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Threw it on out of morbid curiosity because a friend assured me it was “one of the good ones.” If that’s the case, then Marvel movies are even less to my taste than I thought 

Ugly to look at and filled with uninteresting characters facing a generic political conspiracy. Maybe the worst the CGI for these things has ever looked 

Insane that the Red Hulk reveal (which was stupid) was very clearly written into the script as a twist but the marketing focused so heavily on it that it’s just nothing 

Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford are talented actors. How did they get stuck in this?

Fun movie! It leans a lot on Tim Robinson’s specific brand of weird charm rather than on Paul Rudd’s more conventional appeal and creates something unique. It’s more than just The Cable Guy meets I Think You Should Leave 

One person in my screening not-so-quietly asked their date “what the fuck is his problem?”

The action made my palms sweaty, the jokes got some really big laughs out of me and there were more than a few tears. Genuinely the ideal version of what a big action movie should be

Great set pieces and score. Incredible performance, particularly from Simon Pegg and (obviously) Tom Cruise. Hayley Atwell has some really good comedic chops 

The story is a little nonsensical if you think about it too closely but why would you? It’s a spy franchise based on a campy old tv series and there’s a suspension of disbelief that should just come with the idea that you’re watching a movie and not a documentary. There’s a certain beauty to the movie’s presentation that choices lead us down a path but that our fate is never decided for us—it’s unwritten. The final voiceover is so good 

I already can’t wait to watch again

Not much going on here, good or bad.  

Even omitting how masterfully John Carpenter would later adapt the same short story—Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell—this movie is really just sort of a generic creature feature. Whereas the novella has the creature shape shifting into of the crew like in Carpenter’s film, this movie opts to make it a vampiric plant monster that’s out for blood. Literally. 

While I’m sympathetic to the technical (and cultural) restraints that led to some changes to the script from the source material which was deemed “too scary” but the director, there’s no real tension or mystery in its place. 

If you’re looking for chills, they’re not here. If you’re just a really big fan of sci-fi, you could do better than this one.

Forgot that that garbage disposal scene is a fake out because of how afraid it made me of them as a kid

Good, mean fun. A good legacy sequel in the sense that it doesn’t try too hard to connect or call back to the old movies outside of one scene that really served more as a sendoff for a deceased actor. 

I think what it does best is that before a kill it pointedly shows you a number of different things and kinda teases you into guessing what sort of Rube Goldberg sequence is coming only to totally subvert expectations

Saw this a lot as a kid and the dead dad flying into the sewers at the beginning always spooked me a little 

Equal parts Home Alone and Tom and Jerry. Lots of great physical stuff and gags. Nathan Lane really is one of the best to ever do it

A giant poster of this hung over my head for four years of high school French and is emblazoned in my memory forever as a result

This was probably ’s equivalent of the John Goodman Flintstones movie. Good set and costume design, very much in the spirit of the comic as well but just sort of vaguely uncanny 

Really funny! Good gags/well-translated jokes, etc

Pretty funny. It had a Boombastic needle drop

After having watched this I’m not really sure why my mom named my sister Shelby after the character

Really great slice-of-life movie though. I know nothing about author/screenwriter Robert Harling outside of this film but he has such an ear for good dialogue and making the characters feel three dimensional

Just a great one to throw on. I think this is my favorite of his

It was fine but I really thought that a time loop slasher would lean more into the campiness of its premise. Character deaths would veer into funny territory and then not so much

Great movie full of old sitcom stars—Will Arnett, Brad Garrett, Janeane Garofalo and Patton Oswalt  

Anton Ego makes me wanna punch him in the teeth

Doesn’t live up to its reputation as an actually scary movie that just happens to be made by Disney but it’s a pretty good and atmospheric story that, like Something Wicked This Way Comes, was the result of “unhappy compromises” with Disney, who wanted a scary movie and then pulled back on the idea during production. 

