About Fred

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.

Last week, I watched 8 movies:

• Dead Calm generates a lot of terrific tension.
• The Big Clock is fun, resting mostly on the performances.
• Flesh + Blood sometimes feels like it’s trying a little too hard to be bleak, amidst the gore and the violence, and I suppose I can understand why some critics at the time felt the movie needed a hero, or at least a guiding morality. But as Noel Murray wrote a couple decades later, “The rawness of it all fits into Verhoeven’s persistent vision of a world of mass delusion, where self-interest masquerades as good intentions—a hell on Earth where the poor die while the rich get paid.”
• Sean Baker treats even his sometimes unlikable characters with such empathy and understanding that Anora would probably be worth watching even without such a stunning central performance by Mikey Madison.

• There are moments to enjoy in The End of the River, one of only two movies that Powell and Pressburger co-produced under the Archers imprint, independent of their own films. But those moments are scattered, and it’s difficult to say what exactly they add up to.
• Borderline incomprehensible, Bad Kids Go to Hell would like to flatter itself that it’s edgy, almost clever, but the movie is all smartass and no smarts, a largely unpleasant experience, with a bargain-bin collection of borrowed plot devices and ill-equipped actors.
• Questions over some of its historical accuracy aside, the biggest problem with Elizabeth: The Golden Age isn’t its dramatic license, but its lack of drama altogether. The film tries to cover too much, too many years of Elizabeth’s reign, to such an extent that sweeping historical events hardly have a chance to register on the screen. Despite the sumptuous production design and some strong performances, particularly Cate Blanchett in the title role, this is a weak follow-up to 1998’s Elizabeth.
• Larger Than Life is amiable but not particularly funny. (And there’s a good reason why A Time to Kill, released the same year, and not this, was Matthew McConaughey’s breakout role.)

I also re-watched Steven Spielberg’s Duel, which is arguably the best TV movie ever made.

I watched 8 movies last week, straddling 2024 and 2025:

• I very much like the first two Deadpool movies, but Deadpool & Wolverine is such a tedious bore, less a movie than a cynical, cash-grabbing avalanche of call-backs and desperate in-jokes. I am genuinely shocked that so many people found this entertaining.
• I’d be tempted to write Megalopolis off as nothing but a bad movie, if it wasn’t such a passion project for its director. It’s misguided passion, to be sure—full of half-baked, old-man-yelling-at-cloud ideas and bizarre performances—but Coppola is absolutely trying to do something here, and that’s worth something, even if the end result is at times almost unwatchable.
• Madame Web is bad as advertised. I don’t think there’s a good movie chopped up and hidden in all of the weird editing and ADR, but I do think there’s a completely different bad movie.
• Argylle is way too convoluted for its own good, and it doesn’t make up for that with much of anything clever or interesting.

• The Beekeeper is like if somebody fell asleep watching John Wick, half woke up during a Prison Break marathon, then later tried to relate the dreams they had about that. While quoting weird factoids about bees. When I mentioned on Bluesky that I was watching the movie, Sue London called it “both terrible and cathartic.” And yeah, there’s something to be said for Statham’s character going to war against some phone scammers—the movie weirdly shares some DNA here with 2024’s much less pyrotechnic or apian Thelma—but that doesn’t make it good movie.
• Hellboy: The Crooked Man is all just too much. Jack Kesy is better as the title character than David Harbour was in the 2019 attempt at a reboot, but honestly, Hellboy is the weakest link in this whole thing. The movie has a lot of creepy moments, but too many for any one to make a real impact, and it just keep throwing so much on the screen, none of which really sticks.
• I read and enjoyed Richard McGuire’s original graphic novel of , but until the end credits of Robert Zemeckis’ movie adaptation, I actually didn’t realize that’s what was being adapted. It seems like an odd choice, and so Here feels less like a movie than a experiment. It’s buoyed by a more than capable cast and simple, humanistic storytelling, but it’s also all kept at a remove by the formal stylistic restrictions. It’s the sort of experiment that might work better at a much shorter time, and as a museum piece.
• Without Warning isn’t what I would call a good movie, much less a lost horror classic—its small but documented influence on the later Predator movie notwithstanding—but it was a lot of cheesy low-budget fun.

I also re-watched Big Night, which remains as delightful as it did when I first saw it almost thirty years ago.

