This movie does something really fantastic: the entire movie is essentially dialog between the two leads in a hotel room(s). The highest compliment that I could say about it is that I was captivated by the characters, the acting and the story. Emma Thompson is always fantastic but the male lead was right there with her. Their chemistry was ridiculous.
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When was the last time you watched a movie where after the first hour of the movie you didn't know any of the main character's names or what the movie was about yet you were completely engrossed? Ah, the genius of Sergio Leone. Once again, Leone paints a detailed picture with scant few words and captivates the audience while doing it. This film is also widely regarded as the greatest "face" movie of all time. While Henry Fonda was at the top of the billing, it is actually Charles Bronson (I kid you not) that is the star of this film.
One thing I love about Leone is that he's never trying to make a point. There isn't a moral to the story and there aren't any feel-good moments. He brings together a group of characters and spares you the details of who they are and where they come from. There are no good vs. evil confronations. In fact, the most sympathetic person in this movie was a reformed prostitute and the lead in the movie (Bronson) is never actually identified by name.
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Don't get me wrong, I love that show is sweet and has a lot of positive messages. At some point there has to be some character development. The first season was excellent but ever since then this show has devolved into the characters becoming caricatures of themselves. The dialog is so bad that it feels like someone had an AI bot watch the first season and then write future episodes. If you tell me which characters are in a scene I could tell you pretty much exactly how the interaction is going to go. Rinse, repeat.
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There are so many things that I loved about this movie. I loved how clean the whole setup is - it only took about twenty minutes to give the viewer an excellent glimpse into where the movie was going and what the main conflicts are. While the girl was at the center of the story the movie really had nothing to do with the girl. The acting by everyone in the movie is absolutely top notch, especially Florence Pugh (she very much reminds me of a young Kate Winslet). Once the story was set up I was extremely curious as to how they were going to wrap it up - the resolution was amazing and did not disappoint.
I do have one last note on this movie. I am a man that embraces science and discounts religion. On the surface it seems as though this movie be a movie about science vs. religion but I think the exchange between the nurse and the nun at the end of the movie shows that the issue was not necessarily religion but fanaticism.
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I almost bailed after the first episode - too much melodrama. You can start to see new story lines and conflict developing in this episode. The last scene is fantastic.
I had been putting off watching this film for a few weeks now. The "platonic friends navigate the wedding season" genre has been beaten to death in so many mediocre rom coms. I decided to give it a chance based on some of the reviews - this was a good decision.
The film was in fact very different from so many others. I won't go too far into the details as it might give some of it away (is that possible?). I recently watched and enjoyed Always Be My Maybe - I dare say that this was better. The two leads were excellent and perfectly cast the film seemed to find out a unique niche in the genre. I was invested from beginning to end and it is definitely one of the better films that I've seen this year.
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It feels weird grading something like this based on entertainment value. The story is really interesting (and terribly sad, of course) but this doc starts to lose steam towards the end.
This show was a completely joy and I did not expect that it would reach the highs that it did. There is something to be said for these one-off series that allow the writer to drop the viewer right into the middle of the story without having to do character development. In fact, the opposite happens - the viewer gets to discover the character. Each show seemed to be better than the next with the culmination being an absolutely masterful (and emotional ending). I hope this makes it to American tv at some point for those that do not have alternative methods of finding this show.
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I absolutely adored everything about this film. From the minute it started until the minute it ended it regularly provided me with more questions to ponder. It was a commentary on both technology and humanity (probably more the latter than you might expect). Film making at its best.
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Fantastic film. You can tell a lot about a person's taste in film based on what they think about a movie like this. This is why I watch indie movies.
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I ejected halfway through this season. The problem with this show (and others like it) is that they throw out a quirky, dark and dramatic event at the beginning of the season, and then they live off of that for the rest of the season (Sharp Objects is another recent example). I have seen some people say that they are here for the mystery, which is odd. As with season 1, the "mystery" is an afterthought. Instead, we are subjected to watch broken people have bad dialog in a miserable location. Worse, are frequently subjected to cheap tricks such as jump scares and visual anomalies. Foster and Hawkes deserved better than this. Watch Fargo if you want to see how drama and mystery are supposed to be done. This show is nothing more than cheap horror.
