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I watched 10 movies last week.

• As TCM’s introduction to the film suggests, Winchester ’73 “stands out because it was the first to summarize the best of the Western motifs that preceded it…while modernizing the genre by featuring more complicated, tormented heroes.” Stewart, in particular, is quite good in it.
• Breakfast on Pluto occasionally feels a little too episodic, almost disjointed, but Cillian Murphy turns in a warm and tender lead performance.
• I recently heard cinematographer Roger Deakins say that the one movie people should watch to really understand what cinematography is, is In Cold Blood. And the man was not wrong. It’s really quite an astoundingly shot film, but also often chilling in its depiction of these two killers.

• Roger Ebert wrote that Sid & Nancy “pull[s] off the neat trick of creating a movie full of noise and fury, and telling a meticulous story right in the middle of it.” We never grow to like these two self-destructive characters, but we do grow to understand and deeply empathize with them.
• There are some incredible shots in The Earrings of Madame De…, many of which could not have been easy to pull off, and yet the film never feels calculated or impersonal, those shots always revealing character rather than seeming like cheap dolly-shot tricks. The movie is genuine delight.
• A Wounded Fawn takes its grisly horror to such a comically surreal place. Katie Rife called the film a “blend of absurdity, audacity, and righteous anger,” whose “combined effect is one of feverish hallucination.” I’m not sure if it adds up to much of anything beyond the obviousness of its metaphors, but it’s told with such style that it’s hard not to be compelled.

• The Baron of Arizona features what was reportedly one of star Vincent Price’s favorite performances, and it’s not hard to see why. He’s delightfully duplicitous in this perhaps slight but always interesting Western.
• Even without its title, there’s never any real surprise where Invitation to Hell is headed, though it does take some weird detours along the way. (The plot hinges on an intelligent spacesuit planned for a mission to Venus, for instance.) Maybe the most interesting things about this television movie is that it’s one of three films Wes Craven directed in 1984—including the original Nightmare on Elm Street—and that it has such an odd, very ’80s cast. It’s not really what I would call good, much less scary, but it’s diverting enough.
• Two of the best things that Till does is focus on Danielle Deadwyler’s performance—she’s outstanding, in a very good cast—and not pretend like Emmett Till ever actually received justice. (It took 67 years for Congress to even pass the Emmett Till Antilynching Act.) The movie is often tough to watch because of those things, because of the obvious pain that Deadwyler’s Mamie Till-Mobley is feeling, and because we know how this tragic and unjust story is going to play out. But it’s a story that sadly still needs telling.

• British noir doesn’t come a lot more British or noir than It Always Rains on Sunday, which does a great job of combining both a tense manhunt with slice-of-life, almost kitchen-sink post-war drama.

I also re-watched Jaws 2 for the first time in several decades. It holds up well enough, but mostly only because it’s the only halfway decent Jaws sequel.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from last week:

I watched 6 movies last week.

• Your Name gets a little weird—it’s not difficult to imagine a Western version that simplifies the timeline a little and tries to provide an explanation for what’s happening—but it’s also often stunningly animated and a lovely story about connection.
• Cleopatra Jones is a little rough around the edges, and the movie can’t help but betray its ’70s sensibilities and budget. (It’s not great, for instance, that Shelley Winters’ character is often villainized specifically because she’s a lesbian.) But it’s also often a lot of fun, with engaging performances throughout.
• Basic Instinct, which I’d somehow managed to avoid watching until now, feels more than a little like sleazier Brian de Palma. (Which is saying something, considering that the last de Palma movie I watched was Body Double.) I don’t mean that as a dig at Paul Verhoeven, whose direction I think works here, even if he doesn’t really match de Palma for over-the-top set-pieces. But the film is tanked by its terrible script and its wrongheaded belief that its (as Roger Ebert put it in his review) “trimmed-down would-be hard-core” is actually sexy or erotic.

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• Footprints on the Moon is peculiar and hypnotic but also always intriguing.
• Bette Midler is often very good in The Rose, as are several of the extended musical numbers, even if the film itself maybe doesn’t have a whole lot to say.
• There are problems with the second two John Wick movies—not least the way they take a very simple, stylized actioner and layer it with increasing mythology—but John Wick: Chapter 4 might be the first time I was actually bored by the series. That boredom didn’t last through the movie’s nearly three-hour running time, and it really rallies with some fantastic set-pieces near the end that probably played even better on a big screen. But it was easily my least favorite of the four films, and I’m actually kind of disappointed that a fifth is in development.

I also re-watched both Born on the Fourth of July and Jaws over the long holiday weekend. I think they both easily hold up, but the former more for the intensity of Tom Cruise’s performance than anything else.

Here’s all my #nowplaying songs from last week:

I watched just three movies last week.

• I didn’t much enjoy Bones and All, to be honest, despite its being well shot with some good performances—particularly from a creepily odd Mark Rylance. The film is just too slow and meandering; I wasn’t very compelled by the tragic romance at its heart, nor did I think it was especially profound just because it told its story through the metaphor of grisly cannibalism.
• I liked Evil Dead Rise a lot better than the 2013 remake, but I didn’t like that one very much at all. This new film has several clever visual tricks up its sleeve, even if a few of them do occasionally seem a little borrowed. (Seriously, there’s no way to fill an elevator with a river of blood and not feel like a poor man’s rip-off of The Shining.) The film is definitely bloody and gnarly, but I’m not sure it does anything half as interesting with that added gore as Sam Raimi did in the first two films, and I think the opening sequence thoroughly undercuts the shock of the ending. Still, it has its scary moments.
• I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Renfield, and by how many of the movie’s jokes really landed for me. A lot of that is down to a talented cast—although Shohreh Aghdashloo feels just a little wasted—but it’s also a pretty clever script. It’s hardly a brilliant movie, but it is very silly and a lot of fun.