Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021): 4/5

Multi-layered & uncompromising. Cronenberg gets tossed around a lot in these parts, but this is truly New Flesh. Extra half star for the car show opening.

The Many Saints of Newark (Alan Taylor, 2021): 2/5

Mediocre. Unfunny. Blandly directed. The film tries to tell three different stories and botched them all. Deeply unsatisfying. Young Gandolfini is good. So is Nivola (although Dickie is just not that interesting as a character). Liotta’s double role is great (and I appreciated how he becomes Dickie’s Dr. Melfi). But what a waste of Farmiga, Bernthal, and Stoll. And finally, Junior Soprano is not a Fredo!

Ishtar (Elaine May, 1987): 2/5

Hoffman's original assertion that the story should never have left New York is indeed spot-on. He and Beatty are having a lot of fun with these roles, and their "bad" songs are catchy as hell, but the movie dies a witless, convoluted death the moment they arrive in Ishtar, and it never recovers.

Tea and Sympathy (Vincent Minelli, 1956): 3.5/5

fellas, is it gay to hang out on a beach with three hot women and get a little sewing done?

With a Friend Like Harry...(Dominik Moll, 2000): 4/5

Hitchcock meets Tom Ripley European thriller. Engaging without relying on flashy camera work or cheap scares. It’s pure character work for the most part, and sharply done.

The American President (Rob Reiner, 1995): 3/5

Sure, it’s basically just Caffeine-Free Diet West Wing Sweetened With Splenda, but sometimes that’s all you need to quench your thirst.

Wag the Dog (Barry Levinson, 1997): 2.5/5

Despite a great premise and a first-rate cast, it just never quite takes off; it's consistently clever but almost never funny. Certainly a step up for Levinson following disastrous crap like TOYS and JIMMY HOLLYWOOD and DISCLOSURE, and worth seeing, but it's still a trifle.

Malignant (James Wan, 2021): 2.5/5

More like BENIGN!!!

That jail scene had me cackling so hard though, I'll give this an extra half star, bravo. Imagined a far better movie where the two detectives are Wanda Sykes and Nathan Fielder.

Cry Macho (Clint Eastwood, 2021): 1/5

More like SNORE MUCHO!!!

Fallen (Gregory Hoblit, 1998): 1/5

More like FALLEN ASLEEP!!!

Dear Evan Hansen (Steven Chbosky, 2021): 1/5

Or, How Do You Do, Fellow Kids: The Movie

Has the aesthetic of an HP laptops commercial.

The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion, 2021): 2.5/5

Lovely to look at, but Campion's aiming at some soft targets here, and with some pretty stale powder. Hardly the "she's-back" coup de grace I was hoping for. Benedict was good, but one can't help but wonder what Michael Fassbender could've done with it.

The Card Counter (Paul Schrader, 2021): 2.5/5

John Yoo is a tenured law professor at Berkeley. He teaches class, has office hours...just a horrible thought I had after seeing this movie.

THE CARD COUNTER is a mixed effort from Schrader. Starts off strong with Oscar Issac’s mysteriously slick on the outside, tormented on the inside performance leading the way. But once the plot begins to unfold, Schrader can’t quite put the cards together for a winning hand.

rewatched The Player (Robert Altman, 1992): 4/5

More amusing than scathing, I would like someone to show me the unemployed screenwriter in Hollywood who would tell a studio exec to fuck off when offered a deal.

Pret-a-Porter (Robert Altman, 1994): 2/5

In his review Gene Siskel said that "you could've gone shopping instead" during the runtime. Jokes on everyone it's 2021 and I was shopping while watching this. Recurring theme of people stepping in dog shit seems moderately apt.

El Norte (Gregory Nava, 1983): 4/5

Guatemalan siblings Enrique and Rosa seek refuge from hostile militia in the titular North of Uncle Sam's land of milk and honey. They come to discover that first world crises of employment and classism amount to merely another form of social malaise, maybe more complex and insidious than that from which they believed they were extricating.

