Recent watches
Recently watched movies and my (usually brief) reviews, from Letterboxd.
Truly excellent alien contact sequence through the last half hour of the movie.
Something that bugs me: from the perspective of Richard Dreyfuss's family, their husband/father just straight up went crazy and then disappeared one day.
Weird horror movie about an expanding buffet restaurant that consumes a town, told mostly through a string of local tv commercials news reports.
It didn't fully stick the landing for me, but I love the premise and it's impressive given the movie was made for almost nothing.
Bill - I know you're reading this - this movie 100% would have been my Thursday night pick.
What I most like about it is that it's about Mario AND Luigi. It keeps the "bros" in the title and plot.
I first saw this movie at age 15, when it first came out. I feel like that's the ideal age to watch it and enjoy it.
The part that held up surprisingly well is finding people that talk shit on the Internet and beating the fuck out of them.
As a black comedy, it's a laugh riot. It's just so much fun watching Robert Pattinson writhe in emotional turmoil.
Also the real villain of the movie is Rachel, the maid of honor.
It's a blast.
Heavy on the jumpscares if you're sensitive to them. Excellent third act and ending sequence.
"STAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!"
One hell of an 80's B-movie.
It's got everything. It's got punks. It's got satire. It's got a car with dead alien bodies in the trunk that vaporize people. It's got a theme song by Iggy Pop.
Fun and creepy. Lots of "what's coming around the corner?!" horror. Not a ton of jump scares either, which is refreshing.
It's also a total rip-off of HOUSE OF LEAVES, with a thin "secret research institute" added to the plot
"You see, Bob...it's not that I'm lazy. It's that I just don't care."
Not nearly as good as John Carpenter's remake. The Thing is a kind of triffid in this one?
Dope pyrotechnics for the 50's though.
Not nearly as good as the first one. Runs like a grab bag of first movie rehashes that tested well with the focus group last time.
I like how they unceremoniously kill the protagonist of the first movie about halfway in, after he gets a single line about how he's ok dying even though he has a wife and daughter.
Still pretty sick. Fun fast action movie, but it suffers from the fact that they don't even get to the Mortal Kombat tournament in this movie.
Highlight is the buzzsaw hat bisection.
"This is my snakeskin jacket. And for me it's a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom."
I haven't seen much David Lynch, but it fits with what I've seen. One positive observation is that it uses The Wizard of Oz such that its dream-like sequences aren't as inscrutable as in, say, Mulholland Drive. It also isn't as good as Mulholland Drive. But it's still pretty dope.
"If you are truly wild at heart, you'll fight for your dreams.
Notice the difference in those two quotes from the beginning and end of the movie. From symbol to action, reflecting the core character arc.
Such a dumb pointless sequel
Another movie that exists more to advertise intellectual property than tell a story.
My favorite bits were Yoshi in NYC and Bowser's puppet show.
The predictability is overshadowed by the Rachel McAdams performance and that good ole Sam Raimi horror charm
Fuck the haters, this movie ruled.
I hadn't seen this one since it came out 25 years ago. It held up well as a gothic ghost story that gets a lot of mileage out of scares that don't involve VFX. Just old fashioned spooky noises and flashes of a hand.
The bitch-ass manbaby "influencers" in this doc are infuriating and will raise your blood pressure.
What was most effectively communicated about "the manosphere" is how these dumbasses are caught in the same kinds of delusions they claim to critique, and that everything they believe is based on the assumption that the only things of value in the world are sex and money with the two being interchangable.
Like the first one, it surprised me in its ability to sustain an anti-racist premise in a children's movie without dumbing it down. Otherwise it was meh.
"Hey bub"
Every buddy cop action movie cliche you've ever seen goes Hawaiian.
The script is garbage. The bad guys are Yakuza so that they could screen the movie in China. One Yakuza gets his tattoo grated off with a box grater. The funniest moment is when Dave Bautista rips off a dude's nips by the chain piercing. The bad guy is a white dude with a European accent with a really intense fetish for Japanese culture. The movie ends with a Phil Collins song and the credits go black with the sound of Lethal Weapon guitar licks.
I don't know how to express how dumb this movie is without accidentally making it sound awesome. But it is not awesome.
*smacks SNL on the back of the head*
See? That's how you satirize power-hungryfascist idiots when they're currently in power.
Leonardo DiCaprio is the worst part of one of the best films of 2025.
Some favorite things included:
- The Christmas Adventurers Club
- All of the secret codes
- The hilly desert Steadicam car chase
- It's optimistic in its ending after 2 and a half hours of mostly cynicism
Answers the question: "What if there's more to life than being really really ridiculously good looking?"
A satire with pacing that seems downright bizarre in 2026.
"Have you seen Easy Rider?" the main character asks almost every other character, while not remembering that they die at the end of Easy Rider.
Dark satire on Hollywood. Weird in the good way.
About 12 years ago, this movie was the movie D and I watched on our first date. Tomorrow is our 6th wedding anniversary.
Rewatching in close succession with WAKE UP DEAD MAN, this movie is better.
The songs aren't as good as the first one. And the CGI isn't well done. And you can definitely tell when Ariana did pickup shots after the release of the first movie, because there's sequences were she becomes a skeleton in an ill-fitting dress.
Also, is it just me or does this story make no sense when the elements of The Wizard of Oz become part of the plot. Like the whole thing was Dorothy's dream, so none of it is real anyways?
Like all Rian Johnson films, it was impeccably plotted.