There were supposedly over 150 endings considered, which ranged from too scary to too ambitious to pretty tame. I watched both the theatrical ending, which is really too tame, and the original ending that was pulled after the original New York City release. The latter is less coherent—being a truncated version of the effects-heavy proposed ending that was rushed to theaters—but more compelling. The Watcher is a cool little monster man. The former is just a bit too bland for my taste and feels extremely toned down both in of the effects and the occult aspects. 

Cool sets; the woods look especially great. Pretty good acting from the kids in that Bette Davis is giving a great performance and she doesn’t bury them in shared scenes. Props to director John Hough for that to some degree, I’m sure. 

Ultimately a cool concept done in half-measures thanks to the meddling Disney execs.

Pretty good! It changes a couple of my favorite parts of the book and isn’t quite as scary as I’d have liked but that’s Disney for you. Very interesting that they were making a push for more mature stories to break away from their only-family-friendly image and then they came in and undermined the production here to make sure it was a family movie with a script rewrite behind Ray Bradbury’s back.

Still pretty good all things considered. The sequence with Jim and Will in the sewers while they’re being hunted was especially great and the film looked amazing. Really striking soundstages. There’s a kid who plays the young Mr Cooger that’s so weirdly good at acting menacingly. Wonder if he ended up doing more

A movie that’s firing on all cylinders. Not only does it have some dense themes tied to its setting in Jim Crowe-era Mississippi but it manages to also be a really fun movie once it comes time to fight the vampires. 

Both a classic vampire movie and one that invents a lot of new stuff. There’s an homage to a John Carpenter movie too, but not the one you’d expect 

Incredible performances all around and a great soundtrack. The night sequences look pretty good too. Not as crisp as stuff in Nope (which is really the brass ring imo) thanks to the day-for-night approach to that shoot but not as muddy as 90% of modern films. 

The only downside is that a key scene is buried several minutes into the credits instead of being the true ending. And some of the vampire logic in said scene muddies the narrative of others. But whatever. It’s a great time at the movies 

Hope Sinners 2 is a Green Book spoof

Extremely goofy movie. Not in the sense that Tom Hanks’ character gets fired from his job and has to go to college where he competes against his son in the X Games at the behest of Bradley Uppercrust III but in the sense that it’s just a silly conspiracy theory movie.

More National Treasure than Raiders of the Lost Ark but a lot of fun. I’ll check out the sequel

Mostly really good but I’d have liked it more without The Joker in there. He almost feels like an obligatory inclusion to me

How have I never reviews this on here? Of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy it’s the one I’ve seen the most and I think it’s genuinely my favorite one. Just a total bozo movie in the most complimentary sense. 

The Bane voice, Commissioner Gordon keeping a confession in his pocket for eight years, the weird brace that lets Batman kick through solid brick despite his arthritic knees. It’s comic book-y in the best way. In that way it feels at least partly like a repudiation of the perception of The Dark Knight as realistic 

All-timer ending

You can almost see the remains of a fun, offbeat comedy buried beneath corporate meddling and mandates. At a glance, it looks like there were four weeks of massive reshoots to overhaul the movie and you can see how much of the director’s voice was completely sapped from it as a result 

Good performances by the main cast. Awful special effects

Fun thriller. Some cool camera stuff and a couple decent twists. Funny 

Hollywood appears to have a new Jerry Maguire Kid

Great colors, great performances. Extremely sitcom-y in the most complementary way. Not quite episodic but it feels more like a series of small stories strung together than a big one and it really works. Sort of a more focused version of what the Farrelly Bros tried to do with The Three Stooges

Hurley is in it too

This one was sweet. I dunno. Good little period piece slice of life even though it’s not as “big” as some of the others because it lacks a fantastical element. I think the seaside Ghibli movies are my favorites to look at and the music was some of the best

Really fun, really pretty to look at. A lot of recent Legend of Zelda games owe a lot to this movie I think and also Dr Eggman was a character in it 

Maybe it’s because I’ve only seen a few of his other films, but it feels like Miyazaki kinda figured out his whole deal right from the jump considering this was the first Studio Ghibli film. Tonally and thematically, very similar to his other work. There’s also pirates and magic castles like other films of his I’ve seen. I think this is where auteur theory would apply if you’re a believer in that

I feel like I need to watch this once more to really get a full appreciation for it, but what a movie. 

