@thiskurt

This is basically a Columbo episode, we see the murder and the coverup and then we slowly watch the tension build as our detective picks up the clues and the killers get more and more unhinged, so of course I'm in.

Looks great cinematically of course, even without the single-take illusion the staging is fantastic. It's not just a gimmick or an experiment, the fact that we never leave the apartment and never cut away between scenes makes us feel like we're right there which really works for the tension.

This Hitchcock kid, he's got a career in front of him if he keeps this up. But seriously, I've far from seen all of them, but I this is my favourite of his. It's really a masterpiece, a must watch, and great fun too.

Also, of course they are gay. Undeniably, incredibly, chronically gay.

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Certainly the self-aware tongue-in-cheek quippy style was more effective on me when I was a teen when it seemed the coolest thing, but I still enjoyed it a lot.

Slaps and bangs at least twice.

Really, all three of the leads in this are very charming. How could I not have fallen in love Michelle Monaghan when I first saw it and even now. And this is the best audition tape for Iron Man that RDJ could've possibly hoped for.

Is there a better genre than neo-noir crime comedy?

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I think this is the most uncomfortable I've ever been watching a movie. At least for a prolonged time, maybe there have been more horrible segments, but this just keeps going.

The event is terrible enough, but the anxiety of the aftermath is what made me squirm. There's an uncomfortable dark comedy in here, yes, but it doesn't let the comedy aspect give you any relief.

You have to commend it for achieving what it does, but I have no idea what to rate it.

...

Also I watched this straight after re-watching Bean, and, uh, that's not a double feature anyone would come up with, although there are... some similarities.

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I think I liked it. I'm just not sure what to say about it.

The movie relies entirely on Alison Brie's performance and I think she did fantastic, she nailed the mental spiral into madness. This movie is both slow and fast, it lets itself sit in moments long enough, but in the second half it moves very fast and escalates. I wouldn't really say it concludes, it just sort of is and then ends.

But, I don't think this movie was trying to do anything more than portraying a character, and I think it did perfectly well in that.

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This nails everything it tries to do with mood, the 70s vibe, the smokey talk show, the over the top medium, the faux James Randi, the slowly building sense that something is wrong beyond the things that are obviously wrong.

It probably gets a bit wonky around the edges if you poke at it or take a closer look, but if you just focus on what's in front of you it's a great ride.

A long episode of Inside No. 9 really.

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The Death of Stalin was everything I expected it to be, and everything I needed it to be in the moment. Glad I kept it in my backpocket. Even though sometimes I could see the Iannucci formula very clearly, but, hey, I'll enjoy an Iannucci patented crash out any time.

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A bit slow to start, but it builds into a beautiful farce. That was a great speech.

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I already gave the first one four stars and this one really is on a whole new level, so five stars it is.

A fun adventure, and obviously a masterpiece of stop motion, but even apart from that some of these shots are just gorgeous and cinematic.

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A horrifying, gross, comedic, sensual, twisted film filled with The Thing-esque levels of body horror about two people losing themselves in a relationship until they literally merge.

See now why can't I have that?

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I want to buy that picture of the hairy ass.

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I still don't know how I feel about Wes Anderson movies.

"It's been a rough year, dad."

I think I like it.

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Loved, loved, loved this movie.

Wrings everything it can out of the saying "time is like a river."

Its two minute shared single shot approach to the concept is a genuinely new angle on time loop. Thematically, character-wise, visually, everything is on point to serve its central conceit.

Absolutely lovely.

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Sweet, cutee, breezy. It has all the usual beats you expect in one of those, but it also has the needed charm to pull it off.

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I loved everything about this movie. From the glitzy glamour of the '60s, over the dark horror turn, and the lost small town girl in a big city modern parts, to the explosive ending.

But Lindsey, my man, you gotta work on your approach.

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Ten weddings? You know what they call that? Trauma bonding.

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"I'm the perfect servant."

Boy, it was a long road to get there, but I do like the ending a lot. Still, I think the whole Downton Abbey thing, even with a dash of murder and some terrible, terrible, detective work on Stephen Fry's part, doesn't work for me.

