Probably more mindblowing for an American audience that barely gets any exposure to this kind of material from its own industry. For my taste, Guadagnino plays it way too safe. I was waiting for it to push beyond the melodrama into something more wild or messed up, and I never really got that. He's constantly flexing with impressive camerawork, great editing and a fantastic score, but what is it all in service of? There's not a lot more to this than very basic melodrama. Tennis is used a metaphor for innuendo and relationships, which becomes a bit eye-rolling as the film goes along. On top of that it's not nearly as sexy as some people are suggesting, it feels like a lot of foreplay and innuendo without a real pay-off at any point. His camera doesn't shy away from nudity or sweat, and Trent Reznor's score puts in a lot of work in turning up the heat, but you want it to push beyond that at some point. For me it doesn't really develop into anything surprising and the conclusion it ultimately goes with feels kinda lame because of it. Still, it does a good job at intriguing you with the personal struggles of the three main characters, all of which are well portrayed by the actors. Zendaya is a bit hard to read at times, though it could be intentional with the character she's playing. There's enough merit to the complexity of the characters and technical aspects that kept me from being bored, but the entire time I kept thinking about how much more interesting this could be with someone like Paul Verhoeven at the helm.
6/10
This was a lot of fun and felt fresh through and through. For me, the 2+ hours passed by like nothing. I enjoyed most of the dialogues, of course the camera work, the soundtrack and the overall vibe. The final 10-15 minutes made me smile nonstop, this was just really good cinema. I personally also loved the ending shot. Left the theatre with a big grin and a good feeling.
Good Movie, based on true facts.
About the beginning of the era of freedom in Portugal.
"A Revolução Dos Cravos" (Carnation Revolution).2.3 points -> Cinematography (0-3)
1.5 points -> Acting and Characters (0-2)
2.4 points -> Plot (0-3)
0.9 points -> Score (0-1)
0.8 -> enjoyed the movie. (0-1)
Aka. 8.0 points
With 'Poor Things', director Yorgos Lanthimos has created a film that has quite a few similarities with the box office hit 'Barbie'. Both are about women who start out as objects without any self-determination and, in the course of a journey, find themselves and discover their freedom. Both films also impress with fantastic costumes, good performances, and, most importantly, a phenomenal production design.
But, while I enjoyed 'Barbie', this Frankenstein story is in a completely different league. Lead actress Emma Stone delivers perhaps the best performance of her career, and Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe are also great here. The absurd humor worked perfectly for me. I haven't laughed more in a movie all year than I did in this one. And ultimately, the world that Lanthimos creates is one that has never been seen before. It's really difficult to create something "new" in film in the 21st century, but that's definitely the case here.
All in all, I not only give "Poor Things" my highest recommendation, but it is also my favorite film of 2023.
A very powerful movie. One that starts and ends on a statement. A movie that takes a stance, that don't pander to a wider audience, an audience this movie doesn't touch, but still remains accessible. A movie that unabashedly portrays reality, that shows a community with all its struggles, contradictions, camaraderie, and diversity. A rare movie in which each and every character is important; each and every life is important. Amazing when it's loud but even more so when it get quiet. A movie that shows moments when grief is too much to bear and moments when life and joy explode. A film that is moving without feeling manipulative. The kind of film we definitely need more of.
The most powerful moment of this for me was the credits, when the movie halts to a deafening silence. It felt crushing, and the weight and intensity of everything in the previous +2 hours hit me like a brick wall.
i don't get the point of this film, it's like it tries to tell you something but it's also retarded
I think we could not catch all the details but I just wanna share one
During the scene where he buys guns, the seller says "Holds six shots in the clip, one shot in the chamber. That's if you're dumb enough to put a round in the chamber."
In the end, he uses exactly seven shot.
It’s incredible how many great actors you can shoehorn into your movie and get the worst performance out of everyone; Christian Bale, on the other hand, is the only good one here.
John David Washington is so one-note here, as he has the same tone of voice and facial expression throughout. You can tell Robert De Niro is phoning it in regarding his line delivery and lack of interest.
The whole movie feels like an overdose of “acting pills”. It’s a plotting movie that thinks it’s clever and funny but ends up being confusing and boring.
[9.5/10] The most ingenious choice that Greta Gerwig’s Little Women makes is to chop up the story so as to juxtapose present and past. It not only immediately marks this adaptation as distinct from its predecessors, but helps to recontextualize and connect different parts of the story to make it feel new again.
