Glenn Greening

This documentary explores the op-ed article that appeared in the Times about SA en CSAM at Pornhub. In doing this, it adds very little, if anything, to the procedings. We get some faces and voices with the article and a bit of extra background but essentially nothing new or groundbreaking. So on that subject the documentary does not go beyond skin-deep, which is fitting.

The added value then, compared to the Times article, is the opinion on the breadth of the industry by the actor and actresses themselves. The difficulty they have monetizing their product, the uncertainty of it al. It's a shame that the lead-in to this actual 'new' material takes most all of the runtime, so it all ends rather too soon and no real resolution or realisation is gained.

For those thinking to watch this for the nekkid ladies: Please don't bother. The whole thing features 3 pairs of naked breasts (6 boobs, if you will) and nothing much more else. So unless your fetish is 'off screen moaning': You'll have to get your rocks off elsewhere.

All in all: Fine concept, subject matter warrants the attention, but the documentary just skims the surface and sits on the Netflix lineup just to draw in people, I fear. Skippable, unless you missed the Times article "The Children of Pornhub" or want to avoid reading it.

[9.4/10] A good mystery has to do a lot to be, well, good. It has to have a satisfying answer to the “whodunnit” question. But that answer can’t be too predictable or the audience won’t have the thrill of following along. But it also can’t be too out of left field or it will feel like a cheat. So any mystery writer has to balance including enough setups and clues to where the payoff feel earned, but so many that the solution feels obvious or pre-ordained.

But there should also be something more at the heart of the mystery than just the answer to who the killer is. The answer should reveal something deeper about the story, about its major players, about the why and the who behind the mystery. In short, there should be...well...a good donut hole inside the smaller donut inside the larger donut.

Knives Out does it all with flying colors. Its mystery succeeds like clockwork. Writer-director Rian Johnson (of The Last Jedi fame) sets up every little detail to perfection. He lays out his suspects and their motives, establishes the victim and the investigators, and doles out subtle hints at just the right intervals to keep the audience guessing, but informed enough to craft their own theories and follow along.

But he also imbues all that mystery machinery with a larger theme that meshes perfectly with the ecosystem and the family he’s created. On a pure story level, that comes down to rewarding the person who works hard, who acts with kindness and altruism even when it could rip their lives apart, while the people who claim to be her betters are a hypocritical bunch who were born on third base and think they’ve hit a triple. But on a social level, it’s about the same hypocrisy in how we treat immigrants, in how people of every persuasion treat someone they think they’re above, how that treatment shifts markedly when it conflicts with their self-interest, and how that immigrant’s hard work, decency, and above all selflessness makes her more worthy than all the scratching, clawing simps she’s father above than she realizes.

But rather than devolving into didactic sequences to communicate these ideas, Johnson does it all with style and with good humor. Even for a murder mystery that mostly occurs within a single house, Johnson, cinematographer Steve Yedlin, and their superb team bring so much visual flair to the picture. Even before anyone’s said a word, the autumnal feel of the piece and the august old manor establish a sense of tone and place within the world of Knives Out.

Once the movie kicks into gear, that aesthetic virtuosity remains. Johnson and Yedlin set up any number of Wes Anderson-esque tableaus, arranging all the major players in a series of expressive group shots. The scene where the Thrombeys descend on Marta conveys the overwhelming chaos of the scene by switching to steadicam and putting us into the suddenly jostled world that the poor girl’s been thrust into. And the sequence where a faux-affable Walt all but advances on Marta, with the thump of his cane and his first tightening around its handle, communicates the intimidation at play.

Despite those moments of fear, and the tension that permeates the film almost from the jump, Knives Out is a rollicking good time. For as much as the movie is a taut mystery and broader sociopolitical commentary, it’s also an eminently fun laugh riot. Johnson knows when to puncture the tension with a big laugh, and bolstered by Daniel Craig’s performance of a colorful Hercule Poirot by way of Frank Underwood, he’s able to make his characters poignant, menacing, or hilarious on a dime.

But he also knows how to deploy them nigh-perfectly in his well-crafted whodunnit. Johnson and company structure and pace their film brilliantly. The opening act lulls you into thinking you know who the obvious suspects and likely motives for the murder of the Thrombey patriarch are. But then he turns the mystery on its ear, showing the audience exactly, and in elegant detail, how he died and who killed him. The opening police interviews turn out to just be a smart way to introduce these characters and establish their place within Harlan Thrombey’s world.

From there, we follow the tension of the knowledge that Marta is the murderer, but also enlisted to help Benoit Blanc discoverer who the murderer is. The devices that Johnson uses in that effort -- Marta’s lie-related nausea, Harlan’s mystery novel-writer expertise in fooling the authorities, the extra question of who hired Blanc -- all heighten the fun and the twisty excitement as the case progresses. This is, laudably, Marta’s story, and the way her position change, from bystander to inadvertent murderer to overwhelmed patsy to triumphant hero, is aided by the different ways the mystery bends around her.

But the most striking of all if the way that both friend and foe turn against her once it’s revealed that she stands to inherit Harlan’s entire estate. Even including the intricately-crafted mystery, it’s Knives Out best twist. Johnson spends so much of the first act accounting for the different ways the various Thrombeys treat Marta, from dismissive to patronizing to seemingly embracing and understanding. But the second that her financial interest seems to run counter to theirs, every one of them, even and especially the ones who seemed to be decent and kind to her, immediately view her as an interloper denying them of what’s rightfully theirs.

That’s powerful. Johnson and his team build a mystery that unfolds spectacularly, with twists and turns to keep the viewer on the edge of their seat, small clues that add up to big reveals, and variations on the usual form that make it both thrilling and seamless. And yet, it’s biggest strength lies in what the answers to the mystery novel questions Knives Out asks say about the answers to the societal questions it asks in kind.

Johnson’s film is populated with people who believe they are self-made, who built themselves from the ground up, but who are (with one notable exception), entirely hangers on to someone who truly rose to the top of his field through hard work. It’s that kind soul who recognizes his equal and successor not in the slew of self-siding progeny jockeying for position against one another (whom he “cuts loose” to wean them of their dependency), but in the one person they all consider themselves better-than. The Thrombey’s all think themselves superior by dint of birth and by right, but it’s the young woman who, through the good character, industriousness, and decency none of them possesses, proves herself smarter and more worthy than any of them to inherit his fortune, and his legacy. And that makes for one hell of a mystery.

For those of us who remember the originals, we can breath a sigh of relief because the basic heart and soul of those still beats in the third outing of this trilogy. Yes Keanu, sans the John Wick beard, is just starting to show his age, and at times is just mimicking what the fans expect of this character, but, thankfully, he isn't phoning it in just yet. Amazingly, Alex Winter seems even more enthused than his arguably more successful (at least of late) partner in time, and seems to be having a blast just chilling with the old gang. William Sadler is as hysterical as ever, playing Death, who has been exiled from the band and injunctioned from even using the name, because of his 40 minute experimental bass solos, and, the make-up scene between him and the two front men is worth the time it takes to finally get there.

There had to be a hook, besides a mindless rehash of the previous two movies, and "Thea" Preston, and "Billie" Logan playing the oppositely named, female progeny of our intrepid hero's, provide that hook, as being raised by fathers tasked with, but never finishing, the EPIC song that would unite the world, have, in spite of outward appearances, somehow "rain manned" a Wikipedic knowledge and insight of all things melodic and musical. This comes in quite handy once their part of the story begins.

It is rumored that Samara Weaving holds no grudge toward Keanu Reeves for repeatedly killing her father, (Hugo Weaving) Agent Smith, in that OTHER Trilogy he made, nor at any time did she smirkingly call him..... MISTER ANDERSON,,,,,,

The ensuing RE-mash of the first two movies follows, with the daughters essentially retracing the journey of the first Bill and Ted movie, with the appropriate musical theme of course, while, the Dads jump time meeting future versions of themselves in the hopes of stealing "the SONG", from themselves, but discovering instead that perhaps living their mission focused lives, and repeatedly failing, caused them to miss out on all the great things in the one they were actually living. Also, they are now pursued by Rufus' daughters ex-boyfriend turned assassin robot, "Dennis Caleb McCoy'", sent by her Mother, Missus Rufus, and played with neurotic aplomb by Anthony Carrigan, in an inspired turn.

Fortunately, in the end, they do indeed get the band back together, and, as we are still here, (for now) the rest I guess, is history.

The best part of which will be said is they DIDN'T screw this one up!!

[8.8/10] I’m currently watching my fifth consecutive Spider-Man animated series. From the 1990s cartoon that I grew up on, to the Ultimate Spider-Man series that ended in 2017, Marvel and its licensees gave us five versions of the web-head in different forms. Some kept Spidey in New York, others sent him off into space. Some made him an untested kid in high school, others made him an accomplished young adult in college. Some narrowed Spidey’s world to a focused ecosystem of characters and conflicts and others expanded to encompass the whole of the Marvel universe.

But all of them starred Peter Parker as Spider-Man. And in the process of repeat adaptation, they can’t help but prompt the question -- what makes Spider-Man who he is? What is the connective tissue that makes all of these adaptations of a piece and recognizable as stories about the same character? Is it just the suit, or the web-slinging, or the quips, or is it something deeper than that?

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse aims to answer that question with Miles Morales, the Afro-Latino teenager from Brooklyn who took over the Spider-Man mantle in the “Ultimate” line of Marvel comics. Miles shares some of Peter’s qualities -- he’s young, he’s bright, he’s uncertain. But he also has his unique elements: his two loving parents, his being torn between two sides of his family, and the different culture he is a part of and represents. He is familiar to anyone who’s followed the Spider-Man character for years and years in his endearing efforts to figure out both his normal life and his superheroic one, and his youthful awkwardness and uncertainty at it, but he’s also distinct from the raft of Peter Parkers who’ve graced both the big and small screen in the last two decades.

And most importantly, this is his story. Into the Spider-Verse uses its combo-breaking protagonist and its parallel universe-hopping plot to ask the broader question of what makes a Spider-Man (or -Gwen or -Ham). But it is first and foremost a story about a young man being pulled in two different directions by the father he loves and the uncle he admires, about resolving the differences between the place that can help lift him up and the place he came from, about figuring out not just who Spider-Man is, but who you are, when everything’s counting on you.

Strip away the spidey-sense and supervillains. Strip away the interuniversal mashup and the flash and fury. At heart, Into the Spider-Verse is a coming of age tale for arguably the most compelling young protagonist the superhero genre has offered in a long time. And while it is yet another cape flick origin story -- something the film itself pokes fun at -- it has the smarts to make it much less about how a budding hero gets his superpowers, and much more about how a teenage boy decides who he wants to be.

