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Here are all my #nowplaying songs from this past week:

I only watched four movies last week.

• Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem is the kind of movie you put on in the background and forget that you’re watching. It’s probably the kind of movie they started making and forgot that they were filming.
• Sarah Snook is good in Run Rabbit Run, even if the movie is much better at making you feel unsettled from frame one than at really resolving or saying anything.
• There are moments in Extraction that play like a deliberately un-stylized version of John Wick, which makes you realize immediately why style is so much of why the John Wick movies work. There’s a fast-paced brutality to it that’s briefly effective, and Hemsworth isn’t bad, playing some of the same world-weary energy he brought to the much better Blackhat. But it’s just kind of tiresome by the end—and that’s even without the problematic white savior element baked into it.
• Asteroid City is strange and goofy and sometimes off-putting, in a way you pretty much have to expecte with a Wes Anderson movie. I’m not entirely convinced the odd framing device adds anything beyond a chance for even more actors to work with Anderson again, and it’s an overstuffed cast, but they all seem to be having fun.

I also re-watched Inside Man, which I think maybe works a little bit better when you don’t know yet how it ends, but which is still a really solidly directed movie with some very good performances.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from last week:

After the last couple of weeks, when I didn’t have a lot to do except watch movies, this past week, I only watched the normal half dozen:

• William Powell is charm personified, and he’s well-teamed with Kay Francis—with whom he co-starred an incredible total of twenty-one times—but One Way Passage is a little forgettable.
• Tales of Terror isn’t the best of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, but it’s got a fun performance by Peter Lorre and at least a couple by Vincent Price.
• While The Suspect maybe acts more as a character study than a tense thriller, Charles Laughton is very good in the title role.

• There are a lot of reasons to watch the terrific noir The Big Heat, but the best might be Gloria Grahame’s energetic performance.
• Hell Drivers would be interesting just for all the British actors early in their careers—William Hartnell, Patrick McGoohan, David McCallum, Sean Connery—but it’s also a terrifically exciting working-class British noir.
• The Petrified Forest held fewer surprises than I expected, but it has a really nice central performance by Leslie Howard and a nice villain turn by Humphrey Bogart, in the movie that arguably made him a star.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from this past week: