The Vast of Night (2019)

This is pretty much a half hour radio play interspersed with long empty tracking shots and jarring formal allusions to The Twilight Zone, a 60 year old show which regularly packed more ideas and visual oomph into a single episode than this film has in its entire runtime. The two leads are, respectively, as boring as the story and as irritatingly smug as the exhibitionist film-making. I gave up about halfway through and skipped to the end.

Rating: Very bad.

Don't Breathe (2016)

An effective, tight little grindhouse thriller than revels in pointing out all the Chekov's Guns to you up front then letting loose, while also regularly throwing in surprise devlopments as it goes.

Rating: Very Good.

Balle Perdue (2020)

A taut thriller with great car, shootout and melee action sequences, and a simple story with just enough meat on it. Like a less silly, more French, The Transporter (this could easily have been rejigged into a Universal Soldier style rejuvenation of that franchise, in fact).

Rating: Very good.

An American Pickle (2020)

Reminded me a bit of Cable Guy in that it's a fun premise, well made, with lots of fun moments, but the tone is uneven and the story is very slight. It's not surprising that this was adapted from a short story, as it often feels more like a sketch stretched out to 90 minutes. Rogen gives two strong performances, and the film is generally good at whatever it's trying its hand at - spoofy comedy, light satire, gentle drama - even if it never manages to settle on one or meld them successfully together.

Rating: Okay.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

SPOILERS BELOW

Godzilla Vs Kong has a bunch of cool fights, visuals and concepts, and some smart tying together of various lore strands. (The decision to make the hollow earth a huge, gravity-churning version of Skull Island where Kong is more like King Conan works especially well, allowing for some classic Kong action while adding some twists.)

The problem is, this movie functions purely as a delivery system for those cool elements. The small amounts of narrative and human elements that do exist are contrived and illogical. Meanwhile, the titans have changed from inscrutable living natural megadisasters to superheroes. This would be fine - they are essentially gods, after all, so why not hew a little closer to Greek myth? - except they can't talk, so there's no dressing up just how rote the use of the standard team-up/face-off beats is here. (Frustratingly, they  actually introduce a smart way to allow Kong to communicate, but then barely use it!)

When your title characters can't talk and your supporting cast are almost completely disposable, then you're not going to end up with a very satisfying movie, no matter how good your choreography and design are.

Rating: Okay.

EDIT: on a second watch I'd knock this down to Bad if not Terrible. The hollow earth King Conan stuff is utterly wasted and the fights are all cartoonish, stripped off all weight and awe. The whole thing feels like an episode of WWE with some Marvel gooped all over it.

The Suicide Squad (2021)

Funny, surprising, exciting. It gets everything right that the first Suicide Squad movie got wrong - I loved and hated all the characters I was supposed to, the villain is cool, the music is deployed with finesse (to the point where it feels like a conscious jab at the first film), the action is mostly really well choreographed and shot, the character arcs and tragic backstories work and don't feel forced.

It drags occasionally, and definitely should have been 20 minutes shorter, but it's great fun and a huge breath of fresh air after most of the DCEU and, honestly, most of the MCU as well.

Rating: Really good.

Old (2021)

If you've heard the elevator pitch, you've pretty much seen the movie. There are some fun ideas, but overall it feels careless: the two leads (such as they are) give terrible performances, the pacing is mostly languorous, the characters are too slow to catch on to anything (including some everyday common sense stuff), and the effects on the characters seem to come in fits and starts and at varying time rates. Sad to say, this very much feels like a mid-COVID production.

Rating: Meh.