MSU

090 Tetris -- One of a recent spate of movies about tech or business. Air is in cinemas just now and I saw a movie about the Blackberry is coming soon. The Social Network was probably about as interesting as a movie about contract law can get, but I still enjoyed this quite a bit. Taron Egerton is great as Henk Rogers, a tech entrepreneur who spots a new game at a Vegas conference built by Soviet programmer Alexey Pajitnov, Nikita Efremov, who officially works for the Soviet's government-owned version of Silicon Valley. The movie follows the licensing hoops Rogers has to jump through while keeping track of Pajitnov's run-ins with the KGB who want their share, and Toby Jones's Robert Stein who controls the rights. Egerton here is channeling a weird kinda hybrid of Matt Damon from the Oceans movies, and Michael Keaton from The Founder, and it works brilliantly. The first half of the movie is fun and inventive and uses bright graphical overlays that are delightful in a nostalgic kind of way, along with a bright 8-bit and 16-bit soundtrack, and it's a timely reminder of just how awful the Maxwell family -- who somehow had a dog in this fight -- really were. The second half gets bogged down a bit when, much like Tetris itself, it fails to evolve into much more than it was to begin with, but also in keeping with the game, it's still pretty satisfying watching it all fall into place. 7/10 091 The Souvenir (#87 in the A24 series) -- Joanna Hogg's semi-autobiographical debut is absolutely dripping in pretension and self-importance. Honor Swinton Byrne plays Julie, a film student who lives in Knightsbridge -- Knightsbridge! -- who wants to make a film about poor people in Sunderland, who has parties with her friends and fellow students when Anthony, Tom Burke, enters her life. He claims to work for the Foreign Office and can't talk about his job too much -- it's all hush-hush -- and he has an obvious heroin problem that Julie simply refuses to see for the longest time, by which point they're already a couple, and he's already borrowing money from her, and stealing from her, which sends her back to her mansion home to beg for money from her mother, Tilda Swinton, as she resolutely refuses to kick his arse out. It's so ludicrously over the top and tone-deaf that I became convinced it was meant to be funny, except I wasn't laughing. The biggest smile came onto my face right at the end, after the credits, when it cheerfully announced that a sequel would be happening soon. Well, there's optimism for you. 3/10 092 Evil Dead Rise -- I love Evil Dead movies so much that I went to the first screening on a rainy Thursday night when I would normally be tucked up in bed. A decade after the Fede Alvarez reboot, Lee Cronin, who I thought did a decent job with The Hole in the Ground, has written and directed a sequel that isn't so much a natural progression, but a new story with different characters that plays with the same set of rules. Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) is a mother to teenagers Danny and Bridget (Morgan Davies and Gabrielle Echols) and tween Kassie (Nell Fisher). They live in a converted and soon-to-be-condemned bank in Los Angeles when they're visited by Ellie's sister, Beth (Lily Sullivan), who is a bit of a black sheep, works as a guitar technician that everyone confuses with her being a groupie, and she's just found out she's pregnant. A minor earthquake tears a hole in the parking level basement as the kids are heading out for pizza, and this leads Danny the DJ down to an old bank vault where he finds a familiar, nasty-looking book, and some old vinyl and when he plays the recordings, literally (kinda) all hell is released, Ellie is quickly possessed, and the remainder of the movie is about how and how many the remaining characters, including a couple of disposable neighbors, are going to get out. Cronin absolutely knows how to make an Evil Dead. His script puts some of the humour that was missing from the reboot, but it's nothing like the slapstick of Evil Dead 2. There are a couple of questionable moments that my suspension of disbelief just refused to let go of -- When will people stop reading books made with teeth? How consistently can you spin a record at 78 rpm with your finger? -- but the fact remains that this is a very strong entry into a much-beloved series that manages to be an homage to what came before while being inventive enough to tell its story its own way and Lily Sullivan as Beth, covered in blood, grasping on to the mandatory chainsaw, all white eyes and white teeth, makes a fantastic female Bruce Campbell. 8/10 093 Beau is Afraid (#133 in the A24 series) -- This is going to divide people. Ari Aster really has a thing about head trauma. He also has a thing about anxiety. And after this, I'm sure he could do with a chat with his mum. Beau Is Afraid is such a difficult movie to describe. It's part comedy, part horror, and kafkaesque seems to be a word invented just to get involved somewhere. In broad strokes of things that might have happened, Joaquin Phoenix plays Beau, an anxious middle-aged man, terrified of everything, who unfortunately lives in the most terrifying apartment in the most terrifying part of town. Everything he fears can go wrong, does go wrong, and during an attempt to get home to visit his mother, his apartment keys are stolen, he misses his flight, and his home is eventually invaded by everyone on the street. Matters take a turn for the worst when he's attacked and stabbed by a naked serial killer and then run down. There are many moments during its perhaps indulgent three-hour runtime, that don't seem to make much sense, and maybe they don't, but everywhere I looked during the movie there was remarkable attention to detail. Names of businesses, graffiti, TV shows, are all cram packed with little nuggets and it all suggests to me that there is method even in the darker moments of its madness. I don't suggest that I got it in its entirety, and I'm not convinced that seeing it again would necessarily help, but I enjoyed being bemused at it for what it was, or what it struck me to be, which was a study or an impression of anxiety, guilt, and how Ari Aster feels he was a massive disappointment to his mother, told through a language of generational trauma, all weaved into one of the most convincing nightmares committed to screen. 7/10 094 Tomorrow Never Dies -- Forgot to log this one last week. I see this one towards the bottom of many Bond lists and I have no idea why it scores so low. Admittedly, perhaps GoldenEye has it beat but I didn't think there was an awful lot in it, and it was somewhat refreshing that the baddie here was a media mogul, and the fake news aspects couldn't be more of the current time. Brosnan feels entirely settled into the Bond role at this point and he's helped by a great supporting cast. Jonathan Pryce excels as the Steve Jobs lookalike Elliot Carver, Teri Hatcher is his wife, and Michelle Yeoh proves she's been kicking ass in the movies for decades as Chinese superspy Wai Lin. The sequence where she and Bond are handcuffed and making their escape on motorbike is a bit of a masterclass in chase sequences and practical stunts. To score this below Moonraker and Diamonds Are Forever, as it is on Rotten Tomatoes, is lunacy. 6/10

