Pete Baran

Watched Highway To Hell Eloping couple take a wrong turn and she gets kidnapped by a cop from hell, aka Hellcop.So bland hero borrows a souper up car and chases him through a PG-13 hell to rescue her.Dante's Inferno by way of the Beetlejuice cartoon, nothing scary. Nary a whiff of AC/DC on the score

Watching Mamba Tiny studio bets the farm on a two strip Technicolor melodrama about a venal wrong'un plantation owner in German East Africa at the dawn of WWI. Opening tracking shot is terrific, and the green dressses and red fezes pop, but the story is a bit simplistic when it gets to the moral

Watching Sense And Sensibility As this poster suggests this pivots to the grim and drab as partially befits the book, but Daisy Edgar-Jones plays it too straight whilst everyone else plays to the rafters. Not as good as the Ang Lee, and might not match this year's Scents & Sensibility either

Watched Destroy All Monsters You get your bang for your buck on Monsterland, but the lady alien attacking takes up a lot of plot real estate while Rodan shits on Moscow. The last twenty minutes delivers though, even if Pudgy Son Of Godzilla is a total glory hunter dancing on Ghidorah's corpse

Watching A Castle Of Our Own This competitive sandcastle Hallmark feels like nonsense but the BBC have run a sandcastle competition all summer. Quite nuanced, basically a mom reconnecting with her(flagged as neurodiverse)daughter, through zen neighbour love and sandcastles. Damning on strip malls

Happy #crispsandwichday from Andalusia - Haciendo jamon ruffled crisps with piccalilli in a buttered finger roll

Watching Che! Omar Sharif is Che Guevara! Jack Palance is Fidel Castro! Richard Fleischer is the director hot off of Doctor Doolittle and told to avoid the politics. The Politics are non-existent. The cigars are omnipresent The cinematic equivalent of a student Che! poster

Watching Home On The Range By all means be a frenetic cowboy film from the cow's point of view via The Golden Girls, but don't then slip me Alan Menken songs done by kd lang and Bonnie Raitt. Exhausting but the lead cow trio of Judi Dench, Roseanne Barr and Jennifer Tilly is one for the ages

Watching Oh, Sailor, Behave! It's incredible how quickly the musical boom in 1929 burst, and how the studio's scrabbled to pivot productions. Here a pre Hellzapoppin' Olsen & Johnsen try to boot some gags on to a silly Italian musical romance. But O&J aren't given any real leeway until the finale

Watching Crawlers Quantity over size spider movie,mostly terrible people get stuck in an apartment building when a spider infestation happens and only nice janitor Matilda Lutz should get out.That she eventually fights back in a gimp suit while killing bugs with her guitar is your quality guarantee

Watching Silent Movie Think of it as a silent Mel Brooks movie rather than Mel making a silent movie,so it's interesting how unbeholden to silent comedy it is(he did pie fights in Blazing Saddles).It's about 50% musical comedy though,lot of dance and foley gags.Deluise is more tolerable not talking

Watching The Incomer It's not a given that settings something on a small British island equals success, but this Scottish comic marvel works because its commitment to silliness doesn't hide the melancholy, sadness and black comedy. Central trio are excellent plus John Hannah as a seal. Not twee.

Watching Forever In My Heart It's a you can't go home again, oh, I went home again and love my ex-boyfriend best throw over my ludicrous terrible corporate fiancé. The twist is it's Irish and my gosh don't it know it.

Watching Blossoming Love American woman who only has an outside voice inherits an Adelaide flower farm which might as well be on the moon because no-one in the US has heard of Adelaide.She falls for the rugged flower farmer but has to sell up but doesn't sell up and stays despite visas. Terrible.

