Very high quality family drama set on a ranch near small town Texas - the screenplay, cinematography, direction and performances from the four central characters are all first rate. The only negative is the sheer bleakness of the story - it doesn't end well for anybody, and there's no lightness to relieve the gloom apart from the pleasure of watching a story well told.
The first Kung Fu Panda was a lovely surprise - well written, often funny and it looked wonderful. This sequel manages the last of these - as you'd expect - but sadly the storyline couldn't be any thinner and the script barely raises a smile. Disappointing.
It seems comical to think now that a man considers himself fit for hell for spending his life lusting after beautiful women... how far we've fallen since 1943... but Henry Van Cleve is never so bad, thanks to Don Ameche's charming performance. The hell's waiting room bookends are delightful and first hour is pacey but the latter half of the movie begins to drag as Henry becomes older and better behaved, the roster of excellent supporting characters gradually die off, and the witty script gives way to a sentimental earnestness. It was fun to discover that Henry and I share a birthday though.
What a strange film - basically it's a sci-fi sports underdog parental drama kids summer movie, but one that's basically too sentimental and lightweight for teenagers to enjoy, and too predictable and poorly written for adults to enjoy. The whole concept was interesting, although increasingly silly, and more than a little flawed. The robot fights are done well but are never exciting and I couldn't stand the precocious kid - all that pre-bout prancing around was horrid - I was secretly hoping for some 11th hour tragedy... Zeus falls over and crushes him or something... but nothing that happens in this film, from the first frame to the last, is designed to surprise. Nice to see Evangeline Lilly in something again though.
I can't believe some of the comments I'm reading. It's definitely not worth watching... in fact it's utterly inept and probably one of the stupidest big budget action films I've ever seen.
The sheer idiocy of the virtually every aspect of this film and the bizarre actions of the characters mean you would actually have to not care at all about anything other than ADD editing, explosions and slow motion bullets to enjoy it. Every moment is designed only for effect regardless of the actual stupidity of what you're watching.
It seems pointless going into more detail, but as I sat through it and you really shouldn't, here are a few choice and amusing examples... Spoilers ahead... (but, honestly, so what, you can't spoil a turd....)
A little girl vomits a small SD card onto an official's desk which instantly transforms into a floppy disk for him to put into his 90s desktop computer....
It's possible to open a prison door with a hairpin...
You can get released from prison the morning after you've drunkenly smashed a police car if you have a fake library card and a wig - the police won't take your photo though, just your fingerprints...
Two hungry sharks won't dismember a bleeding man in the water, just bite him a bit till he dies and leave him floating where he fell. The photo that appears in the paper the next day will somehow be from twenty feet above his floating corpse...
It's a far better idea to smash your truck through your own gates than open them first...
A SWAT team will blow up an apartment door producing a huge fireball that decimates the corridor when they could just as easily (not to mention quickly or realistically) smash it open...
An exceptional assassin capable of hunting and killing 22 people connected to a Columbian crime boss is somehow not able to trace the man she actually wants... That crime boss also doesn't seem to notice that 22 of his connections have all been taken out and drawn on until a dodgy CIA agent shows him a newspaper...
According to the FBI an assassin drawing on men with lipstick couldn't possibly be a woman...
A rocket launched missile can destroy all the furniture in a villa but not kill anybody inside....
You can train dogs fed on steak to kill a man by saying the word "eat" down a mobile phone to them...
A man closely connected to the assassin and who receives a phone call from her while under interrogation is immediately allowed to leave the police station after she hangs up...
Anyway. I don't understand why Luc Besson is so obsessed with the idea of a girl growing up to be an assassin - he did it well in "Nikita", and even better in "Leon" - the third time he's not so lucky - his embarrassingly poor screenplay, in the hands of the director of Transporter 3, a man actually called Megaton, seems appropriate as this film is a total bomb.
As bizarre and fragmented as you'd expect following Buñuel and Dali's "Un Chien Andalou", but this is clearly less Dali's film and more Buñuel's reflected in his ongoing cinematic obsessions present here: violent sexuality and repression, hatred of organised religion and the mockery of the upper classes. It's easy to understand why it was shocking in 1930 - a woman lustfully sucking a statue's toes - equating Jesus Christ with the Marquis de Sade - and although the satire is somewhat blunted now there still some great surreal images are some wonderfully dark comic moments: the sexually frustrated and mud-spattered good-will ambassador kicking a blind man over in the street and the cow revealed in the girl's bed in particular. A great slice of surrealism and a good taster of great things to come from Buñuel.
