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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.

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.

When I was a kid, schoolyard tales of a movie where a woman was sexually assaulted by a poltergeist made the rounds. It was lurid, sounded insane, and we were offered no title. Only a few minutes into The Entity did that memory come back to me. This is the film, though it's more seriously-minded than what 12-year-olds(?) might have signalled during recess. It's definitely upsetting, but not too graphic, and through the first couple acts, has that "elevated horror" vibe because we're not dealing just with the fear of rape, but of not being believed when one reports it. In this case, it's less a question of he said/she said since the predator is invisible, so we have Ron Silver as a psychiatrist at wit's end trying to convince Barbara Hershey that it's all in her mind. And in a different movie, he'd be right. In the third act, scientific investigation into the phenomenon all but erases these thematic notions in favor of bonkers and half-baked experiments that lead to no resolution or liberation. The scroll at the end tells us this is based on a real (and in 1982, still ongoing) case, which explains why that is. But if it had been more of a fiction, there were enough clues in the woman's backstory to figure out who the ghost was and maybe exorcise it. So it's not pleasant subject matter and then we don't get any kind of catharsis to make showing it justifiable. Still, the big question is: They let the guy who made this also make Superman IV: The Quest for Peace?!

J.K. Simmons can literally do anything and in Glorious, he's an Elder God speaking out of a rest stop bathroom glory hole. You let me know if this or his Milton Berle is the filthiest character he's played in the last couple years. Ryan Kwantan is a man who's suffered some kind of trauma vis-à-vis his girlfriend or wife, and in Call of Cthulhu in a Toilet (in many ways, the treatment Lovecraft deserves), a disembodied voice will tease the mystery out of him for the audience. It's ludicrous, and largely a talky two-hander, but don't think director Rebekah McKendry won't spend money on gore effects, because the deeper we get, the bloodier and more demented things get. It's not the most exciting exploitation of this concept, but it is one of the most original. And we're left wondering if it happened at all, or if, in some way, this was a psychological journey and warranted self-abuse.

No fuss, no muss, no bells and whistles on the way We Live in Time transitions between three basic eras in a couple's life - haircuts and other context clues are enough. We accompany Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield in their meeting and falling in love, the birth of their child, and a devastating cancer diagnosis, escaping the pull of melodrama by injecting lots of humor (obviously, that last bit is tearjerker material, but the movie is mostly fun, bantery comedy) and movie through time to prevent wallowing in heavier moments. A few extensions could have helped the drama, or made moments unbearable, I'm not sure. In any case, we're on a timer - that's true of life and it's true here - so enjoy it while you can. The movie certainly makes the most of Pugh's vocation in haute cuisine, and the birth is a personal highlight. But ultimately, this is a great showcase for two of Britain's best young(ish) actors - they're funny, tragic, and very specific in their performances. I woke up in the middle of the night with many of the film's moments playing back in my head.

Laika's Missing Link invisibly pushes the boundaries of stop-motion by including so many extended action scenes, and this certainly fits its Victorian take on the matinée serial, an Indiana Jones in the world of cryptids which cleverly uses the language of Darwinism into its comedy patter. I quite like it. Hugh Jackman voices a daring adventurer and cryptid hunter (out to prove they exist rather than mount them on his wall like the villains of the piece) who befriends a lonely and humorously literal-minded Sasquatch (Zach Galifianakis) and off they go to find a lot civilization of Yeti. Timothy Olyphant has a great voice for the Yosemite Sam-type character on their trail. I probably muddled this film with Small Foot (out the year before) and Abominable (out the same year), but from all accounts, THIS is the one to watch.

Allison Williams and Alexander Dreymon are former lovers on the road to reconnecting when they board a small plane to get to a wedding in tropical Mauritia; their pilot has a heart attack and Horizon Line becomes a survival movie from then on. The jeopardy is fairly exciting and the effects used to represent it are strong, but while Williams is fine, Dreymon is a total bore. A much better film would have replaced him with Pearl Mackie (mmm, good French speaker) who is the bride here. Imagine SHE'S late to her own wedding, and this is about two besties trying to get out of a deadly situation. There's really nothing a male lead brings to it here except the trite relationship subplot. Although even with that cast change, this plane wouldn't have leveled off at anything better than middling, with its repetitive script - the characters spend 80% of the flight giving each other encouragement, screaming each others' names, or going "you're kidding me!" - shouted over engine noise (which certainly doesn't help the acting). I suppose there's a surface theme here of a woman who hates to say goodbye turning that into a life-saving tenacity (hey, Rose from Titanic, THIS is how you do it), but that's not enough to keep your eyes on the screen and not on your phone.

