- Robot Carnival has some visually impressive moments, and yet, a week later, I’d be hard-pressed to recall any of the individual animated segments.
- The File on Thelma Jordon is just a nice little noir.
- Perfect Days is a meditation on modest pleasures, finding simple joys in things like quietude and routine, the beauty in sunlight and shadow, a passage in a book or a favorite song played on a car radio’s tape deck. The movie doesn’t tell you much about its central character, or why he’s chosen this life of modesty and solitude; there are hints you can piece together, but the full story remains elusive, if not outright evasive, and not much actually happens. And yet it’s an often beautiful meditation, with a lovely performance by Koji Yakusho.
- You’ll Never Find Me works best early on, drawing real tension and fear from a very simple two-hander. I wouldn’t say the movie falls apart when it starts to reveal what’s actually going on, but the tension definitely eases up, and the movie becomes less compelling.
- If you were to imagine a 1972 movie about “a secret cult of lust-craved witches” set in the Philippines and starring a young Tom Selleck, Daughters of Satan is almost certainly the B-movie you would imagine. But for however cheaply and exploitatively it’s made, the movie was a little more interesting than I expected it to be.
- Run Silent, Run Deep is a terrifically tense little war movie, with really good peformances, particularly from Burt Lancaster and Clark Gable.
I also rewatched Repo Man, which I think I found more enjoyable in my early twenties, but which still has a whole lot of strange and oddball charms.