I’m curious what prompted the change in title for some regions to The Boy and the Heron as opposed to the original title, How Do You Live? The former is a good title but I think the latter really circles exactly what the movie is about—selfishness vs selflessness. Living with malice and anger or comion and understanding. 

Gorgeous-looking movie and I love the main musical theme. Strong performances all around but Robert Pattinson is especially great. Unrecognizable 

I really need to watch more of Miyazaki’s stuff

Some absolutely gonzo action stuff in the last twenty minutes. Funny enough for most of the runtime

It’s gotta be some sort of HR violation for an assistant manager to date an employee and then go on a crosstown crime spree to save her 

Pretty standard action comedy. Some fun set pieces and jokes. The kind of movie that will find its core audience among dads who find it on cable. 

It needed more comedy tbh. So often they’d set up what seemed like an obvious gag or laugh line and then just not do it

I love the ending to this one. Lee and Carter just can’t bear to stop hanging out together and it’s beautiful. In a better world we’d have gotten some sort of TV series where they solve a crime every week in a new locale

Jackie Chan is so good in this

Some jokes that definitely haven’t aged well, but fewer than I expected. Wahlberg’s character is really not very likable, but I guess that’s by design 

Ultimately very much a Seth MacFarlane movie, for better or worse. For as mean as the humor can be, it’s secretly very sentimental 

Having not seen it since it was in theaters, I liked it more than I expected to. Giovanni Ribisi is especially funny in it

Not a very great script but a cast that I’ve loved in other things really carry it. Some genuine laughs but not enough of them, unfortunately

The third act where they have to drive the a tiny yellow car through New York City to the Guggenheim while Matchbox 20 plays is so cliche as to almost be parody but it’s also really funny

It’s this video but with hackneyed social commentary

I like that they use the Looney Tunes theme as like a climactic moment in the third act

Perfect vehicle for Don Knotts because of how well it lets him play up his scared guy shtick. Also just a really good mystery and some great special effects with the haunted house stuff. A better Scooby-Doo movie than those lousy ones from the early 2000s

This would pair well with The Private Eyes, starring Knotts and Tim Conway  

Crazy that they finally made a great theatrical Looney Tunes movie instead of something that feels like a reheated Muppets script and then Warner Bros hung it out to dry by selling it to a small studio with no marketing budget 

Five stars is maybe hyperbolic but I don’t really care. This movie was very much my thing 

Really gorgeous movie to look at, even if the animation is sometimes a bit overly “bouncy.” It’s so bright and vibrant. Great voice work from the cast and the fact that they used real voice actors instead of stunt casting big names has a lot to do with that. The biggest name is literally Wayne “Newman” Knight in a minor role. 

Really funny, the characters are great and it just has this sort of oddball charm to the whole thing. There is a joke at the very end that made me ugly laugh so unexpectedly that it made me momentarily self-conscious. 

Aesthetically it has this really pleasing anachronistic charm where it’s both modern and an homage to 50s sci-fi, which I’m a sucker for.

Funny, poignant and thought-provoking satire. There’s a certain lack of subtlety to the idea of a demagogue politician with red-hatted followers as the antagonist. Mark  performance bounces between exaggeration and imitation but it works 

Robert Pattinson gives two very different performances and Mickey 17 and Mickey 18, both great. Love the little critters too. 

