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kayskasmoviereviews · 7 years ago

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Movie Review Catch-up for Fall 2017

I’ve had a busy semester and haven’t had time to review everything I’ve seen in quite a while. It’s been too long now for me to post individual reviews for each and every movie I’ve seen the last few months, but I’m going to post here a list of quick mini-reviews for each one I saw on DVD or streaming. I will later make individual reviews for those films I’ve seen in the theater this past semester. Here are the 37 movies I’ve seen outside the theater since my last update:

Split - M. Night Shaymalan is well and truly back with this fun, weird, twisted movie. I genuinely enjoyed it quite a bit, and was pleasantly surprised both by its overall quality and by its ultimate direction.

Murder by Death - Okay, so, yeah, Peter Sellers doing a yellow-face Asian caricature as the Charlie Chan-parody character is pretty racist, and definitely would not fly today. Still, this is a fun, funny movie with affectionate parodies of Poirot, Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, Miss Marple, and other classic detective fiction characters. If you like Young Frankenstein, you’d probably like this movie too.

Metropolitan - Whit Stillman’s first film is a weird little delight. His gift for impossibly mannered dialogue and witty satire is fully evident from the beginning of his career. I wish this guy got the chance to make his movies more often.

Suzanne’s Career - I did not find Eric Rohmer’s second of the Six Moral Tales series as memorable as the first, The Bakery Girl of Monceau. In fact, I barely remember anything about this movie a few months after watching it. Ah well.

Starman - John Carpenter’s late-70s to early-80s run of films is one to be envied. He mastered so many different tones while generally staying within the rules of genre cinema - suspenseful in Halloween, horrifying in The Thing, campy and goofy in Big Trouble in Little China, satirical in They Live. Here he does sweet and romantic, and it works. Jeff Bridges’s performance as an alien is awesome.

Colossal - A sneaky, brilliantly written movie that at first seems like a fun mash-up of romantic comedy and Godzilla movie, but turns out to be something darker and more serious than that. A great example of a film built on a single, smart metaphor.

War on Everyone - This is a genuinely awful movie,which is a huge disappointment considering that the writer-director John Michael McDonagh’s previous film Calvary is one of my all-time favorites. I don’t know what went wrong here, but I hope McDonagh course-corrects.

Your Sister’s Sister - This is a cute, emotionally keen little indie drama. If you know who Mark Duplass is, you know the types of movies he does. This is one of them. Not the best example of the style he’s associated with, but a solid one.

Bob Roberts - This early ’90s political satire, written and directed by and starring Tim Robbins, is only kind of funny, but it’s insanely perceptive of how the American right manipulates and deludes people. It foreshadows the rise of Trump in many ways. It’s good enough to make you wish Robbins had more of a directing career than he’s had.

A Single Man - This visually stunning first film by the fashion designer Tom Ford centers on a melancholy performance by Colin Firth at his best. It’s definitely a movie for people who appreciate thoughtful storytelling and imagery.

Filth - Fuck this movie. It sucks.

Gerald’s Game - This claustrophobic thriller/horror movie makes the most out of its single main location and an excellent performance by Carla Gugino. This is a very solid Stephen King adaptation, and is consistently engaging for the way it constantly teeters on the edge of absolute horror.

Stray Dog - This early Kurosawa film isn’t his most exciting or visually distinctive, but it’s still a solid crime drama and a fascinating glimpse into Tokyo right after World War II.

Incendies - This was the breakout film for director Denis Villenueve, who went on to direct masterpieces like Arrival, Blade Runner 2049, and Prisoners. It doesn’t quite have the stunning visuals of his later films, of course, but this drama benefits from an insanely strong script and storytelling. It hits you quite hard.

The Duke of Burgundy - This is a genuinely one-of-a-kind film. It’s a meditative, visually lush character study about two women in an intense lesbian S&M relationship. They live in a beautiful European countryside somewhere, in a society that apparently consists only of female entomologists. It’s truly weird. I was engrossed by it.

In the Loop - This acidic satire from Veep creator Armando Iannucci isn’t hilariously funny, but its jabs do land well thanks to an uncompromising performance by Peter Capaldi.

Man from Reno - Here’s an interesting oddity - a half-Japanese-language, half-English-language contemporary film noir about a Japanese novelist taking a vacation in San Francisco and getting caught up in a criminal’s web. It’s odd, stylish, and unpredictable.

Headhunters - This Norwegian crime thriller starts out promising to be an Ocean’s Eleven-style heist thriller about a smooth art thief, but that promise turns out to be a deliberate lie. What it actually is is a totally bonkers chase movie that turns out to be way more violent and chaotic than you were led to believe it would be. Highly recommended.

Meek’s Cutoff - I really liked this extremely slow-paced feminist anti-Western, but most people probably wouldn’t. The movie deliberately downplays everything you expect from the Western genre to instead focus on an unforgiving, harshly realistic portrayal of settlers who have no real idea where they’re going or how to get there. It’s up there with Valhalla Rising in terms of “this is how history actually would have looked and felt, and it kind of sucks” movies.

We Are Still Here - What at first poses as a quiet, “oh the ghosts are metaphors for something” quasi-horror movie takes a sharp left turn into full-blown, ultraviolent horror insanity. Kudos to the effects people, and to the actors for putting up with it.

