I watched 6 movies last week:

• Where Is the Friend’s House is so effective because it is seen so thoroughly through a child’s eyes. We know what Ahmed knows, even when the adults around him don’t, and we understand his inability to articulate that, even as he feels compelled to the right thing for his friend.
• All the reviews I read of The Unknown Girl compare it unfavorably to the Dardenne brothers’ earlier films, none of which I’ve yet seen, but praise Adèle Haenel’s performance, which I agree is what makes the movie work.
• There’s a sense of inevitability that hangs over The Beasts, but it’s so well observed, asking you to empathize with all its characters, even those who do and say terrible things.

• The Heroic Trio is ridiculous, but it’s frequently ridiculous fun.
• Saint Omer is slow and emotionally draining, but it asks difficult and important questions.
• Roger Ebert called The Marriage of Maria Braun the story of “an indelible monster who is perversely fascinating because she knows exactly what she is doing and explains it to her victims while it is being done.” And yet, I think it’s more than that, because Hanna Schygulla’s performance is so good and self-assured that we never quite feel like Maria is a monster, even as she undoubtedly treats others around her monstrously.

I also re-watched Interstellar, which I think I liked more the second time around, a decade later, and Dagon, which remains a really good Stuart Gordon Lovecraft adaptation, all the more so for its micro-budget.

• Well that escalated quickly. Or should I say Quigley, as in down under? (Look, that’s a terrible not-even-a-joke, but nobody else is reading these, and it’s been rattling around in my brain all week.) Anyway, things go from bad to worse very quickly at a remote Australian pub in The Royal Hotel, and it’s a credit to the filmmaking that tension is almost enough to keep you invested, despite fizzling out a little at the end.
• Deal of the Century is terrible, and it would be easy to blame all of that on Chevy Chase, depending on how grating you find his particular brand of smarm. But I think he’s actually sometimes quite good here, intentionally undercutting that smarm with some pathos and dramatic weight. The problem is, the movie is played as a comedy, and not a single moment of it is ever even a little funny.
• Suitable Flesh is fun, if never as much fun as you hope it will be, or as much fun as the ’80s Stuart Gordon Lovecraft adaptations it’s clearly emulating.

• Like a lot of found-footage horror movies, The Tunnel seems to understand the strengths of the format but not its weaknesses. The movie is often genuinely scary, and its structure suggests it’s going to do something clever and unexpected…but then it just doesn’t.
• River of Grass is a lot more interesting as a first step in the evolution of Kelly Reichardt’s career as a filmmaker than as a film on its own. It’s much more disjointed and uneven than any of her later films—occasionally interesting, but the only one of her films I wouldn’t recommend just on its own merits.
• Hundreds of Beavers is clever and silly and often very funny, but its brand of absurdity is a hard thing to sustain for almost two hours.

• While perhaps not the world’s greatest mystery, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a lot of fun.
• Sully works very hard to manufacture tension, and yet it makes the strange decision to depict the crash entirely in flashback sequences, after we’ve been reminded several times that everyone on board the flight survived. It’s no wonder the movie reportedly invented from whole cloth a much more antagonistic NTSB investigation into that crash—without it, there’s little to any dramatic weight in the entire film. Hanks is…I suppose good in the titular role, but it’s hard to bring much to such a reserved and self-effacing character. Despite a couple of gratuitous flashbacks to his youth and several conversations (over cellphones, never on screen) with his wife, by the end, I never felt like I got to know anything about Sullenberger except that he successfully landed that plane.
• The are some good things in The Children’s Hour, including some nice subtle moments in Shirley MacLaine’s performance. But the way the movie often plays coy with its subject matter doesn’t necessarily work in its favor.

I also re-watched After Life, which I haven’t seen in some twenty-five years, but which is still a lovely and bittersweet film. Two decades ago, I was maybe surer of the memory I would pick to take with me, were I to die and face this particular afterlife. Now I’m not so sure, but I also think that might be sort of the point. As Roger Ebert wrote in his original review, “Which memory would I choose? I sit looking out the window, as images play through my mind. There are so many moments to choose from. Just thinking about them makes me feel fortunate.”

