One Good Film: "Land Ho!" (2014)
A hot spring of a movie: It fizzes a lot, and you come out feeling better than you went in.
A regular feature for paid Watch List subscribers: I suggest one reasonably under-the-radar movie from the recent or distant past new movie, and you do what you want with that information.
Note: The Watch List will be on hiatus for a few weeks while Mrs. Movie Critic and I take a long-deserved vacation in a faraway place. Back at the beginning of June, although I may weigh in on the new/possibly last “Mission: Impossible” movie from the airport because there are just things to say about it.
Until then, I will leave you with the news that the recent remake of Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐, my review here) has turned up at the reasonable premiere rental price of $9.99 on Amazon and AppleTV. It’s a glib, enjoyable watch – nothing earth-shaking but worth it for the casually bone-deep performances by Lily Gladstone and “Minari” Oscar-winner Youn Yuh-jung, Joan Chen letting her hair down as a narcissistic PFLAG mom, and a brief appearance as a justice of the peace by a friend of mine from high school, the actor-comedian Jeffrey Joseph. Bowen Yang from “SNL” is in it, too, and he’s fine, but he doesn’t make you feel things just by standing there the way Gladstone and Youn do. Don’t bother trying to rent Lee’s 1993 original, by the way – it’s curiously unavailable on any streaming platform. Not great, Bob.
Also of note: “Riders of Justice” (2020, ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2) has resurfaced on Amazon and Apple TV after going AWOL for a while. Early readers of the Watch List know this one: It sounds like a bad Jean-Claude Van Damme movie but it’s something substantially more funny and moving: A Danish comedy-drama about a mercenary soldier (an unrecognizable Mads Mikkelsen) aching to avenge the death of his wife but tripped up time and again by the cosmic coincidences of the universe and a trio of aging math nerds who join with him to form an unlikely (and fairly unsuccessful) black ops team. It’s the movie I regularly cite to illustrate that good, weird, unknown things really are out there in the streaming hinterlands, and I recommend it highly if I haven’t already banged on enough about it to your liking. (Warning: The trailer tries a little too hard to make it look more like a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie than it actually is.)
