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Blue Velvet 1986
One of the cool things about David Lynch is that his early works maintain their power. Later works contain deeper levels of craft and complexity while plumbing the same psychosexual depths, but earlier movies like Blue Velvet still feel like a complete thesis. The spiritual successor to this, Twin Peaks, goes farther and looks closer, but never feels like it's coming from a place of filling in the gaps for an earlier exploration. Lumberton is a proto-Twin Peaks town in…
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The Duke 2020
Saved almost entirely by Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren, both of whom have enough native watchability to elevate this entry in the Magical Doofus genre from "kill it with fire" to "well, I'm okay with the fact that I watched that."
This one's about Kempton Bunton, a real-life figure in the 1960s who attained some notoriety for being tried in the Old Bailey for stealing and then ransoming Goya's painting Portrait of the Duke of Wellington as part of a…
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The Poughkeepsie Tapes 2007
Not sure how this one acquired the reputation it has. This is the kind of heartbreak you set yourself up for when you have an ill-advised love for found footage films.
It's difficult to pinpoint the main problem with The Poughkeepsie Tapes. The first thing that comes to mind is the awful acting by the guy playing the killer (Ben Messmer). I'm not sure if anyone could have done much with the seventh-grader's vision of a serial killer presented by…