That’s aided by the style of the film, which works in concert with the substance. The term “comic book movie” is thrown around willy-nilly to describe any cape movie (including by yours truly) but this is the first one to truly earn the designation. The entire film exudes the bumpy texture and tropes of the medium to firmly cement the movie as emerging, fully-formed, from the comic pages. It’s a tack that’s particularly effective when Miles gains his spider powers, and the prominence of thought bubbles and whirly onomatopoeia take over to cement the fact that something serious has shifted here. Honestly, you could halt the movie at around the half hour mark and still have a tidy and encouraging tale about Miles discovering his abilities that would work as its own thing and leave you hungry for more.

But that would deprive us of the ensuing hour of superheroic flash and fun. Into the Spider-Verse is a joy to watch, with kinetic, color-bursting action that captures the ebb and flow of Spider-Man’s balletic grace through the skies better than any adaptation to date. The stylized approach to character design and animation gives the whole movie a distinctive flavor from the first glance to the final scene. And the way the movie blends art styles to help connote the ways in which this is a crossover between Spider Men and Women from across the multiverse is funny and fantastic.

The films boasts almost as many web-heads per capita as a Spidey-themed Where’s Waldo book, but it works in the movie’s favor. Whether it’s the black and white stylings of Spider-Man Noir, the anime-influenced presence of Peni Parker, or the Looney Tunes-aping insanity of Spider-Man, one look at the horde of Spider-people on screen tells you what’s afoot.

At the same time, the film sketches out its supporting characters with complete arcs. A spider-powered Gwen stacy has tentative but inevitable romantic chemistry with Miles, but is a capable and vital part of the action, and slowly overcomes her reluctance to build friendships after what happened in her home universe. At the same time, an older Peter Parker from another world joins the fray to give us the “after” of the traditional Spider-Man to Miles’s “before.” There’s real juice in seeing a potbellied, battle-weary, and cynical Spider-Man being forced to rediscover his ideals through the eyes of someone who looks up to him (or, at least, a version of him), and needs him as a mentor. And the way the film not only reconstructs one Spider-Man in the background while it’s building up another for the first time, while baking in a story of growing comfortable with having children, is nigh-masterful.

But in the end, apart from the eye-catching art and dimension-spanning guest stars, Into the Spider-Verse is about Miles, and that’s where it’s the most engrossing. The film constantly draws a contrast between the life Mile’s policeman father wants for him, and the rougher-edged existence his black sheep Uncle has cut out for himself, with the freedom and style that Miles envies while trapped in his midtown magnet school existence. It depicts Miles as inherently uncertain, before and after he has the ability to stick to walls. He is undeniably capable of great things, something his family members and reluctant mentors all agree on. But he doesn't know what shape that’s supposed to take, how to be what he’s expected to be or who he means to be.

Then, through heart-rending but heartening trial and tragedy, he finds out. Into the Spider-Verse signposts it a little too heavily for my tastes, but with the encouragement of his uncle, the acceptance of his father, Miles finds his own path, his own style, that’s the true-to-oneself harmonization of the best that’s been passed on to him, from man and Spider-Man alike. He has his father’s inherent goodness and sense of doing what’s right, with his uncle’s talent for improvisation and determination, and his own creative spark that drives him to put his own signature on each move and choice he makes. The best part of Into the Spider-Verse comes not only from when our hero truly becomes Spider-Man; it comes from when he fully and firmly becomes confident, caring, self-actualized Miles Morales he wants to be.

With that, Into the Spider-Verse answers its animating question. In a preemptive strike against those who would claim that someone who doesn't share Peter Parker’s name, or his skin color, cannot be Spider-Man, it posits that the things that made the character so indelible through fifty years of stories go beyond moniquers or melanin. Through Miles’s journey, and his other universe counterparts, it declares that being Spider-Man requires facing down tragedy and knowing the pain of loss but having it embolden you toward justice rather than driving you to madness and cruelty like it does for the film’s villains. It means learning to trust yourself and what you’re capable of even when that tentativeness and uncertainty hangs over you like a cloud that you just have to thwip or leap your way through.

And most of all, persevering, getting up when you’re knocked down, and deciding not to quit. Time again, Miles is pushed back, beaten down, and all-around inclined to just give up. It’s the quality that inspires the most doubt, in his father, in his wall-crawling colleagues, and in himself. But when he overcomes it, when he finds himself and learns to believe in his own potential, he also refuses to stay down.

That’s the central idea of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The film was preceded by five decades’ worth of Spider-Man adaptations in scores of different mediums, and it will almost certainly be followed by five decades’ more. What unites these varying takes on the character, what makes them true and right and real despite their differences, is that indefatigable quality each of them shares, despite setting or style or sobriquet. And Miles Morales gives shape to that lesson, straining and striving to become Spider-Man, and becoming himself in the process.

[8.1/10] Black Panther doesn’t have the aura of a Marvel Cinematic Universe film. Yes, it has the allies and enemies we’ve met in prior movies like Age of Ultron and Civil War. It has the jovial vibe among its main cast. And it has the mandatory, climactic third act battle, draped in CGI and the usual fanfare.

But it also stands apart from the rest of the MCU’s offerings. It is unabashedly Afrocentric in its focus and its approach. It is a plainly political film, meditating on the legacy of colonialism, the oppression of people of color around the world, and the push and pull of isolationism vs. global activism. Though squeezed into the standard, three act superhero structure, Black Panther takes its audience to a different space, one untouched by the rest of the world and, in some ways, untouched by the broader cinematic universe the film acts in concert with.

It is a uniquely, profoundly black take on the modern superhero film, one long overdue, if for no other reason than how it breathes new life into the familiar formula. There’s nothing wrong with comic book movies hitting certain standard notes of uncertainty, challenge, and self-realization. But Black Panther is a cinematic argument for broadening the franchise, showing the renewed, distinctive character these common stories take on, when they’re told from a fully-formed, confident, and different perspective.

That distinct atmosphere is the best thing about the film, alongside the clear camaraderie among its cast and characters. No hero is an island these days, and while the title character has a notable arc that’s done well, the most enjoyable portions of the movie emerge when the plot mechanics of that arc are set aside for Black Panther to chat, spark, and laugh with his tech-wiz sister Shuri (Letitia Wright), his altruistic ex Nakia (Lupita Nyong'o), and his fierce, principled guard Okoye (Danai Gurira). So much of these films depends on the chemistry and connection between the people the audience is asked to spend two hours with, and Black Panther soars on that front, building a rapport among those core characters that carries the day.

At the same time, Chadwick Boseman gives one of the best dramatic performances to grace a Marvel film. Thematically, the film centers on the notion of whether someone with a kind heart but also uncertainty about how and where to guide his people can be a good leader, and Boseman brings the inherent decency and heft to make these ideas land.

Black Panther constantly puts its title character between conflicting choices and impulses. T’Challa has to balance his inherent sense of mercy, shown to the leader of a challenging tribe, with his desire to deliver swift justice, shown when he threatens enemy of the state Ulysses Klaue in public. He has to reconcile his deep love for his father and his deep respect for his people’s traditions with his growing realizations that his forebears were men, not gods, who made mistakes, and that his homeland may need to change and evolve. He must square his country’s tradition of isolation, with the competing calls to share the nation’s wealth and knowledge in order to help those in need, or to use those resources to bring down the oppressors around the world who keep them in that state.

If there’s one area where Black Panther excels, it’s in creating a central character who’s pulled in multiple directions, on multiple dimensions, leaving him unsure what path to take and what sort of man to be, until the right direction is forged in fires of challenge and hardship. The film is a political story, a cultural story, a family story, and a personal story.

It’s just that Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole seem not particularly interested in it being a superhero story. That’s not necessarily a problem. Films as tonally diverse as Logan and Deadpool have shown you can use the superhero framework to craft a multitude of different films with different approaches within the superhero framework. But there’s a sense in Black Panther that the comic book-y elements are perfunctory, that Coogler and Cole had a compelling story to tell about legacy, power, and obligation, couldn’t tell it without including the de jure superhero fireworks.

Black Panther is at its best when it shows its title character confronting his responsibilities as a citizen, son, and leader, or finding strength, challenge, and affection among his friends and family. And it’s at its weakest when it shows him punching and kicking those things in comic book movies that inevitably must be punched and kicked.

At times, Coogler and director of photography Rachel Morrison capture the same sort of raw intensity of combat that hews close to a boxing match from Creed. The close quarters combat of the challenges for leadership are tight and visceral, giving an immediate sense of the personalities clashing at the same time bodies are, and a digitally-stitched but nominally unbroken action sequence early in the film has the energy and fluidity of a splash page. But too often, the film’s fight sequences are a big jumble, edited to bits and nigh-impossible to follow from one blow to the next. Worse yet, the CGI is especially in these sequence -- digital characters move without weight, animated creatures and vehicles disrupt the immersion of a scene, and climactic fights between fully computer-generated figures in a computer-generated world feel like gameplay clips pulled from Mortal Kombat.

Despite the strength of the story that ends in that skirmish, the film ostensibly breaks little new ground in terms of its narrative. Notably, Marvel’s own Thor trilogy covers much of the same territory, from the prince questioning his place as king, to far off lands debating the appropriate level of engagement with the outside world, to unruly yet sympathetic relatives with an appetite to conquer angling for the throne.

But what makes Black Panther so refreshing is the perspective from which it approaches this material. There is a richness to the cultural wellspring that Coogler and his team draw from, one underutilized in big budget filmmaking. The film is rife with different hues, different pleasures and sore sports, that inform the movie’s sensibilities even as it applies them to the smash-and-then-find-yourself routine that the Marvel origin movies have nigh-perfected at this point.

It’s the critic’s crutch to see a film’s story as a metaphor for the film itself. And yet it’s hard not to see parallels between the story of T’Challa deciding to bring Wakanda into the rest of the world, and Coogler deciding to bring his Black Panther into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One of the wonderful things about the MCU is the way that it can create a cohesive sense of place among different films, and foster the sense, through minor easter eggs and the occasional team-up, that all of these events are taking place in the same world.

But despite having a few of those continuity nods and connections, Black Panther feels like it occupies a world all its own, one full of its own color, character, and vibrancy. At the end of the movie, T’Challa opts for outreach, he decides to open Wakanda’s borders, and share his nation’s knowledge and culture with the world. With this film, Ryan Coogler & Co. do the same for Marvel, telling their own story in their own, but also bringing such a distinctiveness and a specificity to it that makes the world of these films a deeper, richer, better place for Black Panther’s presence within it.

