- 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.
