I watched 6 movies last week:

• The Importance of Being Earnest is exceptionally charming.
• If Five Minutes to Live is worth watching—and that’s a sizeable if—that’s really only because of Johnny Cash’s performance, and that’s unfortunately not because his performance is very good. As an article on TCM describes it, the movie “demonstrates why Cash didn’t seriously pursue an acting career but, at the same time, his see-saw performance which goes from flat line readings to crazed, amphetamine-like behavior is fascinating to behold.” Cash loosened (and likely sobered) up as an actor going forward, but this, his first theatrical film role, was also only one of two, which is maybe a little bit of a shame. The movie itself isn’t any great shakes; it has some potential but too often calls to mind other movies that treated similar plot devices much better. (The film that immediately came to mind for me, oddly enough, was Cash on Demand, starring Peter Cushing and released the very same year.) Five Minutes to Live has been described, I think unconvincingly, as a cult classic, but while the oddity of Cash’s performance—alongside early screen appearances of Vic Tayback and little Ronnie Howard—it’s hardly worth investing in that cult.
• Bring Them Down doesn’t quite hold together in the end. While there is a lot to like about the film—from the performances, to the tension, to the nonlinear narrative that slowly reveals some of the reasons for that tension—too much is left unclear and unresolved.

There’s a lot that doesn’t quite add up in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round, not least of all its title, but Coburn’s con man is charming and clever, and the film comes awfully close to being a forgotten gem.
• Top Secret! is very silly. There isn’t a lot more to say about the movie other than that. Personally, it won’t top my fondness for the other ZAZ spoof movies like The Naked Gun or Airplane, but it is a lot of fun.
• There’s a lot that doesn’t work about The Savage Innocents, from a modern point of view, but most of it comes down to that title—to the likely well-intentioned, but nonetheless dehumanizing, idea of the noble savage. It’s fed by the film being intermittently framed as a nature documentary, by the casting of non-Inuit actors, by the decision to call them Eskimos. And yet there are things that work, including Quinn’s performance, and those good intentions—the filmmakers’ attempt to actually subvert stereotypes—do shine through.

I also enjoyed a rewatch of The Vast of Night.

I watched 7 movies last week:

• Laurence Olivier is terrific as the sad and selfish title character in The Entertainer, but everyone around him is also quite good, and the movie is a terrific example of the “kitchen sink realism” of ’50s and ’60s British film.
• Waitress has a lot of tender and funny moments—and it’s difficult for the viewing not to be colored by knowledge of writer and director Adrienne Shelly’s tragic murder—but good-hearted whimsy only carries it so far.
• There’s a character in Totally Killer who says, “I hate time travel movies. They never make any sense.” I feel like the writers on this movie took that way too much to heart. There’s promise to the movie’s central idea—which is essentially Back to the Future meets slasher movie—and some occasionally clever moments, but it all falls apart in lazy and confused storytelling.
• I’ve seen worse movies, by far, than Transylvania 6-5000, but I have rarely seen one this unfunny, one where every single joke simply fails to land. (One film comes to mind, Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving It, which just so happens to have been written for Brooks by the same guy.) There are so many bits in the film—you will rarely see a movie trying this hard to be funny—and yet not a single laugh to be had.

• There’s a lot to like in The Shoes of the Fisherman, including some very good performances, particularly from Anthony Quinn and Leo McKern. And there are plenty of interesting ideas about faith and the role of the Catholic Church, particularly in the era the film was made. But it’s also overlong, with too many side stories, and it’s never as epic as its overture, intermission, and length would suggest.
• Executive Decision is a better than serviceable ’90s B action movie. It’s slightly corny and dated, not least because it’s a pre-9/11 airplane hijack movie, but it’s also reasonably entertaining.
• A Complete Unknown is actually quite good. A lot of that’s down to Timothée Chalamet, whose Dylan always feels like a real character, never an impersonation or caricature, but the rest of the cast around him is quite good as well. And then there’s the music—Dylan’s own, the folk music scene he exploded into, and the rock and roll that split them apart.

I also re-watched Possession, which in some ways felt like a first watch. (I don’t think the version I saw a few years ago was the heavily edited one they tried to release in the United States as a straight horror movie, but it was YouTube-quality.) The movie is a lot, and not what I would describe as a fun watch, but it’s a powerfully intense and often upsetting film. As a reviewer in Time Out wrote, “There are plenty of movies which seem to have been made by madmen. Possession may be the only film in existence which is itself mad…”

I watched 6 movies last week:

• A music biopic where the band members play themselves sounds a little dodgy on paper, but the members of Kneecap acquit themselves well. The movie is goofy and pointed and entertaining.
• There’s something of a critical consensus that the first Venom movie is kind of lousy and the second one, while not necessarily great, is easily a step up. I would one hundred percent reverse that—I did not enjoy Let There Be Carnage even a little—but I would definitely agree with corresponding consensus that Venom: The Last Dance is the worst of the three movie. It’s full of callbacks to plots and characters I remember not at all from the first two installments, back-stories for new characters who otherwise get no development, whiplash shifts in tone, unexciting CGI, and a metric ton of attempted world-building. Tom Hardy sometimes seems like he’s having fun, but that’s about all I can say for it.
• There’s a lot to admire in Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling, not least of all Richard Pryor’s bravery in making it, his sincere willingness to examine his own self-destructive behaviors. The movie is often audacious and imaginative, and if it has a fault, it’s that you often want it to go even deeper.