The Flood is a perfectly good movie about the refugee crisis in Europe, in a BBC TV kind of way. Ivanno Jeremiah is effective as an African man who has reached Britain and must now tell his story to Lean Headey's immigration officer. A frame tale I at first questioned, but asylum seekers' reception is as important as their journey, and the film manages not to tell a White Savior story, or even a particularly sentimental one despite resolving with some poignant grace. The script purports to have combined the stories of many refugees, so if Haile isn't a real person, his story is nevertheless true. Strong acting throughout and quite a touching turn for Doctor Who's Mandip Gill in a supporting role. If I were to criticize something, it's that when Haile is withholding information from the authorities, it's not as clear as the film would have it. We get there in the end, but the frame tale can get in the way.

I suppose setting David Benioff's 25th Hour in the year following 9/11 is, for Spike Lee, a show of resilience. Edward Norton is a drug dealer convicted, sentenced, and on his last hours of freedom, interacting with his loved ones, contemplating the hardships that await him and that he perhaps deserves. If he doesn't exactly know if he can "take it", New York City perhaps tells him he can. Other elements like the wounded dog he rescued some time ago, his Wall Street friend not wanting to move from an apartment next to Ground Zero, the school essays about grief, etc. inform this as well. Not sure how all the stuff about flirting with underage girls really fits this theme though, except that everyone's pretty corrupt in this world and it's therefore no tragedy that bad things are happening to them. But is Lee saying something about his City and 9/11 there? In any case, his direction is quite novelistic here, incorporating time shifts and internal monologues in interesting ways. I especially like the finale which sold me on a film that, despite having a strong cast, had few likeable characters and seemed to meander.

Paul Auster is one of my favorite novelists, and judging from Smoke, a pretty good scriptwriter too. The chapters in this assembly of different stories about people frequenting a certain smoke shop aren't closed loops, but add characters/plots that are then part of the whole. Smoke pervades, it spreads out, it's fluid, and both Auster and director Wayne Wang (who's perfect for this kind of storytelling) are suiting form to theme in that way. An early speech about the WEIGHT of smoke as what's removed from the solid ashes of a cigar sends us into tales of absence - absent parents, absent children, absent motivations, missing limbs and eyes (Stockard Channing in an eyepatch is an amazing look) - building on that smokey theme in wonderful ways. But it's not just a formal triumph. A powerful cast draws us into the various dramas, until it feels completely natural to just listen to Harvey Keitel tell a long story that fits the theme.

An interesting premise for a time travel romcom, The Greatest Hits has Lucy Boynton (Sing Street) able to go back to different points in her relationship with a now-dead boyfriend by listening to the music that they heard together at those points. It's grief's "living in the past" inability to move on made manifest, and she's been obsessed with saving his life somehow for the past two years. Then she meets Justin H. Min (The Umbrella Academy) with whom she has immediate chemistry, and has to weigh her options. And if the movie works at all, it's largely because they are so cute together, establishing a fun, witty, self-deprecating, bantery relationship almost from the first moment. The boyfriend in the past is CW-handsome, but feels more like a comfy couch, which I think is well set up. One character is the excitement/awkwardness of a new relationship; the other is the comfortable, this will last forever, ease of an old, practised one... and part of the equation she must solve. It's pleasant, though I would have liked the tunes to hit harder. Perhaps there just weren't a lot of songs I knew, but they felt like off-the-rack, we own these so use them, as opposed to specifically chosen for the story. It's a cute film about learning to move on (Min also has a similar subplot) through self-actualization and accepting you can't control everything.

