The Age of Adaline (2015)

IMDb plot summary: A young woman, born at the turn of the 20th century, is rendered ageless after an accident. After many solitary years, she meets a man who complicates the eternal life she has settled into.

Directed by Lee Toland Krieger. Starring Blake Lively, Michiel Huisman, Harrison Ford, and Ellen Burstyn.

The plot and script for this movie are disappointingly unwilling to really dig into the interesting philosophical questions its premise sparks, preferring to focus on much more familiar romantic tropes of learning to trust, but what does shine in this movie are the performances, particularly Blake Lively as the title character and Harrison Ford as someone from her past she never expected to see again. I've never thought of Ford as a particularly talented actor, but he really hits every emotional note here exactly right. And Lively brings a groundedness and solemnity to her role that makes it absolutely effortless to believe that she is actually a 90-year-old woman trapped in a younger woman's body. There's enough good here that I'm confident in recommending it, especially to fans of either actor.

How it entered my Flickchart:

The Age of Adaline > Meet John Doe

The Age of Adaline < Hoop Dreams

The Age of Adaline > The Hunt

The Age of Adaline < The Harvey Girls

The Age of Adaline < The Bad Sleep Well

The Age of Adaline < All's Faire In Love

The Age of Adaline > Charlie St. Cloud

The Age of Adaline < The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness

The Age of Adaline < Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India

The Age of Adaline < Stalag 17

The Age of Adaline < Starship Troopers

The Age of Adaline > Being John Malkovich

Final spot: #1206 out of 3290, or 63%.

The Client (1994)

IMDb plot summary: A young boy who witnessed the suicide of a mafia lawyer hires an attorney to protect him when the District Attorney tries to use him to take down a mob family.

Directed by Joel Schumacher. Starring Susan Sarandon, Tommy Lee Jones, Mary-Louise Parker, and Anthony LaPaglia.

Surprisingly to me, this is less of a legal drama and more... legal-adjacent, focusing on the relationship between the lawyer and her 11-year-old client and the occasional thriller sequence of the boy escaping from the people chasing him. The thriller scenes work best out of everything the film has to offer, well-paced and well-shot in a way that really drives up the tension. The film stumbles a bit more in trying to build the characters' relationship, as it always dances just on the edge of lazy stereotype and never quite settles into something that feels fully real. Still it's an enjoyable enough fluffy watch.

How it entered my Flickchart:

The Client > Rogue One

The Client < The Black Cat

The Client < Cool Hand Luke

The Client < Minority Report

The Client > Walk the Line

The Client > Celeste and Jesse Forever

The Client > Badlands

The Client > Three Colors: Red

The Client > The Fixer

The Client < VeggieTales: Josh and the Big Wall!

The Client < My Favorite Year

The Client < October Sky

Final spot: #1445 out of 3289, or 56%.

Call Me Madam (1953)

IMDb plot summary: Washington hostess Sally Adams becomes a Truman-era US ambassador to a European grand duchy.

Directed by Walter Lang. Starring Ethel Merman, Donald O'Connor, Vera-Ellen, and George Sanders.

There are definitely some good numbers in here, and they stand out in a way they didn't in the cast album, which I had first listened to just a few days prior. Donald O'Connor's drunken disastrous tap dance "What Chance Have I With Love?" is a highlight. The plot is largely insignificant, as was the case with many 1950s musicals. Everything gets wrapped up very abruptly in the final scene. Sadly, the dialogue just also isn't that great and makes for very bland filler in between the musical numbers. This is one worth seeing for the songs alone.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Call Me Madam > The Chalk Garden

Call Me Madam < Hoop Dreams

Call Me Madam > Logan Lucky

Call Me Madam > The Polka King

Call Me Madam > The Last Metro

Call Me Madam < Re-Animator

Call Me Madam > Children of a Lesser God

Call Me Madam < 42 Up

Call Me Madam > Borat

Call Me Madam < Nights of Cabiria

Call Me Madam < The Cranes Are Flying

Call Me Madam > Song of the Sea

Final spot: #890 out of 3288, or 73%.

Nobody's Fool (1994)

IMDb plot summary: A stubborn man past his prime reflects on his life of strict independence and seeks more from himself.

Directed by Robert Benton. Starring Paul Newman, Jessica Tandy, Bruce Willis, and Melanie Griffith.

When this movie works, it works because Paul Newman is off-the-chart charismatic and you can kind of sort of see how he'd be able to get away with the things he does and still be at least moderately liked by his neighbors. On the page, this character is awful, but when Newman says those lines, you kind of get it. He's also able to portray those subtle moments of change that make me believe his character has actually grown at the end. It's hard to tell whether this would have worked at all without such an accomplished actor in the role, but I'm leaning toward no. This is a very meandering script, and you need someone helming it who is a pleasure to be with, and Newman fits that to a tee. This might not make it into my yearly holiday movie rotation, but it's a sweet movie held together by an incredible performance.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Nobody's Fool > Dogtooth

Nobody's Fool < Hoop Dreams

Nobody's Fool > Hoosiers

Nobody's Fool < The Polka King

Nobody's Fool < Inherit the Wind

Nobody's Fool < The Impossible

Nobody's Fool > Hereditary

Nobody's Fool > Creation

Nobody's Fool > Begin Again

Nobody's Fool > Dan in Real Life

Nobody's Fool < All That Jazz

Final spot: #1184 out of 3287, or 64%.