Divorce Italian Style (Pietro Germi, 1961): 2.5/5

For a sixty year old movie about a douchebag plotting to kill his wife so he can bang his 16 year old cousin, it’s actually not that terrible. Having Marcello Mastroianni attend a screening of La Dolce Vita invented meta-comedy.

Flower Drum Song (Henry Koster, 1961): 2.5/5

This Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, which closely preceded The Sound Of Music, is reportedly their only financial flop, and it isn't that hard to see why; the songs just don't have that sing-along-friendly quality, and many of them are artificially brassy, unnatural, and out of place.

Still, it's a fascinating artifact: a big mainstream 1961 movie with a cast that's almost entirely Chinese, and a plot dealing with the generation gap and old-world/new-world values conflicting in the Chinese-American community in San Francisco in the ’60s. It's very broad—big, declarative performances, in some cases aimed directly at the camera—and there's a lot of love-at-first-sight shenanigans and very abrupt turnarounds. Basically, it's clumsy and overdone—but it's also unique, and that alone makes it worth a watch.

Bulworth (Warren Beatty, 1998): 2/5

A mostly bad movie and an utterly fascinating artifact. How Beatty managed to secure studio financing for this lunatic project is beyond me.

The Year of the Everlasting Storm (Jafar Panahi, Apichatpong Weerasethekul, 2021): 3/5

I’m determined to make this the last COVID movie I watch. This omnibus film pretty much covers all the bases: narrative work set during the pandemic, documentaries of life during lockdown, films that are more tangential to the pandemic, and impressionist, experimental work.

Sorry, Laura Poitras: bugs are more compelling to watch than Zoom calls and data visualizations, especially after the year we just had.

POWER RANKINGS:

1. Jafar Panahi, Iran - "Life"

2. David Lowery, US - "Dig Up My Darling"

3. Apitchatpong Weerasethekul, Thailand - "Night Colonies"

4. Anthony Chen, China - "The Break Away"

5. Laura Poitras, US - "Terror Contagion"

6. Dominga Sotomayer, Chile - "Sin Titulo"

7. Malik Vitthal, US - "Little Measures"

The Keep (Michael Mann, 1983): 1.5/5

No, Mannboys, just no. You can tell this was sliced and diced to filth and is just an incoherent, total mess. Basically it's a lot of nazis bickering and then every once in a while a fog demon makes someone's head explode to Tangerine Dream. Would actually benefit from a remake though!

Who You Think I am (Safy Nebbou, 2019): 3/5

Fuck yeah Horny Juliette Binoche Cinematic Universe!

French psychological drama starring Binoche as a frustrated teacher hitting her midlife crisis when she falls into catfishing a younger man on Facebook. It’s perhaps a decade too late for a film like this to really gain traction with the concept so openly out there to really buy into the whole “young man falls head over heels for online avatar” premise. But like most things, if Juliette Binoche wasn't the lead, this would be trash.

Goddamn it and why am I only just now discovering Nicole Garcia???

Gunpowder Milkshake (Navat Papushado, 2021): 1.5/5

Corny, derivative, retrograde. The shit I watch for Michelle Yeoh.

Memories of Murder (Bong Joon Ho, 2003): 3/5

ZODIAC before ZODIAC. (With like sixteen dropkicks.)

La Grand Bouffe (Marco Ferreri, 1973): 1/5

Completely frivolous and without any value I can ascertain. Lots of eating and sex and still absolutely dull from start to finish. Crass, low brow trash masquerading as social commentary.

rewatched Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010): 4/5

"If we were a bit more tolerant of each other's weaknesses, we'd be less alone."

A glorious and fascinating integration of metatextual themes, that a replication of art might be just as, if not more “worthy” than the original: Kiarostami bleeds them slowly into his film and after laying the groundwork for his thesis, begins to directly integrate it, sans explanation, as if to form a cognizant experiment to test his hypothesis.

The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, 1973): 2.5/5

As Roger Ebert put it: "this one could have been titled 'The Man Who Loved to Hear Himself Talk.'" Basically a three and a half hour cinematic endurance test not of attention span but of tolerance for unlikeable characters loafing and loathing.