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Like all good satire, this was double-edged. On  the one hand it’s whimsical tale, on the other it’s a sharp commentary on life within a repressive society. But its lightheartedness won me over. Such a contrast to Klimov’s “Come and See.”

It's a furious fever dream with some wacko characters, good acting, and snappy dialogue, but it didn't quite hit the mark for me. I didn't hate it, but I probably won't rewatch it.

I loved watching this film. Not much “happens” but there is a lot going on. The cinematography and framing of every shot is so exquisite that when when it was over I looked out the window and saw the blue sky in between the slats of a Venetian blind and I thought, how infinitely beautiful it is! 

Haley Lu Richardson: absolutely heartbreakingly perfect. My favourite scene: when John Cho’s character asks her what moves her about a building and the camera switches to inside the glass window, and we see what she’s saying but we can’t hear it, and yet we know, we know…

A visual banquet I will definitely be watching again soon.

I’m a sucker for a good spy movie, and this was great. Tightly scripted, smoothly paced (not a single wasted second), excellent acting all around, no car-chases or gunfights. And a great, percussive score by David Holmes. And educational! For instance, I learned that a tight ass could fool a polygraph.

A well made, entertaining B&W British movie from the 1950’s. Hardy Krueger is appropriately photogenic and charming as Franz Werra, the eponymous man. It’s nothing special, but it’s pretty good, and it kept my interest throughout.

Netflix movies are usually mediocre. This one doesn’t even measure up to that bar. Lame ,unbelievable plot poorly executed.

Ever since my brother pointed out Tom Cruise’s unique running style, I can’t unsee it. He even does it RUNNING UP A WALL!

Anyway, this is my third mi movie. I’m watching them in order. This one is ridiculous and fun.

I love it when I discover an unknown gem like this film. I had never heard of it, and I started watching it with no expectations, and at first I thought, oh yeah, another unfunny lo-fi indie mumblecore so-called comedy. But it grew on me. The humour is the deadest of deadpan, ironic but not self conscious.

Justin Rice is perfectly low-key yet engaging as Harmony, a hapless slacker songwriter detoxing from a failed relationship. His family and friends are all quirky and interesting in their own way. Not a lot happens. If that sounds boring, well, yeah I guess so, but the film isn’t.

The dialogue is loose and the film is loosely put together, but somehow it works. I was mostly chuckling throughout, but there are some really funny lines. Example: when Harmony’s friend Carlos says, “I’m 40, less hair, no job, no money. When people hear I didn’t go to college there’s no irony to it. It’s like, no shit, douchebag.” (Which sounds kind of depressing when I write it, but I laughed out loud when the line was delivered).

It’s surprising and heartening to see a film with no budget and lots of heart. Plus it’s got a song by Jonathan Richman and The Modern Lovers!

The last time I watched this it was in a theatre with a 70 mm screen and it was marvellous. This time, it was a computer. Still pretty marvellous. I mean, this is what a real epic is. Peter O’Toole’s performance is nuanced and layered, as he transforms from a somewhat shy, uncertain minor officer into a larger-than-life Hero. The cinematography is grand and sweeping. The shot where Sharif Ali (Omar Sharif) manifests from the desert like a mirage come to life is everything.

Woody Allen seems to toss off movies so prolifically that it’s inevitable there’s going to be some mediocre ones. This one is good, not great. Some very funny dialogue, for example: “Helen: Two martinis, please, very dry. David: How did you know what I drink? Helen: oh, you want one too?” In the end, I was entertained, which was satisfying enough.

A movie with Jason Statham is never all bad. This one is so-so. It’s kind of all over the place and not quite sure what it wants to be. There’s something off about the pacing and editing which at times makes the narrative barely coherent. Still, it’s JS and his mean-guy stare and some good action set-pieces. Good enough for me.

This is well made, the acting is pretty decent. But the characters are universally unlikable, the story is toxic, the theme is despair-inducing. No. No. No.

An uninspired film about breathtakingly selfish people behaving in shitty ways. I’m sorry I watched it.

A tour-de-force of filmmaking. I didn’t know anything about this film before watching it, so I was blown away by the opening minutes, the continuous shot of the two protagonists in a bucolic setting walking into the trenches. British trenches were not configured like this (there were several miles between the frontline and the rear), but that’s a quibble I could let go of easily. 

As I continued to watch, I realized that the entire movie is a continuous shot, or at least a very good approximation of one. This works really well with the way the story unfolds. It’s linear, and it reads sometimes like a lucid dream (sometimes a nightmare), always moving forward. I like that a lot. There’s no padding with musical montages or the like. 

And speaking of music, the score by Thomas Newman was perfect. 

