Sicario (2015)

IMDb plot summary: An FBI agent joins a covert DoD task force targeting a Mexican cartel. Operating outside legal boundaries with a CIA handler and a mysterious fixer, she discovers the mission's true purpose goes far beyond what she was told.

Directed by Denis Villeneuve. Stars Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, and Benicio Del Toro.

Sicario is a Denis Villeneuve film starring Emily Blunt as an FBI agent who gets pulled into a mysterious operation involving Mexican drug cartels. She begins to suspect it's not quite on the up-and-up but wants to get to the bottom of it and continues getting in deeper. Sometimes Villeneuve works perfectly for me, but a lot of his more crime-centric ones fall a little flat, and that is definitely the case here. Maybe I'm too cynical these days to get out of these movies what I'm supposed to, but it seemed pretty obvious to me early on how shady everything was, and so Emily Blunt's character's disillusionment never quite landed for me. It doesn't help that Blunt feels particularly bland to me in action films, while she's very good in others -- here, she just seems to blend into the background, so the story of her realization doesn't land. This one is pretty well acclaimed, so there must be something about it that sets it apart from other similar crime films, but it wasn't evident to me.

🎥 Sicario (2015)

📊 Ranked #2188/4224 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 48

lost to Cropsey (held at #2155)

beat Dear Evan Hansen (#3204 → #3205)

beat Mystic River (#2673 → #2674)

beat Cambio de ruta (#2416 → #2417)

beat Cowboys & Aliens (#2284 → #2285)

beat Country Strong (#2219 → #2220)

lost to Bottle Shock (held at #2187)

beat The Wailing (#2203 → #2204)

beat The Worst Person in the World (#2195 → #2196)

beat The Good Dinosaur (#2191 → #2192)

beat Splash (#2189 → #2190)

Drunken Angel (1948)

IMDb plot summary: A drunken doctor with a hot temper and a violence-prone gangster with tuberculosis form a quicksilver bond.

Directed by Akira Kurosawa. Stars Takashi Shimura, Toshirō Mifune, and Reizaburō Yamamoto.

Drunken Angel is an early Akira Kurosawa film starring Takashi Shimura as an alcoholic doctor and Toshiro Mifune as the young reckless yakuza diagnosed with tuberculosis. The two form a begrudging bond as their self-destructive tendencies threaten to end them both. This definitely has a lot of Kurosawa hallmarks, including of course two of his favorite actors, and although it feels a little raw in its execution, overall it works very well. Our two leads are, unsurprisingly, extremely charismatic, and it's worth it just to watch the two of them go back and forth with their disparate worldviews. It definitely leans into an older style of acting, the kind I expect to see in a lot of older films, and one that is refreshingly absent in Kurosawa's later, more realism-based work. There are a few moments that are a little slower or more didactic than Kurosawa's later works, but it's still well worth a watch, especially if you're a fan of his to begin with.

🎥 Drunken Angel (1948)

📊 Ranked #579/4223 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 86

beat The Internship (#2155 → #2156)

beat Whip It (#1123 → #1124)

beat The Reader (#603 → #604)

lost to Deathtrap (held at #299)

lost to Rurouni Kenshin Part I: Origins (held at #463)

lost to The White Tiger (held at #536)

lost to Life After Beth (held at #570)

beat Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (#586 → #587)

lost to Being John Malkovich (held at #578)

beat The Kid Detective (#582 → #583)

beat Spotlight (#580 → #581)

Fyre (2019)

IMDb plot summary: An exclusive behind the scenes look at the infamous unraveling of the Fyre music festival.

Directed by Chris Smith.

Fyre is one of the two Fyre Festival documentaries released at the same time. This one was the one released on Netflix. I couldn't tell you anything about the other one or if this one is better than it. I do know the story it's telling is absolutely insane: a group of people who attempt to put on a giant music festival with zero preparation and no effort put into things as simple as ensuring that there were enough beds, or that people could get water. It's wild. Watching it made me extremely claustrophobic and frightened for the times that i have had to do administrative paperwork -- I'm pretty sure this is how this is going to go every time, because i don't trust myself with that, so I felt this anxiety watching it, thinking, "Oh no, what if I too was in charge of a music festival?" (Of course, the nice thing is that I don't ever have to be in charge of a music festival. The organizers should also have made that choice.) The actual festival itself is gone through very quickly and then almost blown past. We almost don't get an ending piece to it. We jump from first night, where people arrive and are getting angry, to suddenly everybody's home. The stories that are most compelling are those of the people who knew this was going to be a disaster and were trying to stop it, saying, "Hey, we've got to tell people the truth about this." It's an interesting story, and this film does a pretty good job telling it. I wish I knew a little bit more about the aftermath -- that gets overlooked a little bit in this story -- but still definitely an interesting film to watch, especially if you were there for the memes and always wondered how did this happen in the first place.

