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I can't pretend to understand the politics or historical context of 2015's The Assassin, and that's an important impediment to understanding its plot. There are others. It's also got a very minimal soundtrack, only in the rarest occasions letting a bit of score seep in and even then, it might be diegetic. It's often like we're in another room, looking in, and therefore only overhearing scenes. And to say it's slow-flowing is an understatement, with many very still shots making you check if your player somehow froze the image. If it's anti-filmic in those ways, others might consider it to be PURE film and I wouldn't necessarily disagree. It's largely down to cinematography, which is absolutely gorgeous - everything I've seen from Hou Hsiao-hsien was basically painted with light - but that's just not enough for me here. I wish it were, because the concept of a reluctant assassin with a connection to her target is a strong one. But her interior life gets lost in opaque historical drama and direction that is obstinate in its contention that the audience should decode images without any help.

Cathernie Breillat's L'été dernier (Last Summer) concerns a taboo relationship between a woman (a fearless Léa Drucker) and her rebellious teenage stepson. From her side, it's not entirely predatory - the 17-year-old is definitely the aggressor - but given what she's ready to do to cover herself in the back half of the film, you may well question whether this was a calculated - if irresponsible, and of course, criminal - seduction. Drucker is absolutely amazing in her ambiguity, by turns ruthless and powerless, and informed in no small measure by her job as a lawyer specializing in family law, child protection and sexual assault. She knows all the tricks, but also all the pitfalls, so why does she do it? So many lines with double meanings here, and I absolutely love the one-pixel finish (you'll see what I mean) before the credits roll. Excellent soundtrack choices too.

Silent comedies often string disparate set pieces together to make their feature length, whether they have much to do with the story or not. Harold Lloyd's Speedy is in that category, though even the long Coney Island sequence still pushes the characters in a certain direction (and scores them a useful dog), so as usual, Lloyd's film are better at story-telling than, say, Buster Keaton's. He plays the eponymous Speedy here, so named because he thinks quickly on his feet, never stays in one job for long, and drives like a maniac. Nominally, the plot concerns his having to save an old man's horse-car business before the railways take him over (truly, a 1920s problem) before Pop's granddaughter will agree to marry him. And as with Lloyd's other feature films, it's a lot of fun and he stands out as the underrated member of the great silent comedy trifecta. Speedy's unhealthy obsession with baseball is a fun bit, though it's almost just an excuse to get Babe Ruth into the film, except that the sport shows up thematically as a motif throughout, which I like, The third act is all kinds of great - chases, fights, suspense, comedy, romance community coming together to preserve tradition, a cute dog, it's got it all.

I'm sure Mermaids means more to people of a certain generation (coming of age through the 60s), but it still works as a story about the loss of innocence. The mother lost it long ago, her eldest daughter both fears losing it and desires to, and the youngest daughter is a total innocent. Modern America is also about to suffer its first trauma and lose a kind of innocence there. All this is wrapped in the portrait of a single-parent family, where the mom (the always powerful Cher) acts like a teenager and is contentiously parented by her daughter (Winona Ryder) and vice-versa, with Bob Hoskins quite charming as the man who would like to make the family "whole". Ryder's sister is Christina Ricci, which makes me think it's too bad Jenna Ortega wasn't even a baby in 1990 so she could be in this family. Quite obviously adapted from a novel, the narration is good, but I'm not in love with Ryder AS a narrator, which kept the film at a distance from me at first. But it did eventually charm me.

Divine is saddled with the absolute worst family and that's enough to drive even the saintliest woman to drink in Polyester, John Waters' parody of family melodramas. Yes, it's the one "shot" in Odorama, and I do wish I had the scratch and sniff card, but also, I'm sure there would be instant regret by Smell #2. It's an amusing gimmick, but it's more than that. This is a world that "stinks", and certainly, Divine's life does. She's gifted with a powerful sense of smell that presages the flashing numbers on the screen, almost like she can sniff out evil. And while some of the broad acting (by the kids, mostly) can be hard to take, and the joke starts to wear thin in the final act, this still has to be one of Waters' downright funniest movies. There's all the stuff taken to extremes, of course, but I find a lot of the small details (the Pepsi bottle at the breakfast table, for example) extremely amusing. Waters has always been a good satirist, but Divine is a sympathetic figure that allows us to tap in when things get TOO satirical. And what a role for Edith Massey - her acting is worse than her dental work, but I love her for it.