A perfectly well made, often exciting spy thriller, sadly diminished by the fact it is set in the Bourne universe and cannot hold a candle to that entirely superior action trilogy. When you realise, along with super-agent Aaron Cross that Bourne's actions have doomed him and all his fellow super-agents there's a palpable thrill of an exciting film ahead after a slow start. He has to vanish and also save the targeted doctor who can help him track down the chemicals that are keeping him super and also alive (a strange and unlikely requirement for agents who may be undercover and on long missions without access to their special pills). When the action does start it kicks in marvellously - the house siege is particularly good - but somehow it all feels less than the sum of its parts. Renner and Weisz are good, the rest of the cast struggle with horribly underwritten roles - Norton in particular, who just looks tired. It never outstays it's welcome, but the end is so abrupt I felt short-changed of another decent set-piece. No classic, but a decent action film if you can forget Jason Bourne's altogether more thrilling story running alongside.
Has there ever been a more inconsistent director than Sidney Lumet? A filmography that includes Twelve Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Fail-Safe, The Pawnbroker, Network, Serpico... also has something as dramatically inept as this amongst his disasters. It really is a terrible film with pretensions of cleverness. Connery and Lumet worked together brilliantly elsewhere - The Hill and The Offence are both fantastic. This is horribly dated - the electro-jazz Quincy Jones score sounds like it was cut and pasted from the cheapest porn film of 1971, the editing is messy, the script is lamentable. Connery himself looks and sounds ridiculous (dispensing his toupee for the first time, but unable to shift his Scottish accent) amongst a cast who all seem miscast - Martin Balsam possibly giving a career worst turn as an effeminate antiques dealer. Christopher Walken barely bothers. You probably shouldn't either.
This was one of Sam Peckinpah's first features and it's clear he was still finding his feet in terms of tone and content, as this is a surprisingly straightforward and old-school western for the most part, with traces of his later trademark bloody violence and violence toward women - in fact the best scenes are exactly the ones that raise the temperature of the film out of its comfort zone - the near gang-rape of naive new wife Elsa, the night time confrontation of the two old friends, and the grim five-man shoot out at the end. What makes it a better than average western is the surprisingly witty script and the two really excellent central performances by Hollywood veterans Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott - the latter in his final screen performance before retirement. What lets it down is a clumsy overblown score and, for my taste, an unlikely and unsatisfying conclusion.
Fantastic, inspired-by-true-events WWII drama by Roberto Rossellini starring Vittorio De Sica, in what many consider his greatest performance, as the opportunistic conman Bardone. Landing up in prison he is persuaded to impersonate the partisan Italian general of the title to uncover the captured head of the resistance. Rossellini expertly negotiates a moral maze for Bardone, desperate to save his own skin yet increasingly hesitant to betray his fellow prisoners to his equally cunning protector Colonel Muller (a great complementary performance from Hannes Messemer). With a powerful message of moral transformation and courage it deserves a place alongside Rossellini's earlier similarly themed trilogy as one of the best films of the war genre and Italian cinema - it rightly won the Venice Golden Lion.
Terrific animated short - a clear progression of Hertzfeldt's talents and featuring some wonderful ideas... think "Duck Amuck" via Monty Python and "Itchy & Scratchy" violence.
Not as hilariously insane or ground-breaking as Hertzfeldt's next film "Rejected" - but packed with wonderful details of the pitfalls of dating and some great laugh out loud moments all the same. Genius.
Stylish and punishingly violent - in other words typically Korean - revenge/cop/drugs/kidnapping film. It never reaches the heady heights of Park Chan-Wook's Vengeance trilogy (although it owes a big debt to them, as well as to Kim Ji-Woon's A Bittersweet Life), because it's hampered with a sentimental streak a mile wide thanks to an tortured hero with an engaging moppet to rescue, but is still one of the best of the recent batch of Korean action thrillers to reach our shores. For one thing the characters are well defined and well performed, even if the leading man's model looks and perfectly sculpted hair are slightly ridiculous. Crucially the action sequences are all very impressively done: the fight in the nightclub toilet stood out particularly. It's not very subtle, and there's a nagging sense that it's all trying a little too hard, but when it works, it really works. Definitely worth a look.