I've really enjoyed this series so far. The drum task and the bingo stuff was just wonderfully funny.

086 80 for Brady -- I hate the Patriots and I hate Tom Brady but I love Sally Field and I hoped that there'd be a few laughs to be had from this. Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno, and the aforementioned Sally Field star as four unlikeable elderly Pats and Brady fans who decide as a last hoorah to go to Super Bowl LI. There's the most meager of plots surrounding the means in which the ladies get tickets in the shadow of ill-health, but mostly this is an excuse to have multiple set pieces where the friends enter a wing-eating competition, play high stakes poker, consume edibles, and other activities which are supposed to be funny because the women are old and dottery. The movie also hopes that we've forgotten how that particular Super Bowl ended up. Really poor stuff. 3/10 087 Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum -- A Korean found footage horror movie, anyone? I had my doubts but it turned out to be an unexpected hit. The story might not be based on truth, but as far as I can make out, it's a real location that has its own real urban legends, so it's at least based on commonly accepted falsehoods. Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital was closed down in the 1970s, but not because of any mass suicide from its patients as the movie would have you believe. A group of friends, filming for part of a web series called Horror Times, get all GoPro'd to the hilt and break into the abandoned hospital to film the ghostly goings-on. This means lots of close-up shots of a static face while the background moves about, a method that always freaks me out a bit at the best of times. It's a slow burn toward the denouement, which for me is not a bad thing at all, and all the way through there is a simmering level of dread that amplifies as the story progresses. The atmosphere of the dark hospital at night is pretty much perfect for scares and jumps and catching glimpses of weird shapes in the shadows. The subtitles are a bit rubbish but it's well-acted, genuinely scary, and the final third is nuts. 7/10 088 Murder Mystery 2 -- The first one hasn't lingered much in my memory but out of all the shite Adam Sandler movies, the ones that feature Jennifer Aniston seem to be slightly less shite. The two of them have good chemistry together, they just do. Nick and Audrey Spitz are invited to a private island and the wedding of a billionaire character who may or may not have been in the first movie -- I honestly can't remember -- along with some other characters I may or may not have been introduced to previously. It doesn't matter. Once all the potential suspects have shown up, the billionaire is kidnapped. Nick and Audrey, with the addition of Mark Strong's hostage negotiator, and the investigation leaps to Paris where matters that are already complicated take a few additional twists and turns. It's quite good fun while not being enormously funny, but a setpiece in a van in Paris makes it just about worthwhile. It's billed as 89 minutes long but there are 10 minutes of credits at the end and the miserly runtime is in its favor. I think I kinda liked it. 6/10 089 Renfield -- Urgh. I'm not thinking much of Nicholas Cage's cosplay adventures so far in 2023. I really didn't like his cowboy movie The Old Way, and I really didn't care much for him being a vampire in this. Nicolas Hoult plays the same sort of character as he does in everything I've seen him in, only this time he's called Renfield and he's Dracula's "familiar" -- basically a servant who ensures his master is looked after (not like that) and well fed. From this perspective, we get the script's only interesting twist, which is the co-dependent relationship between master and servant, both of whom need the other to survive. The jokes, such as they are, threaten to land best in the adult support group that Renfield joins in New Orleans. But inexplicably, this aspect of the storyline