To the person who said this was Past Lives with robots, that's the most accurate review for this movie. The world had it out for these two.
An art house remake of Big Daddy.
Everything about this movie excelled, from the acting to the cinematography to the directing, but the banality of the story kept me from appreciating any of those things enough.
Dev Patel really said I'm gonna outdo the bathroom fight scene (MI:6) and the kitchen fight scene (Tenet) and the elevator fight scene (Winter Soldier) while also addressing social and political themes and call it "Monkey Man"
This movie is already good on its own, but it becomes 10x better when you know what Patel went through to get it made.
The movie has already cemented itself as a classic of the vengeance subgenre, with echoes of Woo and Park Chan-wook, while bursting with enough originality for it to avoid feeling like a carbon copy.
It's a primal yell of a directorial debut from Dev Patel, already an underrated actor, who uses his unique experiences with religion and his own Indian heritage to bring the story of the film to life.
You can smell the blood and sweat wafting through the screen
A film that just misses greatness can be more disappointing than a film that doesn't come close. Dream Scenario is outstanding until the last 20 minutes. It feels as though Kristoffer Borgli just couldn't figure out how to end it and ran out of time. Too bad. #BestNicolasCagePerformanceEver
What a delight. Flipping genres on a dime and with a cautionary tale of modern virality and the destruction it brings to those hunted by it, Dream Scenario is a fantastic smorgasbord of ideas that really shouldn't come together as well as it does. Not many films can be funny, tragic and scary in equal measure and still come out feeling as complete as this movie does. Excellence, I can't wait to watch it again.
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.
Back in 2002 I watched it "by accident" on some random german artsy TV channel. I wasn't into foreign cinema or even profound cinema of any kind at that time. I was only 18 years old. But this movie changed my way of looking at movies. My taste completely changed from that moment on. Everything about this story is so sad, so special. I was obsessed with Maggie after it. I watched all the movies of the director I could find. It literally changed my view of movies, and if you will, my view of love. This kind of romance, you don't find in many movies. It is just so special. It touches me every time I watch it. The music, the colours, the acting. It's just perfect. The best movie about love you'll ever witness. I'm 37 years old now and I still think that's true.
Brilliant. Easily one of the funniest movies I've ever seen.
If you are a German, you have watched it a thousand times. Classic every New Year's Eve. It runs on German TV on every channel.
It was a fun movie. Let's combine Home Alone, Die Hard and some random feel good Christmas movie. It just works.
Is this going to win a bunch of rewards? No. Will it be watched around Christmas by action movie watchers for years to come? Most definitely
If you like crazy action, death and Christmas? Just watch it.
I'd watch it again just for the Home Alone scene. You'll know when you see it
Spectacular movie, but also very sad since it was Paul Reubens's last movie.
Bold and ambitious experiment from writer-director Brian Duffield, who uses almost no dialogue throughout the entire film. The silence creates a haunting and oppressive atmosphere, as well as a challenge for the actors and the audience. Dever delivers a remarkable performance, conveying a range of emotions and motivations with only her facial expressions and body language. She makes us care for her character, even when we don’t know much about her backstory. The movie also succeeds in creating a sense of dread and suspense, as the aliens are unpredictable.
I'm half tempted to give this full marks just for daring to play Radiohead's Everything in Its Right Place during your typical military in dropship scene. Anyway my boy Gareth knocked out another cracking piece of scifi. You really don't mind when a director takes a few years off and comes back with something like this. There's certainly a fair amount of Rogue One, Blade Runner and Terminator in the mix, the latter of which he takes the Judgement Day plot and turns it on its head defying expectations where I assumed it was going just due to the tropes of the genre.
There's also a lot of stuff on screen for 80mill in comparison to other recent effects heavy films. Gets you wondering if budgets elsewhere escalate to $200 mill mark due to talent demands or that something like this has less behind the scenes VFX artists but take longer to bake? I dunno. Either way, check it out. The trailer gives too much away (as always my opinion) however there's plenty more that isn't shown.
NB. Watch out for the Scarif Easter egg
This film does an incredible job showing life integrated with AI and robotics, and it does it emotionally and beautifully. While there’s certainly influences from many Sci-fi stories we already know, this movie depicts very real emotions caused and felt by the AI characters. The sound design was superb as well - with many of the impactful moments being completely silent instead of tormented with a soundtrack to tell you how to feel.
I don't care if it isn't a real one shot, THAT scene was absolutely insane.
Good action, nice actors, ok story.
Some really intense scenes that seem like a one shot and keep going forever. Really immersive!
If you liked the first one and want nice action sequences give this one a go. It kept me entertained the whole 2 hours!
Hopefully there will be a next one...
If there was a dead body instead of a crater and a narrator throughout the film, this could easily be a forward looking update on Stand By Me. Where it was written by someone like Heinlein writing science fiction for young people.