A not entirely convincing retelling of Homer's Iliad, with some suitably epic battle sequences but a vacuum where there should be passion and drama - pretty blondes Paris and Helen never bring their scenes to life, perhaps because both have been over-dubbed by other actors, perhaps because the script never rises above the two-dimensional. Niall MacGuinness, Stanley Baker and Torin Thatcher all chew the scenery as unpleasant Greeks (the last of these playing Ulysses, oddly named the Roman way, rather than Homer's Odysseus) - in fact all the Greeks are painted in a negative light, the Trojans fare much better (including a young Brigitte Bardot as Helen's servant girl) although it makes for an odd imbalance in the story.
Having said all that it's a lot more plausible and entertaining than "Troy" - Wolfgang Petersen's miserable attempt at the same story - aptly proving there are worse ways to spend your time.
An altogether classy affair from Max Ophuls, immaculately shot, intelligently written and featuring great performances from Charles Boyer as a possessive cold-hearted General and the very beautiful Danielle Darrieux as his manipulative wife who sells her husband's wedding gift of a pair of diamond earrings to clear her debts and increasingly gets caught up in her own lies when she falls in love with another man. Brilliant.
@KatForsyth - that is a fascinating website, thanks for pointing it out, it's incredibly impressive work.
The only thing to say against the fact that some of these films have come and gone before and may well do again is that the majority of the recent losses (in my mind essential inclusions to a list of the greatest films and worth the discovery by inquiring minds c/o the Top 250), will never come back into a list with a 30'000 vote limit. How can they? "La Grande Illusion" has about 17'000 votes and "Come and See" around 14'000, "The Passion of Joan of Arc" 16'000, "The Wages of Fear" 20'000, "Les Diaboliques" 22'000 (which maintained a respectable hovering position of 140 to 180 on the list for the last six years, now dumped, deemed "not popular" enough)- all of these votes accrued very gradually over ten to fifteen years.
All that will happen is major blockbusters which pick up the requisite 30'000 votes quickly will enter and exclude the smaller films at the bottom end and movie diversity in the mainstream taste will dwindle. It's a travesty.
There's mastery of the camera as you'd expect from Welles - the B&W cinematography and the use of shadow in particular is brilliant - but the story doesn't hang together quite as well. Welles' Nazi war criminal, hiding out as a history teacher in Smalltown USA, is shifty and suspicious from the outset making you wonder how anyone didn't suspect there was something up with him from the start - it's not a subtle performance by any means, and with the cat out of the bag from the very beginning it doesn't make for great thrills. Loretta Young's Mary seems all the more foolish for not seeing the obvious, but Edward G. Robinson is excellent as the man sent to hunt him down. The denouement is preposterous in the extreme and
so heavily foreshadowed it's quite comical when the clock-face angel finally does Kindler in with the sword of justice
. For all that it's a diverting film noir, and bringing to the screen the horrors of the concentration camps, barely a year after Hitler was defeated, is impressive in itself.
I like Verhoeven's films on the whole, I like his guts and his satire, but this early effort got on my nerves pretty quickly - the almost constant hysterical tone gets tiresome and the need to shock with shit, puke, blood and come just feels infantile without some balance. Hauer is as good as ever, but is saddled with a two dimensional character, Van de Ven is even less likeable and has to contend with a eye-rolling conclusion for her character. A decade later Jean-Jacques Beineix did something similar with "Betty Blue", but better.
Beautiful and harrowing documentary which manages to draw together the seemingly disparate strands of astronomy, archaeology and political atrocities - and it does so superbly. The Atacama desert in Chile is the driest place on earth and so also has the clearest skies allowing high powered telescopes to look further into the solar system. It was also the site of Pinochet's death camps and the place where thousands of prisoners were "disappeared". Guzman's film is by turns poetic and awe-inspiring, thoughtful and upsetting, and is highly recommended.
This - is - appalling! Seriously. This list used to be a great starting point for people actually interested in getting into cinema beyond the mainstream - with tasters of work by great film-makers unknown to the casual film goer - it introduced me to films that I'd never heard of before when I was looking for something more than the mainstream. With the films nawi has listed below now gone that's a guaranteed decline in film knowledge for the future. A Top 250 films that doesn't include Come and See, Wages of Fear, The Grand Illusion, Les Diaboliques and The Passion of Joan of Arc is not a list worth reading, not to mention wonderful films that exist just below the radar. How are these films expected to get 25,000 votes? I am actually shocked.
Unlike the majority of the Western world I went into this with lowered expectations - I enjoyed BB and TDK when they were released, with reservations, but re-watching them both recently I was reminded at how clumsy they sometimes are - the confusing plots, the length and poor pacing issues, the tonal inconsistencies, the desperate "seriousness" of them... Nolan has gone all-out in this series to make Batman as "real world" as possible, but by throwing out the comic book sensibility and ramping up the grit he made the whole concept of a man fighting crime dressed as an armoured bat seem more and more ridiculous. Bale has never particularly convinced me in either of Bruce Wayne's personas, and he was practically a supporting character in TDK he was so swamped by the grandstanding villains and fancy gadgets: "wheeeeere is he?" indeed.
