• Poor Things (2023):
  This movie looked at the weirdest stuff Ken Russell had ever done and said "hold my beer". It's absolutely incredible. Full of relentlessly weird choices in acting, sets and especially cinematography. Why is it suddenly fish-eye! We will never know! And surprisingly filthy! How did this win Academy Awards? This movie is the kind of thing that the Academy hates.

• The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971):
  This movie is absolutely amazing. It had been so long since I saw it that I had forgotten it almost entirely. I remembered the murders, the mask, the hapless detectives, but what I forgot was the sets, the dancing, the fashion, the clockwork orchestra, the absolute lunacy! This is a movie made in 1972 and set in the mid-20s, so the look of it is this insane mixture of 60s high fashion and Art Nouveau. Every scene-change comes with a costume change. Every murder comes with a little dance from Phibes and Vulnavia. This movie is an absolute treasure.

• Dr. Phibes Rises Again (1972):
  This movie is... lesser. It still has amazing sets, and costumes, and the dancing, but it also has an antagonist, and a smidge more plot. And that does not work in its favor. With the first one, you could just let the mood of it wash over you. This one leads you to ask questions like, "But how did he ship the clockwork orchestra to the pyramid?" and if you are asking questions like that, you have fallen out of the trance.

• Lisa Frankenstein (2024):
  A goth girl and her reanimated corpse boyfriend. This is basically: "What if Edward Scissorhands was actually good?" It's set in the version of the 80s that is what people who weren't alive in the 80s think they 80s must have been like. (And even with that, I am embarrassed to admit that I didn't get the joke in the title until the next day. "Ohhhhhh....")

  In terms of set dressing and fashion, I wonder if people who lived through the 1980s feel about this movie the way that people who lived through the 1920s felt about Dr. Phibes.

• 30 Coins (2020):
  This show is absolutely wild. There's a small town in Spain, a creepy priest, and some Satanists trying to collect the Judas McGuffins, and you think, ok, standard Catholic pea-soup fare, I know how this is all going to go. And then there are giant babies, spider monsters, mirror people, shoggoths. Every episode has a "what the fuck did I just see" moment. It's fantastic. And that's just like, the first four episodes! The S02 finale was just chef's kiss. I hope there will be a third season.

• Giri Haji (2019):
  Japanese cop's dead brother was a mobster, and then shows up in London murdering people, so both the cops and the yakuza send him there to bring him back. Ass kicking ensues. It's mostly set in London, but about 1/3 in Japanese. I liked it a lot, despite my aversion to cop fare.

• Death and Other Details (2024):
  Locked-room murder mystery on a cruise ship. It is fantastic, in the manner of Knives Out.

• Parallel (2024):
  A neat little the-multiverse-sucks story where the spooky woods are a portal. Low budget but well done.

• Extraordinary (2023):
  In a world where everyone gets a superpower at around age 18. Except it's usually a really lame, mostly useless power. This is very funny, in that very specific, cringey British TV way.

• Ghosts (2019):
  A couple inherit a haunted house, and only one of them can see them. Extreme British Cringe. It took a couple episodes for it to grow on me, but it did.

• Dune 2 (2024):
  Since part 1 wasn't really a movie -- it was the first two acts of a movie -- I was kind of reserving judgement on the whole thing until this came out. Part 2 is better, and as a whole, I guess it holds up pretty well. I enjoyed how they leaned in to the whole Bene Gesserit colonial thing: that the Fremen's religious beliefs had been done to them intentionally. Paul's character was certainly less flat than he was in the book. I still contend that nobody who hadn't read the books would have a god damned idea of what was going on.

• Stopmotion (2024):
  Stop motion animators have a reputation for being complete weirdos to begin with, but when they try to work out their shit by going full Brothers Quay with roadkill... antics ensue. Anyway, this is creepy.

• 3 Body Problem (2024):
  I tried to watch the 90 episode Chinese version and only made it to like episode three before I ran entirely out of fucks. When I heard that this version was by the Lost people I thought "Oh god no" but at least since this show only gave them eight episodes to make something of themselves, they showed some restraint. This wasn't entirely awful, but out of the gigantic cast there are only like two people to give a shit about. The Giant Cheesegrater scene was an amazing effect, but it defies any kind of sanity that it was the first tool in the box that someone would reach for.

• Late Night with the Devil (2024):
  A 70s late-night host invites a possessed girl on for an interview. "What happens next might surprise you." This is pretty great. Even though it's mostly shot faux-documentary style, they don't go all shaky-cam.

• Fallout (2024):
  Hyper-competent Mary-Sue has to go on a quest to find her missing dad, Kyle McGuffin. I'm led to believe that this was based on a video game. It certainly has video game logic and physics throughout. The sets are gorgeous, several of the characters are interesting, and much scenery is chewed. It bogged down in the middle and could have been shorter by 50%, but it was fun popcorn.

