- It’s easy to see what Love Hurts is going for. The movie is a lot of things—way too many, as it happens—but none of those things is especially original. It’s easy to see what it’s going for, but it’s almost remarkable how immediately and completely almost none of the movie works. It’s overly complicated, yet only half-committed to any of its bits. None of it’s very fun—most of it is decidedly not so—and even if a scattered few of those bits show some fleeting promise—just enough to make it easy to see what they were going for—it’s hard to find any reason to care.
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- The Monkey is a lot, but it’s exactly that go-for-broke, over-the-top gruesomeness, coupled with the very real, very personal trauma that writer-director Oz Perkins seems to be working out in the film, that makes it work so spectacularly. For a movie this gory and silly, it’s surprisingly heartfelt and just a lot of fun.
- Mickey 17 is goofy and inventive and also a lot of fun, thanks largely to Robert Pattinson’s central performance(s).
- I went into Better Man with only the most casual familiarity with who Robbie Williams even was, and I adored the movie. I can’t imagine how much I would have loved it if I had started out as a fan. The movie hits all the standard beats of the music biopic, but it does so in such clever and unexpectedly engaging ways.
- The (mostly) first-person POV in Nickel Boys is arguably both the film’s greatest strength and weakness. It’s visually compelling and immersive, leading to some interesting thematic connections, but it’s also a little distancing from the characters.
- When the first Paddington sequel knocked Citizen Kane (only semi-ironically) off some best-of-all-time lists, maybe that was a cue for the filmmakers to quit while they were ahead. Paddington in Peru never hits Paddington 2‘s heights, or even those of the first film, but it’s silly and charming and sweet enough that it never feels wholly unnecessary.
I also rewatched Wild Things, which I think Roger Ebert described accurately (and admiringly) as “lurid trash.”
