The Movie Review Thread

[Crasherfromwayback]

My Cousin Rachel is fucking great. I'd quite like to interfere with her.

[MD]

Transformers: The Last night. 3/10. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time, splosions, fights and the odd cheesy one liner. The story was all over the place and annoyingly so. Nope. Save yer cash and watch it at a later date... best to watch when you're suffering from insomnia I would think.

Agreed. Want my money back. Knew it would the same old action stuff rehashed. Thought the likes of Anthony Hopkins would raise the bar.
Apes movie coming soon look good.

Wonder woman was well worth the perve. She's no hour glass sexy Linda Carter but she pulls it off. Good watch..the movie, not just Gal Gadot. Would be interesting if Linda was 25 years old again today and did that same film. I reckon she would have nailed it with the added super powers cleavage for good measure.

[OddDuck]

Sleepless - Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan. 4 / 10.

Should've been a good Friday night actioner. Good cinematography, surprisingly good cast, lots of urgency. Unfortunately it's crap.

My doubts set in during the opening heist. Jamie and his mate take cover behind their car while three dudes with M-16s hose the vehicle down. Sirens approach, the dudes decide to leave, Jamie and mate jump back into bullet-riddled ride and take off. Engine's fine. Tyres are fine. Nobody notices anything on the freeway. Right... then it happens again, and again.

Icing sugar dusts stolen suit up to the shoulders as Jamie frantically bags white powder to fake a cocaine deal. Next scene, the suit's utterly pristine. Musta dusted up nice in the elevator I guess.

Jamie gets a stab wound when bad guys kidnap his son. Then there's a fight scene where he moves like a tiger. Fight scene over, he's hunched over and clutching his side... until the next fight scene, where once again he moves like a tiger. Normal: ouchie hunch. Fight: tiger. Basically three-quarters of the movie is like this.

Teargas floods an enclosed parking garage. Masks appear for about two minutes, then suddenly become completely optional for everyone, including the guy who'd fired the teargas everywhere. Just wander through the billowing mists, it'll be fine, unless a completely silent 2-tonne truck sneaks up on you at high speed and mashes you like a bug. It sounds ridiculous enough to be funny, handled right it could be funny, unfortunately here it's just bad direction.

There's good trash, then there's trash trash. This is the latter. I imagine Mr. Foxx and Ms. Monaghan are having some words with their agents about this one.

[OddDuck]

Zero Days - doco about the Stuxnet worm and the emergence of cyberwarfare.

Lots of talking heads, lots of archival footage and photos, a surprising amount of access to former heavyweights in the military or intelligence communities of the USA, Israel, and other countries. It tells the Stuxnet story well and then leads into an unknown future.

Bloody good. Also quite disturbing, in that the doco makes it quite clear that cyberweapons are now a thing and lots of people are working on them. 8 / 10.

[EJK]

A movie where they portrait nature of death and survival is more of enemy than Nazi Germans.

Brilliant film. Spitfire = OMFG AWESOME!!!!

9.5/10

[OddDuck]

Baby Driver.

Getaway driver tries to get out of doing jobs, ideally taking his girlfriend along for the ride... unfortunately his boss isn't keen on letting him go. Oh, and there's a raging nut job on the team, too.

Surprisingly violent - it's R13 but I reckon it's at least R16. Awesome soundtrack. The driving is of course excellent but it's the minor character work and unexpected plot zigzags where this movie really delivers.

Superior friday night popcorn flick. 8 / 10.

[Black Knight]

A movie where they portrait nature of death and survival is more of enemy than Nazi Germans.

Brilliant film. Spitfire = OMFG AWESOME!!!!

9.5/10

I hear IMAX is the only place to really watch it.

[EJK]

I hear IMAX is the only place to really watch it.

Sadly no IMAX in Christchurch :-(

[pritch]

I hear IMAX is the only place to really watch it.

Dunno why they filmed it like that when only a relatively few places in the world can do it justice: just one in NZ, only five in Oz apparently. Never seen a 75mm movie in IMax so I literally don't know what I'm missing.

Watched the old move "The Snow Goose" on YouTube the other day and noticed that Jenny Agutter was having a purple patch as an actress in the 70s, a busy girl. Next movie I watched "I start Counting", I was thinking she's put on weight but the aspect ratio of the film had been stretched. I'd rather have some blank screen than have the space filled by chunky chicks.