spends a lot of its time in the backseat while a storyline of a drugs cartel, the Lobo Family, takes the wheel, presumably as a method to introduce Awkwafina to proceedings. I'm trying to remember the last time I enjoyed Awkwafina in a movie, and it might be back in Oceans Eight, which was terrible, but I seem to have fond memories of her performance. Here, she's phoning it in as Officer Quincy, the only good apple in a barrel full of bad who are all in the Lobo's back pockets. She's so wooden that with a decent aim at Dracula's heart, she could've wound the movie up within 10 minutes, which would at least have spared us from the attempts to convince us that Renfield and Quincy had any romantic potential whatsoever. In the absence of anything better, McKay tries a sleight of hand to distract us with the ropiest CGI blood and gore I've seen in a long time and if it's meant to shock or turn the stomach, it flat-out fails. There is, though, an awful lot of it, far more than can be considered necessary or effective. But surely the biggest crime of all is that there are long periods of the movie where Nicholas Cage just disappears, and given that he's about 110% Nick Cage when he's at his Nick Cagiest, this is unforgivable. 4/10

Bob trending on Twitter always gets me worried but he's trending now because people are talking about which celeb they'd like to be stuck in a caravan with over a rainy weekend.

Been meaning to watch this for a while. Sounds like something I'd enjoy.

084 The World is Not Enough -- I went to see this in 1999 and fell asleep in the cinema, something I've always put down to having had "a few" beforehand. Watching it now, that's probably still partially to blame but I think the lion's share goes to the fact that this is a very boring movie. I wonder if the premise is just too focused on the well-being of an oil heiress, or the cast list included Goldie and I'm assuming a comedy turn from John Cleese is a bit too questionable, or the fact that the franchise's fascination with the nautical has seldom got my pulse raised. I still think Brosnan is a good, maybe even great Bond, but there's not much that can fix a shite story. Good theme tune, tho. 4/10 085 Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves -- I've never been a D&D fan in real life, and I don't think I've seen any of the previous attempts to put it on the big screen, but I was a massive fan of the cartoon series in the 80s and from I saw from the trailers, it looked like writers and directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein were too. This thought was confirmed about five minutes into the movie. And even though it's a completely different movie, you can see and hear Game Night in the style and the beat of the jokes. The CGI works better on backgrounds than it does on some of the things zipping around the screen, the story isn't about to surprise anyone, and most of the twists and turns are reliant on fairly convenient events. The McGuffin is with Jobby the Whiffy? Well, guess what, Doric saw Jobby the Whiffy just the other day and knows where he is. If anything, though, that just makes it more authentic D&D. Convenience is part of the game. The way to escape the dungeon is in the dungeon or the thing that was picked up just before entering the dungeon turns out to be the thing that'll find us the key. Either way, I can forgive these shortcomings because the movie is enormous fun, it doesn't take itself too seriously, the actors are committed to the roles, the script is funny throughout, the landscapes are gorgeous, the action scenes thrilling -- maybe one too many examples of one-versus-many? -- the pay-off is just about worth the runtime, and Hugh Grant really is THAT good. And it was nice to see the hat-tip to the cartoon towards the end when those characters appear to be in a cage about to be killed. I can see myself enjoying this a few more times before the inevitable sequels start coming out. When they do, I hope they retain the mood and the spirit of this. 8/10

