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I’ve been traveling recently, so it’s been three weeks since I last wrote about any movies, and since then I’ve watched 16 movies:

• I liked James Gunn’s Superman but fell well short of loving it. The fundamental problem is, the movie simply does too many things. It helps that a lot of those things are a lot of fun, stacked with good performances and colorful design, but it’s still too much. I appreciate that it’s not telling yet another origin story, but the story it is telling doesn’t always get room to breathe, or its characters room to grow. I’m still interested in what Gunn does with this sandbox he’s been given, but I hope next time he brings a little more focus to it.
• 28 Years Later is surprisingly beautiful and elegiac for a movie so filled with ravenous rage-zombies. The framing device, leading directly to next year’s The Bone Temple sequel—and presumably whatever the third film in the planned trilogy becomes—does feel a little tacked on, even if that second film promises to be equally audacious, and I might have preferred for this to feel more standalone.
• Film critic Christy Lemire described Ghost Trail as “an intimate study of trauma that plays with the gripping suspense of a globetrotting spy thriller.” So much of the movie rests on the quiet performance by Adam Bessa, but it’s a deeply affecting film seen through his character’s eyes.
• Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man could more maybe more accurately be called Larry Talbot Just Wants to Die. Lon Cheney, Jr.’s Talbot is the center of the movie, and pretty good, just as he was in the original Wolf Man. The same can’t really be said for Bela Lugosi, as Frankenstein’s monster, whose lines were reportedly all cut because of his thick accent, and doesn’t feature in the film as much as the title might suggest.

• Give M3GAN 2.0 credit: it goes off in a lot of unexpectedly strange directions. Make no mistake, they’re very dumb directions, but given how much I disliked the first movie, this one proved to be a surprisingly amount of silly fun.
• The Alto Knights makes so many baffling decisions that its initial one, to cast Robert De Niro as the two (unrelated) lead roles, barely qualifies. It’s maybe one of the few interesting things about the movie, watching De Niro build two distinct performances, but it never rises above a gimmick, and those performances never create distinct characters. (De Niro’s Vito Genovese, for example, mostly just feels like the actor imitating his friend and frequent costar Joe Pesci.) The movie is soporific, seems at times almost intentionally tedious, and just because it’s based on true events and real-life gangsters doesn’t make any of what’s on screen interesting or well executed.
• The Legend of Ochi never exactly settles on a tone, and casting recognizable faces like Dafoe and Watson—though they’re both quite good—is maybe too much of a distraction. Still, there’s a lot that’s lovely about the film’s very straightforward, familiar story, and its effects work is genuinely impressive, especially if the reports that none of it was CGI are true.
• The Naked Gun is silly and stupid in all the ways you want a Naked Gun movie to be.

• Weapons is scary and strange, maybe for the way it tells its story more than the story itself, how it keeps the audience on edge and guessing until everything ramps up to a fever pitch.

There’s a lot that’s darkly funny in Honey Don’t!, with some good performances all around, but it very much falls apart at the end and isn’t very satisfying overall.

• The Alphabet Murders bears very little resemblance to any Agatha Christie I’ve ever read—and indeed only a passing resemblance to a movie at all. It’s such a weird experience, from the casting of Tony Randall as Hercule Poirot on down, played for what I would charitably call laughs.
• I didn’t especially enjoy Tobe Hooper’s Toolbox Murders, which felt more muddled than scary in the end.

• I don’t think Materialists is quite the equal to Celine Song’s debut film, Past Lives, but it’s so charming and self-assured, and the performances, particularly from Johnson and Evans, are so good, that it’s hard to complain.
• KPop Demon Hunters is bubbly and kinetic fun, but with real heart, and a lot of the songs—particularly “What It Sounds Like”—legitimately slap. I was kind of shocked by how much I enjoyed it.
• Werewolf of London does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s not amazing, but for a lesser 1930s Universal monster movie, it’s not bad.
• For such a short movie, The Mummy’s Ghost spends a lot of time meandering around a plot, but it’s an entertaining enough ramble.

I also rewatched The Thing from Another World, which as 1950s things from another world movies go, is still pretty good.

I watched just 5 movies last week:

• Fool for Love feels a little like Robert Altman doing David Lynch, which is no less weird than this being a Cannon Films production. Oddly dreamlike, even hallucinatory, I’m not entirely sure it works, or even how it’s supposed to, but there’s an undeniably interesting vibe to everything.
• The actors, particularly Redford and Winger, are a lot better than the plot in Legal Eagles, of which there is far too much, and little of which makes much sense.
• Murder My Sweet is a pretty decent film noir that takes some interesting turns.
• Timebomb is the low-rent ’90s direct-to-DVD version of The Bourne Identity. Sometimes that works, sometimes not so much.
• The Day of the Dolphin is such a strange movie—and not just because it’s a sci-fi thriller written by Buck Henry and directed by Mike Nichols, of all people. It’s at times deeply boring, and yet its goofy plot and strong performances also make it very compelling at times. I genuinely couldn’t tell if the whole thing was good or bad.

I also rewatched Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde, as part of #HorrorWatch on Bluesky. The movie remains a lot better and less problematic than you might expect a 1971 gender-swapping Hammer Films adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson story to go.

