Hadi Darbani

Denis Villenueve. A solid lineup. A different take on first contact. I loved Sicario but went in expecting a cerebral epic sci-fi.

That was a mistake.

Good things:
- Some really nice visual scenes
- Interesting aliens Calligraphy aliens!
- Clear theme of communication is omnipresent
- A neat score that might be awesome in a different movie

Bad things:
- The acting
- The lack of emotional reaction to ALIENS! The students asking to turn on the TV, all of the main characters
- Lack of useful characters Only the aliens and Louise actually did anything the entire movie.
- Supporting characters are very stupid in an attempt to foil the main character slightly
- Very clumsy exposition. Genre-typical news reports, voice-overs, dumb characters asking stupid questions.
- Very slow pacing. This worked in parts of Sicario, but didn't work in this movie because there was no tension. The main characters never seemed remotely threatened.
- Lousie showing up at school thinking everyone will be there after aliens arrive and there's a state of emergency
- Why can't you translate alien language like you can translate Farsi. This is a paraphrase but in the spirit of what Colonel Weber was saying.
- Useless love interest when the costars have no chemistry.
- Ultrasecure military base lets someone steal a ton of explosives and put it in an ALIEN SPACECRAFT without anyone noticing.
- Many unbelievable plot points
- Poor dialogue Let's make a baby - real quote
- Poor handling of the major plot points Looking through time seems to undermine the fact that the aliens need help. Why did one have to die if they could see the future? Why did only one die when they were right next to each other?
- Very heavy handed moral messaging that didn't align with the rest of the movie.
- Why couldn't Ian also see into the future as he studied the language, or any of the others?

Overall extremely disappointing. I'm honestly surprised critics or general moviegoers like this. The premise was very good. It's a real shame the execution failed so miserably.

I don't think I have ever been in love with a movie, like I'm in love with La La Land. From the first few seconds, till the very end. This movie had me and didn't let go. My english vocabulary is not good enough to express my love, heck, my dutch vocabulary is not good enough to express it. This movie is everything.

It is beautiful, happy, magical, romantic and I could go on for a little while longer but I won't. I wasn't expecting it to be this musical-y, but I mean, I love musicals so I'm not complaining. I think this is a great "musical" because there isn't non stop singing, so people who don't like musicals might like this one because it's more "subtle". I can only imagine how much practice went into all those dance routines and don't get me started on the impressive piano skills Ryan Gosling showed us.

Something that really impressed me as well was the way they filmed everything. It's a very creative and different way, which I really enjoyed and think makes this movie a great inspiration for those who love film and camerawork themselves. The build up and flashbacks and stuff were really cool as well. Yea I really enjoyed that. Also, the storyline, which does so much for a movie, was so great.

This is normally the part were I talk about the actors, but seeing that there were mainly only two actors and they were both amazing (I do think tho, that Ryan Gosling his character wasn't a very challenging one for him because we have seen him in roles like these before. Mixing it up with all the dancing, singing en piano playing though, you got something quite different and I loved it), I'm going to skip this part and say that you should watch this movie, do nothing more, just watch it, enjoyed it and love it.

When I wrote my thoughts on Spotlight, I speculated about how knowing the end of the story going in, knowing the extent of the scandal the team in Spotlight was uncovering, may have robbed the plot of some of its punch. And yet, The Big Short is, in many ways, the perfect counter to that.

Almost everyone old enough to watch this film lived through The Great Recession. They know that the disaster all the main characters in the film are predicting comes true, in all its horrible, self-destructive glory. But rather than taking away from the film, it adds to it. There's this sense of foreboding, of doom that hangs over everything.

A film about the financial crisis, especially involving traders and analysts and people crunching numbers in a fund, could easily be too dry. And yet, the fact that the individuals the film focuses on are slowly but surely investigating an economic massacre waiting to happen, and how each step they take reveals another way that disaster might have been diverted, or people who are supposedly in the know digging the whole deeper, means that the entire film is just an exercise in creating that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. It's not a prestige picture; it's a horror film.

