- The way The Go-Between ends, particularly with its flash-forwards, doesn’t entirely work, and undermines a lot of what came before, but until then it’s a lovely period drama and coming-of-age story.
- The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas isn’t the best showcase of anyone’s talents, including Dolly Parton’s, but that’s very obviously the movie’s fault more than hers. She and Burt Reynolds have an easy charm together, and the movie has a few good songs—and to my mind two genuinely great ones.
- If you ever wondered what would happen if the writer/director of Enys Men made a time travel movie, then Rose of Nevada is for you. Sad and strangely haunting.
- Sean Baker makes movies about characters with such empathy, never presenting them as something that they’re not, but never judging them for who they are. He also often draws out terrific performances, usually from his female stars. To say that Starlet is no different risks dismissing it, but it’s a lovely, deceptively simple movie, with a very good performance by Dree Hemingway. (The title character is also well played.)
- Undertone is built on a lot of very familiar tropes—critics can, and have, listed all the other horror movies it appears to borrow from—but it uses those pieces in smart and scary ways. At least until the end, when it maybe runs out of interesting things to do, but even then it’s fairly effective.
- At only about forty-five minutes, From the Old Earth (aka O’r Ddaear Hen) almost doesn’t qualify as a movie at all—and certainly would have been better served as an episode of television or a short film. Even at its under-feature-film length, the movie feels very padded and dull, one poorly handled exposition scene dragging after another, and it doesn’t really do or say anything about the ancient mythology it brings up, or offer any scares. It’s not without its moments of fleeting atmosphere, but the fact of its existence—as a 1981 Welsh-language horror movie—is the only truly interesting thing about it.
I also rewatched F/X2, which has its moments—in the gadgetry more than the story—but which falls well flat from the original, and Clue, which is just a silly delight, as always.
