Thinking out loud, so take what follows as it is...
The problem with anthology films - going all the way back to the Amicus run of films at least, if not all the way to the thirties when the format began - is that the narrative stops every so often and has to rebuild its momentum, and there really is no way around that without maintaining the central core of characters (which is slightly cheating the format). It is interesting to compare and contrast critical reception to comic anthologies, short story collections, and film anthologies, and see how vastly more difficult it is to pull off on the big screen than in other media.
Given that narrative film originally took most of its cues from the stage (at least in France and the US) it isn't at all surprising that the Aristotelian unities were folded into the melange of influences, traditions, and conceits - although it quickly developed into its own thing, that early ideology persists to this day in much arthouse fare.
Due to anthologies abruptly stopping and starting, with entirely new casts in many cases (V/H/S largely works, strangely,
because of its acknowledgement of the media format it focuses on) that unity is not only broken, but completely shattered. While I'm not saying that films work better if there is a core driving narrative, it does seem to indicate that audiences have been trained by repeated film viewing to expect a cohesive through-line.
Comics come from the literary tradition, which has always had anthologies, so readers are prepared for there to be more latitude in how a narrative unfolds. Oddly (at least to me) radio seems to be the best media outside the printed page for the anthology format, which probably harkens back to oral tradition (which informs literary tradition) having prepared audiences for digressions, asides, and complete breaks from the story at hand.
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Though I've not been scoring films as I've watched them (which is slightly too anoraky even for me), I have been keeping track of the joys and disappointments of what I've been watching... My strike rate is waaaay down, and it looks as if I'm going to cover more awful films taking into consideration reviews.
I like Borley Rectory, even though it looks like it was shot for sixpence and a bag of humbugs (which is somehow appropriate), and the cast is excellent. There are moments where the clever artiness is slightly too explicit - and there are a few scenes, such as a character looking straight up through a broken pane of glass, which don't work - but overall it is the best take (which isn't a book) on the subject.
There are important things missing, and the footage which was shot of the ruins - where you can see the rooms laid out on the ground - ought to have been included at the end as a coda, but it is a difficult film to criticize due to the obvious love for the subject on display.
I really dislike Last Christmas. I could spend a few thousand words listing each and every hoary old cliche brought out to play, and all the ways it insults its audience, but it is far easier to simply state that I would rather stab myself in the eye with a rusty spoon than sit through it again. Fantastic cast, but the script...
The one thing it leaves me with is a fascination for Emilia Clarke's eyebrows, which is surely not the intention of the film.
There were no high expectations for The Mummy (Tom Cruise version) nor Gemini Man, but even so...
The Mummy is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. There isn't a scene which works perfectly in the entire film, and it lurches from set-piece to set-piece with all the grace of a drunken sailor. For someone who was practically raised on classic horror films it isn't merely a disgrace to the genre but an insult to the memory of Boris Karloff.
Gemini Man is slightly better, though that's like saying that losing a finger is marginally more appealing than losing an arm. Some of the effects are extremely bad, and the lauded de-ageing technology is more unconvincing than in some other films of the recent past. It also takes far, far too many plot points from better films and stories of the last twenty years. Why it felt like a project intended for Jean-Claude Van Damme eludes me, but that's my overall impression.
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...why? Actually, I think I'm going to deliberately miss out on that as it'll merely provoke a few thousand words of ranting at the state of modern cinema.