I watched 7 movies last week:

• Sole Survivor is creepy but very dull. Wnile it’s well shot, the movie never entirely makes sense, with side-plots and characters that do little but pad out the runtime.
• Dust Devil is a nightmarish fever dream. Which means it doesn’t always make complete sense, but it is full of unsettling and striking imagery.
• Blue Sunshine isn’t very good. Some of that’s down to the acting and obviously limited budget, but the movie also touches on themes that were handled a lot better by other directors before it—like Romero in The Crazies, Cronenberg in Shivers, or in just about any ’70s paranoid thriller, to be honest. By the end, the stakes start to feel increasingly low, and the characters woefully undeveloped.

• Some pre-Code films are less interesting for anything they have to say than for what they seem to be getting away with, subject matter that seem slightly more risqué than films made only a few short years later. Thirteen Women is such a movie: I’m guessing you didn’t see as many film plots so cavalier about poisoning young children post-Hayes, but the movie itself is fairly dated and boring.
• I’m just going to come right out and say it: I don’t think The Craft is a particularly well written movie. I think the cast is good, and I suppose there’s a lot to be said for its theme of female empowerment. But I also don’t think Roger Ebert was too far from the mark when he wrote that “Many of the scenes in this movie have no attention span—do not remember any of the other scenes—and exist only on their own terms.”
• Talk to Me has its share of violent jolts and jump scares, but it’s the smaller things, like the characters and the performances, that I found most surprising. Sophie Wilde is particularly good at creating a character with whom we immediately sympathize, even as we begin to like increasingly less.

• The Blackening is funnier than it is scary, but it’s usually pretty funny.

I also re-watched 1963’s The Haunting—which, for a movie that’s so much simply about watching characters act frightened, is incredibly frightening. It remains one of the best haunted house movies ever made.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from last week:

I watched just three movies last week.

• There was a moment when I worried that No One Will Save You was just going to be its central gimmick—which I won’t spoil, but which is evident fairly quickly. But it does some clever things with that, has a good lead performance by Kaitlyn Dever, and is a lot of fun.
• Landscape with Invisible Hand is much blacker comedy than the trailer led me to believe, a lot bleaker in the pointed things it has to say about capitalism. But it’s also often very smart and funny.
• Even if Jules doesn’t quite stick the landing, it’s a fun and silly ride, with some touching moments along the way and good performances all around.

I also re-watched Don’t Look Now—which doesn’t really fit the alien theme of the rest of the week, but which is still drowned in creepiness and atmosphere, even when you know where it’s headed.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from last week:

I watched 6 movies last week. There was something like a theme to them:

• One Crazy Summer sometimes feels like an ’80s teen comedy, sometimes like a spoof of one, and sometimes like a cheap cartoon. It’s silly enough and sometimes fun but largely forgettable.
• I’m struggling to decide if Two Lovers has a happy ending. Along the way, it’s a well-acted drama about damaged people trying to find something that will make them feel whole.
• Three on a Match is interesting, if only because it’s so very much a pre-Code movie, but it also feels overly melodramatic, with several good performers struggling to give good performances.

• I’ve never really been a fan of Lucio Fulci’s horror movies, so it was something of a shock to discover how much I enjoyed Four of the Apocalypse, one of only a small handful of spaghetti Westerns the director ever made. It’s a surprisingly poignant film, with the low budget and questionable dubbing you expect from the genre, but with a lot to recommend it.
• I’d have cut the last ten or fifteen minutes of Five Graves to Cairo, which I think do a little worse than gild the lily. But it’s otherwise it’s a very smart and tense little spy thriller, with good performances, particularly by Erich von Stroheim and Akim Tamiroff.
• If Six-String Samurai was maybe a third as long, you’d say it was a promising enough student film, with some occasionally clever moments, and then probably never think about it again. At an hour and a half, though, it’s really tedious and repetitive—well shot, for such an otherwise no-budget affair, but with almost nothing even approaching a script.

It was a silly theme—you’d be surprised how few, good, movies there are that start with some numbers—but because of it I wound up watching at least a couple of movies I might never have even heard of otherwise, and which I quite enjoyed.

I also re-watched Trainspotting, which I don’t think I’d seen since it was in theaters. I don’t think it’s as shocking or original as it seemed some thirty years ago, but it really does hold up.