Agree 100%. The Spy Who Loved Me gets pass marks but mostly when compared to other Moore efforts. The parody tone of the others, the writing, Moore's age at the time, none of them do much apart from sparking nostalgic thoughts of Christmases as a bairn.

081 The Lost King -- Sally Hawkins plays a version of the mum out of Paddington who has a nervous breakdown and obsesses over the final resting place of Richard III. The movie takes some creative liberties with Phillipa Langley's story but most of the bits I thought couldn't possibly be true were bang on the money. Steve Coogan stars as Phillipa's ex-husband and also wrote the pretty tight script that has a good few laughs and does its best to generate some tension from a well-known tale. If anything, it's the ghost of Richard III appearing to Phillipa that did the least for me. All in all, it's a perfectly fine way to spend a couple of hours and serves as a decent reminder, if needed, that some dickhead men will do anything to stop a woman get some credit for something. 6/10 082 GoldenEye -- As a guy who was brought up with Connery and Moore, I'm needing to adjust my opinion somewhat about these new kids on the block because so far, I haven't been disappointed. As usual, those pesky Ruskies have been up to no good and they've got their mitts on a satellite system capable of destroying the universe or something. Along for the ride are Sean Bean, Robbie Coltrane, Alan Cumming, and Izabella Scorupco. It's fast, frenetic, and has Bond in a tank rolling through St Petersburg, complete with classic tie adjustment. Much like Licence to Kill, it hits the buttons that I would expect to see in a Bond movie and it hits them really well. 7/10 083 About Last Night (#9 in the Brat Packs series) -- The main challenge of this movie is trying to decide which character to hate the most. I'm kidding, it's obviously Jim Belushi's Bernie. Other than that, it's just another couple of hours of being astounded that Rob Lowe managed to pay his bills through the 80s because nothing he says is remotely believable. Two dull people with no chemistry hook up and end up having a relationship developed during a montage and their friends disapprove and then the movie ends. It's not the worst Brat Pack movie so far, but being better than Blue City is no reason for it to get carried away. 4/10

Well, the Gibson Garage was impressive but not as hands-on as I imagined it would be (except for the Epiphones and Kramers) and my admiration of a Songwriter acoustic was brought short when a guy decided to batter out one of his own songs, with lyrics. However, they had this 1959 Les Paul Standard that has been valued at half a million bucks.

The guy out of Ghosts already coming across as less of a confused fanny than the woman out of Ghosts.

In Tennessee with the family for Spring Break at the moment. Heading to the Gibson Garage in Nashville on Saturday. I'll need to leave my wallet in the hotel or I'll be hitchhiking home on my lonesome. https://www.gibson.com/en-US/garage

Lovely stuff. What a slender profile it has too. Looks like it'll be dead comfy to play, and nice access at the dusty end too.

