Last (x) movies you saw (II)

Eighth Grade I've said a little about in EIGHTH GRADE (2018, written & directed by Bo Burnham, starring Elsie Fisher) , but its most remarkable achievement is the way the audience get situated right with Kayla, both through Elsie Fisher's heart-open performance and the script. Everything feels as traumatic and monumental as stresses and anxieties do at that age, there's absolutely no adult tone present framing it as "one day she'll realise how minor all this was" or "oof, remember how that used to feel"." We're totally present in the milieu, despite so many elements deliberately excluding adult perspectives.

Blindspotting has a little first-film-iness to the script, but is totally carried by the onscreen charisma and chemistry of the writers. If civilisation lasts another ten years, it'll be interesting to see how much the tech-bro-gentrification themes feel like a period piece vs a valuable snapshot of a tipping point. Right now I imagine it'd be largely baffling to non-city-dwelling audiences.

xp wait, WHAT?

Yeah wow, I actually have that blu ray, maybe I’ll watch it tonight

Secret of the Blue Room (Neumann, 1933)
*Lost Horizon (Capra, 1937)
#A Kiss in the Dark (surviving reels) (Tuttle, 1925)
#Too Many Kisses (Sloane, 1925) (personal festival highlight)
#Your Technocracy and Mine (Benchley, 1933)
#The Mad Game (Cummings, 1933)
#We Faw Down (McCarey, 1928)
#The House That Shadows Built (unidentified Paramount drudges, 1931)
#On the Brink (Porter & Weber, 1911)
#Romola (King, 1924)
*#The Cocoanuts (Florey & Santley, 1929)
#Mamba (Rogell, 1930)
#The Circus of Life (Julian, 1917)
#The Stolen Ranch (Wyler, 1926)
#Princess Lady Bug (Barker, 1930)
#The Storm (Wyler, 1930)
*#Brats (Parrott, 1930)
#Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (Del Ruth, 1934)
#A Daughter of the Law (Cunard, 1921)
#The Night of Love (Fitzmaurice, 1927)
#Television Highlights (Schwarzwald, 1936)
#School for Swing (Schwarzwald, 1937)
#It's Great To Be Alive (Werker, 1932)
*#The Coming of Sunbeam (Guy, 1913)
#Twenty Dollars a Week (Weight, 1924)
#Ed Sullivan's Headliners (Schwarzwald, 1934)
#Her First Mate (Wyler, 1933)
#Call of the Cumberlands (Lloyd, 1916)
#The Rescue (Brenon, 1929)

#Capitolfest 16, or J.Lu Yet Again Is Reminded that Not All Silent and Pre-Code Films Are Classics.

celebrating the new thread with some all timers (uk folks nuts in may is back on the iplayer!)

Late Autumn (Ozu, 1960) 9/10
Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson, 1951) 10/10
Pickpocket (Bresson, 1959) 9/10
* Nuts in May (Leigh, 1976) 8/10
* Love and Friendship (Stillman, 2016) 7/10
Hereditary (Aster, 2018) 5/10
Ordet (Dreyer, 1955) 10/10

I don't log short films like j.lu does, but I saw about 8 Sadie Benning videos (made in Pixelvision) that I last watched about 25 years ago; most of those would be 8-10/10.

Three Faces West (1940, Vorhaus) 6/10
*My Beautiful Laundrette (1985, Frears) 8/10
Flat Is Beautiful (1998, S Benning) (50min) 5/10
Swallow (1995, Subrin) (28min) 7/10
The Lovers of Montparnasse (1958, Becker) 9/10
The Young Savages (1961, Frankenheimer) 5/10
Another Girl, Another Planet (1992, Almereyda) (56min) 6/10
Wake of the Red Witch (1948, Ludwig) 7/10
A Girl’s Folly (1917, M Tourneur) 7/10
Gavagai (2016, Tregenza) 4/10
Les Amis (1971, Blain) 5/10

I'd suggest you watch more Davies as prep than Frears, but don't want to prescribe any other TV while yr still not moving forward on Twin Peaks

Davies? this guy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Howard_Davies

Russell T. Davies, the writer of A Very British Scandal. Roughly every second of his works deals with different facets of men-attracted-to-men negotiating a homosociality within heteronormative culture - Very British Scandal is the first that is a period piece, rather than directly contemporary.

Cucumber, his previous main project (eight episodes, twinned with another series called Banana, and a docoseries called Tofu, all named for the hardness of erections), was the best thing he's done ime.

Laundrette's focus on gay stuff is at most 33%.

