I watched 14 movies last week. Is that a lot?
- Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde is actually not half bad. It’s a surprisingly clever take on the Robert Louis Stevenson original, that also draws on Jack the Ripper and the graverobbing Burke and Hare.
- Duck, You Sucker! (also known as A Fistful of Dynamite) is a fantastic spaghetti western, directed with real style by Sergio Leone and with terrific performances by James Coburn and Rod Steiger. (Though you’ll have to forgive Steiger’s Mexican brownface.)
- I’ve never read Donald E. Westlake’s original novel, The Hunter, but I have a certain, maybe undeserved, fondness for 1999’s adaptation, Payback. (That its star is Mel Gibson is the only reason I haven’t revisited it recently.) Point Blank is an undoubtedly better (and arguably more faithful) version, a stylishly dreamy and perfectly scuzzy pulp revenge thriller.
- There isn’t a lot of personality in Solomon Kane, but there are some good, workmanlike performances, particularly from James Purefoy.
- Neighbors is oddly amiable, but it feels more like a half dozen half-finished comedies than a cohesive whole.
- The Boys in the Band is dated and full of a lot of a lot of (often self-hating) stereotypes, but there’s a real raw-nerve intensity and honesty to the performances.
- Richard III can feel old-fashioned, if not stagey, but it’s hard to argue with Laurence Olivier in one of Shakespeare’s best-known plays.
- Malevolent has a pretty good performance by Florence Pugh and some unsettling, if not necessarily scary, moments early on. But it feels a little underbaked, especially once we get to the big twist in the story.
- The main problem with Gremlins knockoffs is simply that they don’t have Gremlins in them. The creatures in Ghoulies aren’t even half as impressive. The movie has some goofy, low-budget charm, but it’s hard to shake that feeling of being a poor man’s Gremlins.
- Ikiru asks, very simply and without sentiment, what is it to live? What is it to actually be alive?
- Trouble Every Day is sometimes upsetting, as you might expect a film that’s (at least vaguely) about the seductiveness of cannibalism and the violence of desire might be. But it’s too unfocused and overlong to ever really effectively say anything, much less develop its characters or anything like a story.
- For a film that’s mostly about the cruelty of youth, Welcome to the Dollhouse is surprisingly entertaining, and it may be my favorite of Todd Solondz’s work. As Roger Ebert wrote, the movie is not “some sort of grim sociological study…[but] in fact it’s a funny, intensely entertaining film: intense, because it focuses so mercilessly on the behavior of its characters that we are forced to confront both the comedy and the pain.”
- Blue Steel can often feel like the pieces of other, maybe better, movies stitched together. And yet, as Roger Ebert wrote, “It works because it’s so audacious in combining elements that don’t seem to belong together.” It’s far from perfect, and there are subplots and characters that don’t get their due—and in the end exist only for plot convenience. But the movie feels less Frankensteined-together than you might expect, and it’s held together by some good performances.
- There some good performances, particularly by a truly captivating Natalie Wood, in This Property Is Condemned, but it’s an unsatisfying film that just kind of peters out. God love ’em both, but Sydney Pollack and Francis Ford Coppola may not have been the best team to adapt Tennessee Williams.
