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.

The Secret Life of Pets (2016)

Yeah, it's been less than a month since my last talking animal cartoon review. This one, despite numerous award nominations and a few minor wins, gets a mostly middling reception. So why did I bother to see it, especially after a decade? Because I was in the mood for something short (86 minutes) and cute.

Max (Louis C.K.), a Jack Russell, basically enjoys life in Manhattan until owner Katie (Ellie Kemper) brings home a large rescue Newfie, Duke (Eric Stonestreet), prompting covetous competition. An outdoor kerfuffle results in both of them losing their collars and getting caught by dogcatchers. Before they can reach the pound, a gang of sewer-dwelling, human-hating abandoned pets busts a member out of the van, and Max and Duke persuade lead rabbit Snowball (Kevin Hart) to take them too. When their overture of rebellion proves false and they accidentally cause the demise of the biggest and nastiest ex-pet while escaping, Snowball becomes determined to hunt them down. As the two dogs seek a way home, Gidget (Jenny Slate as yet another small fluffy white critter), a neighboring Pom with a crush on Max, organizes a search squad of various pets.

Perhaps most useful to the search is antiheroic hawk Tiberius (Albert Brooks), tho he's not as acquainted with Max as most of the others. Chloe the cat (Lake Bell) stands out for pretending not to care as much as she does. Pops the basset (Dana Carvey) may be old and paraplegic, but he knows a few key points. Frequently present if less important are Buddy the dachshund (Hannibal Buress), Mel the pug (Bobby Moynihan), Sweetpea the budgie (Tara Strong), and Norman the lost guinea pig (Illumination Entertainment mainstay Chris Renaud). The gang members are too numerous to list, but I'll mention Tattoo (Michael Beattie), a highly inked pig.

Not exactly an epic tale; most events take place before Katie comes home for the day. It sure doesn't take long for a shared crisis to get Max and Duke to soften toward each other, with only a slight echo of their prior hostility around the start of Act 3. After all, the story tries to be heartwarming when it's not going pure comedy or adventure. Even Snowball is more redeemable than Lulu.

The comedy aspect gets priority. It usually takes the form of pets fulfilling stereotypes, pets defying stereotypes, slapstick, or vulgarity. On the last part, eh, it could be worse. Dont expect much of interest from the humans.

TSLoP is almost exactly what the ads led me to expect. Indeed, it borders on predictable, never trying for innovation. That's not altogether a bad thing when you choose a movie. I probably won't bother with the sequel, but I got what I came for.

Triangle of Sadness (2022)

I saved this for one of my last viewings of Best Picture nominees from 2022 because, well, just look at the title. Only recently did I learn that it's partly comic. Netflix will stop streaming it soon, and I had 147 minutes to kill, so I obliged.

Few films have such an explicit three-act structure. First we get a few scenes involving models Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), who are dating but prone to argumentation over financial matters. Part 2, on a luxury yacht in an unspecified waterway, splits the focus among many customers and staffers. Carl and Yaya get a little more central again when they are among eight castaways on an island, shaking up the social order. (The title is what someone in the modeling industry calls an area of the face, but it works on multiple levels.)

Frankenstein (2025)

When I learned that I hadn't seen any of the Academy Best Picture nominees for the year, I chose the first one I could find. Ordinarily, I save arguable horror movies for October. I say "arguable" because Wikipedia characterizes it as "Gothic science fiction drama." That's fair enough.

The movie begins near the end, when 19th-century Danish sailors find a nearly dead Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) in the Arctic and try to protect him from his raging creation (Jacob Elordi). In the captain's cabin, Victor tells Captain Andersen (Lars Mikkelsen) the first half of the story. Then the creature shows up and takes the narration from there. In the small chance you don't know the gist, Victor stitched together parts from different corpses and brought the gestalt to life but didn't raise him properly, leaving him put upon by society and violently resentful.

Election (1999)

Once I saw this title on the menu, I decided it should be my first viewing after Election Day. The advertising didn't appeal to me, especially the poster showing a tiny man's head in a girl's mouth, but the movie itself has some enduring clout, including reportedly being Barack Obama's favorite political pic.

