Last week, I watched 9 movies:
- There’s something to be said for the way Roger Ebert described The Day of the Locust, as a film that “misplaces its concern with its characters.” There’s a lot that works about the movie, but I don’t think Ebert is wrong that “We begin to sense that they’re marching around in response to the requirements of the story, instead of leading lives of their own. And so we stop worrying about them, because they’re doomed anyway and not always because of their own shortcoming.”
- A Real Pain is a deeply affecting look at human connection, and the limits of it. There are some quiet, deliberate moments in this film that are going to stick with me a long time.
- Roger Ebert called Lucky Lady “a big, expensive, good-looking flop of a movie.” A cast that’s not put to much good use tries their best, but this is like the very definition of forgettable.
- The core of The Naked Civil Service is Crisp’s humor and John Hurt’s great performance.
- The Protagonists is deliberately odd enough to be occasionally interesting, but it’s hard to see what, if anything, that oddness is in service of.
- I find myself much more interested in the scattered scenes of Brian Keith’s Teddy Roosevelt in The Wind and the Lion than in anything between the film’s ostensible leads. And that’s even leaving aside the film’s dubious historical accuracy or the questionable nature of Sean Connery playing a Berber chieftain.
- Nosferatu is often stunning and unsettling in equal measure.
- Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly is both stark and haunting, with a remarkable performance from Harriet Andersson.
- Peter Cushing once called The Blood Beast Terror the worst movie he’d ever made. Well, when you’re right, you’re right. The movie isn’t unpleasantly bad to watch—indeed, I had a great deal of fun watching it as part of #horrorwatch on Bluesky—and Cushing acquits reasonably himself well. But it’s so goofily and poorly plotted, taking these weird side routes and uninteresting digressions. It’s can be enjoyably bad, but it’s bad nonetheless.
