The first 90 minutes of this movie are absolutely fantastic. They build up Marla as such a despicable, horrid creature that I was actively begging for the Mafia to get sick revenge on her.
The last 30 minutes are Season 8 Game of Thrones level of terrible and ruin what was about to be one of my favorite movies this year. The steps they want to strain credibility were insane. Firstly her surviving after being drugged and put in the water were questionable. The mafia failing to kill her girlfriend was just...how in the world did they fail killing that girl?
Marla just fell in the water (and I'm not going into the 3 minutes she was able to kick in a glass front window underwater and maintain holding her breath), but she still has her wallet to buy things at the convenience store. She gets to her girlfriend literally just before the place blows up, which she had no control over because she literally waited for a taxi.
They complain that they have nothing left but the diamonds, and but they also apparently have a handy wig, a taser, some morphine knockout drugs to pull off some James Bond type of killing of Peter Dinklage. And then when Dinklage survives, he agrees to be her partner. Look, I get she's smart and was gonna kill it with the mafia. But the shit she did was unforgivable, and it strains my belief that Dinklage wouldn't just go out and torture her the first chance he gets. They did not present him as being a "money first" guy, so him overlooking the mother being thrown IN A PSYCHIATRIC WARD is nuts.
Look, I enjoyed 70% of this movie. It was an excellent horror thriller to that point. I would've loved if this movie went the route of Dinklage and the mob being mostly outsmarted by the crazy, maniacally, absolutely dastardly woman. But that movie NEEDED to end with Dinklage personally killing Marla. No if, ands or buts, anything but that ending ruins the point they spent the rest of the movie going for.
It really hurts me to trash this movie, because Pike was fantastic again in her role as a villain and Dinklage really made me want his character to succeed. But that ending was the worst type of cop out possible.
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.
Watched again after a few years. Just upgraded his grade from 9 to 10!
If you're looking for an action and "turn brain off now" film, just don't watch it and spare us the 6-7 hearts review.
I for one, am very tired from 500$m crap like Indi Day and Marvel's poop. So I was very excited to watch this one.
This one is more like Spielberg's Encounters from the Third Kind. It's more about the characters in the film and the amazing journey they go through. It's mostly about the human behavior that will make you think.
While it's not an End of the World aliens movie like Battle: Los Angeles, it still offers great amount of military presence and plenty of stuff that's going on.
So if you actually want to care about an intelligent movie and use your head - go. Otherwise, go watch an X men.
Highly recommended for some audience 10/10.
2-feb-2017 edit: Just came out on Bluray and I saw it again. Definitely keeping my rating.
Watching again at July-2023, excited towards Dune II : Excellent. Excellent film. So called plot-holes listed here are negligible when the overall product is really thoughtful and masterfully crafted.
SO SO GOOD! It was funny, scary and amazing! Who can hate on this film, it's much better then everyone thought it would be, maybe better than the originals! Not a perfect movie but it is a really strong 9.
The meanest thing I could say about this movie is ‘Has extreme Don’t Worry Darling energy’.
I have never seen a movie more desperate to justify itself. It’s trapped in this endless neurosis over what it is- a blockbuster Barbie movie in 2023 by an acclaimed art house director that is fun but also deep but also earnest but also self aware but also but also but also. Every point it raises it brings up a counterpoint to before the audience can, every frame is trying to prove it’s not just product but art. It’s never just Barbie. It’s never confident or even comfortable in its skin. You cannot for a second be immersed in Barbie because it’s not a story so much as a visual dissertation without a central thesis, it’s a student film riffing on the big dogs hoping it’s underdog audacity will carry it but given a budget in the millions. It so desperately wants you to like it, to know it’s in on the joke too.
Everythng is an ouroboros here: an endless loop of argument and counterarguement feeding itself. Isn’t it shitty how the Mattel boardroom is full of men? Ah, but isn’t it cool how Mattel’s acknowledged it with this niche? And it’ll mythologize Barbie’s creator but uh don’t worry she did tax evasion we know that, now let her impart into Barbie the experience of all women. Barbie helps women, Barbie hurts women, Barbie is told to be everything so isn’t she just like women, but it is better to be a creator than the idea, and in the end, hasn’t Barbie helped all these women? Oh uh why is this blonde white Barbie the centerpiece of it all and helping not only her diverse Barbie friends but a Hispanic woman and her daughter? Don’t worry we’ll have the daughter call her a white savior! But don’t worry we’ll have the mom say she’s not! It’s fascinating to watch, honestly. It’s a film that wants to prove to you so so bad that it works but it doesn’t and it knows it doesn’t and it knows you knows. It’s Gerta Gerwig wrestling with taking this job for an hour and a half.
