We have here an atempt to make: a horror/action/drama/historical thriller, with a well know piece of literature that at the same time is one of the most iconic characters of all cinema history. Luke Evans don't even touch the surface of Dracula, managing to be worst than Gerard Butler in the also unlucky Dracula 2000.
All the motivations in the movie seems to misplaced (the villain is too evil, the hero is too good...) with a mish-mash of at least three recent big ass movies of the genre. We see Nolan's Dark Knight, Zack Snyder's 300 and Marc Webb's Spider Man, all compressed in the same plot.
The sets are good, but not good enough to work as a make up to the weak script we are served with. The transitions in the story are weird, making the entire movie an almost 2 hour trailer of something that appears to be good. This problem with the montage makes the movie empty and rely on the (maybe the great quality of the movie) visual effects, wich is a great mistake, once it does not translate the action with the proper dynamic.
We'll have to see about this expander universe of monsters, and wish that this mistake do not repeat with others beloved monsters.
This film was beautiful and heart-wrenching (SO MANY TEARS AND SO MANY SCENES THAT WERE SO HARD TO WATCH) as expected due to the nature of the content. Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones' acting was SUPERB and incredibly beautiful. Redmayne's depiction of Stephen Hawking was absolutely breathtaking, as he brought to life Hawking's wit, genius and uncrushable human spirit through struggle. As well this film allowed me to recognize what a remarkable woman Jane Hawking was and must be. The imagery and soundtrack were also a great benefit to the film. Overall, inspiring and made clearer how little I (and perhaps humans in general) know about the theory of everything...
They got the look and costumes right. The cast is also perfect. So where did they go wrong ? Despite some fine looking action none of it is involving. Plus the video games pulls you into the 13th Century more than this movie does.
When Callum (Michael Fassbender) gets transported into the life of his ancestor, we mostly get all action and no character development. There's the making of a good video game based movie for once.
Except there's just not enough to the story to make you care about what's going on or the characters.
Dunkirk by Christopher Nolan was just a fabulous experience. I definitely enjoyed the movie quite a bit from start to finish, and usually war movies aren't really my cup of tea (at least not anymore). However, cinematically, the entire movie is just a masterpiece. As a big movie buff, I could appreciate how meticulously crafted the whole movie was. It's so hard to create a movie like this within this genre while trying to remain "minimal", but Christopher Nolan accomplishes it in every sense of the word.
He seamlessly interweaves 3-4 different plot narratives/timelines, while using minimal amounts of exposition. He gives the viewer such a sense of a looming and foreboding threat, while never even having a Nazi soldier on screen at any time. He tells us "so much with so little" and allows the viewer to take in the conflict of each situation (and there are a lot of them) rather than point it all out to us. In that sense, you really feel like you're getting into the mind of each one of the soldiers/main characters when they are contemplating some very crucial decisions that literally determine life and death, for not just them, but many other men as well.
Nolan gives us continued development, closure and solid endings in each one of the tiny subplots that he sets off from the beginning. It's definitely a joy seeing how all the different plotlines intermingle with each other at the end especially with the civilian aspect added in. And, most importantly, he accomplishes all this in less than 2 hours (and by a damn good margin as well).
If you appreciate amazing direction, cinematography, and vision within a movie, this will be an absolute joy. It could definitely get Christopher Nolan that elusive Best Director Oscar come Academy Award season. I watched Dunkirk in 70mm, but, honestly, I couldn't really tell the difference, especially without being able to do a side-by-side comparison to a regular version. Overall, it didn't seem too different from the usual XD or IMAX type presentation at my local big theater. Still, the movie is a visual treat lending heavily to more practical effects that gives a nice sense of realism to it all.
Anyways, this gets a solid 9/10 from me, coming from a war movie curmudgeon. Watch it, and you won't regret it.
[5.5/10] It’s impossible to process Justice League without considering Batman v. Superman, the film’s literal predecessor, and The Avengers, its spiritual one. Justice League is so much in conversation with these films, so much reacting to them and responding to them and in the twin shadows of them, that the movie almost doesn’t make sense without them.
It was The Avengers, the 2012 superhero team-up film, and its billion dollar box office take, that sparked Hollywood’s current fascination with cinematic universes and builds to franchise-wide crossovers. It is the seismic event in superhero cinema that moved D.C. from making siloed, solo flicks for its best-known characters, to packing as many recognizable faces and logos into each movie as possible, and promising more interconnected adventures to come.
On the surface, Justice League borrows plenty from The Avengers. Both films feature an alien invasion led by a helmet-horned antagonist who promises to pave the way for a bigger bad to come. Both feature the occasional extraterrestrial cube which some want to use as a power source and others want to use as a weapon. And both feature a collection of heroes who are not on the same page, and bicker and take sides with regularity, and need a grand event to reunite them. Having Avengers writer/director Joss Whedon on board to help pinch hit for Zack Snyder (the director of Man of Steel, Batman v. Superman, and this film) as needed just reaffirms the inevitable parallels between the first big superhero team up film and Justice League.
