July was yet another terrific month of movies, wherein I enjoyed some ’50s sci-fi movies thanks to TCM’s spotlight programming, and some Glenn Ford westerns as he was the channel’s Star of the Month. Of course, today marks the first day of TCM’s annual Summer Under the Stars festival, and there are about a dozen or so movies I have on my watchlist to try to check out in August. In the meantime, I’m actually on vacation right now in Washington state so it’ll be a couple of days until I can start diving into that and some other movies I haven’t gotten around to seeing in the past week. But one somewhat movie-related thing I just did was visit some notable sites from the Twin Peaks series, so I’m enjoying my time off and spending time with my family. And on another movie-related note, I also went to the first A24 Public Access event a couple of weeks ago where Lady Bird was screened on a billboard in Sacramento, which was a lot of fun! Now with all that said, let’s take a look at what I watched in the past month.
New-to-Me: 19
Re-Watched: 10
New-to-Me Films by Decade:
- 1920s – 0
- 1930s – 4
- 1940s – 1
- 1950s – 6
- 1960s – 2
- 1970s – 0
- 1980s – 1
- 1990s – 2
- 2000s – 1
- 2010s – 2
List of New-to-Me Films:
- Babel (2006)
- Home from the Hill (1960)
- Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019)
- Our Betters (1933)
- Two Faced-Woman (1941)
- One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937)
- Things to Come (1936)
- The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984)
- Defending Your Life (1991)
- Midsommar (2019)
- It Came from Outer Space (1953)
- Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956)
- Craig’s Wife (1936)
- The People Against O’Hara (1951)
- Gidget (1959)
- The Fastest Gun Alive (1956)
- Cowboy (1958)
- The Trouble with Angels (1966)
- Mother (1996)
A Few Favorite Discoveries:
Defending Your Life (1991), directed by Albert Brooks
Albert Brooks is an actor I’ve always enjoyed seeing whenever he pops up in a movie, but I had yet to see any of the ones he’d written and directed. In Defending Your Life, his comedic talent really shines through along with a more sensitive side, especially in the scenes he shares with Meryl Streep. It was also neat seeing Brooks’s depiction of the afterlife, which is something I love seeing in movies such as Here Comes Mr. Jordan, A Matter of Life and Death, and Heaven Can Wait.
The Trouble with Angels (1966), directed by Ida Lupino
I’ll watch practically anything with Hayley Mills since she has such a charming on-screen presence, so I was excited to see The Trouble with Angels streaming on the Criterion Channel, which was also an Ida Lupino-directed film I’d been eager to see. What really made this movie wonderful for me was her pairing with June Harding, as they play a mischievous duo at a boarding school under the watchful eye of Rosalind Russell’s Mother Superior. It’s definitely one of my favorite representations of female friendship on film.