I just figured Frears was on yr slate because you'd said you were planning to watch Brit Scandal; to me he's a director who is efficient in service of a script's tone and agenda, rather than having an authorial throughline or preoccupations that can be tracked through his work.

if you watch the Laundrette Criterion supplements, he denies being an auteur while his producer insists that he is. Frears does say he considers his string from The Hit thru The Grifters to be a reaction to Thatcherism.

I'm not actually likely to watch that scandal show anytime soon... always drowning in things to watch.

Frears otm! The Grifters as the end of Thatcher reactions, vs the good first step into a bad period of Americana, is interesting, would be curious to rewatch with that in mind.

("gay stuff" is only 7% of AVBS at most, except for how the closet is the driver for every bad action across the fifteen years or so it covers. fascinatingly handled, re. it being a period piece, is how no "character" in it identifies as gay, it's not even an option to consider: those who come out to each other instead compare to what point their bedroom preference is for which gender, how much marriage is a thing they genuinely value vs are having to take on for optics, etc.)

Mississippi (2015), streaming on Netflix - 36/42

*Mississippi Grind

xp I’m not sure what I think of A Very English Scandal. It had a breezy quality, but it was in a very different key than I was expecting.

I loved how lizard-like Hugh Grant was, though. Was he wearing contacts? because there was something very creepy about his black irises

OK, I had no idea Frears directed A Very English Scandal (u have to spell things out, sic) -- because why would I? I haven't seen anything of his since Dirty Pretty Things in 2002. Then he started doing all that Peter Morgan royal shite.

Dream Tower (7.0)
Our Nixon (7.5)
20th Century Women (9.0)
Eighth Grade (6.5)
Demon Seed (5.5)
Quadrophenia (7.5)
McQueen (6.0)
Ocean’s Eight (4.0)
BlacKkKlansman (7.0)
A Stranger Among Us (6.5)

The last one is a late Lumet I saw at the time and completely forgot about. Relatively low key for him. Explicitly quotes from Hud when Melanie Griffith says "I already put in time with one cold-hearted bastard, I'm not looking to find another one." Good one for that last-line-should-have-been-the-title thread: Ask Your Rabbi.

Mission Impossible (Christopher McQuarrie, 2018) - yup, that's how badly my year is going.

It was fun etc.

I forgot to note earlier how amused I was that it was j.lu who pitched for an Electric Boogaloo subtitle on the new thread.

/The Counselor/ (Ridley Scott/Cormac McCarthy, 2013). I saw this in a theater and didn't like it much, but recently learned that the Blu-Ray included a director's cut that was 20 minutes longer. I bought it on eBay for $5 and miraculously, the long version is a really good movie! Recommended.

last batch for a while

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (David Lynch, 1992) - 10/10
Heat (Michael Mann, 1995) - 9/10
Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (Jacques Tati, 1953) - 8/10
This Happy Breed (David Lean, 1944) - 8/10
Ordinary People (Robert Redford, 1980) - 7/10
Fantastic Planet (René Laloux, 1973) - 3/10

China Gate (Fuller)
The Search (Zinnemann)
From Here to Eternity (Zinnemann)
A Man for All Seasons (Zinnemann)
The Longest Day (Annakin, Marton & Wicki)
The Army of Crime (Guédiguian)
La Vie en Rose (Dahan)
Grace of Monaco (Dahan)
Cop (A. Refn)
Once a Cop... (A. Refn)
R (Noer & Lindholm)
Key House Mirror (Noer)*
A Hijacking (Lindholm)*
A War (Lindholm)*
A Second Chance (Bier)
Summer With Monika (Bergman)
Sawdust and Tinsel (Bergman)
Smiles of a Summer Night (Bergman)
The Virgin Spring (Bergman)
Morvern Callar (Ramsay)
We Need to Talk About Kevin (Ramsay)
Katalin Varga (Strickland)
For Those in Peril (Wright)*
Hyena (Johnson)
Ex Machina (Garland)
Beast (Pearce)
Under the Skin (Glazer)
Her (Jonze)
Lucy (Besson)
Ghost in the Shell (Sanders)

All 3.5/5:
True Stories (1986)
Blackkklansman
Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
The Lost City of Z

Mission Impossible Fallout (McQuarrie, 2018) 8/10
the Happy Prince (Everett, 2018) 7/10
Yellow Submarine ( Dunning, 1968) 8/10
Unseeworld U.S.A (Fuller, 1960) 7/10
The Last Emperor (Bertolucci, 1987) 6/10
Paddington 2 (King, 2017) 9/10
Hostiles (Cooper, 2017) 7/10

Um, Underworld U.S.A. that should be.