For better or worse, the movie is exactly what you think it is. They essentially re-made Home Alone but from the perspective of the robbers. Sure, they change around some of the details but it really is the same movie. For whatever reason the robbery scene really bugged me more than it did in the original. Don't get me wrong - it was absurd in the original.... it just felt so hokey in this movie. My kids loved it and I didn't want to put a gun to my head as I was watching it so I can't complain. If you're looking to see a classic Christmas movie re-done with a better result I recommend 8 Bit Christmas.
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Fairly mediocre and much less than it could have been. I bailed after the 6th episode.
I am still shocked that this got the glowing reviews that it did
Everything was set up for this to be a great movie. You had two terrific actors at the top of their game. You had a dark and sterile English manor as the backdrop. And unhappiness - lots of unhappiness. The result? A decent movie but nothing more. I wanted to like this so much more than I did but it never reached anything beyond "interesting". I really didn't care that much about the characters or their unhappiness. I've seen better movies about broken people and broken families. I thought that last scene was very good and seemed true to the spirit of the film.
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I'll say right up front that I am not "burdened" (that doesn't feel like the right word) by having an intimate knowledge of the book so my review is not affected positively or negatively by the director's interpretation of the original work. That said.... I really loved it. While the jumping between timelines seemed somewhat arbitrary at first towards the end of the movie it all started to come together. It doesn't always work but when it does (Godfather Two, Once Upon a Time In America, Blue Valentine) the film can take on the feel of an epic. I think this technique gave us the best view of the complex character of Jo, and in the final scenes the struggles of her complex character resulted in a beautiful bloom. While I thought Lady Bird was terribly overrated I thought that Gerwig did a masterful job with this film. It was at different parts funny, touching, sad and hopeful. And as you might expect, the acting is phenomenal.
It's in my top 5 for the year.
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Another Western? Noooooooo, it isn't. Like most good movies with a Western backdrop the key to the film is a good story. That's one of the reasons that I've often thought Westerns are an excellent genre - the writer is not encumbered by needing to explain job, marriage, kids, etc. We can just get right to story. Fun fact - The story in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly was borrowed from a ninja movie. A good story is a good story regardless of genre.
First and foremost, the acting is tremendous. Phoenix and Jake Gyllenhaal offer up stellar performances but the real heart of this movie comes from John C. Reilly and Riz Ahmed (who was excellent in The Night Of). From beginning to end this just has a very unique feel to it that I couldn't put my hand on. The final five minutes made me realize what that feeling was (I won't say here). The message of the film wasn't about the old west or anything like that. To borrow from the Grinch: it was something much more.
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I spend a fair amount of times researching movies to watch and this one really stuck out because of the gigantic difference between what the critics thought of the film and the audience rating. I almost always side with the critics… until I don’t. This film had a ton of heart and in the end was extremely endearing. I love the way the film transitioned from one “scene” to the next and then was tied up at the end in a way that I should have seen coming but did not.
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I really enjoyed this film. You see very few films that deal honestly with race relations. I like that Clint used words that make us feel uncomfortable - how else could you make such a movie? If I had one (extremely) minor criticism it is that they chose to make a group of people that nobody knows the subject of most of the verbal and physical attacks in the movie. I have to wonder if they feared the repercussions of featuring a group that had a larger voice. The movie was extremely well-acted even though most of the leads were complete unknowns. I thought that Clint may have taken this project because it kind of put his Dirty Harry character to bed, just as The Unforgiven had put his "Man with no name / Blondie" character to bed.
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The show returned with an unbelievable episode. It started of a bit slow, but the scene with Deborah and Hannah alone in the room was magnificent. They were friendly to each other, but there was sooooo much more bubbling underneath. Finding good comedy on tv is so hard - I am so happy to have this show return.
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I wanted to like this movie a lot more than I did. Don't get me wrong, I liked it... I just didn't love it. The problem with it is that it is a more stylish version of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Unfortunately that was a better movie.
