There are some terrible movies that are technically awful and might have actually been saved by some budget. And there are some terrible movies that are bad for story reasons, in addition to some other issues (the cast, the script…). This is one of the latter, presumably a product of the animal craze caused by …
Category: Movies
Ugetsu (1953, Kenji Mizoguchi)
This is another Japanese film (another downer) from decades ago that is ranked by some among the best ten films of all time. I don’t really know how you narrow down literally millions of movies to 10 but I guess some people feel they can. The issue with so many of these lists which include …
How to Die in Oregon (2011, Peter Richardson)
This is not a particularly interesting film as a film, it’s a pretty typical documentary in terms of form and style. But it’s subject matter is extremely vital – looking at the lives and decisions of terminally ill people who are trying to decide whether or not to end their lives legally in Oregon. (With …
The Final Girls (2015, Todd Strauss-Schulson)
This is a reasonably clever and inventive horror comedy which doesn’t have enough laughs and which has a few too many continuity problems whenever you start thinking about it.
Sátántangó (1994, Béla Tarr)
Since I re-ordered my list of films to watch, to prioritize critical opinion, I’ve been watching a lot of extremely long films. I think these types of films are critically celebrated for at least two reasons: There’s a self-selecting group who watch these types of movies: only certain types of people will sit through a …
Venom (2018, Ruben Fleischer)
The world is a strange place. Because of rights issues, Venom is not currently part of the MCU even though Spider-Man and the recent Spider-Man movies are. So Venom isn’t part of the MCU and there is no Spider-Man in it. So that’s, um, weird. It might not be the worst thing, given all the …
Schumacher (2021, Hanns-Bruno Kammertöns, Vanessa Nöcker, Michael Wech)
This is an extremely workmanlike documentary about the first part of the career of Michael Schumacher and a tiny little bit about the accident. Much like the Jacques Cousteau documentary I just watched, it feels sanitized but in this case even more so. It also feels incomplete.
2021 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)
For the second year in a row I attended the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) from my couch. And for the second year in a row the thing was a bit of a mess, though I guess successfully viewing the films means it was a success.
Becoming Cousteau (2021, Liz Garbus)
This is a fairly traditional and hagiographic documentary about Jacques Cousteau. I had no idea he had such an incredible life but I’m not sure this is the movie to tell his story.
Saloum (2021, Jean Luc Herbulot)
My first Senegalese film (as far as I know), this is a tonally inconsistent horror movie which tries to trick you into thinking it’s something else more than once. It’s super stylized and some of my confusion with it likely stems from having never been to Africa and knowing literally nothing about this part of …
Zalava (2021, Arsalan Amiri)
This is a psychological horror drama set in an absolutely gorgeous part of Iranian Kurdistan pre Iranian Revolution. There’s a bit of a Wicker Man vibe to it, though it is a little more grounded in reality (and a hell of a lot prettier). SPOILERS
Arthur Rambo (2021, Laurent Cantet)
This is the story of a rising French literary star (and YouTube personality) whose career is derailed right at the moment of his big triumph by his Twitter history. it’s something that happens seemingly every day in our world and yet I don’t think I’ve seen yet seen a movie that explicitly deals with this, …
True Things (2021, Harry Wootliff)
This movie follows a predictable arc, if you’re familiar with its type: the main character is struggling with their life, a mysterious stranger comes in and entrances said character (or “insert other plot device here”) , and then life lessons. (Sorry for the mild spoiler.) I point this out so early in the review because, …
Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (2021, Edwin)
This film is many things all at once. It is, kind of incredibly, based on a novel, which made my confusion over what happens all the deeper, as the thing that I can’t resolve feels like its the kind of issue that wouldn’t exist in a book. So I’m wondering if something was lost in …
Dashcam (2021, Rob Savage)
The people who made this movie are extremely enamoured with Annie Hardy. I didn’t know anything about her though she’s actually only a few months older than me. If I had encountered her music when I first encountered Anal Cunt or when I was, say, 22, I can imagine also being enamoured by her music. …
Hold Your Fire (2021, Stefan Forbes)
This documentary looks at a 1973 hostage taking at a sporting goods store in Bushwick in Brooklyn, and how it helped create the idea of permanent hostage negotiation units.