I have a lot more I’d like to say about it, particularly in regards to some bookended imagery, but I want to watch it one more time first and let my hype die down a bit. Really great stuff

Fun movie. There’s exactly one death in it that’s not played for laughs and it makes perfect sense, given the director’s own experiences

Surprised to find out Tom Hardy helped write the movie because every time he was on screen he looked like he wanted to be anywhere else. Just a really lousy performance

I was hoping this would fall under the umbrella of so-bad-it’s-good like the other Sony Marvel movies but it was just kinda there. Like other movies in that oeuvre, it was completely incoherent from a writing perspective with some truly hamfisted MCU references. But it just had nothing going on. The movie feels built to please people who want a feature-length meme and not much else 

Insane ending

I’m gonna be honest, Kirk’s eulogy for Spock made me a little emotional. And then the lush orchestral version of Amazing Grace as his coffin sailed past the Genesis planet? Jeez

I love Shawn the Sheep in his little sweater. Wallace’s face when he’s told by the woman that she doesn’t like cheese emotes so much. So funny

This one was a blast. Immediately sets the tone and leans into it fully. Great stylized, campy comedy. Which it definitely is more than a horror movie 

I’m not someone who loves gore and sometimes it makes me squeamish when movies are gratuitous with it. This one framed it in such a way that I was laughing out loud. Just incredible comedic timing. The CGI is sometimes a bit wonky but it feels like that’s by design to make the kills more palatable 

Final Destination by way of Stephen King

I think Seth Rogen is really funny in this one in an understated way but a girl I liked when the movie came out told me he reminded her of me in this so maybe I’m biased! 

He and Barbra Streisand have great chemistry and I think their dynamic is fun and relatable. Really sweet ending

It takes a much bigger swing than the first two movies and mostly succeeds 

Not that I think Paul King is an especially riveting director but it’s interesting to see someone else try to imitate his style and have it come across just slightly differently. It often feels like a live action cartoon 

Lots of great performances and gags. Well-shot and some impressive set pieces. I think the new Mrs Brown does a good job but she just doesn’t have the same charm as the previous actress in the role. I think Ben Wishaw is kind of weak as Paddington though? Every line is delivered with this sort of grandiose cadence like they know people in the theater are going to take what aspirational things he says to heart and he comes across less like he’s talking to the other characters as a result. It doesn’t help that he’s polite to a fault. Paddington should be a real Urkel type. You need to be a little annoyed by his antics 

If I can be nit picky, it’s weird that they suddenly decide Paddington was found by Aunt Lucy as a cub instead of being related. It very clearly telegraphs the “twist” as a result. In fact, a couple twists are telegraphed pretty clearly from the jump but still treated as if they were twists.

But on the flip side to that, the movie is good at doing callbacks in a joking manner. Characters will say something early, like Mr Brown fearing an enounter with a giant Peruvian spider only for it to happen later. Each joke/payoff combo worked really well 

Antonia Banderas is terrific. He hams it up in a way that really elevates the material he’s given 

Here’s hoping that Paddington 4 brings him back to London and gives Mr Curry some screen time. It’s what the people want!

Pretty good performance from Bill Farmer as Goofy. They really give him a chance to bring some depth to the line readings. Who knew Goofy’s feelings could be hurt? I think if they’d gone through with Steve Martin as his voice actor for this it would’ve been an interesting novelty but less impactful 

I love road trip comedies and this one hits all the bears perfectly and has a lot of solid jokes, both big and small. Pete muttering “they always put too much water in these things” as he steps into the motel hot tub and displaces a ton of water cracked me up. The little bits like that peppered in add to the charm. So many movies (both animated and live action) don’t leave that breathing room. Every joke or moment serves the big picture instead of just doing character work

“Are you here because you need someone or because you need me?” Between this and Jerry Maguire’s “you had me at hello,” I think Cameron Crowe is the undisputed king of finding that one perfect line

For years my dad has oscillated between calling this or Die Hard his favorite film and seeing this feels sort of like a Rosetta Stone for better understanding him. But I’m not going to get into that here lol

John Cusack is so damn charming in this one. What a guy. And Ione Skye! Great performance; she’s so layered. Seeing Frasier’s dad as her father was a pleasant surprise 

“Nobody really thinks it will work, do they?”

