Reviews

There's an actor in this who sounds distractingly like a Phil Hartman Simpsons character, so that was funny.

Overall, Atlas isn't very good at all, but it is still an interesting watch, quality aside. Roger Corman was extra ambitious with this one, trying to pull off a classic epic with a clearly minuscule budget. Anyone interested in filmmaking and Corman's whole style will probably find enough here compelling, outside the story and technical qualities.

It's hard to enjoy it on the level you might for a normal sort of movie, but I can't help admiring the sheer ambition of it, even when it's painfully apparent how limited the film is (you notice most of all with the number of extras). It's novel, though - I've never seen a film from this era try to do the sorts of things Atlas tries to do with such limited resources.

Hurry Sundown patiently sets a whole bunch of things up, with things unfolding slowly over a lengthy runtime that nears 2.5 hours. Unfortunately, I don't think it goes to the sorts of interesting places it needed to, and it left me wanting a lot more than it delivered. It's well-presented and the cast is impressive (I guess it was the latter that mostly drew me to watching it in the first place), but overall, it's a bit too slow and has an awkward length.

It sits in between being a grounded/straight-to-the-point drama and a sprawling epic, and committing one way or the other might've helped it be more impactful or memorable. Still, a good chunk is kind of watchable, if a little boring, and I think super patient viewers will get something out of it. For me, my interest waned as it went along.

It's hilarious how sassy Jack Nicholson is in this. It's got some very impressive interviewees throughout too - though apparently, the only time Bruce Dern was free was while he was getting a haircut.

Corman's World is an overall comprehensive and well-made documentary. It hits most of the beats you'd expect, but does go above and beyond by a little when it comes to content and info packed into a 90-minute runtime. It's definitely more than decent, and succeeds in giving me a greater appreciation for Corman (and I've always appreciated him quite a lot).

The guy's a legend, and I believe turned 98 last month. Definitely rooting for him to make it to 100.

I was feeling nostalgic for the original Avengers movie, and it just so happens to have come out almost exactly 12 years ago to the day. This first team-up is so quaint compared to what came next, even though it's still pretty massive, and I remember how big it felt at the time. They made an ensemble superhero movie work better than ever before, with I guess X-Men walking so The Avengers could run.

It doesn't hold up perfectly, and to some extent, I can understand a few of the reasons why it's become unfashionable to like this movie. It's big, broad, silly, and - unfortunately for some - snarky. The times have changed, and there was a style of filmmaking defined within this that many reject now, or have grown tired of. And I do get that, but I also appreciate what this was for the time.

It was a significant movie and it defined blockbuster filmmaking for the rest of the decade it was released in. The MCU was unstoppable from about 2012 to 2019, and then even in the early 2020s, the franchise has had some serious hits. I don't think anything will ever stop the world again quite like The Avengers did, though. And it might not be the best MCU movie, but it's probably the most significant and game-changing. For that, I do respect it, and as for the movie itself, I still enjoy the vast majority of it.

Like any anime from the 1990s, Silent Möbius looks cool. It's a style I can't quite define, but I just dig the way Japanese animation from this period looks.

As far as I can tell, the story is just about several different women having to team together to take down some demon in the future? I don't know, it was all a bit muddled and occasionally seedy, but I kind of liked the way it look and felt.

It didn't waste much time either, given it was only about an hour long, and I've been pressed for time a bit lately. I also liked the way some of this was set during 2024... time flies and all that. This thing's just fine.

For some of this movie's runtime, I found it kind of charming, but it got really tedious at a point. I hope Vin Diesel and Paul Walker get better as the series goes on - both gave kind of awful lead performances here.

It probably doesn't help that I find cars boring and street racing stupid. That should be enough to turn me away from a series like Fast and Furious, and it has for 20+ years... but I'm fascinated by the way the series as a whole started small and morphed into something else. It's a progression I want to experience, but starting off with this first movie (as one has to do)... it was rough!

The racing scenes are pretty boring, the performances are sometimes pretty bad, and the narrative is a dull kind of "undercover cop falls for the people he's supposed to take down" thing that's been done before and done better.

