Je nais se quois

Classic Hitchcock film noir in which two men meet on a train trip, and part ways with one of them believing they've agreed to each murder someone the other wished to be rid of.

Not one of Hitchcock's stronger pictures, if you're just starting out with Hitchcock I wouldn't watch it before, say, "North By Northwest", "Rear Window", "The Birds", even "Rope", maybe even "The 39 Steps"... it's not one of the greats, but even the worst Hitchcock is always going to be reliably above a certain quality. To date, if there's a rotten egg in his catalogue, I haven't found it.

This one is a bit more of a slow starter than many of his, and the setup is a bit contrived, but, this one does build to the kind of climax you can rely on from the Master. Definitely has its moments.

A well-made and engrossing but slightly narratively flawed sci-fi/horror mindbender, with video montages that would make Ken Russell proud. It's not perfect but well-enough done to be satisfying for me, despite the occasional cinematic excess or tough-to-swallow narrative turn.

A tourist couple and some friends visiting a foreign nation break the rules and leave the compound, drunkenly killing a local. From there it gets into some trippy territory that's just unexpected enough that I don't want to give away any more than that.

It's not great but it was good enough that it held my attention. The plot was definitely original, if a little too weird to completely suspend disbelief. I did like the way some outlandish ideas were handled, at least at first, with some gritty, matter-of-fact realism.

By the end it goes a little over-the-top but not far enough to ruin my overall enjoyment of…

This is a top-notch coming-of-age road trip drama disguised as a horror movie about cannibals. Yep. I don't even know where to begin.

Talk about punching above your weight. This incredibly thoughtful, well-made movie is original, leans poetic, and is much more about character and human interactions than blood and guts, although it has its share of that... it is about cannibals, after all.

The direction, the acting, even the editing, everything about this production is the cut above (no pun intended) that it needed to be in order to pull off a movie on this topic and make it excellent instead of lurid.

I feel like the coming-of-age narrative is not necessarily revelatory, it didn't grip me, which is generally what it takes to make me want to watch something again soon, but that's probably the only flaw that keeps me from putting this in my "honorable…

Some horror movies are scary, some are just fun. Both are equally hard to pull off. This one is totally fun.

It plays like a comedy-horror but really is just straight horror. A group of christian teens in a small-town movie theater discover a porno flick in a walled-off lair in the basement that sets loose a succubus. And as silly as that sounds, it's hard to the good end of what such a silly conceit could have turned out to be.

No, it's good! Really! It doesn't aim any higher than it needs to—nobody will ever accuse this of being a great movie—but it aims to be a good, if slightly silly one, and succeeds far better than it has a right to. Good production values and acting, as well as a few deft touches and moments of well-done tension, save it from being a relentlessly silly endeavor. It…

Sort of a fun horror/fantasy/crime thriller about an escaped mental patient with mind control powers on the run from the law among strippers and drug dealers in the seedy underbelly of New Orleans. Stars Craig Robinson as the lead cop, refreshingly actually playing a role, and not just himself. Nice to see that.

Fun magical-realist series about an 18-year-old girl struck down by satellite debris falling from space who joins a team of "reapers", undead people tasked with helping doomed souls depart their bodies painlessly before death. Oh, she also works at a temp agency by day. And the "reapers" hang out at a restaurant called "Der Waffle Haus". It's kinda fun. Created by Bryan Fuller, who also made similar short-lived but fun magical-realist shows "Pushing Daisies" and "Wonderfalls". Plus has Mandy Patinkin, who I always like, as the boss of the reaper team.

Surprisingly solid zombie action thriller about a zombie outbreak in a prison. With this clichéd title and that plot synopsis I expected total crap, but, surprise, it's a well-made, atmospheric, tense, fairly tightly made—if not particularly inventive—little splatterfest, more like "28 Days Later" in tone and production than "Return of The Living Dead". Completely lacks 28DL's epic scope and grand storytelling, but definitely feels like they took some cinematography lessons from Danny Boyle and learned well. Watchable if you're in the mood for this sort of thing. Might be a good date movie, if perhaps a little violent and explicitly gory for some.

