This is a flawless film.
I tried to be a bit sneaky and identity a flaw in it, but I couldn’t find anything.
Well done.
The French Connection (1971).
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Natural Born Killers (1994).
Horrible movie, and much like JFK (1991), an acrobatic display in baroque style and technique, for no reason.
It appears to aim to be a condemnation of mass media and its obsession with lurid violence, yet luxuriates in the mayhem committed by our murderous couple. Decent soundtrack. However, another painful Robert Downey Jr. performance ruins any hope of a watchable movie emerging.
Definitely one of Oliver Stone’s worst, but it’s not down there with Alexander (2004).
The Alto Knights (2025).
About 34 minutes into this derivative drivel, I understood that Robert De Niro playing two non-related characters for no reason summed up the movie: POINTLESS.
Avoid like the plague (or anything).
East is East (1999).
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.
The General (1998).
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.
Atonement (2007). I’ve seldom seen such drivel.
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.
Glengarry Glen Ross (1992).
It’s a pre-internet age and characters are using payphones to make sales calls.
Maybe it’s a metaphor for the ol’ ‘American Dream’ and its fallacies. But it’s mainly just a quote-fest with depressed, desperate lads crumbling. Memorable dialogue is heavy, exchanges that keep you engrossed. It doesn’t matter that the directorial style is a non-thing as it’s the filming of a play.
Impressive.
Total Recall (1990).
This is one funny movie.
Paul Verhoeven excelled at satirical splatter. Then he made Black Book (2006) and it was a sort of solemn drama and departure from corporate critique, and very good despite the absence of jokes.
Arnie is incredible in this. For a good decade he could do no wrong, the best of the hulking beasts.
5/5, a glorious film.
Rushmore (1998).
Intriguing premise slides into tedium. The posters are good and the images make decent copy, but it’s not much of a film.
It gets lost in its own ‘quirkiness’, as tiresome as its protagonist must be to his teachers, and I was bored shitless for the last 45 minutes. It relies on its soundtrack to the detriment of anything approaching character development, the repetition of the scenes a right nuisance. It’s a short movie at the most.
Brian Cox is in it and it briefly livens up the show when he is on-screen. But he doesn’t stop it from being pish. I liked this once but clearly there was something wrong with me.
I was blind but now I can see.
Monkey Man (2024).
What a title for a movie and this is what caught my flagging attention when sieving through the shambolic content we have for streaming. The crap littering the landscape is rather outrageous and this needs to stop.
I was dubious Monkey Man (2024) would be any good – but then one, that is I, never approaches a movie with an open mind and I refuse to watch a film if the poster insults me.
A rags-to-relative-riches yarn, our resourceful hero surmounts the shackles of social stratification (accidental alliteration) by using his primary skill: the fact that he’s lethal, a Jason Bourne type … donning a monkey mask. The action is hair-raising stuff; seldom has brutal hand-to-hand scrappage looked so soothing, if you’re into that kind of thing. The movie has a heart, though. Our lad loses the mask – the beatings he takes imbued with elements of latent masochism – and becomes all he can be.
Recommended.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 