The cast is more than game and able. Margot Robbie is doing her damndest to find the heart and soul in this role, and there’s one scene with an old lady near the end of the first act/beginning of the second that actually works, for just a moment, more than any of the big third act soliloquies or montages with emotional ballads. And as someone who’s seen Blade Runner 2049 and Drive, this is the best Ryan Gosling performance I’ve seen. The man commits and delivers a surprisingly compelling and entertaining antagonist. The movie can’t quite reconcile what he’s done with his ending, or tie it into the themes- is Ken letting go of Barbie and the need to define himself for or against her symbolizing the need for men to do the same, and if so, why play it so lightly and sympathetically?- but that’s not his fault. And the supporting cast are entertaining, but you just can’t have big laughs with a movie that feels like it’s constantly checking in the corner of its eye after every joke to see if you’re laughing, grin stuck in place. It’s not as funny or as smart as it wants to be, and the sad thing is, it feels like it knows that too.
There is some great set design, cinematography, dazzling choreography, popping colors, and some fun high points. But I can’t imagine many kids liking it. And we’ve seen how conservatives have taken this movie. And anyone’s who’s progressed beyond the politics of. Well. A feminist blockbuster Barbie movie will find it cloying or condescending or just incredibly basic. It’s aimed at a very specific crowd who will buy what it’s saying, the liberals who see corporate feminism as progress, who agree that it’s just about a little change sometimes, who are ready for something just a little more complex than a SNL sketch. I don’t regret seeing it, because I was deeply engaged the whole time seeing it struggle at war with itself, in pain for its whole existence. It’s not a boring movie by any means. It wants to say everything before the audience can say it first. It’s the endpoint of The Lego Movie and Enchanted- the corporations interrogating and justifying themselves, and the cracks in this formula are too large to ignore. It wants to be so much, and the attempt is as darkly mesmerizing as a fly thinking it can somehow and someway metamorphize into a butterfly and suffocating and struggling in its makeshift cocoon, but this is one Barbie that fundamentally just cannot break out of its box.
Everyone keeps suggesting there is a paradox concerning the 5D future humans and their ability to save humanity in the past. It's really not a paradox at all. Everyone assumes humanity survived to ascend to the 5th dimension but how could humanity exist in the future if not for the actions of Cooper.. who was guided by future humans (begin endless loop).
Did anyone ever consider the other important character in the movie? Amelia Brand carried on with the rest of her mission (thanks to Cooper). I postulate that Brand used the human seeds as intended and set up a colony. A colony that would thrive and eventually evolve beyond human. Thus Earth is of little importance, and may have indeed died. These colonists, and the generations that followed, would have been told the story of a great man (Cooper) who saved them from extinction. With the ability to manipulate space-time, they would pay homage to their hero "God" by helping him in the past so he may fulfill the mission most important to him, to once again see his daughter. Plan B worked beautifully. But the 5d humans, having the power to bend space-time, decided there's no reason why Plan A had to fail.
9.5/10. There are times when I feel jaded as a viewer. When it seems like despite the breadth of films out there, that I know most of the tricks, to where while I can appreciate a film's achievements in sort of a detached way, when I can even be engaged and invested in something, it doesn't necessarily reach me in the way that movies did when I first started watching them. The scope of appreciation has widened, but the emotional resonance feels muted, because I can't help but see the strings.
And then a film like Room comes along.
And Jack sees the expanse of sky for the first time. And Joy hugs her parents after not seeing them for seven years. And Robert can't even look at his grandson. And Nancy tells her daughter that she's not the only one whose life was destroyed. And Joy tells her mother that if she hadn't been taught to be nice, she might never have gone with Nick. And there's a supreme, heartbreaking look of guilt on her face when a reporter asks if she should have given her son up while in captivity. And Jack walks in on his mother's suicide attempt. And Nancy hears her grandson say "I love you." And Jack sees a real live dog, and makes a real live friend, and cuts his hair to give his mother his strength.
And I wince and I laugh and I cry and I gasp at this beautiful, devastating, intimate, life-affirming film. This is why we make movies. I love popcorn films, with the fights and flashes and epic feel, and I love the big dramas, with their scope and their sense of grandness and the talent on display, and I love those classic film comedies that mix the absurd and the irreverent and the memorable into a single hilarious package. But the films like Room simultaneously so small and so personal, yet so powerful and affecting, have a special place. These are, as Robert Ebert once put it, the empathy machine that is film working at peak efficiency, taking us into the lives of people who have suffered and been unfathomably wronged, and carries us with them as they carve out a way forward.
I didn't know I wanted a film that feels like a cross between Oldboy, Life Is Beautiful, and Boyhood, and yet the elements Room shares with each--the sense of isolation, the loving way in which a parent tries to distract their child from a continuing tragedy, the slice-of-life, impressionistic depiction of a young boy's innocence--come together to form something absolutely tremendous.
