My monthly dump of movies I watched in September
The Thursday Murder Club (2025 - C. Columbus)
Tribute to a Bad Man (1956 - R. Wise)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009 - N.A. Oplev)
Captain Sindbad (1963 - B. Haskin)
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009 - W. Herzog)
Sherlock Holmes (2009 - G. Ritchie)
Medium Cool (1969 - H. Wexler)
Thunderbolts* (2025 - J. Schreier)
The Forbidden Kingdom (2008 - R. Minkoff)
The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009 - D. Alfredson)
I Was a Male War Bride (1949 - H. Hawks)
Otley (1968 - D. Clement)
Peking Opera Blues (1986 - H. Tsui)
Double Team (1997 - H. Tsui)
The Night of the Generals (1967 - A. Litwak)
The Departed (2006 - M. Scorsese)
The Pink Panther (2006 - S. Levy)
What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966 - W. Allen & S. Taniguchi)
His Master's Voice (1925 - R. Hoffman)
The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014 - H. Tsui)
M*A*S*H (1970 - R. Altman)
Havana (1990 - S. Pollack)
A Shot In the Dark (1964 - B. Edwards)
All Is Lost (2013 - J.C. Chandor)
Man of La Mancha (1972 - A. Hiller)
Sinners (2025 - R. Coogler)
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2009 - D. Alfredson)
Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015 - C. McQuarrie)
Berlin Express (1948 - J. Tourneur)
29 films this month which seems a little excessive. I'm not sure I remember all of them but here goes.
The Thursday Murder Club was an inoffensive cozy mystery that I've already written up and mostly forgotten
Tribute to a Bad Man was an interesting fifties anti-hero western with James Cagney playing a ruthless cattle baron. Cagney makes a better cowboy than you'd think.
I watched entire
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy. I think I'd seen the first one before but not the others. They feel like a TV series in pacing and production values except for the kinky violence. The narrative is weird in that the two main characters (the hacker and the journalist) are rarely in the same scenes. I liked the first one (Dragon Tattoo) the best because the conspiracy was cloaked in a mystery which the others lacked. The second (Played with Fire) was a middle child without much of a dramatic arc while the third (Hornet's Nest) landed the plane pretty well. I guess I should watch the Fincher one now.
Captain Sindbad (sic) was a cheesy German Sinbad the Sailor picture starring Guy Williams that Mrs. Eephus picked for some reason. it was laughably bad but had some great sets and costumes.
My Son, My Son What Have You Done? is a disturbing little hostage drama directed by the great Werner Herzog. The tone falls somewhere between his Stroszek and David Lynch. Michael Shannon plays a typically unhinged Michael Shannon character. Worth a watch.
I don't remember what possessed us to rewatch Guy Ritchie's
Sherlock Holmes. Mrs. Eephus liked it better than I did; I thought the storytelling wasn't good and Robert Downey Jr. wasn't right for the role.
Medium Cool is Haskell Wexler's underground classic filmed during the 1968 Democratic convention. It was probably much better in its original contemporary context but still held my interest. Robert Forster did a lot of heavy lifting as the center of the film because there wasn't much plot to speak of; just his character reacting to external events.
Thunderbolts* was another rewatch because Mrs. Eephus hadn't seen it. Its a better than average superhero film but lost a lot on the small screen.
The Forbidden Kingdom teamed Jackie Chan and Jet Li for some impressive action scenes but was weighed down by a boring hero's journey plotline involving an American teenager.
I Was a Male War Bride is a post-WWII comedy set in occupied Berlin. It's amusing enough and clips along rapidly due to Howard Hawks' usual efficient direction but it falls short of being a screwball classic in spite of the best efforts of Ann Sheridan and Cary Grant.
We love 60s spy movies and had never seen
Otley before. It has Tom Courtenay and Romy Schneider and some cool location shots of swinging London but was let down by a dull and sometimes incomprehensible story line.
I watched three films directed by the Hong Kong auteur Tsui Hark.
Peking Opera Blues is an early one and well worth a watch if you're interested in Hong Kong cinema. It's colorful and bursting with life and its action finale is still incredible today.
Double Team is one of Tsui's few Western productions. He does his best with an extremely stupid script and the action scenes are good. It's the highlight of Dennis Rodman's movie career but Jean-Claude Van Damme has done better work.
The Taking of Tiger Mountain is Tsui's take on one of the formative myths of the Communist Chinese Revolution. It doesn't come off particularly heavy on propaganda although the characters are very stereotypical. Modern Tsui loves his CGI and there's tons of it here sometimes to its detriment.
The Night of the Generals is one of those WWII movies where all the Germans speak with English accents. It's very low key without much action and was about 20 minutes too long due to an unnecessary modern framing story.
I hadn't seen
The Departed since it first came out. I don't think it's one of Scorsese's stronger efforts because all the interlocking deceits sap the momentum of the story.
I'd also never seen any of the Steve Martin
Pink Panther movies. His first one wasn't terrible and produced some laughs after I got used to Martin's portrayal of the character. Peter Sellers is still the best though.
A Shot in the Dark is a stage play adapted to include Inspector Clouseau. I honestly don't remember who the murderer was but Sellers was hilarious.
What's Up, Tiger Lily? was the first feature directed by Woody Allen. It's just a comic English redub of a cheap Japanese spy movie. It's another one that was probably fresher and funnier when it came out but there's a lot of cringe now for multiple reasons.
His Master's Voice is a silent picture starring Thunder the Marvel Dog, a 1920s rival to Rin Tin Tin. It was kind of cool to watch a movie made a century ago even though it's far from good cinema. The story was basically Thunder's origin story implausibly narrated by the dog himself. Even Marvel Dogs can't remember things that happened a decade before.
M*A*S*H still holds up pretty well except the football game seems like a completely different movie.
I watched a couple of Robert Redford (RIP) movies and meant to get to some others so there will be more next month.
Havana is a bloated romance set during Castro's revolution. Redford is the best thing about the film as sort of a cynical Bogart-like hero with a heart of gold.
All Is Lost is a decidedly non-epic tale of survival with the shipwrecked Redford. It would have been intense in the theater but the claustrophobia and lack of dialog made it a tough watch at home. If it had been me on the boat, there would have been a lot more cussing and talking to myself but I also would have died in the first reel.
The Man of La Mancha is a musical adaptation of
@Don Quixote. It's a transitional musical from 1970 that's more similar to modern genre than traditional Broadway and movie musicals. Peter O'Toole and Sophia Loren were dubbed but still quite good in their roles. I enjoyed this one a lot.
Sinners was a solid movie but non-horror fan me could have done without the vampires. I think there's another story in that universe that sticks to the twins returning with mob money without the supernatural elements but that's just me.
I rewatched a bunch of M:I movies recently but not
Rogue Nation for some reason. It does a lot of things really well and seemed like a tighter package than the final two entries in the series.
Last but not least,
Berlin Express is a noirish post-WWII thriller involving the reunification of Germany. I'm a sucker for movies set on a train and this one was pretty good even though the train wasn't really an express because it made a lengthy stop in Frankfurt.
Gotta love that 80's product placement. I've seen a few episodes (of the cartoon) and I had thought it was more of a sword and sandal Medieval type fantasy thing-I don't really remember them having laser guns so I was confused but I don't know about the lore. I remember my cousin being big into He-Man and he had the playsets and toys and all.
