The announcement of Bruce Willis’ retirement from acting due to medical reasons has led to many retrospectives on his body of work. One of the most notorious of his films was this one which shocked everyone at the time with how bad it was when Willis was at the height of his career. This eventually did gain something of a cult following with fans claiming that this is so bad that it crosses over into being good. I’ve long wanted to watch this out of curiosity and I’m sad to report that this is just a plain bad movie. You can see in some places how it could have been decent and the character of Hudson Hawk himself does have some charm. But what we actually got was still trash and there’s no redeeming it.

We’ve watched and liked so many of Billy Wilder’s films that I’m always game for another one, especially one that was made in Europe and so might feel less American. Unfortunately with William Holden as the lead and the very Hollywood plot, this one still feels very American. The story relies on a huge twist that is revealed not at the end of the film but somewhere in the final third or so and so everything that is truly important all happened in the past. As the second last of Wilder’s feature films, it wasn’t rated very highly when it was released and although opinions of it have improved since then, I think this isn’t anything close to Wilder’s best work.

Here is another film that feels more like a documentary than anything with a straightforward narrative. It’s an account of the lifestyle of the African-American Gullah people who live on islands off the eastern coast of the United States. It’s a remarkable independent film made by Julie Dash, herself an African-American woman, as predictably no major studio would touch the project. While this is truly as spellbinding as everyone says it is, I fear that it is best to come prepared by reading up on the culture somewhat first as otherwise many details are likely to escape a casual audience.

This film appeared on my radar quite some time back because I hesitated over watching it due to its excessive gore. After a friend recommended it, we finally watched it and indeed this is so much blood and mutilation in it. But it’s also completely different from what I expected being a kind of science-fiction horror movie instead of a serial killer movie. I don’t really like it but I do have to admit it is a very unique and memorable film with strong themes of body dysmorphia and self-harm.

I’m still going to the cinema probably less often than I should but I really wanted to give this film a boost if I could. The trailer for this immediately grabbed my attention when it first popped up and the excellent reviews only cemented the deal. While multiverse stories are kind of the in-thing in science-fiction films right now, I loved how this was simultaneously both a very big and a very small film. I’ve never watched anything by new directing duo Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, credited collectively as Daniels, before and they sure seem like a team to pay attention to.

I’ve featured a few films by John Huston here already and likely there will be more down the line. This one though was his very last film. It stars his daughter Anjelica Huston and uses a screenplay by his son Tony Huston. It’s an adaptation of short story by James Joyce and it has pretty much no plot at all, which makes it hard to write about. It is of course a masterful work and though I have never read the original story, I can’t imagine a better adaptation than this. Even so it is obvious that this is something that would be better experienced in its original written form rather than as a film.

So this was another MCU film that we skipped over watching in the cinema due to the pandemic and the critical response was bad enough that I couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for it either. I would still eventually catch it up of course and so here we are. In the event, this film features surprisingly good action choreography and the moment to moment scenes are solid as well. It suffers though from shallowly developed worldbuilding and just trying to tell too large a story. I would have been happy with a street-level kung fu movie in the MCU but I guess they really needed it to be an epic fantasy movie to justify a big studio budget.