I watched 8 movies last week:

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• Escape from Alcatraz doesn’t do anything more than it says on the tin—and it can’t help but feel a little familiar, in the wake of subsequent prison movies like The Shawshank Redemption—but it’s tense and very enjoyable.
• This Land Is Mine is a remarkably nuanced look at the dangers of collaboration, why so many might choose to cooperate with Nazis, but it’s also a really great character study of cowardice and courage, with at least one great speech by Charles Laughton.
• There’s a lot to love about Dead End, but the standout might be Humphrey Bogart’s performance as a sad and broken man.
• Eephus isn’t exactly a fun movie, even if it is often very low-key funny. Maybe the most telling moment comes late in the film when a long-expected fireworks display happens entirely off-screen, with only one character’s defeated face reflected in its glow. It’s a brilliantly low-stakes but pitch-perfect hangdog comedy.

• The Phoenician Scheme feels very much like Wes Anderson making stop-motion with live actors. That can sometimes make the movie feel unreal and removed, but it’s all so meticulously crafted, often delightfully and playfully so, that it’s hard to mind too much.
• I’ve never played the video game that Until Dawn is based on, but the lazy way the storytelling falls apart near the end doesn’t exactly argue for very compelling source material. Which is a shame, because there’s actually a somewhat clever take on the time-loop conceit, which raises the stakes in some gory and gnarly ways, before that.
• For such a simple plot, The Crossroads is surprisingly convoluted, but it’s well directed, and William Powell is good in it.
• As Brian Tallerico writes, The Amateur “skims the surface of what has worked in spy thrillers of the past, never finding its own rhythm, identity, or personality.” The movie is better cast than it needs to be, but that proves to be more of a distraction than an asset in the end.

I also rewatched Thief. I don’t know that it’s my favorite Michael Mann movie, but it’s got such style, James Caan is so good in it, and it’s got a perfect downer of an ending.

• All You Need Is Death is deeply strange and unnerving.
• Black Moon Rising stars Tommy Lee Jones a a former thief hired by Bubba Smith at the FBI to steal a computer disk that he hides inside an experimental supercar that can drive over 300 miles per hour and is stolen by car thief Linda Hamilton for crime boss Robert Vaughn. Which makes it sound a lot more fun than it actually is. The movie has some goofy charms and a good cast, but it’s not a forgotten ’80s classic or anything.
• There’s a seed of a good idea in Monkey Shines, but things escalate much too quickly, then nonsensically, and finally unpleasantly. It’s never remotely frightening, probably because they (very rightly) couldn’t force a real monkey to actually do any of the things this one is supposed to. It’s not George Romero’s finest hour.

• There’s only so far that likable characters can take you, and the characters in Hot Tub Time Machine aren’t even that likable. It’s dumb fun for a lot of the ride, except when it’s just dumb, but it’s a very lazy comedy.
• Old Henry doesn’t really bring anything new to the table, and the movie mostly just plays itself out, but Tim Blake Nelson is really good in it.
• The best time to have watched D.A.R.Y.L. was 1985, when I was 8 years old. Some (gulp) 40 years later, it’s more than a little silly and dated. There’s a neat little sci-fi idea inside it all, but it’s hardly a home run.
• Death Watch dances around some interesting philosophical ideas—some that many contemporary critic have been a little kind in calling prescient—and it has some likable performances, but it’s just so slow and lugubrious.

I also rewatched M*A*S*H. I don’t think it’s my favorite Robert Altman movie—that’s probably McCabe & Mrs. Miller—but it’s up there.

• The music in Robert Altman’s Kansas City is pretty great, on the rare occasion it’s given a chance to play. Problem is, there’s this whole movie and plot that keep getting in the way, both of which feel like they’ve fizzled out before they’ve even attempted to build up any steam. And it certainly doesn’t help that most of that plot is taken up by maybe my least favorite Jennifer Jason Leigh performance ever.
• Roger Ebert called Full Moon in Blue Water “such a likable film in so many little ways that you want to forgive it for being so bad in so many big ones.” He wasn’t wrong that the movie has a few very modest charms, in spite of itself—namely, its two leads—but it’s such a confused and contrived mess, no matter how much Hackman and Garr struggle desperately to pull three-dimensional characters from the wreckage. By the end, I had almost no idea what was supposed to be happening, nor did I want to.
• I think The Shrouds is the best movie David Cronenberg has made in years—maybe one of his best ever. It’s strange and unsettling, obviously deeply personal and informed by the grief over his own wife’s death, both elegiac and absurd, and playfully exploring some very deep and interesting ideas, with a fantastic central performance by Vincent Cassel.

• There’s a sadness that hangs over La Strada, almost from the very first frame, and certainly to the last.
• Opus is tense fun for a while, keeping your interest for as long as you don’t know where any of it is going—until you realize the movie is going only exactly where you think it is, and until it stumbles badly at the end and you realize it doesn’t know where it’s going whatsoever. It’s buoyed by some good performances, particularly from Malkovich, but the weirdness ends up just being weird for its own sake, and the movie is very confused about what if anything it’s trying to say by the end.
• Jaws is one the best movies ever made, which is the main thing that makes Jaws @ 50 watchable. Despite archival and some more recent interviews, the documentary hardly feels like “the definitive inside story” it bills itself as. Full of as many aimless digressions as amusing anecdotes, it’s not particularly revealing or novel and mostly just makes you want to rewatch the original film. Which is probably the only reason it exists in the first place.
• The Breaking Point does what it says on the tin, but it does so with tension and style and several good very performances.

I also rewatched Bubba Ho-Tep, because after rewatching Phantasm last week, I was in the mood to revisit a good Don Coscarelli movie. This one is very silly, but also good fun.

I watched 6 movies last week:

• Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever has a reputation as one of the worst movies ever made. Insofar as the movie earns anything, it earns that reputation. Roger Ebert was too kind when he called this incoherent, sleepwalking tedium “an ungainly mess, submerged in mayhem, occasionally surfacing for cliches.”
• Even if I didn’t know Terry Gilliam had ever seen The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, I probably could have guessed it. The movie—which, for the record, he said “captured the real spirit of the character”—is like the most Gilliamesque thing he never made. It’s delightfully silly and visually inventive in so many unexpected ways.
• Vamps is not without its cornball charm, but that’s thanks to the cast, not to any of the movie’s tired jokes or cheesy effects or shambling plot. The cast fully commits to the bit—no vampire pun intended, although that’s about the quality of the humor on display here. It’s not enough to save the movie, but there is an amiable, if somewhat halfhearted, charm to the whole thing.

• The Great Bank Hoax is exceptionally dull. There’s a decent enough idea for a comedy of errors in the basic setup, but the movie is all errors, no comedy, and there are a lot of good actors stranded in bad performances. A real waste of everyone’s time, my own included.
• There’s nothing particularly original in Ash‘s story—it would probably be a spoiler just to say what sci-fi horror movies it’s most indebted to, if not ripping off—but it’s handled with no small amount of visual style.
• Fritz Lang’s Fury isn’t necessarily subtle in what it says about mob violence, but it’s well acted and very well shot.

I also rewatched White Sands and Phantasm, although a week apart from one another, not as a double-feature. White Sands I had watched sometime in the early 2000s, when I was on something of a Mickey Rourke kick, but I remembered almost nothing about it. It’s pretty good, if a little overly complicated and not entirely satisfying, but also very much the kind of movie I could see myself completely forgetting about again for another twenty or thirty years. Meanwhile, I’d seen Phantasm a little more recently, though still almost twenty years ago at this point, and I remembered really disliking it then. I still think it’s a very bad movie in a lot of the things that matter, like story and acting and effects, but as a weird low-budget meditation on grief and nightmares—almost a surreal art piece? There’s something almost compelling there.

Another week, another six movies:

• They don’t make a lot of movies like Hooper anymore, partly because they don’t make a lot of movies the way they make movies in Hooper anymore. There’s a laid-back, if not shaggy and drunk, charm to the whole thing, but also some real pathos in Reynolds’ performance, which was one of his best.
• You can see its twists coming a mile away, and there’s more than a little cheesiness to the whole thing, but despite that—or maybe because of it—Spellbinder is an enjoyable enough little supernatural thriller.
• I had been led to believe that Punisher: War Zone was the good Punisher movie, but honestly, I’m just not seeing it. There’s a lot of over-the-top, comic-book-style violence, but it doesn’t lend itself to much of anything and isn’t entertaining in its own right.

• An early, Dutch-language war film from Paul Verhoeven, Soldier of Orange is often tense and thrilling.
• I might have enjoyed Days of Thunder more if it had anything like characters, a story, or even particularly interesting (and not just fetishistically photographed), racing. It’s such a vague gesture at a movie, not even silly fun.
• Belfast doesn’t dig especially deep into its narrative or characters, but it’s affectionate and well acted.

I also really enjoyed a rewatch of The Royal Tenenbaums.