Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.13

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. The Walk (2015) — 7/10
2. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) — 6/10
3. Das Lehrerzimmer (The Teacher’s Lounge) (2023) — 7/10
4. Arcane S01–S02 (2022–2024) — 7/10
5. Jurassic World Dominion (2022) — 7/10
6. Black Adam (2022) — 5/10
7. Time Bandits (1981) — 7/10
8. The Phantom of the Open (2021) — 7/10
9. Asterix & Obelix im Reich der Mitte (2023) — 4/10
10. Dinner with Skinner (2025) — 8/10

The Walk (2015) — 7/10

I wasn’t quite sure about this one at first because I’d seen and liked the official documentary in 2011 and wasn’t sure a Hollywood treatment would survive scrutiny.

Happily, Joseph Gordon-Levitt does honor to the starring role as Philippe Petit, the wire-walker who walked between the two main towers of the World Trade Center in New York City in 1974. Gordon-Levitt spent a lot of time training to wire-walk, even spending a lot of time with Petit himself. He not only learned wire-walking, he learned enough French to be able to deliver his lines in French in the film. So, well, that’s pretty cool.

Petit was thrown out of his home as a teenager by his parents because he wouldn’t straighten up and fly right. He started working at a circus, honing circus skills, at time under the tutelage of Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley). He leaves the circus and starts busking. There he meets fellow street-performer Annie (Charlotte Le Bon). They fall in love pretty quickly and she quickly signs on to his dream of walking between the Two Towers.

Photographer Jean-Louis (Clément Sibony) is the next one to sign on, with Jeff (César Domboy) following soon after. Jeff is clever and has good ideas but Jeff also has a nearly paralyzing fear of heights.

Petit walks between the two main towers of the Notre Dame in Paris. He is arrested but the public loves him.

The crew travels to New York City, where they start to scout the location, which is still under construction. They meet locals Barry Greenhouse (Steve Valentine), who has access to and knowledge of 1 World Trade Center, as well as Jean-Pierre. (James Badge Dale), and David (Benedict Samue), who’s a stoner but reliable as a lookout.

On the day, things are looking grim. They’re three hours late. Petit is still nursing a hurt foot because he’d stepped on a nail sticking out of a board a few days before. The crew sneaks in and gets to the top floor of both buildings. They fire an arrow carrying a light rope from one building to the other. They use the rope to carry the much-heavier cables across. The arrow almost doesn’t make it. Petit has to go way out on the ledge to retrieve it. He can’t see where it landed though. He takes off all of his clothes so that he can feel the filament wherever it is. It works.

Before 07:00, Philippe begins his walk.

He is over 100 stories up.

He walks across once. He joyously greets his co-conspirators on the other side.

He gets back on the ledge. He walks out again.

The police have arrived. They wait for him to arrive.

He places the bar on his neck, twists his arms, and spins around, walking back the other way.

He sits, he kneels, he even lies down.

He is at peace. He will enjoy this moment because it will never come again. It doesn’t matter anymore what comes after. He has done it.

He walks across a total of six times over 45 minutes.

Incredible. Superhuman.

He and his whole crew are arrested, of course. Literally everyone in the city cheers him. The construction crew applauds as he descends. Thousands are gathered in the streets below, having been told to look up by Annie and Barry.

He stays in New York, while Annie pursues her music dreams in Paris. The building manager gives Petit a free pass to visit the top of the tower. The expiration date was “forever”. It actually expired on September 11, 2001.

I gave it an extra star because, while some of the buildup is a little slow, Gordon-Levitt is absolutely enchanting, and the long wire-walking scene is deeply touching, conveying a feeling of having been there, of defiance, of freedom, of peace. It is unclear to what degree a feat of such unalloyed innocence would be even possible in this day and age.

He and his crew did it because they wanted to, they thought it would be a lovely, artistic gesture, a grandiloquent blow against a commercializing world, a way of establishing the primacy of individual accomplishments over the relentless industrial drive, which ironically led to the buildings being built in the first place. Some of this is subtext that I take into the film with me, but some of it is very much strongly hinted at.

Nowadays, there would be a million cameras, with a million reaction videos, all churning up the event without respecting it, consuming it heedlessly for content and then grazing onward, leaving the husk of the feat behind it.

