Curse of Bigfoot (1975)
There is a Bigfoot movie below the level of Sunn Classic schlockumentary or The Legend of Boggy Creek. In fact, RiffTrax calls this the Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny of horror films! What's more curious to me than even all the spinning of shit for a yarn -- a previous short film made in 1958 reframed, with no less amateurish production; the bad pretending of adult activity by adults; the nested stories and drawn-out banal action delaying the payoff of several kinds of crappy costume that don't make sense; the laughably dufus ghost story tactic of the bad school guest speaker -- is just how this was ever first presented: released, shown, seen. Internet info has it that this is a TV movie, and from somewhere comes the data that it had a premier September 27, 1975, in Tampa, Florida. It's hard to believe that anyone who saw this, even in those days of regional TV stations, and no matter how cheap they would be to fill air time, would then purchase it.

Daredevil (2003)
Although X-Men and Spider-Man had already made their way, this makes the low end of the progression through Iron Man, The Avengers movies, and then the better Thor entries, for how Marvel got the act down in their own line. There's even Jon Favreau as comic sidekick. The seriousness is still way too soppy -- what's hyperbolic for Spider-Man is just fatuous for Daredevil -- but it's trying to do some things with humor. But there's also the really soppy attempt at humor, such as the meet cute fight with Jennifer Garner. Have no fear: the RiffTrax core team, Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett, took this one on.

The Fifth Element (1997)
Luc Besson presided over this attempt at pop-pourri, if not blockbuster, which he co-wrote with Robert Mark Kamen (The Karate Kid). The result is a mess of elements that don't mix, something lost in the translation of tones. It affects some grand looks, as in the first sequence, but cuts the sci-fi and adventure epic tone with an oddness or humor that is broader than Star Wars, even in its artistic design, as with the exotic dopiness of the alien guard and gangsters. It's an attempt at grownup cartoonishness that suggests Warner Brothers in clamor, and the 40s shapes on the flying cars -- also following the Blade Runner, Brazil, cyberpunk, yesterday's tomorrows aesthetic, but with a louder palette -- though it's not as sly. Gary Oldman faces a lethal rival in outrageous performance, Chris Tucker. A RiffTrax presentation provides some more earthly humor.

Devil Girl from Mars (1954)
Apart from everything else that's been said about this, its more obvious traits, what stands out for me is the juxtaposition of American-style sci-fi with the inn pub setting and assembly, public in that particular British, and here Scottish, way (it's a British production set in a remote Scottish village). It's like an American 50s B-movie invaded The Old Dark House or The 39 Steps. The RiffTrax crew, Mary Jo Pehl and Bridget Nelson for this one, make similar comment in their treatment. It's a case of the type of "bad" movie where being decently wrought -- the low-budget space ship, Martian woman costume and especially robot are striking in their silly charming way -- only bears out the flamboyance of the premise. And on the matter of the devil and Mars, see Quatermass and the Pit.

Crime quirks

Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice (2026)
The quirky crime comedy didn't begin with Pulp Fiction, but it has exploded in number since, and with more of that emphasis on dropping different characters like fish in a bowl to see what happens, or bouncing them off each other like billiard balls. Despite overworking it in a lot of ways, including trying to play cool, this gets some good play off the setup, which is also with a sci-fi twist. Mikey and Nicky it's not either.

Crime 101 (2026)
By contrast, this isn't a comedy, but its interweaving of four characters' paths resembles that kind of plot. The tone is brooding, foreboding -- which, among other things, shows more range for Chris Hemsworth, the kind we already knew Mark Ruffalo had -- and it opens up more complicated everyday matters like the sort of regular business that can seem not so different from crime, but it doesn't dig into that for the sake of its plot mechanics, including resolution, which makes it seem ultimately lighter. In fact, sometimes the comedies can have more resonance, figurative charge, because they have more play, in more than one sense, whereas the serious can be, if not dogmatic, more constricted to follow its straighter path.

Zodiac Killer Project (2025)
Charlie Shackleton's attempt to make lemonade from a failed attempt at a Zodiac killer documentary -- because he didn't get the rights to the book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge by Lyndon E. Lafferty -- is a staged conversation in which he gives his account of what happened, along with musings on the whole line of true crime documentaries and the obsession with the subject. The reality principle: reflection comes from sour grapes. Shackleton illustrates his account with the sort of "evocative B-roll" tactics he's also calling out, while he's also evoking a lot of what's not going on, with surveillance-like shots of some of his locations zooming in on useless details. The attempt at offhand good humor also comes off as flip, and it might be easy to react with too much enthusiasm or indignation until you realize the ambivalence catches anyone.