At the crossroads between Silence of the Lambs and The X-Files, Longlegs is much less opaque than (though perhaps as weird as) Osgood Perkins' past work. It takes the tack many horror films have been taking of late and that's the "throwback", setting stories in certain eras where its brand of horror was in vogue. So there's a Satanic vibe in his one, and therefore crimes going back to the 70s, but we're following a female FBI agent who is tracking a serial killer in the 90s. She appears to be psychic, there's an occult element to the murders, and the film is shot in Canada-playing-the-U.S. (the rural architecture alone is a giveaway for Canucks), so you're kind of wondering where Mulder and Scully are during all this, but it's definitely one of those serial killer thriller-horror flicks from the latter decade. I might soon get tired of throwbacks, but not yet. Longlegs has a strong mystery, a good anxious performance by Maika Monroe, a weird one from Nicolas Cage, and a solution you don't see coming, but makes perfect sense given the information we're given. Where the 70s-90s mix may set uneasy is the lack of full resolution, which is a horror trope, where the police thriller would include a more definitive epilogue. But it's not like I'll ever need another scene with someone sitting on the back bumper of an ambulance...

I can't be sure how the theatrical cut of Kingdom of Heaven plays, but the 45 minutes restored to the director's cut are probably crucial to the film's quality. At a glance, I would bet the exploration of religion and faith took the biggest hit, given that reviews of the day seem to peg it as "shallow". Which it most definitely is not. Orlando Bloom plays one of the few "good men" in the 12th-Century Holy Kingdom of Jerusalem, protecting the piece from ambitious warmongers from within and without, his Christianity contrasting with the false piety of the privileged who give themselves exceptions to better serve their venal ambitions. The film starts on a worm inside an apple as foreshadowing, and our man Balian (who seems pretty disconnected from the historical personage), despite feeling himself out of God's grace for his sins, nevertheless strives to stave off corruption and embrace Knightly virtues. The epic of course has great battle scenes, an impressive cast, huge sets and vistas, etc., but it's in this (still relevant) dissection of religion and religiosity that it shines. It certainly has a lot of beats that feel like they were repurposed from Gladiator, but in the service of something larger and more meaningful.

There were many versions of 2010's Robin Hood, at least in treatment and script form, and none of them were as serious as what Ridley Scott eventually delivered. I can't say they would have been any better - a romantic triangle between the Sheriff, Robin and Marion, the Sheriff as a CSI investigator, etc. - than a gritty, pseudo-historical origin story for the legend of Robin Hood. The easiest criticism to levy against it is that it's just not Robin Hood. You recognize the names, but putting the character before the more famous events of the legend means he's trapped in Ridley Scott sword battles (seemingly in the margins of his Kingdom of Heaven) and generally not being the spirited outlaw we want him to be. The second is that its difficult development sometimes shows with heavy back and forth between versions. In trying to reconcile the Earl of Loxley and Robin Hood identities, it has Robin steal a man's identity, then is TOLD to take that identity, then his true origins are revealed to be more noble than expected... What's happening here. Similarly, in trying to reconcile legend and history, King John has to be both corrupt AND the man who signed the Magna Carta. It's a bit of a jumble, even if I generally enjoyed the re-inventions. This is also the movie on which Russell Crowe became friends with Scott Grimes and Alan Doyle, leading to an appearance on an episode of Republic of Doyle - a bit of Canadian TV history that is rather dear to me because the "how" is amusingly crazy.

Sometimes you're in the mood for a shitty space station movie, but I.S.S. is so aggressively mid, I'm not sure it fits the bill. Wielding its political message like a blunt instrument, it wastes no time getting to its announced premise - nuclear war breaks out on Earth and on the International Space Station, six astronauts (three Americans and three Russians, which sure doesn't feel very "international") jump at each other's throats. Because of their relationships, it's possible the lines won't be drawn geographically, so there's a lot of paranoia, but that's not where the interest lies (to the film's detriment). Rather, the moments where people feel truly conflicted shine the brightest... except it really is shot like a TV-strength thriller. And then there's the rather unresolved ending that makes you wonder if it was worth sitting through the preceding hour and a half, and the slightly ridiculous stakes of the I.S.S. somehow carrying the "cure to radiation poisoning". Space junk.