The cast is fantastic and everyone does a great job, plus it does an excellent job coordinating such an ensemble. But it's just a bit too slow for me.

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I started watching this movie last year. Now you might assume I turned it off and picked it back up later, but I'm pretty sure I watched it in real time.

It is what it is.

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A hell of a punchline

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It has Agatha Christie whacking someone on the head with a shovel.

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An excellent film, what an amazing payoff and just a complete mastery of balancing comedy and dark tones to be able to pull it off.

Also, that end title card. You bastards.

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This review may contain spoilers.

What a fool I am, I just assumed the automatic corkscrew was meant to parallel the companion bots.

But, no, it was Checkov's corkscrew. Of course it was Chekov's corkscrew! Get it together, Kurt.

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Bloody Millenials

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Could hardly distinguish the gunshots from all the fireworks that were going off while I watched this.

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This movie doesn't seem to be quite up to the task to answer the questions it asks itself, but it still has its moments.

It's funnier than I thought it would be, it has less to say about what it would mean to have your soul extracted, but it's still sweet and human.

It has more to say about economics than about the soul.

Paul Giamatti is always a joy to watch, seeing him act 'without a soul' was spot on and hilarious.

If you let it be what it is and don't fault it for not being what it isn't, you'll enjoy this.

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I liked it even better this time.

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I ended up watching this last out of the three, and this really is an excellent series.

However seeing Benoit Blanc without a beard in this is all wrong. He clearly needs one, glad they figured that out in the later movies. It's like when you watch Prescription Murder and his coat is too neat and his hair is all proper.

"You are a pack of vultures at the feast: knives out, beaks bloody," he said it! He said the line!

This one definitely has the best twist, not just twist resolution, of all three of them, but I still think I like the latest one best.

I also think it learned all the wrong lessons of its own success for the second one.

But Benoit Blanc is a great character and I hope we get to see more of him.

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In my reverse order watching of these movies I watched this one second, but, you know, the other way around. Well, not in reverse, I just mean, you know what I mean.

Like everyone, it seems, I liked this one the least.

Among Us, Lockdown, it's surprising how quickly three years can feel dated if you lean into things too hard, but the Covid thing didn't leave you many options, you would either strangely ignore it or doom yourself to being very obviously set at a very specific time.

I liked the first half quite a bit, but after the mid-point flashbacks it went downhill. I really like the previous, well next, one, but this should've taken itself more serious, or have been more genuine.

I will say, Dave Bautista's wig was a glorious thing to behold.

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This movie just started auto-playing on Netflix, and I hadn't watched any of the others yet, so I decided to watch them in reverse order, I might as well.

I think this is my favourite of the three. Benoit Blanc is completely formed here, and he has a beard as he obviously should have.

What I missed most watching the later, I mean earlier, ones after this is that we start with following the likable protagonist here. I very much liked the priest character.

Meeting him first, then the unlikable suspects and then have Benoit Blanc come waltzing in is the right way to do it in my opinion.

As far as watching this one first, it's obviously no issue, these are all standalone, and you have the benefit of being introduced to Benoit Blanc at his most well formed.

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What a movie. A simple, but absolutely devastatingly tragic story.

And, yes, F.W. Murnau's camera work is great, mature beyond its years. Nothing to be improved on. The dream, and drunk haze, sequences are fantastic and the score is thrilling.

The acting is a far cry from the naturalistic acting we'd go for today, but Emil Jannings absolutely embodies a man who has had his heart ripped out and completely lost his identity, purpose and dignity.

But, fuck those neighbours man.

I've never seen a movie so openly mock its own cop out ending. I fully expected it to cut to him alone and drunk in a corner somewhere.

I suppose only a ridiculous, idiotic fantasy could seem like a way out of the economic malaise of '20s Germany.

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Nosferatu jogging around the city lugging a big coffin around in the middle of the day, his eyes frantically darting around, is one of the funniest things I've seen.

Nosferatu's shadow creeping up the wall as he's stalking towards Ellen's bedroom is one of the creepiest things I've seen.

