About Fred

Here’s a playlist of all the #nowplaying songs I listened to this past week:

I only watched 3 movies last week, but only one of them was any good.

• Marlowe has some of the quips, but none of the style or the tone of the hardboiled mystery it’s pretending to be. James Garner is not entirely uncharming, and there’s an interesting (if poorly used) supporting cast. But the big problem, as Roger Ebert wrote in his original review, is that “We don’t care what happens next because we don’t understand what happened before.”
• Black Adam has obviously seen superhero movies, but I’m not sure it has even the first clue about how to be one. Aldis Hodge and Pierce Brosnan are fun enough together—and probably would be more so if they were given anything approaching real characters to play—but the whole thing is tedious more than anything else. “It’s tempting to describe the movie as tonally inconsistent,” said Darren Mooney in his review, “but that would imply that it has a tone at all.”
• Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a stunningly beautiful delight. While it never shies away from the dark sadness at the heart of the tale, it’s often also exciting and funny and lovely to watch.

Here’s my #nowplaying list from this past week:

I watched just four movies last week.

• You might not expect a globetrotting thriller about espionage, conspiracies, and secret Nazi fortunes to be incredibly dull, almost stultifying. But if that’s true, you clearly haven’t seen The Holcroft Covenant.
• Bullet Train isn’t nearly as clever as it thinks it is. But it isn’t not clever. A movie doesn’t always have to be wildly original to be fun, and while I can understand why people might find this derivative, even insufferable, I had a lot of fun with it.
• Amsterdam is too meandering for its own good, but it’s well-acted and frequently entertaining along the way.
• It takes too many liberties with Billie Holiday’s life story to be anything but a failure as a biography, but Lady Sings the Blues has some fantastic performances, particularly by Diana Ross and Billy Dee Williams. Pauline Kael wasn’t wrong when she wrote, “Factually it’s a fraud, but emotionally it delivers.”

Here’s my #nowplaying list from this past week: