Just one week into 2024 and I’ve watched 5 movies.
- I don’t know that Living has the emotional weight of the Akira Kurosawa original (Ikiru), but it gets a lot of the details right and has a moving central performance by Bill Nighy.
- Pusher maybe seemed more daring and gritty in 1996, but even if the look and approach of the film haven’t aged perfectly well, the movie is very effective at building tension as things spiral out of control for its main character.
- There are some incredibly good performances in Foe, but only because the whole thing feels like a bunch of acting exercises gone awry and left to drag on too long. As a narrative, as any kind of cohesive story, the movie is absolutely terrible, even before it starts explaining itself like a bad Black Mirror episode or layering ending upon ending. There are some good thoughts in the film—I hesitate to call them anything as fully formed as ideas—and I can only imagine that’s what Ronan and Mescal were responding to when they offered the movie two performances it very much does not deserve.
- The Kentucky Fried Movie is just embarrassingly not funny.
- I’m not the biggest fan of The Equalizer film series—I remember almost nothing about the first one and remember only actively disliking the second—but the third one plays to the franchise’s strengths, telling an engaging and straightforward story. Maybe a little too straightforward, since the movie often feels slow and generic, and its stakes often feel more than a little low, but Denzel Washington is good in the role, as is Dakota Fanning opposite him. It feels very much like a movie I won’t remember a year from now—and I still think they missed a trick by not calling it The Threequalizer—but it’s an entertaining enough ride while you’re on it.