Between this and Cherry, it’s becoming more and more clear that the MCU’s best director is called Kevin Feige.
Netflix clearly spent a lot of money on this, you can feel the price of your subscription going up with every new set piece that’s introduced, but the end results are still unforgivingly bland and generic nonetheless.
It’s their attempt to compete with Bond, Bourne or Mission Impossible, but if anything this feels like a poser imitation of those superior blockbuster franchises. The plot is in fact literally ripping off both Skyfall and The Bourne Identity at the same time, but forgets about any of their depth in regards to story and character.
The Russos are clearly trying to recapture that same tone and spark from their Captain America: The Winter Soldier days, but they end up making something that’s more akin to the quality of Red Notice.
In terms of directing they kinda got outdone by their own second unit director with his Netflix action flick, as I’d argue that Extraction is a marginally better film than this.
The action’s poorly done and cheaply put together, lots of annoying editing choices (heavy overuse of drone shots, quick cuts and can the Russos pick a normal font for once?), corny dialogue, distractingly bad CGI, boring visuals and music (why is everything so low contrast, foggy and muddy?); not a lot to recommend about this one.
The acting’s fine, Evans is having a blast, but I have absolutely no idea why an extremely picky actor like Ryan Gosling chose this script in the first place. It seems like a paycheck movie for someone of his caliber. Just watch The Nice Guys instead of this if you want to see Goose in an action comedy, we don’t need these 200 million dollar direct to streaming action films.

4/10

They really set the tone for the 90s slasher film right from the get go; very Scream and Urban Legends style mixed with Goosebumps, and rightfully so because director Leigh Janiak did a couple of episodes of the Scream TV series. I find it to be a perfect fit for this three-part Fear Street film series based on the books by RL Stine. The pacing is great, keeps you interested throughout, but do expect the typical horror tropes of this era. I was able to spot a Stephen King novel and a few of the Fear Street books (as Robert Lawrence aka RL Stine :wink:) in that book store, a Nintendo Game Boy at school, Josh using AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), wearing an Iron Maiden shirt, playing Castlevania on Sega Genesis, and soundtrack included songs from Nine Inch Nails, Garbage, Radiohead, Cypress Hill, The Prodigy, White Zombie. It was oozing with 90s nostalgia, even if they were inaccurate with them. I liked the use of colors reds and blues, and the lighting for the night time scenes. I won't say much about the story, but these three films do involve going through different periods of time which I find really intriguing. The end of 1994 got me really excited for the next two installments which will have us go to a 1978 camp setting :camping: and then 1666 when the cursed started :mage:. That's also what I noticed on the movie poster art is that each of the weapons represents the generation or year that each of films are set in. It's a fun one, so I recommend watching this (and the rest of the trilogy) with a friend who also enjoys spooky time if you can. :knife:

The maturation of the Harry Potter franchise is finally complete in this, the sixth go-round for Harry, Ron, Hermione and friends. Gone (or greatly reduced) are the Hogwarts Academy's whimsical little accents - jovial ghosts, talking paintings, animated plants, hidden chambers - replaced by a quivering mass of moody sentiment, rampaging emotions and stormy romances. It's sensible. The colorful decor we see in kindergarten doesn't usually match what's on the walls in high school.

That's been helped along by progressively better filmmaking, as we've slowly shed the flimsy special effects and inconsistent tones first introduced by Chris Columbus back in The Sorcerer's Stone. The series has struggled with long growing pains ever since, trying to bridge that tricky gap between childish wonder and adolescent gloom, and it's a relief to see the metamorphosis finally come to fruition. The Half-Blood Prince is a genuinely slick, professional presentation, well-realized as a fitting companion to the equally dark, funereal source material. It doesn't really stand alone, though, leaning on an expectant knowledge of novel-only details and events to fill in the plot's many, sizeable gaps. Too much going on in the printed page, I expect, as many well-remembered scenes and important bits of lore hit the cutting room floor. At least quidditch games are back on the agenda this time around; a much-needed (and exceptionally well-realized) break from all the death and doom that's been gathering.

For those fortunate enough to know that this movie was the second of a trilogy, this may be a satisfying movie. The trilogy is M. Night Shyamalan's building his own subset of the superhero genre. His superheroes and villians don't have non-human powers (teleportation, invisibility, heat vision, etc.) but have enhanced human behaviours (survival instinct, empathy, intuition, a hero's heart). Once that is established, our expectations turn to psychological thrillers, as the personalities are explored and the extra- is added to -ordinary. For those looking for a horror movie, a fast paced thriller, or a superhero action movie, you will be thwarted by your genre expectations. Having said all that, here are my pluses and negatives: The acting is superb - James MacAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy and Izzie Coffey, especially. The premise and developing sub genre are interesting. The pacing is too slow for me, but that is Shyamalan's preferred pace in his movies, better than UNBROKEN but still too plodding for me (he writes for an intelligent audience, he should trust that they can keep up). There were some loose ends or lost opportunities for me, Casey Cooke's character, forged in torment, could have been the mirror superhero to our supervillain or at least she could have been enabled to finally escape from her abusive uncle. (Super up the girl's powers of observation and deduction, for Pete's sake). . I give this film a 6 (fair) out of 10. [Genisis of a Super Villain]

Unreal! I didn't expect 'Million Dollar Baby' to be so astonishingly brilliant.

I've said it many a time before but for full context, I do not read up about films before watching them - aside from making sure the film isn't part of a franchise, checking the run time and seeing the genre - so I was expecting this to be a cliché-filled, but still great, sports flick. It's so much more than that.

It's way more deeper and has an everlasting impact that I hadn't anticipated. Even across the opening chunk I was predicating the obvious cliché ending, but as the film progresses and, especially, as the final portion rolls around it just absorbed my total attention - I was fully engrossed... hook, line, and sinker. Some film!

The cast are simply stunning. Clint Eastwood gives an absolutely fantastic performance, Hilary Swank is truly sensational - especially at the end, damn - and Morgan Freeman is Morgan Freeman; what an actor and what a voice, using him as narrator was a great move. Elsewhere, and though less dramatically, Jay Baruchel, Anthony Mackie, Margo Martindale and Michael Peña also feature interestingly.

It's quite the journey the film takes you on, which I just found utterly enthralling to watch unfold. Perfect pacing, perfect acting. I loved watching every second of it and will undoubtedly be revisiting it.

I noted days ago that I was rather surprised to learn that Eastwood's 'Unforgiven' had been so heavily acclaimed, on this occasion with this 2004 film I am the complete opposite. I don't care much for awards et al., but I am delighted to see all involved receive their props for this. Chapeau!

Marvellous, just marvellous.

Cute, conceptually and emotionally rich adventures with a twist, brought to you by the folks who've basically built an industry of such stories. I speak of Team Pixar, of course, which harvests the fruit of high fantasy and pleases all manner of D&D geeks with their latest epic. Onward is about a number of things, from the illusion-crushing indifference of post-industrialization to the stress of graduating into adulthood in a single-parent household, but it's never so heavy as all that. At least, not for very long.

For most of its running time, Onward is a loud and loose road trip movie: a pair of essentially different siblings on the run, exploring the wild in search of the past. What shape the past happens to take, that depends upon the individual. Chris Pratt's elder brother, the live-at-home RPG burnout, seeks a taste of the old life, a genuine sense of romantic swords and sorcery in a world that's almost entirely moved on. Tom Holland, the uncertain soon-to-be high school grad, hopes to learn about the father he never met and, maybe, find himself along the way. Did I mention the half-reincarnated, animated lower-half of their dear ol' dad, blindly stumbling along for the ride? Well, that relates to both goals. Pratt and Holland are great together, poking and teasing like brothers often do, while retaining a sense of radiant familial warmth and compassion. Dad's legs, shockingly emotive for what's little more than a pair of slacks, socks and loafers, bring constant comic relief when the scenes threaten to grow too somber.

It's a quick, colorful film, proudly weird and effortlessly funny, with a witty sense of meta awareness and an intense personal message at the heart of it all. Good proof that, even without John Lasseter, Pixar is still in good hands.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW, NOW THAT WAS AN AMAZING EXPERIENCE!!!!!!!

Having seen a lot of Broadway shows in person, I was sad that I wouldn't be seeing one this summer. But boy was I wrong as when they announced that Hamilton will be coming early to Disney+ I immediately was hyped and couldn't wait to watch it. This is just such an amazing experience with everything in the show being flawless and this might just be my new favourite show.

Every single actor in this show played their parts so perfectly it was unbelievable and the talent on and off stage was just off the scales, just to highlight a few Lin-Manuel Miranda (Alexander Hamilton / Writer), Jonathan Groff (King George), Phillipa Soo (Eliza Hamilton), Daveed Diggs (Marquis de Lafayette / Thomas Jefferson), Leslie Odom Jr. (Aaron Burr) and just so many more just killing it.

The story is so good as well as it gives you a lesson in some American history but with some of the catchiest songs I have ever heard, just to name a few that I love would be difficult, but my favourites are You'll Be Back and The Room Where It Happens.

I urge you to watch this as honestly, it is the perfect family entertainment (maybe 12A) and it will have something for everyone. To people who say they don't like musicals, please give this a try as I have suggested it to two people who are not hugely into musicals and they loved this.

"The broken are the more evolved"

"Split" isn't just a return to form from Shamalamadingdong, but an emotionally powerhouse of a thriller. Anyone who watched the trailer and think they have an idea of what it's gonna be, think again. Putting forward this guys history in films; this surprised the heck out of me.

The cinematography was excellent, same guy who did "It Follows" which was pretty neat. The film had the right balance of tone with comedy and horrific. One minute you're laughing at the intentional comedic scenes, but quickly change when you start to over think.

James McAvoy is absolutely fantastic in this movie. Every personality has a unique purpose to them and McAvoy makes the whole thing believable. Especially when he plays a little boy named Hedwig, who you actually care for and the childlike behavior McAvoy was done so perfectly. The scene when he starts dancing, had me laughing so hard when I saw it, but when I heard M. Night talk about the meaning behind it, it gave me chills. It's about a person dying and coming back to life.

Then again, "Kanye West is my main man".

Anya Taylor Joy was great in this too. Really impressing me from what I've seen from her so far, and might be the new face of horror movies. Her character arc was the most compelling part of the film and ties in very well with McAvoy characters. It's too bad Haley Lu Richardson and Jessica Sula, the other captured girls, couldn't keep up with Anya. They performances were pretty bad and easily the worst part of the film.

It's not just them, some of the supporting actors who thankfully don't have much screen time, deliver such wooden performances. The film also suffers from M. Night's trademark, terribly written exposition. Other than that, this was a pretty solid film.

Overall rating: Welcome back M. Night Shyamalan, for real this time.

Prior to watching this film, I had some catching up to do on the slasher genre, having never seen any of the classics. I stuck to only the originals and watched Halloween (1978), Friday the 13th (1980), and Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). While those three didn't exactly win me over on the genre, I was still glad to have watched them, as this film makes numerous direct references to the characters and clichés of these classics. That said, I don't think you need to have seen them to enjoy this film, as the references aren't critical to the plot and can be understood through generous context in any case.