Watching Parisian Love It's romance among the ruthless Parisian Apache's, Clara Bow's crew rob a rich kid, but it all goes on but the toff saves his old classmate(Bow's boyf). So she sets up a bizarre scheme to get revenge by marrying the toff.All's fair... I guess. Mainly interesting for Bow's hair

Protestors Criticized For Looting Businesses Without Forming Private Equity Firm First https://theonion.com/protestors-criticized-for-looting-businesses-without-fo-1843735351/

Watched Jericho Ridge Used to be the'cop shop under siege' genre was simple, but to get Nikki Amukah-Bird's deputy trapped under fire we also need them to have been robbed the night before of all of its small army worth of weapons. Solid though, and NAB classes the joint up significantly

Watched Love Of Your Life There's that moment when you realise that a rather sweet romance is going to shift to weepy mode, and that's usually when they are married in the first half hour. Margaret Qualley anchors the film in a much more longitudinal study of the selfishness of grief and it's lovely

Watched Mr Majestyk Elmore Leonard writes and Dick Fleischer directs a taut Bronson film where Chuck is a Vietnam vet who just wants to bring his watermelon harvest in,and has to deal with a racist and then a mob hitman. The shaggy dog story work, and it sort of invents the myth of the pickup truck

Discovered today that "Exit, pursued by a bear" from a Winter's Tale is a call back to the original version of Shakespeare's very first play, which he had to rewrite to be about people and take out the bears. That folio is missing but I think we can all imagine Two Gentle Bens From Verona.

Watched The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickelby A little bit too breathless because it is getting the whole book done in 100 minutes. It hits the key points, but sails with Cedric Hardwicke's baddie on screen, possibly because Hardwicke is such a Dickensian name in itself

Watching The Santa Summit Rationing the Xmas movies for my ma, this was a pleasurable girls night out where their whiff of single desperation is erased when they realise they don't need boyfriends as they have each other.At which point they all get boyfriends and thus will never see each other again

Watching Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma A real pleasure,not least in tone, design and the perfect playing by the two leads (Anderson eats this up but Einbinder is equally compelling)throwing a grab bag of film theory at the screen and making its own batshit mythos.Biggest flex is it's a comedy

Watched The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow The Washington Irving semi-classic played largely for laughs with a young reliable Jeff Goldblum as Ichabod Crane wooing a delightful Meg Foster whilst the low budget effects are much more Scooby Doo than Tim Burton but it's hokey fun

Watching The Girl In The River Shockingly poor procedural where a FBI graduate breaks the law and causes at least five deaths chasing the wrong subject AND THEN it fakes out a true story epilogue despite if the actions of the film were true the lead would have been fired

Watched Ice Cream Man There's been a few'kids gone feral'films which have cleverly leveraged the kids on a murder spree into comedy or chills but Eli Roth fails on both counts beyond the first kill.Bland kid leads don't help but it's never that funny even before it grinds to a halt for explainations

Watched The Spirit Of Halloween Pretty sure this isn't the first Halloween riff on A Christmas Carol, but we are at the pop cultural scale of them arguing in film that ghosts are more a Halloween film (though You boy, what day is this doesn't hit as well). She's not nasty enough to start off with

Watched Duel For Gold Duel suggests there are 2 people after the gold, but this has an almost endless run of duels. The acrobat sisters, the thugs, the smart one - all in a Shaw Bros kung fu heist. So full of action that you occasionally wish not every conversation ended with a sword. Great stuff

Watching Hey There, It's Yogi Bear Who knew there was a theatrical 1964 animated Yogi Bear movie? Typically it uses the trick of sending the characters away from the sit. Some not very groovy songs pad it out, but Yogi's accidentally euphemistic alter ego of The Brown Phantom shall linger with me

Watching Shaun The Sheep: The Beast Of Mossy Bottom Great but not quite as sharp as the previous two (still makes it tremendous), but silent slapstick plus some terrific Halloween material makes it very entertaining. As ever the most throwaway gags are the ones that made me force out a laugh.

Better than expected from a satire from tin-earred Iñárritu,it still doesn't work and the money appears to have been thrown at the framing device which ends up being all you talk about rather than the sobering content. What works is largely Riz Ahmed - Cruise isn't bad but the film torpedoes him

Still anither mornin' and never a word or a sign o' him. Eh, me! The sun's gettin' through, so we'll be wearin' oor braws to the kirk the day.

Watching Resistant Evil I've seen all the Resident Evil films in the cinema and enjoyed all of them for some degree of enjoyment, but this is the first one that I would vaguely suggest was good.Played as a relentless horror comedy,Cregger has a charismatic klutz in the lead,like when you play badly

Watching Hope Reliably bonkers and textured Korean monster movie that becomes a few other things before it finishes and you all say the tagline on the poster. Is this how it ends?