The Snow Goose version I saw appeared to have been heavily edited, The quailty was crap, but the price was right. "I Start Counting" is a 'who done it' of sorts. More of a who is doing it really. They say nothing ages like old movies and I certainly wouldn't argue with that on the evidence of this pair. There were a lot of familiar faces/voices that had me dusting off the memory banks trying to remember where I'd seen or heard them before.

Oh, and in case that all seems like a strange mental leap from "Dunkirk", it was mention of that movie that reminded me of The Snow Goose.

[Akzle]

oh so many to review. been lacking time, inclination, sobriety.

flowers of war
an unfortunate mash of two vastly different cine-cultures, fortunately largely ignorable, but they do let it down in more than a few places. (obviously i mean the whitey jewlywood bits)
good on the whole. not over-filmed or over-effected, pretty grim story.

8/10

spectre
daniel kwaaaag (more on him later)
long. as long as any bond. pwetty typical, really, no great... anything, and you kinda come to expect great something with modern flicks, but that kinda also ties it into the rest of the franchise, just formulaic.
fuck me i'm repeating myself, how droll.
hmmmmmmm
6/10

layercake
nau, i've seen this before. also daniel kwag, doesn't really stretch him as an actor...it's a bit liek classic euro-gangster (lock stock, boondock, snatch et al) but more stark.
pretty good value really.
7.5/10

ITHE MARTIAN sets the benchmark for that stuff now.

Also: you need to see THE MARTIAN. Thank me later. Its fashionable in some quarters to disparage Matt Damon but he is excellent if the script is good. And he is very good in this.

so i did. only cos the warehouse has 2 for 10 bucks.
...and it wasn't shit.
implausible, but not a shit movie. doesn't quite portray the whole "it took a few years" thing...but i don't know how they could have without making it too-long
7/10

there were others. a few really good ones that i thought "this could be longer" which not many movies get.
i lied. btw. i'm still drunk.

[Voltaire]

Dunkirk, IMAX. Fantastic. Best war movie I've seen. Going to search out my Airfix Spitfire and Me 109 kits tomorrow. I no longer have a He 111.

[OddDuck]

Headshot.

Indonesian martial arts flick, not bad at what it does but by no means a top example of the genre. Subtitles mostly with the occasional line in English. Enertaining enough if you like your fight flicks, 6.5 / 10.

[HenryDorsetCase]

Baby Driver.

Getaway driver tries to get out of doing jobs, ideally taking his girlfriend along for the ride... unfortunately his boss isn't keen on letting him go. Oh, and there's a raging nut job on the team, too.

Surprisingly violent - it's R13 but I reckon it's at least R16. Awesome soundtrack. The driving is of course excellent but it's the minor character work and unexpected plot zigzags where this movie really delivers.

Superior friday night popcorn flick. 8 / 10.

I thought this would be better than it was. It was pretty conflicted in my view - most of the issues were with the script. It was trying to be Pulp Fiction but with cars. It failed. I particularly disliked the girlfriend. Kevin Spacey phoned it in, in the "Oh yeah I was pretty good in THE USUAL SUSPECTS and MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL so I dont need to do much here" kind of way. Mr Baby was just an annoying millennial.

Star of the show the first six minutes.

Even Jon Hamm didnt save it.

Over rated, over hyped. 6/10

[FlangMasterJ]

Not a film but the series Ozark is fucking great. Ged it!

[MD]

A movie where they portrait nature of death and survival is more of enemy than Nazi Germans.

Brilliant film. Spitfire = OMFG AWESOME!!!!

9.5/10

It was a good movie but for me I found I came away a bit underwhelmed. Maybe too much hype beforehand. To your point it was an interesting ploy to never show a German soldier or face. Maybe trying to be PC and not offend anyone but as you say, probably more to make the point that it was all about survival, not fighting the Germans.

Another Director might have done a better job of those special moments, the emotional times that pull at your heartstrings and leave the audience close to tears. Seemed like opportunities missed to me. Yeah the flotilla arriving was a crescendo moment but was downplayed and should have been where the audiences emotions peaked. Instead it was only given a few seconds really and lets move on to the next scene please.

Still some magical scenes with the Spitfire. Could have watched heaps more of those shots like looking down from above the plane as it soared at such great speed along the beach.

I'd say Private Ryan and Hacksaw Ridge were better WWII movies by far.