Dear friend,

after more than two years of preparing these weekly round-ups, I’ve found myself going back often to past editions to check what exactly my feelings about films were shortly after watching them. It’s interesting that, quite often, I find that my current recollection diverges from my thoughts at the time.
To make this re-discovery easier, I have automated the creation of an index page where all the films are sorted alphabetically and linked to their relevant post. It’s far from perfect: the fact that the format of these posts has evolved means that I for some films the star rating is missing (either because, at the beginning, it was absent from the posts, or because for a period I put it at the end of the post, requiring a bit more work to fetch it), distinct viewings of the same film are listed separately (in chronological order), films with the same title are not distinguishable, and there are some duplicate mentions (both intentional - because non-English-language films are listed both under their original title and the English one - and unintentional). Also, the titles’ order is case-sensitive, and non-Latin characters are at the end of the list.
But it’s still useful to me, and, if you are curious, maybe to you as well.

Nobody 2, directed by Timo Tjahjanto, written by Derek Kolstad and Aaron Rabin, US, 2025 - ⭐⭐½

I saw it too long ago to find it in my index, but Letterboxd says that four years ago I gave the first film about retired-assassin-turned-family-man Hutch Mansell four stars. I don’t remember much about Nobody, except the scene where the big villain is introduced.
In this second film, seeing Bob Odenkirk as an action hero is no longer a surprise. Colin Hanks plays the bad sheriff (not really a spoiler: he’s identified as a wrong’un from the first moment he appears). The big bad wolf is crazy and over the top as you would expect.
Christopher Lloyd is back, but he’s just in a bunch of scenes (OK, the guy is almost 90 years old) and most of the time he’s alone in the shot. Connie Nielsen is also back and her character does exactly what you’d expect she’d do in a second film.
What I’m trying to say is that the writers didn’t exactly break new ground with this film. Not knowing anything in advance about the plot, I liked where the first act led me, but soon enough everything fell back into the default track.
Familiar doesn’t necessarily mean bad, and, after all, this was written by Derek Kolstad, so one knows what to expect.
What brought my rating down was by the violence in the third act. I guess it’s supposed to be funnily excessive, but it felt just cruel. I thought about that scene in Austin Powers where the families of Dr. Evil’s henchmen are notified of their loved ones’ demise.

Wind Chill, directed by Gregory Jacobs, written by Joe Gangemi and Steven Katz, US, 2007 - ⭐⭐½

There is this commonsense rule according to which, if you have never heard of a film featuring a major movie star, it’s probably not a good film. Of course, I keep ignoring it.
This one, featuring a post-Prada and very young-looking Emily Blunt, is, frankly, not terrible, or at least is interesting enough in its first half, when you have to decide whether to side with her - despite her immediately obnoxious behaviour towards the guy who’s giving her a six-hour car lift that will allow her to get home for Christmas -, or him (Ashton Holmes), who slowly starts to show hidden intentions behind his generous travelling offer.
When he takes apparently extremely dumb decisions and the car gets stuck in the snow on a secondary scenic road, she will have to fight to survive; Blunt may not have her Mary Poppins bag yet, but luckily the car boot is full of helpful stuff (this is sort of explained, but not at all convincingly).
When everything was over, I was not surprised to find that director and writers are all men.

Countdown, written and directed by Justin Dec, US, 2019 - ⭐⭐

A horror about the dangers of not reading terms and conditions carefully: in the case of Countdown, the app that tells you exactly when you are going to die, the stakes might be higher than losing your money.
It’s part Final Destination, part ‘curse movie’ (a year after Truth or Dare but before Smile), part demonic horror, with a concept that brings us back to the old and fascinating Appointment in Samarra tale (made popular in Italy by the song Samarcanda, but that’s for a different post): if you don’t accept that you will die soon and try to change your fate, you will die anyway, and you might even, unknowingly, set in motion the chain of events that will lead to your death.

But this film throws away the potentially interesting machinations of destiny, deciding instead to just have a supernatural presence do the dirty work, effectively proving that Final Destination’s choice to avoid showing Death as a character was the correct one.
Furthermore, let’s pause for a moment to examine the concept: for a person in their teens/twenties (like mandatory blonde female protagonist Elizabeth Lail, future policewoman in Five Nights at Freddy’s), it’s rather unlikely that an unexpected death would happen peacefully; so, they’ll either suffer a violent ending, or… a violent ending.