We watched it in French and English, with Italian subtitles. I know that’s weird but it works for us, ok?

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) — 6/10

Charles (Hugh Grant) and his date Scarlett (Charlotte Coleman) rush to a wedding in a Fiat 500. Scarlett stands with Fiona (Kristin Scott Thomas). Charles is the best man, so he stands up front. He’s forgotten the rings. He seems like a jerk. He signals to Matthew (John Hannah) that he’s missing the rings. Matthew is there with his partner Gareth (Simon Callow). Carrie (Andie MacDowell) walks in late.

At the reception, Fiona meets Father Gerald (Rowan Atkinson). That comes to nothing. Carrie approaches Charles. He bails on staying at his friend Tom’s (James Fleet) castle to go to the Boatman pub, which is where Carrie is also staying. After a kerfuffle with a drunken boor that they both needed to avoid, he ends up in her room, where she confirms her reputation as a slut. They part ways.

Wedding #2. The Fiat has been booted. This time it’s Scarlett who’s the bridesmaid and Gerald who’s the priest. Scarlett loses a bow, rips her dress, and has her wig on backward. The usual suspects are here, as they were at the first wedding. Carrie’s there; she introduces Charles to her fiancé. Charles has a bad time of it at the wedding, with old girlfriends ganging up on him. He has to sneak past the enthusiastically fornicating newlyweds to get to and from his room. He ends up sleeping in the dumbwaiter, lulled to sleep by their grunts and howls.

Carrie invites him to her apartment and they smash once again. This time she stays with him in the morning. This time, he leaves her.

Wedding #3 is Carrie and some bloke named Hamish (Corin Redgrave). She’s blatantly manipulative. She meets Charles at a wedding-gift store (or whatever), where he is completely incapable of paying for any of the gifts. The lady running the place is super-shitty about the poor. Afterward, Carrie corrals him into shopping for wedding dresses with her, as if they were best friends instead of having hooked up twice. Now they’re chatting for the first time and she’s listing all of her bodies, churning well into the 30s. She’s very manipulative and he’s a sap. What a bizarre character. Charles pledges his undying love to her. She thinks it’s sweet. Like, of course she does. Her ego will absorb any and all adulation, not caring a whit for what damage it causes.

The wedding is in a Scottish castle. Charles pines for Carrie. Fiona confesses to Charles that she’s in love with him. Kind of out of the blue? Like, it wasn’t even intimated. Fiona had barely even been a character up until now. I was kind of surprised to see how small Scott-Thomas’s role was.

Gareth up and dies at the wedding, presumably from excess (too much drinking, eating, and dancing). His partner Matthew is the last to learn that he’s alone now; Charles must get him from the wedding crowd and tell him that his partner is gone. So, instead of any of them getting a partner for life, one of them loses their partner. Now all of members of the friends’ circle (Matthew, Tom, Fiona, Charles, Scarlett) are alone, together.

Matthew’s eulogy for Gareth is the highlight of the film. He reads Funeral Blues / Stop All The Clocks by W.H. Auden.

“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

“Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

“He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

“The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.”

And now marauding Carrie is back, preying on Charles. They part ways without fucking for once.

Wedding #4 is Charles and one of his old girlfriends Henrietta (Anna Chancellor). At the wedding, Scarlett meets Chester (Randall Paul) again and Tom meets Deirdre (Susanna Hamnett), an old family friend and it’s love at first sight.

You will absolutely never guess who shows up to the wedding, having left her husband after only a short time. I will give you three guesses and the first two don’t count. Christ, I can’t believe what a one-dimensional character Carrie is. Charles isn’t much better. The only thing buoying the rating at this point is Charles’s group of friends.

The ending is predictable.

Das Lehrerzimmer (The Teacher’s Lounge) (2023) — 6/10

Schoolteacher Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) is trying her best to be educational and non-offensive. She is a bit uptight—I don’t think she smiles once in this entire movie—and more than a bit naive. She transfers to a new school, which has recently been plagued by a series of thefts. The students are pressured to narc on each other, which Carla absolutely hates. This puts her in hot water with the teachers, who expect a solid front of authoritarianism versus the students.

