Month: June 2026

• Berlin Express does some interesting things, set (and filmed) in that narrow window of Allied-occupied Germany following World War II, even if its plot bounces around a little too much.
• I enjoyed Normal a whole lot less than I expected to. It’s too convoluted, despite what should be a fairly simple setup, and it throws away characters and jokes without a second thought, or doing much of anything interesting with them. I’ve often liked Ben Wheatley as a director, but much less so when he goes for the shootemups.
• Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror is a sweet delight of a documentary, talking to just about all of the surviving cast, who all have wonderful things to say about the experience of the musical and movie, and looking at Rocky Horror‘s genuine impact in the world at large.

• I’m not saying Meteor is so boring as to make you welcome the collision of a cataclysmic fireball into the Earth, but I’m definitely not not saying that. It’s a remarkably unimpressive movie.
• I really enjoyed Project Hail Mary. Maybe it plays it a little safe, as far as science fiction goes, but it’s genuinely funny and affecting, and I had a blast.
• I don’t think I can say The Paradine Case is the worst Alfred Hitchcock movie, but only because I watched Under Capricorn a month ago. This one has some good performance, but they’re not in service of much more than a very stagey, overcomplicated plot and some unlikable characters.

I also rewatched two movies, the first accidentally, having not remembered I’d already watched it until midway through, and the other on purpose. The first was The First Deadly Sin, which is an unremarkable serial killer plot, some weird comic-relief side characters, but a fantastic, quiet performance from Sinatra, his last leading role and one of his best. The second was Kwaidan, which is just a remarkably haunting movie with beautiful staging and incredible sound design.

I watched 8 movies last week:

• The Leopard Man isn’t one of the best Val Lewton-produced movies for RKO, but it’s a well made B-movie, directed by someone who also directed the best Val Lewton-produced movies.
• Sudden Fear gets a little silly, but the performances are fantastic, and it’s genuinely suspenseful.
• The MGM Kildare movies are hokey and dated, but they’re also pleasantly diverting and sometimes very funny. The Secret of Dr. Kildare is no exception.
• Tasha Robinson, then of the AV Club, had it right about Repo! The Genetic Opera when she wrote, “It’s like nothing else out there, but there’s a perfectly good reason why.: Despite some impressively garish and gaudy visuals, the songs are mostly loud but lousy, the acting is inconsistent, and the story, such as it is, is repetitive and thin to the breaking point.

• I’m not sure Marty, Life Is Short is deeply revealing as a documentary, but it’s very sweet and honest and funny.
• Crack in the World is a goofy ’60s disaster B-movie, never quite schlock, but decent performances and good fun.
• Creatures the World Forgot is an interesting idea for a movie, no so interesting in execution.
• The Snow Woman was shorter than I expected, but also a sad an ethereal folk tale.

I watched 5 movies last week:

• Force of Nature: The Dry 2 repeats all the same problems I had with the first movie—an unsatisfying mystery too slowly pieced together through conflicting memories—but repeats fewer of the things that I thought worked well there—a sense of place, buried trauma, and a reason to care about any of the characters.
• Roger Ebert gave Robert Altman’s A Wedding three and a half stars, Gene Siskel gave it one and a half, and for the life of me I still can’t figure out which one of them I agree with. Even splitting the difference with two and half stars feels wrong, but it’s such a strange and confusing movie, juggling scenes that sometimes feel simultaneously inspired and awful, that it’s hard to know what to make of it.
• “[H]ere is a film that feels incomplete,” Roger Ebert wrote about Dead Presidents, “as if its last step is into thin air. Scene by scene you feel its skill, but you leave the theater wondering about the meaning of it all.”

• There’s undeniably high energy in True Romance, but it grows tedious very quickly, this collision of Tony Scott aesthetics and early Quentin Tarantino shoot-em-up. I wouldn’t go as far as to call it “aesthetically corrupt,” as the Washington Post did at the time, but it is definitely a whole lot of ’90s style and over-qualified cameos in search of anything interesting to say.
• Hoppers is a little weird, in the ways it plays with anthropomorphizing (and not) the animals in it, but it’s very sweet and funny and clever.

I also rewatched both The Guest and From Russia With Love, both of which were fine, though maybe not as good as I remember either. Dan Stevens has a lot of fun playing evil in The Guest, and Maika Monroe is good playing off of him, but the movie does a lot less with its premise than I remembered. Meanwhile, From Russia With Love is almost the prototypical Bond movie a little slow in places, but it’s a little slow in places, and I don’t think it’s where they perfected the formula.