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The culmination of Chaplin's Tramp character. Dealing with labour, unemployment, poverty, prison, tragedy, and romance with all the humour and sentimentality that makes him unique amongst his slapstick contemporaries.

Give that poor woman some shoes!

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An absolute masterpiece of cinema. Action, stuntwork, physical comedy, montage, all of it on point.

The plot is largely there to allow for two excellent extended train chase scenes, something modern movies are really missing out on, some set pieces and Buster Keaton having to go down enemy* lines to, literally, bag a baddie.

Few action movies ever reached the highs set by this movie.

*It should be noted all of the main characters here are on the side of the dunces — I mean confederates — and the movie is entirely uncritical of that. Not that it says anything about the conflict in particular, though.

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This review may contain spoilers.

And then they won and no one had to deal with this kind of nonsense again.

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Didn't really work for me. It all just felt too staged and unnatural.

The different characters being professors of various fields, and one young student, could've led to an interesting back and forth each with their own perspective, but I felt like their characters never amounted to much or felt in any way real.

The flow of the conversation is firmly in one forward direction, it's just a single individual's take and not a very remarkable one.

This might work better written out than as a movie; you wouldn't have the intrusive smarmy soundtrack for one.

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The cast carries this movie, but there's only so far you can carry a midrange episode of a midweek detective show on BBC 3.

Still, I do hope they continue on with this series, even if this one didn't really pack much of a punch.

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Beautifully shot, but somehow scored by the people that did the Spongebob transition music.

Uses every trick in the book of the era, you could easily use it as a reference and rebuild the whole '40s movie making bag of tricks.

Atmospheric, bleak, gloomy, tense, and a wonderful twist, still part of me feels that it didn't amount to that much in the end.

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I'm still not sure what she wants from me, but this is the movie we watched together.

Anyway, yeah, I liked it, I don't know if there's a conclusion this movie has, but I'm a sucker for crime stuff.

Also Matthias Schoenaerts, Belgian actor, Michaël R. Roskam, Belgian director, this is probably why it ended up on the list and I'm sure they all enjoyed working with James Gandolfini and Tom Hardy as I enjoyed watching them.

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Those have got to be some sharp axes. They slice through everything like a Katana.

I suppose I cared a bit about.. Megan? No, Melissa, the slightest bit of character development there was in the whole movie.

You're right, copper, this was worse than '78.

This is the most lesbian teasing I've ever seen in a movie, no, this is the most unfulfilled lesbian teasing I've ever seen in a movie.

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This is just what children's toys used to be like, before everyone went all health and safety.

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Aw shucks, sweet and family friendly on the surface/in the parlor, academic in the next room, dark hocus pocus and human sacrifice in the basement, and desire for control beneath it all.

But enough about filing an insurance claim, this movie is about religion.

We all know the one true religion, Chekhov's rusty nail board, now there's a prophecy.

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If I had to be trapped in a time loop with someone, Cristin Milioti would not be the worst choice, neither would Andy Samberg, really.

Gotta love a good time loop movie. Is there even a bad time loop movie out there? I don't think so, my theory is that if you try to write a bad time loop movie a muse traps you in a time loop forcing you to keep rewriting the movie until it's perfect.

That's why there are never any sequels, well, except for Happy Death Day 2U, I guess that movie was just perfect in the first loop.

Anyway, I absolutely loved this movie.

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This was a perfectly fine era of comedies, but it did not start the revolution we thought it would.

A Segel penis on every corner, we would say, Dracula muppets on every tv channel, between episodes of the Campbell Soup's Segal Penis Hour of course, we would all get to date Mila Kunis. Alas. Not in Musk's America.

Nice to get a glimpse into a lost world filled with Jason Segel's penis.

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Many times during this film I felt I knew exactly what was going to happen next, every danger being resolved the way it appeared in my head as soon as it started, every scene unfolding as these scenes tend to do.

That's not necessarily bad, I wouldn't have written this movie any different, I think. No one would. It's as if there is some predestined Top Gun: Maverick script in heaven we have all always had in our hearts. This truly is the platonic ideal of a Top Gun sequel.

