Two sentences per movie. The last time I did a retro movie diary, I had three weeks to catch up on. Now I have…more than that. No sweat!

1. Seabiscuit, 2003, dir. Gary Ross / I wasn’t prepared to enjoy this as much as I did, but, ahem, never count out the power of an ornery horse. This is probably career-best work from a likewise teed-off Tobey Maguire, whose slightly sallow and moderately awkward performance as Peter Parker has informed much of what’s come after: Nick Carraway and whoever that guy in Babylon was.
2. The Day After Trinity, 1981, dir. Jon Else / Not literally as good as a talking head documentary could be, but it’s pretty close. J. Robert Oppenheimer is painted by nearly everyone, including his brother, as a sped-up Columbus who was immediately revered for his exploits and then blamed for the evil he did.
3. Islands, 1987, dir. Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin / A fairly short documentary about a short-lived artistic project that took many years to complete. The doc doesn’t come to the same conclusion I did, which is that Christo is for rubes, but it was nice that it at least gave us the material to come to such a conclusion.
4. March of the Penguins, 2005, dir. Luc Jacquet / Got into a place where if you’re going to catch up on one animal movie from one’s youth, might as well catch up on another. Not that every Best Documentary Feature winner at the Oscars has to be heartrending stuff, but this is almost as shallow as My Octopus Teacher.
5. Pandas, 2018, dir. David Douglas and Drew Fellman / About the same length as March of the Penguins, about as shallow as March of the Penguins, and with much cuter animals. There is such pathos when you see a scared panda who doesn’t know how to panda in the wild stuck up a tree.
6. Thirteen Days, 2000, dir. Roger Donaldson / It’s a premise for a movie that I think is fecund enough to support another adaptation, and of course it’s fun to see the Kevin Costner-JFK universe expanded. In creating a composite character for Costner to play who deals from a position of nigh-infinite wisdom, it actually feels even more disingenuous than JFK.
7. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937, dir. David Hand / A second viewing which left me more impressed than the first, but still a little short of wowed. Excepting the song where Snow White’s corps of independent diamond miners perform and and bring her into the dance, it’s kind of amazing how bisected the film is between Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
8. The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1936, dir. Michael Curtiz / An adequate movie, and the title is incredibly misleading given just how little of the film is set in Crimea, but a film that I really think ought to be part of the “you have to see this canon” along with contemporaries like Snow White, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, and Casablanca. It pales in quality compared to those other films, but in terms of what a Hollywood studio film looked and felt like, this is peerless.
9. Alexander Hamilton, 1931, dir. John G. Adolfi / My first George Arliss, and quite possibly my last George Arliss. The film has the sense to make the Maria Reynolds scandal the centerpiece, but it loses something when Arliss, more than a little creaky, is playing a man who never even sniffed his fifties, let alone Arliss’s 63 years of age.
10. Bullet Train, 2022, dir. David Leitch / Any film that hinges this seriously on a Joey King performance is asking for trouble, and Bullet Train is no exception. A film that pretends to be maximalist, though I’m not sure it’s even more in-your-face than most train movies, let alone action movies.
11. The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, 1939, dir. Michael Curtiz / Almost certainly the most underrated of the films from America’s cinematic annus mirabilis, probably because people don’t think that Errol Flynn sans swordfights can match Bette Davis in full period costume. This is incorrect; Flynn’s flimsiness comes across as the perfect foil for Davis’s unhinged passion.
12. The Damned, 1947, dir. Rene Clement / Nazis on a submarine, and far from the sympathetic types we found in Das Boot. Shortly after World War II, the film has lived-in sagacity concerning the mid-level Nazis, who are shocked to find that their inhumane superiors are willing to be inhumane to them.
13. Scandal: The Trial of Mary Astor, 2018, dir. Alexa Foreman / Significantly less flashy than other streamer docs, significantly less bloated, and of course more serious for it. I didn’t know anything about this chapter in Astor’s life, and came away marveling at her redoubtable conduct in her trial and in her career.
14. Citizen Ruth, 1996, dir. Alexander Payne / Films don’t “age well” or “age poorly” so much as they are made with a prescient or reactionary sentiment. Citizen Ruth is pretty stupid, and so it only looks stupider post-Dobbs.
