- Double Harness, which features a charming but strangely subdued William Powell, often feels rather old-fashioned—although, as a pre-Code movie, sometimes not in the ways you might expect.
- Criterion calls Vagabond “a splintered portrait of an enigmatic woman,” and I think that’s accurate. We know from the first scene where her story is headed, but because it’s pieced together from the other people she’s encountered, I’m not sure we ever really know her.
- Blue Collar is sometimes a little shaggier than I was expecting, and Paul Schrader may not be the best fit for goofy comedy, but the parts of it that work—the honest look at the guys on the line, just trying to get by, and the union that’s supposed to have their back—really work well.
- There are good actors in A Reflection of Fear, and they almost give some good performances, but the movie itself is just so slow and ponderous, building, very poorly, to a very bad twist ending.
- It! is better than its title. Not remarkably better, and it feels both cluttered and uneven, but Roddy McDowall is fun to watch.
- I’m not going to lie, the bear was maybe my least favorite part of Cocaine Bear. I liked it better as a comedy than a horror movie, and it’s hard to find the CGI bear very funny. (Leaving aside that the “true story” on which this is based was basically just “a bear accidentally ate a bunch of cocaine and it probably died painfully.”) But, yeah, when the movie is a comedy among the human characters, of which there are too many, it’s often very darkly funny.
- “I guess we go to ‘New York, New York‘ to enjoy the good parts,” wrote Roger Ebert in his original review, “and spend just a moment regretting the absence of a whole.” I think I can see what Scorsese was trying to do here, and maybe that would have come together if the movie was twice as long, but I mostly didn’t enjoy this.
- Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie is remarkably engaging and honest, not least because of the man at the center of it. He knows he’s fighting a losing battle but hasn’t lost his sense of humor and determination to fight.
I also re-watched Disney’s The Sword in the Stone, which is perfectly fine, largely forgettable, although I still really enjoy the wizard’s duel scene quite a lot.
