Last week, I watched 6 movies:

• Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, which I’m only ninety-something-percent sure I’ve never seen before, is maybe more interesting than revealing—I’m not sure I learned anything about the man, if I’m being honest—but it is undoubtedly interesting.
• As Roger Ebert wrote, If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium “isn’t a great movie by any means, but it manages to be awfully pleasant.” The movie is dated, and more a collection of character beats than actual characters or story, but the cast manages to make it a pleasant enough experience.
• I don’t know that Highest 2 Lowest is my favorite Spike Lee/Denzel Washington collaboration, but damn if the movie doesn’t make clear there’s still a whole lot of juice left in the partnership.

• Vanessa Kirby is very good in Night Always Comes. I just wish the rest of the movie around her was equal to the performance. That’s not any fault of the other actors, who are also good—and the movie does have some hard-hitting emotional beats as you feel the desperation waft off the characters. It just feels a little too cliche at times, which is a shame.
Wafare does exactly what it says on the tin, by throwing you into the chaos of war with these soldiers in a near real-time experience of war. But while that makes for interesting viewing, it’s unclear what if anything the movie has to say other than “war is a bloody and confusing hell.”
• Thank God It’s Friday is two parts Saturday Night Fever and one part American Graffiti, and also very much less than the sum of its parts. “When you describe it, it sounds like a lot more fun than it is when you see it,” wrote Roger Ebert. The movie was all too obviously designed as a vehicle for Donna Summer’s song “Last Dance,” and hey, they managed to get an Academy Award out of it. But it’s weird, because despite what all of the characters in the film seem to think, it’s not even Summer’s best performance of the song, and her character, such as it is, is even thinner than all of the others who drift in and out of the film.

I also rewatched The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, though not as a double-feature. I enjoyed them both.

I watched 7 movies last week:

• Contemporary reviews talk a lot about how Save the Tiger wouldn’t work without the Jack Lemmon performance. Which is a little weird considering that it has the Jack Lemmon performance. I agree you probably couldn’t drop just any actor into this material, but that isn’t a fault of the material, or just because Lemmon is genuinely so good. His performance is finely calibrated to this material, a character study set against the regret and malaise of 1970s America. It’s not necessarily a fun movie, and it is easy how it could be bad without an actor so good, but I think it does work.
• The Anderson Tapes is interesting, not least for its eclectic cast, though it’s mostly a testament to Sidney Lumet’s skill as a director that the movie is as engaging as it is.

Cold Turkey is never exactly funny, but its characters, while largely unlikable, are well observed.

• To the Devil a Daughter is shockingly bad, and if wasn’t Hammer Films very last movie before going under at the end of the 1970s, oh boy, was it a huge nail in that coffin. The movie approaches hauntingly atmospheric now and then—it’s definitely trying to do something, and it has a much better cast than it deserves—but it’s so very tedious and over-complicated. And then when I learned that Nastassja Kinski, who briefly (and needlessly) appears fully nude, was only fourteen at the time, I really hated this film.
• Z.P.G. is a 1970s sci-fi movie you’ve probably never heard of. I’d recommend keeping it that way. Everybody involved, from the actors to the audience, walks through it half-comatose.
• Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of the laziest, muddled, and unfunniest chores of a comedy I’ve ever sat through.
• 1959’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, on the other hand, is a delight. It’s arguably more Hammer Horror than Sherlock Holmes, but with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee on hand, the movie is a whole lot of fun.

I also rewatched A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I think I’d forgotten just how silly and Richard Lesteresque the movie is, but it’s good goofy fun.

I watched just 4 movies last week:

• Though not without ambition, Lucy in the Sky is a terrible movie. It’s distracted by camera trickery almost constantly, and it strands its actors in ponderous dialogue and a confused premise. You can see director Noah Hawley attempting some of things that have worked well for him in prestige television, none of which work here at all to serve either the story or the characters. And it’s all so very loosely based on the real life of former astronaut Lisa Nowak that you have to wonder why they even bothered.
• I’m not sure Thunderbolts* is my favorite Marvel movie, but it’s definitely in the top ten, maybe even the top five, and it’s easily better than most of the others I’ve seen recently. A lot of that is down to the acting—Florence Pugh in particular is very good—but also because the movie is actually about something—in this case, depression—and has a beginning, middle, and end, rather than simply trying to set up the next installment in the MCU.
• There is so much to like about The Life of Chuck and the movie’s strange and sometimes unsettling joys, but it also very much feels like what it is: a novella padded out to feature length. The movie just kind of ends. And while it doesn’t leave anything necessarily unexplained, it doesn’t do a particularly good job of tying its disparate threads together.
• If you’ve never seen Fire and Ice, imagine what a collaboration between Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta might look like. The movie they made is exactly the movie you are imagining right now. It’s often visually interesting, almost charming, in the way that a lot of Bakshi’s rotoscoped animated films almost can’t help but be, but what little story you’ll find is so repetitive and juvenile.

