A charming and fun procedural. Excellent characters and relationships, but the case stands out as the central element, with few rabbit trails of unrelated sexual intrigue.
A world of people with no grounding in reality becomes a fertile ground for digital exploitation.
10 for the message.
I don't think this is a great film or even an enjoyable one (with the exception of a few violent-but-funny moments), but the moral of the story that Caroline presents in the final scene is perfect, so I'm giving it a 7.
Terrific send-up of Hollywood manic nonsense; everybody trying to out-snow everyone else, and pretend that the other person is making sense, because you must not be an insider if you call BS on the idiot spouting nonsense!
I feel like the premise could have been given to a different writer, and a superb film could have been the result. Needed: more mystery, more thriller, less insanity. It seemed the production team was trying for comedy when they needed to aim for crime thriller. Nevertheless, if it weren't for the atrocious amount of bad language, this would be a film I would recommend despite the zaniness; I felt the message came through loud (and clear?…yyyeah, probably).
The film is exciting, thrilling, well-paced, and almost a terrific watch.
Rosamund Pike does a terrific job as a psychotic black widow, but how should I evaluate Ben Affleck? Maybe he did a superb job, but how does one know? His character is so confusing and unlike anyone I've ever known in real life, that I can't tell if he is doing a bad job, or if he's perfectly portraying Nick Dunne. He's just as slippery a character as she is. She should be inconsistent because that's what psychopaths do, but Nick Dunne is not mentally ill, so his inconsistency made me question Affleck's performance.
When the two got into voiceovers and conversations about playing false characters to each other, I was confused. Of course she was false to everyone in her life; poor thing had no identity from childhood due to her (literally) fictional upbringing; as for him, as everyone must do, he put on a good face to begin courting her, but certainly by the time you settle into a marriage (and hopefully a lot sooner!), you are yourself. No one can keep up a fake identity 100% of the time, yet that's what they both claimed they were doing for 5 years? And the 20 million dollar question: why does she want to keep him at the end?
The last 10 minutes paints the bitterest, most hateful view of marriage in all of literature.
I expected a silly spy comedy with a few ouch moments. Instead, I enjoyed an entertaining spy film with reasonable visual effects (not top-drawer but good enough for a non-serious film) and excellent plot twists. Yes, the alternating characters in Elly's mind are sometimes confusing, but not enough to lose track of who is who. The smoke grenade gunfight was well choreographed and visually delightful.
Expect an art film and you won't be disappointed. "Rechazados" is an excellent commentary on humanity's tendency to separate Us from Them using arbitrary distinctions. Beautifully shot. The sequences where the children seem to dance organically as a group are magical.
Argh! So hard to watch, but it does pull you in. Closer to Stallone than Sorjonen (Bordertown), it gives Rolf Lassgård the full stage on which to shine, and he does that extremely well.
Entertaining and solid production. And finally a bank robber film where I enjoyed cheering for law enforcement, although I felt a little sorry for Doug toward the end. I give it a 6.5.
Excellent story, writing, pace, editing. The theme of parental love is wonderfully illustrated. And it's always good to see a protagonist who isn't a pushover.
Reality Check. The French Government is part of the business of kidnapping and selling tourists to the wealthy. The upside: it benefits a few government officials. The downside: it tanks the tourist industry, which is a large part of the Parisian economy, and which supplies the virgins. Without tourists, they'll have to start selling their own citizens, at which point the French—not known for quietly accepting things they don't like—will probably begin to be upset.
An excellent brain challenge keeping everybody straight; wonderfully tight editing (almost too tight, but the viewer just needs to think faster); a real feather in Scorsese's cap. Super good!
[spoiler]I kept waiting for a real surprise near the end, when Dr Madden was unveiled as some higher-up mole, else why would she be working both Billy and Colin? As it was, that love triangle served no purpose other than to generate a breath-holding moment in the glass box when Billy mentioned her to Colin. I feared Colin would realize Billy was his competition and kill him, pre-empting the real conflict between them. Fortunately, that realization didn't happen.[spoiler]
Excellent job! Although I was at first confused about who was who, and the characters' connections (made a bit more difficult by the failure of Léa to call her mother "Maman"), the writer soon explained the relationships (and even included a meta-remark about Léa's weird habit of calling her mom "Isabelle"). Excellent acting all around. I particularly enjoyed how they handled the flashbacks with increased grain and appropriate color correction palette.
Terrific message; not the usual plot, but tremendously enhanced by the historical backstory.
Wow, they keep covering more and more aspects of the war, usually only seen in specialized films. Great job!
Sasha Bukow and Volker Thiesler!!!
Shaking my head. I have no idea what is going on in Varg's love life. Yes, he's super handsome and is used to women throwing themselves at him. But he acted so irrationally for Wenche whom he clearly doesn't actually love. He likes the sex, but he loves Anna, so why does he abandon her for a washed-up divorcée? And what was with that last comment about waiting for the old broad to get out of prison? Yes, he has waited 38 years for a wife (so we were right in calling a lie his claim earlier in the episode that he'd been married), but his affair-of-the-week hardly means he's going to marry her!
Excellent production values, very good acting, DP & director and writing (style) are just fine. I can't figure out the layout of episodes, however. Two episodes in 2017, then two in 2020, but episodes 1-3 are one story arc, and episode 4 is a standalone story. First two episodes are quite poor, with inept policing and a series of nightmarish assaults on one investigator which are ridiculously excessive in the fashion of Tarantino. Then episodes 3-4 are quite good, with intensity and some violence.