15. Here Comes the Navy, 1934, dir. Lloyd Bacon / Did you ever enlist on the slight chance you might get to bet a guy up? This is the (so, so entertaining) film for you!
16. The Pink Panther, 2006, dir. Shawn Levy / How much I enjoyed this probably has to do with my subbasement expectations for the film. Or maybe it has to do with the sheer number of blows France, the New Jersey of Europe, is dealt during a fairly concise picture.
17. Mary Stevens, M.D., 1933, dir. Lloyd Bacon / A textbook example of a weepie, beginning with a scene that sets the pace for the rest of the film. When Mary (Kay Francis, really good) shows up to treat a man, his rancorous shock at being assisted by a woman doctor only foreshadows how much people far closer to her will belittle her.
18. No Country for Old Men, 2007, dir. the Coen Brothers / Must be coming up to my fifth or sixth time with this movie, and like any really great text does, it’s becoming deeper and richer the more I’ve learned since the last appraisal. In this viewing, I couldn’t stop thinking about how beautifully paced this movie is, especially when individual scenes unravel slowly.
19. Blue Steel, 1990, dir. Kathryn Bigelow / Even pre-Freud I’m sure average people could have put “gun” and “phallus” together like we put together peanut butter and jelly, but Bigelow puts those two together with the brilliant unsubtlety of a imploded building. Ron Silver could have competed with Dan Duryea for parts if they were contemporaries.
20. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975, dir. Milos Forman / Another one I’ve seen a few times, and it has the same dilemma in front of it that the individual scenes of No Country had. Suffice it to say that this one is a slog where No Country is taut.
21. Mistress America, 2015, dir. Noah Baumbach / Baumbach should make more laugh-out-loud comedies, and Mistress America proves it. Baumbach should stop writing his own screenplays, and the second half of Mistress America proves it.
22. A Knight’s Tale, 2001, dir. Brian Helgeland / The specter of a totally naked Geoffrey Chaucer wandering down some path after losing his shirt, as it were, is entirely unnecessary and strangely gripping. That’s my general take on A Knight’s Tale, which is more competent than not even when it loses its grip on what’s actually amusing.
23. The Informer, 1935, dir. John Ford / No other director has functioned as film school for me quite like John Ford, but that also means that I’m not giving him nearly enough credit for the first 10-12 movies of his I’ve seen. On a second viewing, The Informer was not merely about Judas Iscariot but in its circular character routes something more like Greek tragedy.
24. Free Chol Soo Lee, 2022, dir. Eugene Yi and Julie Ha / Not exactly a feel-good movie, least of all when Chol Soo Lee is actually freed. Even the agitators and activists for social justice are a little unprepared for their symbolic talisman to be flesh, blood, and frustrating.
25. Capricious Summer, 1968, dir. Jiri Menzel / Would we have fewer incels and women-haters if more men actually chose to shoot their shot? Maybe we would, but a film that tickles as much as Capricious Summer is proof that not every man should shoot his shot until he improves his aim.
26. The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951, dir. Robert Wise / Less gripping here than on my first visit to the film, although the message of “Stop having nuclear wars or we’re going to blow up your friggin’ planet” definitely rang out more for me this time. Sure, Klaatu is Jesus, but you have to wonder a little bit if people would behave differently if they really believed God was going to blow them up for threatening universal peace.
27. The Tarnished Angels, 1957, dir. Douglas Sirk / William Faulkner is not an easy person to adapt to film (least of all for James Franco, the hack), but the cruelty of entitled, arrogant men comes through unabashedly in this film. The scene where Robert Stack and Jack Carson bet on who will marry a pregnant Dorothy Malone has the same timbre as Thomas Sutpen’s slave fights.
28. Fata Morgana, 1971, dir. Werner Herzog / I watched this particular Herzog doc because of Encounters at the End of the World, and while I appreciated the basically silent film it didn’t scratch the same itch. More Western filmmakers ought to have Herzog’s understanding of the centrality, not just the potency, of the Middle East.