Shinya Tsukamoto shoots Bullet Ballet with raw black and white energy like his Tetsuo the Iron Man, but without the surreal technogore, making for a more approachable, but no sunnier film experience. He plays the central role, a man whose girlfriend took her own life, sending him on a path of vigilantism to exact revenge on those who procured her the gun. I've seen a lot of revenge pictures - it's a favorite subgenre - but I don't think there's ever been one where so much of the action was about procuring a weapon (it should always be this difficult). And even once he has the means, our man doesn't become a hyper-competent everyman. Quite the opposite. And there's the sense that leaving the bad guys alone and letting them off each other would probably be more efficient. Even the crime he's trying to avenge has a desperate and self-destructive aimlessness (pun intended). And what of the prostitute with a death wish who stands in for the barely present girlfriend? Friend or foe or an incarnation of death itself? Some powerful images here, showing you really don't need a lot of money to make an impactful movie.

When you don't have access to the Beekeeper or the Equalizer, you have to take things into your own hands. The eponymous Thelma may be 93, but she likes doing things for herself, like tracking down the scammers who wrung 10,000 dollars out of her on a phone call. She's helped on this mission by Richard Roundtree (Shaft!) in his last role (RIP), and her "man in the chair" Fred Hechinger (her hapless grandson). It's not QUITE Punisher Granny as the trailers make it seems, but it does poke fun at action movie tropes by giving them a silver finish. Ultimately, it's about how the middle generation - here played to comic perfection by Parker Posey and Clark Gregg - infantilize their aged mother and their twentysomething son. And how the former rejects that vision of herself and the latter seems conditioned by it and has to get beyond it. A lot of laughs, and June Squibb the strong heart of the film thanks to which the film works as well as it does.

A much better action thriller than one might think from the stock title, Ricochet stars Denzel Washington as a maverick cop, then maverick D.A., on his way to maverick mayor, whose most notable arrest comes back to haunt him in the form of an insane John Lithgow whose plans to destroy his humiliator's life border on the supervillain. For Daredevil fans, this is Denzel: Born Again. Russell Mulcahy (Highlander, Razorback) directs this thing with an eye for the novel and unusual, and I can safely say it contains scenes I've never really seen before - the initial arrest, the arm wrestling, the parole hearing, and Denzel Washington flashing his willy at the Bionic Woman - despite the essentially formulaic nature of the genre. Everyone is clearly having fun with the material - they even let Kevin Pollak do his Captain Kirk impression. Which is sort of at odds with just how dark the story gets, but I don't think it's a deal breaker. Lots of energy on the screen counts for something.

Pretty usual for an 80s historical biopic, Glory is a black story as told through the Messianic white character who wrote the history (in this case, through letters). It's something Denzel Washington's almost too modern black activist might have called out, and that hurts the picture in retrospect. Unfortunately, the problem is compounded by casting Matthew Broderick as Colonel Shaw - the man in charge of the first black regiment in the American Civil War - and I have a hard time buying him as any historical personage. Washington gives a strong and varied performance - and got his first Oscar for it - but props should also go to a very young Andre Braugher as his counterpart, an educated New England soldier who character arc is almost opposite. He hardens where Washington softens. Needless to say, Morgan Freeman and Cary Elwes are good too. The Civil War is from an era where, because of technical limits, they had the dumbest strategies - the whites of their eyes, indeed - but director Zwick manages to make the main battles reasonably exciting. The film takes the Rebels' perfidy for granted, and so doesn't spare the Union any criticism. It comes off as just as bad or worse, but for their cause. Well made and all, but I can't get very excited about it.

The movie Daniel Espinosa hopes to be remembered for instead of Morbius, Safe House is a pretty solid spy action thriller in which Ryan Reynolds plays a CIA safe house keeper itching for more action and gets more of it than he ever bargained for when Denzel Washington's renegade agent is caught and brought there. Seeing as Denzel's character is a master manipulator (but is he nonetheless righteous?), I imagine an alternate universe where this premise was used for a claustrophobic, one-location thriller. Instead, it goes for a more formulaic chase through South Africa, with Reynolds trying to keep his "guest" safe from unknown assassins, and himself safe from the guest. Lots of strong supporting players, violent fight scenes and stunts, and Reynolds doesn't undermine the tension with his trademark humor. Safe House is borderline bleak as the green rookie gets an eyeful of the true face of intelligence services, and wonders if he'll get burned because he really quite expendable. Better than it's given credit for.