The audience has a chance to meet and appreciate Freidrich before Laurie has burrowed into their hearts. By the same token, the joy and connection between Amy and Laurie can be front and center from the get-go, without springing it on the viewer halfway through the story. And the bookend approach allows Gerwig to put Jo’s drive and travails as a writer into the spotlight early.
But the biggest advantage it confers on the film is how it allows Little Women to constantly contrast the lives that these young girls imagined they would lead one day, with the lives each finds themselves inhabiting in the future. Like the novel it’s based on, Gerwig’s adaptation is anchored squarely around considering the wildest dreams of its titular set of sisters, and measuring them against the paths actually available to women in their time, and the places their choices and passions take them. The jumps back and forth and time allow Gerwig to check expectation with reality, to trace cause and effect, and to resolve the two with poignance and grace.
It also allows Gerwig and company to flesh out each of the young women at the center of the narrative. Jo March still commands the story and the screen. Saoirse Ronan throws herself into the role, conveying all the punch, heedlessness, and subtle vulnerabilities of the character with endearing abandon. It is both a dream role and a hard one, but Ronan makes it look effortless.
And yet, this adaptation makes time for the other March sisters to falter and flourish. Amy is vivid and real from the jump, with her questioning of her own talents, her sense of being second to Jo, and her truth-telling relationship with Laurie put front and center. Meg’s chance at a life of elegance and plenty, the love that pulls her away from it, and the joys and hardships of that choice are given time to breathe. And Beth remains the heart of the film -- still a little too pure for this world, but one who suffers for her own goodness, reminds a kindly neighbor of what’s been lost, and spurs her sister to take up what she’s put down.
All the while, Little Women is utterly gorgeous to look at through the March Sisters’ misadventures. Gerwig and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux capture the bucolic beauty of scene after scene draped in New England splendor. The pair construct tableaus of faraway elegance and local beauty in turn. But these visuals aren’t gratuitous. Beyond making the movie a treat to watch, it helps sell the contrast at the heart of the film. Scenes set in Jo’s youth have a golden hue, an inviting glow that conveys the idyllic, hopeful tone of those early days. And the ones set in her adulthood are darker and starker, visually communicating the various cold realities the March family has had to grapple with in later years.
As necessary as it is to contend with those cold realities, it’s just plain fun to vicariously share in the joy that Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy share with their mother and friends in their family home. Apart from its structural choices, apart from its character focus, the greatest strength of Gerwig’s Little Women is how well it captures this sense of young people at play, of a headstrong young woman in their element, and that unfathomable, spontaneous vigor of youth.
The March Sisters, and their friends and close confidants, fight and babble and hug and exalt together. There’s a move toward Gilmore-esque speed and overlap in conversation after conversation, expressing the happy chaos that envelops these lives. This story is founded on the breadth of possibility forged in such a simple, familiar environment, on the pleasures and satisfactions found despite absences and meager means, on blessings shared and passed around. The warmth of the March household would not work if those who orbit and inhabit it, did not seem so real in their rough-and-tumble interactions and simple joys.
Those joys, however, are meant to run up against the expectations of adulthood that clash with allowances of youth. That’s the role Aunt March plays -- the naysayer to the slack existence her brother and his wife and children have made for each other. But Gerwig does not make her a villain. Instead, she is merely practical, a woman who knows from her own experiences which choices are permitted and which invite difficulties, delivered with an amusing wryness that makes her endearing even as she aims to stifle her nieces’ dreams.
That’s the crux of Gerwig’s adaptation. The March sisters imagine wondrous lives for one another, borne on the backs of each’s great talent. Jo pictures herself as a bold writer in the big city who never marries anything but her art. Meg sees glimpses of a life where she’ll never have to work, where there’s time for things like acting and society and beautiful dresses. Amy envisions the life of the genius painter overseas who stands with giants. And each finds those dreams running aground on the many limitations of the real world, with tethers made extra taut for the declaratively fairer sex.
All except for Beth, whose dreams lie in the simple doing of good, the making of music for those around to hear it rather than for the masses, despite her prodigious abilities. She is the cinch of Little Women, not merely in her death which brings the March sister home. But in her life of quiet kindness at home, in her peace with what must come and the joy to be found despite it, a joy they found together in the attic and can still share and revive no matter how big or little they are now.
