Nightcrawler (2014)

If this were about the beloved X-Man, I would have seen it in a theater. If it were about an earthworm, I might still have seen it earlier. But for all its popularity, I must not have liked what I'd gleaned about it, or I would have put it on my Netflix list. Instead, it was the first halfway-promising result I hadn't watched when I browsed on another account.

Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) has been a sometimes violent sneak thief, but he wants a more legitimate job. At the scene of a car crash, he decides to make videos of newsworthy nighttime incidents and sell them to a struggling L.A. news station. He gets too close for the comfort of emergency personnel, but morning news director Nina Romina (Rene Russo) craves such sensational footage. Lou enlists desperate intern Rick (Riz Ahmed) to help navigate to addresses mentioned on scanned police radio signals. In his business ambitions, Lou has so little regard for laws and ethics that he might have done less damage as a thief.

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

I watched the 1999 remake during its theater run and had mixed feelings about it. When I saw that the original had the same IMDb rating (unlike for Ocean's Eleven), I got curious. My interest increased upon learning that a re-remake will come out next year.

There's no museum art theft this time, just a typical bank robbery in Boston. Investigator Vicki Anderson (Faye Dunaway) correctly intuits that aristocrat Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen), tho absent from the bank at the time, organized and funded the heist. In her search for compelling evidence that would hold up in court, she gets into an intimate relationship with him, however awkward in light of their mutually recognized rivalry.

True Romance (1993)

I rather liked this movie in young adulthood but totally forgot what happens in it, besides a happy ending. Since Quentin Tarantino wrote it, you know it's not just a romantic comedy/drama; it's an R-rated crime flick with antiheroes. At least having Tony Scott direct instead means there's no fixation on a woman's bare feet.

Detroit comic store clerk Clarence Worley (Christian Slater) hits it off with Alabama Whitman (Patricia Arquette) before knowing she's a call girl hired by his employer as a birthday present. Nonetheless, she does fall for him, and they elope. Hearing how rotten her pimp Drexl Spivey (Gary Oldman) is, Clarence confronts him, ends up killing him, and orders another call girl to pack Alabama's things. Only after Clarence takes the suitcase home does he see that it's full of stolen cocaine bags. He hopes to sell it fast in L.A., but he'll have to worry about getting tracked down by previous owners as well as police.

Bugonia (2025)

Nobody on screen says the title. It's a Greek type of ritual sacrifice once thought to produce bees, which appear sometimes herein for an analogy. That's about the only reason I felt the need to look at the movie's Wikipedia page, because the plot's easy to remember.

Cousins Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis) kidnap pharma CEO Michelle (Emma Stone) and hold her in Teddy's house. Teddy is fully convinced that she is a high-ranking alien from the Andromeda Galaxy responsible for the slow ruination of many things for humanity. He demands that Michelle arrange a meeting between him and the Andromedan emperor on the lunar eclipse, which comes four days after the kidnapping. The longer Michelle doesn't do as Teddy bids, the less inclined he is to choose civility over rage. Slightly complicating matters are periodic check-ins by deputy Casey (Stavros Halkias), Teddy's former abusive sitter.

Walking Tall (1973)

I didn't recall hearing about this cult movie when YouTube suggested it, but it got two sequels, a TV series, a TV remake, and a big-screen remake trilogy starring Dwayne Johnson. It also takes inspiration from real events, tho they've since been disputed enough that I won't add my "true story" tag. Indeed, last year, investigators accused the long-deceased protagonist of uxoricide. That would not affect my feelings about the film version.

In 1964, ex-wrestler Buford Pusser (Joe Don Baker) moves back from Chicago to Adamsville, Tennessee, with his wife (Elizabeth Hartman) and kids (Leif Garrett and Dawn Lyn Nervik), planning to work as a logger for his dad (Noah Beery Jr.). His mom (Lurene Tuttle) cryptically warns him to ignore changes in town, but that's not easy when an old buddy (Ed Call) invites him to a casino. He catches the staff cheating, and they beat him within an inch of his life and steal his car. Then he discovers that the sheriff he used to look up to (Gene Evans) is worse than useless and the local judge (Douglas Fowley), while apparently staying within the bounds of the law, is not much better. So much for Buford's promise not to fight anymore....

Desperado (1995)

I watched most of El Mariachi in junior high Spanish class and the rest in young adulthood. It didn't particularly grab me, but it worked pretty well on $7,000. When Netflix suggested the immediate sequel, I got curious how different it would be with a budget 100 times higher.