Gone With the Wind (1939) 7.5/10
Iron Man (2008) 7/10
Tangerine (2015) 8/10

bunch of airplane streaming on the way to and from berlin, the only one i'd seen before is philadelphia story:

all about eve (mankiewicz, 1951) 10/10
paddington 2 (king, 2017) 8/10
rocky (avildsen, 1976) 8/10
the philadelphia story (cukor, 1940) 9/10
happy death day (landon, 2017) 6/10
inside out (docter, 2015) 8/10

honestly happy death day was surprisingly enjoyable for what it was

the gospel of the bear film has reached the troposphere

lol

The Raid: Redemption (Evans, 2011) 6
Mission: Impossible Fallout (McQuarrie, 2018) 7
Disney Christopher Robin (Marc Forster, 2018) 4
Marwencol (Jeff Malmberg, 2010) 8
Icarus (Bryan Fogel, 2017) 8

read that marwencol has been adapted & now will have steve carell in it

https://www.meta-sphere.com/wp-content/uploads/welcome-to-marwen_tete-600x220.jpg

yeah I watched it because i saw the trailer for the zemeckis movie. The trailer makes it out to be an "inspirational" true story but it's not really, not exactly.

baby driver (2017 edgar wright) 6.5/10
mollys game (2017 sorkin) 2/10
suburbicon (2017 clooney) 2/10
the killing of a sacred deer (2017 lanthimos) 6/10
angelo my love (1983 duvall) 3/10
eighth grade (2018 burnham) 8/10
thoroughbreds (2018 cory finley) 4/10

thoroughbreds (2018 cory finley) 4/10

I don't do the out of 10 thing but I'd give this at least a 6. It made me laugh a lot.

lil too try hard idk

*The Naked Spur : 7/10
Vampire's Kiss : 6/10
Dying Of the Light (Paul Schrader Edit): 7/10 -- only 7/10 because Nic Cage is in full on weirdo mode and Schrader's noodling around on Final Cut. The doctor accent is...wow...almost as great as the accent in "Vampire's Kiss"
*The Young One: 7/10 - minor Buñuel for me but still great

Crazy Rich Asians – kind of a riff on Philadelphia Story, but with better-looking people. Lots of film history embedded in it.

What Price Jazz (Baerwitz, 1934)
Felix Gets Broadcasted (Messmer, 1923)
High Flyers (Cline, 1937)
Inflation (Myers, 1933)
Felix in Fairyland (Messmer, 1923)
*Roast-Beef and Movies (Baerwitz, 1934)
*Big City Fantasy (Henabery, 1934)
The Magician (Bergman, 1958)
BlacKkKlansman (Lee, 2018)
Smiles of a Summer Night (Bergman, 1955)

Re-watching Whit Stillman's Barcelona tonight.

I was hoping for good things from Crazy Rich Asians, but found it fairly bland. I may have had the wrong expectations for a mainstream PG rom-com, but I felt like it needed sharper jokes.

kind of a riff on Philadelphia Story, but with better-looking people

!!! I'm sure this cast looks fine, but you are aware that Cary Grant and Kate Hepburn were considered pretty attractive, right?

in theaters July 26 - August 22

Killer’s Kiss (Stanley Kubrick, 1955) - 6/10
Summer Interlude (Ingmar Bergman, 1951) - 9/10
Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham, 2018) - 8/10
Three Identical Strangers (Tim Wardle, 2018) - 6/10
Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada, 2018) - 7/10
Teen Titans Go! To the Movies (Peter Rida Michail, Aaron Horvath, 2018) - 3/10
BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee, 2018) - 9/10

! at low rating for Three Identical Strangers

I knew nothing about the backstory before seeing it at SIFF but on a str8 narrative level it’s my favourite doco of the year

it is an incredible story. a documentary that makes itself, really. what bothered me was how much they reused the same footage from the same Donahue, NBC, + other TV appearances. the same lines. it kinda falls apart at the end, and felt padded even at ~95 minutes. that has nothing to do with the actual story being unresolved, i just thought with so much material to go through (and so many years passed over) the reuse of footage was bizarre.

and fwiw I knew not only the backstory but most of the twists before I saw it. I would've rated it higher if I had gone in completely cold, I wish I could've.

yeah fair enough! the repeated lines are very few & read in SUPER different context the second times around, but if you’re not seeing it / that footage cold, those won’t have the same kick

2 = bad but not totally unenjoyable
1.5 = both bad and unenjoyable
1 = bad and enraging