That last facet of the film, the fact that it filters the entire experience through young Jack's eyes, is a stroke of brilliance. There's a matter of factness, a certain directness or even blitheness to the way children experience the world. Using Jack as the lens through which Room tells its story renders those events not only realer, but plainer, imbuing them with the unvarnished perception of childhood. The way the film is able to get into Jack's head, to allow the audience to view these horrors and steps to recovery through his eyes, is its greatest strength and most impressive achievement.
By the same token, Brie Larson as Joy deserves all the accolades she's received for her performance here. While still a prisoner, she carries herself with such an air of both utter resignation and quiet resolve, someone who's been beaten into submission but carries on with whatever she has left. And once she returns home, the guilt that consumes her, the anger that she has for the world that kept turning without her, are palpable in every moment without fading into overwroughtness.
The film can essentially be divided into those two halves. The first is the story of Jack and Joy in Room, of the way that Joy makes unbearable circumstances livable for her son, the way that she copes and shields Jack from the horror around him, and how Jack strains and struggles to understand the idea of the world beyond those four walls, to where he can, eventually, help the two of them escape. The second half is far less intense, but still endlessly intriguing and affecting. It's a quiet domestic story about how people recover from that sort of trauma, both Joy who feels the opposite of survivor's guilt and second guesses herself, and Jack who is exposed to a big scary world, the depth and breadth of which is entirely alien to him.
But throughout both halves, there is such a pure emotional truth in each moment, from the simple joys that Jack enjoys within the home he doesn't realize is a prison, to his anger and resistance at having that fantasy shattered, to Joy's dispirited but resolute attempts to keep him happy and healthy, to the realistic, painful difficulties parents and children face when rebuilding a family seven years after a tragedy, to the wonder and fear a small boy has for what lies beyond the garden gate, and the unmitigated joy at every step taken toward some cobbled-together normalcy. Room is a beautiful, heart-wrenching, intensely personal film, that takes an unflinching yet uplifting look at how people cope and come back from the worst that our world has to offer.
Not allowed to do a review yet but I'll say this:
This is how you do a superhero movie.
This is how you do a war movie.
And the best comment of the night: "It was amazing, it made me believe I could become Wonder Woman." -6yo girl
IF YOU THROW ANOTHER MOON AT ME I’M GONNA LOSE IT
Funny as hell and delightful rated R content. Was not disappointed.
Okay, what the f? How did they pull this brilliant piece of cinema off? I am your standard hater of Disney live-action and I am pleasantly surprised they made me enjoy a Cruella origin film. Wtf. I want that little dog Wink. What a boss.
Both Rachel's did an amazing job portraying their characters and their romance is simply beautiful, however I was expecting a bit more. After reading the book, I was a bit disappointing with the fact that it was mostly focused on the religion rather than their relationship. Even though the movie focused a lot more in the relationship, I was really unsatisfied that they kept the endings very similar. In the book Dovid, offers Esti her freedom without her asking for it, however she decides to stay with him because of their unborn child. Ronit goes back to New York and ends up with a man. In the movie, Esti asks for her freedom, which she gets, but still ends up staying back in England rather than going with Ronit to New York.
These characters have been in love since early teens and people have tried to separate them since then. I truly believe that they deserved an happy ending where they would stay together.
These ladies are HILARIOUS! I really enjoyed watching this. I laughed out loud a whole bunch of times and really love the actors in these particular roles. I can already see several long-term quotable lines coming from it. Chris Hemsworth was also a riot.
While it's probably technically a remake, this movie has its own original plot and its own original characters. I'm glad for that. I loved the nods to the original without (always) hitting you over the head with it. Keep an eye out for some old friends.
Having said that, the movie does drag a bit around the 2/3 mark before kind of getting its mojo back for the finale. And make sure you stick around through the credits (which go by surprisingly quickly)!
There are going to be people who will hate this no matter what. But don't pre-judge this movie based on the trailer. Give it a chance and you may laugh as hard as I did.
