Weekly Movie Roundup | occasional fish

I watched 8 movies last week, straddling 2024 and 2025:

I very much like the first two Deadpool movies, but Deadpool & Wolverine is such a tedious bore, less a movie than a cynical, cash-grabbing avalanche of call-backs and desperate in-jokes. I am genuinely shocked that so many people found this entertaining.

I’d be tempted to write Megalopolis off as nothing but a bad movie, if it wasn’t such a passion project for its director. It’s misguided passion, to be sure—full of half-baked, old-man-yelling-at-cloud ideas and bizarre performances—but Coppola is absolutely trying to do something here, and that’s worth something, even if the end result is at times almost unwatchable.

Madame Web is bad as advertised. I don’t think there’s a good movie chopped up and hidden in all of the weird editing and ADR, but I do think there’s a completely different bad movie.

Argylle is way too convoluted for its own good, and it doesn’t make up for that with much of anything clever or interesting.

The Beekeeper is like if somebody fell asleep watching John Wick, half woke up during a Prison Break marathon, then later tried to relate the dreams they had about that. While quoting weird factoids about bees. When I mentioned on Bluesky that I was watching the movie, Sue London called it “both terrible and cathartic.” And yeah, there’s something to be said for Statham’s character going to war against some phone scammers—the movie weirdly shares some DNA here with 2024’s much less pyrotechnic or apian Thelma—but that doesn’t make it good movie.

Hellboy: The Crooked Man is all just too much. Jack Kesy is better as the title character than David Harbour was in the 2019 attempt at a reboot, but honestly, Hellboy is the weakest link in this whole thing. The movie has a lot of creepy moments, but too many for any one to make a real impact, and it just keep throwing so much on the screen, none of which really sticks.

I read and enjoyed Richard McGuire’s original graphic novel of , but until the end credits of Robert Zemeckis’ movie adaptation, I actually didn’t realize that’s what was being adapted. It seems like an odd choice, and so Here feels less like a movie than a experiment. It’s buoyed by a more than capable cast and simple, humanistic storytelling, but it’s also all kept at a remove by the formal stylistic restrictions. It’s the sort of experiment that might work better at a much shorter time, and as a museum piece.

Without Warning isn’t what I would call a good movie, much less a lost horror classic—its small but documented influence on the later Predator movie notwithstanding—but it was a lot of cheesy low-budget fun.

I also re-watched Big Night, which remains as delightful as it did when I first saw it almost thirty years ago.