I watched just four movies last week:

• Contemporary reviews of The Outfit largely seem to agree that the movie doesn’t do anything especially new, but they seem divided on whether or not that’s a bad thing. Roger Ebert, for one, acknowledged “the same things are always happening in action movies,” but he argued that “the people in this movie are uncommonly interesting.” I think there are good performances here, particularly from Duvall, and some nicely observed detail. I’m just not entirely convinced it’s enough to elevate what’s otherwise a very pedestrian story, much less uncommonly so.
• Blue Moon is a lot, but largely because you get the sense that Lorenz Hart himself was a lot. Ethan Hawke plays him, in a terrific performance, as a man almost terrified of ever shutting up, of not having some opinion on which to hold court, of being left behind and devoured by his own worst impulses and fears. It’s a moment in time of a sad life cut short by the man’s own excesses, observed with great humor and kindness.
• Mr. Vampire II has its ramshackle charms, but holy hell did I like it a lot less than the first movie in the series. Not really a sequel, despite several actors reappearing as different characters in the modern day, it’s more properly three very loosely connected movies. Two of them are basically well-staged but very repetitive and over-extended fight scenes, while the other is a kid-friendly but underbaked E.T. knockoff, of the sort the 1980s were lousy with. Like the first film, this leans heavily into the silly humor—it’s just never nearly as funny.
• Eternity is sweet and funny but a little unfocused. Its vision of a bureaucratic afterlife is quirky but not exactly novel, and the movie might have been more successful if it had focused just one character’s journey. Still, it sets up an interesting conflict, and has both very endearing performances and its heart in the right place.

I also rewatched a couple of movies. First was David Cronenberg’s Shivers, which I would probably classify as creepily interesting more than good, similar to a lot of very early Cronenberg. Second was The Tomb of Ligeia, which was an enjoyable rewatch, but which felt slow and more than a little padded, a mishmash of Poe tropes more than a satisfying story of its own.

It’s been the better part of a decade since I’ve posted one of these, but let’s see if this gets any response. The rules are simple:

Below are 10 random lyrics. Guess the song and artist in the comments if you know them. Don’t cheat by looking them up.

1. Heavenly wine and roses seem to whisper to me when you smile
   “Sweet Jane” by Cowboy Junkies (guessed by Chris McLaren)
2. I’m not a present for your friends to open
   “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” by Elton John (guessed by Glen)
3. Then I’ll try my best to make everything succeed
4. I said, “Okay, but let’s discuss this at the hospital”
   “Free” by Florence + the Machine (guessed by Jordan)
5. I’m the last chick standing up against the wall
6. I love the light, I love the changing season
7. And the driver says, “You don’t know where this bus is going to?”
8. And all we could do is sing, drink and dance
9. Oh, I can’t take another heartache
10. You tear men down like Roger Moore

Whatever happens, I’ll post the answers and the playlist next week. Good luck!

• Give Miracle Mile this: the movie isn’t afraid to take some weird and wild swings and has the mad energy to see them through. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a madcap race that carries you along.
• Relay is very stylish, very clever, very tense as a thriller. It’s a bit of a shame that it doesn’t quite hold together in the end, but it works very well until then.
• We Bury the Dead is an in interesting, if not necessarily satisfying take on the zombie movie. There are strong performances, particularly from Ridley, and it’s not exactly the movie’s fault that its central metaphor doesn’t exactly break new ground.

• Fréwaka is such a slow burn that it’s a bit of a shame when it rushes its plot along near the end. But it’s deeply tense and upsetting and a terrific work of horror.
• Gidget is an odd movie to watch in 2026—at times very much embracing, if not inventing, every cliche of late 1950s/early 1960s teen comedies, and at other times feeling weirdly subversive of those cliches. Certainly, it’s a little weirder and more sexually frank than I was expecting. While I wouldn’t necessarily call it good, Sandra Dee is genuinely charming in the title role.
• The Wrong Guy is deeply silly, but also deeply smart about its silliness. It’s a “case of mistaken identity” thriller, but one in which the protagonist is the one who makes the mistake.