So, how does this meta-slasher stack up against the classics? It's better in pretty much every way. Both the story and the characters have more depth, with meaningful backstories, relationships, and reveals that all tie to the central conflict. Comedic elements actually land, both in terms of dialogue and meta-slasher commentary (Randy's slasher obsessed monologues are a good time, especially when coinciding with clever intercut moments). Finally, the biggest distinguishing success for me was the ending, which not only doesn't fall flat, but in fact lands so successfully so as to retroactively improve my assessment of the rest of the film. For example, some of the acting that I thought was a little too hammy in the first and second acts (Matthew Lillard's portrayal of Stu) is re-contextualized by the finale and feels much more appropriate in retrospect. It's a well-acted, bloody set piece with twists and turns that had just the right amount of bread crumbs to make them feel earned. It turns a would-be slasher into a who-dun-it that you feel like you could have actually solved, which is a nice change of pace from the much more simplistic classics. In the end, unlike in the case of those classics, with this film I'm actually interested in checking out the sequels, which serves as a solid endorsement to its quality.

EDIT: Forgot that I had taken a couple of notes during the movie. First, the cliché scene where a character is in a bathroom stall and overhears people talking about them was surprisingly solid. And two, being a big fan of Peaky Blinders, it's always fun to hear a soundtrack that includes "On a gathering storm comes a tall handsome man, in a dusty black coat with a red right hand". And given the killer's black costume, it's even somewhat relevant.

[7.6/10] We want our villains to be lively and hateable. We want them to twirl their mustaches. We want them to show their evil loudly in public and harshly in private. We want them to be as thoroughly repugnant, devoid of human connection, that it’s clear to anyone watching how profoundly they’ve lost their way. Sure, we like a good complicated bad guy in our stories these days, but moviegoers still wants to be thrilled, chilled, and know exactly whom to root against.

Vice is a two-hour antidote to that want. It is a paean to the banality of evil -- half exposé, half resentful hagiography for a man who, on the film’s account, did more lasting damage to the world than any big screen nogoodnik imaginable, and did it all by being quiet, unnoticed, and boring.

It would be far too much to call Vice an admiring portrait of Dick Cheney. Writer-director Adam McKay clearly despises the man and all that he’s wrought, to where his film is as much a laundry list of misdeeds and power-grabs as it is a sort of unitary executive bildungsroman. McKay makes his perspective clear, both in the text and in the many direct asides to the audience in the film, which gives the viewer plenty of room to be wary of cherry-picking and slant, but which also puts the director’s cards on the table early.

And yet, there’s a sort of begrudging respect beneath the disdain at the core the film. McKay and company seem as impressed as they are aghast at what their subject accomplished despite little discernible personality and negative charisma. Vice depicts a bloodless coup, an assemblage of power for power’s sake, that flew under the radar despite being at the apex of government because it was mired in bureaucratic tedium, unshowy secrecy, and spotlight-shirking calculation. Even before Vice’s Cheney turns to the camera and delivers his A Few Good Men self-justification and non-apology, there’s a sense of bedrudging admiration next to palpable contempt at the way this superficially uninteresting guy remade our government in his image, due in no small part to seeming so thoroughly uninteresting.

That also’s the film’s grand warning. It presents the stone foundations of democracy and the firm protections of civil liberties crumbling unnoticed because the methods for their undoing are too mundane to grab people’s attentions. While the film’s depiction of partisan food fights and focus group subject more interested in the latest Fast and the Furious movie than in good governance comes off like a hoary, “get off my lawn” critique of political engagement, Vice is chiefly focused on the evil that prospers when good men do nothing, because the bad men are too steeped in jargon and wonkery to warrant much notice or care.

At the same time, it draws out the startling contrast in the staid environments in which these grand decisions are made, the lifeless conference rooms, generic offices, and bland pronouncements, with the hellfire, death, and destruction that burst forth halfway across the world. Like McKay’s last feature, The Big Show, one the biggest strengths in Vice is its editing. Nothing conveys the film’s point-of-view than when editor Hank Corwin shows the prosaic stroke of a pen or an eminently domestic family meal and juxtaposes them with the unflinching horrors of war and consequence. It emphasizes the distance between the pristine-if-unflashy world that Vice’s protagonist lives in with the muddy, thorny aftermath for the people who have to bear the brunt of his decisions.

That’s good because Vice is anything but subtle. Between the film’s narrator (who at least serves a thematic purpose in the story), the numerous title cards and chyrons, and the same type of explanatory segments used in The Big Short, the film is as much a visual essay, directly telling the audience what’s happening and how and why, and what McKay & Co. think the import is, as it is a self-contained story. To call Vice didactic would be a severe understatement, since it not only aims to straight up educate its audience, but resorts to visual over-explained visual metaphors that make The Simpsons’s Behind the Music parody look restrained.

Still, the style, while occasionally eye roll-worthy, mostly works for the film. There’s something to be said for adapting the life of such an ordinary-seeming, matter of fact man with such bombast and directness. And sometimes McKay’s predilection for playing with the form pays off, earning big laughs with a “what if” cut-to-credits and a Shakespearean interlude immediately undercut with the boring and mildly awkward reality. As amusing and showy as these moments are, they serve the film’s purposes, showing how different things might have been for want of a nail and how movies like this one dress up the decisions that change lives in the flourishes of the grandiose but which more often come down to less-than-dynamic, unphotogenic functionaries simply saying “yeah, sure.”

As much as Vice laments the consequences of that ocean of “yeah, sure”s, and harbors clear scorn for the man who uttered them, it also takes some pain to humanize Dick Cheney. It depicts him as a loving father who’s mercenary to a fault but who draws a “line in concrete” in front of his gay daughter, whom he loves and accepts unconditionally, regardless of the liability she creates for a conservative politician. And it shows him seeking power not out of some personal greed or avarice, but to live up to the best hopes of a wife that he loves, and with whom he has an ironclad partnership that balances out both some of his softer inclinations and his lack of telegenic spark.

That’s born out by the performances in the film, which toe the line between impersonation and parody on the one hand and live-in human being on the other. Christian Bale completes another startling transformation, not only gaining the girth (and the talented makeup team) to represent Cheney visually, but slipping so completely into the persona that you nigh-instantly forget that this same guy played Batman six years ago. Amy Adams more than holds the line as Lynne, Dick’s ambitious, rock-ribbed equal who communicates the conviction and determination that catalyzes and sustains the ascent at the center of the picture. Turns from Steve Carell and Sam Rockwell as recognizable figures from the Bush administration occasionally conjure up visions of a darker-edged Michael Scott or the mocking tones of producer Will Ferrell’s impression, but eventually blend undetectably into the world of the film.

It’s a world where elaborate symbolic sequences of board games and teacups are used to make sure the audience is keeping up with each development, where each of Cheney’s “greatest hits” is touched on and explicated, and where McKay attempts to attribute much, if not most, of the world’s problems in the last two decades or so one man and his particular brand of political machine. But it’s also a world where the film’s greatest villain offers no theatrical boasts or colorful schemes or boo-inducing fervor. Instead, he packs a head-down cynical pragmatism, a stultifying bearing and affect, and the slow grind of mundane, byzantine politicking that rarely makes for great stories, but which despite that, or because of it, can remake the world.

Not perfect, but pretty darn close, considering it's ANOTHER "tale as old as timey whimey wibbly wobbly, time looping Groundhog Day-esque, exploration of what would happen if you got stuck in a temporal loop and couldn't get out. BUT, instead of just one person realizing they were caught in a loop, what if there were others there with you, to explore the possibilities, good, bad, light, or dark?

Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti are indeed a quantum match for this screwball take on a potentially played out premise. But, the supporting cast, rather than being mere detritus and fodder for various sight gags and miscues, actually add to the storyline.

As J.K Simmons mused later in the film, "you have to find your really good day, and try to be happy there". Well that's ONE solution, or, is it? Even if you were able to share that perfect day with the perfect person, would you want to be stuck there forever? An interesting question, that has been explored before, but, here, somehow is fresher, and more thought provoking.

Is the paradox resolved in the climax? I was left with questions, but, perhaps that was done purposely, perhaps leaving room for part 2.

Worth a watch.....

[7.4/10] It can be tricky to approach movies and television shows aimed at children but from before your time. Revisiting something from your own childhood comes with an easier ability to slip in that kid sensibility once again, appreciating what your past self felt for those well-loved stories, even if it’s tougher to feel the same thing as a crusty old grown-up. Even unseen family films from the time period of your childhood can be easier to connect with, since they’re built around a style and vision that will be more familiar. But the further back you go, the harder it is to forge those connections for movies targeted at another age group and another time.

Then a movie like Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure comes along. (Read: debuted almost forty years ago.) And it’s not for me exactly, but it’s surprisingly easy to understand how a ten-year-old watching in 1984 could fall completely in love with it.

The reasons this might not be especially accessible to adults are myriad. The story is basic to the point of being stock. Mace, a young boy, and his sister, Cindel, are separated from their parents after crash-landing on the forest moon of Endor. They must band together with the Ewoks from a local village to rescue their mom and dad from the evil Gorax, a gnarly monster holding Mace’s parents captive in a faraway land from which no Ewok has ever returned.

It’s the closest Star Wars has come to Lord of the Rings. The story dispenses with all but the barest trappings of science fiction and goes full high fantasy. An eclectic group of brave moppets, wizards, and warriors goes on a grand journey to save the day, fending off feral beasts, traversing great gaps, tangling with evil spiders, and pushing fearsome monsters in large chasms. There’s a raft of magic at play, with visions of faraway lands and enchanted objects, and even a Tinkerbelle-esque fairy to aid our heroes at a choice moment. Experienced viewers will recognize the familiar tropes at play, deployed without much in the way of twists.

But there’s a charm in the simplicity. The story is accessible, easy for young men and women to place themselves into. The stakes are clear, with the lives of Mace and Cindel’s parents on the line. And a tale of a young boy showing bravery, banding together with a group of people who don’t know him or his family, but risk everything to help save them anyway, amounts to the right mix of adventure and aspiration to fuel imaginations at home.

Granted, some of this could only work through the eyes of the child. The young performers who play Mace and Cindel are, god bless them, pretty terrible, and a script full of repetitive dialogue and extreme reactions to seemingly every development does them no favors. The vast majority of the cast is made up of Ewoks who don’t speak English, relying on mascot gestures and tone to communicate to the audience. (Though a narrator -- none other than Burl Ives! -- helps avoid the nonstop Wookie growl problem from The Star Wars Holiday Special.) And the movie’s middle is flabby, filled with random interludes of Mace getting trapped in an enchanted pond, Cindel getting caught on a runaway horse, and an extended interlude where they have a giggle-fest with a fairy. It plays like fluff at best and filler at worst.

