I’ve been traveling recently, so it’s been three weeks since I last wrote about any movies, and since then I’ve watched 16 movies:
- I liked James Gunn’s Superman but fell well short of loving it. The fundamental problem is, the movie simply does too many things. It helps that a lot of those things are a lot of fun, stacked with good performances and colorful design, but it’s still too much. I appreciate that it’s not telling yet another origin story, but the story it is telling doesn’t always get room to breathe, or its characters room to grow. I’m still interested in what Gunn does with this sandbox he’s been given, but I hope next time he brings a little more focus to it.
- 28 Years Later is surprisingly beautiful and elegiac for a movie so filled with ravenous rage-zombies. The framing device, leading directly to next year’s The Bone Temple sequel—and presumably whatever the third film in the planned trilogy becomes—does feel a little tacked on, even if that second film promises to be equally audacious, and I might have preferred for this to feel more standalone.
- Film critic Christy Lemire described Ghost Trail as “an intimate study of trauma that plays with the gripping suspense of a globetrotting spy thriller.” So much of the movie rests on the quiet performance by Adam Bessa, but it’s a deeply affecting film seen through his character’s eyes.
- Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man could more maybe more accurately be called Larry Talbot Just Wants to Die. Lon Cheney, Jr.’s Talbot is the center of the movie, and pretty good, just as he was in the original Wolf Man. The same can’t really be said for Bela Lugosi, as Frankenstein’s monster, whose lines were reportedly all cut because of his thick accent, and doesn’t feature in the film as much as the title might suggest.
- Give M3GAN 2.0 credit: it goes off in a lot of unexpectedly strange directions. Make no mistake, they’re very dumb directions, but given how much I disliked the first movie, this one proved to be a surprisingly amount of silly fun.
- The Alto Knights makes so many baffling decisions that its initial one, to cast Robert De Niro as the two (unrelated) lead roles, barely qualifies. It’s maybe one of the few interesting things about the movie, watching De Niro build two distinct performances, but it never rises above a gimmick, and those performances never create distinct characters. (De Niro’s Vito Genovese, for example, mostly just feels like the actor imitating his friend and frequent costar Joe Pesci.) The movie is soporific, seems at times almost intentionally tedious, and just because it’s based on true events and real-life gangsters doesn’t make any of what’s on screen interesting or well executed.
- The Legend of Ochi never exactly settles on a tone, and casting recognizable faces like Dafoe and Watson—though they’re both quite good—is maybe too much of a distraction. Still, there’s a lot that’s lovely about the film’s very straightforward, familiar story, and its effects work is genuinely impressive, especially if the reports that none of it was CGI are true.
- The Naked Gun is silly and stupid in all the ways you want a Naked Gun movie to be.
- Weapons is scary and strange, maybe for the way it tells its story more than the story itself, how it keeps the audience on edge and guessing until everything ramps up to a fever pitch.
There’s a lot that’s darkly funny in Honey Don’t!, with some good performances all around, but it very much falls apart at the end and isn’t very satisfying overall.
- The Alphabet Murders bears very little resemblance to any Agatha Christie I’ve ever read—and indeed only a passing resemblance to a movie at all. It’s such a weird experience, from the casting of Tony Randall as Hercule Poirot on down, played for what I would charitably call laughs.
- I didn’t especially enjoy Tobe Hooper’s Toolbox Murders, which felt more muddled than scary in the end.
- I don’t think Materialists is quite the equal to Celine Song’s debut film, Past Lives, but it’s so charming and self-assured, and the performances, particularly from Johnson and Evans, are so good, that it’s hard to complain.
- KPop Demon Hunters is bubbly and kinetic fun, but with real heart, and a lot of the songs—particularly “What It Sounds Like”—legitimately slap. I was kind of shocked by how much I enjoyed it.
- Werewolf of London does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s not amazing, but for a lesser 1930s Universal monster movie, it’s not bad.
- For such a short movie, The Mummy’s Ghost spends a lot of time meandering around a plot, but it’s an entertaining enough ramble.
I also rewatched The Thing from Another World, which as 1950s things from another world movies go, is still pretty good.