It was more Nuclear Man's hairstyle that gave it the extra 0.5

Black Mirror (S5 – 7.0)
Drama (6.5)
Notorious (7.5)
Mile End Kicks (6.0)
Sunrise (revered silent film)
Little Lorraine (6.0)
The Devil Wears Prada 2 (6.5)
House of Cards (S1-6 – 8.0)
Kiss Me Deadly (6.5)
Black Mirror (S6 – 6.0)

i haven't felt like watching good movies recently

Street Fighter 1994
Anaconda 2025
The Incredible Melting Man -- with the same ending as The Substance
Who Killed Captain Alex?

all enjoyable

Watching a lot less movies these days

May so far:

Hokum (McCarthy, 2026) 7/10 maybe a bit convoluted at times but I thought this was an improvement on Oddity

Dark Angel (Baxley, 1990) 6/10 good ol' Dolph

Sirat (Laxe, 2025) 8/10 looooved this

Went out to the local microcinema the last two nights, saw a mystery screening on Thursday of Wicked Ways, or A Table For One, starring Rebecca de Mornay. Truly strange domestic drama(?) where de Mornay plays Ruth, a deeply unstable woman with a habit of setting booby traps around her rural home, married to Michael Rooker, who has a secret family in the big city. Another troubled couple moves in next door and things get increasingly tangled. Reminded me a little of Donald Cammell's White of the Eye but I genuinely had no idea where it was going the entire way through. De Mornay's performance is pretty incredible - the scene of her pointing a gun repeatedly shouting "tell Ruth the truth!" is really going to stay with me. Available on Tubi!

Last night went to the screening of Belinda M. Wilson's Black Mamba, a shot-on-video feature from 2016 that might be the most deranged movie I've ever seen. Black Mamba is a magician who makes potions with her collection of demons in jars and has the ability to transform people into furniture or send them to Hell. Various people come to her for help - a couple wants to be able to have a child, a young woman wants to be beautiful, a dude wants to meet some mermaids - and she provides them with potions and very specific, usually gross, instructions. Invariably their wishes go horribly wrong and their lives are destroyed. It's kind of impossible to describe how nuts this movie is, the green-screen usage is out of control and I would really like to talk to the actors about what the process of filming the main sex scene was like. There's very little information out there about anyone involved, though supposedly the writer/director claims that Black Mamba is based on a family member.

Also I watched The Tall T last week, very good, pretty brutal for a 1950s western.

May (* = rewatches)

Desert Hearts (Deitch, 1985)
Carolina Caroline (Rehmeier, 2025)
Power Ballad (Carney, 2026)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Zemeckis, 1988)*
Go Fish (Troche, 1992)
Con Air (West, 1997)
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri (McDonagh, 2017)
The Devil Wears Prada 2 (Frankel, 2026)
Killer of Sheep (Burnett, 1978)
Marty: Life Is Short (Kasdan, 2026)
King Kong (Cooper/Schoedsack, 1933)
Antitrust (Howitt, 2001)
Stranger Than Paradise (Jarmusch, 1984)
Original Cast Album: Company (Pennebaker, 1970)
The Truman Show (Weir, 1998)*

How was Carolina Caroline?

I enjoyed it -- think I gave it 3.5 on Letterboxd. There are some familiar beats/tropes with the whole "lovers on the run" story, but I found it all fairly well done.

Painters Painting (1972) 2.5/5
* O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) 4/5
Resurrection (2025) 4/5
* Vernon, Florida (1981) 3.5/5
A Very Brady Sequel (1996) 3/5
The Brady Bunch Movie (1995) 3.5/5
I Love Boosters (2026) 3/5
* Fugazi: Instrument (1999) 4/5
At Close Range (1986) 3.5/5. Finally got around to this after seeing the clips in Madonna's "Live to Tell" video 40 years ago.
Prison on Fire (1987) 3.5/5
Magellan (2025) 4/5
Kaili Blues (2015) 3/5
* Speed Racer (2008) 4/5
Working Girls (1931) 3/5
* Deadwood: The Movie (2019) 4/5
The Blue Gardenia (1953) 3/5
Hospital (1970) 4.5/5. The guy who looks like Paul Dano projectile vomiting -- wonder what happened to him.
Leonardo Da Vinci (2024) 4/5
Freakscene: the Story of Dinosaur Jr. (2021) 3/5

peter hujar's day 8/10
sicario 8.5/10
yeast 6/10
the drama 6/10
die my love 5/10
project hail mary 7/10
god's own country 7/10
mile end kicks 5/10
the devil wears prada 2 5/10
blue heron 7/10
the newton boys 7/10
damsels in distress 7/10
the last days of disco 9/10
to live and die in LA 8/10
barcelona 7/10
at land <3
margot at the wedding 5/10
obsession 7/10
AI: artificial intelligence 9/10
nirvanna the band the show the movie 8/10
mad bills to pay 7/10

choppers (pixar 2026) 8/10. no wait it's hoppers. why is the beaver movie called hoppers? anyways it's a movie about rage and it's paced like a crank movie.

