- Well that escalated quickly. Or should I say Quigley, as in down under? (Look, that’s a terrible not-even-a-joke, but nobody else is reading these, and it’s been rattling around in my brain all week.) Anyway, things go from bad to worse very quickly at a remote Australian pub in The Royal Hotel, and it’s a credit to the filmmaking that tension is almost enough to keep you invested, despite fizzling out a little at the end.
- Deal of the Century is terrible, and it would be easy to blame all of that on Chevy Chase, depending on how grating you find his particular brand of smarm. But I think he’s actually sometimes quite good here, intentionally undercutting that smarm with some pathos and dramatic weight. The problem is, the movie is played as a comedy, and not a single moment of it is ever even a little funny.
- Suitable Flesh is fun, if never as much fun as you hope it will be, or as much fun as the ’80s Stuart Gordon Lovecraft adaptations it’s clearly emulating.
- Like a lot of found-footage horror movies, The Tunnel seems to understand the strengths of the format but not its weaknesses. The movie is often genuinely scary, and its structure suggests it’s going to do something clever and unexpected…but then it just doesn’t.
- River of Grass is a lot more interesting as a first step in the evolution of Kelly Reichardt’s career as a filmmaker than as a film on its own. It’s much more disjointed and uneven than any of her later films—occasionally interesting, but the only one of her films I wouldn’t recommend just on its own merits.
- Hundreds of Beavers is clever and silly and often very funny, but its brand of absurdity is a hard thing to sustain for almost two hours.
- While perhaps not the world’s greatest mystery, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a lot of fun.
- Sully works very hard to manufacture tension, and yet it makes the strange decision to depict the crash entirely in flashback sequences, after we’ve been reminded several times that everyone on board the flight survived. It’s no wonder the movie reportedly invented from whole cloth a much more antagonistic NTSB investigation into that crash—without it, there’s little to any dramatic weight in the entire film. Hanks is…I suppose good in the titular role, but it’s hard to bring much to such a reserved and self-effacing character. Despite a couple of gratuitous flashbacks to his youth and several conversations (over cellphones, never on screen) with his wife, by the end, I never felt like I got to know anything about Sullenberger except that he successfully landed that plane.
- The are some good things in The Children’s Hour, including some nice subtle moments in Shirley MacLaine’s performance. But the way the movie often plays coy with its subject matter doesn’t necessarily work in its favor.
I also re-watched After Life, which I haven’t seen in some twenty-five years, but which is still a lovely and bittersweet film. Two decades ago, I was maybe surer of the memory I would pick to take with me, were I to die and face this particular afterlife. Now I’m not so sure, but I also think that might be sort of the point. As Roger Ebert wrote in his original review, “Which memory would I choose? I sit looking out the window, as images play through my mind. There are so many moments to choose from. Just thinking about them makes me feel fortunate.”