“No. You just described every great success story”

It’s incredible how expressive they make Feathers McGraw with such a simple design. You can feel his sinister energy and malice. The train sequence is incredible. No clue how they did it

Kung fu comedy with a schmaltzy Valentine’s Day flair to the whole thing. It’s a lot of fun. The director’s previous experience as a stunt coordinator really shines through in the artistry to some of the stunts, even if they lack some of the imagination of those in classic martial arts films

Fun movie. Likable lead. It’s not going to be compared to Police Story or even Rush Hour in of its caliber but I can practically guarantee it’s a better time than other fish-out-of-water action comedies like Novocaine 

Mike Wazowski is one of the best characters Disney/Pixar has ever created

Very much the blueprint for The Planet of the Apes in pretty much every way other than the apes lol

Astronauts caught in a wormhole end up on a mysterious planet full of hostile mutants and giant spiders only to find out it’s the future of Earth after nuclear annihilation. But whereas Apes makes that the ultimate reveal, this film has a human faction still alive and dwindling because of their subterranean lifestyle. The real conflict comes in as they grow distrustful of the astronauts 

Feels like it could be a classic Star Trek episode. In a good way

I mean this in the most complimentary way I can but this feels like a movie from 2003. The premise, the tone, the whole thing. It’s pretty funny and there are fewer kills than the trailer would lead you to believe but it’s a fun time. There’s a montage. Etc 

The main guy delivers all his lines like a cross between Jerry Seinfeld (the fictitious Seinfeld version specifically) and Ross from Friends. 

He shows up

• The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
• The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water
• Pet Sematary
• The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run

Road trip buddy comedies

• The Muppet Movie
• Planes, Trains and Automobiles
• The Blues Brothers
• A Goofy Movie
• Sideways
• Tommy Boy
• Beavis and Butt-Head Do America
• 48 Hrs.
• Dumb and Dumber
• The Guilt Trip

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

For whatever reason, it’s in vogue right now to get the word “Man” right in the title of your movie.

• Better Man
• Dog Man
• Wolf Man
• A Different Man
• A Working Man
• Superman
• Monkey Man

Strictly his directorial stuff because it would be impossible to rank once you include the rest

• Uncle Buck
• Planes, Trains and Automobiles
• Ferris Bueller's Day Off
• The Breakfast Club
• Sixteen Candles

Romcoms that include a precocious child character

• Jerry Maguire
• As Good as It Gets
• Sleepless in Seattle
• Maid in Manhattan
• (500) Days of Summer
• Love Actually
• Big Daddy
• Just Go with It

Whether the characters are planning a daring scheme to steal jewels or other treasure or just inadvertently caught up in said situation, you can find it here. Other crimes also welcome if the situation is zany enough

• Bottle Rocket
• Fantastic Mr. Fox
• Weekend at Bernie's
• Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo
• Herbie Goes Bananas
• The Great Muppet Caper
• Muppets Most Wanted
• Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
• Tower Heist
• Ocean's Eleven

...plus 28 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movies with prominent apes, monkeys, etc. If they’re not a main character, they at least need to feature in a major scene

The order is randomized. Watch one every Monkey Monday™️ to make your own Year of the Monkey

• Summer of the Monkeys
• Planet of the Apes

  Stinks!

• Buddy
• Dunston Checks In

  George Costanza

• Rise of the Planet of the Apes
• The Wild Thornberrys Movie
• Nope
• Bedtime for Bonzo
• Kong: Skull Island
• Planet of the Apes

...plus 42 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Movies where food plays a major role in the story, especially the act of cooking.

• Big Night
• Ratatouille
• Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?
• Julie & Julia
• The French Dispatch
• Chef
• No Reservations
• The Taste of Things
• Like Water for Chocolate
• Tampopo

...plus 19 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.