• The Outrun doesn’t have anything novel to say about addiction, but I’m not sure that anything novel needs to be said. Sometimes all you need are the quiet truths like “It never gets easy, it just gets less hard.” Saoirse Ronan is as good as she’s ever been, as a young woman struggling to find happiness somewhere other than the places that also bring her misery, and the movie never feels anywhere close to trite or cliche.
• Hi, Mom! is interesting—it’s one of Brian De Palma earliest films, and one of Robert De Niro’s earliest performances—but it’s difficult to say what most, if any, of it is in service to.
• The second, visually more audacious half of The Congress is a lot more interesting than the first—especially now that the idea of replacing actors with digital copies seems less prescient and just something studios are actively trying to do—but I’m also not sure it all coalesces or connects in a fully satisfying way. The movie plays certainly with a lot of interesting ideas, though.

I also rewatched the pretty terrific Amadeus.

I watched just 6 movies last week:

• Roger Ebert described Radioland Murders as “all action and no character, all situation and no comedy.” There’s simply too much going on here, and almost none of it is particularly funny.
• There are several movies competing for attention in Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael. The best of them is the one starring Wynona Ryder, but none of the movies are very good, and they collide against one another in bewilderingly unsatisfying ways.
• Its satire has lost more than some of its bite, but Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? is still often amusing.

• Thunder on the Hill may not have the lush Technicolor of later Douglas Sirk movies, but it has all the exciting melodrama you expect.
• Roger Ebert called Into the Night “a fitfully funny, aimless, unnecessary thriller.” I would argue only with the “funny” part of that, not the “fitfully.” I can’t remember the last time I was this bored and confused by what’s ostensibly a comedy.
• There’s some question about how the movie treats its other real-life characters, most notably reporter Kathy Scruggs, but Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell is well crafted and features a legitimately breakout performance by Paul Walter Hauser.

I also somewhat randomly re-watched Runaway Jury. It isn’t the best Gene Hackman movie. It isn’t the best John Grisham adaptation. It isn’t even the best John Grisham adaptation starring Gene Hackman. But it’s a dumb freight train of a movie, and surprisingly still fun on rewatch even when I knew exactly where it was headed.

I watched 9 movies last week, and thank goodness not a single one of them was a Pink Panther film:

• “If ‘Eureka‘ is not completely successful,” wrote Roger Ebert, “if, indeed, it is sometimes merely silly and often confusing, maybe that’s the price we pay for Roeg’s intensity. At least it is never boring.”
• If Stage Door and now Kitty Foyle are any indication, I need to watch a lot more Ginger Rogers movies.
• Sing Sing is simply told, but with some fantastic, unshowy performances, and honest surprises.

• There’s too much world-building in Battle Beyond the Stars, but that’s a better problem to have than its opposite. The movie can’t ever shake off being a low-budget, over-stuffed Star Wars knockoff, but there’s just enough silly weirdness in the whole thing to be entertaining.
• John Ford’s The Informer is extremely melodramatic, but it’s grounded by Victor McLaglen’s conflicted performance.
• I love that the Adams Family make horror movies together, though Hell Hole is maybe my least favorite so far. As Brian Tallerico writes, “it’s kind of a disappointment” and “drain[ed]…of some of the DIY charm of the other flicks by Adams and Poser.” There are things to like here, some fun things the filmmakers get to do with their obviously bigger budget and some funny performances, but it also feels a little hollow, and the ending is a huge disappointment.

• There’s not a lot to say about The Great Dictator that hasn’t already been said, but there is nonetheless a lot to say for Chaplin’s bravery in making this film when he did, the bite of his satire, but also the lovely silent gags throughout. By his own admission, it’s not a movie he could have made only a few short years later, when the true horrors of the Nazi concentration camps were revealed, but for the moment in time it was made, it is an enduring masterpiece.
• Richard Harris is good in A Man Called Horse, and there’s something to be said for how much the film centers around the Sioux, given the time it was made, though it’s still a little a little disappointing. Not for nothing, as “a trashy, b-movie version of Dances With Wolves.”
• Pamela Anderson gives the best performance of her career in The Last Showgirl, which I think I’d be saying even if I had liked any of her past performances. It’s revelatory not just because we (maybe unfairly) don’t expect it from Anderson—she’s genuinely very good in this sad, complicated movie.

I also re-watched the thoroughly delightful My Fair Lady.