The whole shady process ends up fingering Ali, whose parents are Turkish. Now, there’s a racial-profiling shitstorm, with the mousy Carla at its center. Carla, instead of being more careful, decides to investigate the ongoing crimes at the school by herself. She sees a teacher stealing money out of a common piggy bank in the teacher’s lounge, so she sets up her laptop camera to keep running while she goes to the bathroom (or whatever). When she returns, money had been taken from the her wallet and she’d captured the sleeve of a relatively unique sweater on camera.

Carla figures out that’s it’s a woman in the administration named Kuhn. She confronts her, trying to get her to admit it while keeping everything on the down-low. She just wants her money back and just wants the lady to stop stealing money and making everyone at the school crazy. She likes the lady’s son Oskar, too. The lady chooses to take the low road and flips out. Carla escalates. The school supervisor puts Kuhn on leave but also opens an investigation on Carla for having filmed people without their permission.

This is the last time things will be normal for Carla. The parents are pissed about their children all having been accused of something that an adult did. They call a meeting. The school thinks it’s a great idea to have Carla there all by herself. Carla’s Polish background—c’mon, her parents were Polish; she’s 100% German—becomes deeply relevant. Kuhn shows up and somehow gets support from the parents, even though she’s the one who’d been stealing the money.

Oskar, meanwhile, starts rallying the students against Carla. This deeply wounds her because she thought that they were buddies. Blood comes first, Carla. Oskar attacks a student who didn’t fall in line with his edicts. He’s not done. He also steals Carla’s laptop in an attempt to dispose of the evidence against his mother—oh, my sweet summer child, have you never heard of backups? Cloud backups? Oh, never mind. I’m sure that, Carla being a teacher, that’s probably the only copy that exists—and, when she gives chase, he blasts her across the face with it. Like, no holding back, just brains her with a large metal object. She lurches after him, blood streaming. He cheerfully chucks her laptop in the river.

Carla covers for him! He was just protecting his mom. You see what I mean about naive? It gets better.

Some of the other students run a newspaper. Carla agrees to an interview, but only if she can review the article before it’s published. Guess what? The interview is disrespectful, hostile, and manipulative. And she lets it all happen. Guess also what? They publish the article in the most slanted way possible without consulting her. Because fuck you Carla that’s why.

The other teachers naturally jump on the bandwagon against Carla because fuck that fucking mousy Pollack.

Oskar returns to school despite having been suspended. What does Carla do? She keeps trying to help the boy, clearing out the whole classroom and staying there with him by herself.

The obvious next move would be for Oskar to accuse her of sexually molesting him, for the school to have mysteriously turned off the cameras, and for Carla to end her days tied to a stake, with teachers, students, and their parents all gleefully touching their torches the heap of kerosene-soaked stakes at her feet. Now that would have been an appropriate ending!

Instead, Oskar finally relents to her calm, caring ministrations and finishes the Rubik’s Cube she’d given him when they’d met and she’d realized how clever he was before being carted off by the police. So, a happy end, I guess.

I thought the whole thing was unrealistically manipulative. I don’t know that many toxic people so maybe my whole context is broken. I can’t imagine working somewhere where literally everyone hates you every day and actively works to undermine you with every word and action.

We watched it in German.

Arcane S01–s02 (2022–2024) — 7/10

This is an exceedingly well-drawn animated series. The art-directions, vision, and animation are all just off the charts. The story is decent but has a bit too much kayfabe-style drama, with heels that nearly always serendipitously find a way to not only survive but to thrive, usually because someone can’t deal with them as they so obviously should. I am very obviously looking at Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) here, who fails to take out her sister a thousand times.

Generally, the characters are very good and well-fleshed-out. Some are very one-dimensional (looking at you, Ambessa), whereas others are just stuck in cycles or they plateau in their development (Jayce, Jinx, Vi). The show concentrates a bit too much on those, which is boring. Ambessa, in particular, has ridiculous plot armor.

Jayce develops for a while but then regresses to obstinate refusal of Viktor’s vision. Like, he doesn’t even acknowledge what a shitshow the world is otherwise.