From its first shot, The First Omen is already evoking the original film's aesthetic, whether it's white skies over 70s America or the golden sun of Rome. But by focusing on the girl whose birth was engineered to then give birth to the Antichrist, the film also has a modern layer, absolutely scripted in the wake of the American Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. It's the dangers of the anti-choice movement taken to its most horrific metaphorical extremes, with religion forcing women to give birth to their rapists' babies, even at the cost of their own lives. Not hard to decode this one. Nell Tiger Free is supremely watchable as the young nun trying to uncover the mystery at an orphanage and protect the girl who seems to be tagged as Damien's mother. Now of course, it's a prequel to a horror classic, so some things seem destined to happen. There's some very nice ambiguity about whether the supernatural is happening or not, which is undermined by that fact. It also helps the savvy audience member figure out what's happening before it's actually revealed and makes various call-backs and tributes perhaps expected (except they do play things completely differently, and don't limit themselves to The Omen). And yet, they still pull an ending that, while never contradicting the previous films, also opens the door to future chapters in the series. I quite liked it, perhaps as much as the original.

In Farewell China, Clara Law paints an ugly portrait of the United States (or at least, of New York)' but also gives no other alternative to her characters, as everyone back home in Mainland China counsels them never to return. After losing touch with his wife gone study in America (Maggie Cheung), a husband (Tony Leung Ka-fai) smuggles himself to the Big Apple to track her down. The picture painted by the people whose lives hers intersected seems disjointed and impossible to reconcile (it is proper, I think, to compare this with the Chinese-American indie film Chan Is Missing), but it will when they finally find each other. Though I can't really co-sign the twist that makes it possible, it doesn't come out of nowhere. But while the search goes on, the husband finds himself in a world of poverty, sin and decadence, helped on his quest by a 15-year-old prostitute, just to give you an idea of how debased Law's America appears to be. And if there's racism - and there is - it's often directed inward. A self-loathing that goes beyond rejecting one's home country, but one's cultural identity, which Law may be equating with the Cultural Revolution. Vivid images, strong acting, but a big downer. Prepare yourself.

Scene 1 of Satan's Slave - Michael Gough is a satanist sacrificing a woman to the Devil. Scene 2 - A psycho kills his date in an old manor. Scene 3 - A woman prepares to leave her boyfriend for the week to go visit relatives and admits she's having premonitions. These three characters and concepts will converge, but all the scenes really have in common is that each woman is naked. But more importantly, it's an example of how the pacing is absolutely all over the place in this grotesque exploitation hodgepodge. Part Gothic, part goreporn, perhaps inspired by EC Comics in the way it delivers a couple of head-scratching twists at the end, Satan's Slave has trouble picking a lane. If you like your exploitation films with nudity, gore and sexually-charged violence, you'll find something to like, but as a story, it seems to spend time on the wrong things and the visions could have been used better to motivate a climax that makes sense instead of what we actually got. Can't quite recommend.

I'm not sure one needs to watch Disney's Dexter Riley movies in any particular order, because the first of these, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, still kind of drops you into the middle of things as if this were a college comedy series you'd been following for a while. There's perhaps more of a sense of introduction for the characters, but a matter-of-fact one. Perhaps Disney felt the audience had already been introduced to Medfield College and its wacky science in Absent Minded Professor and Flubber years before. In any case, this is the one where academically-inept Dexter Riley gets a computer brain in a lab accident, becomes the captain of the college trivia team, and runs afoul of a greedy criminal played by Cesar Romero, recently off Batman. The science is goofy, the dean of the college is a stock comic foil, and the plot finds opportunities for slapstick where it can. In other words, it's your typical 1960s comedy. But Kurt Russell, Cesar Romero, and the debut of an uncredited Ed Bagley Jr.

There are elements of the new Ghostbusters film that evoke the old cartoon show, like Janine's styling and Slimer being kind of helpful, but also that it feels like a TV series, and that's really Frozen Empire's downfall. The first hour is replete with subplots, trying to serve the cast of Afterlife (with alllll those kids somehow making it to New York), the cast of the original films (I was surprised at how much Dan Aykroyd had to do), and a NEW cast made up of pretty great comics like James Acaster, Kumail Nanjiani and Patton Oswalt. Throw some fan service guest stars into the mix and you'll be wondering when the big bad will show up. Not to say the subplots don't eventually connect to the main action, but the movie really is written like a television mutli-parter where the final episode/reel finally brings out the big guns after several chapters of investigation and character building. So it takes a while to get going, and I do like that third act, but the first two leave little impression on me except some fine comic performances (let down by the pacing) and a plot hole or two (not a good impression to leave). The franchise is just too scared to leave the older characters behind, but also incapable of jettisoning members of its younger cast. Damn it, there's so much going on, I think we got robbed of Slimer actually joining the group.

