I hate the use the term ‘wildly entertaining’ but my vocabulary is rather limited today and I can’t be bothered consulting a thesaurus. This movie is a joy to watch and it’s funny as hell and appears to be intentionally so. Tom Cruise can be very funny and this is peak Cruise having a ball.
My only criticism is its lack of dramatic heft but maybe that’s intentional. I don’t know.
Anyway, I recommend.
This teaser trailer is bonkers. Here’s hoping this, legendary in its gestation period, movie is more of the same:
A stirring slice of still-contentious Irish history masquerading as a thriller, this is a biopic meets The Godfather (1972).
Tywin Lannister is in it. As is Julia Roberts with the worst ‘Irish’ accent since … the birth of cinema. But she doesn’t ruin it; her role is window dressing, a star name to pump up the box office.
Its like the anti-Richard Attenborough biopic, and thank the gods his perfunctory talents were never let near this kind of material.
Oppenheimer also turns up as an assassin. And the poster is sublime.
4/5.
I’ve never seen Seven Samurai (1954), or Throne of Blood (1957), or Yojimbo (1961), or Ran (1985), though I did own the latter on DVD but lent it to an actor who was in one of my shitty – or sublime if you’d imbibed a gravy boat of amaretto during the viewing – student films and he clearly took it as payment for featuring in something so spectacularly awful/amazing. I bumped into him in a bar years ago and he ignored me. Charming.
This movie, Dersu Uzala (1975), was great, Kurosawa approaching his Indian summer, a proper epic with a soul. It’s long but it doesn’t matter as it’s lengthy for a reason.
Wee treat for you:
Ford’s haircut, what might feasibly be deemed a Caesar, is the feature attraction but he pulls it off.
You can tell from two mins into this brutal courtroom gig that it was shot by Gordon Willis, his unmistakable visuals a pallet of shadows and claustrophobia; when cinematography had character.
No faffing on your phone during the Caesar Attraction for you must pay attention. And it’s got that genuinely shocking ending that defines the era of the glossy star-powered thriller.
Wildly entertaining, impeccably acted, Raul Julia rocks up and somehow becomes the most interesting character. What an inscrutable face, what a voice.
The last great Alan J. Pakula movie.
It’s middlingly entertaining and daft, and mostly annoying.
His wee recruits were nauseating. We are all sick of flicks overstuffed with talentless bairns possessing the collective acting chops of the cast of the Tweenies on a cocaine binge.
Miles Teller is in this and I cannot stand him. Best thing that ever happened to the needy wank is being the victim of drumstick bullying by the grizzled (also annoying) lad from Spider-Man (2002).
The incessant references to Maverick’s age (old man, pops) by smug WASPS vexed me. I was waiting for the whole pack of them to die.
I was bored. Cruise was wasting his time. It overdoes the nostalgia factor so much there is no point to the film.
I turned it off an hour in and watched Top Gun (1986) instead.
Have a nice day.
It’s risky with some of its jokes but they are actually funny (most comedies are joke-free affairs) and stem from the growing characterisation and chemistry of the two leads, and the bizarre credibility of the bit-part players, some of whom appear to have wandered off from the set of Lethal Weapon (1987).
Michael Keaton, eh. He can do no wrong in his Indian summer (I don’t wish to hear of this Batgirl … thing).
For a comedy/satire, it’s well choreographed in its action scenes, even more so than the majority of buddy cop movies out there.
And the late Ray Stevenson pulls off an Aussie accent. X.
Kim Newman in a review decades ago drew parallels between Harry Caul from The Conversation (1974) and this thriller’s deuteragonist (Brill), and the observation inadvertently lifts Enemy of the State (1998) above the generic. That and it’s ahead-of-its-time commentary on domestic surveillance.
Another Gene Hackman powerhouse. And the normally irritating and minimally talented Will Smith is at least serviceable in this, a star vehicle from his pomp years.
It’s got style and is never dull. And it’s funny.
The cinematic travails of Tom Ripley have given us the quite barking The American Friend (1977), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), and the little-seen Ripley’s Game (2002) – a multifarious holy trilogy of sorts linked by the amoral antihero. I have not seen Purple Noon (1960), nor the Barry Pepper number. And what the fuck happened to that actor? He was on the cusp but now operating in the AWOL stakes.
And this TV first, it’s exceptional, a throwback continental thriller with vistas galore. Ripley epitomises the self-effacing weasel; you need to watch out for these creeps for they lurk in the shadows.
It’s a 5/5 from me and I couldn’t find a flaw in it.
And Patricia Highsmith used to smuggle snails through airport customs ….
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 