Reviews

This series is NOT about what you think - and thankfully was filmed before Hollywood became all "Hollyweird". It's about being stuck in a place with people you may not like, and it puts you right in the middle. No wonder Slate & and the other usual suspect hated it. It's also absolutely brilliant, but deeply flawed.

Visually it's near perfect, the way people talk, move, etc, it's spot on. But what's not spot on and a total fabrication are officers like "Captain America", who simply wouldn't exist in this context. As for bad officers, there are plenty, but not all concentrated in one unit - in other words, this battallion won the 'stupid lottery' for the sake of keeping the story going.

There's also an over emphasis on war crimes that goes unpunished, if everyone acted that way the US marines woiuld have disbanded a long time ago. Mistake happen, and there are some criminal elements in some ranks, but not at this insane, utterly deranged level.

Overall, it's hard hitting and brilliantly filmed, it's a winner for sure but shame they didn't make the story as realistic as the guns and locations.

I was expecting to give this a 4, but after watching it twice and realizing it was designed to be watched twice, it convinced me to write this review.

Rare are the movies that stick with you - but this one did for over 15 years - and on the second watch, it didn't disapoint. The sound design truly stand out, the script is sublime, and every actor is at their peak.

Hollywood never makes good films anymore and I feel the whole space peaked in 2006 before A24 came on the scene. This - however - is a masterpiece. It's not perfect, but it's very close to.

I won't spoil it - it's extremely engrossing, well acted and well scripted. And for once, a Hollywood movie has a message and it's not the one you're thinking. Brilliant - makes you feel all the emotions :0.

The real captain philips' crew has denounced this movie as pure nonsense, as the real philips was both arrogant and fooling as HE insisted to sail near the somalian coast despite warnings. He never tried to save his crew like the movie depicts.

In this movie however, he is some bleeding heart hero who spends his time bonding with pirates who are more akin to bumbling fools , holding no ressemblance to the real deal. In fact, the movie is designed to make you feel bad ... for them!

The real deal however, was a different story - when this happened pirates tried to bring 54 hostages from around the world as human shields. They had no respect for human life and would have gladly murdered everyone on board AND the 54 filipinos & thais citizens (which are never seen in the movie) if it wasn't for the action of Mr Perry who was the true hero (he single handedly strongarmed the leader).

... but I guess Perry didn't sell his life story for millions like Philips did.

As for the movie itself, it's the usual hollyweird propaganda - 'terrorists are just misunderstood and kinda funny in a weird way', 'all authority is bad', etc.

Terrible, abject and sadly well recieved by gullible audience.

Brought to you by the very same people who couldn't end GoT properly, comes another strange adaptation of cult-classic books.

For the record, no, Netflix did NOT in fact, 'do a 180' by showing the Cultural Revolution (which killed not one lone university professor, but instead saw 1.5 million people beaten to death or tortured to death in camps just because they were deemed academic bourgeois). The books in the first page are far more graphic and call a spade a spade: men and women have their head blown off by teenage bullies because "Marxism". But of course Netflix would never use the "M" word.

Anyways after that little incursion in China, Netflix of course spends the other 9 episodes re-gendering every character (all strong characters are female, males are litteral doormats, one of them having qualms about complaining about getting friendzoned as he .. dies of cancer). In the book, everyone is Chinese, here, evidently, that cannot be - so you have one Indian, one Black (who smokes weed and drops acide while working a particle accelerator), one White (who is reckless loser , fat and stupid, and gets offed in episode 3 of course).

And evidently, there's political commentary everywhere, which flies in the face of what the book was about. Heck, even "Logic" (the name of the ONE character in the books that considers betraying his people), has been transformed into an always-oppressed Latina woman who hapens to be a model and hates capitalism. She calls people 'fascists' when they take strong action and complains a lot about 'the men, the men'. . Oh and there's of course gay couples for no other reason that having gay couples.

It's a joke, like everything netflix does. Don't be fooled and read the books instead.