But just as Dawn of Justice felt like a reaction to Man of Steel, Justice League feels like an attempt at course correction from Batman v. Superman. Critics complained that BvS was too self-serious, so Justice League has plenty of jokes, light-hearted moments, and the sort of meta winks that have Whedon’s fingerprints all over them. Fans groused about Batman v. Superman’s runtime, so Justice League comes in at a crisp two hours.
And yet, this attempt to imitate the movie that started it all, and course correct from the predecessor that disappointed audience, just leads Justice League to make its own, brand new mistakes, which will no doubt be fodder for some third new direction in the next DCEU team-up film.
The most tangible of these issues is the awful CGI. Steppenwolf, the film’s computer-generated antagonist occupies an entirely different world than the flesh and blood characters in Justice League, and anytime his pre-rendered domain intersects with the nominally real world, there is a sharp dissonance that takes the viewer out of the picture. Everything from the villain’s uncanny valley visage to the fact that the climax of Justice League takes place an off-the-shelf Playstation 2 environment signals phoniness to the audience and makes all the action feel miscalibrated and inconsequential.
But the deeper problem is how underdeveloped most of the characters here feel. One of the advantages of the first Avengers film is that four of its six heroes had already had their own introductory films to establish who they were and what they were about, and the other two had played significant roles in those films. That meant that a handful of scenes to reestablish everyone was all you really needed.
Justice League, on the other hand, has only really introduced three of its characters in prior cinematic outings, and one of them spends most of this movie in a box (the film opens with the equivalent of a Superman flashback). That means Justice League’s hurried attempt to reintroduce its crew in the first act has more work to do, on top of introducing the major conflict, themes, and villain. Only Wonder Woman’s intro can coast on having a full film’s worth of exploration and coast on a thrilling action set piece. That leaves Aquaman to make abbreviated sarcastic comments to Bruce Wayne; Flash to have his entire situation explained in exposition by either Batman or his dad; Cyborg to banally brood in shadows and middling graphics, and for Batman himself to skulk around a cutscene from Arkham City. The result is that only Diana feels fully realized by the time they’re all ready for a team-up.
It also means that everyone comes off caricatured rather than developed. There’s not time in Justice League to really tell Cyborg’s story, so the film ups the brood factor to try to compensate. Flash goes from being the compelling, untested kid finding his way through all of this to being just a superpowered Sheldon from Big Bang Theory. And everyone, but especially Aquaman, starts spouting catchphrases and rejoinders so cheesy, I half-expected the King of the Atlanteans to blurt out “Cowabunga!” There’s interesting threads of stories for each of them, but it’s all either rushed or discarded as the film plows forward.
Despite those mistakes, Justice League finds its own unique, laudable moments, which are entirely separate from its predecessors. The peak of these is the “save one” sequence, where young Flash starts to get cold feet when things start to heat up in terms of the big fight. Batman tells him to simply save one person, and let it all unfold from there. It’s a simple idea, but one that blooms nicely as the sequence goes on, and provides the optimistic bent that had been so demanded in an organic way.
And as much as it follows the Avengers blueprint, Justice League also finds ways to distinguish itself. If there’s a single self-contained arc in Justice League, it’s the same one the Marvel equivalent had -- that these superheroes could be a powerful force for good when working together, but that they needed something important, something that was missing, to unite them. For The Avengers, that was a major death, but for the Justice League, it’s a resurrection. needed a death to reunite them. For the Justice League, it takes a resurrection.
To that end, the film manages to make good on some of the promise of Batman v. Superman that was lost in execution. In many ways, Justice League is the other half of BvS, the answer to the questions that the prior film was asking, and both films come out looking better for it.
It’s a creditable twist that when Batman seeks to revive Superman, and cautions Alfred to have the “big guns” ready, that saving grace turns out not to be a superweapon or a dose of kryptonite, but simply Lois Lane, there to remind Clark Kent who he is. It’s a clever moment, and an echo of that much-maligned “Martha” scene, which reveals how Batman now understands that the way to get to Kal-El is not through weapons of technology, but through their shared humanity.
By the same token, BvS wondered aloud and often if the world really needed Superman. and the closest thing to an overall theme Justice League has is that the world is broken without him. There’s a conviction in the film that Superman brought the world hope, and without him there’s only fear. He is a unifying, reassuring force, for his mother and the woman he loves, for the team that needs him, and the world at large. There’s new threads to pick up, and future teases galore, but the best thing to say in favor of Justice League is that it takes care to resolve much of what its predecessor set up in a satisfying enough fashion.