But some of the material here is transcendent. The production design work of Joe Johnston (one of the first people to play Boba Fett) and his team is remarkable. Part of why it’s easy to understand the appeal of a film like Caravan of Courage for youngsters is how inviting and detailed this world is. The homey yet rustic nature of the Ewok’s homes, the imposing architecture of the Gorax’s lair, the bucolic settings our heroes traipse through all have a lived-in quality that makes them feel real at the same time they seem utterly fantastical.

The character and creature design work is also stellar. In truth, most of the Ewoks are kind of ugly. Something about teddy bears with human-like eyes and big teeth detracts from the alleged cuteness. But performers like Warwick Davis inject such life into them in a way that makes the little fluffballs endearing. Without the benefit of dialogue, the performers have to rely on gestures and tone to convey meaning, and it’s a tribute to their talent and professionalism that each feels like full-fledged characters, connected and bonding with the humans in the story, instead of furry appendages.

In the same vein, there’s a real menace to the larger fauna our heroes encounter. A giant rat-dog chasing the titular caravan inspires a fearsomeness in his gait and snapping jaws. A large spider is a little more evident as a puppet, but has an appropriately grotquese look. The Gorax is an achievement in and of itself, sharing an ugly-yet-terrifying aesthetic with some superb movement and effects work to create the impression of a lumbering giant threatening the despite their best-laid plans. Much of Caravan of Courage shares a vibe with Jim Henson’s fantasy productions like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal, and the sharp use of puppetry only helps add to that.

At the same time, the film’s score helps make a fairly simple tale feel like an epic adventure. Peter Bernstein’s theme is oddly reminiscent of the theme song to the 1960s Star Trek series, but also hits the right swells and sweetness whether the kids are palling around with teddy bears and sprites or going toe-to-toe with some burly beast. Alongside the sonic beauty of the piece, sweeping shots of the countryside or intimately lit, misty scenes at an Ewok home capture the eye as well as the ear. Caravan of Courage looks and sounds remarkably good for a 1980s made-for-T.V. movie. The exquisite texture is something all ages can appreciate.

All of that excellence in craft aids a resonant theme -- that for however different humans and Ewoks may seem in the world of Star Wars, there is a familial loyalty and love that unites them. Boundaries of language and culture fade away when lost children search for their parents, whether they’re fluffy or furless. Leaning into the universality of ideas like caring for children, wanting to be a good kid despite mistakes, and a central curiosity. values that cut across different cultures, are an appropriate set of ideas to build this kid-friendly adventure around.

Those ideas are admittedly basic. So is the plot. So are the emotions. But in that simplicity rests something welcoming to kids, goosed with the fun of this elegantly-constructed world filled with warm and charming figures to help children like them through unimaginable dangers. Such elementary tales may not appeal to grumpy adults in the same way. Yet there’s a beauty here, an appeal to the universal amid furry sages and whiny tots, that makes it easier for grown-ups to understand why all of this would tantalize a young mind, and feel their own inner child drawn to it too, if only for a moment.

Obviously made on a low budget and a collaboration between three or four companies this film happily does not suffer for it. Casting well-known character/comedy actors makes the viewer, in particular British viewers, feel comfortable from the beginning. Clearly the story is written by fans of the sci-fi and in particular time-travel genre. Therefore the poking at the tropes and blind alleys that more serious films gloss over is done with fun and true love of these types of stories.There is as much imagination and ingenuity shown in the storyline as is demonstrated in much bigger and more more serious films of the same type and this is the strength of the film. More flippant or less grounded would have made this something that you sat through rather than watched. If you are observant or really know this genre as much as the characters in the film you will spot signals, background things going on that tell you how the story will go, if you don’t, that’s okay, because it’s as, if not more, enjoyable as the silliness unfolds.

Chris O’Dowd, Marc Wootton and Dean Lennox Kelly are stalwarts of British TV although all three have gone further afield over the years their down-to-earthness is perfect for the roles and they all are well-craft in playing the normal but somewhat bumbling ‘bloke’. The complaining mates-conversations about films, music, what their future holds will seem realistic to thousands of people who has sat in pubs and other places and rambling, seemingly pointless conversations over the years. I certainly know I have taken place in a few ‘converstations’ like this over the years.

The situation, which cannot be go into too much detail as it will spoil it for those who have not seen this film yet, involves a convoluted time-travel situation for the lads and being mixed up with the charming Anna Faris, so it was not entirely a bad day for the lads!

Overall FAQ About Time Travel is a knowing wink to the science-fiction well-worn story of time-travel but it sets about trying to avoid the usual plotholes and asking all the questions these films often leave unanswered with a great sense of humour and some good acting but still with a clear love of the genre it sending up.

Not so well-known or watched this film should be more popular as director Gareth Carrivick’s final film as he unfortunately died soon after the completion of the film. Recommended.

There are a handful of movies that I have always wished I could have seen in the cinema when they first came out. Certain films feel so important and ingrained in the year that they were released that I feel tangible amounts envy towards the people that got to experience them at them at the time they were most relevant. Near the top of this list for me is 2007′s Superbad. I was 6 when Superbad was released and so naturally I didn’t get to see it until much later, the point of that film would have likely went over my head at that age as well, I wish I could have been leaving high school when that film was out so I could experience it at its most impactful. I can only image how emotional and relatable the story of two best friends trying desperately to make it to the last party before graduation would have been for teenagers who were going through the same types of situations at the time.

Well as I said, I was 6 when Superbad was first shown in cinemas. I am about to turn 18 and I honestly feel like I have just walked out of my Superbad. I left high school early but was still invited to my prom which I went to just 6 days before seeing this film, there was a strange feeling that filled the room as if it had only just dawned on a lot of my old classmates that meeting up and hanging out was going to made a lot harder after this summer due to everyone having different plans. Although I didn’t stay for my final year at that school I would be lying if I said that this wasn’t a feeling that hit me too at a certain point in the night after running into some old friends I hadn’t spoken to in a few months.

To get more to the point (and actually talk about the movie I’m meant to be reviewing) that is the feeling that I got while watching Booksmart. This film expertly captures the feeling of moving on after high school in a way that most films aimed at teenagers completely fail to do.

The characters feel like real teenagers, with real teenage problems. The performances are all fantastic especially from the two leads who are both destined to become stars after this. The tone is far from bleak despite what my intro may have had you think. I compared this to Superbad for a reason, it tackles it themes of separation and moving on in a mature way but it is still absolutely hilarious. The interactions between Dever and Feldstein are continuously funny, aided by what appears to be a heavy focus on imporv. The side characters also offer a lot of comedic potential that is rarely missed. Despite not appear much in the film Jason Sudeikis is at the top of his comedic game whever he is on screen however the best moments tend to come from Billie Lourd as Gigi. Lourd is a complete scene-stealer in all of the best ways as she commits 100% to a character that, if handled poorly, could have become insanely irritating. Honestly considering that I had only seen Lourd as Lieutenant Connix in the recent Star Wars sequels, a pretty forgettable role that she was given because her mother was Princess Leia, I did not expect her to be this great.

This is also the feature debut for actress turned director Olivia Wilde which you would not guess from how well this film is put together. I would not be at all surprised if Wilde decides to change course with her career much like Greta Gerwig seems to have opted to do.

I don’t see this film garnering much awards buzz at the end of the year but, with the risk of spoilers for my 2019 retrospective, this is absolutely my favourite film of the year so far. I only really had an issue with one scene in particular where the score takes over way to much but that is all I will say about that so as to avoid spoilers. I highly recommend checking this out although I do admit that this may have just been the right film at the right time for me personally, but Isn’t that the real joy of film?

[8.0/10] I have to admit that I’m a little mystified by Midsommar, albeit in a good way. There’s a decent amount that goes unexplained (or at least under explained) in the climax of the film. The pieces are there to put a good amount of it together, but the close of the film is still a bewildering, unnerving experience, as it should be under the circumstances. But if I had to pinpoint what Midsommar is trying to say, I would center it on two big ideas: empathy and emotion on the one hand and life and death on the other.

The former comes through in Dani’s relationship with her boyfriend Christian. From the moment we meet her, Dani is clearly going through something difficult and feels like she can’t lean on her long-term boyfriend for emotional support for fear of scaring him off. When she tries to express her frustration or grief or anything other than “I’m cool,” he either begs off or turns it back on her to make it seem like she’s the one with the issue. And as the film goes on, we see Christian evincing a deeper lack of empathy, acting nonplussed at horrific scenes, stealing his friend’s work, and feigning only fleeting concern when acquaintances go missing.

At times Midsommar lays some of this Bad Boyfriend material on a little thick (especially him forgetting her birthday and how long they’ve been dating, which feels like something out of a sitcom). But it works to draw a contrast between Christian on the one hand, and Pelle and his “family” on the other. While Christian pays desultory lip service to Dani’s feelings, Pelle sees her is attentive to her and responds to how she’s feeling in a given moment.

So does his whole enclave, the small Swedish community whose midsommar ritual our cast of newcomers is experiencing. In one scene, an elder describes their scripture as “emotional sheet music.” Their society is built on emotion as a free-flowing, communal thing, with the climactic scenes involving the adherents of his culture imitating the expressions of joy or pain or horror until it crescendos into one crowd-wide emotional wave.

For most of the film, Dani is still grieving without even fully realizing it, having this well of pain and mourning she’s been unable to express given how her prime emotional outlet constantly deflects and shuts her down. It’s not until the end of the film, when she firmly discards him, that she can fully express that grief she’s had bottled up for so long, with a catharsis and a rejection that gives her the first genuinely smile we see in the whole picture. Through this lens, Midsommar is ultimately a story of emotional expression, where open processing of one’s feelings is encouraged, snuffing out those expressions is punished, and the consequences of both can be severe.

The other big theme, and this one is admittedly fuzzier from my vantage point, is the cycle of life and death. We witness elders commit suicide at a given age, with it treated as a blessing and a choice, with the idea that their names will be passed on to children not yet born and their lives lived again. One of the movie’s strangest interludes involves a ritual centered around conception. And the climactic set piece and lingering undercurrent of horror upon which the whole movie rests is a ritualistic killing to banish away the dark spirits and invite happiness and prosperity to their community.

I’ll confess my inability to fully articulate what all of this means, but the biggest takeaway I have is this. Dani is laboring under an unspeakable tragedy, with the suicide and murder of the rest of her family, with no good emotional support to help her get through it. This community offers a welcome alternative to that, not only its emotional openness, but in its treatment of death as part of that liberating cycle of nature. Dani sees herself more and more a part of both nature and that community (as represented by her “flower volcano”, as my wife put it, in the closing sequence), and that view of death as something both spiritually freeing and not cause for grief is uniquely inviting to her.

But that’s the great thing about Midsommar. Even if you’re not inclined to grapple with emotional repression or cultural views on mortality, it works as pure slow-spun, unnerving horror. The film shares a vibe with past horror classics like Rosemary’s Baby and Get Out with our protagonist ensconced in a warm and welcoming atmosphere and community, with subtle hints along the margins that something is wrong here.

Frankly, some of the film’s best moments come when you have a vague sense that something is off, but can’t put your finger on what. The film does a good job of escalation, introducing peculiarities that can be written off as foreign cultural practices, until it becomes undeniable and terrifying how this is not just a different society’s ways and rituals but something darker and more sinister. For a film that is not only long, but also languid in its pacing, Midsommar is never boring, gradually bringing the simmering horror to a boil.

Still, the gradualness prompts a confession -- if you could somehow scrub away all the horror elements, I would totally stay in the Harga enclave. Part of the way the horror works is by making their commune seem so warm and inviting, to where you relate to Dani’s feeling so content and at home there.

Much of that owes to the cinematography and beautiful images that director Ari Aster and director of photography Pawel Pogorzelski put together. The location itself is gorgeous, full of sweeping greenery and eye-catching structures strewn about their little grove. It’s a film rich with color, as Dani’s Mayqueen getup exemplified. The look of handsomely-set tables and maypole dances embodies the warm communal feel of the place before things turn deadly, as does the way the Harga seem to be one organism, always moving and feeling in stereo. Aster and Pogorzelski frame the images beautifully, playing with symmetry, different depths of field, and close-ups to convey the grandeur and intimacy of even the most horrifying moments. And there’s even some superb impressionism, with wavy backgrounds to subtly convey the effect of the drugged tea the main characters imbibe.

But part of it is just the smiling, empathetic atmosphere created by the Harga. The film uses that sense to its advantage, by both wrapping the strangeness up in “Well, I guess it’s just their custom,” and by luring Dani and the audience in with the slightly unnerving, unfailing friendliness of the whole thing. So by the time it becomes clear this is a death cult and not just a culturally unfamiliar enclave, both the protagonist and the audience are too wrapped up in it to turn back.

That transformation and relatability rests on the shoulders of star Florence Pugh, who does fantastic work here. The shift from low-key naturalism to over the top emotional exhortations could be jarring, but feels right coming out of her. More to the point, much of the film requires her to be bottling up her emotions until they explode, which in the hands of a lesser actor, leave Dani feeling flat. Instead, Pugh conveys the layers to the character, the internal roiling that makes the choices made in the end feel organic to what the viewer hasn’t seen, but feels through her, until it becomes expressed with lethal consequences.

There’s a lot of weirdness and even opaqueness to Midsommar. That makes the film a little baffling and hard to get your hands around at times, even when its cards are on the table. But it also uses that uncertainty to its advantage, lending an unknowable atmosphere to the Harga and their rituals, and a greater unspoken terror when their practices are laid bare. I’d be lying if I told you that I fully understood Midsommar, but that only heightens, rather than detract from, its horror, its themes, and its final exorcising transformation.

As the many professional reviews I read afterwards suggest, Fatman is a movie that doesn't live up to it's promise.

Fatman has a great premise about a gruffy slightly gritty Santa, a boy-child that feels wronged with his lump of coal and a Santa-obsessed hitman hired to kill him. I even think for the most part that tonally it mostly works. It's not overly gritty and it's not overly serious for most of it's runtime. It strikes that nice balance of casual surrealism.

The problem is that the movie knows what it wants to tell you and doesn't have any patience or subtlety in getting there. All the dramatic tension you expected from the trailer when you hear Mel Gibson's Santa yelling to the hitman about "You think you were the first to come for the Fatman?" the movie doesn't actually have much Fatman hunting. There's no series of hide and seek where we see that Santa is capable of defending himself. Even the tension the movie decides to try to generate of the Hitman even trying to FIND Santa in the first place isn't really tension. It's just a road trip without all the fun aspects of a road-trip movie. No interesting stops, No interesting road people. The movie just walks a straight lines from Point A to Point B. Nothing you see even really matters. Santa goes by Chris in this movie. In this small down he knows everybody and everybody knows him. There is however no payoff for this. He saves a woman from going home with a married man by casually reminding him of his wife and kids but while we see her again and she's clearly a friend there's no payoff. It's like a failure of the Chekhov's Gun trope.

There's a semi interesting plot line about Santa being underfunded and having to take a military contract to be able to pay his workers. In retrospect this entire plot line fails to have any narrative purpose other than world building Santa as a factory owner. In spite of their presence all over the final fight scenes these military security personnel plan next to no role in the violence. There's an even smaller plot line about Chris/Santa being grumpy because of his commercialized depictions compared to this underpaid status and while I like the characterization there it serves so little point to the plot that it feels kinda wasted.

Wasted is unfortunately the only way to describe this whole movie. I went into this hoping for a darkly humorous film with a bit of violence and while a lot of the scenes sans context imply that, this is no Ladykillers (either one).

While the debates among the Star Wars faithful rage on about the proper ranking of the theatrical films, or the level of canonicity of various events, or who shot whom when, one simple truth remains. However high its highs, a franchise as wide-ranging as Star Wars with tentacles in television, novels, comic books, toys, games, and every spinoff and merchandising opportunity imaginable, is inevitably going to produce a fair amount of utter crap.

Most of that crap can be laughed off or outright forgotten because of how tangential it is to the anchors of the franchise. Ephemeral stories or characters, dreamed up by folks far removed from franchise czar George Lucas, who may or may not have been paying attention to one another’s work, can be easily derided and discarded.

But The Star Wars Holiday Special cannot be. Despite its status as complete and total dreck, despite the minimal involvement from Lucas, and despite its mostly disconnected pieces, the special has become an indelible part of Star Wars lore, the original misstep for the franchise, destined to live in disco ball-tinged infamy as long as the franchise persists.

It is, after all, the first on-screen glimpse of the soon-vaunted “Extended Universe” of the franchise, the first unofficial expansion of the world Lucas crafted outside of the films themselves. It features the original introduction of Boba Fett (who was designed by Captain America: The First Avenger director Joe Johnston). And most importantly, it has the imprimatur of legitimacy that comes from having nearly all of the major players from the original cast reprise their roles.

It’s true. That’s part of why it’s so hard to cast aside the holiday special. As tempting as it is to write off the bizarre psychedelic phantasmagoria/comedy throwback, there are Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford in all their phoning-it-in glory to remind you that, no, like or not, this really is Star Wars, and you’re just going to have to deal with it.

But given how thoroughly the flaws of The Star Wars Holiday Special have been documented, let’s start out by focusing on what’s good about it, however slim those pickings may be.

The highlight of the piece, to the extent something so dim can be said to cast and bit of illumination at all, is Bea Arthur’s “Goodnight, But Not Goodbye” number. Set at the famous cantina on Tatooine, the song (written by Ken and Mitzie Welch, parents of superb folksinger Gillian Welch) doesn’t exactly fit in with the spirit of A New Hope, but it has a sort of campy-but-sincere quality all its own.

The piece is a Cabaret-meets-Cheers setup that Arthur sells like a champ, wandering around the room and cavorting with any number of rubber mask aliens in a fashion that’s enough to make you believe she has the slightest modicum of affection for them. Again, it doesn’t really work in the context of Star Wars (though the way the song integrates the famous cantina theme deserves some recognition), but Arthur embraces the sweet-ish kitsch and delivers one of the special’s few winning segments.

The other saving grace of the special, and indeed the only part of it that Lucasfilm has ever officially released, is the animated segment at the halfway mark. The short piece was animated by the production company Nelvana, who went on to do the animation for two future Star Wars ventures on television: the Ewoks and Droids series. This segment does feel the most Star Wars of anything in the special, with a space-bound adventure, a shocking reveal, and a new planet bustling with unusual alien life.

But even this piece of the special, entitled “The Faithful Wookiee,” is mostly a dud. The designs and movements of the characters are bizarre, leading the viewer to wonder if the animators had ever actually seen A New Hope. Luke looks like an escaped mental patient who just got back from a makeover. Han’s nose is longer than his blaster. C-3PO bobs along on his coils in a way never seen before or since, and R2-D2 bends and wobbles like he was made via a droid-shaped jello mold. The reveal of Boba Fett’s true allegiance plays well, but the segment comes off as the fever dream of someone who caught the first half of Episode IV in a bar one night rather than the real deal.

There’s other merits to the film. As bizarre as it is to include a scene of Chewbacca’s elderly father watching holographic human pornography, Diahann Carroll sings the hell out of “This Minute Now,” a song that scans more like a forgotten Bond theme than a part of the Star Wars universe. There’s a mildly redeeming sweetness to the way Saun Dann (Art Carney) offers his affections to the wookiee family. And while it gives the special itself no greater credit, the 1970s commercials attached to the bootleg versions of the film floating around are endlessly fascinating as a time capsule of American culture and commerce.

But otherwise, The Star Wars Holiday Special is an onslaught of the predominantly dull, the overwhelmingly chintzy, and the occasionally bizarre. There’s an odd strain of psychedelia to the special, from a parade of Seussian acrobats, to the acid trip background of Carroll’s musical number, to a lite brite-colored performance from Jefferson Starship. The hideous Wookiee costumes look like they were later spray-painted and reused in the live action How the Grinch Stole Christmas film, which would match the set’s hideous green carpet.

The broad attempts at comedy (most of them from Harvey Korman in a variety of roles) are tepid and full of awkward and sometimes creepy dead spots. The long stretches of segments that include nothing but Wookiee growls quickly become exhausting. And the ending, which features a series of Wookiees seemingly walking into the sun and emerging on the set of the local community theater’s production of Eyes Wide Shut, where all the main Star Wars cast members are magically present for undefined reasons, is the cherry on the perpetually bewildering cake.

Still, The Star Wars Holiday Special lives on in the hearts and minds of the diehard fans, even if we’re not exactly clamoring for another celebration of Life Day. It’s a reminder that even just a year removed from the film that started it all, Lucas & Co. were ready to put their good name on a steaming pile of bantha fodder. The special is an insane combination of a space opera and a variety show, a monument to the fact that the merchandising and spinoff empire that’s spanned decades and mediums galore, started off with a stumble that makes The Phantom Menace look like The Empire Strikes Back. But it too is Star Wars with all the greatness, terribleness, and downright strangeness that title conjures up.

I wasn't a huge fan of this movie the first time I saw it back in theaters as it was very confusing and to be honest, without the understanding about how it fit into the overall story, it was kind of boring. However, I also hadn't read the book at the time, and that would have helped me a lot.

I just rewatched the movie yesterday after reading the book to my children and liked it a LOT more. I was actually impressed how the filmmakers took the 800+ pages of book story & made it fit into 2 hrs & 15 mins of screen time. Sure, it's not perfect & the kids were a little miffed at what they left out from the book story, but it gave me the chance to explain about choices filmmakers have to make when adapting a story that people know so well. Besides, all that stuff they liked was STILL in the book...it's not like it is erased from existence.

Having said that, even not having read the book, the character Dolores Umbridge was done perfectly. In my opinion, she is one of the great villains I've ever seen even though she's ignorant of her own villain-ness [villainity?]. I wanted to punch her in the face when I saw the movie, and only wanted to do it more after reading the book. That's a good character.

Favorite part of the movie: The duel between the Death Eaters & Order of the Phoenix. Would have liked the Dumbledore/Voldemort showdown to be a little longer or have been able to include more verbal back-and-forth between them.

But, if you're ONLY watching the movies without the added depth of the information in the book, this is one of the weaker chapters in the series.

[7.6/10] One of the best tacks a horror film can take is rooting its supernatural or outsized sense of terror in something real. That grain of truth at the core of a movie’s scares makes them more vivid and gripping than bare, spooky scenes or the usual collection of ghoulies.

It certainly works to the benefit of The Visit. The film tells the story of two young children, Becca and Tyler, visiting their estranged grandparents for the first time. “Pop Pop” and “Nana” behave strangely, rumbling and being ill in the middle of the night or sneaking out to a mysterious shed, in a way that unnerves their grandchildren.

The smartest choice the film makes is to walk the line between whether this is the sign of something sinister or wrong, or whether it’s simply a combination of dementia and unfamiliarity that’s disturbing the kids. It’s a horror movie, so it’s not hard to guess how things play out, but the film gains strength by playing with that ambiguity. Outside the confines of a Hollywood picture, kids can have trouble relating to their grandparents, understanding the physical and mental challenges their elders are going through. Using that natural anxiety, that natural misunderstanding, both serves as a means to muddy the waters of What’s Really Going On, and to elevate the frightening qualities of when Nana and Pop Pop are acting out.

If there’s a smarter choice, however, it’s in the casting of the two young leads who carry the film. Olivia DeJonge plays Becca, the older sibling who is a budding director, out to document this momentous and fraught family occasion, with a combination of precociousness and vulnerability. Ed Oxenbould plays Tyler, Becca’s colorful, freestyle-rapping little brother, who makes for an amusingly free-wheeling yin to Becca’s very deliberate yang.

Centering a movie around kids is hard, as the challenges of finding the core of a character and maintaining it from beginning to end can be difficult for young actors. But DeJonge and Oxenbould both give their characters a sense of realness in their childlike reactions to the world around them, but also deliver the emotional layers to that experience to make them compelling figures and not just props in this drama.

Much of that comes from the script penned by the famed/notorious M. Night Shyamalan, who also directs the film. He too captures the inquisitive, precious spirit of childhood, while making Becca and Tyler easy characters to become endeared to and fear for. The film also features one of Shyamalan’s tightest scripts. As much as Shyamalan takes time out to be a little loose and show the kids being kids, helping to establish character and tone, he also dots every “i” and crosses every “t” in terms of setting up the mystery and providing plausible hints, convincing red herrings, and a solid build to the truth about what’s happening with their grandparents.

If anything, the film’s narrative is a little too neat. Emotional beats or noted characteristics come back into play at just the right moment, to the point that the viewer can see the strings of why some detail or story was told in the prelude. The plot never feels too convenient, but at times it moves like it’s on rails.

The same cannot be said, however, for the cinematography. Shyamalan employs the “found footage” conceit here, and it gives him a chance to use perspective and the verisimilitude of that choice to accentuate his scares. More than anything, it allows us to better know Becca and Tyler. If we’re not literally seeing their perspective, hearing their voice and seeing their point-of-view from behind the camera, then we see them in confessionals, opening up in the piercing way only a camera lens can admit.

Shyamalan uses that choice -- having the kids “filming” almost all of the movie, for both terror and fun. The hand-held conceit turns a simple game of hide and seek, or a chance encounter with a bystander on a visit to an old high school, into terrifying episodes, filled with crawling figures or troubling confrontations. But it also gives Tyler the chance to goof off in front of the camera in the way a ten year old would, or for Becca to amusingly wax rhapsodic over not wanting to be too intentional in her zooms and cuts, with Shyamalan clearly having a good time poking fun at his profession through the eyes of the child.

The only problem, then, is that once Shyamalan has laid down that initial layer of humor and creepiness, the inevitable reveal leads to a bit of the air coming out of the picture rather than the terror being heightened. Once the scales fall and the ambiguity is no longer there to goose the scares, the film becomes more stock in its horror, and the emotional climaxes coincide with the horror climaxes a little too easily.

Still, The Visit isn’t content to merely offer a snootful of well-crafted horror and an endearing, if frightening kid adventure. There’s a heavily-underlined but potent theme about acceptance and processing anger for those who’ve hurt us, particularly family members. The film isn’t shy in the way it connects the feelings of Becca and Tyler’s mom (Kathryn Hahn, who makes a strong impression in just a little bit of screentime) toward the parents she hasn’t spoken to in a decade and a half, with Becca and Tyler’s own feelings about their absentee dad. As with the scary side of the movie, The Visit pays both of these internal challenges a little too easily, but still convincingly.

It’s hard not to draw comparisons with Shyamalan’s breakthrough film, The Sixth Sense, give both movies’ use of talented child actors and themes of making peace with difficult parts of our lives, but The Visit stands on its own. It’s a tidier film, more self-contained, more human and unvarnished, with its single-location focus and more conventional scares. And it finds the sweet spot between the real things that unnerve us, and the grander horrors of the screen, to make an effective vignette about two kids finding their way through one uncertain situation and resolving another.

[9.3/10] At first blush, Baby Driver writer-director Edgar Wright and fellow director Wes Anderson don’t seem like a natural pairing. Wright’s films, like Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead tend to be overtly comedic, include a good quotient of action, and bring an adventure-focused quality to the proceedings. Anderson’s, by contrast, tend to be quieter, more droll pictures, that are certainly funny and have their share of exciting moments, but which find their form in the more reserved, music box sensibilities of Anderson’s oeuvre.

And yet, Wright and Anderson’s films have something very much in common. They both create films where it seems like the world was built to fit their characters, rather than more typical films where the main personalities find themselves struggling in a world that’s indifferent to them or even more commonly, which doesn’t fit them at all. Whether it’s Anderson’s elegant dioramas or Wright’s “everything’s foreshadowing” rube goldberg machines, the environments of these films bend to our heroes, not the other way around, resulting in some wonderfully well-choreographed cinema.

Baby Driver is the apotheosis of this tack, brought to bear in the form of car chases, gunfights, and the best jukebox soundtrack this side of the galaxy (and any attendant guardians). Indeed, Marvel Studios’ Guardians is a nice reference point, as both films not only feature countless rockin’ tunes, but also center on roguish but decent young men, holding onto to the last holy artifacts of their mother, finding solace in music and falling in with a rough crowd before deciding to stand for something more. It’s kismet that star Ansel Elgort, who plays the lead (appropriately named “Baby’), is signed on to be the past and future Han Solo in the latest standalone Star Wars flick, a character who’s very much in the DNA of Guardians’ Peter “Star-Lord” Quill.

Independent of any comic book counterparts, however, Baby Driver doesn’t offer much in terms of an original premise. Baby is a badass driver and a decent kid, mixed up with some bad folks, tentative about the prospect of blood and his hands, wanting to start a new life with his lady love. There are a lot of tropes in the film: the quiet but effective young naif, the loose cannon gangster, the slimy mastermind, the ingenue who represents a beacon of hope, the inevitable moral dilemma.

But what the film lacks in originality in its setup, it more than makes up for in performance, texture, and execution. Baby Driver has a murderer’s row of performers who chew up and spit out Wright’s script and make what could otherwise be stock character come alive and compensate for any dearth of depth with the sheer vividness of their presence.

Kevin Spacey looks alive for the first time in ages, bringing a blasé menace as the organizer of each heist. Jamie Foxx is at his extroverted best, rolling through pointed monologues and bringing a lived-in flavor of crazy. Lily James has enough homespun, wanderlust charm to balance out her underwritten part. Elgort is necessarily more reserved, but equally endearing and a fine fulcrum for the movie. And Jon Hamm brings his Mad Men practiced-gentility in a fashion that makes him seem like that much monstrous when the scales fall.
But while the performances carry the film in its quieter moments, what sets Baby Driver apart is sequence after superlative sequence of breathtaking kinetic cinema. Not content to simply toss in explosive but empty action to keep the heart-pumping, Wright, cinematographer Bill Pope, and editor Paul Machliss create these elegantly constructed set pieces of gorgeous synchronous stunts, twists, and turns, the hum right along with the music, just like the protagonist.

That works whether Baby is blowing the doors off the film’s opening with a series of death-defying terms perfectly sequenced to his backing track. It works when the young man finds himself embroiled in a firefight where surprise shots and returned fire blast back and forth in time with the beat. It works in chases on foot as the rhythmic thump of the tune of the moment matches the energy of pursuers and pursued alike. Even when Baby goes to get coffee, the world moves with him; from the graffiti on the walls to the buskers on the street everything goes where he goes.

In the same way, the film doesn’t so much present action scenes as it does ballets of chrome and octane. Baby Driver oozes with style and tempo, knowing how to hold the audience’s attention through great escapes that and close scrapes that keep topping one another, and quieter scenes where the tension comes from sweet interactions juxtaposed with combustive elements, leading the viewer to wonder which will win the day.

It’s also a near perfectly-paced movie. Like a perfect mixtape, Wright knows when to kick things into gear and when to slow things down to let the audience catch its breath before putting his foot on the gas once more. While the film starts to feel a bit overextended at the very end, with the villain creeping into unkillable slasher territory, for the vast majority of its runtime it holds your attention from moment to moment and scene to scene expertly. In that, Wright matches the talents of his protagonist, directing and maneuvering this complex machine like it were a rough-and-tumble ballerina, full of slick thrills and inimitable grace.

He achieves this with a movie, a setting, and a lead character, that each move like clockwork in sync with one another. While Baby Driver is neither as quiet or twee as Wes Anderson’s work, it brings with it the film’s own sense of longing and melancholy beneath an intricately constructed world. Every scene is a dance, every moment a confluence of sound and imagery and movement, whether in the pulse-pounding races against cops or robbers, or gauzy imaginings of another life that might be. In Baby Driver, Wright has built his most elegant, intricate toy, and it’s a treat and a pleasure to see him play on the screen once again.

Wisely retaining the visual aesthetic of Azkaban, albeit with a little more colour, this does lack the visual flourishes and background details that characterised the previous entry. The filmmakers have also recognised the need to streamline Rowling’s novels and keep the focus largely on Harry, though Brendan Gleeson is also a great addition to the secondary characters as Moody. It’s a shame then that a large portion of the plot focuses on a tournament that offers very little except some fun set pieces and the coming of age themes involving teenage jealousy, friendship difficulties and attraction don’t feel as integrated into the plot as last time. Part of the problem is that much of this feels largely inconsequential to the impending return of Voldemort. His return has been teased for three entries and right from the start, it’s clear the film is building to it. Fortunately, the final portion of the film doesn’t disappoint and Ralph Fiennes is deliciously arrogant, evil and appears to be having a great time. There is an intensity and ultimately a sadness to the end of the film as the central trio are faced with mortality and death that takes the series forward into more uncertain times and a recognition that a darker more adult world awaits them beyond the seemingly safe confines of their environment.

The entry of Voldemort into the series at the end of Goblet of Fire means that this entry feels much less episodic and more of a direct continuation from the fallout of the last film. There is an even greater focus on jettisoning much of the extraneous plot and whimsy of Rowling’s world that mean even Ron and Hermione add little to the story. Harry’s guilt and trauma and his desire to isolate himself form a large part of the plot and Radcliffe manages to pull off Harry’s anger and frustration without ever making him unlikeable. That the film returns to the importance of Harry’s friends in his life is unsurprising, but the film balances this with the repercussions of Voldermort’s return on the wider world that Rowling has created - the ongoing thread of denial of the truth and control of information seemingly even more relevant than when the film was made and Imelda Staunton is a wonderful addition to the cast. The previous entry has also given the series a real sense of danger to the magical powers shown, and there is also a much stronger visual style to the film here than the rather flat Goblet of Fire, the final act in the Ministry of Magic being a great example. It’s a shame the final emotional beats of the film don’t hit home as strong as they should and it’s somewhat ironic that after complaints that previous entries tried to include too much of the books, this is the one entry in the film series that would have benefitted from more material to work with.

It sure is pretty. And not much else. It is set up set up set up, and I get it, it’s a part 1. But even part 1 movies have to be movies in of themselves. The climax is the limpest one in recent memory. Zendaya literally tells us this is the beginning, in case we forgot the title card.

And again, I get it. This is based off a book from 1965. But the politics… there’s a fatsuit so fatness can represent greed and gluttony. There’s a mystic and duplicitous Asian doctor. Zendaya is an exotic object for the incredibly pale white savior messiah to be entranced by and lust after. The aforementioned climax is pale boy fighting against a growling, vicious, and dark skinned black man. I know, the book is from the 60s. But there are ways to update or confront that. But Villenueve chose to take on this film, and chose to adapt it as is.

What results in a pretty film that hits every beat you’d expect without making a case for what makes Dune different from Star Wars besides BBC nature documentary shots. The actors are good; Isaacs and Mamoa stand out. Isaacs is a great father archetype; I didn’t expect it from him beforehand but then seeing it in action he’s a perfect fit. And Mamoa has a looseness and natural charisma that livens up the proceedings and makes the world more lived in. But they aren’t enough to lift a film that’s everything I felt about Blade Runner 2049 amplified. All visual, no heart.

And they wasted my man Bautista! I’m sure he’d get more in sequels, but those might not happen! I was waiting the whole time for him to steal a scene and got nothing! He didn’t even wear tiny glasses! This film is lucky it didn’t get zero stars from me.

I haven't seen this movie for a really long time and just bought the new restoration from a 4k master on blu-ray and was happy to watch it. I thought it wouldn't be as good as I remembered it, because most of the time you realize that movies you liked in your childhood weren't actually that good.

That's however in no way true for Rambo (the German title of "First Blood" which is why I always got confused in the past when I heard the original title and thought that it was a part of the franchise I hadn't yet seen).

The restoration looks really good (except for some scenes that stand out because of their worse quality (mostly due to bad lightning in the original movie, I guess), and besides that, the movie is still really captivating, though it is in no way over the top. The car/motorcycle chase for instance - how unimpressive was the car flip or Rambo falling from the motorcycle? Still it was more captivating than a lot of modern movies with so overrealistic and fast paced cuts, that you just stop caring all together.

Also I totally forgot how funny Richard Crennas persona was: "God didn't make Rambo - I made him. I'm Sam Trautman - Colonel Samuel Trautman. I came to get my boy" - what an introduction :D And then follows a dick-measuring contest between Will Teasle and Sam Trautman. That is great acting. As is the acting of Brian Dennehy as the dislikable villain character - and of course we cannot forget the actin of our main character, portrayed by Sylvester Stalone - I also forgot how extremely moving the last scene was - I remembered that there was this critical moment when Rambo finally opens up to Trautman, but I forgot just how intense it was, and how unexpected it came. It feels somewhat displaced in a movie that builds up as an action movie with the underdog fighting the bad guys who unfortunately have the law on their side. And at the finale all of a sudden this change of tone - that is really bold, it's both strange but because of it strangeness so much deeper and better - as you are simply not prepared to what is going to happen. I always remember to feel sympathetic towards Vietnam veterans even though I am and always was a pacifist. I guess that is an impression that this movie left with me when I saw it the first time at my earlier teen years.

Last but not least I also really liked the sound track and the setting and locations are also really great. All in all a pretty good movie and factoring in that this movie had me so interested even though I've seen it a couple of times in my youth, and feeling that though it is so 80s it is still a movie that could captivate so many young audiences who have never seen this movie before, I am inclined to give it the best rating possible.

And because I mentioned the new blu-ray release: this is really worth a buy. There is more than 1,5 hours of extras, and these are pretty mixed - from the classics like interviews, making-ofs, trailers and featurettes to two serious documentaries, one on the Vietnam war and the other on the training of Green Barrets, as well as a fitness training featurette from the personal trainer for Rambo, there is a lot really interesting and unconventional ground covered. And the steelbook artwork looks just stunning as well :)

[7.9/10] Nope is a film of tremendous spectacle. Writer/director/producer Jordan Peele has not lost the slightest of steps in crafting evocative sequences with his team. He elicits tension as heroes and bystanders alike flee the giant specter lurking through the sky, ready to suck them up. He captures the balletic grace of a ribbony jellyfish creature floating through the clouds and gobbling up what it finds. He gets the heart pumping as his new age cowboy races through the western skyline, dust whipping in his wake, as the creature sharply pursues. To see it on the big screen is to be awed by it.

But at the same time, it is a film about that spectacle, the lengths filmmakers go to capture it, profit from it, take credit for it. It’s hard to know how to take that. There’s a recursive quality to the film, a movie rife with impossible images about the cost and peril, moral and otherwise, about committing those images to film. At the very least, it speaks to one of Peele’s recurring narrative motifs, those overlooked or underappreciated, who nonetheless contribute to that which is beautiful and even transcendent, even as they’re appropriated or forgotten.

Here, he extends that franchise to the animals made to perform for Hollywood productions. From Gordy, the sitcom chimp who goes on a rampage, to the horses on the Haywood family ranch loaned out for television and film, to Jean Jacket, the living UFO who feeds on whatever flesh he finds in the great loping west, Nope is suffused with an inherent respect and fear for the wild animals made to perform for our amusement.

The subtext of the story suggests that these animals should not be treated as just another prop, but rather respected and treated like the fellow souls they are. They possess a power, one that requires us to meet them on their level to be able to forge a working relationship with them, lest we be subject to the parts of them that remain wild, the parts we cannot control, no matter how much we think we have them cowed.

The themes, as always, are potent. Nope lingers in the mind and the heart, in its reflections on the creatures made to perform, the urge to wrangle such heart-stopping images, and those who are disregarded and overlooked in both efforts. But the film’s characters are some of Peele’s most inaccessible. Their decisions are often strange, their reactions stranger. Their motivations vary, but often come down to the need for wealth or fame or both. They are some of the director’s most colorful figures, but in a way that can obscure the sense of an inner life beyond the ideas and motifs they signify. It makes the movie a hard one to warm to at times, with the players more sketched than defined.

And yet, in those quieter undefined spaces, Daniel Kaluuya shines once again. It’s hard to discern whether his character -- O.J. Haywood, the inheritor of his father’s Hollywood horse ranch -- is meant to be neurodivergent or simply the archetypal strong silent type. Regardless, he is a man of few words, and Kaluuya makes a meal out of the meaningful looks and body language that convey his bearing and demeanor despite that.

He is reserved, if not outright shy, full of determination, if only to carry on the barrier-breaking legacy his father built, and he is made of steely, steady, stuff. Those qualities make him someone who understands animals better than people, and combine to make him the perfect soul to respect, comprehend, and even commune with this being from the beyond.

Peele and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema also understand how to shoot him. Nope is filled with any number of eerie, low-light scenes where OJ, his more extraverted sister Em, and their handful of neighbors and allies investigated the strangeness hovering above their doorstep. Peele and his collaborators still know how to evoke a sense of dread in these moments, with obscured visions, suggestions of something ominous, and blank spaces for the viewers to fill in with god knows what.

But there’s also great attention to the detail in the lighting, bringing out Kaluuya’s complexion and definition even in darkness, highlighting his expressive eyes, that allows his performance to take center stage even amid the building horror and eerie tone. There’s an interiority to O.J. in particular, and sharp choices in lighting and composition help draw it out to the audience’s wavelength.

Peele and company also do well to set up rules for Jean Jacket that both speak to the movie’s themes while creating practical challenges for the main characters to overcome. The flying beast deadens anything electrical in its wake, something that stops vehicles in their tracks, permits the sound team to chill the audience with waning audio, and makes filming it that much more challenging. The alien creature can only consume organic matter, with rains of discarded metal and other leavings that make it sick creating both a practical danger and frightening imagery. And as with the horses the Haywood family trains, it is provoked through making eye-contact with it as it roams the skies above, turning the horror flick into a reverse “the floor is lava” game of staying shielded from view. These qualities are cinematic, while also creating pragmatic challenges that the main players must be clever and determined to overcome.

In that, the movie’s creative team crafts some of the stunning horror that already defines Peele’s budding filmography. The title drop comes when O.J. witnesses the magnitude and power of this cloud-hopping behemoth, “nopes out” of doing anything to get in its way, as the same imposing figure prompts the audience to do the same. It’s a film as steeped in feelings as it is in thoughts, and the sense of abject terror as something that cannot be controlled, or tamed, only accommodated, imposes its will on those brave or foolhardy enough to try to use it for notoriety, riches, or entertainment.

Nope uses it for those ends too. It’s hard to tell whether the filmmakers want us to feel complicit in this, to speak out against animal cruelty in Holywood, to recognize the below-the-line workers who make the impossible into the real, or simply to experience the same terror and triumph its players do. But in this alternating languid and exhilarating movie, the spectacle, and the awe, overwhelm, as Peele conveys his signature incredible images, through his characters striving to do the same.