Cocaine Bear (2023)

IMDb plot summary: An oddball group of cops, criminals, tourists and teens converge on a Georgia forest where a huge black bear goes on a murderous rampage after unintentionally ingesting cocaine.

Directed by Elizabeth Banks. Stars Keri Russell, Alden Ehrenreich, and O'Shea Jackson Jr.

Cocaine Bear is a thriller/comedy about a drug dealer who accidentally loses a bunch of cocaine in the woods, only for a bear to consume it and go on a wild rampage. This is as silly as it sounds, and it's occasionally entertaining, but the joke only stretches so far. I appreciate the wide variety of talented comedians brought in to bring the story to life, and they do bring in some creativity. (Jesse Tyler Ferguson was an especially high point for me.) But I really think this would work better as a series of sketches on SNL or a short film on YouTube -- the jokes and the characters don't quite stretch to fill feature length, and I found myself anxious for the story to end long before the credits rolled around.

🎥 Cocaine Bear (2023)

📊 Ranked #2658/4318 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 42

lost to Melody Time (#2198 → #1997)

beat Tallulah (#3271 → #3519)

beat Star! (#2733 → #2769)

lost to The Forbidden Kingdom (#2464 → #2192)

lost to Ghost Ship (#2594 → #2592)

beat Death on the Nile (#2662 → #2667)

lost to Focus (#2628 → #2627)

lost to She Loves Me (#2644 → #2651)

lost to Star Trek: Nemesis (#2652 → #2376)

beat Elle (#2656 → #2664)

beat The Little Prince (#2654 → #2665)

beat Le Week-End (#2653 → #2659)

Boiling Point (2021)

IMDb plot summary: A chef must deal with pressures in and out of the kitchen of a high end restaurant in the Christmas rush.

Directed by Philip Barantini. Stars Stephen Graham, Vinette Robinson, and Alice Feetham.

Boiling Point follows an intense shift at a restaurant, seen primarily through the owner and head chef's eyes, as he also deals with family problems, homelessness, and discord among his staff. If you're a fan of the TV show The Bear, you *need* to see this movie, as I think it will scratch a very similar itch, but distilled into a single shot over 90 minutes rather than over several episodes. Stephen Graham plays our protagonist, and he is electric, in a surprisingly quiet and understated way -- you just want everything to work out for him and are on the edge of your seat the whole time. The film is one long continuous shot, which really amplifies the tension the whole way through. While the focus is on Graham's character, we continue to get glimpses of the back stories for several other characters as well, and they're just as compelling. The artistry is on full display for this film, and it's very much worth a watch.

🎥 Boiling Point (2022)

📊 Ranked #400/4317 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 90

beat Melody Time (#2197 → #2198)

beat Southside with You (#1091 → #1093)

beat Garden State (#546 → #661)

lost to The City of Lost Children (held at #259)

beat WarGames (#400 → #401)

lost to Bells Are Ringing (held at #327)

lost to Fantasia (held at #363)

lost to Blood Simple (held at #379)

lost to Welcome to Dongmakgol (held at #388)

lost to A Simple Plan (held at #392)

lost to Half a Sixpence (held at #394)

lost to Won't You Be My Neighbor? (held at #395)

lost to Pink Floyd: The Wall (held at #396)

Creepshow (1982)

IMDb plot summary: Five grisly tales from a kid's comic book about a murdered father rising from his grave, a bizarre meteor, a vengeful husband, a mysterious crate's occupant, and a plague of cockroaches.

Directed by George A. Romero. Stars Hal Holbrook, Leslie Nielsen, and Adrienne Barbeau.

Creepshow is an anthology of five Stephen King horror stories, woven together through a loose frame of a young boy reading the Creepshow magazine. As with all anthologies, the quality varies from short to short, but overall I had a good time with this one. I appreciate the thread of goofiness that flows through every piece of it -- I had several laugh-out-loud moments, particularly in the first story. The one starring Stephen King himself is easily the weakest, particularly because King is truly awful in it, even if the final scenes are great fun. But other than that, they're all pretty solid and I enjoy the creativity of each story as it played out. An enjoyable watch, with only one really worth skipping.