078 Licence to Kill -- The Timothy Dalton tenure as 007 ends just as it was getting started and I've got to say, he's pretty underrated in the role. I've enjoyed this and The Living Daylights quite a bit and the timeline back to poor Roger Moore seems lightyears away. Well, miles away. Maybe round the corner a bit. In this one, Bond goes rogue to avenge the death of Felix's wife and the feasting of bits of Felix himself to a peckish tiger shark. Robert Davi is great as the 80s coke-lord alongside a young Benicio Del Toro and a not-quite-so-old Anthony Zerbe. Add in Carey Lowell, and if you can ignore what Bond's hair's doing most of the time and the occasional resurgence of his Welsh accent, this is right up there. 7/10 079 Skinamarink -- I get how this has polarized opinions. On one hand, it's a terrifying experimental and immersive waking nightmare of a movie. On the other hand, it's boring as f**k. As usual, the truth is somewhere in between. At 100 minutes, it is too long, and made to feel WAY too long by the unconventional way of shooting. There are lots of lingering shots of lego bricks on the floor, corners of rooms, people's feet as they way through the background, there are lots of panning shots around rooms and up to ceilings, and while this is happening, there's not an awful lot else going on. Except, of course, if you're buying into it. If this is working for you, then the lack of anything going on becomes an unbearable anticipation for that state to suddenly change without warning. I thought it was effective, it gave me goosebumps, and if you're the sort of person who couldn't sleep for thinking about that dude standing in the corner of the room at the end of Blair Witch, or the figure at the bottom of the bed in Paranormal Activity, it might just work for you too, and like those two examples, it'll leave some images indelibly branded on to your brain. 7/10 080 Creed III -- I feel a Rocky and Creed retrospective coming along after this. Despite the varying quality between, say, Rocky, and Rocky V, I'm usually hooked no matter what and Creed does the same. Creed III takes a bit of Rocky III and a bit of Rocky I as Adonis finds himself retired and in the lap of luxury and training the new champion, while an old buddy who has been in prison for two decades comes out looking for some favors to be returned and to get the rookie title shot he missed out on. It's horrendously predictable, which isn't necessarily a bad thing for these movies, but the rivalries are skimmed over without much development and it's oddly dialogue-heavy, but dammit if I didn't find myself cheering my way to the finale that I saw coming from around twenty minutes in. It's the weakest Creed installment but it's still enjoyable enough. 6/10

Agreed. Mia Goth is the best thing in both movies. Both movies have tons of promise but ultimately failed to deliver on it. Ty West has great ideas but he runs out of steam and Goth while great just isn't enough to fill in the shortfall. Still freaks me out when I remember she's English.

Tough to imagine getting better value for money than that. Happy noodling!

The fact that a man with hair like that, a tan like that, who stands like he's papped his pampers, with a name that literally means fart, has the nerve to use crappy nicknames for his enemies ... I kinda have to respect that level of stupidity.

Sure I read somewhere that she was supposed to play the lead and convinced Craven to give her the Casey role instead, so I'm not sure anyone was doing her a favour there, other than giving her the smaller part.