• Clouds of Sils Maria makes some unexpected choices, particularly near the end, and it seems very deliberately to leave things (almost disappointingly) unresolved. And yet it’s also very engrossing, and the three leads—particularly Stewart and Binoche—really shine.
• Things escalate very quickly to the diabolic in Alucarda, which I’m not sure is entirely successful—and definitely shows its budget as a ’70s Mexican horror movie—but it has such an interesting, frequently unsettling look.
• Not to put too fine a point on it, but The Man from London is awful, near-unwatchable—and not just because it’s excruciatingly long or strangely dubbed, but because it hardly even qualifies as a film. It’s more a collection of still images occasionally interspersed with a slow sludge of movement or unengaging dialogue. That they’re sometimes well-composed images is hardly the point; a short film like La Jetée, for instance, still manages to make photographs feel cinematic, whereas The Man from London feels like an endurance test, or an art installation critics might nod appreciatively at but no one actually wants to sit through.

• None of the actors in The Seventh Cross are actually German, which is occasionally odd, as is the way the story is narrated. Yet there’s a lot about the movie that is pretty terrific, including an Oscar-nominated performance by Hume Cronyn.
• The Place Promised in Our Early Days has some lovely animated visuals, but the complicated timelines and alternate histories make it a little hard to follow.
• Charlotte Rampling is just so good, in such subtle ways, in 45 Years.

I also re-watched a couple of movies:

• I didn’t like Hackers in 1995, and if I’ve grown to appreciate it more by even the smallest measure since then, that’s only because it seems even more ridiculous, and you almost have to laugh at that.
• I also didn’t love my re-visit of Penn & Teller Get Killed, which has a few good moments, mostly at the beginning at end, but doesn’t hold together as a narrative or as a showcase for the duo. (Oddly enough, Penn Jillette gives a much more interesting performance in Hackers.)

• Robot Carnival has some visually impressive moments, and yet, a week later, I’d be hard-pressed to recall any of the individual animated segments.
• The File on Thelma Jordon is just a nice little noir.
• Perfect Days is a meditation on modest pleasures, finding simple joys in things like quietude and routine, the beauty in sunlight and shadow, a passage in a book or a favorite song played on a car radio’s tape deck. The movie doesn’t tell you much about its central character, or why he’s chosen this life of modesty and solitude; there are hints you can piece together, but the full story remains elusive, if not outright evasive, and not much actually happens. And yet it’s an often beautiful meditation, with a lovely performance by Koji Yakusho.

• You’ll Never Find Me works best early on, drawing real tension and fear from a very simple two-hander. I wouldn’t say the movie falls apart when it starts to reveal what’s actually going on, but the tension definitely eases up, and the movie becomes less compelling.
• If you were to imagine a 1972 movie about “a secret cult of lust-craved witches” set in the Philippines and starring a young Tom Selleck, Daughters of Satan is almost certainly the B-movie you would imagine. But for however cheaply and exploitatively it’s made, the movie was a little more interesting than I expected it to be.
• Run Silent, Run Deep is a terrifically tense little war movie, with really good peformances, particularly from Burt Lancaster and Clark Gable.

I also rewatched Repo Man, which I think I found more enjoyable in my early twenties, but which still has a whole lot of strange and oddball charms.

I watched just four movies last week:

• There might be a way to tell the story that Passengers tries to tell, but definitely not in the way that the movie tries to tell it.
• Jean Simmons and Dirk Bogarde are good together in So Long at the Fair, and it isn’t the movie’s fault if it now feels a little familiar.
• Dr. T. & the Women acts like a drama that thinks it’s a comedy. There are glimmers of things that work in the movie, like Gere’s central performance, but it always feels like the stakes are incredibly low, even when everything that’s happening on screen says they’re incredibly high.
• I’m not gonna lie, The Day of the Beast is a weird movie. Most of it’s a lot of wacky, almost Evil Dead-like fun.

I also kind of randomly re-watched The ‘Burbs, which I found about as occasionally amusing and under-developed as I did in 1989 when I was twelve.