Month: January 2025

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.

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.