The Month in Theaters March 2022

Naoya Fujii. Movie Theater at Shibuya.

Had a very busy early April, so this is much later than it should be. Sorry about that. Six movies in theaters in March. Nine movies otherwise, although one of those was rewatching Copshop, still awesome.

The Batman

I thought this was gonna be movie of the month from the beginning, but then a certain movie down below topped it. This is still excellent. A to A+. Film Twitter was united around this until the conservative “movie critics” decided that it sucked for a litany of stupid reasons. A crowd-pleasing yet very long movie. I could have sat there for another hour (if I could go to the bathroom first,) so the length did not bother me. The events hint to a sequel involving the villain Hush. I just badly want Clayface in live-action. Clayface and Hush could easily work together. Paul Dano got his big break as he impressed me greatly unlike any of his other performances. Robert Pattinson was a really good Bruce Wayne and Batman. They should have kept the deleted scene where Batman visits The Joker in Arkham Asylum in the movie.

Dog

The first major sleeper hit of the year. A movie I enjoyed but felt dragged getting to the inevitable ending. B to B+. It’ll make you cry, laugh, and buy a Chris Stapleton song on iTunes. Channing Tatum directed it as well. This movie is still playing in my neck of the woods even though it came out in February and I’m writing this on April 17^th. Very good ROI. Good for Channing Tatum’s future in the director’s chair.

X

Movie of the month without a doubt. Third best movie of the year so far, as long as Everything Everywhere All at Once is included. Horror has had a good run of it this year. It stands to reason the best movie of any year for me will likely be rated R, but the fact that the top five movies this year so far have only one PG-13 movie in it is cool. You know, the movie that would have been movie of the month had it not been for this. A24, a great studio, made this and Everything Everywhere All at Once. Go into the movie largely blind, but remember: There’s something after the credits. A+.

The Lost City

This movie is saved by Channing Tatum. Outside of him and Brad Pitt, nearly everyone is either poorly written, badly cast, and/or badly acted. Sandra Bullock has zero chemistry with Channing Tatum. Harry Potter plays the obvious villain and does very little. I give this a C- because Channing Tatum and Brad Pitt are genuinely amazing in this. Everybody else sucked for the most part.

Infinite Storm

This movie is too long. The movie drags on for another half an hour after it should have ended to get to a resolution that is largely pointless. It is well acted, but badly paced to a painful degree. It is based on a true story, so maybe what happened is what actually happened, but the pacing is awful. Creative license is great. Use it. C+ to B-.

Flee

I was gonna see Morbius on the last day of April, but dreaded the suckatude. My local indie theater advertised a free screening for this documentary with a free drink and popcorn. I was sold. This documentary, which is completely animated to make the subject more comfortable, is about a gay male refugee from Afghanistan who fled his home country when he was young in the late 1980s. His journey to safety is harrowing and makes me hate Russia even more than I already did. This film is powerful and worth the watch. A.

EVERYTHING ELSE

Television has been solid the last few months. Young Justice is still not as good as even the third season, but more on that in a future article. Reacher is awesome (still need to finish it,) as is The Dropout (finished that) and The Thing About Pam (still need to finish.) We’re getting The Boys season three soon-ish with Dean from Supernatural as a presumably evil Captain America parody. Gonna be dope. The animated spin-off anthology show for The Boys is great.

One of my favorite John Hughes movies is Sixteen Candles. It gave the world Long Duk Dong, played by Gedde Watanabe, who would go on to play the karate teacher and host of Wheel of Fish in the “Weird Al” Yankovic movie UHF. A+. A movie for the boys centered on a girl.

A movie my fiancé wanted to watch because it was removed from Disney+ due to the war in Ukraine. Because Disney only virtue signals. Anastasia is an excellent animated movie. A-. The addition of zombie sorcerer Rasputin was a weird one, but Christopher Lloyd was good as him.

Turning Red is not a great movie, but it is perfectly serviceable. A B. It is not the greatest thing ever nor is it godawful. The idiots on Twitter who unflinchingly defended it and the ones who unflinchingly tore it down were both stupid. Base an entire movie off a thirty second clip on Twitter and not see the actual movie. Yeah, totally a smart thing to do.

A movie I watched because of The Batman. Continuing the tradition of a twist villain change from the comic it is based on, Batman: Hush is fine. Another B. The villain change is stupid and likely only done because having to build up an entirely new character’s hatred for Batman and Bruce Wayne would have taken too long, I guess. These DC Comics animated adaptation writers are really bad at their jobs.

The French Dispatch might have been movie of the month if not for X. A+. Go in blind. It’s a Wes Anderson anthology movie. If something about that turns you off, the movie might not be for you. But it is really good.

This movie was so boring by the third act. The Siege had a great movie before the villain reveal but could not stick the landing. The reveal as to who the terrorist is in this NYC pre-9/11 thriller is punch-me-in-the-face dumb. The acting is excellent until that ham-fisted reveal. Denzel Washington and Tony Shalhoub especially crush it. Bruce Willis is there largely so the writer can blame the rise of Islamo-fascist terrorism on the US government. Absolutely wasted. This was approaching an A- before the third act, but the political messaging that would be awful the second 9/11 happened drops this piece to C status. I will never watch it again.

My fiancé had never seen the original Friday the 13^th. Early but post-Animal House Kevin Bacon! Great villain reveal as knowing it (how could you not) before seeing the film does not ruin the picture like the ending of Citizen Kane is ruined knowing what Rosebud is prior. A classic of the slasher genre and the first true slasher movie. This is when gore took off in horror movies and we’ve never looked back. A+.

Sliver just sucked. It wasn’t awful, but the fact that the murderer was between two characters late into production proves the movie was built around an unsatisfying reveal. A thriller whose twist is not written first is not a good movie. This is a C- just barely. The performances until the third act are genuinely very good.

And that’s yer lot. April has had some great movies so far. Already seen eight movies in theaters with at least five more to go before the end of the month. March and September are the two worst movie months of the year due to raw number of releases. March for being the last full month before the summer movie season and September for being the first full month after the summer movie season. The other ten months of the year are usually jam-packed with major releases, but not those two.