The only issue is that in trying to split the difference between its lead-in and its competition, Justice League turns out to be a fine but unavailing outing for what is supposed to be the climax of D.C.’s Cinematic Universe. It is not nearly as fun, enjoyable or clever as The Avengers. It is not nearly as contemplative or thoughtful as Batman v. Superman. Instead it’s stuck in a strange middle ground, taking a team-up that fans have been salivating for for decades and making it into a reasonably enjoyable, roundly generic superhero action flick, rather than the world-beating crossover the movie-going public has been waiting for. In trying to find a middle ground between those two approaches, and those two aesthetics, Justice League comes up with a film that’s lesser than either.
The day that Ben Affleck stops being Batman is the day that Batman comes back to become the best superhero films of all. This guy with 0 acting skills is destroying it. Too many awesome films before him to let it pass.
This is one of those films that is just impossible to hate.
It’s such a well made crowdpleaser; from the acting, to the score, to the camerawork.
From the very first scene, you know you’re in the hands of a filmmaker who knows what he’s doing.
It’s long, but you don’t feel its length at all.
The predictability of the story is the only real issue.
7.5/10
A well made film , great direction , good acting and the chemisty between christian bale and matt damon is awesome
Even if you're not a car sports fan you're gonna dig this one.
The race sequences were impressive .
its james Mangold....whats more to say?
This is one of the sweetest, satire and dark humorous movies I've seen in a while. Taika Waititi as Hitler really a big F!?K you to him. Scarjo really surprised me in this movie she showed me a unique character that was actually a joy to watch on the big screen. I would definitely watch again.
If you only care about an ending, maybe you should watch some other kind of cinema. There are plenty of choices for you.
If you care about a great script, superb cast and acting, beautiful camera work, intriguing plot, a tension feeling without really knowing what's happening kind of movie, well, this one is for you.
Sam Esmail has delivered a great work here. It ticks all the boxes that you could expect from him.
An ending like this one, is very subjective, but it works perfectly for me. It just feels right. We found out what was really happening, and Esmail put it in a clever and kind of funny way.
Read the synopsis and don't watch the trailer, the less you know about the plot, the better you enjoy it. I loved it.
"Those are... flamingos."
What in the nonplussed, haunting soliloquy was that?! Went in completely blind and that was the right choice. It felt like watching an M. Night Shyamalan movie. It's essentially a psychological drama comedy with a "mysterious event" happening in the background—a great mix! The characters are interesting, the drama works because of this and some well-placed sharp comedy. It's weird, creepy and the mystery is intriguing.
This was actually my first time seeing Julia Roberts in a movie and she was hilarious. Really good acting from everyone. Myha'la is a newfound favorite. Simple yet effective suspenceful score, artistic visuals, nice camerawork and editing. The back and forth between two suspenceful scenes technique is done really well here. Incredible how many themes this movie tackles, there's always something to disect on-screen.
Some weird nonsensical character decisions that are a bit frustrating at times. Too long of a runtime which would make a rewatch difficult, it was totally possible to trim down. Favorite moments are the boat scene and the Tesla scene—on the edge of my seat! I thought the ending was perfect. There are sooo many clues and hints dropped throughout the movie that there's no way it could feel unresolved at the end.
I've never watched Friends
That was a lot, i mean a lot of talking! Dialogues never ending, people always speaking. for two hours and 30 minutes. Interesting drama, mystery very low key. Too much of a story telling but acting was goog. A mediocre movie.Not for everyone.
By squashing together two thematically juxtaposed storylines, American Fiction drives home its point about America's derivative, stereotypical and one dimensional take on race. Traditional media likes to pander, simplify and stereotype black lives, instead of just telling the breadth of variety to the black experience from each unique viewpoint. By showing both a satire of this oversimplification through Monks success, and giving us a window into Monks personal life full of family issues, relationship struggles and financial woes, we're given a running dialogue that equally critiques the current status quo while also showing the truth of a unique, valid black experience. For something with such a lofty message, American Fiction is very easy viewing; equal parts emotional, humourous and punctuated with a buttery smooth soundtrack, you'll be hard pressed to not finish this one if you start. Does its inclusion in the Oscar race play right into the very problem it's satirising though? That's another debate for another time.
For a movie about writers, this sure does have a great script! Made me laugh many times and the acting across the board was really good. Well definitely rewatch when it becomes avalible digitally.
Potential is what people see when what's in front of them isn't good enough.
"It is an absolute blast. Not only is it a cleverly written dark satire, but it also delves into emotional themes of self-discovery and acceptance that complement the satire in a satisfying manner.
I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially the scene where they are picking the winner and what one group of voters says to the other... It was the perfect way to get the point of the whole movie.