• Night Shift (2024):
  Spooky goings-on at a mostly-empty motel, chock full of Checkhov's Handguns. It starts off seeming like it will be predictable but it has a good twist and a satisfying ending.

• Rebel Moon 2, Something Something Subtitle (2024):
  I had some not-entirely-negative things to say about the first one but WOW is this a snore. While the first one at least took a tour of some goofy space-locales, this one had a 30 minute montage of harvesting wheat. Wheat. This was a major plot point. Because when you have FTL, antigravity, resurrection machines, and a Star Destroyer, apparently the Empire can't function without flying to another planet and bullying a village of literally 50 people into harvesting wheat by hand. Sure that scales. That scales.

• Humane (2024):
  The solution to climate change is paying people to commit suicide. At the worst family dinner party, antics ensue. Between this and Antiviral, I'm starting to think that growing up in the Cronenberg household must have been pretty fucked up.

• Godzilla Minus One (2023):
  I enjoyed this a lot; like the original, it was mostly about trauma rather than a rampaging lizard, though the lizard scenes were outstanding. My criticisms are: it could easily have been 25% shorter (the last third is mostly crying) and even though the sets, costumes and framing were excellent, every single shot was god damned teal and orange. No other colors exist in this universe. I'm told that the black-and-white edit is better, and that is utterly believable. If you haven't seen this yet, pick that version.

• The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024):
  This is great. It's basically Inglorious Basterds but funnier and without Tarantino's weird tics. You wanna see a feel-good romp about some Nazis getting fucked up? Oh yeah you do. How does Alan Ritchson just keep getting larger? (Watch Blood Drive!)

• Ghostbusters, Frozen Empire (2024):
  It's cute and fun. It suffers from having too many characters and the writers wanting each of them to get their solo. A bunch of it doesn't make a lot of sense, but the sets and the spectacle did a good job of making me not think about it too hard. (Watch I Still See You.)

• Abigail (2024):
  This starts off as a solid heist movie, adventure party having fake names and all, and then when it pivots to some locked-house vampire shit, it really kicks off. Loved it.

• Baghead (2024):
  Extremely solid ghost story. Reminded me a bit of the also excellent Talk To Me.

• True Detective, Night Country (2024):
  Jodie Foster investigates some murders in Alaska, which also wants to murder you, and every single person is a piece of shit. This was pretty great -- about as good as S01. (I didn't much like, and barely remember, S02 or S03.)

• Whiteout (2009):
  After the latest season of True Detective I was in the mood for more stories where the antagonist is the weather. In this, there's a murder in Antarctica, the night before everyone is shipping out before winter-over. I still really like this movie. There are human villains, bad people making bad decisions, but the primary villain is the environment, which vehemently wants you dead, and it is done really well. This is based on a fantastic comic by Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber, which is better, but the movie is still solid.

  Fun fact! When I was 12 or 13 I thought I might grow up to be a comic book illustrator. Problem was, I went to high school with Steve Lieber, and when I saw how good he was at it I thought, "Yeah, this is not a realistic goal, maybe I should be a computer-toucher instead."

  Billy Porter was also in our class, but fortunately I didn't have any musical theatre ambitions for him to inadvertently quash.

• Civil War (2024):
  Not bad. I had a bad feeling about this when all the press was this sniveling, centrist, both-sides-ism, "but it's not political!" nonsense. But actually -- it's not political. It's a road-trip character study of a handful of war photographers. The war itself is just set dressing.

• The Fall Guy (2024):
  Oh no, a stunt man has to solve a murder. Ryan Gosling Ryan Goslings all over the place. Dumb fun.

• New Life (2023):
  The trailer gives too much away, but it opens with: girl gets infected with a weird disease, goes on the run, and now people are trying to murder her. I liked it. Solid ending.

• Love Lies Bleeding (2024):
  Extremely trashy 80s noir. People who liked Blood Simple also liked.

• The Primevals (2023):
  Full Moon Features are still making movies (yes, the Subspecies and Puppet Master folks) and this movie has all the quality of writing and acting that you would expect from their 80s fare, which is to say, abysmal. But! It's a mixture of live action and stop animation and I don't mean a bunch of digital stuff, or a bunch of digital stuff trying to look like stop animation, it seems to be the real deal. They were aiming for Harryhausen but landed on Rankin-Bass, but still, it's charming in its own way.

• Wipeout 2097 Soundtrack: Noclip Documentary (2024):
  If you are a Wipeout obsessive like me, you will enjoy this brief retrospective and interview with Cold Storage.

Previously.