Groundhog Day always means new year, same old rules. So let's get started.

The following list is an update on movies that I have recently watched for the first time. The first number is the order that they were watched in 2025, and the number after the slash is the order they were watched since I started tracking them on my blog way back when there was still joy and hope in the world in 2012. A complete list of all movies I've seen can be found here, with links to capsule reviews, when available.

This list is kept largely for my personal use, and you may find it helpful to remember that my suspension of disbelief is tenuous in the best of times and my default setting is to hate everything. The odds of you liking a movie more than me are high. Seriously, I'm no fun to watch movies with. Or, frankly, to spend *any* time with. But let's not get too far off track.

1/2433. Repeat Performance (1947)
The Groundhog Day of 1947. A murderess has to relive not one day but the entire year leading up to the murder. And that year is a slog. It is designed such that by the end the audience is begging for her to kill the guy. What's taking you so long, lady? He's a real bastard! The movie is pretty good, actually, even if Twilight Zone has conditioned modern audiences to expect this sort of story to clock in at under an hour (a lesson M. Night Shyamalan has never learned).

2/2434. Nightmare (1956)
The titular "nightmare" is that Kevin McCarthy (who you know from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or, if you're really my kind of people, Weird "Al" Yankovic's UHF), keeps experiencing deja vu about a murder case, and it soon becomes pretty clear he's the murderer. I won't give away the gimmick, but it's a better movie before you know what the gimmick is.

3/2435. Seven Keys to Baldpate (1935)
I first encountered a movie based on this mystery play back in 2021, and at the time apparently I read something that convinced me the '47 version was the only time this was treated as a comedy. Bullshit. The '35 version is also all comedy all the way. Even a romantic comedy, no less. I do think the '47 version was better, though I would guess it also had a bigger budget (and better cinematographer).

4/2436. Scarface (1932)
The original! And boy, is that Alphonse Capone Anthony Camonte despicable! I've read that this film's glorification of gangsters stirred up accusations that cinema was making crime look good, but it really doesn't glamorize much. (To quote from the website of the Mob Museum, "Prohibition practically created organized crime in America," so I suspect that contemporary pearl-clutching had more to do with fear of current events in the depths of the Great Depression than Hollywood's take on psychopathic mobsters.) It feels like someone is murdering someone — or threatening incest(!) — in just about every scene. If this is how crime pays, get out while you still can!

More to come.

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To be continued...

 

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