I don't think we ever learn who the enemy is, or why they are the enemy, and it's not clear to me if Jennifer Connelly's character is supposed to be the same character as in the first one? But such worldly matters aren't important to Top Gun Colon Maverick. This movie exists in a world where the original Top Gun is the only thing that has ever happened.

There are no politics, there is no history, there are no relationships that do not mirror the ones in the first one. The reality in this movie exists only to repeat or continue the one of the first one. Some movies are inspired by life, some by other fiction, Top Gun Colon Maverick is only inspired by Top Gun.

I don't think I've ever watched a movie where I've felt like the entire world outside of what we see is just an empty white void as much as this one.

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I think the aliens were just trying to get into Ron's weed room, actually.

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So far all of Alexander Payne's movies seem to have a quality I can only describe as 'sweetly depressing,' that ultimately culminates in a 'wistfully uplifting' ending.

If you love your wacky road trip movies to be sad and off beat, check it out. Paul Giamatti plays bitter, lonely and stuck as good as ever.

Also young Sandra Oh sure was something else.

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I've been not watching Your Name for a long time now and ended up watching this movie instead not knowing it was from the same director.

Beautiful movie in art, animation, story and characters. Any scene with these characters just hanging out together was a joy.

It was Bae or Bay all over again.

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Absolutely wild movie, unfortunately the title Wild Things was already taken.

Loved it. I don't even know where to start. I was worried it was going to be the kind of artsy thing that doesn't really pull me in at first, but this is amazing.

Loved the cinematography and set design and how they work together to create Lisbon and Paris. Love the hamming of Buffalo, and it occasionally slipping in a sweary moment, love the imaginative elements both boldly at the front and unremarked on in the background.

Let's dig up Mary Shelley, put her brain in a goat and have her watch this just to see what she'd think.

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This review may contain spoilers.

To say this is about cancel culture is really underplaying the breadth of this movie. It's about the full journey of fame, really.

Starting from a boring, and a little sad, figure wanting some level of recognition only to have it arrive through something arbitrary and not really about him, leaning into, the shallow corporate exploitation, all the weird ways people act around it, the sudden turn, and, yes, cancel culture and finding himself in a ridiculous culture war, to the decline and the slow resignation to declined fame.

Nicolas Cage does a great job embodying this kind of guy. But this is why you never fart in front of anyone. Except in France.

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This is a bit of a tech demo of a movie and as a tech demo it works very well, but as a movie it's mostly just fine.

The movie consists of four continuous shot films playing at the same time in a split screen. Everything lines up perfectly and it uses audio very well to direct your attention. At no point does it ever feel disjointed or confusing.

The story on the other hand is just too basic and combined with the largely improvised dialogue it's just not that good.

A great technical achievement, but unfortunately none of the four screens ever had anything interesting to watch.

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This review may contain spoilers.

It's a tale as old as time. Girl jumps off bridge, boy jumps after girl, boy throws knives at girl, boy and girl fall for each other, girl parts ways, girl stops boy from jumping off bridge.

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A real classic film, in every sense of the word.

A bit slow, yet I could've watched it for another two hours no problem. Three interesting characters realized by three great performances. That chase scene is better than any chase scene in any action movie ever. Also let's bring back snap zoom outs in a big way.

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Faux found footage film featuring fearless filmmakers filming faraway fantasy fables. Fantastic fun.

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I'm biased because I could just stare at Rebecca Hall's face for two hours and think it's a pretty good movie.

I'm happy they went all the way with this.

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A lone figure sits in a dark room only illuminated by the flickering images of snow and ice. What is there to be found in a film about penguins? Why does he stare so intently at the white void on the screen like a lion staring at its prey. What nourishment can the screen bring for him?

Perhaps he is looking for an escape out of his existential abyss as he waddles through life without purpose or sense like a deranged penguin. Maybe their madness and despair is like a mirror to his own madness. Or perhaps the resilience of these poor penguins in the face of the harsh, unforgiving nature of the icy monolith in the sound reminds him of the resilience of his own human soul.

Sitting there transfixed by the haunting beauty of nature, at the same time majestic and fragile, and the strangeness of all human endeavour; what is this man to do? What is he to do in the face of the monstrous indifference of the universe? He can only continue to waddle towards the mountains in the distance, towards certain death.