Last week, I watched 6 movies:

• Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, which I’m only ninety-something-percent sure I’ve never seen before, is maybe more interesting than revealing—I’m not sure I learned anything about the man, if I’m being honest—but it is undoubtedly interesting.
• As Roger Ebert wrote, If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium “isn’t a great movie by any means, but it manages to be awfully pleasant.” The movie is dated, and more a collection of character beats than actual characters or story, but the cast manages to make it a pleasant enough experience.
• I don’t know that Highest 2 Lowest is my favorite Spike Lee/Denzel Washington collaboration, but damn if the movie doesn’t make clear there’s still a whole lot of juice left in the partnership.

• Vanessa Kirby is very good in Night Always Comes. I just wish the rest of the movie around her was equal to the performance. That’s not any fault of the other actors, who are also good—and the movie does have some hard-hitting emotional beats as you feel the desperation waft off the characters. It just feels a little too cliche at times, which is a shame.
Wafare does exactly what it says on the tin, by throwing you into the chaos of war with these soldiers in a near real-time experience of war. But while that makes for interesting viewing, it’s unclear what if anything the movie has to say other than “war is a bloody and confusing hell.”
• Thank God It’s Friday is two parts Saturday Night Fever and one part American Graffiti, and also very much less than the sum of its parts. “When you describe it, it sounds like a lot more fun than it is when you see it,” wrote Roger Ebert. The movie was all too obviously designed as a vehicle for Donna Summer’s song “Last Dance,” and hey, they managed to get an Academy Award out of it. But it’s weird, because despite what all of the characters in the film seem to think, it’s not even Summer’s best performance of the song, and her character, such as it is, is even thinner than all of the others who drift in and out of the film.

I also rewatched The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, though not as a double-feature. I enjoyed them both.

I watched 7 movies last week:

• Contemporary reviews talk a lot about how Save the Tiger wouldn’t work without the Jack Lemmon performance. Which is a little weird considering that it has the Jack Lemmon performance. I agree you probably couldn’t drop just any actor into this material, but that isn’t a fault of the material, or just because Lemmon is genuinely so good. His performance is finely calibrated to this material, a character study set against the regret and malaise of 1970s America. It’s not necessarily a fun movie, and it is easy how it could be bad without an actor so good, but I think it does work.
• The Anderson Tapes is interesting, not least for its eclectic cast, though it’s mostly a testament to Sidney Lumet’s skill as a director that the movie is as engaging as it is.

Cold Turkey is never exactly funny, but its characters, while largely unlikable, are well observed.

• To the Devil a Daughter is shockingly bad, and if wasn’t Hammer Films very last movie before going under at the end of the 1970s, oh boy, was it a huge nail in that coffin. The movie approaches hauntingly atmospheric now and then—it’s definitely trying to do something, and it has a much better cast than it deserves—but it’s so very tedious and over-complicated. And then when I learned that Nastassja Kinski, who briefly (and needlessly) appears fully nude, was only fourteen at the time, I really hated this film.
• Z.P.G. is a 1970s sci-fi movie you’ve probably never heard of. I’d recommend keeping it that way. Everybody involved, from the actors to the audience, walks through it half-comatose.
• Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of the laziest, muddled, and unfunniest chores of a comedy I’ve ever sat through.
• 1959’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, on the other hand, is a delight. It’s arguably more Hammer Horror than Sherlock Holmes, but with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee on hand, the movie is a whole lot of fun.

I also rewatched A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I think I’d forgotten just how silly and Richard Lesteresque the movie is, but it’s good goofy fun.

I watched just 4 movies last week:

• Though not without ambition, Lucy in the Sky is a terrible movie. It’s distracted by camera trickery almost constantly, and it strands its actors in ponderous dialogue and a confused premise. You can see director Noah Hawley attempting some of things that have worked well for him in prestige television, none of which work here at all to serve either the story or the characters. And it’s all so very loosely based on the real life of former astronaut Lisa Nowak that you have to wonder why they even bothered.
• I’m not sure Thunderbolts* is my favorite Marvel movie, but it’s definitely in the top ten, maybe even the top five, and it’s easily better than most of the others I’ve seen recently. A lot of that is down to the acting—Florence Pugh in particular is very good—but also because the movie is actually about something—in this case, depression—and has a beginning, middle, and end, rather than simply trying to set up the next installment in the MCU.
• There is so much to like about The Life of Chuck and the movie’s strange and sometimes unsettling joys, but it also very much feels like what it is: a novella padded out to feature length. The movie just kind of ends. And while it doesn’t leave anything necessarily unexplained, it doesn’t do a particularly good job of tying its disparate threads together.
• If you’ve never seen Fire and Ice, imagine what a collaboration between Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta might look like. The movie they made is exactly the movie you are imagining right now. It’s often visually interesting, almost charming, in the way that a lot of Bakshi’s rotoscoped animated films almost can’t help but be, but what little story you’ll find is so repetitive and juvenile.

But I also re-watched 3 other movies:

• A Man for All Seasons—a movie which featured heavily in my Catholic high school curriculum, but which I don’t think I’ve rewatched since then. The acting and period spectacle all still very much hold up, though I may be slightly less sure of Thomas More’s principled stand as I was a teenager.
• The Big Lebowski—another movie I hadn’t seen in decades, but also one that has so permeated meme and bro culture since then, I worried I might not enjoy it as much. I needn’t have worried.
• Twilight—a movie. As Roger Ebert wrote, “The reason to see the film is to observe how relaxed and serene Paul Newman is before the camera….It’s sad to see all that assurance used in the service of a plot so worn and mechanical.