29. A Lion Is in the Streets, 1953, dir. Raoul Walsh / I’ll watch pretty much any Raoul Walsh or James Cagney picture without asking questions, and this one was electrifying until it decided that the antihero had to be punished. More political dramas should be willing to work in lush Technicolor; it can be serious and colorful.
30. Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, 1927, dir. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack / I watched this before the vengeful orca pods took shape, but I was still rooting for the elephants the entire time. Has the worst colonial impulses of Grass without any of the scope that makes that picture worthwhile.
31. The Maltese Falcon, 1931, dir. Roy Del Ruth / A lot more fun than the famous version of this film, and sacrilegious as it sounds, it’s because I prefer the actors of ’31 to ’41. Fine, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre are irresistible, but Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels bring the sarcasm and the sex far more than Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor (more on that later).
32. The Mask of Dimitrios, 1944, dir. Jean Negulesco / See what I mean about Greenstreet and Lorre? The Mask of Dimitrios is not as good as The Maltese Falcon ’41 or as entertaining as The Maltese Falcon ’31, but I was spellbound in large part because it represented something that Warner Brothers could have been in terms of its stable of actors, rather than what it actually was.
33. Girls at 12, 1975, dir. Joyce Chopra / Chopra, in this as well as in Smooth Talk, recognizes something in telling the stories of pubescents: you must be suspicious of your protagonist, but you must also find something warm and worthy in her as well. Girls at 12 doesn’t pretend that the girls have all of their ducks in a row, but it also never condemns them for being twelve, either.
34. Confessions of a Nazi Spy, 1939, dir. Anatole Litvak / Reasonably engaging, I suppose, but it’s absolutely just a first draft for the anti-Nazi propaganda that Hollywood got really good at spitting out somewhere in 1942. Francis Lederer is the real star here, while the work of Edward “G-Man” G. Robinson and his posse is forced so much to the background that it might have worked better as a twist.
35. Candyman, 1992, dir. Bernard Rose / Perhaps the finest American horror movie of its decade, a film which really believes that the sins of the father must be passed down through the generations to come. Without Candyman, Jordan Peele’s oeuvre thus far simply doesn’t exist.
36. Strange World, 2022, dir. Don Hall / Pretty easily the best Disney movie since Moana, even if it has this vestigial fascination with not living up to your father’s expectations that animated movies won’t shut up about these days. More interesting is the idea that our proudest accomplishments are quite possibly carcinogenic, and our claim to greatness is, when understood better, harmful.
37. America as Seen by a Frenchman, 1960, dir. Francois Reichenbach / Peter Carey’s Tocqueville stand-in, the Olivier in Parrot and Olivier in America, dismissively refers to American cuisine as “a vast amount of ham.” Reichenbach is less dismissive, although where Olivier finds fault with these uncultured pioneers, Reichenbach is fascinated by what seems to him a perpetual carnival spread out 3,000 miles.
38. Death in the Garden, 1956, dir. Luis Bunuel / Without having seen every movie Bunuel ever made, surely it’s safe to assume that this movie, at least in genre and story, is less like him than any other. This is a thriller without the louder staples that bad thrillers lean on too often, and it replaces merely functional actors with people like Michel Piccoli (absolutely superb) and Simone Signoret.
39. Fletch, 1985, dir. Michael Ritchie / As is appropriate for a movie where most of the jokes are based on purposeful misinterpretations, Fletch is rude. Rude, as in impolite, and rude, as in really good shape.
40. No Way Out, 1987, dir. Roger Donaldson / A few years later, Alec Baldwin found out that the KGB agent aboard Red October was the “goddamn cook.” More disappointingly, the real culprit in this movie is the goddamn homosexual, which…you guys really didn’t have a better motivation?
41. Being John Malkovich, 1999, dir. Spike Jonze / Hadn’t seen this since high school and I hated it then. I don’t think I hate it anymore, because mostly find it exhausting; it’s a lot of noise without anyone even trying to find music in the chaos.
42. The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker, 2023, dir. Colette Camden / You know there was nothing much to talk about because even Netflix didn’t try to stretch this out to six episodes between 42 and 65 minutes. Turns out to be as clueless as most true crime docs are these days, though I’m the idiot who sprinkles them into his movie diet.
