Weekly Movie Roundup

I watched 10 movies last week.

• As TCM’s introduction to the film suggests, Winchester ’73 “stands out because it was the first to summarize the best of the Western motifs that preceded it…while modernizing the genre by featuring more complicated, tormented heroes.” Stewart, in particular, is quite good in it.
• Breakfast on Pluto occasionally feels a little too episodic, almost disjointed, but Cillian Murphy turns in a warm and tender lead performance.
• I recently heard cinematographer Roger Deakins say that the one movie people should watch to really understand what cinematography is, is In Cold Blood. And the man was not wrong. It’s really quite an astoundingly shot film, but also often chilling in its depiction of these two killers.

• Roger Ebert wrote that Sid & Nancy “pull[s] off the neat trick of creating a movie full of noise and fury, and telling a meticulous story right in the middle of it.” We never grow to like these two self-destructive characters, but we do grow to understand and deeply empathize with them.
• There are some incredible shots in The Earrings of Madame De…, many of which could not have been easy to pull off, and yet the film never feels calculated or impersonal, those shots always revealing character rather than seeming like cheap dolly-shot tricks. The movie is genuine delight.
• A Wounded Fawn takes its grisly horror to such a comically surreal place. Katie Rife called the film a “blend of absurdity, audacity, and righteous anger,” whose “combined effect is one of feverish hallucination.” I’m not sure if it adds up to much of anything beyond the obviousness of its metaphors, but it’s told with such style that it’s hard not to be compelled.

• The Baron of Arizona features what was reportedly one of star Vincent Price’s favorite performances, and it’s not hard to see why. He’s delightfully duplicitous in this perhaps slight but always interesting Western.
• Even without its title, there’s never any real surprise where Invitation to Hell is headed, though it does take some weird detours along the way. (The plot hinges on an intelligent spacesuit planned for a mission to Venus, for instance.) Maybe the most interesting things about this television movie is that it’s one of three films Wes Craven directed in 1984—including the original Nightmare on Elm Street—and that it has such an odd, very ’80s cast. It’s not really what I would call good, much less scary, but it’s diverting enough.
• Two of the best things that Till does is focus on Danielle Deadwyler’s performance—she’s outstanding, in a very good cast—and not pretend like Emmett Till ever actually received justice. (It took 67 years for Congress to even pass the Emmett Till Antilynching Act.) The movie is often tough to watch because of those things, because of the obvious pain that Deadwyler’s Mamie Till-Mobley is feeling, and because we know how this tragic and unjust story is going to play out. But it’s a story that sadly still needs telling.

• British noir doesn’t come a lot more British or noir than It Always Rains on Sunday, which does a great job of combining both a tense manhunt with slice-of-life, almost kitchen-sink post-war drama.

I also re-watched Jaws 2 for the first time in several decades. It holds up well enough, but mostly only because it’s the only halfway decent Jaws sequel.