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I watched just four movies last week.

• I’m often on board for the darkly comic, surreal absurdity of Yorgos Lanthimos, but it seems a lot less purposeful in Dogtooth than in his more recent films. A.O. Scott wrote that the movie “at times seems as much an exercise in perversity as an examination of it,” and it’s sometimes honestly difficult to see the point of that.
• Jeopardy is more than a little contrived, but the film has its moments, usually thanks to Barbara Stanwyck, and often feeling like they’re from a differently, slightly more noir-ish film.
• Proof does some interesting things, and there’s a trio of intriguing character studies at its core, but I’m not sure it’s entirely successful.
• Sr. is a son’s loving tribute to his dying father. It’s maybe too personal to be deeply revealing or entirely cohesive, but it’s lovely and charming and honest nonetheless.

I also re-watched Raising Arizona and Avengers: Endgame. While I enjoyed both of them again a lot, I’m not altogether sure either film worked quite as well for me the second time around.

The Coens’ film is still a delightfully silly, live-action cartoon, but it felt like such a kinetic game-changer back when I first encountered it in college that it was hard not to be just a little disappointed with this re-watch.

Endgame, meanwhile, really benefits from having all of the preceding MCU films, particularly Infinity War, still fresh in your head, and this is the first time I’ve revisited a single one of them. Still, I retain enough connection to the characters that, even if the whole thing is kind of a whirlwind mess, it’s a deeply satisfying one.

Here are all the songs I posted as #nowplaying last week:

I watched only three movies last week.

• I’m not really a fan of Lucio Fulci, to be honest, and that didn’t change with Don’t Torture a Duckling. I don’t think the only interesting thing about the movie is its title, but nothing else about it is as interesting.
• As screwball comedies go, The Mad Miss Manton could stand to be a little screwier. The jokes don’t all land, and the murder mystery feels more than a little confused. It has its moments but feels more like a dry run for the much better chemistry between Stanwyck and Fonda in The Lady Eve.
• There are pretty good performances in The Stranger, but it’s very unsatisfying, both as cat-and-mouse police procedural and as “undercover cop in too deep.” It does both of those things just well enough to be compelling for most of its run—even if it is so whispery and mumbly, on top of the Australian accents, that I had to turn on subtitles by the end—but it doesn’t quite work as either.

I also re-watched Charade, which is still as delightful as ever. They don’t call it the best Hitchcock film that Hitchcock never made for nothing.

Here are all the #nowplaying songs I posted last week:

I watched just five movies last week:

• Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is just a whole lot of fun. I don’t think it’s as good or as clever as Galaxy Quest, but there’s definitely the same kind of vibe to it. I enjoyed hanging out with these characters, and I laughed a lot along the way.
• Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it makes even less sense as an Ant-Man movie. (The “and the Wasp” part feels superfluous here, given how very little Evangeline Lilly is given to do.) The movie tosses out almost everything that made the previous two films work in favor of re-re-establishing the MCU’s new big bad, but without actually making him the least bit interesting. (Say what you will about Jonathan Majors, and wonder what his ongoing legal issues will do Marvel’s future plans, but the version of Kang he played in Loki was at least fun to watch.) So instead of a movie that’s fun, or even looks good, we get an ugly swirl of CGI that’s desperately trying to set up the next ten movies that are coming.
• Zachary Levi is sometimes fun in Shazam! Fury of the Gods, but the movie often feels confused about things as simple as who its main character is. Maybe that’s not entirely the movie’s fault—given all the behind-the-scenes collapse and rebuilding of the DCEU, the impact of Covid on the shoot, and how its younger cast have largely aged out of their original parts—but the movie doesn’t offer much else to justify its existence. It rallies a little near the end, when it actually attempts to give a character some development, if not closure, but then it stumbles again, right into some pretty dumb cameos and mid-credits scenes.

• 65 does exactly what it says on the tin. Which is disappointing, because it doesn’t do any of those things especially well, and it’s not even that impressive a tin. Early on, it seems like the movie might become something unwieldy (but at least interesting) like Cast Away with dinosaurs. But the story’s premise is muddled, and its execution lacks even a moment of surprise. Adam Driver is reasonably compelling, but he doesn’t have a character to play, much less an arc, and it’s hard to care if he’s eaten by giant CGI lizards.
• Roger Ebert said The Stunt Man was “like magic tricks done by a magician in a movie: It doesn’t matter how well they’re done, or even if they’re really done, because cinematic special effects make it all trickery, anyway.” The movie has its moments—it’s hard not to be even a little charmed by Peter O’Toole’s performance—but it doesn’t really amount to very much in the end.

I also re-watched Fantasia, which was considerably more boring than I was expecting, or had remembered. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice section is inarguably amusing, but it’s also fairly short, and probably the only section that’s a straight-up adaptation of its source material. I think the best section, and maybe the only one that truly marries the music with animation interpretation in a unique and striking way, is the concluding Night on Bald Mountain section.