43. The Super Mario Bros. Movie, 2023, dir. Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic / That “Hey, look, I’m Picasso!” line from Toy Story, or maybe the “laser envy” line from Toy Story, has ruined going on thirty years of writers working on movies for kids. Super Mario Bros is not aiming for adults, but squarely at little kids, which is why I’m significantly less worried about upcoming Nintendo cinematic hegemony than I was about the MCU.
44. Criss Cross, 1949, dir. Robert Siodmak / I would also make bad choices for Yvonne De Carlo if I were in Burt Lancaster’s shoes here. I’m not sure I would make choices that bad, but the catastrophically poor choices Steve makes in this movie make this film, even above Out of the Past, the key ’40s noir about men doing stupid things for a chance at a sexy woman.
45. A Fish in the Bathtub, 1999, dir. Joan Micklin Silver / Not only was I not expecting there to actually be a fish in the bathtub in this movie, I wasn’t expecting the fish to get there quite so rapidly. Maybe this is framed as a Jerry Stiller-Anne Meara collab, but this is emphatically Stiller’s cantankerous showpiece.
46. Stage Fright, 1950, dir. Alfred Hitchcock / A less heralded Hitchcock, which I definitely understand even if I don’t completely agree with that interpretation. I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that neither Jane Wyman nor Marlene Dietrich really succeeded with Hitchcock as they did with other directors.
47. The Pink Panther, 1963, dir. Blake Edwards / I like David Niven plenty, but I gotta say that whatever the movie was trying to do with him was totally uninteresting. Peter Sellers falling over has charm, but if you’re relying on Sellers for slapstick, which is seventh or eighth on his list of things he does well, what are you actually trying to accomplish?
48. Matilda, 1996, dir. Danny DeVito / It’s a surprisingly faithful adaptation (absent the unwanted subplot with the doll), but even that doesn’t really save it in the end. Mara Wilson is playing a girl too saintly when she’d be better spunky.
49. Doctor X, 1932, dir. Michael Curtiz / Lots of filmmakers want to make horror movies in black-and-white when they should be emulating the bilious tones of two-strip Technicolor. While we’re at it, let’s make more mad scientists movies; they honk.
50. Unbreakable, 2000, dir. M. Night Shyamalan / There are three exceptional superhero movies from this century. The Incredibles addresses the Randian impulse in all superhero stories, Spider-Man 2 wonders if superheroes can solve problems without physical force, and Unbreakable gets after the recursive idea of a superpowered individual in a society which can only imagine him, not recognize him.
51. Black Legion, 1937, dir. Archie Mayo / The Humphrey Bogart breakout is typically given as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, and who are we to argue with the historical record? If you’d dropped me back into the 1930s, I would have had to wait for his great work in Black Legion to get my proof of Bogart as a powerful presence.
52. Time After Time, 1979, dir. Nicholas Meyer / I believe in the Snakes on a Plane rule, where just because a movie has a completely bonkers premise doesn’t mean it’s going to be worth watching. On the other hand, there is such a thing as the Time After Time rule, where the bonkers premise backed up with some solid performances through the cast can be a terrific ride.
53. Babylon, 2022, dir. Damien Chazelle / I gave this and The Room the same rating on Letterboxd, even though this is leaps and bounds stronger from a purely technical level (the Justin Hurwitz score, snippets of Margot Robbie’s work). Babylon strikes me as the kind of movie that all of us have to get over sooner or later if we’re going to learn to really love how a movie works, and the bad news for Damien Chazelle is that this is his fifth feature.
54. Kedi, 2016, dir. Ceyda Torun / It has many cats. If you’re like me, that’s all you need to know.
55. Airport 1975, 1974, dir. Jack Smight / Not a memorable movie outside of the scenes where Karen Black is very unhappy in a cockpit that’s open to the sky. On the other hand, Karen Black’s unhappiness without sticking a kooky personality on it is fairly compelling.
56. The Sin of Madelon Claudet, 1931, dir. Edgar Selwyn / My first impulse with a movie like this (a woman who’s become a sex worker to survive doesn’t want to put that stigma on her son) is to call it a little overwrought. Of course, if you grant that what happens to Madelon Claudet is not some outlandish story, which you should grant, what Helen Hayes does in that role ought to rend you.