🎥 Fyre (2019)

📊 Ranked #2062/4222 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 51

beat VeggieTales: Sheerluck Holmes and the Golden Ruler (#2152 → #2153)

lost to Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (held at #1122)

lost to Kajaki (held at #1635)

lost to I Lost My Body (held at #1898)

lost to The Bishop's Wife (held at #2024)

beat Bonnie and Clyde (#2088 → #2089)

lost to The Last Castle (held at #2056)

beat America's Sweethearts (#2072 → #2073)

beat Disturbia (#2064 → #2065)

lost to EDtv (held at #2060)

beat Spy Game (#2062 → #2063)

When We Were Kings (1996)

IMDb plot summary: Boxing documentary on the 1974 world heavyweight championship bout between defending champion, George Foreman, and the underdog challenger, Muhammad Ali.

Directed by Leon Gast.

When We Were Kings is a 1996 documentary about Muhammad Ali and his fight with George Foreman. I did watch this at an unfortunate time in my viewing when I was watching two documentaries at the same time and couldn't ever quite get myself in the right headspace for either of them, so I admit that there is something about this that i couldn't quite get into. That could easily be my fault as much as it is the movie's. I liked its portrayal of Ali. I felt like I knew him a little bit better by the end, which was nice because i really didn't have any sense of who he was as a persona. They do a really good job of pointing out what made him unique as a public figure, in his wit and his cocky boldness, which came across as charming and young rather than rather than just macho posturing. I did not particularly care to follow along with the politics of where and when to have this fight. That was much less interesting to me than just watching Ali as a human. I'm sure some of this is just a missed era of pop culture for me, where it's just not something that I know a lot about, so I don't have any stakes in it. There's some really nice music in this as well. The score really helped to bring home the whole vibe of Ali as a figurehead representing his community, for better or for worse. Probably more interesting if you had a connection to the story, but I did feel like I learned something.

🎥 When We Were Kings (1996)

📊 Ranked #2517/4221 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 40

lost to Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan (held at #2151)

beat 12 Days of Terror (#3203 → #3204)

beat The Man Who Knew Too Much (#2667 → #2668)

lost to Neighbors (held at #2411)

beat Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (#2539 → #2540)

lost to Safety Not Guaranteed (held at #2476)

lost to Meet Me in St. Louis (held at #2507)

beat National Theatre Live: The Habit of Art (#2523 → #2524)

lost to Free Guy (held at #2515)

beat Anna (#2519 → #2520)

beat Raffles (#2517 → #2518)

A Man Called Ove (2015)

IMDb plot summary: Ove, an ill-tempered, isolated retiree who spends his days enforcing block association rules and visiting his wife's grave, has finally given up on life just as an unlikely friendship develops with his boisterous new neighbors.

Directed by Hannes Holm. Stars Rolf Lassgård, Bahar Pars, and Filip Berg.

A Man Called Ove is a Swedish film about an elderly man whose wife has recently passed, and he has decided to end his life. However, he keeps getting interrupted by his new neighbors, an immigrant family who frequently need his help. I had seen the American remake of this starring Tom Hanks and thought it was just okay, but oh my gosh, I love this one so much. There are two things that make this one stand out in comparison. One is that it allows itself to have much more humor. The scenes where he is interrupted are genuinely very funny, many of the scenes where he is so upset are genuinely very funny, and the American version doesn't seem to allow itself that kind of darkness in the comedy. The other thing that I think makes a huge difference is that Hanks plays the character as a normal grumpy man who is fed up with life and is mad at everybody, but in the original, Ove is absolutely 100% neurodivergent, probably an autistic man. His rigid adherence to rules is not him being a tool, his difficulty relating to other people and his frustration that they don't follow his rules are not him being obnoxious and controlling. It's him trying to find a way to cope and relate to others. So when these characters manage to find a way into his heart, it's not because the magic of children has suddenly opened up a cranky man's heart who hates everyone. It's that he doesn't have to play the social games anymore, because the mom and her children scoot past them, and they actually relate to him and accept his weirdness. Through that lens, it's an entirely different story. I don't have to be convinced that this family has changed his heart. In this case, they just made a comfortable space for him, and the kindness that was always a part of him that he reserved gets released. It's both darker and more life-affirming than the American remake. I often like the non-subtlety of a lot of American remakes -- I gravitate toward the theatricality -- but if you get a chance to watch this one, it's such a gem and I will definitely watch it again.