072 Scream -- It bears repeating that in 1995, we got The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Leprechaun 3, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, and Piranha. 1996 gave us Scream. What makes Scream so good, I reckon, is that it gives us characters to care about, and it subverts expectations. It's like it looked at Hitchcock killing off Marion Crane in Psycho at the midway point and said hold my coffee. Killing Drew Barrymore after 13 minutes is still kinda insane when you think about it, and imagine going into it not expecting it. Incredible chase scenes, a sharp and witty and meta script when that was still unusual, and a Giallo-inspired whodunnit element, it's no wonder this is still a delight. Oh, to be 23 again and see this for the first time. 10/10 073 Scream 2 -- For me, this movie is all about two unbearably tense sequences that play back-to-back. Gail and Dewey are stalked in the college movie theater and soundproof booth, and then Sidney and Haley are trapped in a crashed cop car and have to crawl over a seemingly unconscious Ghostface in the driver's seat. Add to this a wonderfully deranged performance from Laurie Metcalf and there's a lot of fun to be had. Okay, so the end feels a good bit more manufactured, the kills less satisfying, and there are a couple of very questionable moments -- the song in the cafeteria, Sidney shaking the scenery in the denouement -- but with Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson still at the helm, as far as sequels go it ranks pretty high. 8/10 074 Scream 3 -- Proof, perhaps, that the lightning in the bottle wasn't just Wes Craven because with Kevin Williamson off doing Dawson's Creek, this is a bit a mess. That said, it's interesting that it has a go at the casting couch culture in Hollywood and the industry sexual impropriety with Harvey Weinstein's name on the credits. Sidney is little more than a bit character until the end, thanks to contractual issues with Neve Campbell, so it's left to Gail and Dewey to keep the action engaging, and not even Courteney Cox's bizarre hair is enough to do that. It's Scooby Doo style hokum. 5/10 075 Scream 4 -- In an alternate universe, this would be Scream 3. Craven and Williamson back for what would be the final time makes a better swansong for that generation, a more fitting end to the trilogy. There's plenty I still like about this one; the opening sequences that seemed to be inspired by Inception, the kills are more brutal than I remember, and Hayden Panettiere being the only one with a tan. But it's a tired Sidney Prescott and I don't think I would've begrudged her for bowing out at this stage. Poor Dewey and Gale are beginning to feel like Donald Pleasence in some of the higher-numbered Halloween sequels, desperately trying to be relevant. And who is still selling Ghostface masks at this point? Fucking capitalism. Not bad, not great, better than the last one, pretty much instantly forgettable, and I can't remember the last character I actually cared about. 6/10 076 Scream -- The new cast is a welcome alternative to the old guard who were already looking pretty tired in their roles 11 years previously in Scream 4. Their introduction here is a bridge between the two collections, I guess, but in retrospect, did Sidney really need to return? Maybe not. The meta chat feels even more tired when you see all the movies essentially back to back. It's fun, though, the kills have really amped up in the last decade, and well would you believe it but I actually cared about Judy Hicks and her kid. The ending might as well have arrows pointing at it from the end of Act One, the continuity of who killed who makes no sense, but it's still enjoyable. It's just not as good as I first thought, and whenever I get around to seeing it again, I expect I'll feel the same way about Scream VI. 7/10 077 Champions -- I'm so glad no one tried to make this in the 90s. Woody Harrelson plays a stubborn assistant basketball coach in the Nowhere Leagues who assaults his boss during a game, gets drunk, and then drives into the back of a parked police car. He's given a choice of a custodial sentence or to coach an intellectually disabled team for 90 days. Can this bum of a coach turn this team into winners and maybe, just maybe, learn a bit about himself and the world in the process? Well, if you've seen a sporting comedy in your life, you probably know all the beats that this is going to hit as it slowly saunters its way to the obvious conclusion. Even the love interest B Story of Harrelson and Kaitlin Olson sticks very much to the well-trodden path. The interest in the movie comes from the characters in the team but it's all rather miss rather than hit and aside from a few laugh-out-loud moments, it's mostly a comedy that you smile at while appreciating what it's trying to do. I wish it had been funnier, I wish it had been braver in its narrative choices, and ohmygod I wish it had been shorter, but I'm glad that it exists and that it gives the intellectually disabled a rare opportunity to see themselves on screen, making the jokes rather than being the butt of them. Judging by the viewing I was in, people enjoy being positively represented in the media they watch. Who knew? 6/10

All things considered, I was pretty pleased with the outcome of the Oscars. Was happy for EEAAO, Brendan Fraser, and as happy for A24 as much as someone can be happy for a studio, but generally they make good movies that I'm interested in. Out of 23 categories, I pipped Mrs MSU and our youngest by predicting 13 winners correctly to their 12. The only big shock of the night was Jamie Lee Curtis picking up Best Supporting Actress in a very strong year. Out of the nominees, she'd have probably been my fourth pick. I mean, who remembers much of her role in EEAAO, especially compared with Hong Chau or Kerry Condon or even Stephanie Hsu? My prediction of Banshees being nominated for everything and winning nothing came true, glad that Elvis and Fabelmans came away empty-handed too, and the only real regret of the night was that Aftersun wasn't nominated for more.

The liquid nitrogen and sleeping bag kills were amazing. Final Chapter and Jason Lives were my picks of the bunch, tho.