Glazer, A24 - what more do you want? Well, that's just the thing - you want a perfect execution because anythng else would be unnaceptable and immediately ruin the film. You can't mess up with a subject matter like that.

And oh my, does this film deliver. In spades. Don't think that just because you heard of that 'one scene' the rest is a build up for it - not at all. Every camera movement is calculated and executed to perfection. At times you think you're watching a re-colored b&w movie from 1944. The DP went to town on this one.

I don't want to spoil anything - go watch it - just know there's exactly ZERO exposition, everything just speaks for itself.

I've rarely given a 10/10 - but even 3 days later, I kept thinking 'what more could they have done to improve on this'? And came out wiht nothing. So it earned it.

It took me a while to figure out what made this movie so special but essentially it's its uniqueness. I've never seen something like this and I don't think you have either. The director established herself as one of the greats alongside Gaspar Noé, Lars von Triers, and Carax. The subtlety, the nuance, the way she approaches topics that others would have wasted is masterful. In a world where films are just copy-paste versions of each other with political message inserted, she manages to bring film to its true essence, its true nature. It's something you have to see to understand. She mixes realism and surrealism. She reverses tropes and turns them on their head. She's capable of conveying emotion with characters that you otherwise would not associate with. It's a tour de force of incredible proportion and quite frankly I'm surprised she didn't win more prizes with this film even though her other film Titane won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and rightly so. This director is one of the ones to put on a watch list. She's just so amazing and talented and I can't wait to watch her next film.

It's probably the most linear and easily accessible David Lynch film, but it's also the one that set the tone for the cult classics of the 90s, from Natural Bone Killers to Pulp Fiction, going through The Lost Generation, Kids,, you name it, this film inspired it all.

Some of the shots are absolutely incredible, given this was filmed a whole 33 years ago. It could have been made yesterday with a DSLR. David Lynch certainly had a lot of guts at that time, and has no doubt created the ultimate movie representing the transition from the 80s to the 90s. Everything about it is masterful, from the sound design to the obsessive attention to detail in the sets. It's almost perfect. In fact, even the font it uses as part of its credits is now a very common font in 2023.

This was truly ahead of its time. Yes, Nicolas Cage is Nicolas Cage, and we have to remember with hindsight that at the time he wasn't that famous, and got a little bit more leeway here with his acting, which shows that he could have been something else altogether, but that's his choice. It comes across as a little stiff in my opinion, which is a shame .

It's also nice to see some familiar faces (dafoe!!!!) which this movie helped put on the map. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and deservedly so. A must-watch for all movie lovers.

Triangle of Sadness is the cinematic equivalent of a 14-year-old doing your ears in all night long because they've just discovered a book by Nietzsche and suddenly think they're philosophers specialized in existentialism.

But Instead of a 14-year-old, it's a very blunt, on-the-nose series of dull metaphors and overdone topics. Think bodily humor, including rich people vomiting or rolling in diarrhea wehile the captain reads Karl Marx over the PA. Again, I'm not making this up. It's as subtle as a punch in the face.

At least "the platform" tried to touch on around the class system without being too obvious. But if you really want a good quality movie around making societal analogies without much exposure, go watch Upstream Color instead, or Enemy perhaps. Both are vastly superior to this film and will entertain you more.

At times, I felt it was just purely a North European vaudeville. And if you like thod, there is the excellent Adam's Apple by AJT that you can watch as well.

In other words, there's absolutely NO reason to watch The Triangle of Sadness because for everything it does, there is a better option out there. The only real mystery is how it won the Palme d'Or, which I'll never understand.

IMDB has become the refuge of weeboos that simply will give 10 to anything that's not Marvel. That's their standard of quality, to not be Hollywood, to not have explosions. If it doesn't have an explosion, it's a 10. That's how they think, and we must deal with that.

