The Grouchy Editor

A Haunting in Venice

Alfred Hitchcock said that he did not make “mystery” movies because, unlike his preferred plotlines, whodunits rely more on logic than suspense. Hitchcock chose to feed information to his audience and then keep it on tenterhooks, anxious not about who the killer was, but on when or how the bad guy would strike.

Kenneth Branagh, starring in and directing his third adaptation of an Agatha Christie whodunit, seems to realize that Hitchcock was correct. A Haunting in Venice, in which Branagh once again plays the indomitable Hercule Poirot, swaps suspense for atmosphere. But oh, what atmosphere!

The plot: A cast of typical Christie characters are stranded in a cavernous Venetian palazzo during a storm and, following a séance, learn there is a murderer in their midst. Poirot must unmask the villain while simultaneously battling odd visions. Is he fighting an ordinary criminal or is the supernatural at work?

Not every plot element holds up to inspection, but Venice has never looked lovelier — or creepier. Release: 2023  Grade: B+

Would I watch it again? Eventually, yes.

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Bodies Bodies Bodies

I was ready to write off this movie after the first act. OK, I thought, it’s a whodunit like And Then There Were None meets Any-Slasher-Movie, Gen Z-style. Seven young people gather to party at a mansion during a hurricane, and they are picked off, one by one. Been there, done that — plus, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t stand the music on the soundtrack (yes, I am old).

But a funny thing happens at the end that redeems the whole movie. There is a brilliant twist that I didn’t see coming, and it was good enough that I’m upping my grade from, oh, C-minus to (see below). Kudos to three creative chicks: Kristen Roupenian and Sarah DeLappe, who wrote the film, and Halina Reijn, who directed. Release: 2022  Grade: B+

Would I watch it again?  Yes.

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The Invisible Man

This is what you don’t need when casting the titular character in The Invisible Man — Cary Grant or Clark Gable. Movie-star looks, it should be apparent, are irrelevant when you can’t be seen.

This is what you do need — A Voice.

Director James Whale hit the jackpot when he cast Claude Rains as doomed chemist Jack Griffin in this 1933 classic. Rains, whom we don’t actually see until the last scene of the film, had The Voice.

In normal-guy mode, Rains’s delivery is sonorous, commanding, and oh-so-British. But when poor Jack literally loses his looks, and then his mind … talk about putting the “mad” in mad scientist.

I still wake up in the middle of the night hearing his gleeful, piercing cackles.

OK, so the special effects are what you might expect from a 90-year-old movie (crude — but amusing). But overall, The Invisible Man has a winning combination: Rains’s incomparable voice acting and Whale, the king of campy horror, delivering fast-paced, entertaining set pieces.

Release: 1933  Grade: A-

Would I watch it again? Happily.

Whale, left, on the set of “The Invisible Man”

*

Thanksgiving

Eli Roth has been accused of making mean-spirited, unpleasant, misogynistic movies. I’m talking about films like Hostel, or The Green Inferno. That might or might not explain why Roth pivots toward more mainstream with his latest directorial effort, Thanksgiving.

Love or hate Roth’s previous films, they were at least interesting. Thanksgiving, on the other hand, is just another teen slasher flick. A masked killer picks off vapid kids, one by one. Gory kills abound. Sound familiar?  Yeah, too familiar. Release: 2023 Grade: C

Would I watch it again? No.

*

Evil Dead Rise

What I liked:

Actress Alyssa Sutherland has the perfect face to play a mother who is possessed by a demon. That face was not lost on the film’s marketing team; it’s what we see in most of the posters (see above). Sutherland has an excellent evil grin.

I liked the setting. The filmmakers ditch the obligatory cabin in the woods for a creepy, decrepit high-rise apartment building. Reminded me a bit of the old building in Rec.

What I disliked:

There is one movie trope that irritates me more than the “it was only a dream” cliché, and that is the monster who refuses to die. There is little suspense to be had when you can predict, with 99 percent certainty, that the “killed” demon is only resting.

Gore and a deafening soundtrack are no substitutes for genuine suspense — even in a horror movie.

I enjoy the Evil Dead franchise, movies and the TV series. But most of them have one element that is lacking in Evil Dead Rise: humor. Release: 2023 Grade: B-

Would I watch it again? Probably not.

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Society of the Snow

There aren’t many true stories that inspire multiple first-rate movie and book adaptations. A 1972 plane crash in the Andes, in which just 16 of 45 passengers survived — including a grueling 72 days stuck on a mountain — is one of them. The book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors is superb. A 1993 movie, also titled Alive, is riveting. Now we can add this Spanish-language production, which might be the best rendition of all.