57. Airport ’77, 1977, dir. Jerry Jameson / The worst of the three Airport movies that Netflix put on their service (haven’t seen the fourth, sure I will someday), and it gains added humor when George Kennedy shows up; is he the reason air travel is so unsafe? Giddily reminiscent of an episode of Thunderbirds.
58. All About Eve, 1950, dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz / Truly a balanced movie able to hold the flaws and strengths of its female characters in mind simultaneously, without needless judgment or adulation. On this viewing, I was taken by how easily led almost every man in the movie is; even Addison’s late manipulation of Eve is a testament more to his venality and weakness than to her vulnerability.
59. Crown v. Stevens, 1936, dir. Michael Powell / I watched this to get one step closer to having seen all of Michael Powell’s films. I am now one step closer to having seen all of Michael Powell’s films.
60. Chloe, 2009, dir. Atom Egoyan / There’s a movie in here that feels like an Atom Egoyan movie, one in which the roles Julianne Moore and Amanda Seyfried are playing became inextricable from one another, teasing each other, wearing masks with each other’s faces. Then there’s the movie this becomes, which is more It’s Not Fatal, I’m Just Going to Need Surgery Attraction.
61. A Man Called Otto, 2022, dir. Marc Forster / For all of us who love Star Wars, that line where Luke sees the Millennium Falcon for the first time and blurts out, “What a piece of junk!” is a beloved irony. There’s nothing beloved or ironic in the piece of junk that is A Man Called Otto.
62. M3GAN, 2022, dir. Gerald Johnstone / A welcome picture in that it considers what we’re supposed to make of a woman who is more interested in her job than in child-rearing, and whether that’s a desire we should neglect or challenge. Too bad it had to end like a horror movie.
63. Deluge, 1933, dir. Felix A. Feist / The sequences where the world ends are fine, although I don’t think they even compare to the tumultuous trauma of San Francisco just three years later. Deluge is fascinating because it’s not the end of the world that needs to be addressed, but the rebuilding of it afterward, for the rebuilding is where we actually have agency.
64. The Docks of New York, 1928, dir. Josef von Sternberg / Our ceremonies and traditions, however ill-fitting they may appear to be in the grim sub-proletarian setting of these docks, still have the ability to shape us towards dignity. Whether the shaped clay has the strength to be fired is a different matter, though the structure goes a long way.
65. The Pink Panther 2, 2009, dir. Harald Zwart / The screenplay wasn’t co-written by Steve Martin, but by a guy whose greatest accomplishment is yelling at Adam Silver. You can guess which of these reboot movies is better.
66. My Son John, 1952, dir. Leo McCarey / Just a nightmare of reactionary politics, which everyone knows going in, but even if you’re not wanking off to those nightmares, you still have to contend with how remarkable Helen Hayes and Robert Walker are here. It’s a really good movie, and for people who don’t have real conservatives in their lives, consider this a starting point.
67. The Breaking Point, 1950, dir. Michael Curtiz / John Garfield’s penultimate film role, and watching him you wonder if he’d lived/HUAC had died, could he have singlehandedly pulled American film forward by a year or two? Film Twitter often wonders which black-and-white movie you’d show someone to get them into older movies; I think this might be my answer.
68. The Cabin in the Woods, 2011, dir. Drew Goddard / The most important thing this movie did for me was to build up my appreciation for Old. When someone writes a history of the 2010s in popular film (Leonardo DiCaprio Pointing Meme: Easter Eggs, TV Tropes, and the Quick-Hitting Cynicism of movie Craft), at least one full chapter is going to need to be devoted to this crap.
69. Hardcore, 1979, dir. Paul Schrader / It’s easy to be attracted to Schrader’s unforgiving ethos when it’s set in grimiest New York City or directed against the malefactors behind climate change. Only the true sickos (me) deserve the most literal, direct expressions of Calvinist chauvinism in his entire oeuvre as we see it here.