Now, as for this movie, yes, it is completely better than your average télé-novela Korean edition. Of course it is. It has some amusing parts, but it's all very slapstick. It has some dramatic parts, but nothing that you haven't seen before. And it has some heartwarming parts, which feel a little bit overdone. And while the acting is on point, the script just lets it down. This could be a very good noir movie, but instead they went for this usual tragicomedy Korean mashup, the kind people who gave an an 11 to Parasite will be ecstatic over, but quite frankly is simply cinematographically nowhere near, even as much as a 4 or a 5. In reality, if you average it all out, and you see that movies like Titane get 5.7 on this site, this would be more around a 2 or a 3. Since we can't give half-star, I'll give it a 2.

Ps: I'm not tone deaf and I could clearly see that this was a very political movie, cups are bumbling fools, The government is constantly quashing riots, as usual, it's as subtle as a punch in the face.

I usually don't give reviews for one-star movies, but because this one won the Grand Prix at Cannes, I thought it was worth mentioning that the adaptation of the novel is terrible on all fronts.

First of all, the soundtrack is an insult to the viewer in itself. It's essentially AI-generated music that you hear in elevators. It's so flat and unengaging, it's almost bothering on the bizarre. Then there's the sound mix, which is at times completely inaudible, and even native Spanish or English speakers will have to turn on the subtitles to understand what is being said. Ironically, they've hired French actors to play Nicaraguan roles, which evidently doesn't work well at all. :/

Everyone seems to be high on Xanax in this film. It's utterly strange. Unlike films where a flat affect is used for effect, here, it's simply because the dialogue is terrible, and the director completely failed at managing not just the first, not the second, but the third actor that bailed out on this film!

Indeed, it was Patterson that was supposed to play the lead role, and by the time COVID hit, he was too busy to bother with this nonsense. Good on him, he went on to do great movies, while this is a flop of the highest order. I would rather watch paint dry than watching this.

Their script is abysmal. The only good thing about it is the premise, but that's not a surprise given the novel is pretty good. You can summarize the entire plot device and all three acts of the film in exactly one line, which I won't insult you with. It's already been done by the director .

Just avoid, don't waste your time, and watch something good that actually deserves a Grand Prix this time.

Titane, on the surface and its first 30 minutes, can seem to be a bizarre mash-up of the House Jack buily, Crash, Climax, and just basically every top "shock value" indie film that made it to the festivals.

The payoff kicks off at the 40 minute mark, where the story progressively transforms into a more traditional narrative. This, by the way, has been confirmed as being very purposeful by the director. And there lies the genius of it. You start with a surrealist canvas, and then you end up in a deep analysis of characters, which is probably the best love story I've seen in a very long time.

If concepts such as the deconstruction of the individual, the criticism of the merging of man and technology, and things of that nature sound boring to you, well, the good news is that the film is in no way boring, as all of these elements are never overexposed, but instead hinted at through various scenes, some of them even containing humor. But you might have to be French to understand the subtlety of what is being said.

Titane is a film that is not to be taken at face value, but instead read between the lines. And that's the beauty of it. It's extraordinarily well constructed, and that's why it won the Palme d'Or. I'm very surprised by the low ratings, because IMDb has no problem giving an 8 to Eraserhead, but somehow this is too obscure for them? That makes no sense whatsoever. If you thought Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive were great films, this will feel more like a traditional movie, in fact. I'll go as far as saying that the surrealist elements are very limited, and again, the director confirmed that there is nothing in the film that constitutes a "dream sequence" . Everything is meant to be as is, in the real world. That's its beauty.

Personally, I really enjoyed it. I can understand the violence and the graphic depictions can be a little bit too much for some, but again, I'm surprised by that because we've seen far worse.

So, in conclusion, Titane is a masterpiece that suffers from being tried to put into box when, in fact, it can't be boxed. If you love movies you will love this.

In an ocean of bad films, I started watching Anatomy of a Fall by complete accident through a random playlist. I was immediately captivated by how incredibly well acted this was. It's genius, to a certain extent, because it presents itself as a courtroom drama, but it turns the concept on its head.

It's nothing like you've ever seen before. Nothing.