As far as I am concerned this is the ONLY version of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice that exists. That other thing that Warner Bros. released in theatres is good but isn't a patch on what Snyder originally created. Snyder took an awful lot of flack for the theatrical release, but whatever you think about him as a film maker, you will have sympathy for him once you see how the studio took a hacksaw to his movie. This Ultimate Edition isn't simply another scene or two which adds 30 minutes but doesn't change the movie, it is a sprinkling of expansions to scenes throughout that solve its much maligned choppiness and lack of flow. Apart from the improved editing which allowed the film to breathe, this version of the movie makes you care about the characters more, especially Superman. Following the journey of Clarke Kent in more detail, seeing him actually do some investigative journalism, and understanding his motivations makes a huge difference. This is especially the case in his death at the end of the movie. Without earlier shots of him doing "Superman" things such as helping people after the Capitol Building bomb, as was the case in the theatrical release, I simply didn't care when he died. With the added tidbits in the Ultimate Edition, Supermans sacrifice brought me to floods of tears. Even though I knew what was coming, the gut punch was overpowering! This character expansion also benefited his nemesis Lex Luthor, who with just a few additional scenes (that he isn't even necessarily in), transforms from a spoilt brat into a criminal mastermind. While it was previously suspected, it now becomes clear that he has his fingerprints on everything, from the Africa scene by blackmailing the witness, to intercepting Wallace Keefe's cheques from Bruce Wayne, and Keefe himself being an unknowing puppet of Luthor carrying a bomb in the led lined wheelchair so Superman couldn't see it. Overall, my recommendation if you haven't seen Batman V Superman yet, or if you saw it in the theatres and hated it, is to give this version a watch. I loved it.
The friend zone has been taken to a whole new mechanical level.
120 minutes of jokes, pop culture references and free violence. This could be 120 minutes Deadpool standup.
The movie has a Disney vibe, at least for me. The only thing missing is speaking dinosaurs, but the sparkly eyes, pompous fairy-tale like music and drama are there. Personally, I expected more from it, some parts were just rushed over and it finished too abruptly. I guess kids will appreciate this much more than I did.
I haven't had such fun since Guardians of the Galaxy! Providing non-stop wit, gorgeous cinematography, and an absolutely stellar cast, Ant-Man is another victory for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
For all international viewers, the movie is based on a Romanian fairytale (“Capra cu Trei Iezi” written by Ion Creangă) and follows the original story quite closely.
It’s another superb performance from Maia Morgenstern with her unique way of transmitting emotions, while Marius Bodochi plays the role of the bad guy in a horror movie superbly - he really is scary.
I watched a fantastic video that focused more on the murderer Chris Watts’ abysmal turn in the interrogation. It focuses a lot less on Shanann (which is a good thing because the documentary throwing mean comments towards her did nothing for the story). Check out JCS Criminal Psychology Chris Watts for a better analysis if you are interested in the case.
fun movie. the concept has been done before, to a point -- yet, the material felt fresh. I was a big fan of the camera movements when "activated"
I can't understand why there's such a low rating from critics and stuff. What were they expecting??
The scenery, wardrobe, makeup, everything is so beautiful and colorful. I felt like I was watching a play, a musical, everything was amazing. Emma Watson was a great choice for Belle, Gaston was perfect, the Beast was lovely as expected (Dan Stevens is a great actor - I might think Gaston was a little bit better though) and you're there for Lumiére. He stole the show for me. Ewan McGregor proves again he's the best, most versatile actor ever.
It is exactly the same as the animation, just some changes. It was a great movie overall, I cried like a baby the whole time (favorite 'Disney Princess' tale right here).
I can't understand why people wouldn't like it.
This film is so deep. Tells a story of love and family. And it teaches about life too. Underlines the importance of living the way you want to live, even if sometimes, the risks bring to something bad. But that's just how it works.
This is probably the most charming character study movie I've ever seen; it really is delightful!
I agree that Greta Gerwig did an amazing job and really made Frances playful and sincere and sweet. The other actors were excellent as well.
The pacing of this movie also really stood out as exceptional.. there were so many fantastic little scenes sprinkled throughout the movie of her just interacting with someone or doing something simple, that really fleshed her out and gave both her and the audience time to process everything.
The soundtrack was used really well too. It was just a fun and wonderful movie all around :)
One of the best movies that Disney has made. The visuals and animation is incomparable to any studio (except Disney itself with Pixar) and the story is so well balanced, with (meta-)comedy and drama/suspense mixed so well together. The voice actors really makes you believe in a world where animals can be anthropomorphic and live in a society. A must-watch for children but also anyone who appreciate the beauty of animated storytelling.
This movie takes no hostages... The driving was absolutely top notch, the special effects were beyond good and although the action was relentless, it never once felt fatigued or over done. This movie delivers on all its promises. If you want a pure action flick that wastes no time, Mad Max Fury Road is it!
The best performance I've ever seen about Jake Gyllenhaal ! I enjoyed all the movie.
I cried more than one hour because of him! Maybe there is someone who never seen this before so I don´t wanna write here spoiler but he is the best character for me so I cried like little kid when it happened. I was all day so sad from that. I was like a zombie..
The combination of Spielberg's direction, Hanks' performance and the Coen Brothers' script makes for an awesome film.