I watched 6 movies last week:
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- 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.
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- 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.