• Sacco & Vanzetti, said Roger Ebert “is sometimes accurate, sometimes biased and sometimes even fictional in its telling of the story, but no matter.”
• Were it not so grounded in its characters and their emotions, Revanche could easily feel like a string of convoluted coincidences. But what might begin to strain credulity instead begins to feel inevitable and tragic.
• Show Boat is pleasant, with some good performances in this 1951 Technicolor production, but I’m not sure there’s a single song I remember other than “Ol’ Man River.”

• Gothic is mildly tame by Ken Russell standards, but only by those standards. Harlan Ellison reportedly (and I think rightly) called it “loopy and fatally flawed and an aberration”—and that was in praise of the movie!
• Heaven knows there have been worse attempts to shoehorn lore into the Predator series than Predator: Killer of Killers, but that is undoubtedly the weakest part of the whole thing, with the movie’s final twist threatening to undo all the good that’s come before it. However, each of the movie’s trio of stories is a lot of fun, with well-animated action sequences, that deliver on what you want most from a Predator movie.
• True to form for a Roger Corman-financed production, there is a certain charm to how far Deathstalker can stretch its very obviously limited resources. But none of that charm extends to the plot, which is as confusing as it is paper-thin, or to the characters, who are almost without fail reprehensible. And oof, there is so much rape.

I also rewatched Widows. I don’t think it’s director Steve McQueen’s best movie, necessarily, but the strength of the performances alone make it worth watching. It’s weird how quickly the movie became memory-holed.

I watched 6 movies last week:

• Roger Ebert called The Adventures of Ford Fairlane “loud, ugly and mean-spirited.” I mean, when you’re right, you’re right.
• The Jerky Boys is the sort of movie that makes you feel like you need to apologize for finding their prank phone call schtick funny back when you were in junior high. I don’t think there was a better movie to be made from their comedy but I can’t overstate how not funny the one they actually made is.
• The Hunt isn’t terrible. It has some clever moments, and Betty Gilpin’s a lot of fun, but it’s extremely shallow as satire (and weirdly dated for a movie that’s only five years old—but oof, what an awful five years those have been, eh?)

• I think Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is slightly better made than the two films that preceded it in the series, but that’s not saying much. This one is mostly just tedious and confusing.
• Appointment with Death is a little meandering as a mystery, but it’s a fun hangout with these characters.
• Leonard Maltin reportedly called 1945’s Bewitched and “interesting idea, especially for its time, but heavy-handed.” That sounds about right.

I also rewatched the Red Riding trilogy—1974, 1980, and 1983. They didn’t quite hold up for me as well as I remember, maybe partly because I remembered to plot better than I thought and wasn’t surprised, or maybe just because the whole thing is fairly bleak. Some good stuff, just not as strong the second time around.

I watched 8 movies last week:

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• Escape from Alcatraz doesn’t do anything more than it says on the tin—and it can’t help but feel a little familiar, in the wake of subsequent prison movies like The Shawshank Redemption—but it’s tense and very enjoyable.
• This Land Is Mine is a remarkably nuanced look at the dangers of collaboration, why so many might choose to cooperate with Nazis, but it’s also a really great character study of cowardice and courage, with at least one great speech by Charles Laughton.
• There’s a lot to love about Dead End, but the standout might be Humphrey Bogart’s performance as a sad and broken man.
• Eephus isn’t exactly a fun movie, even if it is often very low-key funny. Maybe the most telling moment comes late in the film when a long-expected fireworks display happens entirely off-screen, with only one character’s defeated face reflected in its glow. It’s a brilliantly low-stakes but pitch-perfect hangdog comedy.

• The Phoenician Scheme feels very much like Wes Anderson making stop-motion with live actors. That can sometimes make the movie feel unreal and removed, but it’s all so meticulously crafted, often delightfully and playfully so, that it’s hard to mind too much.
• I’ve never played the video game that Until Dawn is based on, but the lazy way the storytelling falls apart near the end doesn’t exactly argue for very compelling source material. Which is a shame, because there’s actually a somewhat clever take on the time-loop conceit, which raises the stakes in some gory and gnarly ways, before that.
• For such a simple plot, The Crossroads is surprisingly convoluted, but it’s well directed, and William Powell is good in it.
• As Brian Tallerico writes, The Amateur “skims the surface of what has worked in spy thrillers of the past, never finding its own rhythm, identity, or personality.” The movie is better cast than it needs to be, but that proves to be more of a distraction than an asset in the end.