EM had ended with the unnamed title character (subsequently played by Antonio Banderas) killing drug lord Moco (Peter Marquardt), who had killed the guitarist's love interest and shot him in the left hand. Alas, his thirst for vengeance has not been quenched; he now seeks Moco's boss, Bucho (Joaquim de Almeida). El Mariachi's buddy Buscemi (yup, Steve Buscemi) discovers compelling evidence of which small town holds Bucho's base of operations. It doesn't take long for a trail of destruction to put Bucho on high alert. Meanwhile, El Mariachi must have a type, because he falls for yet another drug lord affiliate, bookstore owner Carolina (Salma Hayek, paired with Banderas for the first time), who tends his wounds.

The Bad Guys 2 (2025)

Huh, once again, I watch an entry in the series when it's newly streaming on Netflix. The two are almost tied in general reception, with possibly a slight advantage to the sequel. And I was in the mood for a cartoon.

Even if you didn't watch the first movie, you shouldn't have trouble catching up to speed or be surprised that the titular five friends -- Mr. Wolf (Sam Rockwell), Mr. Snake (Marc Maron), Miss Tarantula (Awkwafina), Mr. Shark (Craig Robinson), and Mr. Piranha (Anthony Ramos) -- are trying to be good, but their criminal history hurts their job searches. Things get worse when someone frames them for a set of high-profile thefts. The so-called "Phantom Bandit" turns out to be three Bad Girls, who want the quintet's help to steal a rocket. Their leverage: a video that reveals the dark past of Governor Diane Foxington (Zazie Beetz). The Bad Guys reluctantly agree to "one last heist," but will they be tempted back to a life of crime?

Sinners (2025)

I don't recall ever going to a theater two nights in a row before. But I was getting tired of knowing so few Best Picture nominees ahead of the Academy Awards. This one makes four for me, and it has the best shot among them at winning.

Sammie (Miles Caton), against the wishes of his preacher dad (Saul William), decides to use his blues singing and guitar skills at a new rural juke joint run by his older twin cousins, "Smoke" and "Stack" (both Michael B. Jordan), who are thuggish yet charismatic to anyone they don't rob or attack. This being 1932 Mississippi, it's only a matter of time until the Black-centric establishment gets unwelcome attention. Well, the Ku Klux Klan shows up in force only near the end, but an even worse menace plagues opening night....

The Secret Agent (2025)

No, nothing to do with the Joseph Conrad novel by the same title, just similarly big on corruption and tragedy. It wasn't high among my priorities for watching before the Academy Awards, but it was the only Best Picture nominee showing at a convenient time and place last night.

Most of the scenes take place on or near Carnaval 1977 in the vicinity of Recife, Brazil. Yup, it's under that government. Armando, once a researcher, has adopted the alias of Marcelo because of his dissidence, and his allies help him get clerical work in an ID office. He tries to live as normally as possible, reconnecting with his young son, who has been living with the parents of Armando's dead wife. He also reluctantly accepts protection from a corrupt civil police chief, for what that's worth when a personal enemy hires a hit man.

The Rip (2026)

I knew this was getting a middling reception from general audiences, but someone had recommended it earlier in the day. Besides, I hadn't seen Matt Damon and Ben Affleck together since Dogma in 1999. And this was the only movie left on my Netflix list that ran less than two hours.

The title is slang for confiscation. A Miami police team under Lt. Dane Dumars (Damon), including Det. Sgt. JD Byrne (Affleck), Det. Mike Ro (Steven Yeun, not to be confused with Mike Rowe), Det. Numa Baptiste (Teyana Taylor), and Det. Lolo Salazar (Catalina Sandino Mareno), searches a decrepit Hialeah house suspected of storing loads of cash for drug dealers, with only one Desi Lopez (Sasha Calle) at home. They find about $20 million, far more than they anticipated. This is not entirely good news for them, because both career criminals and cops might do almost anything for that kind of take. Dumars insists that they count the money on site (trusting any labeled amounts on stacks to save time) but not call it in, and they must prepare for a shootout. Naturally, tensions rise within the team.

Ip Man 2 (2010)

Either I watched the first Ip Man before I launched this blog, or I was too unenthused to write a review. I certainly don't remember much of it. Just know that it's an action flick about an RL grandmaster of the Wing Chun style of kung fu, often called Yip rather than Ip even on screen, perhaps best known for teaching Bruce Lee. From what I can tell, the story bears little resemblance to his actual life, and I imagine that the sequels hew no closer.