High school civic teacher Jim (Matthew Broderick) has complicated feelings about busy, ambitious A student Tracy (Reese Witherspoon): He resents her for having had an inappropriate relationship with his now fired and divorced co-worker, Dave (Mark Harelik), but also fears that he will make the same mistake, especially if she becomes the student government president and thus spends more time around him. He persuades injured football star Paul (Chris Klein) to run against her. Paul's sister Tammy (Jessica Campbell), bitter at him for dating her female love interest, Lisa (Frankie Ingrassia), then enters the race to thwart him. Amid this havoc, Jim turns out to be in much more danger of straying toward Dave's ex-wife, Linda (Delaney Driscoll), who is also a friend of Jim's wife, Diane (Molly Hagan).

The Look of Silence (2014)

Yet again, I chose a viewing based on what was about to drop off my Netflix list. It's another documentary with more talking than anything else, but at least it's on a subject I knew almost nothing about.

This is a companion piece to 2012's The Act of Killing, similarly directed by Joshua Oppenheimer (no relation) and an anonymous partner. Here we follow optometrist Adi Rukun, sometimes providing his services or hanging with his cheerful children, but mostly interviewing older Indonesians who remember the anti-communist purge of the mid-'60s, along with younger relatives. Many of the seniors had a hand in the massacre of hundreds of thousands and were never penalized for it, because they had the government's blessing then and ever since. Adi also watches an earlier video of two men who had killed his brother.

Brothers After War (2025)

This is the first documentary sequel I've ever seen. Brothers at War (2009) escaped my notice, but this one has a much higher IMDb rating, albeit with few votes yet. When I happened to be very close to the theater, I picked this viewing partly for a convenient start time and partly because someone I trust had endorsed it.

Director Jake Rademacher has surprisingly many literal brothers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here he pays visits to them and some veteran friends, including women, to see how they're doing. (None of my sources name them all.) Some are doing quite well; others are struggling on at least one front. They all know soldiers who died either in battle or later by suicide.

The Whale (2022)

Even before seeing the A24 logo, I knew that this would not be a fun feature. Having Darren Aronofsky at the helm wouldn't help. But it looked like one of the more intriguing offerings on my list, different enough from my recent viewings, and short enough (117 minutes) that I might not see fit to split it over two nights.

In modern Idaho, Charlie (Brendan Fraser) teaches online college literature courses with his camera off, because he'd rather hide his Class III obesity. In the first scene, he gets a heart attack but refuses to go to the hospital for financial reasons, even tho he can well afford it. The screen indicates each new day of the week, hinting that he really doesn't have long to live. Will he make peace with himself and his few acquaintances in time?

Upgrade (2018)

This has nothing to do with the Blake Crouch novel of the same title. Pity; that could make a great movie. This one is only vaguely similar in premises, but at least it promised to be similarly exciting.

A few decades from now, in an unspecified U.S. city, thugs paralyze mechanic Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) from the neck down and murder his wife, Asha (Melanie Vallejo). Engineering genius Eron Keen (Harrison Gilbertson), one of Grey's customers, offers him a computer chip called STEM to let him move the rest of his body, but since STEM isn't government-approved yet, he must keep it secret and pretend to still be quadriplegic. Little does Grey know that STEM has a mind of its own and can speak (with Simon Maiden's voice) such that only he can hear. Indeed, STEM's superior mental acuteness and reflexes help him track down and take on his attackers when the police have had no luck.

The Fundamentals of Caring (2016)

I chose this Netflix original almost at random from my list. The description didn't exactly grab me, but it looked rather different from what else I'd seen lately. At worst, it would waste only 97 minutes.

Seattle ex-novelist Ben (Paul Rudd) registers as a caregiver and, despite inexperience, asks to look after Trevor (Craig Roberts), an 18-year-old from England with a single mom, Elsa (Jennifer Ehle), and Duchenne muscular dystrophy. After a period in which Trevor does little more than watch TV, Ben persuades Elsa to let the two men make the big production of driving to several odd sights Trevor has expressed interest in seeing. Along the way, they pick up young adult hitchhiker Dot (Selena Gomez), who finds instant mutual attraction in Trevor; and then "Peaches" (Megan Ferguson), a woman with a dead car who looks ready to give birth any day now.

World War Z (2013)

I chose this partly for being relatively popular and partly because Netflix will drop it at the end of the month. Aside from that, all I knew going in was what the Z stood for. The first question in my mind was how the story would differ from that of the quintessential Dawn of the Dead.