Warning: panned badly on IMDB, 4.3 stars. I'm not sure why. It's not great by a long shot but it deserves better than that.

What to say about this critical fave? A drug-addicted schizophrenic anarchist hacker takes on the forces of corporatism and global-scale evil in this dark cyberthriller series that never lets the intensity go below 10 for a second. Every scene is intense. Every piece of dialog. People look at each other intensely, or argue and threaten each other intensely. One woman was cast, I'm sure, primarily for her skill at sitting there looking, because it's almost all she does. The show never takes a quiet moment to gather power for the next scene, never lets up. It's just one intense climax to the next, like a Whitney Houston song.

This series reminds me of what took me so long to cotton to "Breaking Bad" for—slow pacing, intensity conveyed with lots of quiet and stillness instead of action. Which, in principle is admirable, and much harder to do well than the…

Slightly uneven but admirably well-done tribute to 1970s cinematic gore á la "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". Someone knew where they were doing here and really wanted to make a quality genre picture, not just an exploitative, derivative rip-off "tribute".

In 1979 a porn production crew rents a remote farm to make make a porn that would also be a "real movie" (clearly a fourth-wall nod there; this production tries, and to a respectable extent succeeds, to rise above its genre.) Unfortunately, the old couple they rent from are at first odd and menacing and then it gets worse.

The story and motivations don't quite hold up—the reason the old couple act the murderous way they do is never even hinted at, a classic case of "because, movie"—but, like a lot of '70s horror, this goes further into character and decent moviemaking than modern audiences are probably used to. It explores…

I've never been more torn as to whether I liked or hated a film.

This plays like the evil twin of "Being There"—a cheaply-made film in which a deranged man-child, kept imprisoned in squalor and sexually abused by his mother for his entire life, escapes into urban Adelaide, and in a highly episodic series of events is taken, "Chance the gardener"-like, into various people's company, eventually fronting a rock band, and getting laid way more often than a babbling, homeless-looking person who can only repeat things he's heard said to him really ought to be, before ultimately stumbling into true love, all without being able to string together a single coherent sentence.

First off, this film has a lot of taboos—incest and animal cruelty, for starters, as he has sex with his mother and senselessly asphyxiates first his cat and then his parents with plastic wrap.

Then, the…

A slow-to-get-going, very quiet but beautifully shot rural folk horror that I'm sure most people will hate but I found very satisfying, once it got going, to the extent that it ever does. A researcher out at a rural pond for not-clearly-specified reasons encounters mounting hallucinations and increasingly hostile locals, with a heavy dose of pagan mythology. Picture a much quieter, almost arthouse "The Wicker Man" or "Midsommar" vibe, but fortunately restrained enough not to be distractingly pretentious.

This was very badly panned by a lot of people on IMDB, but a few seemed to appreciate it as I did, and film buffs might find it to stand out from the pack. Despite being bored for the first part, I did, and by the end I found it very good.

The cinematography stood out, and even a lot of reviewers who hated the film acknowledged that—very reminiscent of Lars…

Now, this is a uniquely weird movie. A bizarre and gory tale of unseen forces manipulating humans to commit acts of extreme violence is told entirely with human-sized puppets, which are detailed enough to go straight down the uncanny valley: they blink, they appear to have nearly-real-looking human skin with stray hairs and razor stubble, although the facial expressions are largely unchanging. It helps that it's filmed in real locations.

At first it seems like someone knew they had a fair-to-middling-at-best horror sci-fi on their hands so they decided to make the best of it and elevate it into something truly strange, making suspension of disbelief much easier with the puppet-only production. But, boy, the trick kinda worked.

One critic said, "too damn strange to completely ignore", and I agree with that.

To give an idea of what's going on here, turns out some of the characters are…

Kind of an offbeat British/American comedy about an eclectic assortment of characters who become involved with each other in the days before humanity is due to be wiped out by a comet. Jenne Fischer, Rob Lowe, Diana Rigg. I enjoyed it, it was more clever and entertaining than it should have been, and I was disappointed when the first season ended on a cliffhanger and it wasn't picked up for a second.