Chapman and Mackay were outstanding in their roles, especially MacKay, whose intensity was never too much.

There are a few less-than-believable and illogical moments in this, but because the movie is so well crafted and the story so compelling, I could overlook them easily.

Spoiler alert: there is no plot against Harry, unless it’s life itself. In that regard, this reminded me of A Serious Man. But whereas that film has more obvious jokes, this one has an ultra-dry wit that accumulates as you continue to watch. It’s full of offbeat, interesting characters and unusual settings. A charity benefit on a subway car, a dog-training school. I like the way director Michael Roemer just plunks you down in the middle of the narrative and lets you go along for the ride. I was kind of charmed. 

Bravo! Entertaining, coherent and masterfully put together. The pacing is perfect, the cinematography is excellent, the acting is first rate. There is no filler here, each scene is exactly as long as it should be. I liked the trolley guy distinguishing the sounds of the different trolleys. That was a tiny, insignificant little bit, but it was moments like that one that made the movie so watchable and enjoyable. Five stars from me!

The reference to the rise of Fascism is obvious in this movie about sadistic bullying in an Austrian boarding school, but the message isn’t heavy-handed. The film has a spartan, even bleak tone to it, but it’s not depressing. I kinda wish Törless had more cojones, but that would have been another movie. It reminded me of If… but without the satisfying massacre at the end.

Films about mental illness are not my favourite thing. If the story is interesting, maybe okay, I can like it, but this is not one of those movies. The hallucinations don’t work for me, the claustrophobic tone is just annoying. I had to really work to keep watching. I didn’t care about any of them, except maybe the two boys.

A hot mess, but an interesting one. It involves a couple of Vietnam war alumni (Nick Nolte, as Ray, an ex-marine and now a merchant seaman, and Michael Moriarty as John, a fuzzy-brained war photographer) in a scheme to smuggle some heroin back to the states. John’s wife Marge (Tuesday Weld, whose character is a hot mess herself), go on the lam, chased a crew of bad guys, one of whom is a bent federal agent, and a few minor characters.

It becomes a bit of an unfocused shaggy dog story. Ray’s motivations are unclear. The heroin is a maguffin, a hook for the action. Nolte’s performance is powerful, and he delivers his line with gusto. 

I the source novel, Dog Soldiers, as being a richly layered meditation on the loss of innocence following the 60’s and Vietnam. The filmmakers boiled this down to make an action movie.

I don’t know why I gave this such a low grade the first time I watched it. PSH is perfect. He doesn’t act; he inhabits the character. The way he practically devours his cigarettes. Grigory Dobrygin breaks my heart.

I just couldn’t get onboard with this. I found the editing needlessly frenetic, and the shaky hand-held camera work made the action an incomprehensible mess. James McAvoy’s tics and incongruous grins didn’t help.

This is not a biopic of the real-life Idi Amin, who from all s was a complex,  brutal, murderous and possibly crazy dictator. This is about a fictional character, a young  privileged white man who consistently makes really stupid decisions, is extremely callow, and is not very sympathetic. I think a more interesting and engaging approach would have been to tell the story through the eyes of one of the African people around Amin. However, the movie’s source material was a novel, with the white guy as the central figure, so what can you say?

Forrest Whitaker is absolutely outstanding in the role as Amin. He manages to humanize the monster, which is no small feat. 

The movie seems to gloss over the colonial history of British rule and its exploitation of the country, and I think this is one of the things that really bugs me. I would probably have appreciated this more if McAvoy’s character hadn’t managed to sneak onto the plane at the last minute (which scenario I just couldn’t swallow). I mean, I didn’t want him to die horribly, but he got a free and it didn’t seem like he earned it.

Nah, it doesn’t work for me.

A solid 80's Cold War thriller with all the hackneyed cliches of those types of movies: elaborate deep state conspiracies, nasty bad-guys, good-guys way over their heads. Hackman and Jones lift it from humdrum to fun. A good watch for a rainy Friday night.

A movie that is full of the exuberance of youth. Luna, Bernal, and Verdú have a chemistry that practically explodes onscreen. The two teenage boys are selfish and callow, but also endearing in their innocent bravado. Cuarón’s camera is roaming and inquisitive, so that what could have been a high-octane road trip instead becomes an enquiry and commentary on the politics of Mexico at the time and the disparity therein. The cinematography was excellent, the soundtrack was perfect, the acting was a standout. Great movie.

I have to give Spielberg credit for his superior skill in crafting movies. This one has some astounding set-pieces. I mean the Omaha Beach landing is a tour de force. I just wish this wasn’t so schmaltzy. It’s a criticism I have for a lot of Spielberg’s work. Too much bombastic music, overblown speeches (like when General Marshall quotes Lincoln), and cheesy setups (the “mystery” about what Miller’s peacetime occupation) all seems forced and manipulative. 