Less than 3 for at land is harsh

New:
I Love Boosters (3.5/5, I'm too old for this shit)
Carolina Caroline (3.5/5, Badlands is a hard act to live up to)

Old:
Nuts in May (4.5/5, there's a little of Keith in all of us, well me anyway)
The White Reindeer (4.5/5, great 1952 Finnish folk horror featuring the largest reindeer herd you've ever seen)
Diamonds of the Night (4.5/5)
Intentions of Murder (4.5/5, Shohei Imamura takes it too far yet again)
Gion bayashi (4.5/5)
Devi (4.5/5, Satyajit Ray may be my favourite director right now)

Right Now, Wrong Then (4/5 but how many Hong Sang-Soo films do I actually need to see?)
The Pied Piper (4/5, strange 1980s Czech animation)
Hyuil/A Day Off (4/5, 1960s Korean angst)
The Hitch-Hiker (4/5, Ida Lupino's finest directorial moment, very realistic self-centred whining from the titular psychopath)
The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (4/5)
The Savage Eye (4/5)
Old Joy (4/5)
Wendy and Lucy (4/5)
It Happened Here (4/5)
Juliet of the Spirits (4/5)
Wanda (4/5)
A Generation (4/5, first part of Andrzej Wajda's war trilogy)
Lightning (4/5, mid-ranking Mikio Naruse therefore better than most)
Ornamental Hairpin (4/5)
A Moment of Innocence (4/5, by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, amazing final freeze-frame)
Last Chants for a Slow Dance (4/5)
The Flowers of St. Francis (4/5, half a point docked for being Catholic propaganda)
The Upturned Glass (4/5)
This is Not a Film (4/5)
Confessions of a Psycho Cat (4/5)

Kaili Blues (3.5/5)
Notes Towards an African Orestes (3.5/5, Pasolini doc on a film he never got made)
Illusion Travels by Streetcar (3.5/5, middling Bunuel from the Mexican era)
A Report on the Party and Guests (3.5/5)
Street Angel (3.5/5, 1937 Chinese drama, fascinating period piece)

Army of Darkness (3/5)
Carry On Dick (3/5, disappointing, which tells you I had expectations)
Carry On Henry (3/5, not the best era for Carry Ons, not sure there was one really)

Paper Moon (6.0)
Jules and Jim (7.5)
Chinatown (10.0)
Blue Heron (6.5)
A Hard Day’s Night (7.0)
Sunday in New York (5.0)
Backrooms (5.5)
Stranger Than Paradise (8.0)
Peter Asher: Everywhere Man (6.0)
The World of Henry Orient (6.5)
Black Mirror (S7 – 6.0)

Took me over a month to finish the last season of Black Mirror, so sketchy on particulars. Thought two or three episodes started strong, then fizzled out towards the end. The "USS Callister" reprise was interminable. The only episode I liked unreservedly was "Eulogy," which I though was quite moving.

June's watches

Night on Earth (Jarmusch, 1991)
Cry-Baby (Waters, 1990) - haven't seen this since the 1990s
The Wraith (Marvin, 1986)
Picasso Trigger (Sidaris, 1988)
Voyage of the Rock Aliens (Fargo, 1984) - second viewing to share with spouse
Chopping Mall (Wynorski, 1986) - re-watch
Guns (Sidaris, 1990)
Voyage of the Rock Aliens (Fargo, 1984)
Hot Fuzz (Wright, 2007) - re-watch to take my mind off of...
Obsession (Barker, 2025)
Vicious Lips (Pyun, 1986)
Land of Doom (Maris, 1986)

wow, vicious lips, chopping mall, voyage of the rock aliens? that's basically an ivy-approved triple feature

June so far:

$POSITIONS (Daley, 2025) 8/10
The Long Walk (Lawrence, 2025) 6/10
The Hospital (Hiller, 1971) 8/10
Disclosure Day (Spielberg, 2026) 5/10
*The Master (Anderson, 2012) 8/10
Send Help (Raimi, 2026) 6/10
Best Seller (Flynn, 1987) 6/10
I Love Boosters (Riley, 2026) 6/10

June so far:

$POSITIONS (Daley, 2025) 8/10
The Long Walk (Lawrence, 2025) 6/10
The Hospital (Hiller, 1971) 8/10
Disclosure Day (Spielberg, 2026) 5/10
*The Master (Anderson, 2012) 8/10
Send Help (Raimi, 2026) 6/10
Best Seller (Flynn, 1987) 6/10
I Love Boosters (Riley, 2026) 6/10

xp to ivy:

<3 I discovered Tubi this year, and it has been giving me exactly what I've always needed.