Throughout the film, I kept asking myself, what if this had been filmed by Lars von Trier or Gaspar Noé? This would definitely be at the Festival de Cannes. And it's only when I finished watching the movie, in awe of its ending, that I realized that, in fact, it did win the Palme d'Or, as it should.

After giving over 20 one-star reviews in a row, I was starting to think that there were no longer any good movies left. This gave me hope in cinematography. It shows that, in a world dominated by AI, we can still have creativity beyond belief, things that computers could never think of, things that only an artist of the highest caliber could possibly deliver, a work of labor of love, a masterpiece, to a certain extent.

I won't spoil the film for you, but let's just say that it's entirely in Frenglish, which is both almost amusing and yet so chilling. I speak both languages, so it was easy for me to follow, but I can understand why some viewers might be a little bit distressed by that.

An important point to note is that the film does not contain any type of fantasy/dreamlike element like so many have before such as antichrist or climax. And I think this is why it's such a tour the force: the director is able to convey something that on paper is seemingly dreadfully and turns it into high art.

It's hard to explain. You have to watch it for yourself. Absolutely fantastic. 9/10 but only because I'm comparing it to classics at this point.

This movie is like Marmite, you're going to love it or hate it, period, there is no in-between. The major problem of IMDb these days is the reviews are pretentious. This site has become the refuge of wannabe film critics who give 10s to anything 'not Marvel's, thinking they look smart doing so. But what's the deal with this movie? Well, for starters, the first hour feels very much like your standard modern Spanish / South American production. With fairly static shots, stiff acting and generic delivery.

BUT for some reason that is absolutely beyond me, its second half kicks off with a shot I had to rewind to believe and even looked up on YouTube to understand how it was done, then it merges into some homage to Casablanca, then to the French classics, and finally it desaturates its color palette to the point where trees become gray. No explanation is given. It's either going to be seen as pure genius or absolutely demented. And that's what bothers me. It's an homage to the French classics, it nails the 80s feel, probably in a way that no other movie has ever done. But at the same time, we're treated to amateurish make-ups, and the aforementioned first hour which felt more like law and order than watching a real movie. Did the director of photography get fired mid shot? Is this all purpose? We will never know.

If the symbolism had been better handled, (it is not exactly subtle) and the movie far more consistent visually,this could have been an absolute masterpiece. I felt like I watched half a film. And I can't even excuse it for being low budget or made by amateurs because it's none of these things.

Puzzling but they are worse things you can watch.

Dogma is, at its heart, a light-hearted dark comedy, which, for some bizarre reason, has not aged well - at all. The delivery is flat and uninspired, except for the now-infamous line, which Ye made popular again in 2023 in his album Vultures.

The photography is extremely amateurish, sound editing is something you could have done on your iPhone, and overall, the colors and even the transitions are as puerile as some of its content.

It's one of the films that you may have watched when you were in your early twenties and remember fondly for being "edgy" and it does, to some extent, contain some excellent one-liners, and if you're a little bit faded and whatnot, it's a good movie to watch with friends.

That said, in that particular genre, from Hollywood around that time frame, I feel that movies like The Office or Idiocracy are considerably superior and were made on lower budgets. I feel bad giving Dogma such a low score, because, quite frankly, it's still head and shoulder above whatever Hollywood's producing these days. And it certainly doesn't take itself seriously .But we have to be honest with ourselves, and maybe accept that our memories of the film are far better than the film itself.

P. S. If you want to watch a dark comedy with a Biblical sub-theme, watch Adam's Apples instead. It's absolutely fantastic, modern, and unlike Dogma, probably won't have aged one iota by the time you read this review.

P. S. 2. The movie is not anti-Christian or anything like that. I am myself a Christian, and I found it innofensive. The jokes are limited to things like a golden calf cartoon character, and demons that look straight out of a child's series. There's really nothing to talk about on this level.

But hey, great movies don't just fall out of the sky, you know?