70. The Maltese Falcon, 1941, dir. John Huston / I’ve seen this one about as often as I’ve seen any other noir, and I can’t shake this terrible, heretical feeling that Mary Astor is miscast. Learning what “gunsel” actually means takes the queer readings of this picture far, far beyond Joel Cairo.
71. Fanfan la Tulipe, 1952, dir. Christian-Jaque / I can appreciate why, if you were not raised on Robin Hood or Star Wars, this is the kind of movie that might appeal to you as a youth; forgive me if that’s why I can’t even rouse up a lot of interest in this one. I don’t say this often, but this film is absolutely dying for color photography.
72. Waterloo Bridge, 1940, dir. Mervyn LeRoy / This didn’t even need Vivien Leigh in it to make it clear why this is an especially rough romance (and Robert Taylor, amazingly, is quite good opposite her). I guess it’s hard for me to get fully wrapped up in a story where coincidence, not feeling, is the major obstacle for the lovers.
73. The Body Snatcher, 1945, dir. Robert Wise / Perhaps not a popular opinion given where his career led him, but personally the Wise who most interests me was the one from the 1940s, the one who was still doing discount Orson Welles after doing his part to help the studio circumvent Welles’s vision for The Magnificent Ambersons. The Body Snatcher is this sharp Faustian story brought to the Victorian era, dulled only by the fact that the “villain” must be punished in 1945.
74. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, 2022, dir. Ryan Coogler / Maybe I should hold off on this because it’s really like, a 1400 word article for some website that specializes in comic book stuff, but Wakanda Forever only works if you’re the kind of person who needs to mourn T’Challa (not Chadwick Boseman, the future absence of T’Challa) in a movie theater for half an hour. Or maybe Marvel should stop hiring actors with significant abuse allegations, that’s another possibility.
75. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, 2023, dir. Peyton Reed / I continue to be the person who thinks the Ant-Man series represents, no, really, the best of the MCU. Also, Quantumania looks bad, but is it significantly worse than Guardians 2 or, haha, Civil War?
76. Down to the Sea in Ships, 1922, dir. Elmer Clifton / This isn’t a long movie, so maybe that’s why it feels overstuffed from a century on. The actual whaling, the shanghaiing, the stowaway, the unfortunate lovers…it all gets crammed into a package that is overwhelmed on arrival.
77. Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie, 2017, dir. David Soren / Count me among the number of people who thought Flip-O-Rama didn’t really meet the magic of doing it with one’s thumb and index finger in the pages of a book purchased at a late 20th Century Scholastic Book Fair. As far as kid movies go, it’s definitely more than tolerable.
78. Viva Zapata!, 1952, dir. Elia Kazan / This happens to me so often that I’m starting to think I need the following warning tattooed on my body: if it’s an Oscar-nominated movie with a namebrand director and at least one big star, if it took you until you were into your thirties just to find it in the wild, and Filipe Furtado is practically the only guy on Letterboxd who has seen it, then there’s a reason you haven’t seen it already. Incredibly, this movie made me a little homesick for On the Waterfront.
79. Richard Jewell, 2019, dir. Clint Eastwood / On the other hand, you know how sometimes you’ve read some controversy about a movie (in this case, the truly well-deserved pushback about Kathy Scruggs) and it’s directed by a filmmaker you really don’t care for, but then you watch it and it’s a minor epiphany? I’m not going to recant about Million Dollar Baby or Unforgiven or The Bridges of Madison County or anything like that, but Richard Jewell is so competent it has me wondering where this Clint Eastwood has been hiding.
80. Camouflage, 1977, dir. Krzysztof Zanussi / Plotted and talked out to within an inch of a full-body sunburn, Camouflage is so much about the thing that’s it’s critiquing that you can’t give it any credit as an allegorical or satirical statement. The best thing about it is an unqualified university bigwig who gets to take a swim in a pool that had been empty mere hours before his arrival.
81. Countdown, 1967, dir. Robert Altman / Maybe Robert Altman is the one who filmed the fake Moon landing? More seriously, chalk one up for auteur theory, because even in a vehicle that bears no superficial resemblance to the movies he’d make just three years later, you can feel Altman’s awestruck pessimism run through this just as you can feel it in Brewster McCloud or The Long Goodbye.