Movie Brains T-shirt
Well-Worn Lines Collection

No Other Choice (2025)
Park Chan-wook (Old Boy, The Handmaiden) directed, and co-wrote with Lee Kyoung-mi, Don McKellar, Jahye Lee, based on The Axe, a book by Donald Westlake -- with an ingenious title because he set the tale of downsizing in the paper business. There was also a 2005 film directed by Costa-Gavras based on the book. This has a leering, grasping quality of horror films or thrillers and mixes elements that might seem to be jumps in tone or form. In that way, too, the progression of the central character is more reaction, the clatter of billiard balls, though the effect of pitting the benefit of fewer over many isn't lost.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
John Ford isn't in his element here. Without his usual exterior shooting, using mostly a sound stage, the movie looks and sounds like a TV Western. The setups are similar to his set cross-sections in movies like The Searchers, and there are a few exterior scenes, but without the level of photography of either the black and white My Darling Clementine or the color Searchers. All this was due to budget constraints, so literally to production value, but nonetheless. The story sets up an interesting scheme of the taming of the West with the advent of civil organization, and moreso a parable of law, power, violence and justice between the characters played by James Stewart, John Wayne and Lee Marvin as the title character. The folksy lightness to the social environment characteristic of Ford's movies, even other than the Westerns and regardless of the scriptwriters, comes off more stagey in the TV way, and particularly with Marvin and his henchmen, Strother Martin and Lee Van Cleef, though quite the trio they are. It may be an attempt to portray gleeful malice and corruptibility, but it's more madcap than menacing.

Send Help (2026)
By contrast to How to Make a Killing, Sam Raimi's sorta kinda version of The Admirable Crichton or Swept Away, written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, has such broad characterization that it seems at start wacky comedy. But that surprisingly has a fresh sense once we get to the island. The silliness, especially with Rachel McAdams, becomes more workably lifelike, part of sticking to the guns with the characters, their drives and foibles. The escalations also seem to play out formal variations, parody, allegory, surreal, screwball, and McAdams and Dylan O'Brien give relish for the fun of it all.

How to Make a Killing (2026)
This redo of Kind Hearts and Coronets certainly doesn't have the predecessor's various charms -- Alec Guinness as eight characters, Dennis Price, Joan Greenwood -- though perhaps in its way it's more apt as a comedy of manners for current times. The heredity certainly doesn't work the same way as for the British context, but that makes another kind of comment about the U.S. The twist here is more of the knife of the Pyrrhic victory, getting everything you wanted but only after you've learned the cost of that, more like Room at the Top. Writer, director John Patton Ford's Emily the Criminal was better at the cringe factor of the drama, whereas here the more thriller kind of drama flattens the contrast of the original.

Dave (1993)
Director Ivan Reitman delivers a quieter, softer sort of comedy than his usual -- Meatballs, Ghostbusters, Twins, etc. -- written by Gary Ross (Big, Pleasantville, The Hunger Games), and it gives room for the cast to play more delicately, which particularly suits Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver and Frank Langella. It's nice to notice other things when the madcap or suspense aren't being constantly cranked up. Even with the Capresque mollification, pandering with the sentiment even if it's otherwise worthy, the ability to play with the material -- government, the workings of office, politics and politicians, behavior and people as characters and types -- is also significant.

Permanent Midnight (1998)
Some wit and tone get washed out by a tack that's almost too straight, and then towards the end comes a rock ballad kind of soulful. It's not so much that it's like some TV movie earnest prosaic as that it just doesn't have some other take to contribute. Until its epigraph with the talk shows.

29th Street (1991)
The directorial debut of George Gallo who wrote Midnight Run (and later wrote and directed Trapped in Paradise), based on a story by Frank Pesce and James Franciscus about the former winning the first New York state lottery, has its own cozy little charm of the kind Danny Aiello and Anthony LaPaglia could deliver (in Italian neighborhood style before it was largely known the latter is Australian). Pesce, himself an actor, claimed this was a true story, except the part about actually winning the lottery. In the movie, there's a kind of nice, modern version of "The Gift of the Magi" -- it's a Christmas twist movie, too -- which is then given a further twist that winning the $6 million prize provides, because Pesce wanted a happy ending.