As for Viktor, he’s pretty cool. It’s a bit too on-the-nose to have the guy with the Russian name and the Russian accent be the one who seeks union of all souls, with no more room for individual bullshit that leads to so much strife and suffering.

“It is the answer you and I pursued all our lives.

“An end to cruelty, injustice.

“All of us our own authors to an unbroken saga of progress. To the benefit of all.

“Choice is false. It is how we clothe and forgive the baser instincts that spur us to division.

“Death, war, prejudice. Energy spent only to consume itself.

“But we can be of one mind.

“United.”

This is, of course, not what ends up happening. But it almost does! Instead, things get wildly magical—arcane—and esoteric. Battles proceed on the astral as well as the mortal plane. There are nigh-unstoppable monsters. There are shock troops. Everyone doesn’t live happily ever after but there is finally a truce between the city-dwellers and those below. For now.

Jurassic World Dominion (2022) — 7/10

There are dinosaurs everywhere. They’re in the snow somehow. Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) are in a relationship and they also have Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), who is a clone of someone in the Lockwood family and whom everyone wants to capture, I guess. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) is also in the mix, tracking the prehistoric insects that are devastating anyone’s field who doesn’t use Biosyn seeds (the company that resurrected the dinosaurs in the first place).[2] Alan Grant (Sam Neill) is still doing paleontology in the field.

Owen meets back up with Blue (a velociraptor) and sees that she has had a baby. Poachers capture the baby, knocking Blue into a ravine. The poachers also pick up Maisie, so now Owen and Blue have a shared mission: get their kids back.

Meanwhile Ellie and Alan meet with Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), who’s the president of Biosyn, I guess? And he’s odd. They are in a super-compound for dinosaur research. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) is giving a speech at a symposium. He and Ellie discuss end-of-the-world stuff. Dodgson and Henry Wu (BD Wong) are discussing shifty stuff about Maisie and the young raptor. Claire and Owen are at the poacher’s market, where Claire meets Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise), who she tries to convince to help them. Meanwhile, Owen is with Barry Sembène (Omar Sy), who I can’t remember how he even got there but I like Omar Sy, so I didn’t ask too many questions.

The poachers meet up with Soyona Santos (Dichen Lachman), whose some sort of big connection, which I can only intuit because she’s got this incredibly exotic and unique-looking face (she’s Tibetan/Australian) and she is dressed all in white in a beautiful, ancient-looking but also very obviously sandy and dusty city. The feds (or whatever) drop a trap on the poachers, causing a lot of dinosaurs to get loose. Some escape and some are deliberately loosed by Santos.

Claire catches Santos, learning where Maisie is but Santos sics a velociraptor on her. She escapes of course. They both escape, of course. Kayla decides to help Claire. Owen and Barry capture another velociraptor, capturing Santos at the same time. She has pretty thick plot armor, though, so she manages to paint Owen with a signal that sics two velociraptors on him. I dunno, I guess it’s a thing. It adds order to the chaos. It lets us know why the dinos chase Owen and Claire instead of just turning on Santos. Or Barry.

The action scenes are pretty well-shot—not muddied at all. They are reasonably coherent, which sets them apart from a lot of these movies. The dinos are kind of indestructible but I don’t really mind that. I guess you’re not allowed to show them getting hurt in a kid’s movie? How is it OK to teach kids that falling from great heights does no damage?

Ellie and Allen get a sample of the giant-locust DNA while Maisie releases “Beta” (Blue’s autogenetic child) into the lab, giving Dodgson and Henry a serious problem. Maisie meets up with Ellie and Allen. Owen. Claire, and Kayla are airborne but they are attacked by a pterodactyl, which takes out both engines. Owen tells Claire she has to take the one parachute. Owen and Kayla are going down with the plane. They biff into a giant snowbank and no-one even has a stiff neck. Like, they just bounce out of there, moving on to extremely athletic derring-do as if experiencing a plane crash were not just survivable but no worse than banging your funny bone.