Well, for starters, there is an unambiguous protagonist, Gerry (Brad Pitt), whose background as a UN investigator makes him especially important to combatting the viral zombie outbreak. Only about half an hour in, he gets his wife (Mireille Enos) and daughters (Sterling Jerins and Abigail Hargrove) from overrun Philly to a reasonably safe outpost. But even favor from the UN deputy secretary-general (Fana Mokoena) won't let them all live there indefinitely; Gerry has to pull his weight by going back into danger for clues on how to vaccinate against zombification. And yes, the characters do say "zombie" eventually.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

I liked the Coen Brothers' remake of True Grit, tho I later learned to prefer the original. This other western has sat on my list for a while; I hesitated because it's only moderately popular and these guys are a gamble to me. Kind of an ugly title, too. But the continuing use of the "First time?" meme increased my curiosity.

Buster (Tim Blake Nelson) actually doesn't appear for long, because this is an anthology of six stories, each with completely different characters and actors (among them Liam Neeson, Tom Waits, James Franco, Stephen Root, Clancy Brown, Tyne Daly, and Brendan Gleeson). Two of them are based on literary short stories. The others seem to pay more homage to movies. Apart from the Old West setting, the main unifying theme is death.

Nimona (2023)

My inclusion of this on my Netflix list was quite tentative. The ad had looked only so promising, and I hadn't heard of the graphic novel on which it's based. But the Academy has nominated it for Best Animated Feature, and I've seen only two other nominees for the year so far.

The main setting looks like a near-future metropolis, except that knights in shining armor are still around, sworn to protect the realm from magical threats. Sir Ballister "Bal" Boldheart (Riz Ahmed) stands out as the first commoner ever to be knighted, facing mixed reactions. At the knighting ceremony, his sword fires a laser beam and kills the queen (Lorraine Toussaint). Seemingly everyone else, even boyfriend Sir Ambrosius Goldenloin (Eugene Lee Yang), presumes he intended as much. (It doesn't help that he sports black armor and facial hair.) Bal escapes and lies low, trying to figure out a way to clear his name. The first entity to find him is Nimona (Chloë Grace Moretz), who usually presents as a fangy teen girl but is actually an ancient, super-speedy shapeshifter. As a fellow vilified outcast, she insists on being his sidekick in whatever he plans next.

Fallen Leaves (2023)

I had never seen a Finnish flick before. My dad and I decided this was one of the more promising entries in the AFI European Union Film Showcase. A runtime of 81 minutes may have contributed to that assessment.

In Helsinki, Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) both have trouble keeping jobs and making ends meet, Holappa because of his alcoholism, Ansa more from bad employers. After a couple happenstance encounters, they quickly develop an interest in each other. But for reasons that are unclear to me, they don't exchange names, which makes connecting a little difficult when they get even less lucky. Ansa also considers heavy drinking a dealbreaker.

Wendell & Wild (2022)

In my continuing quest for Halloween-type movies that I haven't seen before and might want to, I accepted Netflix's up-front suggestion, which they had pushed quite a bit last year. It has fared a bit better with critics than with general audiences, but hey, I've seen and reviewed less popular on this blog.

At 13, delinquent Kat (Lyric Ross) gets transferred to a Catholic girls' boarding school in her fading former hometown, Rust Bank. There she discovers a captive demon (Phoebe Lamont) who makes her a "hell maiden" able to summon Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and Wild (Jordan Peele), two disgraced sons of underworld lord Buffalo Belzer (Ving Rhames). She wants them to bring back her parents (Gary Gatewood and Gabrielle Dennis), whose deaths she had accidentally caused ages ago. The boys stumble on the revitalizing properties of their dad's hair cream. They also learn that two execs (Maxine Peak and David Harewood) could pay them enough money to start their own afterlife amusement park -- provided they use the cream only on the dead councillors who could sway the vote in favor of turning Rust Bank into a prison complex, a motion otherwise unanimously opposed. Let's just say demons aren't so good with promises. But despite Kat's efforts to avoid friendships lest she jinx more people, she can get a fair amount of support from certain students and faculty to save both the town and herself.

Ride the Pink Horse (1947)

For a moment, I expected a quirky western. As it is, I barely understand where the title came from. A character does ride an allegedly pink carousel horse (we can't tell in black and white), but that's not important to the plot, and any symbolism in it is lost on me. Maybe the filmmakers just wanted something that didn't sound like a cookie-cutter noir.