The harrowing flight disaster is remembered today, in part, because the group of mostly young men had to resort to cannibalism to survive. But what resonates most for me about this saga is not the cannibalism, but rather the heroism. Release: 2023  Grade: A

Would I watch it again?  Yes, but not right away.

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The Last Voyage of the Demeter

If we must have yet another Dracula movie, it’s probably a good idea to have a change of venue. Rather than revisit castles, and London, and every other setting we’ve seen ad nauseam in previous movies, why not put Dracula aboard a cargo ship enroute to England? After all, that is the setting of chapter 7 in Bram Stoker’s novel. As for the captain and crew stuck on the ship with the vampire: talk about a captive audience.

Alas, The Last Voyage of the Demeter was just … so-so. You might expect that with such an inherently dangerous, eerie setting, the atmospheric possibilities for a horror movie would be delicious. Instead, the ship was kind of cool, but not that cool; Dracula himself was kind of cool, but not that cool; and the ominous sea was mostly missing in action.

I suspect the mediocrity of the film is due to the triumph of computerized effects over practical effects. Had Voyage been filmed in 1975 in a giant water tank on a soundstage, I think it would have been a better movie. Release: 2023  Grade: C+

Would I watch it again?  Not likely.

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The Killer

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: David Fincher is possibly our finest working movie director. Any filmmaker whose resume includes Se7en, Zodiac, and The Game — yes, The Game; you can have Fight Club, I’ll take The Game — is top-tier to me.

But Fincher’s latest, The Killer, is an underwhelming disappointment. We learn about the life of a perfectionist assassin-for-hire played by Michael Fassbender and … well, that’s about it. A hit goes awry for our protagonist, and he spends the rest of the movie tracking down the bad guys who retaliated for his screwup by assaulting his girlfriend.

The movie is what we expect from Fincher in that it looks great, and sounds great, and it is absorbing. But the most important element, the story, is no great shakes. Release: 2023  Grade: C+

Would I watch it again?  Possibly, but only to see if there is some hidden genius at work that I might have overlooked. (I doubt it.)

**

No Hard Feelings

In my misspent youth, I used to devour movies like this one as a matter of course — especially the good ones, like Risky Business starring a fresh-faced Tom Cruise.

But that was back in the sinful ‘80s and ‘90s.

I had a bad feeling about a 2023 sex comedy starring Jennifer Lawrence. I suspected it would be one of two things: watered down thanks to “MeToo,” and/or saturated with political correctness.

OK, so I was wrong. No Hard Feelings is actually a sweet, sometimes raunchy, occasionally laugh-out-loud good time. Lawrence plays a cash-strapped woman who is hired by a wealthy couple to “date” (whatever that means) their virginal son, who is seriously lacking in social skills.

Despite its 1980s-style, ballyhooed skinny-dip scene featuring a fully nude Lawrence, No Hard Feelings is less Porky’s, more John Hughes. Release: 2023  Grade: B+

Would I watch it again?  Maybe. Or possibly just the skinny-dip scene. 

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Fair Play

Thinking about Oliver Stone’s masterful Wall Street (1987), it seems to me there were probably disparate audiences for his drama. Some viewers admired Gordon Gekko (“Greed is good!”), and others were horrified by the fate of poor Bud Fox, who wound up going to prison.

Fair Play, a drama set in the world of finance, targets the same two demos: people who salivate at the chauffeured limos and fancy meals available to Wall Street hotshots, and those who recoil from the human tradeoffs required to make it big in that profession. 

Fair Play doesn’t shy away from those moral questions, but it adds a new wrinkle: gender politics. When analyst Emily gets a big promotion that her lover/coworker thought was his, their relationship is put to the test. To put it mildly. Should Emily “stand by her man,” or should she subscribe to the feminist mantra, “you can (and should) have it all, baby”?  Release: 2023  Grade: B

Would I watch it again?  Probably not. The movie is well made and provocative, but its unlikable leads and downer resolution make it a once-is-enough-for-me, thank you.

**

Up the Down Staircase

Within a month of each other in 1967, two high-school-themed movies opened in theaters. The films were To Sir, With Love, and Up the Down Staircase. Chances are, you recall the movie with a big star (Sidney Poitier) and a titular song that topped the charts. The other movie might or might not be familiar.

I prefer Up the Down Staircase, starring Sandy Dennis as a teacher at an inner-city school who must choose between a job at a cushy, wealthy school, or the unceasing challenges of life at Calvin Coolidge High School.

Sir and Staircase both tug at the heartstrings, and they deal with similar themes. But to me the latter film is more realistic, and far less sappy. Release: 1967  Grade: A-

Would I watch it again?  I just did.

