Alien (1979): In a week of middling movies, why not go back and rely on a classic to wipe the nasty aftertaste? I rewatched Alien a while ago, when it screened at a local cinema, which reminded me how much I wanted to do this more than a decade ago, while in London. And I did! At the time, the Prince Charles Cinema seemed like the only hope I would ever watch Alien on the big screen, but since then, there seems to have been a revival of older classic screenings.
The End of Oak Street (2026): David Robert Mitchell just about makes this classic 80s movie feel like a time capsule. Except that we’re in 2026 and it’s hard to treat this as anything more than a derivative Jurassic Park sideshow. Anne Hathaway plays a strong frustrated mother-character, who’s just about sick of putting up with her underperforming husband embodied by Ewan McGregor. Their two children sense this and are worried the worst might happen, and it turns out the worst does happen, only that it is means being teleported into the Mezozoic. The family bonds in this life or death escapade featuring many a, you’ve guessed it if you’ve seen the painfully spoilery trailers, dinos. There are moments when this is intriguing, but to me reducing the whole story to how the family unit fights for their survival is simply underwhelming. The only time I felt anything was during the final sequences, but even then the movie fails to end on the right note, because it’s so intent to wrap a bow around itself. I swear I wasn’t so negative leaving the cinema, but as I write this, I am only able to remember the frustration. 5
Nuremberg (2025): For a movie as big as this, director-writer James Vanderbilt manages to boil it down into the most generic essentials. The star-studded cast, led by Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, fare well enough, but the historical treatment is slight and makes the whole affair feel like a TV movie. Hermann Goring’s capture and trial, alongisde a number of other high-ish ranking Nazis at the Nuremberg trial’s, is potrayed through the eyes of psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, a tragic character in his own right. Kelley starts by trying to extricate information from Goring, then starts seeing him as a person, then completely turns against him once the atrocities of the extermination camps become public. That’s evidently a made up escalation of events, which felt fake to me all along. I guess the performances can be enjoyed, but this is neither a serious historical movie, nor a serious trial movie, so I’m not sure what angle to look at it from in order to justify its existence. 5
Josie and the Pussycats (2001): It’s obvious that there’s some cleverness behind Josie, as a movie dishing witty critiques at the music industry and its commercial tie-ins. I ascribe that to the source material being the Archie Comics series, because most the things put on top of it (i.e. the actual movie) just lack panache and humor. The plot follows a band made up of three friends who suddenly make it big, as the malevolent producers need new fodder to sell goods and services subliminally through hit songs. For a movie trying to be critiquing the brandification of everything, it unabashedly features some of the most famous brands in America at the turn of the century. If you want to do this bitingly, you create fake brands, the viewer gets it, right? Even so, there are moments where Josie is fun to watch, especially when it drops references to other 2000s movies. Ultimately, the solid cast (RL Cook, Rosario Dawson, Tara Reid, Alan Cumming, Parker Posey) helps to make what could have been a catastrophic-miss into a near-miss. 5
Watching Detectives (2007): I thought I had stumbled across an unseen gem, a small movie form the mid 00s, a romcom to boot, starring Cillian Murphy, Lucy Liu and Jason Sudeikis! Well, turns out there was good reason to have not stumbled upon it previously. The movie is written and directed by Paul Soter and I don’t think I’ve ever thought to myself “wow, this is what a manic pixie dream girl looks like”. And that’s coming from someone who has watched Scott Pilgrim more than a dozen times. I notice the there are quite a few fans of WD on Letterboxd and the wider internet, but I just can’t get how you would enjoy this movie in any way other than ironically. It tells of a guy who owns a movie rental business, all watcher and not doer, whose life is upended when a woman seemingly straight out of the movies appears at the store and intoxicates him with her intoxicativeness. The movie meta genre rarely offers delights, so I should have known this isn’t High Fidelity for VHSes. And that’s a shame, because Murphy and Liu are likable, but the way this thing is written is the definition of unfunny, unromantic cringe. 4
tributary stu 
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