Sign me up for the more over-the-top entries that verge away from racing. I think I'll enjoy them more (I saw Fast Five years ago and found it better than this... the only other movie from the series I've seen in isolation is Tokyo Drift, and I remember finding that one more watchable too).

So, the original The Fast and the Furious... it's not for me, but I am keen to keep chipping away at this series, because it's been a pop culture blindspot for me for too long. The start of it all proved to be surprisingly lame and boring though, in my opinion.

Well, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Is definitely interesting, but it feels like Pedro Almodóvar still finding his voice to some extent. From what I can tell, his earlier films do feel a little more comedic, and then he hit his stride to a greater extent when he started leaning toward drama. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Is kind of a comedy that revolves around a kidnapping, and to its credit, I think it works for more of its runtime than you might expect.

At a point, however, it starts to focus on the romance between the lead characters, and that felt like a bridge too far, even if the kidnapper is played by Antonio Banderas. I had a slightly bad taste in my mouth by the end of it all, but a good chunk of it was entertaining. Plus, it looked pretty amazing; no one makes Spain look as colorful as Almodóvar does.

The first time I saw Young Frankenstein was a good few years before I'd seen any of the old Universal Pictures horror movies from the 1930s and '40s, and so I always felt like a rewatch was in order. Now that we're in the year where this turns 50 (and it came out the same year as the other Mel Brooks classic that is Blazing Saddles, which is just amazing to think about), it felt like the right time to go back to it.

You could technically call it a parody of old Frankenstein movies, but most of the jokes here don't really require any knowledge of that series. The benefit of being familiar with those movies comes with admiring the technical qualities of Young Frankenstein. To me, I think it's more homage than parody, because while it's a very silly and joke-filled movie, it does have a reverence for that style of horror film. Technically, Brooks and everyone else behind the camera really capture the look/feel/tone of those older Frankenstein movies. They just made a classic Frankenstein movie that feels extra joke-filled.

Also, I guess some of them were already pretty silly (at least some of the sequels post-Bride of Frankenstein), so it never quite needed the mockery the Western genre received with Blazing Saddles. Speaking of that movie, I don't find Young Frankenstein quite as funny, and I think I'd also rank it behind The Producers if we're talking about the best Mel Brooks movies... but it is likely his most technically accomplished movie. It's not his funniest, but it's his most impressive as far as the filmmaking goes, and I further appreciated Gene Wilder's gonzo central performance this time around much more than I had in the past.

She Gods of Shark Reef is a lesser Roger Corman movie through and through, and it was a tough sit, in all honesty. I had some interest in it thanks to the title, and I've sort of enjoyed some movies that he directed around this time in his very long career, but She Gods of Shark Reef just wasn't it.

It's about two brothers who find a strange group of women - basically, the she gods - and then get wrapped up in their quest against the sharks in the reef or whatever.

It's the sort of film where very little effort seemed to be put into most of the making of the film, and that led to a dreary experience for the viewer. At least it's only about an hour long, and is tedious enough that you can drift in and out of it, never really losing anything of significance.

Even for a below-B movie, this one's not really acceptable.

Supremely bittersweet, considering it only goes for about 15 minutes. I was impressed by how it captured a specific teenage feeling and just sat with it for the entirety of the short, not doing much else, but certainly not needing to either.

It reminded me a bit of those parts in Days of Heaven where Linda Manz's character hangs out with that other young girl, only there are a few more heavy implications of romantic feelings here. I think what I was trying to say is that Your Fingertips drifts and evokes feelings in a somewhat comparable way to parts from what might be Terrence Malick's greatest film, and that's got to count for something.

It just ends at a point, unfortunately, but I otherwise found Your Fingertips quite moving and nostalgic for a short film. Could only find it on the cursed Dailymotion site with its ads every four minutes, but it was still an engaging experience, and worth sitting through those frequently obstrusive ads for.

