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It does a great job of adding to the series without changing the premise, a rare treat from a modern sequel. The military's "plan" seems misguided at best, but that's how these things usually go. Plenty of enjoyable surprises.

I lost count of whether there were more expository monologues or close-ups of actors with serious looks on their faces. Fantastic final sequence with the biplanes, though. Would love to see again if I could just come in for the last hour.

So effective for a small budget movie. Quick cuts, fast "zombies," the full spectrum of human behavior on display. What's not to like?

Much more enjoyable than I expected. Shallow characters picked off one by one is an old trope, but this one managed to give it some life. And the child actor was surprisingly good.

Both heartbreaking and inspiring, it centers around the tragic accident and branches out from there in both time and space. Better than a standard biopic, but yet it never dove deep enough. Lots of ideas mentioned but not explored, questions left unanswered, so it felt a little unfulfilling by the end.

It's weird to rewatch a movie that has so many iconic ideas and images only to realize that it just isn't very good. The whole is less than the sum of its parts. Still, there are some good parts: Carousel still impresses, and the overgrown D.C. looks great. It's a great encapsulation of the '70s.

So many wonderful things-- the performances, the music, the beautiful cinematography; but one is almost forced to wonder what this movie could have been without the vampires. It's still great fun, though, and the vampires serve an important function in their own right. The surreal dance sequence is worth the price of ission alone.

Not every interesting footnote of history deserves to be made into a movie. The attempts to inject tension and an ill-fated romance only highlight how thin the plot is. Everyone is appropriately dour, though, so at least it's melancholy as well as boring.

I appreciated the grounded storytelling without multiverses or world-ending threats. The character plots and fight scenes were very good. However, the over-arching plot was boring and there were so many little details that made no sense that I never felt fully engaged.

Such a classic gore-fest! Twisted and darkly funny, gross and great.

Two things I never noticed before:
The Talking Heads poster on Dan's bedroom wall.
Herbert puts his sock and shoe on OVER the toe tag after sneaking into the morgue. What a weird dude.

Enjoyable and charming with fantastic animation, but as a whole it didn't feel nearly as grand as their previous efforts.

Watched on Saturday April 26, 2025.

Watched on Monday April 21, 2025.

Watched on Monday April 14, 2025.

A spy thriller for those who prefer mind games to shoot-em-ups. A parlor game of wits.

Watched on Monday April 7, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 6, 2025.

Watched on Friday April 4, 2025.

Watched on Saturday March 29, 2025.

Watched on Saturday March 29, 2025.

Watched on Tuesday March 25, 2025.

Watched on Monday March 24, 2025.

Anderson's performance is very good, but she's let down by a weak screenplay and lackluster directing.

I loved the technique of using LEGO to tell a non-fiction story. It helped visualize abstract concepts well, and a lot of the animation was beautiful. But in the end, it was still just another music bio-pic, with the expected story beats (hah, pun not intended, but left in anyway).

An interesting premise that never felt fully realized. Long on talk, short on scares. Perhaps the movie was trying to be too many things at once, and ended up being short in all of them.

Impressively solid for a cheesy, low-budget, monster movie. Great creature effects, goofy dialog, and memorable scenes. What more could you ask for?

I appreciated the approach of this yet-another-musical-bio-pic: narrow the focus to a few formative years, pick the highlights, and make sure to include good tunes. It wasn't anything earth-shattering, but very enjoyable and well-made. Chalamet did an excellent job.

Delightfully bizarre. If you could throw in a blender: silent era comedies, Terry Gilliam's animation, NES video games, and a touch of the survival show Alone, this is what you'd get. No notes.

A very strange movie, and for me, difficult to get into. But that last ~30 minute single take was amazing.

Watched on Friday January 17, 2025.

Jean Batiste is a treasure and a light. This slice-of-life bio captures so many different facets of him, yet somehow it still felt like something was missing. But man, that encounter with the shoe shine guy-- oof.

Watched on Sunday January 12, 2025.

Watched on Sunday January 5, 2025.

Very unique and touching. The animation and voice acting was a great approach to immersing the viewer in his online life.

Visually wonderful, perfectly creepy, plenty of homages to previous films. Unfortunately, the whole seemed less than the parts.

Watched on Friday January 3, 2025.

Watched on Saturday December 28, 2024.

It's just sooo bad. It didn't cross over into camp or parody or "so bad it's good" territory for me; it just stayed bad from the opening scene to the last. None of it makes any sense. It's Esterhaz's cocaine-fueled fantasy world of competitive strip-dancing with nudity. Lots and lots of nudity.

Bring on the surrealism!
I was hesitant to watch this one because I had heard it was heavy on the body horror. It turns out, that didn't bother me at all. I was much more disgusted watching Dennis Quaid devour shrimp than by anything else.

Watched on Sunday December 8, 2024.

Watched on Monday November 25, 2024.

Watched on Friday November 22, 2024.

Sean Baker's talent for merging comedy and tragedy into the same scene, let alone the same movie, is matched only by his understanding and care for his characters. I'm still not entirely sure what to do with this movie, but I'm glad it takes its time and shows me things and people no other filmmaker seems to care about.

Beautifully rendered with fluidity and a painterly quality, it's wonderful to see the new directions computer-assisted animation is going. The story is solid as well, with expected but still rewarding beats of joy and sorrow. A lovely experience.

A good mix of sorrow and hope as you witness incarcerated men try to become better fathers to their daughters. The power of a single dance to give so much to both participants: hope, connection, dignity, camaraderie; it's a shame it isn't implemented everywhere.

Oof. Nowhere near as charming or funny as Mistress of the Dark. It plays at being a parody of the old Hammer horror and Poe-based stories. Like Airplane!, it wants to lampoon those while also being one of those. Unfortunately, the gags just don't land. Part of Elvira's charm is her out-of-place-ness, and that's mostly absent here. Just a tiresome disappointment.

I was well-aware of The Dating Game Killer before this movie, so it was really disappointing that they cast a schlub of an actor to play him when he was more of a Ted Bundy charismatic type. Putting that aside, the movie is pretty well done.

It's time is split fairly evenly between Anna Kendrick's single aspiring actress and Rodney Alcala. The movie does a good job of showing just how ignored, besieged, and preyed upon women are in nearly every situation; unfortunately, I don't think it played up that angle forcefully enough. Alcala is maybe too much of a presence in this movie, and should've been relegated to the background. Then again, the last act is pretty powerful.

Watched on Thursday October 24, 2024.

Delightfully campy, sexy, and funny in all the right ways. Not an all-time great, but perfect for what it was and everything I wanted it to be.

It has wonderful moments and fantastic creativity, but for some reason the parts are greater than the whole. I understand why so many have fond memories of it, but for me it just didn't hold up as well as other similar classics.

1. Anora
2. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
3. Dune: Part Two
4. Civil War
5. The Wild Robot

1. Das Boot
2. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
3. The Abyss
4. Jaws
5. The Hunt for Red October
6. Yellow Submarine
7. Finding Nemo
8. The Deep
9. Operation Petticoat
10. The Incredible Mr. Limpet

A list of all the films I've seen in 2016, regardless of when they were released.

• Godzilla
• Deadpool
• 10 Cloverfield Lane
• The Nice Guys
• Captain America: Civil War
• The Jungle Book
• Green Room
• Spectre
• The Witch
• Joy

...plus 43 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

A list of all the movies I watched in 2013

• Looper
• Another Earth
• Super
• How to Survive a Plague
• Beasts of the Southern Wild
• The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
• Safety Not Guaranteed
• Ted
• Me and Orson Welles
• Iron Sky

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.