The Associate (1996)
Strawman feelgood vehicle for Whoopi Goldberg at the height of her fame (this was one of four 1996 films with her), about a black woman running into the white man ceiling of Wall Street. Despite the predictable melodrama gyrations, this is interesting for not trying to be quite too serious nor quite too wacky, carrying along with some spirit nonetheless. As with her character in the movie, it puts off doing too much in the disguise of the invented person, but when she does appear in that, there's a strangely Marlon Brando quality, which is also remarked by another character in the movie. Perhaps most interesting is seeing this as reflexive of Goldberg's own career, having to get along in precisely this sort of package, keeping her cool gliding through all the contortions around her. This also has Tim Daly, of Diner notably, in a more rare film role, as the main weasel.

Lady in Cement (1968)
Sequel to Frank Sinatra's Tony Rome vehicle of the previous year, this may be striking for some of the frankness for its time, but it's also in a woozy, if not sleazy, vibe of trying to be hip and funny. Despite headliners Sinatra and Raquel Welch, Dan Blocker of Bonanza fame makes the biggest mark, not just literally.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (2025)
Starts out well, with a good opener for Sam Rockwell, and the cast performs its task well even when that's not the best asked of them by the script and direction. Rockwell is fun throughout, but that's part of the way it's strangely light and deft, but then heavy-handed. Backtracking paths become Black Mirror-like as vignettes and tone, and then the ending becomes even more heavy, unsubtle and simplistic.

War Machine (2026)
The army's entire official disposition is hardass drill sergeant. All the radio and PA announcements sound that way, all the brass are like that, and Dennis Quaid's major scowls at everything. Despite that, and an opening scene that's mawkishly macho, this settles down and accomplishes two things that are no small feat: it actually doesn't punch up the squad characters shtick, in the long line of hackneyed derivation of Aliens, and it sticks to its guns of having no guns. The ordeal is one of being badly outmatched and barely surviving. Granted it's another Predator for that, but it actually manages decent drama of that sort of courage. With the twist on commandos from that source, I wonder how many will think of the reversal here of an invading military on civilian populations.

Beaches (1988)
Some weird run-through register that's not comedy or drama. It's that constant pizzazz pitch of Bette Midler, but turned into mechanical storytelling by Gary Marshall. It reaches a pitch and falls into a rhythm of blazing through time where it becomes a better shtick of this view of the foibles of relations, the pricks that are not just tolerance but fondness, but it's more by default, and not having set it up and doing it consistently. And it has too much sentimental manipulation to make it something more artful like that. The Randy Newman song, "I Think It's Going to Rain Today," is the perfect example of the sort of touch this uses without getting.

Pillion (2025)
Like Twinless also of last year, this has implications beyond sexual orientation, beyond even specific kinds of relationship -- the love ones, not just the dom-sub ones. Jacques Lacan's "il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel" (most often translated as "there is no sexual relationship") might as well be: there is no rapport. Harry Lighton here manages to skirt enough in a useful way -- not make it too much of one thing or another, although this also has some inadvertently comic effects, perhaps also in a dreamlike or absurdist way -- that we can see this, not just allegorically or as parable, but more broadly even about what it involves. In the dom-sub here we can see the orientation of the idealization of the other as the subject, and the orientation towards the other as the object. Just as Lacan, like Gilles Deleuze, was keen to note that the masochist was the master of the sublimation, or manipulation at least, of the lack, and the sadist is at the mercy of the notion of control, Lighton makes a nice twist with both romance dramas and this apparently more unconventional line with a moment that shows where the greatest weakness is, and even though it might be pressing it as any sort of flush realistic representation, it has its parable kind of significance. Twinless cleverly works its discourse into the play, while this shows more than tells.

The Prince of Tides (1991)
So prefabricated it's like a dramatic declamatory, or perhaps popular movie dramatic declamatory, and that's even Nick Nolte's performance, though it falls to Barbara Streisand as director. It sets up its own distinction of the idyllic facade of a Southern life and what that hides, so it's not all quite as resoundingly cloying as the opening, but it's hard to even settle into interest of the matter. And after the most serious revelation, scenes that might've been farce turn it to addled melodrama.

Scream 7 (2026)
The reflexive stuff is more and more a bad projection of horror fans, like commercials portraying customers raving for their products. The lead-in sequence lathers that on with the death house attraction, and then the obligatory sequence -- for this franchise -- of characters throwing down horror movie discussion as exposition and vice versa. Apart from that, there's lots of dry setup with Neve Campbell that seems to play on the appeal of the franchise history, or I don't know what. Once the actual slasher mechanics start up, there are, typical of the whole series, some interesting, sometimes bluntly funny turns even with gore, the perps never too super-human to get some blows of their own.