* Farewell, My Lovely (1975) 3.5/5
* Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025) 4.5/5 Trying not to let Matt Johnson's public statements dim my admiration for this one.
The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) 2.5/5
Clockwatchers (1997) 3.5/5. Essential Parker Posey
* A History of Violence (2005) 3.5/5. Birth of the overdone "unstoppable killer hiding as regular guy" trope?
Walker (1987) 3/5
* Repo Man (1984) 4/5
In the Soup (1992) 3/5
Disclosure Day (2026) 3.5/5. Charming in a nice lib uncle sort of way.
* The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1978 cut) 4/5

Short:
How to Shoot a Ghost (2025) 1/5. Charlie Kaufman collaboration with his utterly vapid poet pal. Made me question if he was ever any good at all.

Yeah, that Kaufman short was dire.

blackberry 4 bags
mandibules 5 bags!!!!!
john carter 3.5 bags
savage house 2.5 bags
congo (1995): i bailed. really bad.
frankenstein (del toro) only 2. very boring
sorry to bother you 4.5
i love boosters 4
the fall guy 4.5
sorceror (friedkin 1977) 4 bags. could've done with some comedy robots
infinity buffet 4.5

congo (1995): i bailed. really bad.

Saw this at the time, actually paid for a cinema ticket, and kind of loved it. But yes it is really bad, enjoyably so though. My all-time #1 talking gorilla flick.

i remember finding it passable back in the day, but my patience has worn thin. beggars belief how they get bruce campbell AND tim curry and don't really do much with either of them!

July so far:

*Rambo First Blood Part 2 (1985) 5/10
*Upgrade (2018) 9/10
Obession (2025) 8/10
*Under The Silver Lake (2018) 7/10
After The Hunt (2025) 6/10
Alpha (2025) 4/10
The Odyssey (2026) 8/10
Backrooms (2026) 5/10
*Extreme Prejudice (1987) 8/10

First six months of 2026. There's still lot of famous movies I hadn't gotten around to until now.

Naked Alibi (Jerry Hopper, 1954)(
Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (Junta Yamaguchi, 2020)
Inside (Vasilis Katsoupis, 2023)
The Getaway (Sam Peckinpah, 1972)
Josie and the Pussycats (Harry Elfont, Deborah Kaplan, 2001)
To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)
Daphne (Peter Mackie Burns, 2017)
The Boss of It All (Lars von Trier, 2006)
Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)
Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977)
The Moment (Aidan Zamiri, 2026)
'49-'17 (Ruth Ann Baldwin, 1917)
Mr. Nobody Against Putin (David Borenstein, Pavel Talankin, 2025)
The Secret Agent (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2025)
The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953)
The Voice of Hind Rajab (Kaouther Ben Hania, 2025)
The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994)
Too Cool to Kill (Ru Qian, Wenxiong Xing, 2022)
The Perfect Neighbor (Geeta Gandbhir, 2025)
The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001)
Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud (Brent Renaud, Craig Renaud, 2025)
Farewell, My Lovely (Dick Richards, 1975)
Pixote (Hector Babenco, 1980)
Asteroid City (Wes Anderson, 2023)
Mogwai: If the Stars Had a Sound (Antony Crook, 2024)
Lola (Andrew Legge, 2022)
Weapons (Zach Cregger, 2025)
Umberto Eco: A Library of the World (Davide Ferrario, 2022)
Gamer (Mark Neveldine, Brian Taylor, 2009)
Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946)
The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973)
The Devil at Your Heels (Robert Fortier, 1981)
F1 (Joseph Kosinski, 2025)
Becoming Led Zeppelin (Bernard MacMahon, 2025)
Honey Don't! (Ethan Coen, 2025)
Steel (Steve Carver, 1979)
Sluzbeni polozaj (Fadil Hadzic, 1964)
Violent Road (Howard W. Koch, 1958)
The Lost Bus (Paul Greengrass, 2025)
Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt, 2022)
Hannie Caulder (Burt Kennedy, 1971)
Yakuza Graveyard (Kinji Fukasaku, 1976)
Aurora's Sunrise (Inna Sahakyan, 2022)
Two Weeks in Another Town (Vincente Minnelli, 1962)
The High Frontier: The Untold Story of Gerard K. O'Neill (Ryan Stuit, 2021)
Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw (Mark L. Lester, 1976)
Aporia (Jared Moshe, 2023)
The Sunshine Makers (Cosmo Feilding-Mellen, 2015)
Red Sun (Rudolf Thome, 1970)
Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh, 2025)
The Flight (Бег) (Aleksandr Alov, Vladimir Naumov, 1971)
Crimson Tide (Tony Scott, 1995)
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (George Miller, 2024)
Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944)
Letter Never Sent (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1960)
London Boulevard (William Monahan, 2010)
Bottle Rocket (short) (Wes Anderson, 1993)
Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933)
Coffy (Jack Hill, 1973)
It's a Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie, Zabriskie Point (Daniel Kremer, 2023)
Everyone's Going to Die (Max Barron, Jones, Michael Woodward, 2013)
The Dream Syndicate: How Did We Find Ourselves Here? (Emiel Spoelder, 2022)
Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973)
Tramway (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1966)
Factory (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1971)
The Pigeon Tunnel (Errol Morris, 2023)
The Desperate (Doro inu) (Takaharu Saeki, 1964)
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (Robert Altman, 1976)
Bowie: The Final Act (Jonathan Stiasny, 2025)
We Were There to Be There (Mike Plante, Jason Willis, 2021)
Erupcja (Pete Ohs, 2025)
Ghost Elephants (Werner Herzog, 2025)
Hospital (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1977)
Seven Women of Different Ages (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1979)
Railway Station (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1980)