Emmanuelle Béart's Marianne agrees to play model to Michel Piccoli's artist in La belle noiseuse, a word I had to research since, no matter what Marianne says about her stay in Quebec, doesn't ring any bells for THIS French Canadian (but Béart imitating a Quebecker is going to be an earworm for a while). It's essentially someone who's looking for a fight; it seems to sometimes be translated as "The Beautiful Troublemaker". And though we don't really know what the artist is thinking, there IS a sense that, as a concept, he wants to create something that hinges on provoking and angering his model. He's titled the work before creating it, after all. He wants adversity, but he also wants absolute control, and it's only when SHE turns the tables on him that things start to loosen up, that the work starts to take shape. And very naturalistically, too. We're seeing drawings and paintings being made IN REAL TIME, with long sequences that amount to scrapes-on-paper ASMR. We're seeing things they never show, and there's a beauty to that. I navigated the world of fine arts for a while and also served as a model, and the relationship here is totally believable. The awkwardness giving way to a mechanical process, where the body is just an object, a shape to be manipulated and reproduced. The model can be part of the creative process too, and bring ideas to the table. It all felt very real. I also like Jane Birkin's portrayal of the artist's wife and former model, again a person I think I met in the real world. She gives Marianne a warning at some point that seems to mean one thing, but means something additional once we start seeing reactions to the work. Ultimately, it's about artistic process - intellectually, physically, spiritually - and the toll it takes - ALSO intellectually, physically, spiritually. A four-hour, somewhat improvised, French epic loosely based on a Balzac short story seems a big ask, but it was totally worth the investment.

By Song of the Thin Man, it's been 13 years since the series started, and it's eased itself into a vehicle for Myrna Loy and William Powell's banter as a "sexy married couple" (no, really, there's a fellatio joke in this one that's a real spit take), with fairly ordinary mysteries to hang things on. Ordinary, as in, Nick it kind if hinges on everyone confessing at the end. Unlike the previous film, Nora Charles is kept in the loop consistently, which is amusing given that it's about a murder in the all-night jazz scene and neither of them can ever go to bed. Of course, their being out of touch with the "hip" generation and their lingo stresses the fact that they're getting long in the tooth. That and their young boy at home - Dean Stockwell alert! - who's a handful and who Nick is loathe to punish (still a weird spanking scene from today's perspective, but toothless, no worries). I can't stand Asta Jr., the replacement for Sparky who played the original dog - such a jumpy thing, way too excited compared to the real thing. He's not overplayed here like he was in Goes Home, but he's still annoying. So nothing great, but there hasn't really been a GREAT one since the first.

The play premiered in 1967, but the 1971 film version of Little Murders is even more "of its time", made in the shadow of the Kent State shootings, which in the story, becomes a kind of "new normal" in a New York where institutions, infrastructure and morality are disintegrating. Enter a hero for our time (because if the felt like the end of America, what do we make of the 2020s?), Elliott Gould as a photography who has made disassociative apathy his entire character. He doesn't feel it when he gets beat up in the street, and he doesn't feel it when he falls in love. He just goes through the motions, and finds he can't bring people into focus, only objects, and excrement at that. He's like many, insensible to the violence around him, and like some, only seeing what's terrible and not what's good. The film presents three viewpoints and asks to you to choose between them, really: Is it better to ignore the world collapsing around you, allow yourself to see it, or actively participate in it? It sounds heady, and it is in that "70s protest satire" kind of way, but it's also very funny. There are some absolutely GREAT monologues in this thing - including the judge's thoughts on God and Donald Sutherland's a-ceremonial marriage ceremony, to name just a couple. When the murders start happening, things get darker and the chuckles subside, but the wit is still there. Alan Arkin directs (it was almost Goddard, we dodged a bullet, I hate Goddard) and creates a New York City that's truly falling apart, with random power outages, background riots, and a heavy-breathing pervert on every phone line. A wild ride that unfortunately seems even more relevant today than it was then.