Jo, Amy, and Meg each regains a measure of that golden glow in the shadow of the house they grew up in. Amy loses the artists life in Paris she imagines, but finds happiness in a partner who vindicates her talents and for whom love triumphs over station. Meg is denied by circumstance of the beautiful things and easy life she once pictured, but is buoyed by the care and satisfaction of family and a life built with the man she loves. Even Jo turns away from the “spicy” stories that sell to stuffy cigar-smoking New York publishers and finds her truth, finds her greatness, in the bonds fraught and familiar at home, with a winking-but-joyous connection to a beau of her own. And each is seen sharing the fruits of their talents, passing them on to a new generation of young men and women.
There’s a degree of wish-fulfillment to the close of the film, a heartstring-tugging image of familial warmth in a bucolic setting. But Gerwig earns that warmth. The happiness crafted in a humble home is measured against the metes and bounds of the wider world, and found no less worthy. The choices afforded to women of any station at the time are reckoned with and suffered in, with the ensuing joys and small, self-possessed rebellions made more potent in that unfair crucible. The losses each suffers, the distance between the lives they dreamed and the lives they live, is laid bare in the cuts between past and present.
But in the end, Gerwig does as Alcott did, and makes the fulfillment each chooses meaningful by those terms. The hardships great and small each endures, make it more than a publisher-mandated happy ending when, despite that difference between past imagination and present truth, each of these little women realizes they’re living the lives they truly want.
I went for the laughs and left the movie theater with an existential crisis. I loved it <3
This is the greatest movie to watch when you are high or drunk. The whole movie feels like an existential experience. 9/10.
A remarkable adaptation of a play that is not easy to turn into a film without falling into too much political verbiage. J.T. Rogers does clever cinematographic script, supported by actors who breathe life into hieratic characters. Suggesting that dialogue cannot be found if it is not sought, through the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations there is a deep reflection on the human being. There is tension and suspense around a table, with an extraordinary cinematography.
Not a bad movie. Already seen The Belier Family before so...
And i understand the need of American version, because in USA, something French are not a thing to Sell.
But learn how to read and get subtitles because the cast of Belier presents really more emoticon then this.
I cryed in the last song of Belier Family.
Very powerful movie full of emotions
The journey of dealing with deafness is told impecably , each stage you feel the disappointment and empowerless of Ruben
Well written , Well directed , and very well acted , Riz Ahmed is phenomenal and the sound was great
This is an excellent example of using a great cast to make a good movie into a great movie.
Probably the first four-hour movie that I watched in one sitting. Not a perfect one, but the first fiction that caused me emotions since "Endgame". The plot is interesting. The characters are developed. The soundtrack is incredible. It could have been a beginning of something, but, you know what happened. Such a pity that a franchise with this potential has been lost.
well... at least the costumes were stunning? because jesus fuck, the script is so flat that I am amazed that Cate didn't break her back carrying this movie so hard
Ema is a beaten dog that bites and you don't know if you should pity it or not, because you don't know if it bites because it's beaten or beaten because it bites.
But the dog doesn't care what you think, it just continues to dance.
A highly stylized psychosexual drama, Ema is an over-long song with so-so lyrics but great music that makes you feel like dancing.
Sure, books are always better, but I liked the dark setup and looking forward to the second part...
No Quidditch for years, and suddenly we get tryouts and snippets of a match because it's plot-relevant again. I know there's only so much that can be packed into a movie series, even one with such long installments as this, but a little backstory on how Harry got to be team captain and what happened to Wood would have been nice.
As a movie it's the most well crafted of the series. But as an adaptation of the book, it was by far the worst.
This is where the series starts to get serious and dark.
Beautifully constructed and developed, epicness at the highest levels.
A super hero villian who succeeds with their diabolical plan to destroy the world and ironically save it at the same time. WHAT? So much love for the creativity of this movie.
I just finished watching “The Death and Life of Marsha P Johnson”... spent the last twenty minutes or so with tears running down my face. Unexpectedly, it was Sylvia Rivera’s story, woven into the larger tale that broke my heart. Islam Nettles story too, illustrates how little has changed for transgendered women since Marsha’s body was found.
Everything is just so messed up. Awesome!
It's interesting the way this movie holds your attention, really hard 127 hours that the real climber faced. Very good acting from James Franco. I recommend watching this movie, I really liked it.
Like driving circles on the motorway: there's a lot of movement but it doesn't really go anywhere.
