About Fred

• The Fall Guy is a fun, laid-back, largely forgettable love letter to practical stunt work.
• Walker is confused as satire, and the deliberate anachronisms, which ramp up to a feverish pitch as the movie progresses, aren’t especially effective at conveying anything. And yet there’s something in the unhinged intensity of Ed Harris’ performance that holds the interest.
• Janet Planet is maybe too slow and quiet for its own good, and arguably nothing much happens in it—and, when it does, that leaves more questions than it answers and somewhat breaks the film’s realism. But still, the mother-daughter dynamic between Julianne Nicholson and newcomer Zoe Ziegler has plenty of charm.

• I can only imagine how shattering and raw Cassavetes’ New Life runs out of momentum and ideas at the end, but it’s a surprisingly effective little thriller, considering it’s obvious shoestring budget. A simple, scary premise and good performances go a long way.
• The Boy and the Heron was a lot stranger than I expected, and while it’s rightly been seen as the culmination of Miyazaki’s career (if not his swan song), I’m not sure I enjoyed it quite as much as some of those earlier films. It was maybe just too big and personal for me to really get a handle on it, or to keep up with the many odd turns the film took. At the same time, though, it’s gorgeous and captivating, and there are some truly spectacular moments of animation in it.

I also thoroughly enjoyed a rewatch of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

• There’s a lot that works about Lisa Frankenstein, from the vibrant ’80s visual design to the equally colorful performances, but the stuff that doesn’t work? Oof. The movie can’t ever figure out its tone, and it really falters because of that.
• Immaculate feels very old-fashioned, almost threadbare, like a throwback to the kind of late-’70s religious conspiracy thrillers made in the wake of The Exorcist and The Omen. It’s helped enormously, though, by some good direction and a strong performance by Sydney Sweeney.
• The Unknown

• Reckless has its charms, but it’s also kind of a mess. Jean Harlow, who was reportedly reluctant to join the picture at the last minute, gives what I think is an uneven performance, and the whole thing feels like it’s stuck somewhere between stage musical comedy and drama.
• The Mephisto Waltz is mostly just disappointing, not without a handful of interesting moments, but ultimately confused and maybe best described (as TV Guide once did) as “a made-for-TV-ish Rosemary’s Baby rip-off.”
• The Deep House is an interesting idea for a movie…and that, sadly, is about all that it is. The two leads, particularly Camille Rowe, try their best to inject some actual personality into their characters early on, but once the movie actually descends to the bottom it’s clear it has nowhere left to go. It’s not terrible, just very slow, not especially frightening, and disappointing in its ending.

• The Palm Beach Story is maybe a little less screwball than I like my screwball comedies, but there are a lot of really funny moments throughout.
• There are a lot of good performances in Lonelyhearts, but I think I was most taken with Robert Ryan’s nasty cynicism.
• The Instigators is a surprising amount of fun, with a pretty tight (if not overly clever) script.

Three Days of the Condor and The House That Dripped Blood, both of which really held up. Condor has some really good performances, along with that cynicism of ’70s political thrillers, while House is just silly horror fun.

I watched just five movies last week:

• For 1931, the realistic effects and sets in Kameradschaft are phenomenal, but the movie is also (as the Criterion Collection puts it “an arresting disaster film and a stirring plea for international cooperation.”
• While Challengers can be a bit much at times, it’s thoroughly entertaining, and Zendaya is never less than captivating on screen.
• The characters in Jack Goes Boating go a little off-the-rails near the end—more than you might expect, even given where they are emotionally—but for most of it’s run, it’s very nice, well-acted character study.

• Is the ending of I Saw the TV Glow disappointing? Maybe, from a certain point of view, but that sort of seems to be the movie’s point. It’s strange and heartbreaking and haunting, and it manages to capture the feeling of ’90s YA horror TV perfectly.
• You can definitely see why Gene Tierney was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for Leave Her to Heaven.

• Thirst feels like lesser Bergman, a little disjointed in its narrative, but there are compelling moments throughout.
• Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is a high-octane thrill-ride with a lot of great set-pieces and performances…and yet it’s not altogether difficult to see why the film so badly underperformed at the box office. If you’ve seen Fury Road, a lot of this prequel can feel redundant, fleshing out Furiosa’s backstory, but not in any meaningful, much less necessary, way. Fury Road felt like a huge cultural moment, maybe the best movie of its type ever made, and this one, while thoroughly entertaining, can’t help but feel like just another movie made in that style.
• Blood and Wine was almost certainly a re-watch, though I say that only because it felt so incredibly familiar, not because I actually remember watching it before. (But it feels like the kind of movie I would have gone to see in theaters in the late ’90s, or rented on Netflix.) That said, there’s a lot to like here, from the committed performances to the way the movie takes its plot (and increasing desperation of its characters) seriously.

• In a Violent Nature is such a weird inversion of the slasher movie—fascinating as an experiment and intriguing as a meditation on violence, but not particularly entertaining as a film. It’s more upsettingly gross than scary, especially as the violence ratchets up to brutally cartoonish levels; and while I respect what the film is trying to do with horror movie tropes, by its (long-approaching) end, it was just kind of tedious.
• Jeremiah Johnson probably wouldn’t work half as well without Robert Redford’s performance, but it’s a nice, understated, and old-fashioned Western.
• The Day of the Triffids is cheesy and dated, and often feels less interested in the triffid part of its apocalypse, but it’s also pretty good fun.
• Wicked Little Letters is a lot of fun, mostly because the cast is incredibly game, though it is pretty slight as a story.

I also re-watched Go, which is a very 1999 movie but otherwise holds up pretty well.

I watched five movies last week:

• I’m not altogether sure what to think about Civil War, but I absolutely agreement with Matt Zoller Seitz on the fact that it’s “a furiously convincing and disturbing thing when you’re watching it.”
• The Tall T is a lean, mean, often bare-bones Western with some strong performances.
• I went into Born to Win not sure what to think. George Segal was a great comedic actor, but many of his better-known ’70s comedies—Bye Bye Braverman, A Touch of Class, Fun With Dick and Jane—have left me pretty cold. But I really liked this one, which is by turns clever and cynical, stumbling along the highs and lows of Segal’s character, with some terrific scenes along the way.
• Ellen Burstyn is terrific in Resurrection, which treats its subject in such a quiet and understated way.
• There’s definitely some pointed social commentary going on in Monkey Man—the widening gulf between the rich and the poor, if nothing else—though by the end, it might be swallowed under a little by bloody, John Wick-esque style. That style is often a lot of fun to watch, though, and Dev Patel brings a lot to the screen as both director and star.

I also re-watched The Legend of Hell House, which I have to admit doesn’t have the greatest of scripts, but has so much atmosphere and great performances that you can easily overlook the shallowness of its actual story.