Netflix ruined everything, and I mean everything. There must be someone who should be able to put a stop to this nonsense. Fincher is not a bad director, but this movie is absolutely hot garbage. There is nothing redeemable about it. Everything looks like it was shot with a cheap DSLR with the resolution turned up to the max " just because" , thrown in tesolve for a quick color edit, and some bespectacled nerd at Netflix ordered to have some cool reference for the kids.

At some point, the killer in question even comments about, and I quote, "wordle" , order things on his phone from Amazon complete with a screen overlay straight out of "you", and listens to hipster Muzak.

I'm not too sure what to even make of this. It's a slow descent into hell for the entire movie industry, as megacorps essentially control all narratives, and cannot, even and the cost of their own bankruptcy, create anything even mediocre. Go and watch indie films instead, or movies from foreign countries, such as Denmark, which makes excellent thrillers these days, and call it a day on Hollywood. It's done.

Fincher.. seriously.... Smh.

Despite a promising premise, this film struggles to leave a lasting impact. The narrative, though initially intriguing, soon becomes muddled, losing its direction in a labyrinth of underdeveloped subplots. Performances are passable, with the lead actors delivering what's required, but failing to elevate the material. Visually, the film offers some interesting moments, particularly in its representation of dream sequences, but these are too few to compensate for the overall lack of originality. The soundtrack is forgettable, blending into the background rather than enhancing the experience. In essence, it is a film that you watch, acknowledge, and then quickly forget, embodying the very essence of average cinema.

I get it, you can't use an 80-year-old script in a 2000-something movie because people are easily offended these days. Fine, just change the name of the soldiers. You did that, okay, then why change the script?

Everything is a drone shot, everything is colored to the max, it has DSLR written all over it, and quite frankly, they ruined a perfectly good story by wanting to add to an absolute classic.

The initial story was perfect, the motivations made sense, but no, they had to go in there and change it further, and now we're left with something that's quite average and is only saved because the original is so damn good it's hard to destroy it.

Let's face it, by 2023 standard, this is more comedy than horror, but it's still bloody excellent, pardon the terrible pun. Acting is hamfisted, exactly as it should be.

It's like watching an extended episode of Tales from the Crypt meets Dead Alive filmed in the 90s, except that one was filmed in 2006. I'm really impressed by this film for so many reasons, the practical effects, the refusal to use bad CGI, the jokes that land correctly every single time, and in general, a movie that doesn't take itself seriously and therefore delivers in spades.

If you want to entertain yourself, this is actually a good one, and trust me, they don't make movies like that anymore, and they probably will never likely do it again.

By far the best AJT movie I've seen. Usually his movies tend to reveal the plot in the first 5 minutes and the rest becomes a well-executed exploration of various themes complete with a thick layer of dark comedy.

But here, in Adam's Apples, we have actually a meaningful plot which is full of twists, surprises, and is executed particularly well.

The biblical allegory is also done very tastefully and I have to say this movie is maybe one of the top dark comedies out there.

Acting is superb as usual in all of his movies and I feel that the photography is also considerably superior to even some of his later releases. It's not perfect of course, but comedies are notoriously hard to transform into fantastic movies.

Definitely a winner and it was the movie I was looking for from AJT.

Infinity Pool is a concept movie which is supposed to be an allegory of the freudian Id, ego and super ego. It's not exactly subtle about it either .

In practice, however it's purely an exploration without a conclusion. Unlike " Enemy" by Denis Villeneuve which , despite its ambiguous middle manages to provide a cohesive ending, Infinity Pool fails at every step and become progressively more desperate.

You might be tempted to think it's a purposeful post ironic reflection upon the protagonist of the movie , which at one point is called a try-hard - but it's not.

Despite that you will hear, the movie is not particularly shocking although it attempts to be, but because of the overly stylized visuals the violence and torture scenes feel more artificial than anything else.

It's as if a kid had run with a copy of resolve18 and turned all the primary color wheels to their absolute maximum. It's just incoherent and as a film it fails to also bring the best out of its actors, with a Mia Goth doing a pretty poor representation of a sociopath, narcissist.