🎥 A Man Called Ove (2015)

📊 Ranked #408/4220 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 90

beat The Shining (#2157 → #2158)

beat Miss Saigon: 25th Anniversary Performance (#1130 → #1131)

beat The Way Way Back (#611 → #612)

lost to Annihilation (held at #306)

beat Boyz n the Hood (#472 → #473)

lost to Fail Safe (held at #386)

beat High School Musical 2 (#424 → #425)

lost to Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (held at #403)

beat Before Sunset (#412 → #413)

lost to Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar (held at #407)

beat Adaptation. (#409 → #410)

Babylon (2022)

IMDb plot summary: A tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess, it traces the rise and fall of multiple characters during an era of unbridled decadence and depravity in early Hollywood.

Directed by Damien Chazelle. Stars Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and Jean Smart.

Babylon is Damien Chazelle's movie from 2022, a giant sprawling three-hour epic about early Hollywood, specifically the transition from silence into talkies. We follow a few different key figures: a young Mexican security guard who finds himself rising through the ranks, and two stars who do not adjust particularly well in the transition from silence to talkies. Notably the first 25 minutes is an enormous decadent orgy party at a producer's home, and it continues on this big decadent road. A lot of this works, although both this and La La Land show me that Chazelle is not my ideal crafter of movies about movies. I like the ensemble casting here, but I can't tell if I love or hate the strange absurdist tone in the latter half of the film. There's a scene toward the end where one of the characters watches Singin' in the Rain in the 50s, where the characters are very much reminiscent of these two actors who were not able to make the transition smoothly, and it makes the comedic scenes hit in a different way. I both loved and hated that. It did have the emotional punch needed, but I also felt very aware that the entire movie had been written for that scene, and it was hard to hold that awareness without at least a little eye rolling. The three-hour runtime is also a LOT. You could tell this story just as effectively in two. There are a lot of great individual scenes in this (I particularly enjoyed a confrontation between Brad Pitt and Jean Smart), but it's so long, and the ending does hit you over the head in a way doesn't feel like our long journey had been fully justified.

🎥 Babylon (2022)

📊 Ranked #1406/4219 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 67

beat Dunkirk (#2157 → #2158)

lost to Miss Saigon: 25th Anniversary Performance (held at #1130)

beat Sin Takes a Holiday (#1642 → #1643)

lost to Shadow of the Vampire (held at #1386)

beat Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (#1515 → #1516)

beat How to Train Your Dragon (#1450 → #1451)

beat Duck Soup (#1418 → #1419)

lost to Death by Hanging (held at #1402)

beat Under the Skin (#1410 → #1411)

beat Child's Play (#1406 → #1407)

lost to Summer Stock (held at #1404)

Day Zero (2007)

IMDb plot summary: The military draft is back, and three best friends are drafted and given 30 days to report for duty. In that time, they're forced to confront everything they believe about courage, duty, love, friendship, and honor.

Directed by Bryan Gunnar Cole. Stars Elijah Wood, Chris Klein, and Jon Bernthal.

Day Zero is set in a mid-2000s version of America where average citizens are drafted into military service to go fight in the Middle East. We follow three men, played by Elijah Wood, Chris Klein and Jon Bernthal, who are all good friends who get drafted at the same time. We join the countdown in their lives down to that day, watching them process it and figure out all the things that they are worried about, whether they're going to try to get out of it, whether it's something they're proud of. This film got absolutely eviscerated by critics, but I didn't think it was that bad. It's a little edgelord-y at times, but the core concept of it isn't terrible, and some of the acting choices are interesting. The characters are written in good balance with each other, where each one of them is saying something unique and different about their place in the world, even as they all share the experience of being semi-privileged young white men who suddenly find themselves in a position of having to give up those privileges, and how they respond to that when their country is letting them down that way. It doesn't pull off the ending, and it doesn't manage to say as much as it thinks it's saying by the time the credits roll, but I stayed engaged on the ride. It's a 12% on Rotten Tomatoes, which feels absolutely incorrect, when this is clearly around a 50: adequate but not exciting.

🎥 Day Zero (2007)

📊 Ranked #2261/4218 on my Flickchart

🎯 Flickscore™: 46

lost to The Shining (held at #2156)

beat City Slickers (#3204 → #3205)

beat The Muppets Take Manhattan (#2670 → #2671)

beat 42 (#2415 → #2416)

beat Superman Returns (#2284 → #2285)

lost to It's Kind of a Funny Story (held at #2219)

lost to Kiki's Delivery Service (held at #2250)

beat The Green Goddess (#2268 → #2269)

lost to All Quiet on the Western Front (held at #2260)

beat To Kill a King (#2264 → #2265)

beat The Unsinkable Molly Brown (#2262 → #2263)