flying is a remarkable movie, genuinely beautiful and heartbreaking, full of incredible shots and compelling performances.
• Companion would probably be better if it didn’t give away its central twist in every single bit of its marketing (including, spoiler warning, that poster), but that twist isn’t exactly groundbreaking, so maybe it’s fine. The movie isn’t wildly original, but it does some fun things and offers some good performances all around.

I also re-watched Carrie and The Raven, two very different movies, but both of which are still pretty great. (For the record, Carrie is a lot better, but The Raven is very charmingly silly.)
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I watched 6 movies last week:

• Vesper is visually stunning, in some strange and occasionally remarkable ways, especially given its relatively low budget. Its effects are always in service of its story—which, while fairly standard, is told well and balances a believable bleakness with a spark of hope.
• Heart Eyes simply did not work for me at all. It’s a simple but clever enough premise, mashing together a romcom and a slasher movie, but that’s maybe the last clever thing about it—and that’s certainly the last simple thing. Needlessly over-complicated and never particularly scary, the movie has a few jokes that nearly land—and a likable cast, if not necessarily likable characters—but it’s a surprisingly big disappointment, given director Josh Ruben’s previous two very fun horror comedies.
• Perhaps a little too meditative and enigmatic for my tastes, Evil Does Not Exist nevertheless offers some lovely visuals and subtly complex observations about our balance with nature and one another.

• The epic scale and set-pieces in Napoleon are to be admired, and it’s nice to see that Ridley Scott hasn’t lost his painterly eye, but there’s something about the film that never quite comes to life. Maybe it’s the half-comedic way Phoenix plays the character, undercutting that epic scale at almost every turn, or maybe it’s some of the liberties the film takes with the historical record. More likely, though, it’s the rushed pacing, because if anything, it feels too short and compressed at two and a half hours. There’s more than a little to like about the film, but it’s hard not to think it wouldn’t have found more success as a miniseries, where events and characters were given the room they need to breathe.
• It’s not so much that The Thicket is unrelentingly grim, it’s that grimness is all the movie seems to have on offer. It’s well enough shot, and Peter Dinklage and Gbenga Akinnagbe have good buddy chemistry together—enough that it’s easy to imagine a better movie with them both left on the cutting room floor, or just not adapted from the original novel—but many of its characters don’t have the same kind of on-screen chemistry, and the movie simply isn’t fun or particularly compelling on its own.
• More inventive visually than in its storytelling, The Book of Life would feel like a knockoff of Pixar’s Coco if it hadn’t been made three years earlier. The anachronistic songs never feel less than odd—as does the framing as a story within a story, of Mexican culture told to decidedly white characters—but the movie isn’t without its own charms.

I also re-watched Aliens, which absolutely holds up, and House of the Long Shadows, which never did. (I had fun watching the latter as part of the weekly #HorrorWatch on Bluesky, but it’s a creaky plot that squanders titans of the horror field, while saddling them with a very bad performance by Desi Arnaz Jr. Aliens is still really great, though.

I watched 6 movies last week:

• The Importance of Being Earnest is exceptionally charming.
• If Five Minutes to Live is worth watching—and that’s a sizeable if—that’s really only because of Johnny Cash’s performance, and that’s unfortunately not because his performance is very good. As an article on TCM describes it, the movie “demonstrates why Cash didn’t seriously pursue an acting career but, at the same time, his see-saw performance which goes from flat line readings to crazed, amphetamine-like behavior is fascinating to behold.” Cash loosened (and likely sobered) up as an actor going forward, but this, his first theatrical film role, was also only one of two, which is maybe a little bit of a shame. The movie itself isn’t any great shakes; it has some potential but too often calls to mind other movies that treated similar plot devices much better. (The film that immediately came to mind for me, oddly enough, was Cash on Demand, starring Peter Cushing and released the very same year.) Five Minutes to Live has been described, I think unconvincingly, as a cult classic, but while the oddity of Cash’s performance—alongside early screen appearances of Vic Tayback and little Ronnie Howard—it’s hardly worth investing in that cult.
• Bring Them Down doesn’t quite hold together in the end. While there is a lot to like about the film—from the performances, to the tension, to the nonlinear narrative that slowly reveals some of the reasons for that tension—too much is left unclear and unresolved.

