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I watched 6 movies last week:

• The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight isn’t funny at all, which is a problem for a comedy. It’s much more interesting as a minor footnote to what was happening in Mafia movies at the time—the almost involvement of Francis Ford Coppola, the fact that Al Pacino dropped out to star in The Godfather and was replaced by a not-yet-famous Robert De Niro—than because of anything on the screen.
• The Beast Within isn’t remotely subtle—werewolves as a metaphor for alcoholic abuse—but it’s effective. Or would be, if it were a short film. It’s a solid metaphor, with good performances, seen through the dreamy, only half-understanding lens of childhood. The problem is, the movie overstays its welcome by more than half until and hammers that metaphor beyond recognition.
• It’s difficult to make a really good found-footage horror movie, but it’s got to be equally difficult to make one as bad as Solvent. The movie is obviously trying to do big things, like speak to generational violence and the lasting scars of right-wing Nazism, but it doesn’t necessarily have interesting things to say about them. Overall, it’s more than a little pretentious and unpleasant.

• I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the ending of Backrooms, but the unnerving way it uses liminal space to create dread and terror up until then is genuinely masterful.
• The Vampire Lovers is less chaste and less coy about being about lesbian vampires than I might have expected, even for 1970, but it’s also a decent enough Hammer horror movie.
• Claudine is a little dated—less in the things it’s about and more in the 1970s way it’s about them—but Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones are really great together.

I also rewatched F/X, which was a lot of fun, and Witchfinder General, which…well, it has other strengths besides fun. It’s a little too dour and sadistic to really be enjoyable, but Vincent Price and the rest of the cast—most of whom arguably are in the movie longer than Price—are quite good, so it kind of washes out.

I watched 9 movies last week:

• The 2003 version of Our Town starring Paul Newman mostly didn’t work for me, for reasons that were difficult to put my finger on. I’m a big fan of Newman, and of the 1977 adaptation of Wilder’s play, but this production always felt poorly staged, somehow less minimalist by drawing so much attention to the artifice and lack of finished sets. And while the acting is largely good, I felt no real warmth or connection for the characters, particularly George and Emily, which seems like a fundamental problem with the production.
• The Last House starts promisingly enough, with a simple but mysterious hook and strong leads in Greta Lee and Wagner Moura. And it does some clever things with its confined location—or at least most of the same things you would expect clever movies do when confined to a single location like this. But it’s really let down by unconvincingly tidy ending, and a plot that invites you to spend too much time looking through the holes in it.
• Sicario: Day of the Soldado doesn’t have anything like the weight or tension of the first movie, though it has a little of both, leant to it largely through the performances of Brolin and del Toro.

• Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother often feels more like an exercise than a narrative in and of itself, thanks in part to the anthology nature of the piece. It’s well made and acted, with some exceptionally well observed (and often bittersweet) details, but it really wasn’t until the final third of the triptych that I felt the movie come alive, with characters that felt fully real.
• The Crime of Monsieur Lange is a gem of a movie, albeit a small and modest one, and a pleasant glimpse into 1930s Paris.
• I’m not sure The Drama is always successful in what it’s trying to do, or if what it’s trying to do is always worth doing, but it does some interesting things along the way, and has good performances at its center.

• Dead Ringer is Bette Davis’ show all the way, so it’s good that she’s very good in it. The movie itself is a little hokey and uninspired, not doing a whole lot with its premise, throwing a lot of camera tricks on screen to try and sell it. It’s fun, but nothing special.
• All I can tell you about Lawyer Man is, William Powell is a lawyer, and he’s a man. In all seriousness, it’s a little morality play—more than a little convoluted, especially for such a short film—with a dependably charming Powell as the lead.
• I think I prefer the quiet and stylish retelling of the same story in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath, but The Vourdalak certainly goes further with the gore and creepiness of it, particularly with that puppet.

I watched 6 movies last week:

• The Buddy Holly Story is a very by-the-numbers musical biopic, almost a little boring—which is maybe inevitable given the unfortunate shortness of the man’s life, the full potential of his musical career never reached—but Gary Busey is terrific enough in the title role to forgive all of that.
• I’m not sure They Will Kill You successfully pulls off everything it’s trying to do, and sometimes just throws stylized shots on the screen for their own sake, but it’s energetic, often clever, and a lot of fun./li>
• I was maybe impressed with, more than engaged by, Forty Guns, but it’s hard to deny the strength of the performances and simple effectiveness of Samuel Fuller’s direction.

• Over Your Dead Body is sometimes very funny, but it never quite figures out its tone, or a reason to care about the two leads coming together.
• MGM made nine Dr. Kildare movies in five years, so despite their charms, it’s no wonder they feel by turn a little thin, a little padded, and a little repetitive. Dr. Kildare’s Strange Case is no exception, except here the medicine feels especially hokey and dated.
• Hagazussa is deeply weird and unsettling, slow to the point of ponderous, more mood than plot, never what you would call fun, and often genuinely disturbing, and yet it really got under its skin, and that mood worked on me.

• I think I can see the “sparks of talent and wit” that Roger Ebert recognized in Class of 1984, but there’s a lot more of the “raw, offensive, vulgar, and violent” that he also acknowledged in the film. I often couldn’t shake the feeling that might would better if it was worse, if it just embraced the camp that it keeps leaning towards, and yet its increasingly darker moments are the movie’s more effective ones. This isn’t a great movie, or even necessarily a good one, but it is a lot.
• Christmas in July feels effortless, which is good, because I’m not sure how much effort the movie could have sustained. It’s an endearing, well-directed and acted, if somewhat slight, comedy.
• Circus of Horrors could do with a lot less circus and a few more horrors, is all I’m saying.
• Cavalcade is a lovely (though very melancholic) Noel Coward trip through several decades of the early 20th century.

I also re-watched The Blood on Satan’s Claw. The movie’s pacing is more than a little chaotic, and it can’t help but feel a little pieced together from a movie that originally started as separate tales in an anthology film. But it’s a very creepy, well produced, and at times deeply upsetting, piece of folk horror.

I watched just 5 movies last week:

• The sudden and unexpected loss of his girlfriend Lynn Shelton understandably hangs heavy over the Marc Maron documentary Are We Good?, but I’m not sure that it brings any new insight to that loss that Maron hasn’t already discussed at length in his own comedy specials and interviews surrounding them, and it often crowds out other biographical details and moments for revelation. It’s difficult to tell if it’s the filmmakers or Maron keeping the other at a distance, but that distance is frequently felt, and while there are funny and touching moments throughout the documentary, it’s unlikely to tell you anything even the most casual fan of Maron doesn’t already know, and hasn’t seen him discuss better elsewhere.
• I had some fun watching Mausoleum—but not, I must stress, because it’s anything like a good movie. The entertainment comes purely from the ridiculous and unintentional comedy. As a horror movie, it makes some very bizarre choices, some no doubt due to limited budget, but nearly all extremely bad.
• Often more restrained than lurid, at least until the end, when everything goes fully off the rails, The House with Laughing Windows makes for an odd but often haunted giallo at times.
• I think I appreciated what Masters of the Universe was trying to do more than what it did. The movie looks great, and a lot of the humor lands—but not all of it, and enough doesn’t to leave the whole thing feeling a little flat.
• Disclosure Day does a lot of very interesting things, and it does them both very well and at breakneck speed, and yet it never fully came alive for me.