An American Werewolf in London - I have to admit I was actually kind of disappointed by this one, given its minor-classic reputation. Sure, the werewolf effects are amazing, and Griffin Dunne is a ton of fun in a supporting role, but the romance is incredibly forced, and the story abruptly just ends on a really nothing note. The script needed more work in this case.

A Monster Calls - Beautiful, well-acted, incredibly moving drama about a boy facing the possibility of life without his terminally-ill mother. It made my friend Laura sob.

Lake Mungo - A genuinely spooky Australian horror movie posing as a documentary about a girl who haunted her family after her drowning death. This movie understands way better than most how to make something incredibly creepy without trying too hard.

Thesis - A gripping, quasi-Hitchcockian Spanish thriller about a film-studies student who discovers the existence of a snuff film in which she knows the victim. The ending does feel a bit disappointing, but the build-up is superb.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare - This is the only Nightmare on Elm Street movie I’ve seen besides the original, and it’s pretty fun. The metafictional concept for the movie - Freddie Kreuger breaks out of the movies and into “the real world,” targeting the actress who played the heroine of the first movie - is very clever and thoroughly integrated into the entire story. The scares and special effects are mostly fun. My only problem, oddly enough, was that Freddie himself wasn’t really characterized enough.

Stretch - I can kind of see what Joe Carnahan was going for here, but the end result just kind of sucks.

My Life as a Zucchini - This is a beautifully animated, sweet, moving film about orphans. Despite the cute stop-motion style, the film is honest about the pain and trauma its characters experience.

Trick ‘r Treat - This campy little anthology horror movie doesn’t add up to much more than some creative special effects, a fun monster character, some darkly humorous scenes, and an overall feeling of mischievous fun, but that’s fine. I think the film largely does what it sets out for, and it eventually led the director to the superior Krampus.

Dark Star: H.R. Giger’s World - This documentary captures the surrealist artist H. R. Giger in the final year of his life. Giger was best known for designing the Xenomorph creature in Ridley Scott’s Alien, but he produced decades’ worth of dark, unsettling art on either side of that film. The movie doesn’t follow a standard biographical format, but gives you a thorough look at his late life.

Dragon - This is a visually engaging, exciting, often funny martial-arts/detective film starring the great Donnie Yen and Takeshi Kaneshiro. It’s an oddball film, and the ending may not be satisfying for some, but I quite enjoyed it.

Gremlins - Somehow I had never seen this wonderful little horror-comedy classic before, but I finally did on Thanksgiving. The story is only serviceable (I can barely remember the protagonist now), but that’s fine, because this movie is all about them gremlins. And boy, do they gremlin it up. It’s just so much fun, of the kind you only really find in those pre-CGI ’80s movies.

Stations of the Cross - This intense, aesthetically rigorous German drama about a fanatical Catholic teen is a harrowing and moving experience. The movie is made with only 14 individual shots, each of them lasting for quite a long while, and each scene paralleling one of the stations of the cross from Jesus’ crucifixion. Not light, obviously, but a great film.

Henry Fool - This strange, novelistic comedy-drama from ’90s indie filmmaker Hal Hartley is a weird, mannered, sometimes-ironic, sometimes-not study of the relationship between a pretentious would-be artist and a garbage-man who might actually be a great poet. There are tons of jarring tonal shifts and out-of-the-blue incidents in this film’s long run-time, yet it all feels of a piece, somehow.

Knights of Badassdom - I liked the premise of this film, and I’m convinced a good movie could have been made with the same premise (and even some of the same cast), but this one ain’t it. The end product is sloppy and tonally adrift, and the ending in particular is incredibly stupid and unsatisfying. I wish this movie were way better than it is.

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry - This is an intimate documentary about the contemporary Chinese artist, activist, and social-media personality Ai Weiwei. The movie follows him in the creation of some of his art pieces, his encounters with Chinese authorities, and his attempts to communicate with the people of China. I came away from the movie very persuaded of the social value of Weiwei’s efforts to stand-up to the repressive communist regime in China, but less persuaded about the intrinsic interest of some of his art.

Phoenix - This stylishly-made German drama in some ways replays Hitchcock’s Vertigo in 1946 Berlin. The film follows a Holocaust survivor (Nina Hoss) who, apparently rendered unrecognizable by facial reconstructive surgery, is recruited by her unwitting husband (who may have betrayed her) to pretend to be...herself. It’s like Hitchcock without as much suspense or immediate danger. The ending is excellent.

To Have and Have Not - As others have pointed out, this 1944 Humphrey Bogart movie in many ways plays like a rip-off of a certain 1942 Humphrey Bogart movie called Casablanca. I mean, in both films, you have Bogart playing a cynical American ex-patriate living in a foreign location and getting roped into schemes to smuggle French resistance fighters under the nose of corrupt local authorities at great risk to himself, while falling in love with a woman. There’s even a piano player featured prominently in both. Ultimately, this movie isn’t as good or as memorable as Casablanca, but then most aren’t. On its own terms, it’s still quite a solid film. Bogart’s as appealing as ever, and Lauren Bacall oozes sexy confidence. Walter Brennan is pretty fun in a supporting part as well.

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