I would divide it into two seasons by year of broadcast.
"Season 1" rates 4.
"Season 2" rates 8.
If you didn't need to watch episodes 1 & 2 to understand episodes 3 & 4, I would strongly recommend just watching the latter pair.
Don't let yourself be confused: Dominique, his lawyer, has been replaced with an actress bearing a striking resemblance to the embittered widow from the cemetery in the first episode! When she first appears in Borchert's cell, it will seem a continuation of his nightmare, but that scene is real, not a dream. Raspberries to the director for this terrible gaffe. Director Rola should have introduced her to us somehow in another fashion—making her first appearance directly after a dream segment is the height of confusion!
Superb synthesis of the various elements of the Sixties, making connections no longer well-known. (HUAC triggered the first protests at Berkeley!) The interviewees, with the benefit of perspective, are able to acknowledge where they were on the right track and where they weren't. And the greatest lesson is stated: if you want to change things, you need a vision for what you want in their place.
Good for practicing your Spanish. Not so good if you want to understand what's going on, although the show is not nearly as confusing as many. The filmmaking world still needs more ways of labeling characters (freeze frame with name is good; website with photos is the best, as long as the photos look like the characters). This has neither, and dialog isn't written so villains name each other when they converse. The rat's nest of connections and conspiracies is sadly too tangled for the protagonist (or the show's writers) to figure it all out before the end. The very end even introduces an entirely new type of villains. Perhaps the producer was hoping for an order for season 2?
No government involvement there! :rofl:
I wanted to like this—and it's great for practicing one's French—but who wants to watch a procedural where all the officers are working for the bad guys for money or blackmail or sex? Most shows have one or two compromised team members to make things interesting, but what progress can possibly be achieved if every cop is a criminal? I had to throw in the towel after 3 episodes, and I see why it's impossible to live in France today.
Terrible! An Irish police psychologist should be a great idea for a show, so why not do it in Gaelic or English?? But the language doesn't matter, because there are only enough lines to fill 30 minutes of a decent procedural. This is nothing but emoting and short-depth-of-field shots and a protagonist who has much to say but can't say it because the writer won't give her any lines! The bad guys are uninhibited in their ability to take action (from time to time), but the good guys just stand and stare, or cry a lot.
Although the ending is odd, I enjoyed this film. There are so many brands of so-called Christianity, so no film is exactly like one's own experiences, but this presented many elements authentically. It tackles head-on the inconsistency in modern America between sexual freedom and legal restrictions on relationships, and the thorny grey area between love and exploitation. Eliza Scanlen is an excellent actress and her performance is consistently believable in every emotion, including confusion over what she feels at times.
Superb concept, executed tremendously well. It's a beautiful tale of humanity through the medium of technology.
So much of history is buried under the lies of the victors. It's nice that once again, a film is able to reveal what really happened, and the terrific cast, art direction, and cinematography bring us right into the story as well. Life indeed is by turns comic and tragic; this is illustrated well here.
A suspenseful, beautiful story. What fabulous music!
After the events of the film, does the happy family has 13 years to get out of Russia before the hatchet falls. Do they make it?
A heavily artistic film with a good concept. J is trying to decide whether to stay with their biological gender or transition their body to a girl, and is taking puberty blockers to delay the decision as long as possible. As J prolongs their decision, the other characters are shown to be plagued as well by decision paralysis. This paralysis contributes to the slow pace of the film, and even when the pace accelerates with the cacophony of a family gathering, the inability to decide on paths of action invades lives there as well.
The first half of the film is marred by Nicole Coffineau's monotone performance. She alternates between boredom and seething frustration(?) in all her lines, and sadly, her character lingers. Her side job is as a medical actor (playing patients with predefined symptoms for medical students to practice examining), making her monotone even more ironic (and leaving the students she should be helping even fewer clues to go on!).
Rhys Fehrenbacher does a very good job with the title role, conveying clearly the introspection expected from such a tremendously important decision process.
Silly concept, terrible language, but visual execution was excellent. I'd like to give it a 6.5.
Fanny Louise Bernth's lack of facial expressions is a serious impediment to the character's ability to fool the villain, and to the viewer's ability to know what she's feeling. Anger, fear, caution, boredom, curiosity, concern—all these emotions have exactly the same blank facial expression. Certainly the worst of all the "angel of death" films or miniseries. American hospitals are unsafe due to corporate greed. Danish hospitals, judging from this miniseries, are unsafe due to appalling lack of accountability. The drug room is open to all, and there is no tracking of who takes what drugs out? Really?! (Not only health care workers have free access; apparently no one disagrees when hospital administrators claim that patients can take drugs from the closet as well.)
Oh, bummer! "Interweaves crime and medical storylines" sounds so good! But this show takes place in smalltown England, so not much rises to a level of 'exciting.' I wanted to like it, and it's gentle, with likeable characters. You just have to NOT be in the mood for "crime and medical storylines," at least not in the usual sense! :wink:
Three of us in this basement—only one of us is acting like a serial killer! No, it's not predictable. Yes, Tarantino would be proud.
Great cinema is dependent on great story, and this great story is well-told. While the pacing may be a little slow for American audiences, this is well-produced and has a terrific soundtrack. My, what a soundtrack! Certainly the best soundtrack (ever) for a fully-African production (I believe those South African films with award-winning soundtracks are European co-productions). I hope Zambia gives us a lot more films this good!