82. The Russians Are Coming, 1968, dir. Heiner Carow / At its root, fascism is an ideology which hates life no matter what form it takes; anything that lives or breathes is inferior to that which is etched in stone. Any political ideology can be, and has been, harnessed against life outside the self; I’m not sure there’s any other film which finds the despair and hatred of an individual’s own life as deeply connected to ideology as this film does.
83. On the Beach, 1959, dir. Stanley Kramer / In this soon-day doomsday film, people living in Australia are just biding their time until the nuclear winds sweep over them as well. Much less obnoxious than your average Kramer, though the tradeoff is that it’s also much more aimless than usual.
84. The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds, 1965, dir. Bert Williams / Has the pathetic quality of a throwaway movie even though it’s clear that leading man and director and producer and writer Bert Williams doesn’t feel like it’s a throwaway at all. The story is interesting enough for this to be remade on a 2020s indie budget instead of a 1960s indie budget.
85. Strange Cargo, 1940, dir. Frank Borzage / There are two movies fighting with one another inside Strange Cargo, and the fisticuffs are even more visible than Clark Gable or Joan Crawford. There’s the purging ruthless story of Devil’s Island escapees, and there’s the spiritual story of a good man influencing bad men in South American hell; guess which one the movie places its last emphasis on.
86. Slap Shot, 1977, dir. George Roy Hill / Sure, if you wanted to look at this movie as one of the Rust Belt dead-ender films, like Breaking Away with slurs or The Deer Hunter without the Vietnam stuff, then that road is open to you. May I suggest instead just cackling like an idiot whenever the Hansons are on the screen?
87. The Plea, 1967, dir. Tengiz Abuladze / To live within strict traditions (or, say, under a repressive government) means that to survive, one must elect to sacrifice one’s right to speak one’s heart. The Plea isn’t very long, yet it makes that idea relentless in three separate and aching stories.
88. Anastasia, 1997, dir. Gary Goldman and Don Bluth / The difference between the 1990s and now is that in 1997, people thought Anastasia was a “Disney princess,” and now people fight over the merits of Illumination as an animation firm. What this movie should have been, based on the parts that were actually good, is a Three Stooges-style comedy where the Stooges are Rasputin’s head, Rasputin’s body, and a bat with albinism.
89. Bama Rush, 2023, dir. Rachel Fleit / If Letterboxd is any indication, Bama Rush has a headstart on claiming the title of most reviled film of the year. I also don’t know if alopecia actually has anything to do with sororities, but the way normies watch documentaries now, I think most of the problem is that the doc doesn’t sufficiently spill tea.
90. Beware the Slenderman, 2016, dir. Irene Taylor Brodsky / Could have cut to the chase if they’d just said the documentary was about schizophrenia as opposed to trying to teach us what a meme was. Rare to watch a film which gets to its central idea and then immediately get bored with itself.
91. Moonfall, 2022, dir. Roland Emmerich / The question, after watching this thing, was whether I should focus on the part with the Moon…falling…or if I should focus on Emmerich’s swipe at Close Encounters. The fact that I not only forgot about the latter half, but that my mouth actually dropped open when I thought about that twist, means that I should think more about the Lexus December to Remember sales event.
92. Howard the Duck, 1986, dir. Willard Huyck / I’m just going to say it, this wasn’t weird enough. I’m not even sure the Lea Thompson in bed with Howard thing is the most uncomfortable seduction Thompson attempts in this two-year period!
93. Clash by Night, 1952, dir. Fritz Lang / Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Ryan are the type of screen couple who bring bedazzled brass knuckles to bed, and putting them together in this film is a special type of sadism. Making Paul Douglas the third wheel, and not just the third wheel but the kindly, unassuming third wheel at that, is inspired.
94. Amen., 2002, dir. Costa-Gavras / The first scene of Amen which shows us the horror of the Holocaust is a secondhand scene, in which we’re watching Ulrich Tukur’s horror at watching what for him is a previously unthinkable murder. It does not show us the murder, because Costa-Gavras understands that murder like that becomes spectacular; he maintains some dignity for the victims because he refuses to make them into props.
