The Menu (2022)

★★★
Comparing the characters in The Menu to actual people and describing how their actions and fates relate to celebrity culture as of late should have been easy, but just when I had a good idea of where this movie was going, it pushed back against my assumptions. Either the movie is not at all what I think it is, or its purpose wasn't fully realized. The elitists and the disaffected behave as anticipated, until they do something to send theories back to be reevaluated. It's like the block of stone hiding a great sculpture inside of it, and our only task is to chisel away the excess bits. The Menu is like the block, hiding something great within. Nevertheless, even though the sculpture is a work in progress, it is a magnificent structure on its own. At its most basic, the movie is a denouncement of snobby celebrities and the pedestals they occupy.

The Descent (2006)

★★★½
Neil Marshall's The Descent understands the inherent fear-inducing components of cave exploration—the tight spaces, the darkness, the twisting tunnels—and combines them with the creature feature to come away with this intense and raw tale of terror. This movie establishes just enough of a backstory to get its characters into an inescapable situation, and from there it turns the monsters loose and becomes a harrowing spectacle of intense frights and melancholy outcomes. Marshall, fresh off the success of Dog Soldiers, establishes himself as a director who can take the barest of plots and apply layer upon layer of suspense. His project is an exercise in minimalism. The setting offers few opportunities for the characters to improvise any kind of plan, yet Marshall works within the confines of this scenario to heighten the tension.

Annie (1982)

★★★
Highlighted by a cheerful performance by Aileen Quinn in the starring role, Annie comes off as one of the more endearing of the post-Hollywood Golden Age musicals. Its status has taken a back seat to some better-known musicals from that time period in the late '70s and '80s. Grease has seen one wide theatrical rerelease, and Little Shop of Horrors was given due consideration when it came out on D.V.D. (including its rarely-seen alternate ending on a very limited edition D.V.D.), but Annie has since slipped under the radar screen despite its catchy songs.

Black Adam (2022)

★★
Black Adam, for all its bluster and spectacle, is just too ordinary. Its setup and execution offer few surprises, and Dwayne Johnson is becoming less interesting as the years go by. Once again we get the origin story, the introduction of the hero, the introduction of the supporting characters and the final battle between everyone involved. This can work, and it has worked many times, because the wide variety of comic book superheroes and their powers offers filmmakers enough material to give each entry a different look. Of course, the nature of the D.C. Extended Universe (D.C.E.U.) requires that many movies are made within close proximity to each other to capitalize on the opportunities for cross pollination while squeezing as many appearances as possible out of the actors before they age out of their roles, but this business model can give rise to a tendency to fall into redundancy. If Black Adam had been played by a different actor, then there might have been hope for a better movie, but Black Adam was played by Dwayne Johnson, who looks like he's just passing through from San Andreas to high-five everyone in the audience on his way to the next Jumanji sequel.