Shelter (2026)
The story is a patchwork of so many others, even the girl that Jason Statham's dark operator is protecting, but it's done with a style, even if overdone -- music is good but used too much, handheld gets just ridiculous sometimes -- that makes it compelling, sometimes for just the images. It feels a lot better than some of his others that are more straight thrillers, even though there's lots of similar silliness. There's a dash-off about it, like not taking it too seriously, even for the seriousness, but there are some good touches with the action, some change-up moves on it. But Statham also helps with that.

Robert Duvall tour

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
It plays better than the more declamatory nobility of some of the 40s message movies, notable also by comparison with Gregory Peck to Gentleman's Agreement, as with the opening credits sequence, and the charmed childhood recollection. But in some ways that makes it more devious, as with the encounter at the jailhouse, where the children manage to cast conscience on a lynch gang -- the power of good conscience, at least in fiction. It compares well to modern day well-meaning prestige pictures because it doesn't have that kind of bluster, though its composure also at times has a kind of TV show theatrical rote quality, but it amounts to that kind of prestige of its day.

Happyend (2024)
Written and directed by New York born Neo Sora, who also made a documentary about Ryuichi Sakamoto, this slight projection into the future of earthquake alert and surveillance technology also takes the pulse of Japanese students in reaction to these effects on social conventions as well as politics. It's similar to Bright Future. The loose stance gives an interesting approach to the characters -- more surprising when they speak up out of groups, and not signaled or pushed with the presentation -- but sometimes this just seems like general slackness, and with incongruous effects as with the music.

Tom Noonan died.



What Happened Was
The Wife
Manhunter

Burning Man (2011)
This goes so far with chronology cut-up, despite whatever value it would have in the psychology of grief, it's not even so much the confusion of where your anchor is -- from where are we flashing back or forward -- as that it just becomes an affectation. Watching this movie also made me realize that sometimes the embarrassment at the intimacy that's being portrayed is about the conceit of it, not as if we've stumbled into someone's bedroom while they're having sex -- the bare event of it -- but as if we've stumbled into the parlor of their mind where they're in full sway of some idealization, the whole air of their conceit.

Marty Supreme (2025)
It starts out great, like Uncut Gems, and even seems to be making of that rolling bustle a sort of epic American portrait, a tableau of life moving too fast to be caught still, spilling over. That's for about half, then the scene with Penn Jillette is exactly where it goes wrong. After that it's just pile-on concocted, which then works retroactively, to make the whole that way. There was a scene of catastrophe, itself a culmination of the orchestrated chaos, just before, and then the scene with Jillette does that again. The pile-up of all these pile-ups then becomes less like trying to keep up with the material, as in Uncut Gems, and more blown-up, embellished, flighty. And it ends up being so little about ping pong and then even about the character's hustling (it's loosely based on Marty Reisman and his book The Money Player). Director Josh Safdie uses music that's not of the period portrayed, and manages to bring it off in a way that's better than Dirty Dancing -- 80s stuff like "The Order of Death," "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" (well worn though they are for movies) and "The Perfect Kiss" -- and the fact it's music from the 80s makes it even more like, or like a reference to, that movie, than if he'd used modern music. In fact, the way this works, as an interesting material portrayal that nonetheless becomes more fanciful even in its ultimate use of all that, makes it even more like Dirty Dancing, analogous.

Fight Club (1999)
It's a blizzard of satirical jabs at modern lifestyle egoism and soul-searching, with director David Fincher showboating, but it piles up premises before even getting to the main one of the title and without making much connection between them. It may be a satire of the phase cycle, of impressionably jumping from one thing to another in search of salvation, and that might be even the humor of the fight club itself, the self-destruction it more than implicitly amounts to. But even that doesn't play as humorous and seems to be as much its own muddled conceit as anything it would be a comment on.

Frederick Wiseman died.

Honey Don't (2025)
The next installment of Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke's collaborations of lesbian B-movie camp. See Drive-Away Dolls. The overall plan is more playful, but the dry, mordant quality comes off rote. It does have Wanda Jackson's rendition of Carl Perkins's song of the title.

Queen of Chess (2026)
A documentary about chess grandmaster Judit Polgar, the greatest female player, traces her history and development also through her matches with world champion Garry Kasparov. Neither too flashy, nor too drab, with interesting interviewees, including Polgar and Kasparov, and some plucky soundtrack additions to suggest exuberantly bucking against the male-dominated field.

