When this movie came out, somebody noticed some of the spaceship fighting scenes were the same as Battle Beyond the Stars. And somebody noticed the score was the same too. Remarkably, despite those hilarious facts, this is not among the worst movies ever made. SPOILERS?
Tag: Movies
Idi i smotri [Come and See] (1985, Elem Klimov)
This is a vivid, gorgeously shot Soviet war film that often feels like a horror film. It’s certainly a unique experience and its third act is pretty hard to watch.
John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017, Chad Stahelski)
I didn’t like John Wick as much as most people did, though I found it entertaining, and so you’ll no doubt be surprised that I didn’t like Chapter 2 as much as most people did, or as much as I enjoyed the first one.
Skandal! Bringing Down Wirecard (2022, James Erskine)
This is a wild story, of how a seemingly legitimate German company (in some ways the German Paypal, but more than that) committed massive fraud. It’s a story I somehow missed while it was happening.
Du Rififi Chez Le Hommes (1955, Jules Dassin)
This is a pretty classic French heist film with a pretty great set piece at the centre and more plot than you might expect.
Edvard Munch (1974, Peter Watkins)
This film was actually a Norwegian TV series that was slightly abridged for a theatrical release in the rest of the world. (Unfortunately I watched the abridged version.) It’s a typical Peter Watkins approach to a documentary about a historical subject – filmed as if the film crew had travelled into the past.
All the Old Knives (2022, Janus Metz)
This is a spy mystery film with a fairly big dose of romance which feels like it would have been a lot less of a mystery if it had been told in chronological order.
Home Sweet Home aka Slasher in the House (1981, Nettie Pena)
We were looking for a Thanksgiving horror film and so we found our way to this god-awful mess, featuring some of the worst lighting you will ever see in a movie. The director has a single credit after this film, and I suspect it’s because nobody believes they can light a film.
X (2022, Ti West)
This is a fun spin on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre style of horror movie – the young people are filming a porno – that has a fairly fatal flaw, in my book. But I liked some things about it. SPOILERS
Yuki yukite, shingun aka The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987, Kazuo Hara)
This is a bonkers documentary about one man’s quest to expose the truth about what happened to two Japanese soldiers in his regiment in New Guinea at the end of WWII. I can honestly say I’ve seen few films like it. I also think it’s a bit of a landmark as, though this type of …
Untold: Operation Flagrant Foul (2022, David Terry Fine)
This is an interesting, compelling and entertaining documentary about Tim Donaghy for most of its run, and then it runs into conspiracy territory at the end and becomes rather frustrating.
Space Truckers (1996, Stuart Gordon)
This is not one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen but it is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen with a cast this notable, which, for me, makes it feel worse.
The 2022 Toronto International Film Festival
This was my first time attending TIFF in person in 3 years. It was a little exhausting, given how far out of downtown we now live but, once I got the hang of it, I fell back into the rhythm of it and thoroughly enjoyed myself. It also helped that, after a few movies that …
Project Wolf Hunting (2022, Hong-Sung Kim)
This is an extremely gory, bloody and bonkers action/horror film about a ship of inmates travelling from the Philippines to Korea. The theme of it is basically overkill – don’t just hit somebody once, do it seven times. Why shoot at someone once when you can use the entire magazine? It’s quite funny and entertaining …
Chevalier (2022, Stephen Williams)
This film purports to tell the story of the first major black composer. But it’s a fantasy, not a real biography, and it spends much of its runtime obsessing about a made up love triangle and focusing on the friendships of the composer that are likely also made up. It’s a ridiculous movie. SPOILERS
The Banshees of Innisherin (2022, Martin McDonagh)
This is an extremely funny dark comedy that takes a turn for the tragic. It was introduced to us as a fable, and I think it has to be viewed that way given the basically inexplicable behaviour of Brendan Gleeson’s character. SPOILERS
Triangle of Sadness (2022, Ruben Östlund)
This is a satire cum gross-out comedy about the world’s 1%, broken up into 3 parts with a prologue. It won the Palme d’Or so there was more than a little hype going into it. What I can say is that it is very funny and it is breezy 147 minutes. So that’s something.
Holy Spider (2022, Ali Abbasi)
For most of this film’s run-time, it’s a conventional, perhaps a little contrived, serial killer film, with a great opening sequence, that is otherwise mostly distinguished by the fact it is set in Mashad, Iran. And then it goes to a place that these films don’t. But that’s a spoiler so SPOILERS
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022, Laura Poitras)
This film tells the story of the (formerly controversial) photographer Nan Goldin through the lens of her crusade to convince the major art galleries of the world to stop receiving money from the Sacklers (the former owners of Purdue Pharma) and to remove the Sackler name from their institutions.
Free Money (2022, Lauren DeFilippo, Sam Soko)
This is a brief but reasonably compelling and entertaining documentary about a UBI experiment in Kenya by the charity GiveDirectly. Full disclosure: I have complete drunk the Universal Basic Income Kool-Aid so I am not going to be the most critical reviewer of anything about UBI. You have been warned.
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (2022, Aitch Alberto)
This is a coming of age drama about two teenage boys in El Paso in the late 1980s. Jenn and I were not warned it was based on a YA novel and so we did not know what we were getting into. (To clarify: we knew it was based on a novel, we just didn’t …
R.M.N. (2022, Cristian Mungiu)
This is a film that analyzes xenophobia in a small, multiethnic town in Transylvania in Romania. “R.M.N.” is apparently the Romanian acronym for MRI, so I guess Mungiu views this as an MRI of xenophobia is his native country. (Also, a character does get an MRI and MRI images play a role.)
Emily (2022, Frances O’Connor)
I normally hate when biopics deviate wildly from the historical record but, in this case, it really doesn’t bother me as much. And I think that’s because the director essentially admitted it was all made up in her introduction. I have more time for these historical inaccuracies if only because I know it’s fantasy. Mild …
They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead (2018, Morgan Neville)
This is a super arty, slightly hagiographic documentary about The Other Side of the Wind, a film Orson Welles never released but apparently completed. If I knew, I had forgotten that the film was released with this documentary. (I have not yet watched the movie.)
Star Force: Fugitive Alien II (1987, Minoru Kanaya, Kiyosumi Kuzakawa)
No, I have not seen the first Fugitive Alien.
Death on the Nile (2022, Kenneth Branagh)
This is a bloated, basically humourless, and simply ridiculous version of Death on the Nile that makes the campy 1978 version look pretty great. I remember, when I saw Hamlet in theatres over two decades ago, an audience member loudly complained about Branagh’s ego in the intermission. I thought, “But it’s Hamlet. He is the …
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022, Sam Raimi)
Can you tell me why some characters in other universes are played by the same actors and others aren’t? In this film Dr. Strange is always the same actor but in other films of the MCU Spider-Man is played by different actors. Jenn suggested it was British cast who stayed the same and American cast …
Starcrash (1978, Luigi Cozzi)
Usually, I’m pretty good about rating a film I’ve watched through Mystery Science Theater 3000. But, apparently, not in this instance. As this film as starting, I got a massive sense of deja vu and so I went to its Wikipedia page and saw that I had indeed already watched it (or most of it) …
Battle Beyond the Stars (1980, Jimmy T. Murakami, Roger Corman)
If you’re looking for a Roger Corman Star Wars ripoff starring Johnboy Walton, with effects by James Cameron and a story by John Sayles…well, you’ve found it.
Viy aka Forbidden Empire aka Forbidden Kingdom (2014, Oleg Stepchenko)
This is a bizarre Russian horror film starring an English actor (and so dubbed into English, at least on streaming services) that was made in 3D, so it looks extra bizarre on your TV. It is bizarrely listed as “Fantasy” on IMDB and, hence, on streaming services, but it’s horror (ish). I actually saw a …