I went into this movie knowing nothing about it, and really enjoyed it. A clever legal drama full of great actors at the top of their game is the kind of thing that would've played in theaters and maybe got a couple Oscar nominations a decade or two ago, but now it feels like The Burial just kind of got tossed out there on Amazon Prime. Definitely worth watching for Jamie Foxx alone, but the whole ensemble is excellent, Bill Camp is one of my favorite character actors in the world these days and he got a few great moments. 

Totally Killer is sort of a playful high concept twist on a slasher movie involving time travel, kind of in the same wheelhouse as some stuff I love like Happy Death Day. And director Nahnatchka Kahn has done some cool stuff, including creating "Don't Trust The B---- In Apartment 23," so my hopes were high. I thought Totally Killer was just okay, though, didn't really hold my attention, felt like it needed a little more going on with the characters and/or performances to be engaging. 

c) Reptile 

I came of age in the MTV era, when music videos had big budgets and looked amazing, and the directors who made the best videos often jumped to features and made some great movies like Fincher, Jonze and Gondry, and I wish that was still the case. Grant Singer is one of the few people who seems to have made a name off of directing videos in the last decade, including several of The Weekend's biggest hits, as well as Taylor Swift, Future, etc. So I was kinda rooting for his debut feature to continue that tradition (another reminder of the MTV's golden age: a nice supporting performance from Alicia Silverstone). Singer co-wrote the screenplay with the star, Benicio del Toro, and it's a nice bleak crime thriller that benefits a lot from Singer's eye, there's a number of scenes that feel like they really pop because of the very deliberate camera angles he uses to give a character's perspective or build up suspense with withheld information. I think Justin Timberlake has had a couple really good movie roles over the years, don't entirely know how I felt about him in Reptile though -- I liked seeing him as a villain, but felt like his fame was distracting and those scenes might have worked better with a different actor in that role. 

I feel bad that my kids and I talked about going to see this while it was in theaters but we never got around to it, so I'm glad it's finally on streaming. It's funny, I grew up on the TMNT franchise but the shows and movies that were around when I was a kid weren't really any good, whereas the adaptations my kids have gotten are much better, particularly the 2012-2017 series and this movie, which has some pretty hilarious moments. Jeff Rowe directed this and also The Mitchells vs. The Machines, and I feel like his stuff (along with the Spider-Verse movies) kind of points toward a new direction for computer animated movies  that isn't that slick bubbly Pixar style, he has a distinctive visual style that almost has more of a painted texture to it. I already praised the soundtrack album, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's score sounds even better in the context of the movie, one of their best to date. 

Justin Simien seemed to have so much potential as a bold and funny new writer/director when Dear White People came out in 2014. But almost a decade later, he's mostly worked on the less acclaimed Netflix series version of "Dear White People," and then this year he finally released his second feature, a fucking movie based on a Disney World ride. Haunted Mansion is better than it needs to be, and makes decent use of a wildly overqualified cast (Lakeith Stanfield, Danny DeVito, Owen Wilson, Rosario Dawson, etc.), but a family-friendly horror comedy feels like an inherently toothless proposition that never gets a chance to be especially scary or especially funny. And the whole thing just feels like kind of a humiliating illustration of Simien's squandered potential, that he sold out for a movie that didn't even turn a profit. 

My wife read the Dean Koontz novel Odd Thomas this week and wanted to watch the 2013 film adaption, so we checked it out. The late Anton Yelchin plays the title role, a guy who sees dead people and uses what he learns from them to avenge murders or prevent tragedies. Overall it was a decent movie and my wife said it was very faithful to the novel, but it mostly made me wonder what happened to Stephen Sommers -- he directed a string of big profitable action movies including The Mummy, Van Helsing and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra that were at least pretty slick and professional, if not masterpieces. And then the only thing he's directed in the last dozen years was this modestly budgeted horror movie that had some bad-looking visual effects and some dialogue that was so flat and emotionless that I couldn't tell if the actors or the director was the problem. 

I've wanted to see this movie for probably 20 years, just hearing that Tom Waits made a concert film in the '80s and you could see him perform Rain Dogs/Swordfishtrombones/Franks Wild Years songs with the musicians from the albums. So while I was recently working on my piece ranking Tom Waits albums I realized the movie is currently on Tubi and finally got to see it. And I'm kind of surprised this doesn't come up more in discussions of great concert films, it really is a great visual translation of the music of somebody who hasn't made a ton of high profile music videos. Weirdly, the biggest gig it seemed to lead to for director Chris Blum was the video for Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire." 

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