Dirty Dancing (1987)
This movie isn't what you might think, until the ending, which is everything you might think it is from stills, trailers and reputation. It's actually a grainier -- looking and feeling -- portrait of the early 60s along the lines of Diner or The Wanderers, and the title isn't referring to just some speciously derived romance performance, but to the popular forms of music and dancing, like rock 'n' roll, in the context of social and class tensions at a resort in the Catskills. Although it has a bit of after school special message earnestness to it, it manages some fairly evocative spread. But then there are the modern songs, of the era the movie came out rather than what it portrays, such as "The Time of My Life," which aged worse than the period music, and the finale is completely a flourish like that in a tone outside the period frame.

Robert Duvall died.

Side Effects (2013)
From the period, at least since Magic Mike where Steven Soderbergh became a more composed director, this unfolds in an intriguing way, and has a nice tactic of relaying the involvement and suspense from one character to another -- a kind of who done what to whom - even though when it's all over and you have the whole picture, there's some pretty wild leaps involved.

Top Secret (1984)
This was the next project of the spoof sketch gag style comedy of writers, directors Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker, started with Kentucky Fried Movie and after their big success with Airplane, and it was Val Kilmer's debut. There are some good bits, like the inspired lunacy of skeet surfing and the deep focus joke, but it doesn't have the structure or pace of the airplane disaster movie parody and shows the difficulty of stringing together gags that have to work on their own without a stronger spine.

The Doors (1991)
The movie where Oliver Stone's swaggery style may be most appropriate, so the match going on here isn't just Val Kilmer with Jim Morrison, but Stone as well. Even following Morrison's conceit, this comes off as a tilt on biopic, but still within that ambit. That works as much to situate the pretension.

Next of Kin (1989)
This is the movie where Adam Baldwin kills Bill Paxton while Ben Stiller watches -- in case you need to know. It's also an attempt to make Patrick Swayze a serious action movie lead, which may have been part of the wrong-headedness of the concept, but it's certainly too wrong-headed to pull it off. Hillbillies versus wiseguys is the premise, but it doesn't waste any time on incisive or poetic comparison. And Liam Neeson is cast as an Appalachian. Only that and Swayze's getup approaches the zestier cheese of Road House or Point Break.

JFK (1991)
Oliver Stone made the blockbuster movie version of being accosted by an assassination buff. I don't think there's ever been a movie built so entirely on exposition. With the sledgehammer artsiness that culminated in Natural Born Killers, he adds visual aid assault, propaganda-like rifle-cutting to images that materialize whatever point to make, superliminal, while otherwise shooting from dozens of angles, shifting the photographic scheme, roving the camera like a caged cat, and in case you don't get it, adding a soundtrack that mounts up like a jet plane arriving at your gate, especially over the drone of Kevin Costner in the last-act trial sequence. A barrage of stars confers the proper reverence, a la The Greatest Story Ever Told, you know, like who John Lennon said they were bigger than, but JFK.

Sentimental Value (2025)
With Joachim Trier's direction we don't get the sense we're watching these people's lives because it's too posed and swoony, especially when he's showing people in the theater for stage productions. The moments of drama, father writer director coming to terms with his life for his daughter and actress daughter coming to terms with that -- Trier doesn't get us to that point, certainly not in the first 40 minutes to an hour. And the clever trick with the frame at the end only bears out that problem by contrast.

Puzzle (2018)
Good execution by director Marc Turtletaub and his cast, especially Kelly MacDonald, Irrfan Khan and David Denman, and it builds up its situation and the tensions nicely. In going for the bigger drama stuff the emphasis is shifted to the metaphorical sense of the title, despite some nice lines about how much jigsaw puzzles were doing psychologically. We know the weight love affairs can have. Might be nice to see how the puzzling itself could create the same ripples and awakening.

Anaconda (2025)
The cloying way this tries to sell us back affection for the 1997 movie is a double sin, and makes the wrongness apparent every step of the way. The forerunner is a blockbuster version of a B movie, big-budget trash that's fun not because it's comedy, but because it's played seriously. This is a fanboy fawning processed version of Goonies for grown-ups mashed up with Saving Silverman and Jumanji.

The Secret Agent (2025)
Remarkably similar to One Battle After Another, but in the way that those and also Bugonia and Weapons are meditating on the times. Writer, director Kleber Mendonca Filho and his Brazilian cast, especially the lead Wagner Moura (who played Pablo Escobar in the series Narcos), give a more sober bearing, one that makes American films seem much more affected, though it's notable, too, that Benicio Del Toro comes off more like this in One Battle After Another, as he does elsewhere. The non-actorly style is plainer than neo-realism, but in Mendonca Filho's composition, it's also fascinating, watching things unfold naturalistically. It strikes as incongruous with some of the more fanciful flourishes, influenced as much by American movies themselves -- Jaws and The Omen among others -- and the jumping leg sequence. But even this is cited as fanciful reporting the characters are laughing at, and not without real-life reference.