🎥 Creepshow (1982)

📊 Ranked #1382/4316 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 67

beat National Theatre Live: The Seagull (#2197 → #2186)

lost to Pom Poko (#1089 → #975)

beat The Tragedy of Macbeth (#1651 → #1645)

lost to She's Gotta Have It (#1369 → #1364)

beat The Green Mile (#1512 → #1624)

beat Ping Pong Playa (#1438 → #1543)

beat Manchester by the Sea (#1403 → #1551)

lost to The Shoes of the Fisherman (#1385 → #1370)

beat Undercover Blues (#1395 → #1387)

beat World War Z (#1390 → #1383)

lost to The Killing of a Sacred Deer (#1388 → #1381)

beat SubUrbia (#1389 → #1404)

The Day of the Beast (1995)

IMDb plot summary: Bent on committing as many sins as possible to avert the birth of the beast, a Catholic priest teams up with a Black Metal aficionado and an Italian connoisseur of the occult. Now, he must become an unrelenting sinner. Is there still hope?

Directed by Álex de la Iglesia. Stars Álex Angulo, Armando De Razza, and Santiago Segura.

The Day of the Beast is a horror film about a priest who believes he can find the secret of the Antichrist's birth in metal music, and he teams up with a metalhead to commit as many sins as possible to prevent the end of the world. On paper, this sounds like an amazing concept, but it's flatter in execution. I wanted the film to land more solidly in either camp or horror, and instead it treads the line in a way that ends up just being kind of boring. It takes itself surprisingly seriously for being such a ridiculous premise, and not even in a so-bad-it's-good way. It's possible that there are pieces of this I'm missing culturally that would make it land better for me. But as it was it was a mediocre movie that I wanted to be more interesting.

🎥 The Day of the Beast (1995)

📊 Ranked #2660/4315 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 42

lost to Zelig (#2196 → #2198)

beat The Fugitive (#3268 → #3266)

beat Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (#2731 → #2727)

lost to Finding Vivian Maier (#2462 → #2399)

lost to A Foreign Affair (#2592 → #2596)

beat 10 (#2659 → #2945)

lost to The Harder They Fall (#2626 → #2370)

beat Death on the Nile (#2642 → #2662)

lost to The Keep (#2634 → #2373)

beat Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town (#2638 → #2921)

lost to The Devil Wears Prada (#2636 → #2630)

lost to A Cure for Wellness (#2637 → #2238)

The Second Mother (2015)

IMDb plot summary: When the estranged daughter of a hard-working live-in housekeeper suddenly appears, the unspoken class barriers that exist within the home are thrown into disarray.

Directed by Anna Muylaert. Stars Regina Casé, Helena Albergaria, and Michel Joelsas.

The Second Mother is a Brazilian film about a woman who moved to another city to work as a live-in maid and housekeeper, leaving her young daughter behind to be raised by her father. Years later, her daughter is ready to go to college in the big city, and she visits her mother and gets to see what her life has looked like for the last decade. The drama in this film is largely due to the young woman being unable to process the subservient role her mother is happy to live in to provide for her, and the mother's frustration that her daughter isn't willing to play the same role as needed while staying with her. I enjoyed the fact that the film was clearly exploring an uncomfortable class divide but still keeping the dramatic tension very small and personal. The acting is understated but extremely watchable and draws you in. That being said, it was one that didn't emotionally stay with me once the credits rolled. I thought to myself, "That was good," and then almost immediately forgot about it. I could see myself returning to it, as I think it was well-done, but I wish more of it stuck with me.

