Month: September 2025

I watched just 5 movies last week:

• Fool for Love feels a little like Robert Altman doing David Lynch, which is no less weird than this being a Cannon Films production. Oddly dreamlike, even hallucinatory, I’m not entirely sure it works, or even how it’s supposed to, but there’s an undeniably interesting vibe to everything.
• The actors, particularly Redford and Winger, are a lot better than the plot in Legal Eagles, of which there is far too much, and little of which makes much sense.
• Murder My Sweet is a pretty decent film noir that takes some interesting turns.
• Timebomb is the low-rent ’90s direct-to-DVD version of The Bourne Identity. Sometimes that works, sometimes not so much.
• The Day of the Dolphin is such a strange movie—and not just because it’s a sci-fi thriller written by Buck Henry and directed by Mike Nichols, of all people. It’s at times deeply boring, and yet its goofy plot and strong performances also make it very compelling at times. I genuinely couldn’t tell if the whole thing was good or bad.

I also rewatched Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde, as part of #HorrorWatch on Bluesky. The movie remains a lot better and less problematic than you might expect a 1971 gender-swapping Hammer Films adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson story to go.

Last week, I watched 6 movies:

• Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, which I’m only ninety-something-percent sure I’ve never seen before, is maybe more interesting than revealing—I’m not sure I learned anything about the man, if I’m being honest—but it is undoubtedly interesting.
• As Roger Ebert wrote, If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium “isn’t a great movie by any means, but it manages to be awfully pleasant.” The movie is dated, and more a collection of character beats than actual characters or story, but the cast manages to make it a pleasant enough experience.
• I don’t know that Highest 2 Lowest is my favorite Spike Lee/Denzel Washington collaboration, but damn if the movie doesn’t make clear there’s still a whole lot of juice left in the partnership.

• Vanessa Kirby is very good in Night Always Comes. I just wish the rest of the movie around her was equal to the performance. That’s not any fault of the other actors, who are also good—and the movie does have some hard-hitting emotional beats as you feel the desperation waft off the characters. It just feels a little too cliche at times, which is a shame.
Wafare does exactly what it says on the tin, by throwing you into the chaos of war with these soldiers in a near real-time experience of war. But while that makes for interesting viewing, it’s unclear what if anything the movie has to say other than “war is a bloody and confusing hell.”
• Thank God It’s Friday is two parts Saturday Night Fever and one part American Graffiti, and also very much less than the sum of its parts. “When you describe it, it sounds like a lot more fun than it is when you see it,” wrote Roger Ebert. The movie was all too obviously designed as a vehicle for Donna Summer’s song “Last Dance,” and hey, they managed to get an Academy Award out of it. But it’s weird, because despite what all of the characters in the film seem to think, it’s not even Summer’s best performance of the song, and her character, such as it is, is even thinner than all of the others who drift in and out of the film.

I also rewatched The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, though not as a double-feature. I enjoyed them both.

I watched 7 movies last week:

• Contemporary reviews talk a lot about how Save the Tiger wouldn’t work without the Jack Lemmon performance. Which is a little weird considering that it has the Jack Lemmon performance. I agree you probably couldn’t drop just any actor into this material, but that isn’t a fault of the material, or just because Lemmon is genuinely so good. His performance is finely calibrated to this material, a character study set against the regret and malaise of 1970s America. It’s not necessarily a fun movie, and it is easy how it could be bad without an actor so good, but I think it does work.
• The Anderson Tapes is interesting, not least for its eclectic cast, though it’s mostly a testament to Sidney Lumet’s skill as a director that the movie is as engaging as it is.

Cold Turkey is never exactly funny, but its characters, while largely unlikable, are well observed.

• To the Devil a Daughter is shockingly bad, and if wasn’t Hammer Films very last movie before going under at the end of the 1970s, oh boy, was it a huge nail in that coffin. The movie approaches hauntingly atmospheric now and then—it’s definitely trying to do something, and it has a much better cast than it deserves—but it’s so very tedious and over-complicated. And then when I learned that Nastassja Kinski, who briefly (and needlessly) appears fully nude, was only fourteen at the time, I really hated this film.
• Z.P.G. is a 1970s sci-fi movie you’ve probably never heard of. I’d recommend keeping it that way. Everybody involved, from the actors to the audience, walks through it half-comatose.
• Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s The Hound of the Baskervilles is one of the laziest, muddled, and unfunniest chores of a comedy I’ve ever sat through.
• 1959’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, on the other hand, is a delight. It’s arguably more Hammer Horror than Sherlock Holmes, but with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee on hand, the movie is a whole lot of fun.

I also rewatched A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I think I’d forgotten just how silly and Richard Lesteresque the movie is, but it’s good goofy fun.