what did you think of them?

*John Wick ch. 4 (Stahelski 2023)
The Hidden Fortress (Kurosawa 1958)
*Boogie Nights (P.T. Anderson 1997)
The Outfit (Flynn 1973)
Dust Bunny (Fuller 2026)
Berlin Express (Tourneur 1948)
From Russia With Love (Young 1963)
Bucking Broadway (Ford 1917)
Eno (Hustwit 2024, 6/26 Criterion Channel version)
Project Hail Mary (Lord, Miller, 2026)
Eno (Hustwit 2024, 7/26 Criterion Channel version)
The Odyssey (Nolan 2026)

Blue Heron was ultimately pretty unusual, but I think it will be very memorable, it will stick with me.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946 – 7.0)
Blow Out (8.5)
Adieu Philippine (6.5)
The Shark Is Still Working (6.0)
Widow’s Bay (S1 - 6.0)
Band of Outsiders (6.5)
Masculin Féminin (7.5)
No Country for Old Men (10.0)
Antidiva: The Carole Pope Confessions (7.5)
I Saw the TV Glow (6.5)

I thought the first three episodes of Widow's Bay were really good, but for me it went steadily south after that. I especially disliked how Matthew Rhys was often left to stammer out a repetition of what some character just told him--"You mean to say that...the old woman who lives on the hill...(etc.)"--like he was Kevin Costner in JFK.

Lots of good stuff recently:

The Devils (Russell, 1971) (8.5)
*Gothic (Russell, 1986) (7)
Women in Love (Russell, 1969) (7.5)
An Unmarried Woman (Mazursky, 1978) (8)
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (Johnson, 2025) (8.5)
Blue Heron (Romvari, 2025) (8.5)
I Want Your Sex (Araki, 2026) (7.5)
*The Spirit of the Beehive (Errice, 1973) (9)
The Return (U. Pasolini, 2024) (7)
Project Hail Mary (Lord/Miller, 2026) (7.5)

Lots of good stuff recently:

The Devils (Russell, 1971) (8.5)
*Gothic (Russell, 1986) (7)
Women in Love (Russell, 1969) (7.5)
An Unmarried Woman (Mazursky, 1978) (8)
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (Johnson, 2025) (8.5)
Blue Heron (Romvari, 2025) (8.5)
I Want Your Sex (Araki, 2026) (7.5)
*The Spirit of the Beehive (Errice, 1973) (9)
The Return (U. Pasolini, 2024) (7)
Project Hail Mary (Lord/Miller, 2026) (7.5)

(whoops)

Mandalorian & Grogu (6/10)
Spiderman & Jean Grey (5/10)

Feel like I‘m missing large parts of the lore here but these were dull as hell.

To Tipsy, what version of The Devils did you see? Isn't there a high profile restoration being done or that was just done? I know it is finally getting a high quality home video release soon.

This was the BFI version released in 2012. It added back some but not all of the missing footage. I think the new one coming this fall has a few more minutes? Plus 4K etc. I will watch that one too — in a theater if I get the chance.

