Weekly Movie Roundup

Last week, I watched 8 movies.

Cry Terror! Three Thousand Years of Longing Is That Black Enough for You?!?
The Wonder Slumberland Moonage Daydream The Secret World of Arrietty

You wouldn’t expect a movie with a title like CRY TERROR! to be quite so boring. But despite a strong cast, a theoretically tense plot, and a literal ticking time-bomb, the movie is mostly undone by voiceover narration and slow pacing.

ALL MY FRIENDS HATE ME is often wickedly, uncomfortably well observed and funny—a horror movie played as comedy, or vice versa.

THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING is beautiful, elegiac, sometimes a little dull, and a touching story about the stories we want to tell ourselves.

Elvis Mitchell’s documentary IS THAT BLACK ENOUGH FOR YOU?!? occasionally meanders a little, but it has a strong central thesis—namely, that representation matters. There are interviews with a lot of great black filmmakers, and I defy you to walk away without a long list of other films you now want to watch.

Florence Pugh is fantastic in THE WONDER, but so is everybody else. There’s not really a false note in the movie.

SLUMBERLAND has its…I want to say charms, but that might be a bit of a stretch. It does have some cute and clever moments, and is even occasionally touching, though it does feel a little cheaply made and under-populated, and it grates more than a little by the end.

There’s an argument that MOONAGE DAYDREAM doesn’t tell us anything new about David Bowie, but that doesn’t feel like the movie’s intent. (It also assumes that every viewer knows the same things.) It’s more an hallucinatory, kaleidoscopic, patchwork celebration of an artist’s life—not definitive, or even necessarily revelatory, but beautiful and substantial all the same.

THE SECRET WORLD OF ARRIETTY is beautiful and sweet, even if it’s also arguably slightly lesser Studio Ghibli.