It's also a very weird film. It's not so bold in its presentation that it feels unprecedented, but it feels stitched together, disjointed, and unusual, but in a good way. Adam McKay, of Anchorman fame, is the right man for the job. There is a darkly funny absurdity to the topic The Big Short covers, and with his fourth-wall breaking asides, his cuts to celebrity explanations of complex financial consequences in ridiculous situations, and his jumping between various characters acting wild or nutty lends the perfect tone to the movie, one of simultaneous horror at what hell hath been wrought and unavoidable bemusement at the clowns who steered us all into this ditch.

The direction and rhythm of the film is frenetic. It's closest comparison point is Requiem For a Dream with the same frenetic hodgepodge of images and sounds, bleeding and blending into one another, disorienting the viewer and conveying the sense in which the financial world the film depicts is intoxicating, dizzying, and unsettled all at the same time.

Another aspect of the film that makes it hard to compare to other works in this space is the fact that it doesn't really have a protagonist or a plot. Sure, it has a story, and it has characters who take up the most oxygen over the course of the movie, but more than anything it feels like a documentary. It's far too stylized and irreverent to really deserve that label, but it's far more interested in trying to describe what happened, to explain just what mistakes and lies and blindspots led to the global economic crisis, than it is in rising action and resolution, or showing people growing or changing.

That's not to say there isn't an emotional element to the film. Steve Carell stands out by playing essentially a smarter, angrier Michael Scott who grabs your attention every time he's on screen. The parallels between his character's sense that a catastrophe is looming in economic terms that he could do something to prevent, and his guilt over not doing more to prevent his brother's suicide was--while perhaps a little easy--also affecting.

The rest of the cast do their jobs well, but blend together a bit because again, while they're a vital part of the film, the film isn't really about them. The characters in The Big Short are conduits to detail, in amusing and human terms, just what the hell went wrong. Christian Bale is a collection of actorly tics, but he acquits himself well enough. Ryan Gosling does his best dudebro douchebag type, and is sufficiently entertaining in that guise. And Brad Pitt seems pretty reserved, short of his moment where he chastises his young wards for being too happy about what they're making their money from.

But again, the fact that there's not really a narrative means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The film is not really a story; it's an autopsy, cutting up the corpse of our financial system and exposing the bloody innards, the rotten organs at the core that led the USA, and the world, to the dire economic state it was in by late 2008. In that sense, the film succeeds wildly, and McKay manages to tackle something of real significance without losing the absurd madcap attitude he brings to his comedic works, and somehow, doing justice to the insanity of the lead up to The Great Recession in the process. It's a hell of an achievement to make a film this funny, this disturbing, and this great.

Like Someone in Love, by Abbas Kiarostami. Despite this entire film being Japanese, the director was born and raised in Iran. and he's the same director as Certified Copy, which was spoken in English, French and Italian. If that doesn't deserve some credit, I don't know what does.

Now, if you're the type of person that doesn't typically watch films that deviate from the norm, but would like to start somewhere, TRUST ME that this is not the film you want to start with. Despite loving this film overall, it's not something that I would exactly recommend to people, unless they have a certain degree of patience. It's extremely well shot, and the characters are all convincingly realistically, but if you find that you're not the type of person who normally checks out things from the Criterion Collection, I would suggest checking out something else, and if this does look appealing to you, I would strongly recommend checking out Certified Copy, because that is a much, much better film.

Now, you're probably wondering why I have to add such a huge disclaimer in front of it, and the reason is because it's impossible for me to ignore just how meticulously directed this is. The majority of the movie is in real time, and everything's so natural and realistic that it really makes you feel like you're an omniscient observer on the conversations taking place. And I can rarely say this about a movie, but even when analysing and critiquing it, it's almost impossible to view the actors as anything but their characters.

The only flaw I noticed in the film was a moment near the end where one of the characters lines of dialogue was out of sync. But aside from that, this is an extremely professionally well done film. Granted, he would have drawn in bigger audiences had there been a few more arcs in the story, but when it's abundantly clear that he told the story he wanted to tell, I fail to see how that would be fair criticism.

Wildlife is a methanol fire: it burns slower and you can't see the flames but it does the same sort of damage as a regular blaze.

Because Wildlife burns like a fuse that's building slowly to a soft explosion, all of the elements must be primed to prevent the spark from going out. The actors, the script, the directing must all be optimum to keep the fragile pyre burning. Fortunately, that's the case with Wildlife.