I also rewatched Thief. I don’t know that it’s my favorite Michael Mann movie, but it’s got such style, James Caan is so good in it, and it’s got a perfect downer of an ending.

• All You Need Is Death is deeply strange and unnerving.
• Black Moon Rising stars Tommy Lee Jones a a former thief hired by Bubba Smith at the FBI to steal a computer disk that he hides inside an experimental supercar that can drive over 300 miles per hour and is stolen by car thief Linda Hamilton for crime boss Robert Vaughn. Which makes it sound a lot more fun than it actually is. The movie has some goofy charms and a good cast, but it’s not a forgotten ’80s classic or anything.
• There’s a seed of a good idea in Monkey Shines, but things escalate much too quickly, then nonsensically, and finally unpleasantly. It’s never remotely frightening, probably because they (very rightly) couldn’t force a real monkey to actually do any of the things this one is supposed to. It’s not George Romero’s finest hour.

• There’s only so far that likable characters can take you, and the characters in Hot Tub Time Machine aren’t even that likable. It’s dumb fun for a lot of the ride, except when it’s just dumb, but it’s a very lazy comedy.
• Old Henry doesn’t really bring anything new to the table, and the movie mostly just plays itself out, but Tim Blake Nelson is really good in it.
• The best time to have watched D.A.R.Y.L. was 1985, when I was 8 years old. Some (gulp) 40 years later, it’s more than a little silly and dated. There’s a neat little sci-fi idea inside it all, but it’s hardly a home run.
• Death Watch dances around some interesting philosophical ideas—some that many contemporary critic have been a little kind in calling prescient—and it has some likable performances, but it’s just so slow and lugubrious.

I also rewatched M*A*S*H. I don’t think it’s my favorite Robert Altman movie—that’s probably McCabe & Mrs. Miller—but it’s up there.

• The music in Robert Altman’s Kansas City is pretty great, on the rare occasion it’s given a chance to play. Problem is, there’s this whole movie and plot that keep getting in the way, both of which feel like they’ve fizzled out before they’ve even attempted to build up any steam. And it certainly doesn’t help that most of that plot is taken up by maybe my least favorite Jennifer Jason Leigh performance ever.
• Roger Ebert called Full Moon in Blue Water “such a likable film in so many little ways that you want to forgive it for being so bad in so many big ones.” He wasn’t wrong that the movie has a few very modest charms, in spite of itself—namely, its two leads—but it’s such a confused and contrived mess, no matter how much Hackman and Garr struggle desperately to pull three-dimensional characters from the wreckage. By the end, I had almost no idea what was supposed to be happening, nor did I want to.
• I think The Shrouds is the best movie David Cronenberg has made in years—maybe one of his best ever. It’s strange and unsettling, obviously deeply personal and informed by the grief over his own wife’s death, both elegiac and absurd, and playfully exploring some very deep and interesting ideas, with a fantastic central performance by Vincent Cassel.

• There’s a sadness that hangs over La Strada, almost from the very first frame, and certainly to the last.
• Opus is tense fun for a while, keeping your interest for as long as you don’t know where any of it is going—until you realize the movie is going only exactly where you think it is, and until it stumbles badly at the end and you realize it doesn’t know where it’s going whatsoever. It’s buoyed by some good performances, particularly from Malkovich, but the weirdness ends up just being weird for its own sake, and the movie is very confused about what if anything it’s trying to say by the end.
• Jaws is one the best movies ever made, which is the main thing that makes Jaws @ 50 watchable. Despite archival and some more recent interviews, the documentary hardly feels like “the definitive inside story” it bills itself as. Full of as many aimless digressions as amusing anecdotes, it’s not particularly revealing or novel and mostly just makes you want to rewatch the original film. Which is probably the only reason it exists in the first place.
• The Breaking Point does what it says on the tin, but it does so with tension and style and several good very performances.

I also rewatched Bubba Ho-Tep, because after rewatching Phantasm last week, I was in the mood to revisit a good Don Coscarelli movie. This one is very silly, but also good fun.