🍿 The Body (2012) was the perfect puzzle-box thriller in which the myriad of small details that tickled your brain for not being quite right or made sense throughout the movie finally click in place minutes before the end and before you know it you want to watch it again. Which I will!
🍿 K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025) picked up just enough of the Sony Animation Studios' better instincts to be watchable even to people like me, who are not exactly fans of the K-pop genre (neither the music nor the art style). That team continues to trounce Pixar and lead the way in animation.
🍿 Thursday Murder Club (2025) felt oddly flat for a British murder mystery with an A-level cast. I can think of two reasons why: Chris Columbus’s sense of pacing doesn’t sit well with me — “Home Alone” was the last time he hit his target — and Thomas Newman’s scores tend to be lethargic. Too bad.
🍿 Black Bag (2025) was a breath of fresh air: sleek, well-written, well-acted, well-executed, vintage Soderbergh.
🍿 Heretic (2024) was a low-budget, high-suspense portrayal of a psychopathic Hugh Grant, and unlike his prior attempt it just flew by even at 110 minutes run time. The movie has four actors, a few set pieces and no highfalutin' special effects: kudos to A24 for still making them this way.
Some good news to start the week:
- Project Hail Mary, my notes on the book here, is being turned into a movie and the trailer has just been released. (↬Marty Day)
- The directors are Phil Lord and Christopher Miller of the Spider-Verse, which is excellent.
- The cinematographer is Greig Fraser of Dune, which is even better.
- The star is Ryan Gosling, which, well, you can’t win them all.
The NYT is collecting readers' votes for their list of 100 best movies of the 21st century and, well, I made some interesting choices. I do stand behind each and every one of them!
For those not using X, I picked:
- Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022)
- Memento (2001)
- Spirited Away (2002)
- Oldboy (2005)
- The Lives of Others (2006)
- No Country for Old Men (2007)
- There Will Be Blood (2007)
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
- Godzilla Minus One (2023)
- WALL-E (2008)
🍿Annie (1982) was messier than I remembered. I guess it’s hard to make a throwback to 1950s musicals when none of the skills survived — all that staircase dancing would have made much more sense with Gene Kelley doing the moves.
If not for Carrol Burnett it would hardly have been worth the rewatch.
Scott Sumner notes some underappreciated movies, most of which I haven’t seen, so now my to-watch list has grown threefold. He thinks that the greatest films of all time were mostly done in the 1920s through the 1970s, and I absolutely agree! My favorite came out in 1952. (ᔥTyler Cowen)
🍿 Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022) was a riot. Reading about the intricacies of how they managed to fit all the celebrities into 22 days of planning and 18 days of shooting — on an $8M budget and with a constantly shifting cast — was almost as entertaining.