Christy (2025)

★★★★
I looked up Christy Martin's fight record after I finished watching the biopic Christy and was amazed by her win-loss totals. I then watched her 1996 match against Irish boxer Deirdre Gogarty, which took place on the undercard for the Mike Tyson and Frank Bruno main event. It was an astonishing display of athleticism and a technical masterpiece. Writers Mirrah Foulkes and David Michôd and director Michôd bring Christy Martin's turbulent life to the big screen to chronicle her beginnings in amateur boxing competitions to the professional stage in Las Vegas and beyond. It was a life of triumph and shocking lows that almost came to a tragic end. It's a remarkable story on its own, but to see Sydney Sweeney embody the role so effectively as Christy is to see an actress take a big leap forward to challenge herself and convey all the pain and tragedy of that story into a gripping narrative.

Scream 3 (2000)

★★
The below review was written in 2000. After my rewatch, I looked at this review and decided to repost it and not write an update, since it largely explains my current feelings about the movie.

The first two Scream movies were all about being self-aware. They knew the conventions of horror movies and poked fun at them too. What they didn't do was fall victim to them. Scream 3, on the other hand, is a by-the-numbers slasher flick that offers a few chuckles but otherwise doesn't have anything new to say. Even with the same director and the main actors of the series returning, Scream 3 falls short of expectations. Maybe that's because Kevin Williamson didn't write this installment. Ehren Kruger (any relation to Freddy?) has the screenwriting credit. Williamson does have a producer credit, though I have to wonder how much he was involved with the production, because this entry isn't as fresh as the first two.

Scream 2 (1997)

★★★
Scream 2 continues the premise of the original film and adds to it by featuring characters who not only know they're in a horror movie but also know that they are in a sequel to a horror movie. As Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy), the resident horror movie buff, helpfully explains to former deputy Dewey Riley (David Arquette), there are rules to follow regarding the body count, level of violence and suspects. Kevin Williamson returns as the screenwriter, and he has no shortage of ideas to explore in this sequel, which is amazing considering that he was a busy man during this time. In addition to this, he wrote 1997's I Know What You Did Last Summer and created Dawson's Creek, which premiered in early 1998. This time around, he toys with the conventions of slasher movie sequels and our expectations for them. The result is a movie that doesn't match its predecessor's originality but does feature a worthy mystery and engaging cast.

Scream (1996)

★★★½
Scream was the perfect storm that made landfall at the right time when it was needed the most. By 1996, the big three horror franchises of the '80s were finished. Freddy was dead, Jason went to Hell and Michael had one last shot at relevance with 1995's dreadful Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers before his series ran out of gas. There were still notable horror movies in the first half of the '90s (Candyman, Body Snatchers), but the outlook for the slasher movie genre looked bleak. It was just as well. Most were just obvious cash grabs with little to offer beyond what had already been done better by John Carpenter and Wes Craven. It would be Craven himself who saw an opportunity to reflect on the genre and toy with its conventions in his 1994 feature Wes Craven's New Nightmare, but its low box office haul showed that something was missing to make this kind of movie appealing again.

Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation (2015)

★★★½
If Ghost Protocol writers André Nemec and Josh Appelbaum and director Brad Bird laid the groundwork for increasingly stacking the deck against mission success to test Ethan Hunt's resolve and make the plot compelling, then Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation director Christopher McQuarrie was the perfect man to bring in to follow that blueprint and develop challenging adversaries who will push Hunt to great lengths to finish the job. Whereas James Bond can quip a one-liner to decompress after a near death experience, Ethan Hunt remains alert. His missions are too multilayered to allow him any respite. This isn't surprising, as McQuarrie wrote The Usual Suspects, a dense and complex crime thriller the ending of which slowly unfolded in a way to force us to rethink everything. Previous Mission directors didn't write the scripts. McQuarrie not only wrote this one, but he will also write and direct the rest of the series. A film universe that needs an I.M.F. perfectly plays to McQuarrie's strengths as a writer.