I watched just 6 movies last week:
 |
 |
 |
- Roger Ebert described Radioland Murders as “all action and no character, all situation and no comedy.” There’s simply too much going on here, and almost none of it is particularly funny.
- There are several movies competing for attention in Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael. The best of them is the one starring Wynona Ryder, but none of the movies are very good, and they collide against one another in bewilderingly unsatisfying ways.
- Its satire has lost more than some of its bite, but Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is still often amusing.
 |
 |
 |
- Thunder on the Hill may not have the lush Technicolor of later Douglas Sirk movies, but it has all the exciting melodrama you expect.
- Roger Ebert called Into the Night “a fitfully funny, aimless, unnecessary thriller.” I would argue only with the “funny” part of that, not the “fitfully.” I can’t remember the last time I was this bored and confused by what’s ostensibly a comedy.
- There’s some question about how the movie treats its other real-life characters, most notably reporter Kathy Scruggs, but Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell is well crafted and features a legitimately breakout performance by Paul Walter Hauser.
I also somewhat randomly re-watched Runaway Jury. It isn’t the best Gene Hackman movie. It isn’t the best John Grisham adaptation. It isn’t even the best John Grisham adaptation starring Gene Hackman. But it’s a dumb freight train of a movie, and surprisingly still fun on rewatch even when I knew exactly where it was headed.