Queen Margot (1994)

IMDb plot summary: Young Queen Margot finds herself trapped in an arranged marriage amidst a religious war between Catholics and Protestants. She hopes to escape with a new lover, but finds herself imprisoned by her powerful and ruthless family.

Directed by Patrice Chéreau. Starring Isabelle Adjani, Daniel Auteuil, Jean-Hugues Anglade, and Vincent Perez.

I mostly found this... exhausting, for all the reasons I find Game of Thrones exhausting, and other things in a similar vein. Endless scheming and scandals and murders and family intrigue and way, way, way too many dark-haired bearded men who all look the same. I could only recognize about two of them by the end, and I just got tired of watching everyone betray everyone else. Because of that, it was refreshing to have Margot and Henry form an unusual sort of bond by the end of the film -- probably the only ones who had. It's becoming increasingly clear the more 1994 movies I watch that this was a year for bloated period pieces that should have been about an hour shorter, and this falls into that category.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Queen Margot < The Chalk Garden

Queen Margot > The Birthday Party

Queen Margot < Sarah, Plain and Tall

Queen Margot < After the Thin Man

Queen Margot < Rebel Without a Cause

Queen Margot > Bunraku

Queen Margot > Christmas on the Square

Queen Margot < The Little Princess (1939)

Queen Margot < Planes, Trains & Automobiles

Queen Margot < Where to Invade Next

Queen Margot < Ivan the Terrible, Part One

Queen Margot < My Favorite Wife

Final spot: #2388 out of 3286, or 27%.

Look Out, Officer! (1990)

IMDb plot summary: An officer killed on the job returns to Earth as a ghost to solve his own murder and seek justice with the help of a rookie cop and some funky magic.

Directed by Sze Yu Lau. Starring Stephen Chow, Bill Tung, Stanley Sui-Fan Fung, and Vivian Chen.

This movie is beyond silly, with constant mistaken identities and farcical switcheroos that everyone in the world just takes at face value. Chow commits to his goofy hapless character, as does Stanley Fung as his boss and reluctant sidekick, and they make a lot of this nonsense work with how seriously they take it. The film does have a few dated jokes that don't land well at all -- this is the second 90s comedy this week that has featured an extended scene where the punchline is basically "sexual assault is hilarious" -- but overall it is a fun, silly ride if that's a style of comedy you're already a fan of.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Look Out, Officer! > The Chalk Garden

Look Out, Officer! < Chronicle

Look Out, Officer! > Logan Lucky

Look Out, Officer! > The Happening

Look Out, Officer! > The Last Metro

Look Out, Officer! > Re-Animator

Look Out, Officer! > Hawking

Look Out, Officer! > Crocodile Dundee

Look Out, Officer! > Barton Fink

Look Out, Officer! < Whip It

Look Out, Officer! > Robot and Frank

Final spot: #825 out of 3284, or 75%.

Wyatt Earp (1994)

IMDb plot summary: From Wichita to Dodge City to the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, a man becomes a myth in this thrilling journey of romance, adventure and desperate, heroic action.

Directed by Lawrence Kasdan. Starring Kevin Costner, Dennis Quaid, Gene Hackman, and David Andrews.

Wyatt Earp came out within a year of the movie Tombstone and is basically the same movie -- a dramatization of Wyatt Earp's life and famous battles, starring Kevin Costner as Earp and a nearly-unrecognizable Dennis Quaid as Doc Holliday. I saw Tombstone ages ago but don't remember it being this agonizingly long or Earp being this unlikable. This version of the story may have possibly been trying to create a more fleshed out character of its title cowboy, but what they ended up doing was showing a bloodthirsty, violent, quick-tempered jerk self-righteously killing as he wished and ruining his family's lives without a care for them... and then backing him up the whole way as a legendary man of principles, which is just NOT the picture of him we actually see on screen. It's a strange, muddy character chosen as the center of this movie. On top of that, the cinematography, which inexplicably got an Academy Award nomination, is frequently so dark I had to turn my laptop brightness up all the way just to make out the bare minimum of what was happening on screen. This is just a long, boring watch with a gross hero, and there's not much to recommend it.

How it entered my Flickchart:

Wyatt Earp < The Chalk Garden

Wyatt Earp < Bright Young Things

Wyatt Earp > Gomorrah

Wyatt Earp < Hannibal

Wyatt Earp < Footloose (2011)

Wyatt Earp > Don Juan DeMarco

Wyatt Earp < The Roaring Twenties

Wyatt Earp < Passion

Wyatt Earp < Pinocchio

Wyatt Earp > Wilde

Wyatt Earp > Penelope

Wyatt Earp > Alice in Wonderland (2010)

Final spot: #2817 out of 3285, or 14%.