There’s a lot that doesn’t quite add up in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, not least of all its title, but Coburn’s con man is charming and clever, and the film comes awfully close to being a forgotten gem.
• Top Secret! is very silly. There isn’t a lot more to say about the movie other than that. Personally, it won’t top my fondness for the other ZAZ spoof movies like The Naked Gun or Airplane, but it is a lot of fun.
• There’s a lot that doesn’t work about The Savage Innocents, from a modern point of view, but most of it comes down to that title—to the likely well-intentioned, but nonetheless dehumanizing, idea of the noble savage. It’s fed by the film being intermittently framed as a nature documentary, by the casting of non-Inuit actors, by the decision to call them Eskimos. And yet there are things that work, including Quinn’s performance, and those good intentions—the filmmakers’ attempt to actually subvert stereotypes—do shine through.

I also enjoyed a rewatch of The Vast of Night.

I watched 7 movies last week:

• Laurence Olivier is terrific as the sad and selfish title character in The Entertainer, but everyone around him is also quite good, and the movie is a terrific example of the “kitchen sink realism” of ’50s and ’60s British film.
• Waitress has a lot of tender and funny moments—and it’s difficult for the viewing not to be colored by knowledge of writer and director Adrienne Shelly’s tragic murder—but good-hearted whimsy only carries it so far.
• There’s a character in Totally Killer who says, “I hate time travel movies. They never make any sense.” I feel like the writers on this movie took that way too much to heart. There’s promise to the movie’s central idea—which is essentially Back to the Future meets slasher movie—and some occasionally clever moments, but it all falls apart in lazy and confused storytelling.
• I’ve seen worse movies, by far, than Transylvania 6-5000, but I have rarely seen one this unfunny, one where every single joke simply fails to land. (One film comes to mind, Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving It, which just so happens to have been written for Brooks by the same guy.) There are so many bits in the film—you will rarely see a movie trying this hard to be funny—and yet not a single laugh to be had.

• There’s a lot to like in The Shoes of the Fisherman, including some very good performances, particularly from Anthony Quinn and Leo McKern. And there are plenty of interesting ideas about faith and the role of the Catholic Church, particularly in the era the film was made. But it’s also overlong, with too many side stories, and it’s never as epic as its overture, intermission, and length would suggest.
• Executive Decision is a better than serviceable ’90s B action movie. It’s slightly corny and dated, not least because it’s a pre-9/11 airplane hijack movie, but it’s also reasonably entertaining.
• A Complete Unknown is actually quite good. A lot of that’s down to Timothée Chalamet, whose Dylan always feels like a real character, never an impersonation or caricature, but the rest of the cast around him is quite good as well. And then there’s the music—Dylan’s own, the folk music scene he exploded into, and the rock and roll that split them apart.

I also re-watched Possession, which in some ways felt like a first watch. (I don’t think the version I saw a few years ago was the heavily edited one they tried to release in the United States as a straight horror movie, but it was YouTube-quality.) The movie is a lot, and not what I would describe as a fun watch, but it’s a powerfully intense and often upsetting film. As a reviewer in Time Out wrote, “There are plenty of movies which seem to have been made by madmen. Possession may be the only film in existence which is itself mad…”

I watched 6 movies last week:

• A music biopic where the band members play themselves sounds a little dodgy on paper, but the members of Kneecap acquit themselves well. The movie is goofy and pointed and entertaining.
• There’s something of a critical consensus that the first Venom movie is kind of lousy and the second one, while not necessarily great, is easily a step up. I would one hundred percent reverse that—I did not enjoy Let There Be Carnage even a little—but I would definitely agree with corresponding consensus that Venom: The Last Dance is the worst of the three movie. It’s full of callbacks to plots and characters I remember not at all from the first two installments, back-stories for new characters who otherwise get no development, whiplash shifts in tone, unexciting CGI, and a metric ton of attempted world-building. Tom Hardy sometimes seems like he’s having fun, but that’s about all I can say for it.
• There’s a lot to admire in Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, not least of all Richard Pryor’s bravery in making it, his sincere willingness to examine his own self-destructive behaviors. The movie is often audacious and imaginative, and if it has a fault, it’s that you often want it to go even deeper.

• The Outrun doesn’t have anything novel to say about addiction, but I’m not sure that anything novel needs to be said. Sometimes all you need are the quiet truths like “It never gets easy, it just gets less hard.” Saoirse Ronan is as good as she’s ever been, as a young woman struggling to find happiness somewhere other than the places that also bring her misery, and the movie never feels anywhere close to trite or cliche.
• Hi, Mom! is interesting—it’s one of Brian De Palma earliest films, and one of Robert De Niro’s earliest performances—but it’s difficult to say what most, if any, of it is in service to.
• The second, visually more audacious half of The Congress is a lot more interesting than the first—especially now that the idea of replacing actors with digital copies seems less prescient and just something studios are actively trying to do—but I’m also not sure it all coalesces or connects in a fully satisfying way. The movie plays certainly with a lot of interesting ideas, though.

I also rewatched the pretty terrific Amadeus.