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The movie is as advertised - it is surprisingly entertaining and informative. While I found it particularly interesting because I lived through that time and adored that phone, I think the story is good enough for a non-geek to appreciate. The two leads are perfectly cast and form an excellent center to the movie. I would have actually liked it more if it had spent more time showing us the evolution of the phone. In that sense it may have worked better as a limited-series show.
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How did this show get this good out of nowhere? The first 2 episodes were exceptionally uneventful. Hell, it even seems as though they turned the weak link on the show (Stiffler's Mom and her storyline) into a gem. Fantastic writing here.
As someone who is generally not a fan of summer blockbusters the only thing I have to say about this movie is.... wow. Just wow. They absolutely nailed this one. I think the most impressive part about what they did is the nostalgia side of the movie. While watching this movie I thought a lot about The Force Awakens. In that movie it felt like we were sluggishly being dragged through a re-make of Return of the Jedi. As Maverick played out we were kind of laughing about all of the checkboxes that were being checked as the movie when on: singing in the bar, beach scene, emergency situation developing overseas, etc. There difference between this movie and other movies like The Force Awakens is that it didn't beat you over the head with the nostalgia. It all felt very authentic, especially when the movie did zag a little bit in the last twenty minutes. And most importantly, the movie is a TON of fun.
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I watch a lot of indie movies that try to pull off films like this and they almost always fail miserably. I think what impressed me the most about this movie that they were able to take the limitations of a pandemic film and make it into a positive. In a way it reminded me of the movie 1776 in that the monologues sent over voice.... errr... video mail worked the same as if the two leads were sending letters to each other. We got a sense of who they were and what they were struggling with through these monologues without having to sit through scenes to act them out. By the end of the film I felt like I knew them. Fantastic job. If you aren't familiar with the works of the Duplass brothers I suggest you seek them out immediately.
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I am really loving this year. Unlike past seasons where you had to have the obligatory one-season bad guy and girlfriend this season is stripped down and more about the characters. I don't get the previous comment about being more invested in the characters in previous seasons - if anything I am more invested now (and I had tapped out of the show for a while in previous seasons).
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The best way that I can describe this show is that it is a more mature and advanced version of The Wire. While that show certainly had higher highs this show was consistently good from beginning to end and actually got better from one season to the next. And unlike The Wire it knew when its ending was and was able to finish the final season appropriately. The backdrop and the stories are fantastic. The finale..... one of the top 5 in the history of television. I loved it and will miss it terribly.
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Besides the obvious draw of the film (oh my freaking god I can’t believe he climbed the rock without ropes) there really was a lot of meat on the proverbial bone in this film. I spent much of the film assuming that he was simply an adrenaline junkie only to realize later on that this was not true. The director did a fantastic job slow-playing this story line as it isn’t towards the end that you get a better feel for what makes him tick.
The second most interesting theme in the film is the relationship between the climber and his girlfriend. What does he owe her? What is right for her to expect from him? Once again this director avoided did a great job to not portray her as a sobbing puppy and instead focused on the nature of their relationship. Some of his statements about the relationship will really grab you.
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One of the most gritty movies about love that I have ever seen. The story is told in two separate story lines - one where the couple has just met and is falling in love and... well... the other one. The contrast is stunning and really socks the viewer in the proverbial gut. At the end I was exhausted and emotionally spent and I loved every minute of it.
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This film was about a young girl growing up in a very broken home in Brooklyn during the 80's. The film was horrific, tragic, beautiful and moving. It was a real testament to both the best and worst of humanity. The acting in this film was second to none. It kills me that The Blind Side took home a single award over this film.
In the event that you have not heard of this movie, it is the last film made by the great Heath Ledger. Ledger did not live to finish the film so his friends stepped in to help out - Johnny Depp, Colin Farrel and Jude Law (it may sound silly but it works in the movie - you'll see why). It is also directed by Terry Gilliam of "Monty Python" fame. I started to type out what the story is about but then realized as that was a pointless exercise. The film has some amazing performances (with the notable exception of Vern Troyer) and it absolutely keeps your attention. It is very rough around the edges and that is part of what makes it an enjoyable film.