Controversial? Boris Karloff's best movie is How the Grinch Stole Christmas! He's got such a great voice, it'd be a shame to put Frankenstein in this slot. Or maybe I just relate too well to the Grinch. I, too, hate all the noise and garishness of Christmas, but my heart swells up to three sizes pretty easily too. Whatever the case may be, it's actually fascinating to watch this golden oldie which is recognizably Dr. Seuss' drawings come to life, BUT JUST AS RECOGNIZABLY Chuck Jones' Looney Tunes work. The Grinch-Max relationship is like one of those great, slapstick-happy, cartoon pairings. It's all in the expressions and the MOTION' which is of course what Dr. Seuss couldn't entirely put in the book. Let's end on a question to ponder this Holiday Season: What kind of meat is "roast beast"? Sounds like beef, outwardly looks like turkey, slices like ham... all Who!???? I mean, what do you think Who Hash is made out of?

Bobby Suarez's Filipino exploitation flick, The One-Armed Executioner, is late to the game in terms of the one-armed martial arts subgenre (One-Armed Swordsman came in '67), but is kind of on the cusp of the heroic bloodshed genre with its inclusion of some gun fu elements in the lead character's re-training. It's perhaps closer to the western than anything John Woo would make, but either way, it makes for an entertaining revenge picture. Franco Guerrero is an engaging action star despite not always hiding his left arm in his shirt very well (a common problem, everybody's got an odd torso), and the script has fun with its ancillary characters. And then there's the location. You're well used to seeing this kind of movie coming out of Hong Kong or Japan, but not so much the Philippines. The third act in the jungle makes great use of muddy marshlands and involves multiple opponents, weapons, and vehicles. I'm not convinced with the big bad's death though... were they sequel-baiting?

It's probably not a good idea to watch The Relic on a streaming service because the creature feature tries for dark, moody cinematography - which I certainly appreciate - but goes too far and I'm sure goes to total black at the usual bit rates (or however these things are defined). But when even a fancy museum gala is by candlelight, crawling through basements and sewers in search of a South American chimera is probably not going to be lit very well. At least Peter Hyams tried - he's a jobber, but I'm usually entertained - and possibly, this was to show the creature as little as possible, even if he had Stan Winston on creature effects (the gory bodies are still well lit most of the time). The creature is sometimes 90s CGI, but in the darkness, it's not so bad, so there you go. Penelope Ann Miller and Tom Sizemore are good enough leads, and despite all the tropes (he's a a superstitious cop, she's the logical scientist!), they don't initiate a romance between them. That's a breath of fresh air in an otherwise pretty standard monster flick.

A Mexican B-movie (though perhaps not in Mexico itself) with some American actors and A-level effects, Demonoid moves at a very quick clip so you never get bored. In terms of the disembodied hand sub-sub-subgenre, it's got amazing creeping hand effects, but the "Devil's Hand" also has a Satanic possession power and it's that hybridization certainly enhances the picture. As does the stuntwork, the big sets, etc. Which is why I doubt Mexico itself would have considered this a B-effort. Samantha Eggar (The Brood, or if you'd rather, recognizable for dozens of guest appearances on 70s and 80s television) is pretty unflappable as the woman who wants to rid her husband of the cursed hand and becomes its next intended victim. Demonoid (surely, that can't have been the original title) takes its horror seriously - its tongue isn't in its cheek whatsoever - and goes for jugular. No one is safe, and the gore is savage. It doesn't reinvent cinema (in fact, it looks like a television production but for its adult content), but you could do a lot worse if looking for a horror quickie.

Given the task of crafting a Jaws rip-off, Joe Dante delivers something a lot more interesting and idiosyncratic: Piranha. There's no doubt this was made by the director of Gremlins when you early on catch sight of stop-motion "little guys" who are about as gratuitous as the movie's flashes of nudity. The Jaws stuff is still there - Dick Miller visually READS as a the Amity Island mayor - but it's everything else that feels amusing and memorable. The worst camp counselor in America. The plumbing-related escape from jail. The comic book-reading little girl who won't go in the water and might just be the hero the movie needs. The crazy finale. The genetically-engineered piranha in the movie sometimes nibble at your bum, sometimes skeletonize you in seconds, and sometimes are smart enough to disassemble your raft with their teeth - whatever the script needs at that point - but that's part of the fun. Piranha doesn't take itself very seriously, and Dante shows early that he can put little kids in danger and not have the audience get angry at him.

My girlfriends went off to Toronto to see Taylor Swift, and I decided that, even if couldn't even NAME a Swift song, I would press play on The Eras Tour just as their show was starting. Now maybe I'll know what they're talking about when they recount their experience. As it turns out, I recognized three tunes, though possibly one of them was used in the trailer and that's where I'd heard it. Not unpleasant, if way too long for someone who doesn't know any of the words, with lots of spectacle and a good storyteller on stage (through the music, the crowd work is a little cheesy). That's perhaps one of the problems with shows on this scale. They are SO produced, there's little room for improvisation. You have to hit all the beats perfectly, or else something is going to go out of sync. So I do appreciate that Swift at one point proposes an acoustic set - apparently different at every show, truncated in the film presentation, but tacked on at the end of "Taylor's Version", the cut that's streaming - where she can just sing and play instruments and not worry about all the bells and whistles. Will I end up putting any Taylor Swift songs in my rotation? Probably not? Maybe a few? Time will tell. For a Swifty - and I get it, folks, even if her topics aren't really in my wheelhouse - this is a great show, and everyone who saw her live have this memory of her they can watch and rewatch (and everyone who couldn't get a strong substitute). For a non-Swifty, it's a little overwhelming and the love/anti-love ballads kind of melt into one another.