Young Ed Oxenbould (who I remember best from Shyamalan's The Visit) continues to show promise as an up and coming actor, Jake Gyllenhaal makes all the right choices in keeping his portrayal subtle and strong, and Carey Mulligan turns in what may be her best performance to date.

Paul Dano passes behind the camera for the first time and delivers a film full of subtle poetry that many with far more experience will envy, bringing to life a nicely paced story penned by himself and partner (in every sense of the word) Zoe Kazan.

So why not a perfect 10? The film fills its art-house, family drama niche perfectly, but doesn't try to go beyond that. It's content to be just a small film and not a small film with universal aspirations (like Jim Jarmusch's Paterson). There are, as well, some story lines that are threaded then neglected (the friend Ruth, for example) and finally, I felt some of the changes the characters went through were too hurried.

But those are small drops in the ocean of Wildlife, and do little to dilute or douse its power.

The original film is one of my favourite films, it explored philosophy and kept my attention throughout despite being one of the most simple films I've ever seen. A group of people talking around a fire. I was so excited to see what they could do with a sequel.

And it started off well, I was invested during the build up to where someone would inevitably discover his secret. Touching on him finally starting to age was a really interesting idea! But we found out nothing more about it. But the whole ending was just a let down that gave us nothing.

I was invested in the students to start with as they worked their way to discovering who he really was, they figured it out in a really great way. But they lost me when they started wanting to create a religion out of him. The way Tara "leaked" their secret to John felt pretty forced. Yeah it's believable that she'd try and make a move on a cute fatherly lecturer, even after finding out his secret. But the timing of it was too convenient and just screamed of plot progression.

The climax of the film. I really enjoyed the way John spoke with Philip, it was very well done, as was Philip believing he was being manipulated. But to go from that to the fanatical reaction he had was disappointing.

The worst part though, is that we don't have an ending, just the hope of a future instalment that may never come. It felt like the pilot to a television series, rather than the sequel to a film.

Back in 2014, there was a film called "Whiplash" that blew everyone away, including me. It was my 2nd favorite movie of that year and I had my eye out for the director next project. Wasn't very long until Damien Chazelle next film in was in post-production and was already a serious Oscar contender. I think "La La Land" and "Silence" was my most anticipated movies of 2016/17. And let me tell you, it did not disappoint.

"La La Land" is one of the best musicals I've seen since "Sweeney Todd" and "Singing in the Rain". It's a movie that lifts your spirit up and leaves you smiling though out. Even with today's generation of loud politics, four years of Trump, celebrities dying, and endless amount of pointless controversy. But then comes a musical about two people who are dreamers, that deal with inn conflict and show how dreams can lead to success. By making the impossible possible while living in a place where dreams come to die.

Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone were both dynamite in this movie. The relationship was sweet and relatable that I actually cared for what was going on. Even with the singing and dancing use as a tool that the characters express their happiness, sadness or disappointment was terrific. This is the best I've seen from Stone and Gosling. Both of them sparkle in this musical.

Damien Chazelle, what can I say about this guy. Chazelle as a film making is both amazing and inspirational. He's on a roll recently and if he's next two movies are brilliant, then he is the best living director today. In "La La Land", he follows a similar theme in his previous movie "Whiplash" about fighting for a dream and jazz, but this movie goes for more a light tone than a dark one. For the dramatic elements of the movie, I really like how he lets it go on for awhile as an emotional effect. He also got an eye for spectacle, because LA never looked so beautiful and fairy tale-like. What else is there to say, but Chazelle nailed it.

Without spoiling anything, but the last shot of this movie was so beautiful and yet sad at the same time. Chazelle sure knows how to end his movies and that's with a powerful punch.

My only complaint I have with the movie is that a few scenes could've been trimmed a bit, as it dragged for me. And while the homages to old musicals were fitting, but some was a bit down your throat. I wouldn't say repetitive (because it's not), but more of a "alright, I get it" kind of complaint. That's really it for flaws.

Overall rating: "La La Land" is simply wonderful. It's a firework of joy and excitement that it's really hard not to fall in love with it. I'm already looking forward to "First Man".