Train Dreams (2025)
This seems influenced by Terrence Malick, but it's also studied that way, which makes it sometimes seem more derivative, and sometimes more likes its own thing. There are some confident, well-observed strokes from the script, dialogue, in one case giving William H. Macy an interesting variation of a character. The drift of it is a kind of dispersal, with time and spirit, but that comes to seem as much an unintended effect as thematic.

Rental Family (2025)
Brendan Fraser has an obliging quality that comes across in all his work, but this more modest production makes it apparent in a way other than that of the big popular vehicles he's been in. Which is also to say, uses it to a fault. The rental family idea in Japan holds lots to mine, and the movie opens up the question about the difference between that and acting, what that would be like for an actor, and larger questions about acting, lies and white lies, promise in the different contexts of those frames, obligation and deference. But it doesn't exactly track those questions. The various cases Fraser's character takes on with the job are treated with a more gliding montage style in an overriding sense of the fullness of experience, somewhat presumptive and redundant.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992)
If you take out an overriding attitude or mood, tone down any sharpness or swerve, what you have left is business, in at least two senses. Neither comedy nor horror, as if afraid being too much one would detract from the other, this is a sort of leisurely hum, banking too much on just the formula of Valley Girl meets The Lost Boys. It's amazing how the sitcom Halloween party tone washes out such a cast, even Rutger Hauer and Paul Reubens.

Barton Fink (1991) ♠
Before their more wily approach to the mundane with Fargo, the Coen brothers turned to the uncanny. This movie is as remarkable, especially in the market of American popular movies, as anything by David Lynch, for not being literal. It's a surreal parable, but the great thing about it, too, is that it doesn't really announce or proclaim this. It goes about it in an offhand way, as in the manner of its humor. The sardonic view of Hollywood doesn't leave us with comfortable ground either. As the plot twists it also drifts -- imagination, perspective, dream, framing story or story within story -- and Barton neither is nor has an outside. The theater, New York, a greater view or purpose, even for the common man that Hollywood would exploit, also get pulled into the drift and the satire, just as any sober view that would be Barton's or other. In this way, it even makes a set with Mulholland Drive as a loop of the fantastic involving Hollywood and the movies.

Raise the Red Lantern (1991) ♠
Red Sorghum and Ju Dou had been released outside of China, and this was already the fourth movie he'd made with Gong Li, but this established director Zhang Yimou as one of the best in the world. He had been a cinematographer before, such as on Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth, and that part of his movie making was never more apparent than here. But the sumptuous quality, rather than just a superficial sense of lush photography, also works with the shrewd observation of bodily comforts as part of the conditioning in this parable of divide and conquer, in the drier, blunter delivery with darkness more than just undertone. Based on a novella Wives and Concubines, the portrait it gives of a situation of women in a certain place and time is even more significant. The problem of calling it the plight of women, or even feminist, bears out the problem with that more generally: taking it as not pertinent to all. It's such a definitive breakdown of any sort of hierarchical system, let alone racket, where each is pitted against the other so that none really see the plight of all, it seems archetypal, like a fable. It also has a great score combining traditional Chinese opera with modern composition.

Annie Hall (1977) ♠
The peak of Woody Allen's work and one of them for American movies, at all but also because for comedy. While Allen would follow with great inventiveness, with at least a decade of great work before declining returns, he never matched the full stroke of this. It was also the first movie he made with Gordon Willis as cinematographer, which played no small part even in Allen's account of his movie making. As well as The Godfather movies, All the President's Men and Pennies from Heaven, among others, his projects with Allen, including Manhattan and Zelig, would add more range and impressive accomplishments for Willis. As Nietzsche said about great tasks as play (see comments for Le Million), this take serious matters comically, but comedy seriously. The dash of the play with form comes from the comic sense. When this won the Oscar for best picture in 1978 (at the ceremony for the films of 1977) a lot of people still didn't even know what it was. Now it's as iconic for the 70s, if less imposing, as Star Wars, which was also nominated that same year, and holds up even that time well for being such a great expression of it, also the end of an exceptional period of American movie-making when the Academy Awards largely reflected that.