Sometimes known as Sonny Boy & Dewdrop Girl and sometimes known as Rain in the Sunshine (which is always going to make me think of Prince's Play in the Sunshine), this short film is a relatively straightforward one about young love, and an emotional farewell that sees a young boy racing against time to tell his love what he thinks of her.

There's not much more to it than that, but the animation used throughout looks pretty good, and there is some emotion to be found throughout the whole thing. Not quite enough for it to hit hard or anything, but this is a serviceable kind of short film, and it's equally hard to feel either passion or derision towards it.

Like a great many Roger Corman movies, Frankenstein Unbound isn't very good overall, but it is quite interesting. It has a beefier budget than the vast majority of his movies, only really looking cheap at the very end when things get snowy (it's such a massive downgrade, as if they shot this in chronological order and, at a point, ran out of money entirely).

But the first hour or so looks pretty good, and the cast is generally impressive too, doing about as good a job as they can with the material at hand. The only performance that didn't work for me was Nick Brimble as the monster, but the look of the creature was also pretty shoddy.

Funnily enough, I lost a good deal of interest when the monster showed up, with the blend of time travel and horror before then making this interesting enough to feel watchable. I think Corman's at his best when he's working with sci-fi, and Frankenstein Unbound is pretty decent for a good chunk of its runtime, though it does sadly fall apart/collapse in on itself at a point.

Cursed One Piece (kind of hilarious title) is a horror short that asks the question, "How scary can a cursed dress be?" The answer ends up being "not very," but this is still a good bit of fun to watch, following the experiences of three different young girls who each encounter the titular terrifying piece of clothing.

The whole thing is more than a bit silly, and I'd be surprised if it succeeded in creeping anyone out, but I still kind of liked it in any event. But the animation style is charming and I think the structure is sound, jumping from one character to the next before any individual story runs the risk of getting boring. It feels worth devoting half an hour to, in the end.

A weird and concentrated burst of crazy. I think I kind of liked it, but I also have almost no idea what to make of it. Despite it being a short film, it feels like there's less to immediately grab onto compared to Masaaki Yuasa's feature-length films, or at least the ones I've seen. As such, Kick-Heart feels considerably more difficult to recommend, but I guess the fact that it's only 13 minutes means it won't waste much of your time if you end up baffled by it, like me. All that being said, I did find it interesting, and Kick-Heart was consistently stylish and cool-looking, but it kind of washed over me and left me more than a little lost by the end of it all.

A sequel to The Ipcress File that's not quite as good, I still mostly enjoyed Funeral in Berlin. It's got a relatively young Michael Caine (he always looked a little bit old, or maybe that's just a 1960s thing) doing spy espionage stuff, mostly revolving around smuggling a person out of East Berlin. It's all just okay- very watchable, but nothing great.

And that's all there really is to it. It's exactly what I thought it would be; nothing more and nothing less. It's all a bit slow and stiff at times, but provides decent entertainment value and is just fine for this kind of film made at this point in history.

It's hard to say anything insightful about a movie that's sort of just there, but at least it's not a bad one, at the end of the day.

People seem afraid to give this one less than 3/5, so I'm going to go for it with a slightly lower 2.5/5. It's boring! It's beautifully shot, sure, but it's dull. I don't think it should be labeled as belonging to the action genre, because this is... I don't know, it's not even really a drama. There's a ceremony to pick a new abbot at a monastery, there's a scroll a few people want to get but it's hidden away, and there's political intrigue after the decision regarding the former event is made.

But the film slouches awkwardly from one thread to another, and much of Raining in the Mountain feels like numerous scenes stitched together, the only through line being that the movie is set in one fairy confined location. Okay, that's something. I'll concede. But I found very little rhyme, reason, or rhythm as to how those scenes were placed together. There was no flow, there were no interesting characters, there was little action in what I thought was a martial arts movie, and some of the music was so annoying (it drove me insane during the chasing/sneaking scenes, and there are many).

King Hu was on autopilot with this one, I think. Every other films of his I've seen is better, or has more to offer. I was enamoured with the first couple I saw, but digging out his deeper cuts has been diminishing returns to some extent... though this is the first one I found really disappointing. If you want something spiritual, atmospheric, and maybe thematically rich (if you want to dig deep or whatever), maybe there's something to be gained from approaching this with that frame of mind. And yes, it does look very good; I can't entirely criticise the visuals without being petty or unfair.