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All in all a fairly standard gangster film, but a well executed one. It does everything it needs to do. Don't expect anything you haven't seen elsewhere, but seeing it here, in this setting, alone makes it worth a watch in my opinion.

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Ghost chatroulette is a lot like regular chatroulette, the dicks have to ruin it for everyone.

It was totally the kangaroo, right?

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Finishing off the impromptu one-shot trilogy with this movie was A Choice.

What a movie. Beautiful, and by beautiful I mean completely unsettling.

It does a good job as a cult's fictional lost propaganda/brainwashing fairy tale. There's something really wrong under the surface. Heck, there's something really wrong on the surface, it's even worse underneath.

If you know a bit about the backstory all the elements are obviously here: the cultural images, the control, the fear, the isolation from the world, the constant air of abuse. It's still hard to really Understand, but it always would be, I suppose. You definitely feel it though.

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The second one-shot film in a row, but purely by accident.

Unwind after a long day with this tense and stressful masterpiece.

Enthralling from start to finish, a great atmosphere, characters you recognise, but who are still interesting enough. I was on the edge of my seat when he was taking those bins out.

That darn walnut oil, they were the only table I liked too.

Not sure about the ending, though.

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I'm giving this an extra star for the technical achievement element of it all.

Apparently this was a one shot, didn't even notice, and from the behind-the-scenes montage at the end I noticed this movie was shot on a phone too. All that and keeping track of timey wimey logistics. Plus it managed to do show and tell at the same time with its establishing exposition.

The movie itself is great. Cute, sweet and short, a real joy to watch; go do so right now if you haven't yet.

Imagine inviting your friends over and they're there in two minutes. Forget the five minute city, this is a two minute city, they're living in the future over there in Japan, but only two minutes.

That is one long extension cord, though.

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The perfect movie for anyone who's ever wanted to be terrified by Rubin's Vase.

Fantastically executed visuals, tense throughout and the lead actress is so, so good.

I would've changed nothing. (That's a joke)

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This movie gets more charming every time I watch it.

I can understand why maybe some people didn't like it at the time, but with hindsight, and with the series fully regenerated, it is a lovely, somewhat cheesy and goofy, gem of a movie full of charm.

An excellent Doctor, an excellent Master and excellent companions who deserve all the love from fans of the series. And guns, questionable health care, shots of Frankenstein on tv to make it clear he's being resurrected, to make it relatable to the Americans.

Brian is the worst.

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Like an old friend you haven't seen in a long time, every once in a while you have to sit down with this movie and let it talk to you for a bit.

It's just two friends having a conversation, it doesn't get more basic than that in cinema, just shot reverse shot, and yet it just pulls you in and captures your attention the whole way through.

I didn't mean to watch this movie again, I just put it on, because I was trying to remember something from Wallace's opening monologue and before I knew it the movie was over.

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It is impossible to decide whether this or Fargo is my favourite Coen Brothers movie. This one is my biggest comfort watch, though.

I probably quote more lines from Big Lebowski, but I talk more often to myself in the Fargo accent. So it's a wash.

It's not a unique thought to say that this movie is like a hard-boiled detective story staring the least hard-boiled detective around, but that really came across on my last viewing.

The entire sequence of the Dude in Malibu, doing the pencil trick on a notepad, getting knocked out, being hassled by the local police who give off more than a whiff of corruption could've been ripped straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel.

Philippe Marlowe is constantly getting in trouble with local law enforcement in small towns near LA for being too nosey. He never had his rug stolen though.

That rug really tied the room together.

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This seems to be another entry in the M. Night makes a Twilight Zone series. I guess that's a comparison you can make for most of his movies, so I'm not sure why Devil and Old feel the most like this to me. Perhaps it's the scale.

People seem to like this one more than Devil, though, I would say it's a more unique premise, but I'd say they're pretty even otherwise.

I do think more work was put into developing the characters and giving the movie the breathing room to explore the themes more, but it didn't connect with me that much. I can see why other people would love it, though.