Colors of Time [La venue de l'avenir] (1995)
Despite laying out such an absurd array of paths to follow -- maybe they're shooting for a series -- and for how that also diffuses the significance of the jumps in time (the French title translates more literally as "the coming of the future") this manages to have hooks thanks to some of the performances and because, if even in its own more commonplace way, it manages to be about life styles, choices or phases we don't always treat fairly.

To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (1995)
Admirable game effort from Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze and John Leguizamo. In the case of Swayze, this shows even better range for him, with his lovable cheesy movies, than the few attempts at serious action lead, and even than Ghost. But, for example, this isn't nearly as campy as Road House or Point Break, whether on purpose or inadvertently, because of too much setup of melodramatic good conscience.

Hammett (1982)
Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope produced this, and Coppola got Wim Wenders to direct it, but then when he wasn't satisfied with Wenders' work, reshot much of it, with the kind of studio movie reflexive approach of One from the Heart. The contrast can still be seen in the few remaining external shots Wenders supervised, the different view of Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco they suggest. The canned look and concoction of it all, recooking lots of Hammett bio material as one of his own stories, has a broad presentation, like a parody -- The Cheap Detective or Murder by Death -- that's trying to be serious. Coppola's own attempt at popular movie postmodernism, through also Rumblefish, had the effect of leaving out what he'd particularly been so good at, as if formalism or meta-movie-making were only more layers of icing with no cake.

A Scam Called Love (2025)
A taste of South Africa via a culture clash, and one with a twist on the couple's introduction to the family, how they pass themselves, is interesting, but this builds up like so many forks of the story, and those like so many bits, often with flighty effects, like heavy suspense music during a seduction scene.

Nebraska (2013) ♠
The paradox of realism or naturalism, besides of course the glaring one of not acknowledging the pretending, is that it will still have a stroke, a bent, a tone. Every story you decide to tell straight will still have accent, context, perspective, an emphasis just by context or situation or difference. Take for example The Straight Story, David Lynch's attempt, which is even "straight" by reference to his other work, compared to this. The way both of these movies play it straight is also not a purely documentary or kitchen-sink kind of realism, more a sort of plaintive but comic frankness. Alexander Payne goes more into the petty squabbles, grudges, gossip and banal nastiness, as if turning over the rock to reveal that with the process, a casual discovery of what's beneath the casual or faded. But there's also a lightness and gentleness to that, or an airiness like the sparse environs between Montana and Nebraska, mostly around the highways. After Payne's The Descendants, this seems even straighter, more unflinching, if just the accent of its gruffer denizens. But Payne also gives us with this a portrait and expression that are fuller for being slower, quieter, and about the commotion that goes on even that way.

Ghost (1990)
Such a pastiche of plot points and popular movie airs it's like several movies collided. The setup of flaunty yuppie movie lifestyle, the pottery wheel scene that's already a spoof before it was spoofed so many times, the thriller thread, the comedy shtick with Whoopi Goldberg as a medium who finds out she's not fake, the extra supernatural stuff with the ghost training and the schmaltzy heavenly special effects -- lots of business piled on, and for all that a surprising amount of Patrick Swayze reaction shots that don't make much of his character and give him little to do. There's little actually clever or inventive and the biggest can of worms is a metaphysical variation on vicariousness and agency in intimacy or sexuality that shunts its implications for only the straightest melodramatic romance resolution.

Irresistible (2006)
Independent Australian production, written and directed by Ann Turner, brings together Susan Sarandon and Sam Neill, and Emily Blunt in an early role to show off her talent with accents and ambivalent mien. The variation on gaslighting has some subtler twists, and the outrageous thriller turns aren't quite as outrageous as other cases. It manages to be interesting and give some mood, if more tilted toward the furnishings.

Impulse (1984)
Tim Mattheson and Meg Tilly tried to parlay their recent fame into starring roles, and Bill Paxton and Hume Cronyn, one very young, the other not, also appear. The mysterious cause of strange behavior, people acting without inhibition, connected to an apparent earthquake, makes for more drama and suspense than horror effects, and there's no shyness about how characters will be affected, creating some twists on any pure melodramatic outcome. What they use for background material, however, that gets dredged up, adds to a scattered quality other than intended, no less because of the unevenness of dramatic weight.

The Princess Bride (1987)
A begrudging fairy tale as if from the perspective of adults who may be a bit weary of the material from having to read to children. That's what the frame of Peter Falk reading to grandson Fred Savage sets up in part, but the humor of the whole is more mature wry and parodic if also affectionate. This is mostly due to the script and performances, that part of the execution. Rob Reiner had this project in mind after his directorial debut This Is Spinal Tap, but did The Sure Thing and Stand by Me before he got this off the ground. He didn't have the greatest attention to production design and photography (compare Monty Python and the Holy Grail which looks fantastic on a fraction of the budget). In a fun cast with interesting people popping up even in bit parts (like Peter Cook), Manny Patinkin most deftly carries the playful seriousness.