From factual story to stage play to film, Breaker Morant is a tale of the neglected Boer War and an early example of modern guerrilla warfare, repurposed into an investigation of what is justified in war when the enemy doesn't follow any kind of rules. Morally, is there any high ground at all, or is that an untenable position (and therefore hypocritical to claim one)? It forces an ambivalence on the audience - which I don't mean in a pejorative sense - making us question Morant and his men, but also putting on their side, since they are clearly in a kangaroo court looking to score political points. And the fact, these are Australian soldiers in a British unit makes its Empire vs. Colonies, and we do want to root for the underdog. But it's not just a moral fable, it's also a cracker of a courtroom drama, with Jack Thompson's country lawyer rising to the occasion and giving the prosecution something to sweat about. Edward Woodward brings a lot of gravitas to the role of Morant himself, and he's well supported by Bryan Brown (FX, but also every Australian movie ever, seems to me) as the "typically Aussie" loose cannon. The film asks a lot of questions, of the situation and of yourself, but no easy answers.

Jeffrey Wright plays "Monk" Ellison, an African-American author, in American Fiction, but Ellison wouldn't describe himself that way. After being told his writing isn't black enough (or black at all), he writes a lampoon that reinforces and makes fun of all the stereotypes inherent to the African-American experience as seen in media as a middle finger to publishers, never expecting it to be taken seriously. But it sells like gangbusters, and he's caught in the kind of success he never wanted, acting like someone he isn't. His personal world is upper middle class, filled with doctors, lawyers, academics, beach houses, the fear of becoming like one's father, and romance over wine. So the movie gives us a "non-black" family dramady with a playful ending that riffs on the "give 'em what they expect, sell-out" nature of the film's fictional bestseller. The whole thing is grand satire, with thoughtless micro-aggressions every time a white character is in the room. Beyond the biting satire, there's Ellison's story, filled with charming and witty characters, efficiently working to ingratiate you to the family members, and knowingly nod at the send-up of white literati. Very funny, and often touching, American Fiction is a full meal that has a lot to say about how reductive our entertainment is, but also wants us to invest in a cast of well-drawn characters. It's like a good book! Indeed, it's based on one: Erasure by Percival Everett, which I really must put on my reading list.

I don't love movies about human misery, which is what Rabbit-Proof Fence seemed to promise. In the 1930s, Australia's policies regarding Natives had them kidnap kids to reeducated them in occidental culture (as did Canada, and both countries did it far past the 30s), with the added wrinkle of a eugenics program designed to breed the Native out through marriages with whites. It's ghastly, and Kenneth Branagh plays this as an evil that believes itself a good. It's not his film, however, and it's barely about the reeducation center the young leads are sent to. Rather, it's about their escape and subsequent months-long trek through the wilderness to get back home (and the authorities may or may not be waiting for them to arrive). If it hadn't actually happened, you probably wouldn't believe it. The eldest of the three girls, Molly, is played with smoldering intensity by Everlyn Sampi, who doesn't look her 14 years, and she manages to carry the film. So though it is a downer of an issues film (most are), it IS more about cultural resilience and therefore feels like a victory, albeit a Pyrrhic one.

David Mitchell and Robert Webb weaponized their sketch work into Peep Show, where they play unlikely flat mates, one uptight to the point of emotional crippling (guess which?), the other a dumb and venal layabout. The conceit (to explain the title) is that we see everything through someone's eyes, whether a main character or a passerby. When we're in the leads' heads, then we may also hear what they're thinking (I would have liked a weirdo episode where we hear the recurring guests' thoughts instead, but maybe that would have broken the mold). If your nastiest thoughts were exposed, you'd probably come off as a terrible person too, but these guys act on those thoughts more than they should, and you can squarely place this comedy in the cringe column as a result. I find Mitchell's character personally relatable, but the only thing that saves his and Webb's characters is that almost everyone else is just as bad or worse. It can be quite a pill to watch these in the span of a few days like I did. 9 seasons, 64 episodes, it got a little depressing by the end, in spite of the laughs. A great cast surrounds our hapless losers, including Olivia Coleman before she was as big a star as she is now, Rachel Blanchard (the Conchords' "Most beautiful girl in the room", and Paterson Joseph, whose performance as the bullshitting superboss makes me think that, yes, they were right to consider him for the role of Doctor Who at around this time.

