Les Cousins (Claude Chabrol, 1959): 3.5/5

Chabrol's follow up to Le Beau Serge makes for a natural double feature - he casts the same two male leads in opposite roles. That film's cynical drunk becomes the naive country bumpkin who takes a room in Paris with his decadent cousin, who played the do-gooder in Serge. Les Cousins' urban setting informs the style here, which is considerably looser and New Wavy than Serge's suffocating rural Rossellini tone. The filmmaking is more energetic, with ironically employed classical music. A final confrontation eloquently expresses the thesis of the film: when carefree frivolity goes up against heavy seriousness, the quickest draw goes to the one who doesn't realize what he's doing. (Chabrol tends to save all the interesting stuff in his films for the last 15 minutes and this movie is no exception.)

Metropolitan (Whit Stillman,1989): 3/5

Pleasurable gabfest. It's like Jules and Jim with yuppies! Or American Psycho without chainsaws!

Wait Until Dark (Terence Young, 1967): 2.5/5

Goofier, stagier, more contrived and unstable than I anticipated. I was actually kind of rooting for them to pull off their convoluted, elaborate hoax. Why wasn't Richard Crenna more of a star??

Judex (Georges Franju, 1963): 3.5/5

Starts out slightly soporific but steadily slides into full-on crazytown. I had almost no idea what the fuck was happening in this movie, but I really didn't care. Franju's homage to Feuillade is note-perfect in all the ways that count. Opulence fused with striking silent film flair. Francine Berge... in a massive nun's hat. Francine Berge... hanging onto the side of a building in the moonlight. Judex in a bird mask. And Judex's regal/funereal entrance at the costume party ranks among cinema's most hypnotic sequences (with a huge assist from Maurice Jarre).

The Whales of August (Lindsay Anderson, 1987): 2/5

Wearyingly sentimental. Script is terribly thin and treacly, and the whole thing pretty much looks like a public television gardening show. But check out this bit:

"According to director Lindsay Anderson, one day he said to Lillian Gish, 'Miss Gish, you have just given me a perfect close-up.' Bette Davis observed, 'She should. The bitch invented 'em.'"

Halloween (David Gordon Green, 2018): 2.5/5

The pitch: what if Halloween H20 but not terrible? #moviepass

Thesis (Alejandro Amenabar, 1996): 2/5

An interesting premise that would not be possible without the behavior of an uncharacteristically dumb protagonist. Frustrating.

Tag (Jeff Tomsic, 2018): 2/5

Tag, you're shit.

Fahrenheit 451 (Ramin Bahrani, 2018): 1.5/5

Very timely kinda reminds me of what's going on right now etc and so forth and whatever.

Paterno (Barry Levinson, 2018): 1.5/5

An hour and a half of Al Pacino saying "IDK"

Stage Fright (Alfred Hitchcock, 1950): 2.5/5

Silly, arbitrarily-plotted Hitch film, set in London, his first British movie after leaving for Hollywood a decade earlier. Jane Wyman is a stage-struck kid who risks it all for the man she loves (Richard Todd) after he's framed for murder by his lover (Marlene Dietrich), getting entangled with the investigating officer (Michael Wilding) and going deep undercover as a maid, with the help of an extraordinarily bad Cockney accent. The story is so scatty that it seems as if they came up with the set pieces first and then just tried to tie them together.

Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981): 2.5/5

Am I crazy or does it seem that if you're a female character in a De Palma film, you are essentially guaranteed of being physically abused, raped or being nothing more than a tittering pair of bouncing breasts - and that you have at least a 50% shot of nailing that whole trifecta? (I think Nancy Allen's character hits the trifecta and then some.) De Palma's whole women-are-objects thing aside, Blow Out scores mainly on style points, with its neon-drenched sets, vertiginous aerial shots, and balletic camera work.

Red Sparrow (Francis Lawrence, 2018): 2.5/5

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy meets Atomic Blonde by way of Paul Verhoeven on the Starz network. Way too much weirdo cold war nostalgia and posturing for my taste but Francis Lawrence's ice cold objectification and brutalizing is admirable in its complete and utter disreputability (seriously, wow, so gross). Confusing that they kept referring to Joel Edgerton as “the handsome American". Could've benefited from a less convoluted story overall.

Hot Summer Nights (Elijah Bynum, 2017): 2/5

Elijah Bynum has a really great feel for aesthetics and atmosphere, but story?? characters?? pacing??!? Not so hot. Stylistically charming for the first 20 minutes or so, but then overall a forgettable project. I can see why it was a DirecTV release.

Gotti (Kevin Connolly, 2018): 1.5/5

I forced a bot to watch every mobster film made after Goodfellas, and then asked it to make a mobster movie of its own. The end result was Gotti... and it added a Pitbull soundtrack for some reason.

Revanche (Gotz Spielmann, 2008): 3.5/5

Well-crafted and constantly engaging. Bleak yet beautiful. Starkly, simply, yet stunningly shot. Masterfully acted. Deliberately paced but fascinating. A haunting tale that lingers in the mind long after the film is over.

Advise & Consent (Otto Preminger, 1962): 2/5

Really could have used some more Henry Fonda here. I mostly watched this for the first mainstream depiction of the interior of a gay bar. Also, there's Betty White's big screen debut a a senator throwing some shade. Like Anatomy of a Murder, Preminger spends a lot of time trotting out procedure and rules throughout the course of the movie. It feels too much like a civics lesson more than once, and the characters are all over the place. I couldn’t name a single one, except for Charles Laughton, whose Southern accent was too awful to forget. Each of them gets a pointless side plot because apparently the main one isn’t interesting enough?

Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2014): 3/5

A patiently structured, layered and surprisingly unbiased observation of Islamic radicalism and its devastating effects on the lives it touches upon. But this isn't a sensationalized, overtly shocking portrait - it dares to portray those zealots as humans blinded by single-minded ideologies but humans nonetheless. Through a series of intermingled slice-of-life vignettes centered around a small town under the restrictive watch of jihadists, we are given an intimate view of the complex issues that plague the region.