🎥 The Second Mother (2015)

📊 Ranked #1924/4314 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 56

beat Deceiver (#2196 → #2195)

lost to The Band Wagon (#1088 → #1087)

lost to Strictly Ballroom (#1649 → #1648)

lost to Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles (#1925 → #1923)

beat Holiday Inn (#2059 → #2060)

beat Divergent (#1992 → #1999)

beat The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu (#1958 → #2239)

beat Isle of Dogs (held at #1941)

beat Backbeat (#1933 → #1930)

beat Connie and Carla (#1929 → #1932)

beat Peeping Tom (#1927 → #1931)

lost to Rabbit Hole (#1926 → #1900)

Memories (1995)

 

IMDb plot summary: A freighter crew responds to a distress call from a station run by an AI opera diva. The AI manipulates life support, VR and nanosystems, posing dangers the crew must overcome to survive.

Directed by Kōji Morimoto, Tensai Okamura, and Katsuhiro Ōtomo. Stars Tsutomu Isobe, Shozo Iizuka, and Koichi Yamadera.

Memories is a Japanese anthology film with three short films, all based on manga stories by Katsuhiro Otomo. As with most anthology films, some of these are more interesting than others. The three stories are very, very different in terms of style as well. The first is sort of romantic drama, the second one -- my personal favorite -- is sci-fi horror comedy, and the third one is dark and a bit more unusual in form, as it tells a mostly-silent story of a world that is perpetually at war. That one was the hardest for me to latch on to because of the lack of dialogue, but overall these all felt like they were worth the watch. I got around to liking all of them in the end and I really liked the variety of the different films. This is one that I knew very, very little about, but I really enjoyed it.

How it entered my Flickchart:

🎥 Memories (1995)

📊 Ranked #1109/4313 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 74

beat Zelig (#2196 → #2197)

lost to Shakespeare in Love (#1087 → #657)

beat Quartet (held at #1648)

beat Koyaanisqatsi (#1367 → #1404)

beat Henry V (#1227 → #1225)

beat Fanny and Alexander (#1156 → #1193)

beat Minority Report (#1121 → #1120)

lost to Session 9 (#1104 → #1102)

beat Match Point (#1113 → #1111)

lost to Single White Female (#1109 → #1108)

beat Dangerous Liaisons (#1111 → #1148)

beat The Last Metro (#1110 → #1155)

Sound of Falling (2025)

IMDb plot summary: A remote German farm harbors generations of secrets. Four women, separated by decades but united by trauma, uncover the truth behind its weathered walls.

Directed by Mascha Schilinski. Stars Hanna Heckt, Lena Urzendowsky, and Susanne Wuest.

Sound of Falling is a German film following four generations of women all living in the same house from the 1800s all up to modern day. The film cuts non-linearly between the four of them, hopping from story to story and timeline to timeline. I found it a little jarring until I finally settled into it. As a result, I liked the film more in concept than an execution. Many of these scenes were so slice-of-life and so slow that it was difficult to really connect to the characters or to the conflict of the moment, although there were definitely a few that stood out. I think I may need to re-watch it again now that I have a stronger understanding of the film's concept, as well as hopefully having an easier time identifying the different characters the second time around. Even though the stories were set several decades apart, I still found it difficult to tell when I was in which timeline. However, it is a really creative film, and I totally understand why people are loving it, even if its structure kept it from totally landing for me.

How it entered my Flickchart:

🎥 Sound of Falling (2025)

📊 Ranked #2186/4312 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 51

lost to The Girl on a Motorcycle (#2196 → #2184)

beat Bright Lights (#3266 → #3488)

beat Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (#2730 → #2731)

beat Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (#2462 → #2463)

beat The Accidental Tourist (#2328 → #2329)

beat The Seventh Seal (#2261 → #2262)

beat Ender's Game (#2228 → #2229)

beat The Dawn Patrol (#2212 → #2213)

beat Serpico (#2204 → #2205)

beat The Lair of the White Worm (#2200 → #2202)

beat Away We Go (#2198 → #2199)

beat The Score (#2197 → #2198)