95. Dog, 2022, dir. Reid Carolin and Channing Tatum / This one’s been on my radar since the trailers started dropping, and given some things happening in my personal life when those trailers came out, I knew I was not going to be strong enough to watch this for a while. Some time has passed, I watched Dog, and I love the dog even if the dog is racist.
96. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1978, dir. Philip Kaufman / Like Amen, a film about a functionary believing for too long that the higher-ups will fix a problem if they’re alerted to it. Unlike Amen, it has that shot with the human-dog hybrid, and I’d happily read 1,000 words on how they came up with that idea, how they put it together, and who managed to get that past a producer.
97. Action in the North Atlantic, 1943, dir. Lloyd Bacon / A little hard for me to give this a fair shake, because its beats so nearly match those of The Cruel Sea and The Cruel Sea is just so, so much better. It’s also a little hard for me to give this a fair shake because there’s not one but two lines of dialogue in here about slicing up Nazis like cheese.
98. Passage to Marseille, 1944, dir. Michael Curtiz / The only movie I watched in May that I’ll immediately grant looked better than this one is The Breaking Point. If Humphrey Bogart were working as hard as Garfield was in that other Curtiz joint, we’d have a stew going.
99. Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, 1940, dir. William Dieterle / It used to be that you could depend on a really solid movie in which a short character actor/star plays a major research scientist risking it all to advance medicine. If they could start to make them again and make them like Dr. Ehrlich here (with bullets that look like condoms on the publicity material), I’d be all for it!
100. High School, 1968, dir. Frederick Wiseman / Young, hip teachers are even worse than the crotchety bullies, I think. My favorite part of this movie was seeing the dean of students (elevated gym coach? vice principal? I dunno) dressing down a boy for hitting another boy with glasses, like the glasses are the worst part of the infraction.
101. Trouble Every Day, 2001, dir. Claire Denis / It’s axiomatic to say that vampires and sex go together, because that’s been part of the Dracula story, at the very least, from the beginning of Dracula stories proper. Sexy vampires are something we take for granted, and then you watch Trouble Every Day and the vampires are just not sexy anymore.
102. Life with Father, 1947, dir. Michael Curtiz / The feature version of “Though we adore men individually/We agree that, as a group/They’re rather stupid.” Just do what Irene Dunne and Elizabeth Taylor want you to do, this isn’t a noir, what exactly is the downside here.
103. Battle Cry, 1955, dir. Raoul Walsh / Well, we finally found it, a Raoul Walsh war movie that I can’t argue should be better remembered. Like so many other movies with ensembles that big, it never does manage to make the emotional climaxes land because we’re never really given enough opportunity to know the individuals with said climaxes.
104. The Wolfpack, 2015, dir. Crystal Moselle / The documentary, as one might expect from a person making her first feature-length doc, is scattered at best, and to boot the best part of the film is not really about her own filmmaking. Mukunda Angelo’s “Window Feel” is genuinely exciting and imagistic in a way that none of The Wolfpack is.
105. Sibyl, 2019, dir. Justine Triet / The temptation to make this a Persona film, especially from a critical angle, is certainly a strong one. Triet knows better than that, because a Persona film doesn’t rely on outright exploitation in order to create the confusion of two souls.
106. The Nutty Professor, 1963, dir. Jerry Lewis / It doesn’t matter if Buddy Love wasn’t written to be Dean Martin, because it’s not the characterization of Martin in Love that matters but the disconnect between Kelp and Love/Lewis and Martin that matters. Toxic masculinity, if the phrase still means anything, is a coin with two faces.
107. Confessions of an Opium Eater, 1962, dir. Albert Zugsmith / The true grandfather of Doc Sportello is not Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe but Gilbert De Quincey, which also means that Doc’s cousin is Jack Burton. An unusual movie in form more than subject or structure, but the form of it is unusual enough to make it mandatory viewing for anyone with a neo-noir interest.
108. Laughter, 1930, dir. Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast / The screenplay for this movie has four contributors, of whom the last two are the ones history remembers best: d’Abbadie d’Arrast, Douglas Z. Doty, Herman J. Mankiewicz, and Donald Ogden Stewart. You can absolutely feel the stranglehold that the latter two have on Laughter, for better or for worse.