This conclusion not only ends the trilogy on a high but is a much more satisfying film than its predecessors (again, I'm not expecting many to agree); the pacing is better - it builds properly to its suitably large denouement - it makes more sense, and best of all by tying in smartly and directly to the other two films it completes a saga that improves all three films as a brilliant, ever escalating sequence of events.
I have gripes: Bane is not an interesting character, never was, purely invented to "kill Batman" when comic book sales were plunging in the mid-90s. Hardy struggles with the mask and a bizarre plummy accent (I understood virtually all of his dialogue - I guess my cinema got the mix right) although the sewer fight is impressively brutal; Caine (miscast from the start) gets to deliver more watery-eyed platitudes - I was never convinced, particularly the clumsy Florence anecdote.
Vitally though, Bale comes into his own at last, Hathaway is brilliant as Catwoman bringing some much needed lightness of touch to her moments and some good one-liners, and Oldman and Levitt are solid and compelling real-world protagonists. It was great to see Murphy and Neeson cameoing too. Couple of major plot spoilers here.....
I had heard it speculated when Marion Cotillard's casting was announced that she would be playing Talia Al Ghul, and never quite forgot it, so that element was sadly not a surprise for me, but I really liked that the twist was there - I certainly didn't expect John Blake to become the future Robin. Very nice touch indeed.
All in all I'm sorry that Nolan is leaving the franchise here, because he's finally made a great Batman movie.
Having missed this on the original release I was interested to catch this prior to seeing the last in Nolan's trilogy. As Lang Welles said - very much a hit and miss affair, although contrary to his opinion I thought the first of the six was probably the best, stylistically and in the script. The tales are all vaguely interlinked to a larger and not particularly interesting narrative but there are some nice distractions from rogues gallery alumni Scarecrow, Killer Croc and Deadshot. All in all very average, but with some good moments.
This excellent little film is a loving homage to the classic 70s and 80s slasher and supernatural horror flicks, complete with 80s electronic soundtrack, chunky yellow opening credits with freeze frames and grainy, washed out cinematography, but with a couple of distinct advantages: first and foremost the acting is largely excellent including Tom Noonan - my favourite screen psychopath in "Manhunter", indie chick of the moment Greta Gerwig, and unknown but beautiful actress/model Jocelin Donohue (very easy to watch). Secondly the special effects when they come are more sophisticated than the bright red paint of latter days. The pacing and build of tension is excellent, only let down by a fairly standard final 15 of straightforward blood letting that is true to the horror tropes but feels a little pedestrian now. Nice epilogue though. If, like Ti West, you have a hankering for the old school, you'll love what he's managed to achieve here.
Comments 201 - 225 of 429
Movie comment on Hud
dombrewer
Very high quality family drama set on a ranch near small town Texas - the screenplay, cinematography, direction and performances from the four central characters are all first rate. The only negative is the sheer bleakness of the story - it doesn't end well for anybody, and there's no lightness to relieve the gloom apart from the pleasure of watching a story well told.Movie comment on Kung Fu Panda 2
dombrewer
The first Kung Fu Panda was a lovely surprise - well written, often funny and it looked wonderful. This sequel manages the last of these - as you'd expect - but sadly the storyline couldn't be any thinner and the script barely raises a smile. Disappointing.Movie comment on Heaven Can Wait
dombrewer
It seems comical to think now that a man considers himself fit for hell for spending his life lusting after beautiful women... how far we've fallen since 1943... but Henry Van Cleve is never so bad, thanks to Don Ameche's charming performance. The hell's waiting room bookends are delightful and first hour is pacey but the latter half of the movie begins to drag as Henry becomes older and better behaved, the roster of excellent supporting characters gradually die off, and the witty script gives way to a sentimental earnestness. It was fun to discover that Henry and I share a birthday though.Movie comment on Real Steel
dombrewer
What a strange film - basically it's a sci-fi sports underdog parental drama kids summer movie, but one that's basically too sentimental and lightweight for teenagers to enjoy, and too predictable and poorly written for adults to enjoy. The whole concept was interesting, although increasingly silly, and more than a little flawed. The robot fights are done well but are never exciting and I couldn't stand the precocious kid - all that pre-bout prancing around was horrid - I was secretly hoping for some 11th hour tragedy... Zeus falls over and crushes him or something... but nothing that happens in this film, from the first frame to the last, is designed to surprise. Nice to see Evangeline Lilly in something again though.Movie comment on Colombiana
dombrewer
I can't believe some of the comments I'm reading. It's definitely not worth watching... in fact it's utterly inept and probably one of the stupidest big budget action films I've ever seen.The sheer idiocy of the virtually every aspect of this film and the bizarre actions of the characters mean you would actually have to not care at all about anything other than ADD editing, explosions and slow motion bullets to enjoy it. Every moment is designed only for effect regardless of the actual stupidity of what you're watching.
