Alright, friends and occasional readers, here’s the March roundup. First up is The Innocents (1961; written by William Archibald, Truman Capote, and John Mortimer; directed by Jack Clayton), based on the play of the same name by William Archibald and the novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James.

This is my second or third time watching it, and it’s still one of my favorite haunted house films. The story involves a governess (Deborah Kerr) tasked with looking after two young children in a large English estate and realizing ghosts may be trying to possess them. Director Jack Clayton’s creates a haunting (pun intended) atmosphere with stark black and white cinematography (by Freddie Francis), eerie sound design, and a committed performance by Kerr as the anxious tutor. Are the ghosts real or a product of her imagination? The film is much more straightforward than the ambiguous novella, but audiences and critics still debate it. A must for any horror fan.

Rating: ***½

Keeping with the ghosts angle, next I decided to watch Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021; written by Gil Kenan and Jason Reitman; directed by Jason Reitman), the fourth installment of this franchise. This one acts as a sequel to 1989’s Ghostbusters II, all but ignoring the events of the much-maligned Ghostbusters reboot from 2016 which I enjoyed but most people felt was lame (because girls). Well, that one’s much better than this lazy outing which has Egon’s grandchildren (Finn Wolfhard and Mckenna Grace) dealing with the return of the evil entity from the first flick. I was mildly amused for about a half hour, then started dozing off after a scene set inside a deserted Walmart. Talk about unexplained phenomena.

Rating: **

I’ll be honest, I did not get Licorice Pizza (2021; written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson) at all, a dramedy about a teen (Cooper Hoffman) in love with a young woman (Alana Haim) in 1970s Los Angeles. It’s a meandering, unruly film (as usual with Paul Thomas Anderson), but even worse is the fact that I didn’t feel any connection with the characters or their struggles. I also didn’t find it particularly funny. But hey, this has a ton of admirers. Maybe it’s me (or maybe it’s just PTA).

Rating: **

So now we get to my unpopular opinion of the month: I think Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961; written by George Axelrod; directed by Blake Edwards) is a mediocre, wildly overrated film. The story of a call girl (Audrey Hepburn) who becomes involved with a struggling writer (George Peppard), it seems pretty apparent that the deeper themes (trauma, insecurity, underage marriage, etc.) explored by Truman Capote in his original novella were put aside in favor of a breezier rom-com. And let’s not even start on the painfully cartoonish turn by Mickey Rooney as a Japanese neighbor, a choice that feels egregiously wrong even for its era. Then again, the enchanting Moon River almost makes up for it.

Rating: **

Feeling low on horror, I revisited the slashers Scream 3 (2000; written by Ehren Kruger; directed by Wes Craven) and Scream 4 (2011; written by Kevin Williamson; directed by Wes Craven). Scream 3 is certainly the weakest entry in the franchise – moving the action to Los Angeles and setting it around the film-within-a-film Stab 3 seemed like an inspired idea, but it’s nowhere near as clever as the previous two installments. It paid to wait eleven years for Scream 4, which at least features a memorable triple opener and a surprising reveal as to who the killers are.

Scream 3 – Rating: **

Scream 4 – Rating: **½

Rounding out the month is O Agente Secreto (2025; English Title: The Secret Agent; written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho), a political thriller in which a Brazilian professor (Wagner Moura) goes on the run after insulting a corrupt executive with ties to the dictatorship of Ernesto Geisel. It’s a suspenseful slow burn, nicely assembled by writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho to evoke a 70s cinema aesthetic: Realistic, violent, ambiguous. It also has one of the most surreal (and funny) scenes I’ve seen in a long time. O Agente Secreto may not be for everyone, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Rating: ***

Carlos I. Cuevas