I watched 8 movies last week:

• Blitz very effectively captures the tension and fear of living under the German’s bombing of London during World War II. The movie is perhaps a little too episodic, and not necessarily Steve McQueen’s best work, but it’s beautifully shot, with some very good performances.
• Violent Night maybe isn’t as clever as it could be, but it is a little clever, and everyone involved is committed enough to the bit that it kind of works. “Let’s literally make Die Hard a Christmas movie” is a weird and wonky premise, but it’s surprisingly fun.
• There’s probably a way to take the ridiculous premise of Juror #2 and turn it into a fun legal potboiler—or even a more serious discussion of our courtroom system and personal ethics—instead of the interesting but dull story Clint Eastwood chooses to stage here.
• They really don’t make movies like The Towering Inferno anymore. That might be for the best. It’s occasionally entertaining, and the special effects are good for 1974, but there’s not much of a movie here.

• Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger is not exhaustive. It talks only a little about the duo’s films together before they started their production company, and not at all about the two films they made together a decade after its dissolution. But it’s an interesting look back, through the very personal lens of Martin Scorsese’s memories of the films.
• Topper is effervescent—both charmingly bubbly and also instantly forgettable.
• Nightbitch has such a strange tone—it’s a horror and a comedy, but it’s decidedly not a horror comedy—but it walks that odd tightrope well, thanks largely to Amy Adams.
• Saturday Night can’t entirely shake a sense of smug self-importance, but it never goes full Studio 60. The performances are all fairly good, capturing the qualities of the early SNL cast without ever feeling like impersonation—even if that does mean it’s not always clear who someone is supposed to be until they’re introduced by name. Likewise, the film’s biggest strength—its near-realtime structure—is also its biggest weakness, because while it has a fun ticking-clock, behind-the-scenes energy, the movie is very superficial.

I also re-watched 1989’s Batman, which I hadn’t seen in years—maybe not in its entirety since I was twelve and it was in theaters—and it was somehow both a lot more, and a lot less, silly than I remembered it.

Last week I watched a dozen movies:

• Foreign Correspondent isn’t Hitchcock’s best, but it’s decently suspenseful.
• There are several good peformances in The Barretts of Wimpole Street, but the best may be from Charles Laughton, who’s perfectly hateful in his role and plays all the weird subtext with a gleam in his eye.
• Son of Lassie is surprisingly dark, a proper trapped-behind-enemy-lines war film.
• There’s a reason why every film production of it since has been compared to Olivier’s Hamlet. It’s not the only way to take the play, and it’s arguably too theatrical and stage-bound, but it’s evocative and haunting.

• Quicksand starts out a little silly, and Rooney’s voiceover is sometimes a distraction, but when the movie starts racking up twists and starts tossing Peter Lorre into the mix, it gets a lot more fun.
• The Sea Wolf is a tense sea voyage, with some great cinematography and a terrifically menacing performance by Edward G. Robinson.
• Anyone who thinks an over-reliance on movie sequels is a recent phenomenon should be introduced to early Hollywood series like the Dr. Kildare movies. They made nine of these things in the span of just five years, then another half dozen spin-offs in the six years after Lew Ayres left the series and the title role. (And that’s to say nothing of the television series a decade later.) Calling Dr. Kildare, the second film in the series, is no less dated and hokey as the first, but it’s still genuinely entertaining.
• William Powell and Myrna Loy are, no shock, terrifically charming together in I Love You Again. The movie has a very silly, but nevertheless clever, premise, but it’s mostly worth it just to see these two on the screen again.

• The Devil Commands has some fun mad-scientist shenanigans, along with a sad and haunted Boris Karloff.
• Vacation from Marriage is (probably intentionally) a little slow to start, but the cast is just so good.
• I don’t want to say Lon Chaney Jr. is no Boris Karloff, because the makeup and his performance in The Ghost of Frankenstein are at least well done. It’s just a case of diminishing returns, with both this and Son of…, the two sequels post-Bride of Frankenstein. That’s probably to be expected, following two of the very best monster movies ever made, but still.
• Okay, so Die Hard is absolutely a Christmas movie if Meet Me in St. Louis is one. The movie is good fun, with some decent songs—including, of course, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”—but it just as easily be called a Halloween movie, since there’s a much more extended sequence set at that holiday, and that’s also where the movie’s vibrant Technicolor truly comes alive.