In 1950, Ip (Donnie Yen) opens a Wing Chun school in Hong Kong. He has no students until young hoodlum Wong Shun Leung (Huang Xiaoming) challenges him and the word spreads of how awesome Ip is. Alas, they develop a fierce rivalry with thugs from the Hung Ga school under Hung Chun-nam (Sammo Hung), who runs a protection racket for martial arts trainers. By the second half, the main villain appears to be dirty Superintendent Wallace (Charles Mayer), who shakes down Hung, bullies journalists who print unflattering truths, and pulls strings for British boxer Taylor "Twister" Miller (Darren Shahlavi) to take on Chinese opponents and assert ethnic superiority. You can guess who the last one will be.

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)

I know it hasn't been long since my last superhero movie, but this one promised to be rather different. Besides, people have long told me it's one of the best Batman animated features, if not the best ever, and I never saw it offered on Netflix when I looked. When YouTube suggested it, I couldn't resist for long.

A creepy new vigilante (masked voice by Stacy Keach) has been hunting down and killing unthemed Gotham mob bosses. Unlike Holiday in The Long Halloween, Phantasm keeps getting mistaken the superficially similar Batman (Kevin Conroy). Commissioner Jim Gordon (Bob Hastings) doesn't believe it, but City Councilman Arthur Reeves (Hart Bochner) sends the police after Batman with authorization of deadly force.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)

Despite my mostly positive reviews of prior entries in the series, I'd been putting this one off. I'm a practicing Catholic, and Hollywood rarely depicts the Church in a kind light. Even members of other religions have reported WUDM rubbing them the wrong way -- and indeed, director Rian Johnson says he likes to make polarizing pictures that annoy much of the audience. But this one is still popular overall, and my curiosity about a cultural phenomenon won out.

During a Good Friday service in a small New York town, controversial Msgr. Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) is found stabbed to death under seemingly impossible circumstances. The police chief (Mila Kunis) is inclined to arrest junior Father Jud Duplenticy (Josh O'Connor), who has a history of violence and notably locked horns with Wicks. But famed PI Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) thinks Jud, while no angel, doesn't act like the guilty party. He enlists Jud's help in gathering clues. The case gets freakier still come Easter....

Tenet (2020)

Christopher Nolan doesn't seem to have directed any unpopular features, and this was one of the more profitable of the (infamously off) year. But I haven't encountered people discussing it much, and its IMDb rating is relatively low for him, so I hesitated to watch. The 150-minute runtime didn't tempt me either. Only a Netflix notice that it would stop streaming at the end of the year prioritized it for me.

Like in Looper, the time machine hasn't been invented "yet," but its effects can already be seen. Unlike in Looper, it doesn't just send things back; it can send things backwards. Even inanimate objects behave differently that way, as by falling upward to be caught by a "dropper." The curiously unnamed protagonist (John David Washington), a CIA agent, comes across such effects on a mission and is then made privy to a still more secretive agency, Tenet (clearly named just for the palindrome), that tries to use time travel for the greater good. He and recruiter Neil (Robert Pattinson) are among a globe-hopping team out to neutralize the forces of the world's most dangerous time traveler, Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh).

Zootopia 2 (2025)

I had been looking forward to this sequel at least as much as I had to Inside Out 2. When I learned that it would feature a good-aligned snake, I grew even eagerer. So I talked my parents into joining me at a theater. (If you go to a family movie in December, expect an obscene number of ads. I finished my candy before the first preview.)

Within a week after the last scene of Zootopia, lapine Officer Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and her new ZPD partner, reformed vulpine hustler Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), are losing their heroic public image and the support of Chief Bogo (Idris Elba), thanks to Judy's highly irregular, reckless approach to crime fighting and Nick's complementary unserious attitude. It gets worse when they start aiding and abetting Gary De'Snake (Ke Huy Quan), a pit viper who steals a city treasure that he believes holds a secret that will vastly improve life for the marginalized reptiles in Zootopia. Crime boss Milton Lynxley (David Strathairn) wants to keep that secret at any price, and he pressures new mayor Brian Winddancer (Patrick Warburton) into authorizing a deadly hunt for the rogue cops.

Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker (2000)

I ignore most direct-to-video movies, but this one caught my attention via YouTube ads, and it turns out to be pretty popular. Having watched just a little of the Batman Beyond TV series, I had some idea of what to expect. And this wouldn't be the first time I counted a Batman animation among my Halloween season viewings.