Ex-soldier "Lucky" Gagin (Robert Montgomery, also directing) comes to the New Mexican border town of San Pablo to confront Frank Hugo (Fred Clark), a mob boss who ordered the killing of Gagin's friend "Shorty" over a blackmailing. Gagin's lucky charm is his pistol, but he wants to try his own hand at blackmail rather than vengeful murder. FBI Agent Retz (Art Smith), who's kept tabs on both Gagin and Hugo, advises against this, but given Hugo's historical pull with the government, Gagin doesn't readily trust Retz. Hugo's moll, Marjorie (Andrea King), asks Gagin to raise the ransom and cut her in, but he's not sure what to make of her either.

Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)

This is pretty rare: a movie that was highly esteemed when new, both at home and overseas, but did so poorly at the box office that the production company folded. I don't recall how it got my attention, but it did receive a Best Actress Oscar nod, losing to Mary Poppins. Well, at least Julie Andrews didn't have to fake a British accent.

In London, alleged medium Myra Savage (Kim Stanley) badly wants money, which doesn't come easily when husband Billy (Richard Attenborough) is too asthmatic to hold a job. She persuades Billy to kidnap Amanda Clayton (Judith Donner), preteen daughter of aristocrats. Instead of the typical scheme of simply pocketing ransom money, Myra plans to fake a séance to determine where to find Amanda, hoping to gain renown and thus so much business that she can pay back the "borrowed" ransom. Charles Clayton (Mark Eden) doesn't believe in her powers, but his wife (Nanette Newman) does, and Charles has to admit that no other method is making headway.

Sound of Metal (2019)

When the 93rd Academy Awards came and went, I thought I'd never see all its Best Picture nominees -- hadn't wanted to see any of them -- yet here I am. I guess all those not-so-depressing others encouraged me. In case you're wondering about the date, SoM was screened at the Toronto International Film Festival more than a year before its wide release.

Ruben (Riz Ahmed) plays drums in a fairly popular heavy metal band. Almost overnight, he loses too much of his hearing to make sense of most speech. He ignores a doctor's advice to lay off loudness for a while, so it gets worse. Concerned at his stress and poor coping, girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke) strong-arms him into rooming at a rural shelter supporting deaf people, especially those with a history of drug addiction like Ruben. Leader Joe (Paul Raci) insists on rather ascetic practices in order to cut off old avenues and develop new habits. It takes a while to feel anything like home to Ruben.

Drive My Car (2021)

This Japanese film does not include the Beatles song, which really wouldn't fit the dramatic tenor. Instead, it's based on a Haruki Murakami short story by the same title. How a 40-pager plus bits of two others in the collection made the basis for a 179-minute feature is beyond me, but the latter was too esteemed for me to pass up.

In the late 2010s, middle-aged Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) doesn't want to act on stage ever again due to emotional issues regarding his late wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima). Nevertheless, his past as the star of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya gets him tapped to direct another production thereof. One condition of the arrangement is that he not drive himself, given his glaucoma. He reluctantly accepts young woman Misaki Watari (Tōko Miura) as his chauffeur and lets her hear him go over lines in his car with a recording of Oto. Young actor Kōji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada) is surprised when Yūsuke casts him as Vanya. Imagine his surprise if he'd known that Yūsuke caught him committing adultery with Oto.

Son of Frankenstein (1939)

I didn't think I'd be seeing any more old Frankenstein entries from Universal Pictures. Even Bride of Frankenstein was more cheesy than scary or funny. But this one was on a list of horror recommendations, and I did want something older and more allegedly classic than I've been seeing this month.

Shortly after the natural death of Heinrich von Frankenstein (why he wasn't Victor is beyond me), his son Wolf (Basil Rathbone) moves into the castle, hoping to make use of the adjoining lab and restore honor to the family name. There he finds squatter Ygor (Bela Lugosi), who had assisted Heinrich; and Heinrich's infamous creation (Boris Karloff), who has been secretly alive but comatose for some time. Wolf performs a project to re-energize the monster, if only for scientific study. The monster does as Ygor bids, apparently out of sheer fondness for a fellow misshapen outcast. Alas, Ygor is vengeful....