Buckle up everyone, we have got a pile of properties to get through and not much time to do it. This was a productive week in film-watching for me, though my selections were admittedly a little scattershot, and perhaps more beholden to the Netflix algorithm than usual. We also continued to barge through She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, taking down seasons two and three, and polishing off the rest of One Piece while we were at it. Yes yes, end of an era and all that, but I’m trying not to feel too broken up about it – after all, post-Oden Wano is still a damn good weekly anime, leaving me something to look forward to on the weekends. That aside, we’ve got a pile of films to sort through, so let’s not waste any more time, and dive into the Week in Review!

First up this week was The Five Fingers of Death, a Shaw Brothers martial arts film starring Lo Lieh, who journeys to a new master in order to prepare for a dangerous martial arts tournament. Five Fingers of Death is classic Shaw Brothers from start to finish, featuring rival schools, secret techniques, ominous foreign muscle, betrayal, romance, all of it. There’s a part where the hero has his hands broken but must Rise Above Through Sheer Effort, and another part where a jealous rival has his eyes plucked out by the bad guys for his failure. Between that, the title, and the prevalence of that specific “eee-ooo-eee” alarm noise, it’s clear that Five Fingers of Death was a direct influence on Tarantino’s Kill Bill – and why wouldn’t it be? Five Fingers of Death kicks ass, and if you like kung fu movies, you’ll almost certainly enjoy this excellent example of the form.

After that, we watched a classic of a very different sort, screening the 1952 western High Noon. High Noon centers on Will Kane (Gary Cooper), a town marshal who’s just hung up his badge, and is prepared to embrace a quiet life with his new wife. Just then, news comes in that a bandit he thought he’d put away has been released by the courts, and is on his way into town with a band of his thugs. With just about an hour to go until the arrival of the noon train, Kane must rally the people he dedicated his life to, and gather a posse to defend himself in his darkest hour.

Only he doesn’t successfully do any of that. Kane’s one remaining deputy quits in a huff, too bitter about his own career prospects to support the man who hired him. The locals at the saloon laugh him down, driven by a combination of sheer avarice and kinship with the bandits. Friends shy away or disappear entirely, and even at the local church, he is urged to leave rather than draw the town into his own business. As the hour of judgment approaches, Kane is forced to realize that a lifetime of service has left him without a single trustworthy friend.

High Noon is an absolutely furious film, brimming with contempt for the simplistic values that often characterize western dramas. Honor, brotherhood, and community? Sure, people might say they value such things, but ultimately they’re just looking out for their own skins, and will turn aside when a true moral test appears. The film’s anger is refreshing and well-aimed, skewering America’s unearned self-image, and reflecting the fury its author must have felt at his own engagements with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Screenwriter Carl Foreman was actually blacklisted during the production of High Noon, and forced to move to England to continue his career.

High Noon isn’t just exemplary as a commentary on American culture, though. It’s also a simply excellent, high-energy film, using its real time conceit to build tremendous momentum as the hour approaches, and stunning both with its gorgeous black-and-white cinematography and plethora of arresting performances. Cooper himself is incredible as Kane, with each new blow to his sense of self and community carving a fresh crease down his face. In his performance across this film, you see an entire belief system crash down around him, leaving him ambivalent about a legacy he’d cherished up until that morning. A beautiful wrecking ball of a film.

Next up, we checked out one of Netflix’s recent animated productions, the Witcher tie-in Nightmare of the Wolf. Nightmare of the Wolf centers on Vesemir, the witcher who trained our guy Geralt, and covers Vesemir’s journey from a servant’s son to the last hope of the Wolf line. If you haven’t met Vesemir via the Witcher books or games, this film does little to catch you up – and that’s to its benefit. Instead, Nightmare of the Wolf tells a compelling and largely self-contained personal story, as Vesemir grapples with the sacrifices inherent in becoming a witcher, and how we make the most of the lives we are given.

Young (well, young by witcher standards) Vesemir makes for a charming roguish protagonist, and Nightmare of the Wolf is quite well-animated, offering plenty of crunchy fight scenes with merely a light garnish of CG embellishment. But surprise surprise, the thing I most liked about this film was its melancholy love story, featuring the woman Vesemir loved as a youth reappearing as an elderly matriarch with children and grandchildren. Rather than the obvious time dilation sorrows you might expect such a meeting to provoke, the two actually reconnect marvelously as adults, each of them now understanding how precious time is. Stories that mess with time like this provide a unique opportunity to explore the idiosyncrasies of our wandering lives, and Nightmare of the Wolf offers a thoughtful example of the form over the course of a generally satisfying action-adventure film. An easy recommendation for any Witcher fans.

Next up was The Old Ways, a possession film about a young woman named Cristina (Brigitte Kali Canales) who moved from Mexico to America after witnessing her mother’s possession by a demon, and who returns as a young adult with a heroin addiction and a death wish. After collapsing in an allegedly haunted cave, her cousin drags her to a local bruja, who determines that Cristina has a demon inside her.

The Old Ways proceeds pretty much exactly how you’d expect, weaving drug addiction and possession together with moderate grace, and offering a reasonable procession of spooks and ghouls. The film is emphatically “okay” on basically every level – the script is coherent but highly familiar, the acting is so-so, and the cinematography is simply functional. If you’re a big possession fan, it’s a fine enough watch, but basically nothing about it struck me as memorable or exceptional.

And after that, we checked out Godzilla vs Kong, the latest in Universal’s Monsterverse series. After the grand disappointment of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, I was really hoping Godzilla vs Kong would be a return to form. Unfortunately, the film left me with the impression that this franchise simply can’t be fixed at this point – it has run out of compelling human characters, leaving a hollow shell of action scenes.

I’m not sure it’s even anyone’s fault that Godzilla vs Kong is boring. It’s certainly not due to the director – Adam Wingard is tremendously talented, and Godzilla vs Kong is an extremely pretty film, with few wasted moments throughout. It’s also not the fault of Godzilla or King Kong, who each do their best to convey personality and intent with the barest of narrative material. The real problems are more fundamental – like this film’s inability to define what it’s actually about, and more importantly, why we should care.

Obviously, a film with a title like Godvilla vs Kong is going to be intent on making giant monsters fight each other, regardless of the specific reason. But in great kaiju films, the titanic parts land with impact because they’ve been set up with tangible consequences, generally related to human characters we actually care about. Godzilla vs Kong has none of that – its human characters are relentlessly unmemorable, with the film failing to provide them either arcs or personalities. Things simply happen one after another, with no narrative momentum driving us between setpieces, and no emotional investment carrying us to the end.

Previous Monsterverse entries have benefitted from great, distinctive performances courtesy of stars ranging from Bryan Cranston to Samuel L. Jackson, building drama out of recognizable human emotions, and using their giant monsters as a punchline to be held in careful reserve. Rather than constantly trying to dazzle us with over-the-top action, they built actual worlds for these creatures to inhabit, crafting a tangible context for the chaos to come. These more recent entries have just been monstrous punch-fests from the start, starring actors who fade into the scenery as soon as their lines are read, and taking place in cities full of strangers. Saving this franchise would likely require vastly scaling it down, and focusing on a more human-driven narrative; but I can’t imagine “fewer monsters who appear less frequently” is a popular take on the film, leaving me worried for the fate of the franchise.