But I also re-watched 3 other movies:

• A Man for All Seasons—a movie which featured heavily in my Catholic high school curriculum, but which I don’t think I’ve rewatched since then. The acting and period spectacle all still very much hold up, though I may be slightly less sure of Thomas More’s principled stand as I was a teenager.
• The Big Lebowski—another movie I hadn’t seen in decades, but also one that has so permeated meme and bro culture since then, I worried I might not enjoy it as much. I needn’t have worried.
• Twilight—a movie. As Roger Ebert wrote, “The reason to see the film is to observe how relaxed and serene Paul Newman is before the camera….It’s sad to see all that assurance used in the service of a plot so worn and mechanical.

Last week, I watched 6 movies:

• Can’t Stop the Music isn’t a particularly good movie, even as a vehicle for the Village People, but it’s goofily endearing all the same. That’s mostly thanks to it being such a schlocky time capsule of 1980—which is why it’s not hard at all to see why it failed so badly in that moment—but I think you also can’t underestimate the charms of Valerie Perrine’s performance.
• Lacombe, Lucien is an interesting take on some of the same ideas I saw recently in This Land Is Mine. That movie takes place mid-World War II, and more about reclaiming the nobility of the human spirit than the ugly violence we often trade it for, but both are about collaboration, and why many would choose it willingly, or without thinking.
• The Twelve Chairs is very amusing. I don’t know that I’d put it in the top half of Mel Brooks’ filmography, but I’d probably at least put it in the top half of the bottom half.

• The Luckiest Man in America feels more fictionalized than it needs to be, which sometimes doesn’t work in its favor, but the cast, particularly Hauser, are the real draw.
• Ballerina doesn’t always work, but when it does, it works really well. It plays heavily on the worldbuilding mythology of the John Wick series, which has always been that series’ weakest part, but it also plays to the series’ strengths with some fun, kickass fight scenes.
• I had a lot of fun watching Troll with the #HorrorWatch crew live on Bluesky, but that isn’t because the movie is particularly good. It’s one of two movies I can remember really frightening me as a child, enough that I never watched more than a few scattered minutes of it. But seeing the movie now, decades later, all I could think was: This? This is what frightened me? The movie has such a weird tone, neither scary in the least but also not exactly kid-friendly, so that might account for it. And it has its goofy charms, I suppose.

In honor the recently departed Terrence Stamp, I also rewatched The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, probably for the first time in thirty years. It’s not a perfect movie, and not everything about it speaks to where we are today, but Stamp’s performance is one of the best things about it.

I watched another 6 movies last week. The week started reasonably well, but took something of a turn.

• Harvest is often surreal, even hallucinatory, unfolding slowly in this uncertain time and place of upheaval and change.
• I’m not as familiar with the tales of Odysseus as I’d maybe like, but The Return doesn’t insist upon that knowledge, is a simple enough tale of violence and regret, with a compelling performance by Ralph Fiennes.
• Love Me can feel a little like a short film stretched to feature length, and still doesn’t necessarily flesh out its ideas as much as it might, but they’re deep philosophical ideas about what it means to be human and real, and the movie plays with those ideas in interesting ways, with strong performances by the two actors.

• Death of a Unicorn could maybe use a sharper satirical bite, or could make its villains a little more unlikable, but it’s often funny and well cast.
• Margot Robbie is an undeniably electric performer, who is just completely wasted in the otherwise tedious Dreamland. As critic Peter Sobczynski writes, “there is a fine line between ‘homage’ and ‘uninspired imitation,’ and this film constantly finds itself tripping over it.” I felt like my time had just been wasted by the end of it.
• Wicked City is an interesting experience, full of a lot of strange, often hypersexualized body horror, but it isn’t a particularly enjoyable experience, often for the same reasons.

I also rewatched Local Hero, which I think is a movie a lot of people are a lot more fond of than I am. I do like it a lot, as it’s quite charmingly endearing, but I still don’t think it’s some great masterpiece.