That's on at my local cinema in October, can't wait!

KEN RUSSELL’S THE DEVILS is the uncut and unfiltered theatrical experience that Russell always envisioned – and the first time the film will be presented restored and in 4K.

July's watches

Summer Camp (Vincent, 1979)
The Ten (Wain, 2007)
They Came Together (Wain, 2014)
The Mothman Prophecies (Pellington, 2002)
Fit to Kill (Sidaris, 1993)
Hard Hunted (Sidaris, 1992)
Anchorman (McKay, 2004)
The Return of the Living Dead (O'Bannon, 1985)
Savage Streets (Steinmann, 1984)
Do or Die (Sidaris, 1991)
Three Colours: Blue (Kieslowski, 1993)

Summer Camp (Vincent, 1979)

Never saw, but a claustrophobic 70s poster classic:

https://a.ltrbxd.com/resized/film-poster/3/2/5/2/6/32526-summer-camp-0-2000-0-3000-crop.jpg?v=3221217848

That poster is awesome, thank you! As you can tell, it's a cheapo, summer camp sexploitation movie. I mostly just watched it to get another Linnea Quigley notch in my belt. The guy on the bottom of the pyramid with the hoagies and beer is Walter Olkewicz, who later played Jacques Rennault on Twin Peaks.

Obsession (2025) 3.5/5. This director really loved the herky-jerky ghosts from PULSE.
The Long, Hot Summer (1958) 3/5
Blue Heron (2025) 4/5
The Odyssey (2026) 3.5/5
The Big Clock (1948) 4/5
Sisters (1972) 3.5/5
Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) 4/5
The Fan (1982) 4/5

Last six weeks:

Enemy of the State (Scott, 1998)
Disclosure Day (Spielberg, 2026)
Are We Good? (Feinartz, 2025)
Niagara (Hathaway, 1953)
The Invite (Wilde, 2026)
Millennium Mambo (Hou, 2001)
Hollywood Shuffle (Townsend, 1987)
World War Z (Forster, 2013)
The Searchers (Ford, 1956)
L.A. Story (Jackson, 1991)
Blue Heron (Romvari, 2025)
The Odyssey (Nolan, 2026)
Air Force One (Petersen, 1997)*
The Last Temptation of Christ (Scorsese, 1988)

*coincidentally a day before the news about Trump's great escape

End of Oak Street was solid. Eerie as hell sequences, gallows humor, and a snake-salamander thing that will haunt me for weeks.

looking forward to that

Sweet Smell of Success (Mackendrick, 1957) 10/10
Django (Corbucci, 1966) 9/10
An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu Bo, 2018) 8/10, tragic he didn't get to make more films than this
The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (Fassbinder, 1972) 8/10
Limite (Peixoto, 1931) 8/10, Brazilian experimental silent drama
The Travelling Players (Angelopoulos, 1975) 7/10
The Lathe of Heaven (Loxton/Barzyk, 1980) 7/10, even Ursula Le Guin liked this adaptation
Il Bidone (Fellini, 1955) 7/10
D.O.A. (Maté, 1950) 7/10
The Lower Depths (Kurosawa, 1957) 6/10
Dersu Uzala (Kurosawa, 1975) 6/10
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Capra, 1939) 6/10, all the chest-beating about the wonders of American democracy ringing hollow in the current era
Husbands (Cassavetes, 1970) 6/10, couldn't tell whether Cassavetes/Gazzara/Falk's characters are meant to be the most obnoxious people ever put on screen or the film's just dated badly
Ro.Go.Pa.G. (Godard/Gregoretti/Pasolini/Rossellini, 1963) 6/10, Go and Pa segments are good, G passable, Ro pretty bad
The Puppetmaster (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 1993) 6/10
Jinsei (Suzuki, 2025) 6/10
Capone Cries a Lot (Suzuki, 1985) 6/10, there's a fine line between absurd and wacky and this tipped onto the wrong side
Underground (Kusturica, 1995) 6/10, ditto to a lesser extent
Carry On Don't Lose Your Head (Thomas, 1967) 5/10
London in the Raw (Miller, 1965) 5/10, tame Brit effort at a mondo movie, the hair transplant footage will haunt me to my dying day though
Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (Kurosawa, 1990) 5/10
Madadayo (Kurosawa, 1993) 4/10
Mahjong (Yang, 1996) - bailed after 20 mins, the parts in English feature the most stilted dialogue and acting I've seen since the 10 mins of Rancid Aliminium I once managed

Sweet Smell of Success (Mackendrick, 1957) 10/10

May I rent you out as an adding machine?