Beside all that, I have no tolerance for American jingoism at this time.

This movie is a highly entertaining, exquisitely crafted high-seas adventure story during the Napoleonic wars. Russell Crowe is perfect as the swashbuckling eponymous Master and Commander, Captain Jack Aubrey. He plays it tough, uncompromising, “larger than life;” yet he also manages to convey a character with human sensitivities and feelings. Paul Bettany as the ship’s surgeon is equally good.

All the elements — story, cinematography, acting, score  — come together in this film seamlessly. I loved it!

An eminently quotable, deliciously literate, completely plotless romp through the tail end of the sixties. Richard E. Grant is perfect as the eponymous Withnail, sloppily dapper as a mostly drunken wannabe actor. His performance never crosses the line into buffoonery. Paul McGann nails his “I.” And Richard Griffiths’s Uncle Monty is both pitiful and very funny.

I first watched this when it was a new release, and I being delighted by how it conveyed queer love. Not as a campy comedic trope, not as a tragic story ending in despair, but as something soulful and real. It was one of the first films to tell a gay story in this way, and now it seems almost dated. But for me it still holds up. Gordon Warnecke nailed his Omar character with just the right amount of cheekiness and vulnerability. DDS was a standout. The ending was perfect.

A methodical, workmanlike assassination procedural. It kind of reminded me of Bresson’s A Man Escaped in its meticulousness. Edward Fox struts his stuff suavely. Michael Lonsdale gives a satisfying performance as the dogged, sad-faced inspector tasked with tracking the Jackal down. In the end I was, “Hey ho. Time for bed.”

Trying to squeeze the last bits of juice out of an already-squeezed lemon, you end up with very little juice and a lot of unsatisfying pulp. This film had none of the heart and gusto of its parent. A lot of the themes and tropes felt forced. Some good music choices, but the needle drops with frenetic editing, unlike in T1, seemed contrived. Sometimes you can get the band back together again, but that doesn’t mean you should.

A very solid, well paced, tightly plotted crime film with an incongruous title. Fargo echoed many of its tropes 30 years later: a bag of money in the snow, some quirky bad guys (one of them  being ground up in a machine). 

Aldo Ray is tough but vulnerable as the “good guy” with several aliases. Ann Bancroft is his love interest, and she does a great job. The writing is crisp, with some excellent dialogue. There are some really good location settings, the snow actually looks like snow, urban California is gritty and very fifties, all in glorious B&W!

Just about every time-travel movie I’ve ever seen contains an anomaly or paradox that, if I think about it, doesn’t make logical sense. But if it’s done well, I don’t mind the illogicality.

Writer/director Nacho Vigalondo keeps things moving at such a brisk pace and with enough sly humour that you don’t have time to stop and think, “wait a minute…” 

I liked Héctor, the hapless main character who finds himself in a time loop and is pummelled and beaten up over and over. By himself, that is. He’s overweight and out of shape, clumsy and not exactly bright. I kept thinking, maybe this will all be resolved by Héctor having a heart attack.

This is not a masterpiece, but it is entertaining and fun, and shows what can be done on a tiny budget with no special effects. A good Sunday matinee movie. Just don’t think too hard about it.

I know this film gets a lot of love, but for me it didn’t land. The one-take was a gimmick, but in the service of what? The improv dialogue was messy and unnecessarily repetitive, although the actors were all very good. I didn’t feel the tension that a lot of people talk about. I’m not sure what I was supposed to take away from this. And the ending seemed like it was tacked on just to kinda sorta wrap it up.

A surreal East German road movie about two homeless teenagers, Sauly and Mickey, in a fictional country that’s part , part USA, part Cuba. They set out in search of the ocean. On the way they encounter a collection of strange people, including Landolfi, who tells them  that he took Sauly’s guardian angel and sold it to someone named Miller who lives in a city called Prince. When they arrive in Prince, they discover that everyone there is named Miller. The film is absurd and subversive and endearing. There are some genuinely funny bits, and the ending is sad and poignant. Probably not for everyone, but I liked it a lot. Watched on Kanopy.

An entertaining film with the inimitable Jason Statham, who is rather endearing in this. The direction is adequate, and the actors are too. A good Sunday afternoon show.

An ultimately disappointing offering from Guy Ritchie. It starts off with a bang, literally and figuratively, but it fizzles after that. I don’t mind comic-book violence if it’s done well, and there are flashes of ok-ness in some of the action set-pieces, but the often poor lighting and fast cuts make a lot of it incomprehensible.