In an unspecified future, when a cane-needing Bruce Wayne (Kevin Conroy) publicly resumes his leadership at Wayne Enterprises, he could swear he helped bury a dead Joker (Mark Hamill) about 40 years ago. Yet the party crasher before him looks and sounds exactly the same -- not even any older. Unable to explain this, Bruce wants to dissuade his successor, Terry McGinnis (Will Friedle), from continuing to be Batman. But somehow the Clown Prince of Crime must know both secret identities, because he heads for Bruce while his minions (including one with a Halloween theme, incidentally) go after an uncostumed Terry....

Perfect Blue (1997)

This was one of the last items on my Netflix queue before the disc service discontinued. Once I saw that it was replaying at a local theater, I leapt at the opportunity. In truth, I'd been putting it off before, because people warned me it was grittier than the cover made it look. But anime fans deem it a classic, and I had enjoyed director Satoshi Kon's Tokyo Godfathers, Millennium Actress, and to a lesser extent Paprika.

In her early 20s, Mima (Junk Iwao) gets tired of being in a pop trio and takes up acting instead. Her agent, Tadokoro (Shinpachi Tsuji), nabs her a role on a mystery TV series, with increasing airtime. Some fans are displeased with her career shift, and hostile messages are followed by substantial violence against people involved. The prime suspect is a freaky stalker known as "Mr. Me-Mania" (Masaaki Ōkura), but he's not the only cause of trouble in Mima's life. Under stress, she starts to imagine her pop persona as a separate, impish being out to supplant if not kill her....

Limitless (2011)

I didn't really know anything about this picture going in. Nor had I heard of its literary basis, Alan Glynn's The Dark Fields. I just thought it looked different enough from my recent viewings, possibly along the lines of Upgrade. OK, it's set in the present, but still a sci-fi thriller about enhancing oneself.

In New York, broke aspiring writer Eddie (Bradley Cooper) runs into his ex-brother-in-law, dealer Vernon (Johnny Whitworth), who gifts him a tablet of an unregulated drug so new it has no name other than NZT-48. It vastly improves Eddie's mental faculties for a day. He comes for more and discovers that someone has murdered Vernon and ransacked the apartment, evidently in search of the NZT stash. Eddie finds it nonetheless, along with significant cash, and uses them to do phenomenally in the stock market, garnering the attention of finance bigwig Carl (Robert De Niro) and reconnecting with ex-wife Lindy (Abbie Cornish). Of course, he also gains the attention of people who would kill for NZT. What's more, withdrawal means progressively serious symptoms....

Bad Shabbos (2024)

This saw limited release in December last year, as reflected by a Christmas tree on screen, but got wide release in late May. Now a local theater has been hosting a Jewish film festival. Thanks to my mom for calling my attention while I'm in the area.

Observant Jew David (Jon Bass) is engaged to Meg (Meghan Leathers), who is preparing to convert. He invites her and her Wisconsin Catholic parents, John (John Bedford Lloyd) and Beth (Catherine Curtin) to a Friday night dinner at the New York City apartment of his parents, Ellen (Kyra Sedgwick) and Irv (Stephen Singer), where they'll also meet his brother, Adam (Theo Taplitz); his sister, Abby (Milana Vayntrub); and Abby's boyfriend, Benjamin (Ashley Zukerman). Perhaps it's just as well that Meg's parents are running late, because Adam pulls a prank that accidentally kills Benjamin. Not wishing to get Adam in trouble, his family conspires with Meg and friendly doorman Jordan (Cliff "Method Man" Smith) to hide Benjamin, hurry dinner along, and whisk Benjamin to his apartment before a less friendly doorman (Alok Tewari) starts his shift.

Man on Fire (2004)

Not to be confused with Man on Wire, this title had turned me off for a long time. When I saw that I could watch it free on Hulu, I looked it up and found that it was much better received by the general audience than by critics. That gets me curious.

Since holding rich kids for ransom is rampant in Mexico, troubled ex-Marine John Creasy (Denzel Washington), at the advice of a buddy (Christopher Walken), becomes a bodyguard to Lupita or "Pita" (Dakota Fanning), preteen daughter of automaker Samuel Ramos (Marc Anthony). At first he is highly standoffish, but as she urges him to be as sociable as others, he learns to like her. Of course, this wouldn't be much of a story if he never failed at his job....