Huda’s Salon (2021, Hany Abu-Assad)
This is an excellent, taut thriller about blackmail and hard choices in Palestine. It is mostly extremely well done and really worth checking out both for how it works as a movie and for its message of how hard it is to be moral in a place where you feel like you have no allies. …
Attica (2021, Stanley Nelson)
All I really knew about Attica was the scene in Dog Day Afternoon, a movie I’ve seen way too many times. I had some vague idea of the riot, but that was it. This documentary collects interviews from the prisoners, the “Observer’s Committee” and the families of some of the guards to re-tell the story …
Free Guy (2021, Shawn Levy)
This is an intermittently amusing and clever film about an NPC that becomes sentient. I have to say, I had no idea what it was about from the title, though the trailer clarified that for me. On the whole, given the cast and the conceit, it’s a film that should work more often than it …
The Dawn Wall (2017, Josh Lowell, Peter Mortimer)
This is a pretty good documentary which I might have liked even more had I not stupidly already watched Free Solo first. I would strongly recommend that, if you’ve seen neither and you want to watch both, you watch The Dawn Wall first and Free Solo second. For one, that’s the chronological order of the …
Untold: Malice at the Palace (2021, Floyd Russ)
This is a roughly hour-long episode from a new Netflix documentary series about the infamous “Malice at the Palace.” I was just getting into basketball then – I think Pistons/Lakers may have been the first NBA finals I really watched – but I did not watch this game live as far as I know. But …
Le chagrin et la pitié [The Sorrow and the Pity] (1969), directed by Marcel Ophuls
Full disclosure: The DVD which I was watching basically failed 2/3-3/4 through part one, so I am sorry to say I did not actually watch the entire movie, just a majority of it (all of part 2 and, as I said, 2/3-3/4 of part 1). This documentary, made by the son of the great Max …
Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II (1989, Charles B. Griffith)
If you thought Wizards of the Lost Kingdom was bad, well do I have a movie for you. Wizards of the Lost Kingdom, which has nothing at all to do with the original movie, has a far bigger actor attached to it than the original and somehow manages to be so much worse. This movie …
Bo Burnham: Inside (2021, Bo Burnham)
Yeah, it took me a little long to get to this, given how buzzed it was, and given that we have Netflix. But let me say that the hype is mostly right: this has got to be one of the best pieces of art about the pandemic – at least as it applied to people …
Wizards of the Lost Kingdom (1985, Héctor Olivera, Alan Holleb)
This is a terrible fantasy film with slight more of a budget than you might expect and some credible costuming for a terrible film. It’s basically a fully ’80s fantasy film, with way less of a budget, and where a ton of the cast are dubbed because I guess they were speaking Spanish?
El guardián de la memoria [The Guardian of Memory] (2019, Marcela Arteaga)
This is a gorgeous film – seriously it’s beautiful – about an awful subject, Mexicans fleeing Mexico due to persecution from cartels. It’s a little like Taming the Garden in terms of how pretty it is, though the shots are not as impressive as that documentary.
High-Rise (2015, Ben Wheatley)
I have read only one J.G. Ballard novel though I have seen a couple of films adapted from his books. I thought I had seen more than one of Ben Wheatley’s movies, but it turns out I’ve just seen one. On paper, I think I can probably see the Ballard-Wheatley pairing as a match made …
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019, David Leitch)
This spinoff is reputed by many to be the worst of the interminable Fast & Furious movies. I must admit I still haven’t seen all of them – though I have seen most by this point – but I’m not sure why exactly. Most of the problems with this movie are typical of the problems …
Magic Mike (2012, Steven Soderbergh)
This is an entertaining and engaging comedy drama about male strippers during the financial crisis. It’s sort of an oblique comment on the consequences of the financial crisis and it’s fascinating that Channing Tatum wanting to star in a movie about his life as a stripper before he got famous turned into this film.
The Human Condition (1959, 1961, Masaki Kobayashi)
This is an epic film, released as a series, that adapts an epic novel. Taken as a whole film, it is one of the longest narrative films ever – by my count the 8th or 9th longest ever, and probably the longest ever made at the time of its release. But it was released as …