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I suppose Grumpy Old Man Set in His Ways Learns to Care Again is a whole genre on its own that has been done to death and I suppose this film is just a sappy, feel-good TV movie in a lot of ways. And yet, there's something about it.

Maybe it's Tom Hanks, maybe this movie has perfected the formula, maybe it's maybelline, maybe it's the fact that it has subtly updated the tropes to fit a bit better in the modern era.

I couldn't tell you why this movie is better than it should be, but it is. It's Very Good.

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I don't know if I can explain why I like this movie so much.

It features a group of characters trapped in an elevator with a supernatural terror, but is as much about the people as the terror. If you know the elevator pitch for this, pun intended and I will not apologise for it, you probably know what it's going to do.

Does it explore the character dynamics as well as something like The Mist? Probably not. Does it approach its theme of forgiveness with enough depth? Probably not. But I still really like this movie.

It does everything it needs to do for this kind of story and it does it adequately, I don't think it will stick with you any more than hearing the basic premise would, but it did stick with me.

The acting and the atmosphere is pretty spot on though, in those aspects I think it more than exceeds expectations.

It may at times feel more like an episode of a modern horror take on the Twilight Zone, but it's certainly one of the better episodes.

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This review may contain spoilers.

As far as an 'old friends get back together for a weekend' film goes it was fine, nothing too remarkable, hilarious or moving, but it was enjoyable enough.

I think I enjoyed the film more as an historic artefact than as an actual movie.

The reveal of Peter near the end that he has AIDS was interesting in that it very much marked it of its time. Not sure how it would've come across at that time itself, though. Would it have felt tacked on? Poignant?

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I really need to watch more of the Coen Brothers. Fargo is one of my favourites, Marge Gunderson may be my second favourite detective, The Big Lebowski is such a comfort movie, Raising Arizona didn't really do it for me, and Barton Fink is wild.

You know how you can tell a book isn't that good when all the praise on the back is about the author rather than the book itself? That's not exactly what's going on here, I did like it, I just don't really know what to say.

It's a noir film, the Coen Brothers are very good at those, all the characters are very good, and all very smart which does make it interesting to see how it all will get resolved, and Gabriel Byrne does an excellent job as the main character.

I just don't know if I liked this movie as much as I appreciated it.

I think I'm going to watch this one again some time, I suspect I might like it more.

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This is probably the least depressing film about binge drinking I've ever seen. It doesn't shy away from showing the dark side of both the effects and underlying reasons, but it's also quite joyous, human and hopeful, plus it's just a really fun movie.

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The way videogames have Roguelikes, Soulslikes and Metroidvanias, there are a few styles of movies that go beyond genres and tropes and can be best described using a *-like moniker.

The three main ones that jump to mind are Scroogelikes, Groundhoglikes and Freakylikes. Movies that more than share a genre, but are almost ever changing fairy tale like retellings of Scrooge, Groundhog Day and Freaky Friday respectively.

Unsurprisingly Freaky is a Freakylike, well more of a Freakylite, really. It has the body swap aspects, but there's not as much learning to appreciate the other by living in their shoes.

I mainly watched this movie in the hopes of satiating my hunger for Happy Death Day 3U. I don't think it quite did that, but it was worth it for watching Vince Vaughn as a teenage girl.

Give Vince Vaughn more teenage girl roles. But there's no need for a high concept explanation, just don't address it.

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This review may contain spoilers.

An excellent movie. Just a nice story about a girl going out for a cheeseburger and coming home satisfied.

I could try to talk about what the movie is trying to say about restaurant culture, about art, audiences, snobbery, class, and a whole load of other things. The problem is that I worry that if I do that it will take away from just how much fun this movie was.

This movie is neither a Sous Vide Espuma Deconstruction of a resurrected dodo nor a cheap fast food snack, it really is like eating a simple, but excellent, cheeseburger made by a master of the craft while watching an island of cultists burn.

As far as murder mystery dinners go this one is pretty easy to solve, though.

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This is Social Anxiety: the Horror Movie.

Is it actually a horror movie? Yes, but no. Is it a comedy? Yes, but no. Is it a character drama? Yes, but no.

Worth checking out. I didn't not like it.

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