I'm glad I managed to hear this movie mentioned a lot the last few months without really absorbing any details about the plot. I'd recommend going into the movie cold if possible, it's excellent and probably best experienced that way. Unsurprisingly, director Mark Mydol has done a lot of episodes of "Succession" (more surprisingly, his last feature was the 2011 Anna Faris flop What's Your Number?). But I was a little relieved that The Menu isn't really another satire about how evil or pathetic wealthy people are or whatever, it's got some interesting other levels it's operating on and subjects it's commenting on, in some ways it felt like it took the long way around to be something more like Seven or Saw or even Midsommar. Great performances from the entire cast, but especially Hong Chau, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Ralph Feinnes. 

I didn't realize that Alison Brie and Dave Franco are married, but they co-wrote this movie that he directed and she stars in. I am fond of making fun of a certain subgenre of movie I've seen dozens of, low budget dramedies starring semifamous sitcom actors, very often passion projects and very often about people who live in big cities going back to their hometown to visit or move in with their parents, reconnect with people they grew up with, etc. Somebody I Used To Know hits a lot of the identifiable tropes of these movies, but I will say that it was better than most of them, in that it wanted to be a comedy rather than a mopey dramedy, and had some decent laughs and sharp satirical moments. It was also fun to see Brie pal around with her "Community" co-star Danny Pudi. Even the plotty emotional stuff mostly worked, which surprised me because for the first half of the movie it felt like a meta version of My Best Friend's Wedding where the characters reference My Best Friend's Wedding. At some points it just felt like Dave Franco really wants you to look at his wife's boobs, which, I mean, I suppose I can oblige him there. 

This movie is a version of Romeo & Juliet told from the perspective of Rosaline, Juliet's cousin who Romeo was in love with first, a minor character in the original play. It's a pretty clever little romcom, and nice to see Kaitlyn Dever in something lighter for the first time since Booksmart. Kind of reminded me of Ella Enchanted, that sort of thing, with an excellent supporting cast including Minnie Driver and Bradley Whitford. 

Benjamin Caron's debut feature is a fairly clever tale of grifters double crossing each other, told as a series of vignettes from each character's perspective. But there were only a couple reveals that didn't feel inevitable by the time they happened, I feel like it could've used a tighter, faster paced edit of the final cut, or an additional draft of the screenplay with more narrative sleight of hand to make it dazzling and not merely good. And Briana Middleton really held her own with people like Julianne Moore and gave an impressive performance, feels like she could be a major star. What I really liked, though, was the look of the movie, something in the texture reminded me of older movies, and I found this article that gets into how deliberate that was, the use of light and shadow and underexposed long takes in homage to stuff like The Godfather. 

Don DeLillo's White Noise always seemed like one of those novels I should probably read at some point, and this recent adaptation didn't get great reviews so I wasn't in a rush to see it. But then there was the somewhat eerie timing of a derailed train releasing toxic chemicals in Ohio, just like in the movie, happening in real life a couple months after the movie's release, so I felt like okay, I'll watch it. But I dunno, as I watched a Noah Baumbach movie that ended with hundreds of actors dancing to a LCD Soundsystem song, I thought how someday I'll forget this embarrassing NPR totebag of a movie and maybe then I'll read the book. 

This was a pretty good modern take a '70s-style slasher movie. But I kind of rolled my eyes at the whole Mia Goth dual role thing, and the idea that it was worth her sitting in a makeup chair for hours every day to play one of those characters, or that that character should get her own prequel spinoff. But I dunno, I guess I'll watch Pearl too at some point. 

This comedy stars Kristen Bell and Alison Janney, who both can really do no wrong in my eyes, and was written by a couple of "Bob's Burgers" writers. They didn't quite knock it out of the park, but I thought it was decent, better than the reviews suggest. 

This movie was an odd little fusion of a hard partying college comedy and a drama about racial inequality. I respected what it was trying to do but by the end it just felt a bit too heavy handed, I would've appreciated if they married those elements a little more cohesively or made it more of an absurdist satire. 

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson has had a pretty charmed life in Hollywood, Southland Tales aside it just feels like he's made one blockbuster after another. But Black Adam is the first movie that really felt like Johnson invested a lot of himself into it and into the hopes of kicking off a franchise, and when it fell short at the box office, the schadenfreude was palpable, I guess a lot of people had been waiting for The Rock's downfall. I don't really relate to that, he's a great screen presence and I wish him well, this movie could have been better but it wasn't terrible, if anything the movie's biggest weakness was he wasn't in it enough in the first half. 

20 years ago this month, my future wife and I spent our first Valentine's Day together, stuck in my apartment during a blizzard watching horror movies and eating Chinese food, and that's been our VDay tradition ever since. Picking the movie to watch every year is always the hardest part, we bandied about some high profile recent horror movies to watch but wound up browsing the random low budget stuff on the OnDemand menu and picking Escape The Field. It's one of those horror movies where a few strangers get stranded in a mysterious place together and don't know whether to trust each other -- in this case, six people wake up in a cornfield, each of them with a useful object next to them (gun, knife, lantern, compass, etc.), and decide to team up and find their way out. Theo Rossi is pretty good in the movie but some of the cast really can't act and Shane West is way over-the-top chewing the scenery. The execution was imperfect but I liked the way the story kept both the characters and the viewer guessing, I think I enjoyed it more than my wife did. 

It's a little fun to think that Mary McCartney was born a week after her father finished recording Abbey Road, and then grew up to direct a documentary about Abbey Road Studios. That said, maybe she's deserving of some 'nepo baby' snark, because there were some moments when it felt like the interviews were not conducted well and they failed to leave some fairly dull moments on the cutting room floor. It was still a pretty genial and entertaining movie about a fascinating little bit of pop music history, but it probably could've used a more seasoned director. 

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