Yeah, I watched the original last night and it's still incredible. When you look at the state of horror movies in 1995 (Leprechaun 3, Halloween 6, The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre) it's all the more incredible that a year later something like this could be made that was fresh, that could out-Psycho Psycho by killing a leading actor in the first 13 minutes, and reinvent a genre. Still not sure why Henry Winkler had to get killed, tho. Expect a 10 on 10 on next week's list. Agreed. I enjoyed it once it got going, I loved the chase sequences, and the city setting worked better than I thought it would, and Mrs MSU and I enjoyed picking apart the plot holes after. Perfectly functional stuff and good fun but compared to the original, it's night and day. That said, in front of us there was a family of five, all of them wearing What's Your Favorite Movie t-shirts, and ranging in ages down to I'd guess 10 or 11 (yikes) and they were LOVING IT.

067 The Living Daylights -- I hadn't seen this one all the way through before. I don't know if it's my unfamiliarity with it, if Timothy Dalton is really that great a Bond, or if his debut is helped by coming off of the complete run of Moore entries in the last couple of weeks, but The Living Daylights isn't just a great 80s action movie, it's a great Bond movie. Another cracking theme tune doesn't do my enjoyment of this one any harm whatsoever, and nor does Maryam d'Abo in Mujahideen garb. 7/10 068 It Happened One Night (#7 in the Oscar Best Picture series) -- The story is simple, the script crisp, and the acting far better than I've been lead to expect from pre-war cinema combine to make a perfect movie and a template for a million romcoms that followed it. If it seems full of clichés and stereotypes, it's because it invented them. What is remarkable, though, is how well it has aged and despite the effect of subsequent mimicry, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert still manage to delight. Bugs Bunny has a lot to thank it for, too. 10/10 069 Women Talking -- The final movie from this year's Best Picture nominations list is a heavy enough story even before you factor in the fact that it's based on actual events in Bolivia where, in an isolated religious colony, men drugged and raped their women folk over a period of years. The movie is basically a meeting of those women to decide what they're going to do once they discover what's been going on. The acting chops on show here are as impressive as anything else released in 2022. Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Frances McDormand, Ben Whishaw, all do a magnificent job, which begs the question of why the movie didn't attract more Oscar nominations besides Best Picture. McDormand is only in the movie for a few scenes and does more with those minutes than some actors manage in a career. For me, as much as I admired it, it felt a bit stagey, and while the dialogue is as carefully crafted as it is beautifully delivered, there are moments when the text could've done with some subtext. 9/10 070 Kingpin -- It's a weird combination of events that led me to rewatch Kingpin for the first time in probably a decade or so. I worried that it hadn't aged well, and it hasn't, but the Farrelly brothers' output has never been renowned for its inclusivity. However, this doesn't alter the fact that the movie is packed full of jokes, and an awful lot of them find their mark. The thing that particularly tickled me this time was Ishmael being referred to as The Kid by Roy and Claudia despite Randy Quaid being 46 at the time of release and more than 10 years older than his co-stars. Purposefully mean-spirited, with Woody Harrelson and Bill Murray facing off to play the biggest douche in the movie, it does its best to hide its heart and it might yet be the Farrelly's masterpiece. 8/10 071 Scream VI: Ghostface Takes Manhattan -- The movie more or less picks up in real-time from the end of last year's Scream requel. Our Core Four of Sam, Tara, Mindy, and Chad have left Woodsboro and now find themselves in the Big Apple where Tara is attending a fictional liberal arts college on the Upper West Side, and Sam is battling online conspiracy theorists who reckon she was actually the killer in the last movie and she framed Richie. It's enjoyable enough, and it's maybe the best opening since Scream 4, but at this point in the franchise, all the meta chat is a bit dull, multiple stab wounds threaten the suspension of disbelief far more than any character, and the plot holes that had been threatening to bubble up for most of the movie do indeed surface in the third act. The returns are undeniably diminishing since the requel and, of course, the original, and there's an increasing part of me that hopes we end it here, while it's still enjoyable, and before we get to Scream X: Ghostface in Space (and Also the Future). 7/10

