Here’s the roundup of the last nine movies I watched at the end of 2023:

• The 2006 Black Christmas remake is extremely bad, leaden with confusing flashbacks and indistinguishable characters, and it’s easily the worst of the three movies that bear that name.
• Oppenheimer is incredibly cinematic for a movie this long that’s largely built on testimony and public hearings.
• Polite Society is a lot of frenetic fun.

• There are some pretty good performances in Maggie Moore(s), even if it kind of feels like everybody is there as a favor to somebody else, and a few decent enough laughs, even if the whole thing feels more likea mild diversion than anything else. It often feels a lot like Fargo-lite.
• The Holdovers is a melancholic, sometimes bittersweet holiday delight.
• Dream Scenario didn’t quite come together for me in the end—and might need a repeat viewing—but it’s fun and strange, and it’s got one of the better recent Nicolas Cage performances.

• You have to give Martin Scorsese for continuing to stretch himself as a filmmaker, and for continuing to ask really difficult questions, as he does in Killers of the Flower Moon, about the nature of evil. It’s also great that he centers the film more around the Osage people—although he probably could have done so even more, not least because Lily Gladstone is fantastic in the film.
• For a movie that very deliberately offers no conclusive answers, Anatomy of a Fall is very satisfying. It’s a smart and tense puzzle whose point is that it can’t be solved.
• A Haunting in Venice is a little much at times, as Branagh plays way into the horror movie motifs and odd angles, but it’s also pretty entertaining.

I also re-watched the other two, much better versions of Black Christmas—the 1974 original and the 2019 remake. I’m maybe a little more fond of the remake, which I think does some really interesting things above being a slasher movie and has a real point of view, but the original has a really great creepy scuzziness to it. You probably couldn’t ask for two movies with ostensibly the same subject (if not plots) but with such incredibly different philosophies. Both are well worth your time, while the middle 2006 child should be locked away and forgotten.

It’s the holiday season, so I watched a dozen movies last week:

• It seems strange to call They’re a Weird Mob my “white whale,” if only because it’s not at all well known, or—jumping forward—even particularly good. But several years back, I decided to watch all of the Powell and Pressburger movies, and this, their penultimate collaboration and the last one I hadn’t seen, proved incredibly difficult to find. Having finally seen the film now, of course, that’s hardly surprising. Walter Chiari is a charming enough lead, but the film has only one joke: ain’t it funny when foreigners try to understand Australians? It’s easy to see why the film never really played outside of that country, or why it’s become an elusive footnote to Powell and Pressburger’s joint careers.
• There’s a certain lo-fi whimsy, somewhat akin to early 2000s Michael Gondry, in Strawberry Mansion, and there’s a wit and warmth to its unreality that mostly makes that work.
• Chandler isn’t exactly a lost neo-noir classic, and it’s often more than a little slow. But the movie has some very nice moments, and Warren Oates is good in the hardboiled, downtrodden lead role.

• I like that The Creator exists a lot more than I like the movie itself. Maybe that’s a low bar, but original cinematic science fiction, not tied to a franchise or existing propetry, is such a rarity these days that I can look past a lot of flaws. And The Creator definitely has a lot of flaws. Gareth Edwards does a fantastic job of building his futuristic world and making it feel lived-in, but he’s let down by a story that makes too many narrative leaps and never coheres in a satisfying way.
• Not only does it look like a thousand other digitally color-corrected movies from the early 2000s, but The Invasion plays less like a remake and more, as Roger Ebert put it, “like a road company production” of the same story. Maybe there was nothing new to bring to Finney’s original novel, but this version barely musters up enough enthusiasm to even try.
• Sometimes you just want to watch somebody kick the shit out of some Nazis. In which case, Sisu has got you covered. It’s not always the most inventive John Wick-esque, “you meessed with the wrong man” actioner, but it is gory and largely satisfying.

• I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes is a little silly and overwrought—even in the movies, it’s hard to imagine a murder case hanging on such circumstantial evidence—but it works nonetheless.
• Rolling Thunder is a revenge thriller without the thrills, the story of what happens to a man when war and torture strip him of the ability to feel much of anything.
• What’s that, you say? A man wrongly convicted—in an Alfred Hitchcock movie?! Next you’ll be telling me there’s rear-projection and over-the-top set-pieces! In all seriousness, though, while Young and Innocent does sometimes feel like early-draft Hitchcock, it’s also entertaining enough.

• Saltburn isn’t as surprising, and doesn’t have as much to say, as Emerald Fennell’s previous film, Promising Young Woman, even if both are occupied (in different ways) with the privilege and insularity of wealth. And yet it’s very entertaining, and Barry Keoghan has probably never been better. Its targets might be a little obvious, and its twists hardly unexpected, but there’s a lot to thoroughly enjoy here.
• I’m not sure I walked away from Maestro with a deeper understanding of Leonard Bernstein’s career or appreciation for his music, and yet I enjoyed the movie quite a lot. It’s well directed, with some bold and assured choices, and the two performances at its heart
• The Criterion Channel describes Repeat Performance as “Something like film noir’s answer to It’s a Wonderful Life or a full-length precursor to The Twilight Zone. It’s a strange mix, but often entertaining.

For good measure, I also re-watched one of Powell and Pressburger’s earlier collaborations, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, with audio commentary by Martin Scorsese and Michael Powell. It’s a fantastic movie. Maybe not my favorite of theirs—that would probably be Black Narcissus or The Red Shoes—but still really great.

I watched a half dozen movies last week:

• The Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion is your quintessential giallo, from the lurid subject matter to the convoluted plot, from the overly complicated title to the occasionally (maybe even accidentally) stunning shots.
• I wasn’t too fond of Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal’s first team-up (What’s Up, Doc?), so I don’t know why I thought the rematch (The Main Event) would be any better. But it’s significantly worse. Whereas the former was too aggressively madcap in its attempt to recreate classic screwball comedies, trying way too hard to ever be laugh-out-loud funny, it was at least trying. The same can’t be said of the latter, which is rarely funny at all. Roger Ebert called it “a Meet Cute from beginning to end, forced smiles, smarmy dialog and all.
• Amistad rightfully gives the African characters real agency in their own story, and Djimon Hounsou’s Cinque never feels secondary to the white characters. (Indeed, Hounsou’s is probably the best among several good performances.) The movie maybe overdoes it a little, by overplaying the historical significance of the trial and creating Morgan Freeman’s freed slave character from whole cloth. But even it’s not necessarily Spielberg’s best, it’s a more than solid historical drama.

• It takes surprisingly long for the dolphin to even show up in Flipper, and when it does, the movie probably over-estimates how cinematic just watching it swim will be. But the whole thing is not without its innocent charms.
• Romper Stomper is a bleak affair—turns out it’s not exactly fun watching skinheads run riot—but as a portrait of broken people inflicting violence on themselves and others, it’s often quite compelling.
• Clockwatchers starts out almost like an Office Space-like comedy and then takes some dark but never unexpected turns. It’s often bitter but wickedly funny and honest.

I also re-watched (I think for the second time) Pontypool. I really love all the weird ways it finds to be both really scary and strangely funny.

Here are all my #nowplaying songs from last week: