Weekend Watchlist, 4/17: Go West

Happy Friday everyone! Earlier this week, I guested on the very fun Pod Universe podcast, pitching my vision of a cinematic universe around the Unfriended movies. How many different screens can an Unfriended movie happen on? Give it a watch/listen to find out!

Here are this week’s picks.

Bad Day at Black Rock

Where to watch: Criterion Channel (leaving at the end of the month)

I threw on Bad at Black Rock this week for two reasons: It’s leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of the month, and it’s 81 minutes long. I was blown away – one of the great American films of the mid-20th century, it’s a searing and timely take on how we treat outsiders. Spencer Tracy plays a disabled war veteran who comes to a remote desert town to investigate the disappearance of a Japanese-American man. There, he encounters hostile locals led by Robert Ryan’s sinister Reno Smith. Impeccably crafted and with strong performances from an excellent cast (including Ernest Borgnine AND Lee Marvin!), Bad at Black Rock is a superb crime drama/Western that reckons with some of America’s greatest sins.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Where to watch: Hulu or free with a library card on Kanop

Director Daniel Goldhaber and his partner-in-film Isa Mazzei have a new movie out, the reimagining of cult horror film Faces of Death. It’s a good excuse to watch their previous film, the excellent eco-thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Released in 2022, the movie is an adaptation of a non-fiction book through a fiction lens, following a disparate group of young people who join together to blow up an oil pipeline. It’s a strong meld of the classic genre framework with a bold political message, resulting in an entertaining and propulsive thriller. If you want to read more, my review is one of my favorites I wrote for Polygon.

Thieves Highway

Where to watch: Hulu

One of my favorite underseen movies of last year, Jesse V. Johnson’s cow crime Western (yes, you read cow crime right) Thieves Highway, has finally arrived on streaming with its Hulu premiere. Johnson is a veteran director of the direct-to-video action space best known for his work with martial artist Scott Adkins, and this is one of my favorites of his. It follows a cow cop (Aaron Eckhart, a human who investigates crimes involving cows, not crimes committed by cows) dealing with a deadly group of cow rustlers (led by Devon Sawa) who are trying to get out of Oklahoma with their haul. Thieves Highway benefits from Johnson’s tight direction and instinct for tension, but also because it deeply cares about the story it’s telling and the characters in it. It’s a strong 80ish-minute throwback to a different era in American movies.