060 For Your Eyes Only -- It's obvious that Moore's age, at the start of the 1980s he was in his mid-50s, is starting to become a problem for most of the action and many of the love interests. Talking of which, Bibi Dahl has to be the most annoying so far. I appreciated the more serious tone, and the Sheena Easton theme tune, but I can't imagine this to be the top of anyone's list. Middling Bond fayre at its most mediocre, perhaps. 5/10 061 Octopussy -- By 1983, Roger Moor had turned into his own Spitting Image puppet. Steven Berkoff is prime baddie-with-an-accent as the Soviet general who, I think, wants to trigger a nuclear explosion that will lead to unilateral disarmament, which will then in turn lead to worldwide communism, and all of this has something to do with Faberge eggs maybe. Maud Adams is interesting as Octopussy -- apparently, it was her father's creepy nickname for her -- until Bond beds her. But the thing that I'll remember from this viewing is how the first half of the movie crams in a frankly incredible number of lazy Indian stereotypes. Rating-wise, honestly it's somewhere between a 4 and a 5, but I'm marking it down for Bond in a gorilla suit checking his watch, and a honking theme tune. 4/10 062 Share (#83 in the A24 series) -- The movie opens after the pivotal moment where 16 year old Mandy is sexually assaulted while passed out drunk and the video of it goes viral round her school, and it deals quite expertly with the fall out and the pursuit of justice from a system ill-equipped to provide it. Rhianne Barreto is great as Mandy and Pippa Bianco in her first feature directs with a careful eye, and an intimate and intense approach as she uses close-ups of whispering characters as more of the story is revealed. The ping of a new text message has rarely felt so panic-inducing. Grim stuff, but. 7/10 063 The Kill Team (#85 in the A24 series) -- It's a fairly interesting, but by-the-numbers movie about American atrocities committed in the name of war in Afghanistan and while it asks important questions and touches on themes of groupthink and blindly following orders, Alexander Skarsgård's villainous Sergeant Deeks is a bit too one-dimensional to be truly effective, and the movie seems to realize this in the final act when we're all swiftly kettled towards a conclusion. Based on a true story because of course it is. 6/10 064 Causeway (#122 in the A24 series) -- I very much enjoyed this character-driven piece mostly for the slow pace and reflective nature and outstanding score by Alex Somers, but really the movie revolves around the performances from Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry as two emotionally and physically scarred people who strike up an unexpected and slightly co-dependent relationship. I honestly don't think I've seen either be better in anything else. Brian Tyree Henry is pretty much in a leading role so I suspect the Supporting Actor nomination is a pragmatic decision, and while I don't think he's really in any danger of picking up the Oscar later this month, that shouldn't detract from how incredible he is here. 9/10 065 A View to a Kill -- My memories of this are mostly around the big ticket set-pieces; the Eiffel Tower parachute chase, the mine, the blimp at the Golden Gate, and the horrendous gameplay of the tie-in game for the ZX Spectrum, so much of it is better than I remember. Christopher Walken gloriously camps it up as the psychotic main villain -- I may have cheered when he tells Bond he's incompetent -- Grace Jones is fabulous as his henchwoman, and Patrick Macnee is brilliant fun as Tibbett. It's by no means the stain on Moore's tenure as Bond I had remembered it to be, but he was wise to bow out here. Cracking theme song, too. 5/10 066 Cocaine Bear -- As I was leaving the cinema, someone behind me said that this movie was both everything and nothing like they were expecting. Well, what can you really expect from a film about a bear roaming a national park, high on cocaine that had fallen from a smuggler's plane? The very very loose true story has been embellished and built upon by Jimmy Warden and directed by Elizabeth Banks, out of off of Pitch Perfect, and they do a pretty fantastic job cutting a story with lines that intertwine, giving it a narrative arc, and filling it with characters that might avoid development, but are still interesting and have realistic goals, even if one of their primary objectives is to avoid being eaten by a bear out of its tits on cocaine. Funny and beautifully gory, it's an unexpected high point of 2023 movies so far. 8/10

Bradley was trying to make Sex Panther, wasn't he?