Ellie, Allen, and Maisie magically meet up with Ramsay Cole (Mamoudou Athie), who was introduced as Dodgson’s right-hand man but who actually turns out to be Malcolm’s man on the inside, who’d been feeding them all information and now he’s there just in the nick of time to get them to an escape pod that will go straight to the airfield, where they will be whisked away from the clutches of Biosyn and it is just, like, super-lucky that there are no cameras anywhere in the facility, otherwise someone might have seen them and stopped them, but there aren’t, so they didn’t.

Claire drops into a jungle where she has to evade a large, feathered velociraptor-like dino that doesn’t seem to have such strong eyesight or hearing. She gets away by hiding underwater. Owen and Kayla pop out of the plane’s wreckage, completely unscathed—like, their hair isn’t even messed up. They shuffle-walk across the ice into which they’d crashed, which seems to be atop a fortress or base of some sort. A smaller version of the feathered dino greets them and herds them back across the thin ice. Owen falls in but Kayla pulls him out of the icy water. He is totally fine. Not even cold. A few seconds later, his boots aren’t even wet. Another few seconds and his shirt is dry, to say nothing of not shivering. He and Kayla escape down an elevator. They are now inexplicably out in the jungle. No transition.

Dodgson finally manages to stop Ellie, Allen, and Maisie’s shuttle, so they’re now on foot in a dinosaur-infested cave. Malcolm and Ramsay are basically fired, at least Malcolm is, with Ramsay about to be fired as soon as he’s caught being grievously insubordinate. Malcolm meets up with Ellie, Allen, and Maisie, rescuing them from the cave complex while Owen and Kayla rescue Claire from yet another dinosaur. Dodgson orders the destruction of the locusts. Destruction by fire. They escape through a ceiling hatch, all on fire, then dropping like little meteorites. Malcolm drives off the road a little bit, they teeter, and then roll several times, coming to rest exactly where Owen, Claire, and Kayla are. No-one is hurt. Like, at all.

They all get to tackle a giganotosaurus together, in exactly the same way everyone’s dealt with these things since the first movie: by hiding behind a car. They all make it into the aerie, where the giganotosaurus is right at eye level. They fight it some more, finally getting it to go away. No-one is injured in any way.

The forest burns.

Ellie and Claire go off to shut down some power thingamajig so that the air-defense system has enough power … I don’t know, I think that’s what’s going on. It does give Malcom the opportunity to be very funny running the op. Owen, Grant, and Maisie capture Beta. Shutting off the power traps Dodgson in an access tunnel. He is, of course, not alone. This is exactly the same ending for the #1 billionaire baddie as in the very first film, over thirty years. Let’s call it an homage rather than laziness.

Henry pops up out of nowhere, promising to be able to analyze Maisie to be able to figure out how to kill the locusts. OR WHATEVER I DON’T KNOW I FEEL LIKE THEY’RE JUST MAKING SHIT UP NOW.

The group is now even larger (eight of ‘em) with Kayla in a small plane. There is going to be a big dinosaur fight over the spoils. They all get away, of course. There’s a bit of tension, then a single rescue flare solves the whole problem. All nine are in this small chopper and it’s lifting off into the rain.

Everyone is fine and triumphant. Nearly tension-free. The end. I gave it an extra point because, though the action scenes are endless and consequence-free, they are, at least, coherent.

Black Adam (2022) — 5/10

It is 2600 years ago. People are digging in a giant ditch in the desert, enslaved by an evil king. A boy steals a crystal and is transformed into a champion (Dwayne Johson). The champion fights the king and destroys the city.

In the modern day, the city is back but it’s kind of a war zone, overseen by mercenaries. Adrianna Tomaz (Sarah Shahi) is on the run, helped by a few friends, who smuggle her out of the city to somewhere in the desert. She’s kind of a Lara Croft and is seeking the crown that the king once had. She finds it but then a bunch of mercenaries find her. As they are about to kill her, she somehow knows exactly how to resurrect the champion, who appears in an explosion of light.

He chokes out and flays one guy to the bone. The other with fire. He is utterly immune to bullets. He moves like lightning. It’s kind of comical-looking, though. He saves Adrianna’s life when a rock is about to collapse on her. She and her brother Karim (Mohammed Amer) escape. This feels kind of like Apocalypse in that X-Men movie: an unstoppable, ancient quasi-Pharaoh brought back to life. He can electrocute people. But there is the Superman element: he is apparently allergic to Eternium. So when he catches a rocket laden with it, it does damage. He crashes to the Earth.

