What movies did you see last week? (10/1-10/7)

The King of Comedy - One of my favorite Scorsese films and DeNiro's performances. Just a great look at obsession, and the efforts people will go to, to get famous. A film that just keeps improving upon on me on rewatch. - 9.5 / 10

A Star is Born - A very solid updating of a classic story. Bradley Cooper's directing debut is a nice look at fame, and how it affects us all. Cooper with his slow deep "drunken voice" is good in his role, but it's Lady Gaga who steals the show. Much of the film being tailored made to her talents. I quite enjoyed it. - 8 / 10

Harry Brown - 7.5 / 10

The Rainmaker - 7 / 10

Almost Famous
Hold the Dark
Silver Linings Playbook (re-watch)
Air Force One
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
No Country For Old Men (re-watch)
Hellboy

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) — 8/10
Very nice Western. Clean, sharp, fun, though Katherine Ross was underutilized and the "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" sequence feels like it belongs in a completely different movie. Even with the movie's lightly comic and self-aware tone, it was a bizarre and kind of annoying moment.

The Wild Bunch (1969) — 8/10
Edging out Straw Dogs as my favorite Peckinpah film. I really enjoyed this one. Lacked the weird smugness of some of his other films. He treated the violence with respect, allowing it to be cathartic without glamorizing or making light of it, which I feel some of his other films have done. Great ensemble too, especially Holden, Borgnine, and Ryan.

Moonrise Kingdom rewatch (2012) — 10/10
Yup, still adore it. Sam and Suzy's friendship is still so goddamn cute, Anderson's aesthetic is so precise and clean (this one's cinematography is quite underrated), the ensemble performance gets funnier every time I see it but is also appropriately somber, and I think this is WA's most compelling depictions of mental illness and depression (moreso then Tenenbaums definitely). No one is happy in this beautiful, provincial little seaside hamlet. Randy the scout master (Ed Norton, adorable) is insecure and naive, Sam (Jared Gilman, endearingly awkward) is a disturbed, bullied orphan who finds himself abandoned by his foster family, Suzy is a friendless depressed teen caught between her despondent feuding parents (Murray and McDormand, both dryly hilarious) who don't know how to talk to her, Bruce Willis rounds out the cast as the lonely Captain Sharp, a "sad, dumb policemen" who breaks the dreary monotony of his life by having an affair with Suzy's mother. What a gloomy bunch of saps. I love them all. And I love Anderson for making this beautiful, thoughtful film. The soundtrack is heaven.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) — 7.5/10
Effectively creepy. It becomes sorta dumb towards the end but I found it to be a largely enjoyable and scary. The movie makes excellent use of a small setting and Jane Doe herself, an icy corpse with a sinister and piercing dead-eyed stare, is the stuff of nightmares. Most of the film works just because Øvredal understands how scary the corpse is and milks it for all its worth. I never stopped wanting to get another glimpse of that awful face. Ugh

The Ritual (2017) — 7.5/10
UK horror film about four mates who get lost in the woods while hiking in Sweden. Familiar premise, very well-executed. This is a movie for anyone who's afraid of going into deep dark woods. Director Bruckner uses nail-biting atmospheric suspense-building to effectively tap into that fear, which sustains the film until the final 10 minutes where things just get too hokey for my taste.

For a Few Dollars More (1965) — 8/10
Better than A Fistful of Dollars for sure. More elegant and resplendent, foreshadowing the grand revenge narrative of Once Upon a Time in the West without quite reaching the spiritual and emotional heights of that film. For what it is, this is a fantastic and beautiful spaghetti western film, but mostly everything in it pails in comparison to its emotionally-charged Mexican standoff finale, and I can't say the same for the consistently-fascinating Once Upon a Time. Ultimately the comparison doesn't mean much because both should be required viewings.

The Innocents (1961) — 8.5/10
I loved how delightfully unhinged Kerr's performance is in this. I typically don't enjoy films that blatantly raise the question of whether or not everything is just in a character's head but Kerr's go-for-broke performance and the dense screenplay justify it here. Are the kids truly sinister or are they just behaving oddly because of a traumatic past and their parentless existence? They're initially depicted as sinister (and Martin Stephens is sooooo good at being a creepy little bastard) because we only see them through Kerr's eyes, but her reliability as a narrator comes into question when disturbing events from the children's past sheds light on her own dysfunctional obsession with sex and sinfulness bred out of extreme repression. It's a Freudian playground.

On a sidenote, isn't it great how the British could get away with putting this stuff in a 1961 film? God bless.

The Eyes of My Mother (2016) — 8/10
Had kind of an odd reaction to this film. I didn't so much enjoy it as much as I respected how it subconsciously compels the viewer to adopt a perspective about mental illness and crime that I think is ultimately healthy. It goes along with other films that are told from the POVs of deranged killers (Angst, Henry) and weaves a portrait of isolation and insanity that's as sickening as it is tragic. I do like Angst a bit more. I felt like that film was better able to get into its protagonist's head and better justifies his crimes fro his own perspective using inner dialogue,. The result was a more harrowing, more authentic, and more tragic depiction of mental instability.

Split (2016) — 6/10
Quite entertaining until the final act slapped me with stupidity. A running plotline in the film is a therapist's theories about how James McAvoy's dissociative identity disorder is a kind of superhuman ability or the next step in human evolution. It's goofy of course, but because this is an M. Night Shyamalan film she turns out to be right, resulting in an ending that annoyingly paints Kevin as misunderstood. The movie's ideas about trauma are also pretty icky, especially how those ideas relate to Anya Taylor-Joy's character in the final act. It's a mind-boggling misstep in the narrative that sends all kinds of dumb mixed messages.

The Thing from Another World (1951) — 6/10
Maybe it's shallow of me to say this movie was boring, but it was. I was bored out of my fucking mind. This predecessor to Carpenter's 1982 masterpiece feels very like an early 1950s studio effort in all the worst ways. It's a woefully dated film, from that constant clean sarcasm to its militaristic patriotism to the stereotypical half-baked characters that are for the most part indistinguishable. The things about the film that don't come off as dated but still quite impressive are the cinematography and practical effects. The movie was quite good when The Thing was in frame, but otherwise virtually nothing works for me. None of the characters convey the gravity of the situation (finding an alien and killing it is all in a good day's work) and the stakes never feel high enough for the screenplay to seriously delve into the implications of the plot. This is light, escapist family entertainment from the 1950s. Which is fine for what it is but it doesn't hold up nearly as well as some of its contemporaries that aimed a bit higher.

A Star Is Born (2018) — 8/10
This was so damn tender. The movie worked for me because Cooper and Gaga had so much chemistry, and the emotional magnitude of their performances comes through clearly when it needs to (when Gaga comes onstage for the first time and sings "Shallow"...FUCKING CHILLS). It's because of moments like that and because of the performances that I just really dug this thing. Crowd-pleasing of the highest order. My main complaints are that Sam Elliott was a bit underutilized (a lot of potential there but the film doesn't capitalize on it enough) and the midscetion is a bit draggy.