Month: August 2025

I watched just 4 movies last week:

• Though not without ambition, Lucy in the Sky is a terrible movie. It’s distracted by camera trickery almost constantly, and it strands its actors in ponderous dialogue and a confused premise. You can see director Noah Hawley attempting some of things that have worked well for him in prestige television, none of which work here at all to serve either the story or the characters. And it’s all so very loosely based on the real life of former astronaut Lisa Nowak that you have to wonder why they even bothered.
• I’m not sure Thunderbolts* is my favorite Marvel movie, but it’s definitely in the top ten, maybe even the top five, and it’s easily better than most of the others I’ve seen recently. A lot of that is down to the acting—Florence Pugh in particular is very good—but also because the movie is actually about something—in this case, depression—and has a beginning, middle, and end, rather than simply trying to set up the next installment in the MCU.
• There is so much to like about The Life of Chuck and the movie’s strange and sometimes unsettling joys, but it also very much feels like what it is: a novella padded out to feature length. The movie just kind of ends. And while it doesn’t leave anything necessarily unexplained, it doesn’t do a particularly good job of tying its disparate threads together.
• If you’ve never seen Fire and Ice, imagine what a collaboration between Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta might look like. The movie they made is exactly the movie you are imagining right now. It’s often visually interesting, almost charming, in the way that a lot of Bakshi’s rotoscoped animated films almost can’t help but be, but what little story you’ll find is so repetitive and juvenile.

But I also re-watched 3 other movies:

• A Man for All Seasons—a movie which featured heavily in my Catholic high school curriculum, but which I don’t think I’ve rewatched since then. The acting and period spectacle all still very much hold up, though I may be slightly less sure of Thomas More’s principled stand as I was a teenager.
• The Big Lebowski—another movie I hadn’t seen in decades, but also one that has so permeated meme and bro culture since then, I worried I might not enjoy it as much. I needn’t have worried.
• Twilight—a movie. As Roger Ebert wrote, “The reason to see the film is to observe how relaxed and serene Paul Newman is before the camera….It’s sad to see all that assurance used in the service of a plot so worn and mechanical.

Last week, I watched 6 movies:

• Can’t Stop the Music isn’t a particularly good movie, even as a vehicle for the Village People, but it’s goofily endearing all the same. That’s mostly thanks to it being such a schlocky time capsule of 1980—which is why it’s not hard at all to see why it failed so badly in that moment—but I think you also can’t underestimate the charms of Valerie Perrine’s performance.
• Lacombe, Lucien is an interesting take on some of the same ideas I saw recently in This Land Is Mine. That movie takes place mid-World War II, and more about reclaiming the nobility of the human spirit than the ugly violence we often trade it for, but both are about collaboration, and why many would choose it willingly, or without thinking.
• The Twelve Chairs is very amusing. I don’t know that I’d put it in the top half of Mel Brooks’ filmography, but I’d probably at least put it in the top half of the bottom half.

• The Luckiest Man in America feels more fictionalized than it needs to be, which sometimes doesn’t work in its favor, but the cast, particularly Hauser, are the real draw.
• Ballerina doesn’t always work, but when it does, it works really well. It plays heavily on the worldbuilding mythology of the John Wick series, which has always been that series’ weakest part, but it also plays to the series’ strengths with some fun, kickass fight scenes.
• I had a lot of fun watching Troll with the #HorrorWatch crew live on Bluesky, but that isn’t because the movie is particularly good. It’s one of two movies I can remember really frightening me as a child, enough that I never watched more than a few scattered minutes of it. But seeing the movie now, decades later, all I could think was: This? This is what frightened me? The movie has such a weird tone, neither scary in the least but also not exactly kid-friendly, so that might account for it. And it has its goofy charms, I suppose.

In honor the recently departed Terrence Stamp, I also rewatched The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, probably for the first time in thirty years. It’s not a perfect movie, and not everything about it speaks to where we are today, but Stamp’s performance is one of the best things about it.

I watched another 6 movies last week. The week started reasonably well, but took something of a turn.