It's solid, it's hopeful without being syrupy or cliche.
Thankfully it does NOT take a dystopian turn at the end where we find out that Omega is an alien world where the residents e the people sent there. There are things that go unexplained because they don't matter like the half built city, the strange holo-deck, etc. They're just settings for the story, and don't need to take up time.
Sadly, Disney seems to have decided to bury this one for unknown reasons, matey. Arrrrr... if only there be a way to see it.
The Chinese Bud Spencer does not pummel much here. Is a sort of career self-tribute, inside a light Chinese-style family drama. Quite pleasant and honest for what it wants to say.
Brilliantly edited between standard doc style re-enactments mixed with Michael J. Fox film and tv footage while giving real insight to the day to day faced by the person behind it all.
I didn't really inform myself what I was gonna watch so my first thought was "oh. shit.. a Chinese kids movie... that's probably going to suck" but I don't think this has to hide to the big Western players in the field. Most noteable (to me) was certainly the 3d animation. Besides the odd face designs and some scenes involving water this not only looks really good but is damn near photo realistic in the lion dance scenes (I really would love to see a behind the scenes of that).
While the movie is certainly goofy at times it surprisingly doesn't shy away from pointing towards the poor working conditions in the country (in whatever form that is allowed anyways). The conclusion offered is certainly a spectacle with the visuals but also makes good use of music so yeah, my bias was very wrong.
It always bothered me a bit that the Chinese animation studios are eating away at the Japanese anime market already (which is relying on Korea, etc. too) but if this is the level of 3DCG they can offer then that bundled with good stories certainly makes them a force to be reckoned with even more.
Not sure what other people were expecting... I thought it was the perfect blend of humor, action, gore and even some heart.
At 93 minutes, it was a lot of fun and didn't drag at all.
Like me in a relationship: pretty entertaining if you don't ask too much of it.
After Searching, Missing is the second in the anthology of multimedia found footage films, where the entire film is set only on smartphones, tablets and other electronic devices.
While there's nothing terribly new in this outing, the formula still holds up really well and there's enough excitement to move the movie along at a good pace.
My only issue is, Sev Ohanian (co-writer and producer of both this film and Searching), loved my review of Searching so much (honestly, it's so thorough I freaked out the editor--Google "123wtf searching review" if you don't believe me) that he reached out to me early last December and promised he was going to drop an Easter egg reference to me in the film. Well, I watched this as closely as I could and I didn't see anything so... Sev? :sweat_smile::wink:
Legend has it, that the script took forever to finish. Every time they finished a line, it disappeared
I was fairly surprised by the brave ending... which had no backpedalling to status quo. That is truly unlike Disney. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier I'm looking at you
Plot and themes of parenthood and cost of gas/oil for the environment were a bit too easy, but at the same time were worked in really well. I enjoyed all the family characters. For greater impression cartoon lacks... plotholes and one or two big mistakes in world building or character's screentime distribution. Surprisingly, lack of mistakes leaves behind more plain impression than with let say Onward that wasn't polished as well as this one.
I guess, I was already heavily indoctrinated into basic human rights support so I only expected to find complaints about two things:
- too much PDA for conservative folks;
- cheap sympathy with the dog;
Nevermind.
What a great movie! What movies should be like. This needs to be viewed in theaters! Highly recommend.
Ah, I love it when I genuinely have fun when watching a murder mystery! I hope they'll manage to write another extravagantly entertaining adventure for Benoit Blanc's third screen exploit!
Oh, by the way, with everything that's been going on with Twitter, was anyone else eerily reminded of the mercurial "Chief Twit"'s antics when witnessing Miles Bron's chaotic decisionmaking? I don't think this was originally intended, but that character now definitely feels like a parody of Elon Musk lol
What if "Groundhog Day" were a late-80s German gangster thriller with a pumping techno soundtrack, a nerve-shredding adrenaline-fuelled premise and a few surprises thrown in? That's "Lola Rennt" for you! :)
Like trying to get the kids to go back to bed and leave you alone... then realizing you don't have kids.
The movie is the story of a group of children who discover they have special powers when they're together, and of the one, troubled boy who decides to use this power for bad.
The Innocents is the bastard child of other films that led the way (notably Village of the Damned and The Omen) but, fortunately, has learned from their mistakes and gone on to greater heights.
Written to perfection and directed with a good deal of suspense by Eskil Vogt, The Innocents goes harder than any American film with children would dare go and will leave bite marks on the viewer's memory long after the film has ended.
Mia Goth’s monologue in the third act is chilling, absolutely chilling in a way that’s both vulnerable and eerie. Between this, X, and the upcoming MaXXXine I think it’s safe to say Goth is already a horror icon.