I also rewatched Black Sunday, which is delightfully over-the-top Italian Gothic horror.

I watched 6 movies last week:

• There’s a thick thread of melancholy running through An Autumn Afternoon. But then, there’s melancholy in almost all of Ozu’s movies, and he explores many of the same themes—the passing of a generation, love and marriage—with the same quiet grace that he does elsewhere. I don’t know that this is his most melancholic, or if it’s just the knowledge that it was also his last film, made the year after his mother died, and the year before he did.
• Zabriskie Point undeniably is widely considered Michelangelo Antonioni’s worst film. And while it sometimes looks undeniably good, with the director’s meticulous eye for visual composition and cinematography, the critics at the time—like Roger Ebert, who called it “such a silly and stupid movie”—were absolutely right.
• Mr. Vampire is just such delightfully silly fun.

• Touki Bouki is perhaps most interesting as a time capsule to early 1970s Senegal, but the direction and editing is often daring and engaging all on its own.
• There are some real ways in which Girl with Hyacinths, and the tropes that it plays with, are very dated. And yet, for a movie made in 1950, it’s exceptionally daring, treating these subjects, beginning with suicide, very honestly and humanely. If this were an American film of that era, I would be shocked by its candor and compassion—to say nothing of its flouting of the Hays’ Code.
• The mythologizing and worldbuilding of the Predatorfranchise is possibly the worst thing about it, second only to the insistence on connecting it to the mythologizing and worldbuilding of the Alien franchise. And yet, while Predator: Badlands does both of those things, it’s overall very entertaining—knowing when not to take itself too seriously, offering some fun action set-pieces, and actually having a beginning, middle, and end.

I also rewatched Memoirs of an Invisible Man, which I think is far from perfect, but I think also underrated. Chevy Chase, however difficult he reportedly was to work with, is genuinely good in the movie, and certainly his instinct that the less comedic elements in the story were the more compelling ones was spot on, even if it often put him at odds with a lot of other people involved in developing the script.

I also rewatched Curse of the Crimson Altar (aka The Crimson Cult), even though it’s only been three months since I first saw it. My opinion remains unchanged: it’s not a very good movie, largely boring, but occasionally Christopher Lee or Boris Karloff pops out, and that’s nice.

I read 12 books in January:

• The Carter of La Providence by Georges Simenon
• Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing with David Naimon
• Haunt Sweet Home by Sarah Pinsker
• Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
• Elevation by Stephen King
• The Man Who Japed by Philip K. Dick
• Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou
• Absolute Batman Vol 1: The Zoo by Scott Snyder et al.
• Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre
• What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
• Time and Again by Jack Finney
• The Flash: Book One by Mark Waid et al.

I read 39 short stories in January. These were my favorites:

• “The Sun Globe” by Tim Pratt and Heather Shaw (PodCastle)
• “Give a Dog a Bone” by Richard E. Dansky (PseudoPod)
• “The Versions of Yourself That You’re Better Off Without” by Aimee Ogden (Nightmare)
• “Body? Glass” by Osahon Ize-Iyamu (Nightmare)
• “Stairs for Mermaids” by MM Schreier (Flash Fiction Online)
• “The Doorkeepers” by A.T. Greenblatt (Uncanny)
• “Sing” by Jules Bly (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
• “Mother’s Hip” by Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff (Lightspeed)
• “The Orchard Village Catalog” by Parker Peevyhouse (Strange Horizons)
• “The Stars You Can’t See by Looking Directly” by Samatha Murray (Clarkesworld)
• “Speaking for Those With Obsidian Tongues” by Wendy Nikel (Small Wonders)
• “The Spindle of Necessity” by B. Pladek (Strange Horizons)
• “Symbiote” by Diana T. Chiu-Chu (kh?ré?)
• “Baron Quits the Payloaders” by Renan Bernardo (Escape Pod)
• “The Peculiarities of Hunger” by Woody Dismukes (kh?ré?)
• “Joiner and Rust” by Lavie Tidhar (Reactor)