• Harvest is often surreal, even hallucinatory, unfolding slowly in this uncertain time and place of upheaval and change.
• I’m not as familiar with the tales of Odysseus as I’d maybe like, but The Return doesn’t insist upon that knowledge, is a simple enough tale of violence and regret, with a compelling performance by Ralph Fiennes.
• Love Me can feel a little like a short film stretched to feature length, and still doesn’t necessarily flesh out its ideas as much as it might, but they’re deep philosophical ideas about what it means to be human and real, and the movie plays with those ideas in interesting ways, with strong performances by the two actors.

• Death of a Unicorn could maybe use a sharper satirical bite, or could make its villains a little more unlikable, but it’s often funny and well cast.
• Margot Robbie is an undeniably electric performer, who is just completely wasted in the otherwise tedious Dreamland. As critic Peter Sobczynski writes, “there is a fine line between ‘homage’ and ‘uninspired imitation,’ and this film constantly finds itself tripping over it.” I felt like my time had just been wasted by the end of it.
• Wicked City is an interesting experience, full of a lot of strange, often hypersexualized body horror, but it isn’t a particularly enjoyable experience, often for the same reasons.

I also rewatched Local Hero, which I think is a movie a lot of people are a lot more fond of than I am. I do like it a lot, as it’s quite charmingly endearing, but I still don’t think it’s some great masterpiece.

• Sacco & Vanzetti, said Roger Ebert “is sometimes accurate, sometimes biased and sometimes even fictional in its telling of the story, but no matter.”
• Were it not so grounded in its characters and their emotions, Revanche could easily feel like a string of convoluted coincidences. But what might begin to strain credulity instead begins to feel inevitable and tragic.
• Show Boat is pleasant, with some good performances in this 1951 Technicolor production, but I’m not sure there’s a single song I remember other than “Ol’ Man River.”

• Gothic is mildly tame by Ken Russell standards, but only by those standards. Harlan Ellison reportedly (and I think rightly) called it “loopy and fatally flawed and an aberration”—and that was in praise of the movie!
• Heaven knows there have been worse attempts to shoehorn lore into the Predator series than Predator: Killer of Killers, but that is undoubtedly the weakest part of the whole thing, with the movie’s final twist threatening to undo all the good that’s come before it. However, each of the movie’s trio of stories is a lot of fun, with well-animated action sequences, that deliver on what you want most from a Predator movie.
• True to form for a Roger Corman-financed production, there is a certain charm to how far Deathstalker can stretch its very obviously limited resources. But none of that charm extends to the plot, which is as confusing as it is paper-thin, or to the characters, who are almost without fail reprehensible. And oof, there is so much rape.

I also rewatched Widows. I don’t think it’s director Steve McQueen’s best movie, necessarily, but the strength of the performances alone make it worth watching. It’s weird how quickly the movie became memory-holed.

I watched 6 movies last week:

• Roger Ebert called The Adventures of Ford Fairlane “loud, ugly and mean-spirited.” I mean, when you’re right, you’re right.
• The Jerky Boys is the sort of movie that makes you feel like you need to apologize for finding their prank phone call schtick funny back when you were in junior high. I don’t think there was a better movie to be made from their comedy but I can’t overstate how not funny the one they actually made is.
• The Hunt isn’t terrible. It has some clever moments, and Betty Gilpin’s a lot of fun, but it’s extremely shallow as satire (and weirdly dated for a movie that’s only five years old—but oof, what an awful five years those have been, eh?)

• I think Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is slightly better made than the two films that preceded it in the series, but that’s not saying much. This one is mostly just tedious and confusing.
• Appointment with Death is a little meandering as a mystery, but it’s a fun hangout with these characters.
• Leonard Maltin reportedly called 1945’s Bewitched and “interesting idea, especially for its time, but heavy-handed.” That sounds about right.

I also rewatched the Red Riding trilogy—1974, 1980, and 1983. They didn’t quite hold up for me as well as I remember, maybe partly because I remembered to plot better than I thought and wasn’t surprised, or maybe just because the whole thing is fairly bleak. Some good stuff, just not as strong the second time around.