James Woods as the odious pimp Lester Diamond in Casino (1995).
The lad features for a mere 10 minutes but in those precious scenes cements his acting legacy by effortlessly creating one of the the sleaziest, slimiest characters ever put on celluloid.
James Woods is a treat and we should be grateful to him.
Strong nostalgia tour here, the type of entirely unnecessary sequel you’d expect after a 30-year hiatus.
It’s okay for what it is – hit and miss, breezy enough for an hour but far too draining once the physical comedy reaches breaking point in its repetition.
And erstwhile golfer/legendary hellraiser John Daly has a cameo. I forgot about him. But I’m glad I have learned he is still alive.
Jimmy McNulty pretending to be a serial killer and phoning a perplexed Scott Templeton really shouldn’t be at all funny. But it is:
The score in Kingdom of Heaven (2005) is exceptional, one of the best I’ve heard, and beautifully applied to image. It’s just a shame Orlando Bloom features, but I suppose you can mute him.
It evokes a time and place in a way that is definitive, without qualification. This is what that period sounded like, surely:
I tried.
Scorsese always deserves a second change of pants.
This movie is fucking atrocious. The needless, meandering, wholly unmemorable dialogue was the worst element of this unimpressive stinker.
You get the impression they are all about to drop the bombshell. And there isn’t one.
And it’s not even funny.
I hated it and hope you do too.
Sorry, Marty.
How a gruesome series of sadistic slashers whose sole concern is setting up, with our complicity in the premonition, chain-reaction sequences of unfettered butchery can be … fun is entirely testament to the filmmakers.
And this is by a mile the best yet.
It’s brilliant.
Complex but not too much so, at breakneck pacing the internal paradoxes of time travel have seldom had such thrilling treatment. It’s all a bit depressing as well, with one wrong move ruining future generations, but it’s done in an enjoyable way. Dumping Jennifer, Marty’s beleaguered girlfriend and soon-to-be wife, in an alleyway (and then a porch) is a bit naughty, though. That’s not aged well.
As for it’s prediction of 2015, much of it was accurate, but I don’t recall hoverboards a decade ago. Even today, members of Edinburgh’s shrieking underclass community are still pounding it along pavements on pink scooters (stolen), with lifted cleaning goods from budget supermarket Aldi shoved down their tracksuit bottoms.
A real shitty look distinguishes this real shitty film, and there was so much manky, needlessly prurient dialogue in it that just irritated me. Every actor dwelling in this silly bit of unfunny farce had a smutty, unbearable ‘performance’, reeling off standard lines from a depressing (they all are) British soap opera.
Pointless movie, and it won’t shock you to read the revelation that I hated it.
I mind a school teacher back in the day thought it was a hoot because a semi-mute teenager in this shabby excuse for a movie won’t remove his Inuit coat. It’s a less funny gimmick than that kid in South Park who kept dying.
“Oh my God” and all that.
Brendan Gleeson is one of the finest out there and even in a stinker he’s never the one doing the stinking.
Jon Voight, best known these days as an outspoken MAGA acolyte, has his considerable talents on display as our protagonist’s Gardaí nemesis, the Nineties his thesp Indian summer. This and his barking turn in Anaconda (1997) is a mighty double bill I would recommend to anyone.
The black and white works, it’s frequently thrilling, and he’s a very funny character who maintains your interest.
Superb movie.
Even the opening credits annoyed me in this desperate movie, which is schematic as it comes in its plot contrivances, and a fucking pain to get through. And we have the inevitable fawned-over sequence shot, an intricately constructed bit of cinematography with no purpose other than to showcase the director. A characterless piece, it was dreadful. Every frame and utterance was weak Merchant Ivory or the worst embraces of The English Patient (1996). One is even pummeled with the delights of elegantly framed close-ups of actors with an incapacity to emote; it’s like their toaster has just died when a tragedy occurs.
It attempts to delve into a few ideas about the dangers of subjectivity and misinterpretation, but there’s nothing here that Hitchcock didn’t trample on innumerable times.
I hated it and everyone in it.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 