The Fortune Cookie (1966)
Billy Wilder brought Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon together, but this social comedy about insurance fraud though light in tone follows a pretty straight plan. It doesn't have the comedic punch of Wilder's own Some Like It Hot or The Odd Couple, nor the bite of Ace in the Hole (maybe a reason he played lighter with the satire), and it certainly doesn't have the sweep of The Apartment, though much of it looks like it was filmed in the same apartment. It does have an appearance by sports announcer Keith Jackson, his biggest in movies.

Primitive War (2025)
A mashup of dinosaur and Vietnam movies isn't so cockamamie -- well, novel -- if you remember Kong: Skull Island. While this doesn't aim for quite that budget level of blockbuster, it comes in somewhere between higher end B movie and lower level niche production company efforts. It's an Australian production with Jeremy Piven as the most familiar in a cast of lesser known actors, American and Canadian among Australians, giving the sort of intensity that makes this more serious than it should be, especially Piven. The CG ranges from impressive to more like what you'd expect for its budget, sometimes in the same shot. And there's definitely an extended interest in seeing dinosaurs chomp humans, so if you've wanted that from your dinosaur movies, you might be able to wade through all the exposition and business about Soviet experiments gone wrong, although this is probably more gory than most folks would want for the dinosaur appeal to children.

Tron: Ares (2025)
Tron: Legacy tried to be more chic, and this goes in -- well, another direction, if not quite opposite. It's so streamlined for action that it's thin on development, making it seem simplistic if it's not anyway. But, hey, it's got a Nine Inch Nails soundtrack.

Bela Tarr died.



See comments for:
The Turin Horse
Werckmeister Harmonies

The Odd Couple (1968)
A happy balance that works out for all concerned, not least for Walter Matthau and Jack Lemon. It's a case of a theatrical play working well for the movie version, not because of opening up -- there's some of that, here, and it does add some New York City flavor, such as the night photography with the flashing signs at the beginning, and buses and Shea Stadium -- but because everything Neil Simon's play does well also keeps it from movie foibles. It's situation comedy in the truest, best sense, not firing gags or one-liners, or setting up punchlines like tee-ball, but creating a portrait of these characters from their situation and rolling that along through dialogue that always flows with its context.

Nuremberg (2025)
This starts out almost as if it's too flip about the subject. But there are two qualifications of that, one in the movie itself, the other from the situation outside it. The movie sets up a progression that's a recreation of how it occurred then: the revelation of the full extent of the holocaust. So there is definitely a contrast, a setup for a scene at the Nuremberg trials that involves archival footage. The other matter is just how difficult it is to play this sort of thing, especially when everything this message works against has returned and is being normalized. A certain amount of mollifying good conscience has come with the warmed over lessons of World War II, and even the well-meaning rehearsals like Judgment of Nuremberg. But as much as there needs to be room for other types of reaction, there doesn't need to be concession made to unregenerate denial. This movie is also not just the trials, despite the title, but a related story, another route to them, that of a psychiatrist who interviewed Hermann Göring. Despite a somewhat slick, expedient approach, it manages to get its points across.

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025)
Like Bruce Springsteen himself, with his music, this walks the line between popular cliche and anything it would be or be about otherwise: original music, more profound contemplation, folk or ballad or rock that is popular without being hackneyed or pandering. Further twists ensue with artistic integrity or authenticity, since even what is true, deep, natural, soulful, etc., can be a pat or trite idea, itself conventional or cliche, or without understanding of the complexity of artifice. Scott Cooper, who directed and wrote the script, based on a book by Warren Zanes and Springsteen's autobiography Born to Run, tries to make this more about the creative process, which is admirable, but it's also another kind of hazard. Trying to show how artists create often reduces processes of the mind to literal-minded depiction, biopic cliches. The movie starts out looking like that, but becomes more interesting where's it about the particular project and process of Nebraska. For related movie interest, the title track of that album was inspired by Badlands. Springsteen watching a movie or looking up articles on Charles Starkweather provides more pithy and interesting practical action, tracking away from melodramatic swells. I was also wondering if Jeremy Allen White would avoid the smoldering of either the beleaguered artist or the Carmy variety, and he does a good job of giving us a tack that's not just impersonation or derivative.