Life was a bitter cup for the saddest of all men (bomp-bada-bomp-ba-bomp bomp-bomp-ba-bomp bomp-ba-bomp dang-da-dang-dang-ding-a-dong-ding)

BLUE MOON

2025

Directed by Richard Linklater

Written by Robert Kaplow

Spoilers: for what, Oklahoma!? I mean, high, I guess

She was shakin'

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE

2025

Directed by Mona Fastvold

Written by Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold

Spoilers: inapplicable

Mentally ill from Amityville: Auto DeFeo

AMITYVILLE II: THE POSSESSION

1982

Directed by Damiano Damiani

Written by Tommy Lee Wallace and Dardano Sacchetti (based on Murder In Amityville by Hans Holzer)

Spoilers: moderate, or high, or inapplicable?

Mentally ill from Amityville: 28 days later

THE AMITYVILLE HORROR

1979

Directed by Stuart Rosenberg

Written by Sandor Stern (based on the book by Jay Anson)

Spoilers: moderate, but sort of inapplicable, right?

When will you make an end?

THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

1965

Directed by Carol Reed

Written by Philip Dunne (based on the novel by Irving Stone)

Spoilers: Michelangelo did, in fact, finish the Sistine Chapel ceiling

No whammies

THE LUCKIEST MAN IN AMERICA

2025

Directed by Samir Oliveros

Written by Amanda Freeman, Maggie Briggs, and Samir Oliveros

Spoilers: moderate (though, in a grander sense, N/A)

Reviews from gulag: Police abuses

Well, it's probably not the most inappropriate connection I've drawn between two films, but we are trying to do an end-of-year wrap-up here with barely 48 more hours to go before it's moot, so that's what we're going with.  Today's subjects: I'm Still Here and Hit Man.

I'M STILL HERE

Ainda Estou Aqui

I'm Still Here, concerning the extrajudicial murder undertaken by the Medici-led military government in Brazil that triggered the mid-life ascendance of famed human rights lawyer Eunice Paiza to prominence, is exactly the kind of movie you'd guess it was from the "I'd never heard of it till it was nominated for Best Picture" thing it's got going on, and even then you'd probably ask "of the movies broadly like it, why this one?", though a more charitable response would be "why not?"  Maybe it's because it looks alright, albeit mostly by virtue of being shot on film (a 35mm so grainy I thought it was 16, and now I'm a little unsettled about it); maybe it's because it couldn't possibly offend anyone, though it does come off categorically anti-military coup, and I think that's just awfully closed-minded of it.

Still, I can't help but think it's sort of wrongheaded, as a matter of its overall narrative strategy.  Which isn't to let the tactics off the hook: take, for instance, the extended pre-inciting incident first act that's just this naturalistic slice-of-life for a Brazilian family, one that I assume was this large and of this composition in real life, because there are, like, at least three more children than the actual film can handle in its extant configuration (something the film even sub rosa acknowledges in numerous ways throughout, for instance being noticeably relieved to have gotten rid of the eldest daughter by way of a long trip abroad once her function of "being a politically-conscious teen" and "providing some almost nauseatingly-shaky Super 8 home movies" has been accomplished), but this is a slice-of-life that has no goal whatsoever besides impressing on you that bad things can still happen to nice people.  And they are, for sure, nice: with the obvious exceptions, it seems like it'd be cool to be in this family, and live in their cool beach neighborhood, and enjoy the 70s Brazilian lifestyle of wearing underwear or overclothes but not both simultaneously, but this does not, by itself, make them all that interesting to watch.  (And as long as we're talking small stuff, then the constant reference to period pop cultural signifiers is a routine example of the movie's naturalistic tolerance of dead air—I assure you, I do get that it's right at the transition to the 1970s.)

Thirteen women

THE BOSTON STRANGLER

1968

Directed by Richard Fleischer

Written by Edward Anhalt (based on the book by Gerold Frank)

Spoilers: N/A

I want to be loved by you, just you, nobody else but you

THREE LITTLE WORDS

1950

Directed by Richard Thorpe

Written by George Wells

Spoilers: moderate, rather inapplicable

What a disaster: The Jerry Jameson TV roundup, part 2

In which we discuss Terror On the 40th Floor, The Deadly Tower, Superdome, and A Fire In the Sky, concluding our overview of the disaster telefilms Jerry Jameson directed in the 70s, which began here., where we dealt with Heatwave!, The Elevator, and Hurricane.

TERROR ON THE 40th FLOOR (1974)

When I set myself to the disaster telefilms of Jerry Jameson, I negligently failed to realize there were this many, so many that even just "the disaster telefilms of Jerry Jameson of 1974" became a fractal, neverending endeavor, so that I suppose that after doing three previously and only realizing I'd missed a fourth now, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if there were, somehow, four more still lurking out there to make me look foolish.  Fortunately, Terror On the 40th Floor doesn't change anything I said about The Elevator, which is, if anything, even more comfortably Jameson's best movie of an extremely busy 1974.  Similar in setting and somewhat in concept to The Elevator, what we've actually got here isn't that at all, and it's pretty shameless and more than a little suspect just from the outset: a skyscraper-on-fire TV disaster movie aired three months before The Towering Inferno came out in theaters in December.  If that sounds hackish and mercenary and even gauche to you (yet actually about two months too early to properly parasitize on the marketing and hype for The Towering Inferno, especially when Airport 1975 is presently playing on the big screen), you're pretty much right; this is quite low-effort material.  A notable distinction, anyway, is that The Towering Inferno is legitimately "about something"—mostly that fire is hot, sure—but also that skyscrapers and perhaps the system that produces them are an affront to morality, and the disaster there is triggered by greed and hubris and poor regulation; in Terror on the 40th Floor, the disaster is triggered by a drunken blue collar worker spilling fire all over everything.

Where the wild ones are

THE BIKERIDERS

2024

Written and directed by Jeff Nichols (based on the book by Danny Lyon)

Spoilers: moderate

Walt Disney, part XLVIII: At the minute of my execution, she hazarded the beating out of her own brains to save mine

POCAHONTAS

1995

Directed by Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg

Written by Carl Binder, Sussanah Grant, Philip LaZebnik, et al

Spoilers: N/A

Blownapart

NAPOLEON

2023

Directed by Ridley Scott

Written by David Scarpa

Spoilers: inapplicable

In all of your dealings with me, you will do me the courtesy to conduct yourself as a dead man

THE DUELLISTS

1978

Directed by Ridley Scott

Written by Gerald Vaughan-Hughes (based on the short story "The Duel" by Joseph Conrad)

Spoilers: moderate

Disinherit the earth

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Directed by Martin Scorsese

Written by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese (based on the book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann)

Spoilers: N/A

American Gothic Week: The discovery of witches

WITCHFINDER GENERAL

aka The Conqueror Worm aka Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General

1968

Directed by Michael Reeves

Written by Tom Baker and Michael Reeves

Spoilers: moderate

Doctor Manhattan

OPPENHEIMER

2023

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan (based on the book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin)

Spoilers: N/A

What in the world could make a river red turn blue?

FULL RIVER RED

2023

Directed by Zhang Yimou

Written by Chen Yu and Zhang Yimou

Spoilers: moderate

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety

CLEOPATRA

1963

Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Written by Ranald MacDougall, Sidney Buchman, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (based on The Life and Times of Cleopatra by Carlo Maria Franzero, plus Plutarch and that whole gang)

Spoilers: N/A

Hunk of burning love

ELVIS

2022

Directed by Baz Luhrmann

Written by Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner, and Baz Luhrmann

Spoilers: N/A