Oh no. There is a team of heroes arrayed against him. Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), a skinny, black, quirky genius—like the super-annoying girl from Black Panther—who can turn herself into a tornado. I am kind of stunned that she seems to be heterosexual. It gets worse from there. There’s Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan). There’s Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo), who inherited his role from Uncle Al (Henry Winkler). There is Hawkman (Aldis Hodge). They are—I shit you not—the Justice Society. OK. Sure.

They are, of course, rich beyond all reason, and have a giant spaceship. It’s underground, under a giant country manor. You know, like the X-Men.

Adrianna’s son Amon (Bodhi Sabongui) is super-excited, you know, like Shazam. He was also awakened by the word “Shazam” and has the lightning bolt on his costume, so that tracks.

Black Adam’s out and about now. He kills a bunch of people that attack him. Hawkman puts a lot of effort into saving two mercs, who Black Adam immediately kills. Now the Justice Society takes on Black Adam but, like, it’s weird because Dr. Fate is weird. And we have no idea who he is or what he can do. Apparently, he can make mirages? It’s unclear why Hawkman can go toe-to-toe with Black Adam, even after being electrocuted a lot.

OK, now Cyclone pretty much destroys a whole chunk of the city, without checking for innocents or civilians. Black Adam unleashes holy hell on them but Atom Smasher smashes him into the ground. It doesn’t stick. The people of the city love Black Adam. No-one likes the Justice Society, which has destroyed a ton of the city. Pierce Brosnan is just f™&king embarrassing himself.

Adrianna says,

“Why do you want Teth-Adam to surrender? He’s the Champion of Khandaq. Who are you? The Justice Society? We have been living under military occupation for 27 years, and have never seen you before. You didn’t come when Intergang invaded our country, when they stole our resources and killed my husband. But now, we finally have our own hero and you decide to fly down here and save us? Thank you, but… we’re covered.”

They keep fighting and fighting and fighting.

OMG Hawkman and BLack Adam are fighting again. It’s tedious. It’s pretty well-choreographed but it’s kind of tedious. There’s all sorts of Zack Snyder-style slo-mos (but it was directed by Jaume Collet-Serra).

Oh, wait. Now, they’re all working together agains the incredibly powerfully armed mercenary army. They’re there to rescue Amon.

OK. So they did that. Now, there’s a ton of exposition and backstory that ends in Black Adam saying Shazam and losing all of his power and Hawkman finally getting what he wanted because he’s so awesome that we should all be super-happy that he’s happy. They store Black Adam away in a coffin underwater. Like, it’s pretty f™&king harsh, man. He’s back in prison.

It’s still going though. There’s at least 45 minutes left. What is happening? Is this two movies in one?

It was less terrible than I expected it to be but still not great. I wrote that line before the second movie started, after Black Adam had been put into a horrible living death of a prison.

A new CGI orgy has begun with a demon-king that looks like Hellboy. I’m not even at-all interested in how he figures into the story. He’s going to be all-powerful…until he suddenly isn’t. It won’t be at-all surprising when they have to wake up Black Adam in order to defeat the demon-king. Also, since this is obviously a PG movie, no-one ever gets a scratch. No blood. No-one suffers any debilitation at all, no matter how egregious the damage.

But first, Dr. Fate is going to sacrifice himself to save Hawkman. Dr. Fate kind of reminds me of Dr. Strange, though. Dr. Fate releases Black Adam remotely. He is still in his miniature version, until he says Shazam, I guess.

Oh God please make it stop.

I watched it in German.

Time Bandits (1981) — 7/10

Terry Gilliam generally puts together movies that no-one else would ever have made. They are usually visually sumptuous—as this one is—and they are usually peopled with ironically presented dialogues and quirky, zany characters. I last watched and reviewed this in 2016. The review and rating stand.

The Phantom of the Open (2021) — 7/10

Maurice Flitcroft (Mark Rylance) is a crane operator in 1970s Britain. He is married to devoted, loyal, and loving wife Jean (Sally Hawkins). They have three sons: rising business star Michael (Jake Davies), who works at the same place Maurice does, but in management, and the twins Gene (Christian Lees) and James (Jonah Lees), who are dead-set on earning their living as disco dancers. That is not a typo.

