Jim Rash won an Oscar for the screenplay for The Descendants, and his work as Dean Pelton on "Community" is one of the funniest sitcom performances of the last couple decades, but I don't know if people really appreciate how talented Rash is. Miss You, Love You, Rash's first solo effort as a writer/director after previous collaborations with Nat Faxon, essentially has three principle characters, but only two of them are actually in the movie. Diane (Allison Janney) is mourning her second husband, Tyler (offscreen) is her son from her first marriage who's too busy with work to come see her (he's some kind of famous important journalist who's also gay, so I pictured Anderson Cooper), and Jamie (Andrew Rannells) is Tyler's assistant Jamie who comes and helps Diane plan the funeral. And the whole thing is really compelling for a movie that's almost entirely two people talking, slowly unveiling all these emotional fault lines. 

Being trapped or confined is a pretty elemental horror trope, but so many 2020s horror movies about people being stuck in their houses have, whether intentionally or accidentally, felt like COVID lockdown allegories. So I kind of rolled my eyes when I started watching The Last House, a movie where suddenly every door in the world is mysteriously sealed shut and nobody can get out of their house. The premise takes a pretty big turn in the second half, and it appears from the reviews that pretty much everyone hated it, but I found it a relief that it wasn't entirely what I expected. Greta Lee and Wagner Moura are definitely way overqualified to lead a movie like this, though. 

I think Sydney Sweeney could probably be a good scream queen, given that her best performances in "Euphoria" usually involved her character responding social or romantic situations with mortal terror. I didn't think much of Immaculate, though, just kind of a loud, clumsy movie without much atmosphere or tension. Director Michael Mohan made a decent Lizzy Caplan/Alison Brie dramedy Save the Date over a decade ago, I don't think he really has a feel for horror. 

There are some wonderfully disturbing supporting performances in The Whisper Man by Hamish Linklater, Michael Keaton, and Owen Teague. But I don't feel like the stars, Robert De Niro and Adam Scott, were given a whole lot to work with in their roles, a lot of it felt like a third generation Silence of the Lambs knockoff. 

Speaking of Silence of the Lambs, a pretty good thriller starring Jodie Foster, although a totally different kind of story. 

So much of the promotional rollout for The Devil Wears Prada 2 just centered on the four stars being friends and being excited to work together again, which made it kind of jarring, in a fun way, to put on the movie and be reminded that, oh yeah, these characters are not besties and would not be back in each other's lives under happy, nostalgic conditions. I think there's probably no kind of sequel that's harder to pull off than following up a beloved comedy more than a decade or two later. I thought this was perfectly fine and they came up with a better story than I expected with a few fun moments, but I imagine I'll kind of forget it ever existed as I continue to watch the first movie again and again. 

My wife and I watched A Dog's Purpose years and years ago and found it to be a reasonably charming little emotionally manipulative family film. More recently my 11-year-old son watched it as well as the sequel, and I thought it was sweet how much he got wrapped up in the sentimentality of the story. I also got way more interested in the sequel than I expected because Betty Gilpin plays a negligent mother, just casually being one of the best actors of our time even something she's kind of too good for. 

While putting together my recent lists of 2010 and 2011 movies, I caught up on some stuff from that era that I missed at the time, and this is kind of a big canonical one I felt like I had to finally see. I'm a lot less skeptical of Ryan Gosling now than I was when this came out, he's done some really good work. I didn't really think he had the right screen presence for a character with no name who says few words, though, and the direction and music that people found so incredibly stylish and fresh at the time already seems a little stale and dated to me, or maybe that's just because it was influential? In any case, it was better than I thought it would be, even if it didn't totally in me over, if that makes sense. 

Margaret came out in 2011, but it was actually filmed in 2005 and underwent a whole protracted battle over Kenneth Lonergan getting a final cut he was happy with and getting the studio to release it. That results in a funny moment where Anna Paquin, playing a high school student, makes a derogatory reference to "the current president" in a scene that was filmed during the George W. Bush administration and released during the Barack Obama administration. Pretty great ensemble cast, including Kieran Culkin and J. Smith-Cameron years before "Succession," some very memorable scenes, but I don't know, a very strange premise in some ways and I don't know if Lonergan captured what he was going for after all that time. 

A pretty moving little slice-of-life British film about two guys who hook up and spend the weekend together right before one of them is about to move out of the country. 

I think it's funny that I unintentionally watched movies called Weekend and Warrior on consecutive nights. Tom Hardy playing an MMA fighter? Sure, I can buy it. Joel Edgerton also playing an MMA fighter? Not so much. 

I was happy when Melissa Leo from "Homicide: Life on the Street" won an Oscar for The Fighter, but in retrospect it doesn't really feel like it had much impact on her career or the quality of roles she's gotten since then. Okay movie, Leo and Christian Bale definitely earned their Oscars, but it definitely seems like the moment when David O. Russell went from being a unique filmmaker whose work was unlike anyone else's to a guy who more often than not just directs whatever a studio wants him to direct. 

Another movie that feels like a semi-forgotten relic of awards season hype. Do you remember that a French black-and-white silent film won Best Picture in 2012? I did like it, especially Berenice Bejo's performance, but I kind of wish they hadn't packed recognizable American actors in the supporting cast, every time I felt really immersed in and feeling like I was actually watching a movie made in 1927, John Goodman or James Cromwell would show up and puncture that bubble. 

When I was looking for 2010 films to watch, I learned that Sofia Coppola directed a movie I'd never heard of in the seven years between Marie Antoinette and The Bling Ring. Stephen Dorff plays a movie star, but one ten times more famous than Dorff ever was, living a sort of debauched, drunken, promiscuous life while his 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning) stays with him. I don't think this movie was as deep or as funny as it thought it was and probably would've been a lot better with DiCaprio, who apparently considered the role, but it's probably for the best that he didn't waste his time with it. 

A pretty good Kelly Reichardt movie about survival and death on the Oregon Trail. 

A biopic of a famous animal, told through the lens of the humans who owned, trained and rode him is a weird idea, when you think about it. I enjoyed it, though, Diane Lane and John Malkovich's performances really make it watchable, and after I wrote about horse racing for the first time this year, it was an interesting window into that world. 

As one of the few non-franchise J.J. Abrams movies, I was curious to see this, but it really didn't add up to much, and he really is fucking ridiculous with that lens flare. 

One thing I like about early 2010s movies is that Gemma Arterton was in a lot of them. Very odd movie, though, like it starts out feeling like this very straightforward thing about a woman moving returning to her hometown, and then the plot takes so many weird and often very stupid turns. 

This was the one John Hughes movie I had never really seen at all before when I ranked Hughes movies a few weeks ago, and I don't think anyone had any problem with me putting it in last place. 

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