What Was The Last Movie/Anime You Watched?

[Cartagia]

You Can See Everything - This could have ended at the 2 hour mark and it'd still be 5-star best of the year affair, but the last act really shows you why Nathan Fielder was the only person who could have been the voice of the audience.

I will say, though, that is also I don't think it is as nearly transformative of the genre as some are saying. It's just Nathan being Nathan. If you've seen Nathan for You or The Rehearsal it isn't doing anything he hasn't already done there. It's just that this time he is up against personalities that mirror his character and not your average Joe on the street.

Magic (1978) - Anthony Hopkins is truly one of the best to ever do it. Even as a ventriloquist dummy.

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors - Has its ups and downs like any horror anthology, but there's more good than bad here. I feel like it's going for the whole delicious irony thing, but doesn't have quite enough bite to really make it work, except for the last two segments.

Hokum - What I like the most about this is that you could remove the supernatural elements entirely and still have a very solid little murder mystery. The ghost stuff is just icing.

The Devil Bat - Sometimes when you watch a film from this era it is easy to write it off under "They just didn't know how to make movies back then," but then you remember Dracula and Frankenstein were almost a decade earlier.

Good thing this is so charming because the script is dumb as hell.

Good Boy - The smartest thing about this movie is that it realizes there is no more than 75 minutes of story here, as necessitated by the gimmick.

And of course, Indy truly is a good boy. Perhaps the best boy.

Howling IV: The Original Nightmare - Commits the one sin a terrible movie can't escape; it's boring.  The transformation sequence is kind of amazing, though.

Born to the West - Really solid for a Poverty Row production! It's just generally so much more well put together than they usually were.

The House That Jack Built - Matt Dillion is phenomenal in this. Equal parts disturbing and hilarious. However, the 'yeah, I get it' factor is incredibly high with this one. Especially considering the runtime.

Frailty - I know some people really go to bat for this one, and while it is far from bad, it doesn't wholly click with me.  The character bait and switch doesn't really serve much of a purpose narratively and really feels like an attempt to 'gotcha' the audience before another reveal.

Faces of Death (2026) -  Really inspired update on the whole Faces of Death concept that almost completely unravels in the third act. Amazing soundtrack.

Day of the Dead - Never got around to this before for some reason, but it's good! Probably not as good as Night or Dawn, and you can really tell that it was operating on a slashed budget, but it is still a hell of a capper for Romero's original trilogy.

Dracula (1931) - What music they make, indeed.

The House by the Cemetery - It starts off pretty strong, with a good score and some nice atmosphere, but the mystery isn't particularly interesting and the kid is so annoying.

Exit 8 - Pretty much unquestionably the most accurate video game adaptation ever made? While also prescribing a more specific metaphor to the game play loop. Really impressed!

The Secret of NIMH - The idea that we'd genetically engineer super-smart rats and this is what they decided to do with that is so goddamn funny to me.  Love the way it looks, and the story is very much the anti-Disney of the era which rules, but there are still a couple of Disney-isms which stand out like a sore thumb.

Werewolves Within - The cast is a lot of fun, and the plot doesn't really go the way I was expecting, but still ultimately ends up where I originally guessed. Could have used a bit more gore.

Flaming Star - This works for two primary reasons. First, Don Siegel. Second, because it is a Western that happens to have Elvis, not just an "Elvis" movie.

What starts as an interesting moral and ethical conundrum about a mixed heritage family of the Old West seems to just toss all that aside in the last act for a rushed climax that undoes a lot of the progressive (for the time) characterization that it had been doing for the Kiowa.

[Cartagia]

Wildwood - Not just my favorite movie of the year, but one of the best and most impressive fantasy films ever made. I am just completely in awe of this production. Jaw-dropping, stunning, awe-inspiring. Pick your superlative. Finally a worthy successor to the whimsy and darkness of 80s adventure films.

[dhaabi]

I've finished another October watching 31 horror movies, and I'm pleased with the variety of what was watched in regards to sub-genre and country of production. I don't usually share my thoughts, but here's a quick overview of three of my favorites this year:

Beauty and the Beast (1978)
I greatly enjoyed the 1946 French adaptation to the classic fairy tale in 2025, so I was more than curious to see how a Czech horror fantasy framing of the story would be executed. Cocteau proves to his audience that magic is real in the earlier work in what's a stunning masterpiece; in this later version, however, Herz demonstrates how there is goodness to be found in terror by relying upon gothic imagery and the macabre that interconnects with a more psychological perspective from the titular Beast himself. Both adaptations are exceptional in their own ways.

The Snow Woman
The tale of yuki-onna is well-known across Japanese folklore with its numerous regional variations, but it is writer-translator Hearn's version from the early twentieth century that's most popular. As an adapation to that specific version, The Snow Woman expands on the brief piece of literature in ways that greatly enrich its themes of love and loss by incorporating politics and religion, and they're implemented so authentically. The latter in particular is most captivating, as parallels are drawn between the yuki-onna and goddess Kannon that re-contextualize the former as something more than a spirit who's embraced humanity and found love.

The Wolf House
By all accounts, The Wolf House is a sinister but wondrous substance of artistic expression. Its environments move and grow along the eponymous house's walls to slowly manufacture a scene made from a collection of materials told through stop-motion animation. But the film's animation is not neat and clean as one may imagine but instead an unmistakable work that champions its five-year production by documenting every messy step across each shot. Figures arrange themselves out of nothing, writhing around from one uneven camera position to the next as they transform into something new entirely. The film's presentation is coupled with its efforts to mirror real-world events regarding a German cult forming in 1970s Chile that has ties to Nazism and a history of slave labor, torture, and child sexploitation. It's undeniable that The Wolf House is a dramatic masterpiece that makes no attempts to disguise its metaphorical fairy tale nightmare, and it's deeply distressing.

[kamikazekeeg]

Godzilla Minus Zero - Fantastic movie, like I know I'm a sucker for Godzilla to begin with, but I think this one might be on the same level as the first.  It's very hard for me to say if it's better or not, I feel like the first one hits harder from the point of view of it being post-war Japan, they are still dealing with the aftermath of the bomb, and the arrival of Godzilla is this nightmare brought upon an already struggling society.  Minus Zero is them hoping to have overcome the struggle of Godzilla, to go back to regular life, but it's upset by the arrival of Ghidorah.  It's still a hard hitting drama, some real terrifying scenes in this, but we get some cool stuff with Godzilla going against Ghidorah. This isn't some big Monsterverse style thing, which is good, that's a different vibe, but it also shows to me, how lacking Monsterverse was becoming with New Empire, where they just didn't have the right cinematography to sell the scale and size well.

Great movie, if you liked the first movie, like Godzilla, this is a good watch.