When I discovered they made a TV show out of Charles Yu's postmodern novel Interior Chinatown, I thought, no, not doable. But as it's Yu himself with comedy genius Taika Waititi... okay, yeah, maybe it is. As it happens, this 10-episode limited(?) series is pretty great, though I think if you want to know what it's really saying about the Asian-American experience, you need to read the book. The novel uses a television script conceit to track its lead, Willis Wu's (Jimmy Yang) journey from background extra to "kung fu guy" (which itself proves limiting), but here, we're already in television land. So Yu and Waititi lean into that and make it a cop show, going through various eras (80s, CSI, up to today's big conspiracy arcs) to explore how television itself has changed of the years, especially in connection to showing more diversity on screen. To make it work as a television series, ancillary characters get much more to do, including Chloe Bennet as Willis' cop partner, Diana Lin as the mom, and the Daily Show's Ronny Chieng as the comic relief best friend. The absurd metatextual premise is amusing, but Chieng brings more straightforward comedy to the proceedings. So wow, guys, they did it. And the result is different enough from the book that both can still be enjoyed without spoiling one another.

Based on true events, Memories of Murder can be a hard watch, and also a frustrating one as we watched country cops bungle an investigation into a series of terrible rape and murder cases, even with the help of better-trained detective from Seoul who, inch by inch, starts to crack under the pressure. As with the director's other films, it's excessively well-made, but yes, frustrating. I reconciled myself to the fact that this was ABOUT frustration, the frustration of the "unsolved case", the frustration of seeing the police go after the wrong people with the wrong means, the frustration of coming up empty or else seeing evidence evaporate before our eyes because of accidental circumstance. And that makes sense - it's a story crime thrillers rarely delve into - but for an audience, it hurts out brains and our souls. But that's really the point, and Bong Joon-ho's tonal inspiration - Alan Moore's From Hell - definitely exists in that same sphere.

I didn't know Jodie Whittaker and Sacha Dhawan had worked together before Doctor Who! They don't interact much in the three-episode thriller Wired, but they're both bank employees (different branches) coerced into helping dangerous criminals commit bank fraud. Whitaker is very good at playing a complicated character, and there are lots of strong actors around her, but you know, it's hard to get too involved in a thriller based on shuffling paperwork and watching money move from account through a load bar. (I don't know why I've never thought of this before, with all the movie slow transfers of money, but it must be fairly simultaneous in real life, right? It's just a ledger adjustment, you're not transferring each dollar as a file, unless I'm mistaken about how these things are encoded. I'll never see those scenes the same way again, thanks Wired.) Anyway, a watchable TV thriller, but it feels like its complicated story and multiplication of villains needed a few more episodes to breathe.

1959 is quite early after WWII to make a war film (indeed, the tanks are wooden fakes), but The Bridge feels more powerful as a result of its proximity. How could this not be personal? Towards the close of the war, a band of school boys are eager to go and fight for their country and the adults being all too aware of their age and naivety, they are eventually put on guard duty, on a bridge ten meters from their home village. Nothing should have happened there, but things quickly go wrong as the Americans advance on the town on their way to Berlin. In addition to some great cinematography, the reason Die Brücke works so well is that we spend half the film (more!) finding out who these boys are, their lives in the village, their relationship with their families and each other. Once they're in the army, it becomes a little harder to distinguish who is who (barring rewatches), but it hardly matters - we know what they, as a group, as a DEMOGRAPHIC, stand to lose. Enthusiasm for war is a product of propaganda, and the film is filled with national regret.

Mormon missionaries go to a theologian's house and get more than they bargained for in Heretic, and I think there's a version of this film I like better, in which the thriller of ideas DOESN'T turn to horror and still shakes the two girls to their core, but I'm not holding that against the finished product. After all, it works as simply a confrontation between religion and reason, with lots of interesting points made in a witty way. Chloe East, in particular, plays someone who is adept at justifying (to use what appears to be HER cultural touchstones, No-Prizing) contradictions to her faith, and that plays into Hugh Grant's manipulations. His genial, yet creepy character is the perfect teacher, pushing his unwary students into uncomfortable realizations, but he isn't playing fair. Except... is that part of the lesson? There are bits where I was asking myself if, in the world of the film, certainly miraculous things could be true. Completely absorbing.