I'd only heard lukewarm reports about Brigadoon, but if you put Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse in something, I won't be able to resist it forever. Indeed, the dancing is of a high level, and it's when the choreography takes over that the film shines strongest. The songs, not so much. Aside from the bonafide classic "Almost Like Being in Love", they're pretty forgettable. There really needed to be some peppier numbers thrown in. The story, about a man who walks into an 18th-Century Scottish village that only appears once every hundred years and falls in love there, but finds he can't stay, and returns with his annoyingly caustic friend (Van Johnson). Except he hears the call to return. The third act does offer some surprise twists, and I like how they play Kelly being haunted by his experience, but ultimately, it's an excessively saccharine story where people make goo-goo eyes at each other and things magically resolve themselves. Charisse feels miscast, or perhaps it's just that her character is underwritten (as is Kelly's fateful decision). I won't fault her too much for a dodgy accent because that seems to be a characteristic of Brigadoon entire. Nice matte paintings on giant sets too, but in the end, it's just okay and I didn't feel the same pull back to the town Kelly did.

I do like the conceit of spy comedies where hapless normies are in way over their heads, so there was an even chance that, given its international setting, uber-rich pool of possible villains, and penchant for action comedy, I would find Murder Mystery amusing. That's IF my old nemesis Adam Sandler didn't derail the whole thing. He plays a shlubby New York cop on 15-year-late honeymoon with his wife, a mystery fan played by Jennifer Aniston who's the real hero here. Sandler's dumb jokes mostly fall flat, but Aniston has enough comic charm to get us through, and the two of them DO have comedy chemistry, which makes this re-pairing a no-brainer. The Thin Man is a clear reference (Sandler's character is even called Nick), and the whodunit elements work within that context, even if most of the characters are played for laughs. The hardest thing to believe is that "Nick" scored (not-Norah, uhm...) Audrey given not only the beauty gap, but the way he treats her until the excitement reinvigorates the marriage. Not great film-making by any means, but still enough here to justify a sequel or two.

What if Henry Fonda was bullied to come up with the same verdict as everyone else in 12 Angry Men? And then felt so guilty about it that he spent the next few days trying to solve the theater-related crime before an innocent woman goes to the gallows? That's essentially the premise of Murder!, a very early Hitchcock talkie that has its charms - the jury deliberations, the gallows humor, seeing the play from backstage, the tense audition scene - but generally jumps around too much for it to work as an effective whodunit. Herbert Marshall makes a good effete detective - an actor himself so he can read people - and there's value in showing how the police in this case were lazy in their pursuit of the evidence. I don't know why Norah Baring (as the accused Diana... ALSO Baring? That's so weird!) is so ethereal. I suppose this is from the book being adapted that she doesn't really defend herself, but you never really connect with the character and therefore neither care nor believe people are so taken with her. What tricks Hitchcock 'ports over from silent film-making are interesting, but this is one of his lower-tier efforts.

It's hard to like cats when enjoying a cute story about mice and birds.

It strikes me, perhaps more in The Boy and the Heron than in previous films, that Miyazaki heightens the wonder of his fantastical worlds by first giving us a very solid reality, filled with tiny, relatable details. The way your foot sinks in mud. A reflection in a mirror. All the bird poop! Less Totoro than a dark version of Spirited Away, the film nevertheless has its share of humor, usually provided by the comedy grannies, the always cute warawara, and the fascist budgies. But it's still a pretty serious story. Mahito has lost his mother in WWII's fire bombings of Tokyo, and goes out to the country to be raised by his aunt until the end of the war. There he is taunted by a trickster figure, the Heron, into entering the mysterious ruins of a tower and into a timeless underworld. Many have seen in this story something of Miyazaki's relationship with his own son, an indictment of someone disappointingly unable to take up his legacy. But aren't the film's conclusions rather an admission that things look very different from one's ivory tower, and that sons and daughters should be allowed to make their own way, according to their temperaments and priorities? As is the case with the best personal films, the audience sees what it wants to see.