Narratively, the plot follows the familiar beats of the genre (P.J. Byrne from Final Destination 5 plays the quirky supernatural expert, for instance), explicitly rejecting the ‘usual way out’, just to fall into it when it has no more cards to play.
Objectively speaking, this film is maybe not as bad as I’m describing it, but it left a bad taste in my mouth, starting rather strong and getting, slowly but surely, worse as it went on.
No surprise then that this is the 90-minute version of a 5-minute short film by the same author, who hasn’t directed anything since but - according to his own website - has a few works in the pipelinee. All in all, I feel this could have benefitted from involving a co-writer, to iron out the story and possibly a few characters (the ‘father’ is so lifeless here…).

The Sting, directed by George Roy Hill, written by David S. Ward, US, 1973 - ⭐⭐⭐½

There was a time (and maybe that still happens today, but I doubt it) when every aspiring piano player would be heard trying to master Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer. The tune was also everything I knew about this film, except maybe that it featured Paul Newman and Robert Redford (I wasn’t yet obsessed with films back when I was an aspiring piano player).
With time, I learnt the film was about a ‘big con’. The Italian title (La stangata), despite keeping a kind of assonance with the original one (not a common trait for Italian adaptations) doesn’t really convey that meaning, rather suggesting someone suffering a big blow (either physically or economically). It’s not as enticing.
This partly explains why I had never watched this 7-Academy-Awards-Winner.

Grumpy Me would like to write that The Entertainer, written in 1902, is still the best part about this film.
Look, ‘it’s not you, it’s me’.

There are several factors at play against this film. First, it’s set in the Thirties, and I am not attracted by films set before the birth of rock ’n’ roll. I can’t really say why, but that’s a fact. It’s probably because they depict a time that’s too different from the one I’ve ever lived in (true, I have never lived in the Sixties either, but I feel more connected to that period). Which makes me wonder: do people who make period films (Robert Eggers aside) really care about being faithful to history? Or for them too, it’s just a nice fantasy, an artificial construct?
Then: I struggled understanding most of dialogue, mostly because it’s made of con artist slang, or betting terminology, neither of which I’m an expert. I put subtitles on, and still I didn’t understand half of the words.
Furthermore: it’s obvious that the film was shot on a studio lot. It is very claustrophobic. I have never been to Chicago but there’s no way the place depicted can be called the windy city. It’s as realistic as Diagon Alley.
The acting is also so artificial: Newman acts a bit too cool for my taste, and I don’t think Robert Shaw’s Lonnegan would ever put up with “Shaw”’s behaviour.

Is this of any importance? It is, because it took me away from any involvement with the story, which I ended up analysing rather than being immersed in, therefore anticipating ’the prestige’.
But objectively I can see how the film can be a fun watch, if you don’t have all my idiosyncrasies.

Mayhem, directed by Joe Lynch, written by Matias Caruso, US, 2017 - ⭐⭐½

So, this is a film starring Samara Weaving and Steven Yeun, and I had never heard of it. Hmm. But the two leads are charming enough even when taken separately, therefore I took the risk of renting it: worst case, I would have spent some time with people I like.

Mayhem is essentially The Belko Experiment (i.e. a fantasy about colleagues in a corporation building killing each other) set in motion by the rage virus from 28 Days Later. Look, I usually dislike it when people assemble a collage of other titles to describe a movie, but that’s exactly what this film looks like.
The plot is an excuse for (indeed) mayhem, character motivations are lifted from The Big Book of Film Clichés, the ‘eat the rich’ component is too grotesque to be taken seriously, the (totally chaste) sex scene is… a way to add two more minutes to the running time?
But the film actively dismissed any such criticism: because the virus removes people’s inhibitions, so their behaviour is not required to make any sense. What are you complaining about?.

I complain because what starts as an entertainingly stylish film, despite all the violence loses steam quite early and struggles to fill an 87-minute running time, even obliterating Yeun’s charisma. At least, blood-covered Weaving can be a bit more deranged than usual and as fun as her (future) standard.
The director, who went on to shoot Suitable Flesh, must like his own work quite a lot, because he reviewed it at least four times on Letterboxd (in fairness, he seems to like a lot most of the films he reviews).