Films I Watched This Week — Mar 24–30, 2025
Hopscotch (1980)
Hopscotch is a breezy and off-beat spy comedy and Walter Matthau's dry humor is a perfect fit as we watch him hop over two continents, hide out under false passports and assumed names, and amuse himself by playing a international game of cat-and-mouse while threatening to send his memoirs to the world's most powerful intelligence agencies.
Magnificent Obsession (1954)
Magnificent Obsession is a self-aware melodrama that includes many of the wonderful elements that have long defined director Douglas Sirks style all throughout his career. His rich signature technicolor palate is on full display here along with the cast delightfully overacting, making for a melodramatic weeper high in camp, and yet it is far from Sirks' most engaging and interesting film.
Diabolique (1955)
The most popular motives for murder are either money or passion. The goal of course is canceling the existence of another human being but after the act comes the guilt and the clumsiness of trying to get away with it. Perfect murders thankfully occur much more often in fiction then in real life, and like perfect art, doesn’t exist, but it’s never stopped a murderer or artist from trying. Director Henri-Georges Clouzot has always been labeled as the ‘French Hitchcock’ and Diabolique has always been quoted as “the greatest Hitchcock film that Hitchcock did not make.” Diabolique is a near-perfect movie about a near-perfect murder, a film in which the director’s methods are equally matched as the killers, in cunning and ruthlessness. The story of Diabolique unfolds in a French provincial town where Michel, a sadistic headmaster of a school belonging to his wife Christina, a fragile young woman with a weak heart, carries on an affair with Nicole, who has been his mistress from the day she arrived. He has, however, treated Christina badly as his wife, and the two women have been driven into an alliance against him. Together they work out an elaborate plot to rid themselves of their common tormentor. Luring him away from the school to Nicole’s cheap lodging house, they induce him to drink some doctored whiskey, and drown him in a bath. The body is later wrapped in a nylon tablecloth, placed into a laundry basket, and during the night, is transported back to the school, and thrown into the grimy waters of the school swimming pool. When, shortly after, the pool is drained, the women are shocked to discover that no corpse is found, and soon enough strange and mysterious occurrences begin to happen, along with the ghostly reported sightings of the dead headmaster. Some sources say that Alfred Hitchcock missed out on purchasing the rights to Les Diabolique by just a few hours with Clouzot getting to it first. Alfred Hitchcock was said to also be a huge admirer of Clouzot’s film and even screened it for the writers of Vertigo, because the murder plot and the manipulation of an innocent victim were similar themes used in both stories.
Diabolique (1955) is on MY TOP 300 FILMS OF ALL TIME LIST
Smooth Talk (1985)
Suspended between carefree youth and the harsh realities of the adult world, a teenage girl experiences an unsettling sexual awakening in this haunting vision of innocence lost. Based on Joyce Carol Oates’s celebrated short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” the narrative debut from Joyce Chopra features a revelatory breakout performance by Laura Dern as fifteen-year-old Connie, an actress who seems perfectly suited to this role. She is a chameleon who looks 12 in one shot and 18 in the next, and is able to suggest the depth of her unhappiness by the way she tries to seem cheerful. She is the black sheep of her family, whose summertime idyll of beach trips, mall hangouts, and innocent flirtations is shattered by an encounter with a mysterious stranger (a creepy and menacing performance by Treat Williams). Smooth Talk (1985) is not a “teenage movie.” It is a study in deviant psychology, in the power that one person can have over another. It shows a young girl who is surrounded by sexuality, who is curious about it, and flirts dangerously in the wrong places. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, Smooth Talk captures the thrill and terror of adolescent sexual exploration, and it transforms the conventions of a coming-of-age story into something altogether more troubling, sinister and profound.
River's Edge (1986)
Teenage burnout Samson has murdered his girlfriend and left her naked body lying on the bank of a river just outside their small California town. He not only doesn't run away, he brings his friends to gawk at her dead body. Gradually, word of the crime spread through his circle of friends, and for a long time, nobody called the cops. I remember reading up about this case several years back. At the time this happened, a lot of articles were written to analyze this event, which was seen, the same way Larry Clark's Bully (2001) would be, as a moral breakdown in our youth's society. River’s Edge (1986), which is a horrifying fiction inspired by the case, offers no explanation and no message; it regards the crime in much the same way the kid’s friends stood around looking at the body. The difference is that the film feels a horror that the teenagers apparently did not.
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