Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021)

I liked the three short Marcel web videos from the early 2010s, but the announcement of this movie caught me by surprise. The shorts mostly consisted of monologues with almost no plot and rarely a second character on screen. How could the makers fill 90 minutes? When I saw that the answer was streaming on Netflix, I immediately opted to find out.

Marcel (Jenny Slate) is a walnut-sized seashell with one eye, a mouth, two stubby legs, humanlike language capacity, and a childlike demeanor. He's been living with grandmother Connie (Isabella Rossellini) at an Airbnb, unnoticed by humans until amateur documentarian Dean Fleischer Camp (as himself, more or less) moves in, discovers him, and persuades him to star in the aforementioned YouTube series. After gaining a fandom, Marcel hopes anew to find the rest of his large family, who were accidentally packed up when prior tenant Mark (Thomas Mann) left in a hurry. Imagine his dismay to learn how large the world is and how unhelpful most fans are.

Gran Turismo (2023)

I first assumed that this would be a video game movie in the usual sense, but the subtitle "Based on a True Story" told me otherwise. Like the same year's Tetris, it pertains to a game series but is not an adaptation thereof. That would explain its relative popularity.

British youth Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe) has played the eponymous racing sim obsessively, to the annoyance of his father, former soccer pro Steve (Djimon Hounsou), who thinks it'll never be useful. Imagine their surprise when Jann's record arcade score yields an invitation from Nissan marketing exec Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom, looking like Tom Hiddleston) to enter another race to qualify for the new GT Academy, which hopes to turn a player into a real world-class racecar driver, albeit with a PlayStation controller-based steering wheel. Yup, a gamer bro's dream come true. But the path to stardom involves a lot more challenges than in The Wizard -- not to mention physical danger.

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

In the wake of the Academy Awards, I feel a little more motivated to watch the nominees. This was the only one playing at a nearby theater this week, apart from Oppenheimer. The showing included closed captioning, which suited me fine given the accents.

Novelist Sandra (Sandra Hüller) and her preteen son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), find her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), dead of a head injury outside their French alpine lodge, evidently having fallen from a higher floor. No eyewitnesses to the event come forward. Investigators discover enough fishy details to cast doubt on the idea of an accident. Sandra's lawyer friend, Vincent (Swann Arlaud), advises a focus on the possibility of a suicide, while the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) at her trial leans heavily on the likelihood that she killed Samuel. Daniel testifies in her favor, but his word carries only so much weight. (Funny how almost all the characters have first names spelled the same in English.)

Dune: Part Two (2024)

Wow, when was the last time a new movie had this much up-front popularity? Going by both IMDb and general social circles, I'd say 2003, with The Return of the King. Of course, it's been released only a week in the states, so I don't assume lasting momentum. But between its initial reception and my appreciation of the first part, I saw fit to check it out almost ASAP.

In keeping with where we left off, young adult Duke Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) now walks among the desert-dwelling Fremen, with his clan's killers initially uncertain whether Paul still lives. He and the Fremen are warring to stop House Harkonnen from taking over spice operations on Planet Arrakis. His mom, Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and Fremen leader Stilgar (Javier Bardem) look forward to Paul awakening as the prophesied messianic Kwisatz Haderach, but most Fremen don't believe it. And Paul hopes to avoid it, because his own spice-induced visions appear to foretell consequent mass devastation more than salvation.