I watched six movies last week:
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- The Wild Life invites—and greatly suffers from—comparison to Cameron Crowe’s previous high school comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
- Man of the Moment has its moments.
- It’s interesting seeing film noir tropes filtered through a Norwegian sensibility in Death Is a Caress. It’s not that interesting—I wouldn’t say the story really holds together particularly well here—but it’s just enough like and unlike Hollywood ’40s noir to keep you wondering.
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- There’s just enough in Bone Lake to suggest that several of the people involved will go on someday to make a good movie. I don’t want to oversell it and suggest the acting and direction are necessarily good, but they show a lot more promise than the script, which trades on the most obvious (and yet also unbelievable) twists.
- Beast is raw around all its edges. Sometimes, like in Jessie Buckley’s primal scream of a performance, that works very well.
- 2021’s Black Phone never felt like a movie that could bear the weight of a sequel, and here comes to Black Phone 2 to prove that point. It’s an admirable attempt, visually chilling and honest about what actually living through the events of the first film would have done to the characters. Everyone involved is trying their best. And yet it’s also kind of an overlong, exposition-heavy exercise that lays more lore upon the framework of the first (decent but also forgettable) movie than it can stand.
I also rewatched The Dunwich Horror, which I didn’t remember well from a few years ago but really quite enjoyed this time around. It’s more than a little cheesy and silly, very much like Roger Corman’s earlier Edgar Allen Poe adaptations, but for Lovecraft, and I enjoyed it very much on that level.