Actually, I would just say watch King Hu's similarly named Legend of the Mountain instead, which came out the same year, is longer, has even less action, but definitely has something to it that makes it compelling and easier to get lost in/hypnotised by.

First watched this almost exactly 10 years ago, and expected to like it a little more on a rewatch, now feeling a little more knowledgeable about politics and being more familiar with some of the people behind this (namely Armando Iannucci and Jesse Armstrong... it doesn't reach the heights of Veep or Succession though).

It's a funny piece of political satire. It's got a decent number of laughs and the actors are all well-used. There isn't really one amazing scene or exchange of dialogue that really sticks in mind, and I don't know if it'll ever feel like a true classic to me, but it's good. It's very good. It's just not quite as great as I expected it to be.

Challengers is ambitious and goes to some strange places throughout, and most of its big swings pay off. It's about three people who are all involved with tennis, and the complex friendships/relationships between the trio. It takes place over an extended period of time and tells its story in a non-chronological way that's always surprisingly easy to follow. It looks fantastic, too, and the score - while sometimes a bit much - is memorable.

I love how cinematic tennis looks here. In a way, it reminded me of Tokyo Olympiad, which is an artistic and beautiful documentary film about the 1964 Olympic Games. I'm not usually crazy about watching sports, but that documentary and Challengers both find ways to make sports look unique and far more dramatic than any ordinary broadcast. Like the score, the visuals of Challengers sometimes feel like a bit much (some of the slow motion is slooooooow), but it gives the film a unique voice, which is appreciated.

Speaking of slow, that's my main complaint - I wish Challengers was a little shorter, because there were some patience-testing scenes. The slow-burn feel doesn't work as well for this story as it's worked for some other Luca Guadagnino films in the past, but many sequences here soar nonetheless. It's visually inventive and the acting from the three leads is top-notch. That final act went on a bit long for me, but this is otherwise an early highlight of the year so far.

It took me an embarrassing number of dream sequences in this movie for me to realise "oh that's why they called it Robot Dreams."

It's a simple movie narratively, to the point where saying anything about it feels like saying too much. What can be said is that it's a wonderful demonstration of pure visual storytelling (with the help of a great soundtrack). There's no spoken dialogue, but everything is conveyed clearly, expertly, and emotionally. Similar to the narrative, the animation style is quite simple, but this also works very well.

It's a movie that is probably appropriate for most ages, but I appreciate its willingness to be surprisingly realistic. The world depicted in the film contains joy, cruelty, and heartbreak. The ups and downs of life within this world - populated by animals and robots and no one who actually speaks any language - feels true to the real world. That kind of surprised me, in a good way.

Robot Dreams takes the sort of premise you'd expect a short film to tackle and stretches it out to a feature length runtime, and is highly successful at doing so. There were a couple of little detours in the narrative here and there that I think we could've done without, but much of the film is charming, moving, and easy to get swept up in. It's pretty great overall.

I've been on a bit of an Alain Delon spree as of late, and I saw The Black Tulip get mentioned quite a bit alongside 1975's Zorro, which I really enjoyed. It's another movie where Delon gets to take part in some sword fights while being a dashing hero, and though it's not as entertaining or as action-packed as Zorro, it was still pretty decent overall.

The main trump card The Black Tulip has is that it features Delon playing two characters: brothers who swap identities after one of them gets a scar on his face. Alain Delon has pretty good chemistry with himself, even if it would've made more sense had they been twins, because they do look basically identical (even the scar and different hairstyles do little to distinguish them).

It's all straightforward stuff, with villains being thwarted and an underdog hero becoming a revolutionary figure. It's slow-going at some points and the action scenes don't quite have the spark needed to make them really stand out... though none of it's bad exactly. The Black Tulip looks good enough and Delon's fun in the two lead roles. It doesn't really feel like an essential watch or any kind of classic, but it's good enough.

