• Mad God is monstrous and astounding. Even if I’m not sure what if anything its nightmarish visions add up to in the end, there are moments of such strange inventiveness throughout.
• Twice in a Lifetime is a tender falling-out-of-love story. It offers no easy answers or resolution for its characters, but they’re acted with such grace and nuance that you care about them all by the end.
• The Interview isn’t a particularly satisfying puzzle, but it’s an often interesting one along the way.

• Dollman wasn’t ever going to have amazing special effects given its low budget, but it needed to have some. The movie does almost nothing to actually sell its own premise—there’s no forced perspective or giant sets, just a lot of “no, trust us, he really is small.” It doesn’t do anything interesting with that idea, and the story and characters aren’t very engaging on their own.
• Truly my only complaint about House Party, which really is a lot of fun, is that I don’t buy any of its characters as being young enough to still be in high school.
• Pickup on South Street is a terrific not-quite-noir, with lots of great performances.

• There’s a biting satire splashing around somewhere in Infinity Pool. The movie frames the nihilistic depravity of the ultra-rich, as well as questions of identity and xenophobia, against its unsettling and hallucinatory images—sometimes to great effect, and sometimes not. It’s an interesting, even haunting, mess, but it’s a mess all the same.

I also re-watched Critters, which I enjoyed. It’s more than a little goofy, but it’s also a better-than-decent ’80s creature feature. I think I’d forgotten how bloody it could get, or maybe only ever saw an edited-for-TV version.

Here are all the songs I posted as #nowplaying this past week.

• Rosaline doesn’t reinvent Shakespeare or anything, but it’s charming and good fun, and Kaitlyn Dever is very engaging in it.
• The Fallen Sparrow is a really effective noir, thanks in part to a really strong performance by star John Garfield.
• The Killers is the movie that made both Ava Gardner and Burth Lancaster movie stars, and it’s not hard to see why, with this tense and often terrific noir.

• Yes, Madam! is often very silly—even if it does take a pretty dark turn at the end—but it’s also a lot of fun, with great fights and stunts by Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock.
• Minor Premise doesn’t fully work, but that’s not for lack of trying. The film is proof you don’t need a big budget for big sci-fi ideas, but it’s much more interesting when it seems like it’s going to have deeper emotional revelations to unpack—when it seems like it’s going to have something to say about those ideas, which in the end it just kind of doesn’t.
• The Loved One is an odd…I guess satire? Of Hollywood, of the bereavement industry… It’s a bit zany and madcap, down to all the off-kilter cameos and odd casting choices, and not every scene of it works. But it’s interesting and entertaining enough.

• In many ways, Cobra feels like a pale ’80s imitation of the Dirty Harry movies—and I didn’t even like those.
• The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is silly and dumb, and I’m not sure it has anything to actually say about movie stardom, or that of Nicolas Cage in particular. The movie’s also genuinely entertaining, thanks to Cage and Pedro Pascal. I mean, it’s no Paddington 2, but then what is?

I also re-watched Platoon and The Lavender Hill Mob and enjoyed both quite a lot. I think Platoon maybe suffers a little from the voice-over narration, which can seem a little heavy-handed sometimes (or like it’s trying too hard to echo Apocalypse Now), and from the fact that so many Viet Nam war movies have imitated it in the years since.

Here are all the songs I posted as #nowplaying this past week.

• Women Talking is a powerful and moving film, but also incredibly cinematic and joyous, given its dark and difficult subject matter.
• EO doesn’t fully anthropomorphize the donkey for which it’s named, but it does ask you to empathize with it…which isn’t exactly hard, given how brutal and cruel most of the human characters he encounters are to him. And yet there are also moments of strange beauty throughout.
• Designing Woman is amiable enough, with some nice chemistry between its stars, but it’s also very dated and incredibly contrived.

• Skinamarink feels like being trapped in a nightmare. Not nightmarish exactly—although there are some (mostly implied) gruesome moments late in the film—but the terror and dread that can come only from being trapped by dream logic. I don’t think the movie needs to be as long as it is, but there are rewards for your (much-needed) patience, and it’s a fascinating work of experimental horror.
• Judy Holliday is just a delight, top to bottom, in Born Yesterday.
• Fade to Black is interesting but also very uneven, never really deciding what kind of movie it wants to be, or being any of its choices entirely convincingly.

• There are some striking images and good performances in Inside Daisy Clover—and maybe it felt more transgressive and shocking in 1965 to say that old Hollywood was a sham—but it feels a little too obvious and trite at times.

I also re-watched Barry Levinson’s Diner, which I really enjoyed. (It was interesting seeing a young Mickey Rourke in Fade to Black, made just the year before.) The movie is certainly sentimental and nostalgic, but it also does a good job of frequently undercutting that.