Good Movies, April 2020

• The Deadly Affair, 1966 - ★★★½. I’m not sure what surprised and delighted me the most: James Mason’s amazing domestic troubles or Harry Andrews’ incessant narcolepsy.

• Tampopo, 1985 - ★★★★½. This movie is equal parts innocent, charming, disgusting, confusing, and endearing. It made me go “aww” and “oh, oh my god why oh interesting” every five minutes.

• Miami Connection, 1987 - ½. FRIEND!?!?!?

• Cover Girl, 1944 - ★★. Good dancing, bad singing, good lines (“Sure, I’ll marry you. Who is this?”), meh plot.

• Cinematic Titanic: Danger on Tiki Island, 2010 - ★★. My new business card is definitely going to say “Carla, to my friends and enemies.”

• The Anderson Tapes, 1971 - ★★★½ Now that’s how you fuck up a heist, kids.

• Hardcore, 1979 - ★★★ Really wanted George to invite Season back home to help rehab his daughter, but that would be a whole different movie. Ah well. If you liked Taken but wanted the dad to have a much lousier set of skills.

• Bitter Moon, 1992 - ★★★★. Being an adult means being the kind of hypocrite you can live with — an old piece of advice that definitely ran through my head as I watched a Polanski film in 2020 while self-isolating.

• The Big Heat, 1953 - ★★★★. The crib on the porch is for the outside baby we don’t talk about.

• Shadow, 2018 - ★★★★. It’d be cool to just hang out in those robes doing calligraphy though.

• Pain and Glory, 2019 - ★★★★. Intimate and touching. Very well done.

• Experiment in Terror, 1962 - ★★★★. So good. One of those great ones that’s just to the left of ten other movies you love, but takes this long to bubble up to the surface.

• Beauty and the Beast, 1946 - ★★½. Disney’s 90s version is probably the best, but this came out fifty years before and still puts up a fight.

• Dead Reckoning, 1947 - ★★½.

• The Skeleton Twins, 2014 - ★★★.

• You’ll Never Get Rich, 1941 - ★★. Ugh, the army.

• Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll, 2019 - ★★. Some episodes of Violet Evergarden are so crushing you feel your heart wrench itself apart. Other episodes are just sort of sweet and slow, but it’s okay because this is a pretty and winning world for a hang. This movie is more of the second. I was hoping for more of the first.

• High and Low, 1963 - ★★★★★.

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