**

The Goldsmith

What I loved about 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was its tone of demented glee. When young people encountered a crazed family in Texas, we didn’t need (or want) “backstory” explaining the lunatics’ twisted history. We already know there are crazies in the world. Just bring on the madness, please. Chain Saw did just that.

The Goldsmith, another young-people-versus-loonies story, bores us with action-halting exposition in which we learn why the baddies are so bad. Also, it doesn’t help that the protagonists, a trio of thieves out to rob an elderly couple, are so unpleasant. When the movie degenerates into all-out body horror, I didn’t care what happened to anyone.

Goldsmith, from Italy, is a lot like its American cousin, Don’t Breathe. In both movies, what begins as a suspenseful break-in story morphs into something else entirely — but not in a good way.  Release: 2022  Grade: C-

Would I watch it again?  No.

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You Won’t Be Alone

“It may strike some as too artsy for its own good.” — from the critics’ consensus about You Won’t Be Alone on Rotten Tomatoes.

Yeah, that might be an understatement.

Actually, the film isn’t so much “too artsy” as it is bleak and slow-moving. The plot involves a peasant girl who, after a fateful encounter with a witch, becomes a sometimes-murderous shapeshifter seeking love and the meaning of life in 19th-century Macedonia.

Individual scenes are mesmerizing, many images are indelible — the photography and score are beautiful. But oh, man, is this movie slow going. Meaningful or meaningless, life is simply too short. Release: 2022  Grade: B-

**

Brightwood

Groundhog Day meets The Twilight Zone when a bickering couple goes for a scenic jog that never ends in this low-budget indie.

I love a good premise, but when said premise is nothing new, repeated ad nauseam, and leads to an ambiguous denouement that reeks of a screenwriter’s “I can’t think of a good way to end this, so I’ll just have them do something gross” … well, no thanks. Release: 2022  Grade: D

**

Happy Death Day 2U

Like its predecessor, 2017’s Happy Death Day, this sequel is a mash-up of Groundhog Day, Back to the Future, and Scream. Also, as in the original, the plot is a convoluted mess involving time loops, multiverses, and the “butterfly effect.” And if you’re looking for actual scares, best look elsewhere.

None of that matters. What matters is that it’s all consistently amusing, the characters are likable, and good lord — move over, Jennifer Lawrence. To my mind, Jessica Rothe is the best comic actress working in movies.

And did I mention that the story is also shockingly poignant? Release: 2019  Grade: B+

**

Barbarian

The first half of Barbarian promises to live up to its lofty 93 percent “fresh” rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. The movie is compelling, believable and, above all, suspenseful.

Georgina Campbell plays a young woman who, upon arriving in Detroit for a job interview, learns she must share a rental house with a man played by Bill Skarsgard. Can the handsome stranger be trusted? Are the two of them alone in the small house?

Alas and alack, the second half of the film, in which the story switches gears, is all too familiar to fans of horror flicks: It’s increasingly ridiculous, with our heroine making bone-headed decisions and the plot veering into genre cliches.

If you are a horror-film-lover, as I am, you understand that these days you can’t have nice things — just half of nice things. Release: 2022  Grade: B

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Snatchers

A teen girl has unprotected sex, gets pregnant, and gives birth — all within 24 hours.

Despite my rather grim synopsis above, 2019’s Snatchers is actually a madcap mash-up of movies like Mean Girls and The Hidden. Or possibly Gremlins.

The plot is ridiculous, and I wouldn’t describe the film as particularly “scary,” but the direction is fast-paced, and the girls and their Gen Z jargon are consistently amusing. As pleasant timewasters go, you could do a lot worse than this horror-comedy.   Release: 2019  Grade: B

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Inside

Willem Dafoe plays an art thief who, when things go wrong, becomes trapped in a high-tech, high-rise apartment in Manhattan.

Dafoe is always an interesting actor, with an interesting face and an interesting voice. But spending two hours watching his character struggle to survive entrapment in a fancy penthouse isn’t the same as, say, two hours spent watching Tom Hanks marooned on an island in the Pacific. The former simply isn’t sustainable. Release: 2023 Grade: B-

**

65

If you read the reviews of 65 on Rotten Tomatoes, you’ll notice that critics who give “thumbs up” to this science-fiction thriller feel the need to apologize for doing so. They imply: It’s not enough for a movie to simply set out to entertain its audience. Where is the Important Message?

65, in which space travelers Adam Driver and a tween girl get stranded on Earth — 65 million years ago — starts out silly and gets sillier as it progresses. But it has two likeable leads and never fails to entertain — more so than many overhyped, budget-bloated, three-hour blockbusters. Release: 2023 Grade: B

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