Faced with a potential and unexpected early retirement, Maurice searches around for something to do with himself. He decides to take up golf. But he doesn’t want to just play. He wants to earn money. So, he decides to enter the British Open, lying his way in, even after his local club doesn’t support him. They are portrayed as elitist—they are, of course!—but also he doesn’t know how to play golf. Like, not even a little bit.

Well, how’s he gonna learn if he can’t get on a course? Well, that costs money, money that he doesn’t have. Hey Maurice, your job was just eliminated by mergers. You live in a capitalist dystopia, not fully automated luxury communism. It ain’t right, of course, but don’t pretend to be surprised.

Maurice applies to the British Open saying that he is a professional golfer. Back in the 70s, when you lied on an application form, no-one doubted it, so he’s in. Maurice is allowed to play, of course. He puts up a 121 on the first day, which is amazingly high. That’s not good, of course. You’re going for a low score in golf.

His subterfuge is easily detected—OMG he’s not really a professional—but he gets kind of famous for his affable attitude and the absolute cheek of what he’d done.

Despite the public’s adoration, the British Open organization bans him and has it arranged that he will never be allowed to golf at any club in the country. Undeterred, he continues to practice and even gets pretty decent at golf. Over several years, he keeps getting into tournaments—even the British Open! Again and again!—but under assumed identities, and playing in disguise. My God, were the 1970s the last time it was possible to do anything nationally funny and harmless like this?

Maurice and Jean’s fortunes decline, though, as he ends up losing his job due to his antics. Jean sticks by him, though, without complaint. It’s glorious how dedicated they are to each other. His disco-dancing sons become successful, traveling the world, but only as long as disco itself is successful, which isn’t more than a decade. They are all pretty broke at this point, on the verge of being poor.

Michael shows up to admonish them for being so impractical. But lady luck ain’t nothin’ if not mercurial. Maurice soon gets a letter informing him that’s he’s famous in the U.S. There are tournaments named after him, where amateurs seek to get the highest score possible. They fly Maurice and his whole family to the largest annual Flitcroft Cup. Oh, also Michael reconciles with the family once he sees that other people, whom he’s marked as targets of his obsequiousness, also like his Dad now. A toady to the end. The disco-dancing twins are much better people.

This was based on a true story.

Asterix & Obelix im Reich der Mitte (2023) — 4/10

This movie is not great. It’s not even good. Somehow it does have Marion Cotillard as Cleopatra and Vincent Cassel as Caesar, which is kind of bizarre. Like, what the heck are they doing in this movie? I know that this movie was made in France but were they required to work on it by the union or something? Zlatan Ibrahimovic plays a Roman guard named Antivirus. He has a bigger role than Cotillard.

I figured I’d check out one of these Asterix movies while it was on, but it was not good. It’s trash. It’s also more than a little racist. “Reich der Mitte” means “Middle Kingdom”, which means “China”, so you can imagine the kind of broad humor that the film pretty heavily leans on. There are a thousand better movies to watch.

I watched it with half an eye, in German.

Dinner with Skinner (2025) — 8/10

The description at IMDb isn’t wrong but it doesn’t do the film justice.

“An expanded, live-action version of the beloved Simpsons sketch known online as “Steamed Hams.””

It is not just this, though that’s the skeleton on which the film’s story hangs. The sinew. muscle, nerves, and blood that flesh the story out—as it were—are the nearly beat-for-beat reproduction of 45 minutes of My Dinner with André, overlaying that film’s concept with the almost unique strangeness of that one episode of the Simpsons.

“And then it all ended as quickly as it began. He ushered me out of the house and I was on my way.

“It was a nice afternoon, so I treated myself to a long walk home. Along the way, I thought about my old stomping grounds, the beautiful Mohawk Valley.

“All those interconnected memories, growing up, getting in trouble, falling in love, and losing it.

“They all led me here to this place.”

You and me both, brother. You and me both.

Steamed Hams but it's a Critically Acclaimed Feature Film by Tyrone Deise (YouTube)