A really good thriller set in the wreckage of post-war Berlin. James Mason is excellent as a shady operator with uncertain political and moral convictions, and Claire Bloom does a great job as the innocent abroad. And one of the uncredited stars of the film is Berlin itself. Director Carol Reed’s explores the devastated city by filming in the snow-covered streets amidst the rubble, with actual Germans playing the parts (Mason excepted).

Some people compare this unfavourably to The Third Man, but I don’t see any point in doing so. This has similarities to Third Man, but it’s a different story and a different movie. There are some elements of the plot that are vague. But in the end, I found that I didn’t worry too much about who was doing what to whom and I just went along for the ride.

Not a great film, but it’s a good story well told by a journeyman director.

The story unfolds in fits and starts. In lesser hands such an approach would be disastrous, but Terence Davies is masterful in making it work.

Jack Lowden is magnificent. He fully inhabits his sensitive, searching, traumatized character. He is devastating in the final scene. 

Some might see this as simply a queer story, but I see it as being about someone searching for truth. 

Deeply moved after watching this.

Overly long anti-imperialist satire. Pythonesque animation bits were refreshing. Very 60’s. Not my cup of tea.

Like the main character’s dresses, this film is exquisitely crafted with elegance and attention to detail, Daniel David Lewis manages to infuse his seemingly insufferable character with enough humanity that you can’t help caring about him despite his solipsistic nature. If this is his swan song as an actor, it’s a great one. Vicki Krieps ‘s performance is enigmatic and compelling; Leslie Manville is perfect in her stillness. Like every Paul Thomas Anderson’s film I’ve viewed, this one left me unsettled and pensive, (I found myself sitting through the entire end-credits, grooving on the music and the beautiful fonts).

At first I was thinking oh no why am I watching this. It seemed trite and saccharine. But I stuck with it and I’m glad, because it ended up being a highly entertaining movie. So many great performances! Standouts for me were Gabriel LaBelle, Lamorne Morris, Nicholas Braun, whose line “Look, I know what people think when they see a man with his hand up a muppet” slayed me.

Bravo! This is a sumptuous, satisfying rendering of the mother of all revenge stories (and a favourite book of mine). It is exquisitely crafted with beautiful and believable sets and costumes. The filmmakers have managed to condense the original’s sprawling, extravagant plot lines into a coherent story, ignoring some of the book’s sub-plots and changing some characters while still keeping true to the central tale. Three hours remarkably quickly when you are watching something as engaging as this.

An overly long, cliche-ridden, run-of-the-mill 60’s war extravaganza with stock Hollywood characters, bombastic martial music and unfunny humour. Sounds like I hated this but I didn’t, really. It was an ok Saturday matinee that I won’t rewatch. The only thing I‘ll probably is how old and worn out William Holden looked. I imagine his alcoholism was catching up to him by that time, poor man.

A mostly dull, very low budget British film. Who knew James Mason had such a hairy chest?

Stephen Frears is dependably good, even when he makes mediocre movies. This one is based on the true story of Philippa Langley (played by Sally Hawkins) who helped find the remains of Richard III in a Leceister parking lot. SF treats all his characters with kindness here, even the more insufferable ones. An ongoing interaction between the woman and an apparition of the king could have easily become mawkish, but Frear deftly avoids that trap. Sally Hawkins has a million-dollar smile, and she plays her quirky character wonderfully.

A modern noir film about three hustlers in a karmic stew of causes and consequences. Cusack as small-time conman Roy Dillon, Huston as his hard bitten mother Lily, and Bening as his cynical, deadly love interest Myra, are all standouts. There are some really great ing actors too. My favourite is Henry Jones as fussy desk clerk Mr. Simms. The dialogue is great (“He was so crooked he could eat soup with a corkscrew”); direction by Stephen Frears is excellent. It ends on a note of devastating sorrow but what else can you expect from film noir?

Came across this randomly and I was intrigued. It is an interesting documentary, put together and researched well.

A very good depiction of life on the Atlantic convoy escorts of WW2. It wasn’t pretty or romantic, and the filmmakers do an excellent job of conveying the miserable conditions and the constant tension and fear. It starts off a bit slow, but by the end I was fully engaged.

This was a pretty tame attempt to tell the history of the development of radar before WW2. It’s an important story but not an especially exciting one. A saccharine score, an uninspired script, and listless acting all make for a humdrum viewing experience.

I don’t think this is a great film, but I was entertained. It’s basically a stylish soap opera about three very attractive young people in a love triangle. But I couldn’t get emotionally invested in the characters. They were mostly vapid and not very interesting. Lots of interesting style choices, some of which worked for me and others that didn’t. I thought there was too much repetition, which made it much longer than it needed to be. Also (hate me if you want) the music was annoying a lot of the time.