Weirdly OK sci fi flick. In pandemic times, a scientist wakes up imprisoned in a life support unit, and spends the movie wandering a medical-facility-cum-military-installation, uncovering the truth about what's happening to her. Little dialogue and almost no plot, but, visually well done enough to be sort of interesting, I guess, and with touches of fairly disturbing body horror. I didn't hate it, and might actually watch it again at some point to pay a little closer attention.

Surprisingly fun horror about a young girl who takes a spider from space as a pet, which causes problems as it grows. Starts off with a "Goonies"-type "kid movie" vibe but actually turned out to be alright horror, slightly above average. Fun, at least. I liked it.

A pretty pleasant surprise—a thoroughly derivative captivity/pursuit movie of the "trapped in an insane psycho's house" variety, about a young woman who is tricked into meeting someone via a dating app who is not who the profile says, but which slowly picks up about a third of the way through and then, surprisingly, just gets better and better.

This is entirely derivative in terms of its themes, indebted deeply to movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but slowly they began to introduce elements that had me thinking, "Well, this is actually alright for what it is, I bet younger horror fans will think it's great... although I'm just not sure it's necessary when we have The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." And then, slowly, they just kind added enough novel elements, and truthfully the whole thing is well-made enough all the way through, that I actually wound up enjoying it quite…

Let me say first that virtually any reasonable person will hate this movie. I can't decide if I like it myself. For a good part of it, I sure didn't.

This is sort of like "outsider art" of sci-fi horror. Absolutely terrible by most conventional standards: paced like a slog through a swamp, fairly poorly acting, and a difficult-to-make sense of story.

The story, for what it's worth, is a medical student gets a night job as a caregiver for a cantankerous, agoraphobic old man, who is never seen, but rather only heard perpetually cursing over a baby monitor from his room, as the primary nurse does all the actual attending to him. Strange shadows occasionally dart about and startle him, without explanation. And that's the first half of the movie. And it's, strange, there was actually something about it I kind of liked somehow, but I couldn't…

This movie is truly an odd bird. I believe the weaknesses outnumber the strengths, a flawed gem that's more flaw than gem, but I can't say it has absolutely nothing at all going for it.

Three people get trapped in a high-rise holiday flat, and as the food and water run out they begin to lose their minds. Eventually it comes to appear they may be victims of something larger than a simple mishap.

It's well-made and well-acted by indie film standards. Also, it had some nice production touches... some of the camerawork, the way they handle the apartment, was reminiscent of how the hotel sets were used in "The Shining", but not in a deliberately derivative way, just in seeming to have picked up some nice moves from it.

But the narrative is pretty weak and disjointed, and the first probably two thirds of the movie are…

What starts out as a really excellent pitch-black comedy about a production of "Julius Caesar" gone murderously wrong loses the thread about halfway through.

For the first half it was incredibly well made and cruising to be a particular favorite, but about halfway through the tight plotting suddenly gets very, very flabby, and instead of exploring the consequences of a murder they fall back on the "comedy" of the bodies piling up as many more happen.

It's a true shame. The production is excellent, whole thing is surprisingly strong, and even the acting holds up all the way through, with the exception of the appearance halfway through as Malcolm McDowell, playing his usual role of Malcolm-McDowell-in-costume-as-someone-else. The actors seemed incredibly true-to-life, based solely my meager experience with theater actors. I'm guessing this really is aimed as a satire at people who've been involved in the theater, but it was…

Sometimes I stumble onto a treat.

A company invents VR technology to allow rich people to experience life from the viewpoint of someone more disadvantages. To say more about the plot would require spoilers.

This indie sci-fi is filmed in black and white, which seemed pretentious at first, but made sense as the movie rolled on, because, it's sci-fi, yes—but mostly it's actually film noir, and while nobody would accuse it of being one of the greats, it's a pretty well-done one for a little indie flick. As the story gets more involved the choice to film in black and white as an homage to vintage film noir makes sense.

It started out seeming pretentious and not very effective, not to mention not particularly well-acted, but only got better as it went along, building, happily, to a very effective ending noir ending. Though it takes a while…