Secondhand Lions is a strange kind of movie, but I sort of liked it for what it was. It's worth it just to Michael Caine and Robert Duvall doing their thing: two inherently likable actors who unsurprisingly work very well together, playing the uncles of a kid who's made to stay with them, likely because his mother wants him to inherit a supposed fortune the pair have.

It's very much a family movie, and the sort that doesn't seem to get made very much nowadays. Whether in 2003 or 2024, it's surely a hard film to market, because a lot of it's about being old, which kids might find boring, but it's also kind of light and silly, and that might turn away older people. It's an odd one. I'm not crazy about Secondhand Lions, but at the same time, it's hard to feel like I regret watching it.

The controlled chaos of Underground is something to behold. Emir Kusturica Can sometimes push things a little far when it comes to surrealism and sheer bizarre sights, but I feel like he reined those sensibilities in almost the perfect amount for this film, and continued to perform said balancing act tonally for almost three hours.

Commenting on the endless nature of war/conflict and mining comedy/satire from it in a way that puts it on the same level as Dr. Strangelove, Underground rushes by in an almost manic way, but never so fast you ever get truly lost.

Ambitious deception, jealousy, love triangles, underground societies, themes surrounding identity, a monkey controlling a tank, the societal implications of three different wars one after the other, slapstick comedy, the conflict between truth and fiction, grim drama... Underground has it all! It's a long sit, but the pacing's generally good, and it doesn't feel the 170 minutes it takes to get through.

Was glad to buy this on bluray, but my god has physical media just gotten too expensive here in Australia in the last year or two. I love building a collection, but it was easier to do between 2010 and maybe 2021 at the latest. Now it's extra expensive, and various stores are starting to seriously cut down what they sell in the first place.

Anyway, Kuroneko looked great on bluray, and was a good enough film to be worth the premium price tag on it. It has a super harrowing 10-minute opening sequence that has no dialogue, then it's quite fun for about 20 to 30 minutes, while two female spirits get well-earned revenge. Then, the plot thickens when someone re-emerges back into their life. Things do ultimately get grim once more.

It's consistently eerie throughout, I loved the music, and it's very stylish. It's beautiful and disturbing, sometimes at the same time, and even with it not being a pleasant watch at times, I think I could see myself reciting it one day.

I'm sure A Fistful of Dollars is someone's favourite of the three Clint Eastwood + Sergio Leone westerns, but it's probably not the favourite of many. This loose trilogy the pair ended up doing comprised one movie a year for three years in the middle of the 1960s. Watching it in order, we go from one solid film to one great film and then finally it concludes with one absolutely perfect film.

A Fistful of Dollars is quaint in comparison to both For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and almost feels like a proof of concept, in hindsight. Still, it's a more than solid western that can be appreciated today, but I don't think it's as enjoyable as any other film Leone made after this. It probably says something that it took me about 13 years to finally watch it for a second time, whereas I've revisited all the others much earlier (and some I've seen several times, on average once every couple of years).

This film also has to be celebrated for the fact it pretty much established two legends who went on to achieve greatness in the years following: Eastwood as an actor (and eventual director) and Leone as a filmmaker. I guess it was also one of the earliest big films Ennio Morricone scored, too, so it's like a star is born times three.

(Also, Yojimbo's much better, and I think I'd still feel that way even if A Fistful of Dollars had come first).

Very different from the other 1989 movie called Black Rain, that's for sure.

I watched this immediately after reading a couple of chapters of the graphic novel Maus, and so it's been a pretty heavy afternoon. Both that and Black Rain look at survivors of horrible events that happened during World War II, and how such events never stopped affecting those caught up in them. There's a bleakness to both, and I'm struck by the rawness and honesty, as well as the way such stories look at how World War II led to generational trauma.

Specifically focusing on Black Rain, I'm not sure it's something I'll ever want to watch again, but it was striking and effective and I appreciate it quite a lot. It reminded me a fair bit of 1953's Hiroshima, which is similarly harrowing in its exploration of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath.