Rate the last film you watched out of 5

[Mike S]

11 hours ago, Steve McQueef said:

It's funny you should mention that, it's the one thing I asked my wife for, for Christmas, but she forgot to order it...

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Happily, it magically appeared today, via Amazon. 

 

 

The Amazon elfs are very thoughtful! I've got a couple more chapters to go until finishing the book (technically the audiobook as the preview sample lead me to believe QT was narrating the whole thing but he has, so far, only read the opening chapter. Probably a good thing overall as 10+ hours of him might be a bit exhausting) and it has been a unique and fascinating insight into the greatest decade in cinema.

 

42 minutes ago, glb said:

Planning to now! Thank you for the recommendation

 

 

Enjoy!

 

The book has made me hopeful of a post film making career Tarantino devoting his time to writing and talking about film.

 

Congrats on the 1000 BTW! An astonishing amount of films to watch in a year...

[glb]

1,001 now as watched a decent HBO feature doc on Cypress Hill last night! Add that ‘achievement’ to my 100 cinema trips in 2018. I’m fortunate to have a job where I can incorporate watching films into my working day. 1,000 was excessive though and often became a grind. Planning to get more fresh air in 2023, and probably watch some series, which I’ve neglected doing.

 

Need to watch around 200 films to reach 5,000 (according to my IMBd history) That’s only 16 per month across a year! Will try and tick off some more classics that I’ve missed and be a bit more deliberate with my choices I think. And visit some more independent cinemas, that might be interesting to collect some experiences, maybe there’s a thread in that (or a bump if one already exists)

[SeanR]

The Batman 6 out of Se7en

7 Woman 1 Murder 3 knives out of 5

[Triple A]

Chungking Express

 

My first Wong Kar-Wai movie.  Pretty good!  Gorgeous to look at and with a very healthy dose of humanity.

 

4

[Timmo]

5 hours ago, glb said:

I’m fortunate to have a job where I can incorporate watching films into my working day.

are you a television

[Silent Runner]

Thelma and Louise
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103074/

 

Two best friends set out on an adventure, but it soon turns around to a terrifying escape from being hunted by the police, as these two girls escape for the crimes they committed.

 

Working my way through a few Ridley Scott films and if this is the last film I watch this year I finished it on a real high. 

 

Everyone involved here does great work - the two leads are excellent and the support are just as good, in particular Brad Pitt and Christopher McDonald. It moved between funny, dramatic, exciting and sad effortlessly. I really liked how this this film looked, pretty much any shot captures a nice piece of Americana - there's oil fields, the grand canyon, honky tonk bars, run down towns that are falling apart - it feels like a real American road trip.

 

This will almost certainly be in my Ridley Scott top 3 with Alien and Gladiator. Loved it.

 

4.5/5

[Barnard]

Titanic. 5/5

 

The huge running time still flys by.

 

The last scene after Rose closes her eyes and travels down to the ship and sees Jack at the top of the stairs is 100% her dying isn't it?

 

My wife disagrees ! 🤨

[ZOK]

I Wanna Dance With Somebody - 5/5 (Cinema)

 

This is a biopic of Whitney Houston’s life, where an actress who looks a bit like her mimes along immaculately to a catalogue of Whitters’ greatest moments. And it’s amazing.

 

Your enjoyment of this movie may be tempered by how much you like music biopics, and how much you love Whitney. So if you are a decent human who loves both those things, you will love this. I’ve seen some reviews that do it down for not fully digging into the murk of all the horrors she experienced while becoming a living legend, but they really miss the point. This isn’t an excoriation of her life (there are two great docs that have already done that), but a celebration of Whitney in all her glory while lightly touching on her tragedies. I was crying from about two minutes in, and managed to stop occasionally.

[Nathan Wind]

The Captain - Prime

 

A German language black and white war film telling the tale of Willi Herold, a German war criminal known as The Exexutioner of Emsland. It follows the true story of a young German private, fleeing his unit in the dying days of WWII - a time of complete disarray after the breakdown of infrastructure, communication and governance within wartime Germany. He happens across a Luftwaffe captain’s uniform in a crashed car and puts it on, slowly embodying the role.

 

There’s a school of thought that films like this are making money from the very worst atrocities but I think it’s important that these stories aren’t forgotten. It touches on some very dark themes around the power of uniform and authority, male ego, human cruelty, turning a blind eye, and the filmmakers have punctuated it with some quite bizarre moments of surrealism. I learned after the fact that some people weren’t keen on that approach but for me it worked brilliantly, with those moments of levity really heightening the awful things happening elsewhere. It’s a gruelling watch, but I found it utterly compelling, with incredible acting and cinematography throughout. The fact that this happened, and indeed was allowed to happen (whether or not parts of the story were dramatised for film), is staggering. There are a couple of incredibly sobering moments, one of which is a very brief scene shot in full colour.

 

I need to quickly mention the excellent soundtrack too. Its sparse, heavy, foreboding synth, only kicking in briefly three or four times throughout. Very well done. A bit like All Quiet on the Western Front, to which I think this is an excellent companion piece.

 

Amazon tells you it has a four hour run time but it’s half that in reality, with the black and white version running straight into the colour one for some reason. I’d recommend the former, as it was intended.

 

4/5
 

 

[Couch Corpse]

Glass Onion - 5/7

[Festoon]

White Noise

 

Wife wanted to watch it. I warned her about Noah Baumbach. She gave up after 30 mins saying "what is it about films like this and things like Joy that have a sneering '80's aesthetic?"

 

I barely watched it in the 30 mins but it seemed insufferably smug and all over the place. Bear in mind I really dislike Baumbach films though but this did seem like an absolute mess.

 

Can't rate/5

[Dark Soldier]

As Bestas aka The Beasts (2022)

 

Spanish film based on a true story.

 

French couple give up their comfortable life to move to a tiny Spanish village to farm and live off rhe land while doing up property there.

 

Company comes with proposition to build a wind farm, the locals agree as they are filthy poor, but the French couple refuse. Tensions slowly escalate and explode.

 

Denis Menochet and Luis Zahera absolutely rip up the screen with two brooding, powerhouse performances. A suffocating, tense slow burn of fear. Great start to the year.

 

There's a scene in the local 'pub' which is mesmerising.

 

The two leads, I've already said it, but holy fuck.

 

4/5

[Vimster]

Miss Congeniality (2000)

I asked someone to recommend a really lightweight comedy I could just stick on and enjoy. My trust in their judgement has been eroded a little. Sandra Bullock is the tomboy FBI agent who has to go undercover at a beauty pageant as a contestant. Michael Caine is the man to get her event-fit. It's not bad, just not for me. There are some alright jokes, Bullock is charming and keeps things watchable, her character going into the even then anachronistic world of beauty contests and shaking things up.  Surprisingly little rom to com ratio, I was expecting more than the dalliance with her boss. Oh and there are some absolutely heinous examples of product placement here.

 

2.5/5

 

Deathgasm (2015)

Never been a massive fan of metal but have known a few people who are and even through association with them I have the sense to get how totally metal this superb film is, it did feel like it came from people who knew their stuff. It's sheer gory, energetic fun from start to finish. A garage metal band unwittingly summon a demonic force to their small New Zealand town and have to battle the forces of darkness with chainsaws, axes and sex toys. Obvious comparisons with Peter Jackson's early films, and I'd say this was definitely worthy to stand with those.

 

4/5

[Thor]

Rogue One

 

Thought I'd give this another shot post Andor, but I still don't really rate it. Bad dialogue littered with fan service, Forest Whitaker is wasted (his introduction with the breathing mask is straight out of Space Balls), and 'I am one with the force, and the force is with me', 'I am one with the force, and the force is with me', 'I am one with the force, and the force is with me', 'I am one with the force, and the force is with me' ... Oh shut up, for fuck's sake. Some shoddy effects too.

 

But the film has its moments, Vader is mostly decent, the rebel attack at the end is rather good, K-2SO is the best thing in the film, Jyn Erso is a good lead, and Krennic is a decent villain. The film ends strongly, it's just a bit messy in how it gets there. 

 

2.5/5 

[Silent Runner]

The Wailing
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5215952/

 

Soon after a stranger arrives in a little village, a mysterious sickness starts spreading. A policeman, drawn into the incident, is forced to solve the mystery in order to save his daughter.

 

Has this one on the list for a while but the long run-time put me off, so I watched it over a couple of nights - half in 2022 and half in 2023. This is set in a rural Korean village where strange things are happening. It feels like a mash-up of multiple horror genres - plague outbreak film, zombie film, ghost story, murder mystery - but it all adds up to something really unique with an amazing atmosphere all the way through.

 

The acting and the cast are all tremendous. And you're never really sure what's going on - the main mystery is strong and there's always something weird or spooky happening. It's proper scary and there's some legit shocking scenes - trigger warning if anyone is thinking of watching there are some animal killing scenes. And there's a battle between a shaman and a demon that's the best edited and most exciting I've seen in a long time.

 

I did feel that there was things I was missing because I know nothing about Korean folklore or the history of conflict between Korea and Japan. But I don't think it took away from my enjoyment of it. 

 

Absolutely loved this - a real quality piece of work.

 

4.5/5

[Vimster]

Guns For Hire aka The Adventures Of Beatle (2015)

Really struggled to maintain interest in this flashback-driven tale. Difficult to describe, but I'd say it was an off-beat mystery thriller built around a lesbian romance (the strongest part of the film), but it was an uninspiring mess overall. There's a twist at the end so poorly pulled off it just made me sigh in resignation that I'd sat through everything to get to that point. A good twist makes you re-evaluate what you've seen, this felt more like it was dropped in.

 

1.5/5

[Dark Soldier]

Playground (2022)

 

French film about a seven year old girl who attends her new school, that her older brother is already at, and witnesses her brother being bullied.

 

It is shot, entirely, from the height level of the seven year old girl. Stunningly shot in places.

 

Absolutely captures that child like feel, the way in which they communicate and see the world.

 

Its a gut wrenching thing. It isn't brutal in the 'classic' sense but the themes of alienation, fear, panic, anxiety which many kids feel as they grow (and im sure we felt back then) are portrayed so vividly that it can be a hard watch. Totally nails that naive cruelness children possess, that cinema rarely likes to show.

 

By far and away the greatest example of child acting I have seen. The girl who plays the seven year old deserves an Oscar and all the world.

 

Adults are kept at arms length, we only see snippets of their faces and are often off camera

 

Absolutely astonishing film and only 72minutes long.

 

5/5

[El Geet]

Primal Fear (1996) (Netflix)

Richard Gere is the arrogant defence attorney who takes on a client who is an altar boy accused of brutally murdering a Catholic bishop in Chicago. 
 

I remember thinking this was brilliant when I first saw it on release. It was Edward Norton’s big movie debut for which he got an Oscar nomination. He is good but the whole thing feels a bit hackneyed now. 
 

The biggest problem is I just struggle with Richard Gere. I mean in many ways he is perfect as the arrogant defence attorney but he is always the same arrogant twat in every film. 
 

It was great to see Laura Linney in her prime and it was quite funny to see her banter with another Marty. Despite best efforts to create sexual tension between her and Gere, the chemistry was totally non-existent. 

 

Still an entertaining enough watch. 
 

2.5/5 (3 if Richard Gere doesn’t get on your nerves)
 

 

[Jamie John]

I'm going to try to watch a film each week in 2023. This might seem a very modest target for some people (like @glb), but I don't really have the chance to watch a film mid-week, so I'm going to have to dedicate one of my weekend nights to a film for the next 52 weeks. I've also got a pile of about 15 Blu-Rays and 4K Blu-Rays that I want to get through.

 

Anyway, I started last night with film #1/52: Good Time (2017) - Netflix

 

 

After a robbery goes wrong, Connie's younger brother Nick is arrested and sent to prison. Desperate to get him out, Connie does everything he can to pay Nick's bail.

 

The entire time I was watching this I kept thinking it was really similar to Uncut Gems - same grimy, New York setting; same frenetic, claustrophobic, extreme close-up-style of filming; same morally dubious protagonist making a series of progressively worse decisions. And - wouldn't you know it! - it's directed by the same pair of brothers who did Uncut Gems. Having watched that film first, however, I don't think this is quite as successful as the stakes don't seem as high and the ending sort of fizzles out a bit - it seems very much like a warm-up to what Uncut Gems would turn out to be. Still, Robert Pattinson puts in a convincing performance in the lead role, and if you enjoy these sorts of panic attack-inducing thrillers then this is well worth a watch. It's only on Netflix until the 10th, however, so catch it while you can.

 

3.5/5

[ZOK]

Good Time definitely isn’t as good as Uncut Gems but it is a very good movie nonetheless. I don’t think I there’s much similarity between the two movies at all though.

[Triple A]

Bloody love Good Time, in some ways more than Uncut Gems, other ways less.  Would love a 4K UHD disc version!

[SuperCapes]

On 23/12/2022 at 22:38, Thor said:

The Departed

 

It's been a few years since I've seen it, but I was obsessed with this when it came out. It's still absolutely fantastic. I know DiCaprio and Nicholson get all the plaudits, but Matt Damon puts in the performance of his life. Just a terrific crime thriller.

 

5/5

 

The correct score, as it is one of the greatest of all time. Couldn't agree more about Damon. What a movie.

[Silent Runner]

The Pope of Greenwich Village
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087932/

 

Two cousins unknowingly rob the mob and face the dangerous consequences.

 

Eric Roberts and Mickey Rourke are cousins down on their luck - they've just been fired from their jobs and they both need money. They come up with a crackpot scheme involving a break-in, a horse with secret parentage and a day at a race-track. Unsurprisingly things don't go to plan and they end up on the wrong side of the mob and the cops. 

 

I thought this was really fine. The cast are excellent, both the leads are on top form and it's easy to forget how good Mickey Rourke was back in the day. The support are also class and there's loads of the kind of faces that are full of character that you don't really see any more; Emmet Walsh, Burt Young, Frank Vincent. And Daryl Hannah does a lot with a small role.

 

No Italian crime-movie cliched is left unused; Sinatra soundtrack, private members clubs full of old lads drinking coffee and chain-smoking, everyone is someones cousin with a connection to something, massive deli-meat sandwiches being scoffed at all times - it's so good. The clothes are pure Travolta in Saturday Night Fever and it has that same New York grimeyness that films from that era have that make them feel so alive.

 

Great start to this years films.

 

4/5

[ZOK]

2 hours ago, SuperCapes said:

 

The correct score, as it is one of the greatest of all time. Couldn't agree more about Damon. What a movie.

It’s a godawful piece of shit, without a single redeeming element, unless you count Ray Winstone’s comedy accent as a positive. It’s not fit to be mentioned in the same breath as Infernal Affairs.

[Mike S]

On 01/01/2023 at 20:14, Vimster said:

I asked someone to recommend a really lightweight comedy I could just stick on and enjoy. My trust in their judgement has been eroded a little.

 

Actual LOL at this!

 

Hahah!

[Mike S]

20 hours ago, Dark Soldier said:

Playground (2022)

 

French film about a seven year old girl who attends her new school, that her older brother is already at, and witnesses her brother being bullied.

 

It is shot, entirely, from the height level of the seven year old girl. Stunningly shot in places.

 

Absolutely captures that child like feel, the way in which they communicate and see the world.

 

Its a gut wrenching thing. It isn't brutal in the 'classic' sense but the themes of alienation, fear, panic, anxiety which many kids feel as they grow (and im sure we felt back then) are portrayed so vividly that it can be a hard watch. Totally nails that naive cruelness children possess, that cinema rarely likes to show.

 

By far and away the greatest example of child acting I have seen. The girl who plays the seven year old deserves an Oscar and all the world.

 

Adults are kept at arms length, we only see snippets of their faces and are often off camera

 

Absolutely astonishing film and only 72minutes long.

 

5/5

 

 

This sounds great. Where is it available?

 

That is a wider request as I really appreciate seeing where folk are seeing/sourcing films, especially newer ones.

 

EDIT: It's on MUBI! Will watch this week...

[SuperCapes]

26 minutes ago, ZOK said:

It’s a godawful piece of shit, without a single redeeming element, unless you count Ray Winstone’s comedy accent as a positive. It’s not fit to be mentioned in the same breath as Infernal Affairs.

 

Haha alrighty! 

[Stig]

35 minutes ago, ZOK said:

It’s a godawful piece of shit, without a single redeeming element, unless you count Ray Winstone’s comedy accent as a positive. It’s not fit to be mentioned in the same breath as Infernal Affairs.

 

So don't mention it then 🤷‍♂️. You're the one that always brings it up when someone watches The Departed.

[skondo]

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

 

What an utterly ridiculous film. Very silly and Nic Cage does seem to have a lot of fun being Nic Cage. 7/10.

[Dark Soldier]

51 minutes ago, Mike S said:

 

 

This sounds great. Where is it available?

 

That is a wider request as I really appreciate seeing where folk are seeing/sourcing films, especially newer ones.

 

EDIT: It's on MUBI! Will watch this week...

Yeah I watched it on Mubi. I basically have BFI, Amazon, Netflix and Mubi, and then if its not on any of those it'll be Real Debrid. A lot of what I watch isn't really on any streaming service.