Overall, avoid.

Here's the thing with AJT films. They present a very deep sub-layer of a main theme, usually something alongside the lines of biblical themes, or the butterfly effect, and so on, and present themselves as dark comedies.

Overall, the concept is very interesting, well-executed, well-filmed, but more importantly, extremely well-acted. Where it falters, in my opinion, is that within the first five minutes of any of his films, you already know how it will end.

And while I understand the beauty in the journey, I find it regrettable that the plots are so paper-thin. Overall, this one will be another forgettable entry, despite being a brilliant dark comedy.

Ten out of ten for acting, ten out of ten for the comedy, but quite frankly, three out of ten for the plot overall.

Another interesting title by ATJ, who has established himself as one of the best Danish filmmakers. I'm not going to spoil the movie for you. It's fun, engaging, well-acted, in fact, extremely well-acted, and, as usual, ATJ delivers a weird but entertaining script that will keep you captivated.

That being said, I do have a problem with ATJ's movies. I feel like they're always a step away from greatness, almost as if he knew he could create something on par with the Gaspar Noé and the LVTs of this world, but decides against it because he wants to sell more movie tickets, and make his films accessible rather than obscure oddities.

I can respect this process, and I appreciate trying to make art accessible to as many as possible, but, in reality, what ends up happening is Americans see the Danish language and run the other direction, while the aficionados of better movies are a little bit disappointed that it doesn't quite go all the way through with its concept and ideas.

The Green Butchers, which should have already been called Danish DELIKATESSEN, with a few winks to the French original masterpiece, is such a movie.

It's a solid 5 out of 10, but it's not a memorable film, nor is it attempting to be. It's a good way to spend time. Please keep in mind, when you see this rating, that I give 1 out of 10 to pretty much everything these days anyways. So this is actually a good score.

Is Riders of Justice the best movie ever made? Evidently not. It's not an art film. It's not on par with the great authors. And it's not arthouse. But it's a fantastic action-comedy movie which obliterates anything Hollywood has put out in the last five years. It's an absolute gem when taken at face value.

It doesn't try to be anything but action-comedy. And it succeeds at it in a way that I haven't seen in a long time on a U. S. screen. We are now in a world where Hollywood is a dying patient kept on life support by small production companies like A24, sucking their inspiration out until its inevitable downfall. We're already seeing it with the Disney financial wipeout.

Move over, Hollywood. It's over. Time for real filmmakers to take over.

Given that this movie is the number one horror thriller on Rotten Tomatoes, I thought I would give it a shot. Firstly, yes, it is very clever and I would say that the last 30 minutes are really, really enjoyable.

That said, there is no other way to look at it than to accept that the first hour is painful to watch, and it kind of raises the question as to why we tolerate it for movies like Climax by Gaspar Noé, but not for other genres.

Overall, I won't spoil it like others have. It's worth watching. It's a light-hearted comedy, so don't expect the cinematic dizzying heights of true art-house movie like "Shoplifters" from the same country, which is a solid 9 out of 10.

I'll give this 6 out of 10 because you can tell a lot of effort went into breaking the mold from a director who is known for paper-thin adaptations of animes.

Maybe that's the true story after all, opening a fourth dimension to an already very meta script.

American viewers: If you want to give 10 to offering movie, go watch some Gaspar Noe, Carrax or Von Triers.

It's just so sad to see people piling up to give TV movies that are a dime a dozen in Europe 10 out of 10 , only because they're so used to watching marvel films , this must feel very exotic and 'intellectual' to them.

There's nothing particularly wrong about this film. It's just good fun if you're learning Spanish as a second language, but this is definitely not something that will stay with you or change cinema as we understand it. In other words, if you're expecting Almodóvar, you're dreaming.

In addition, it's worth nothing that the movie takes great liberties with the source material and as usual, i'm afraid to report the book is far superior to the movie.

3/10: this is a film where a sexually addicted gnome has a bodyguard dubbed the elephant man. Trust me, it's a lot less fun than it sounds.