It seems pointless going into more detail, but as I sat through it and you really shouldn't, here are a few choice and amusing examples... Spoilers ahead... (but, honestly, so what, you can't spoil a turd....)
A little girl vomits a small SD card onto an official's desk which instantly transforms into a floppy disk for him to put into his 90s desktop computer....
It's possible to open a prison door with a hairpin...
You can get released from prison the morning after you've drunkenly smashed a police car if you have a fake library card and a wig - the police won't take your photo though, just your fingerprints...
Two hungry sharks won't dismember a bleeding man in the water, just bite him a bit till he dies and leave him floating where he fell. The photo that appears in the paper the next day will somehow be from twenty feet above his floating corpse...
It's a far better idea to smash your truck through your own gates than open them first...
A SWAT team will blow up an apartment door producing a huge fireball that decimates the corridor when they could just as easily (not to mention quickly or realistically) smash it open...
An exceptional assassin capable of hunting and killing 22 people connected to a Columbian crime boss is somehow not able to trace the man she actually wants... That crime boss also doesn't seem to notice that 22 of his connections have all been taken out and drawn on until a dodgy CIA agent shows him a newspaper...
According to the FBI an assassin drawing on men with lipstick couldn't possibly be a woman...
A rocket launched missile can destroy all the furniture in a villa but not kill anybody inside....
You can train dogs fed on steak to kill a man by saying the word "eat" down a mobile phone to them...
A man closely connected to the assassin and who receives a phone call from her while under interrogation is immediately allowed to leave the police station after she hangs up...
Anyway. I don't understand why Luc Besson is so obsessed with the idea of a girl growing up to be an assassin - he did it well in "Nikita", and even better in "Leon" - the third time he's not so lucky - his embarrassingly poor screenplay, in the hands of the director of Transporter 3, a man actually called Megaton, seems appropriate as this film is a total bomb.
I feel a bit better now.
Movie comment on L'âge d'or
dombrewer
As bizarre and fragmented as you'd expect following Buñuel and Dali's "Un Chien Andalou", but this is clearly less Dali's film and more Buñuel's reflected in his ongoing cinematic obsessions present here: violent sexuality and repression, hatred of organised religion and the mockery of the upper classes. It's easy to understand why it was shocking in 1930 - a woman lustfully sucking a statue's toes - equating Jesus Christ with the Marquis de Sade - and although the satire is somewhat blunted now there still some great surreal images are some wonderfully dark comic moments: the sexually frustrated and mud-spattered good-will ambassador kicking a blind man over in the street and the cow revealed in the girl's bed in particular. A great slice of surrealism and a good taster of great things to come from Buñuel.Movie comment on The Bourne Legacy
dombrewer
A perfectly well made, often exciting spy thriller, sadly diminished by the fact it is set in the Bourne universe and cannot hold a candle to that entirely superior action trilogy. When you realise, along with super-agent Aaron Cross that Bourne's actions have doomed him and all his fellow super-agents there's a palpable thrill of an exciting film ahead after a slow start. He has to vanish and also save the targeted doctor who can help him track down the chemicals that are keeping him super and also alive (a strange and unlikely requirement for agents who may be undercover and on long missions without access to their special pills). When the action does start it kicks in marvellously - the house siege is particularly good - but somehow it all feels less than the sum of its parts. Renner and Weisz are good, the rest of the cast struggle with horribly underwritten roles - Norton in particular, who just looks tired. It never outstays it's welcome, but the end is so abrupt I felt short-changed of another decent set-piece. No classic, but a decent action film if you can forget Jason Bourne's altogether more thrilling story running alongside.Movie comment on The Anderson Tapes
dombrewer
Has there ever been a more inconsistent director than Sidney Lumet? A filmography that includes Twelve Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Fail-Safe, The Pawnbroker, Network, Serpico... also has something as dramatically inept as this amongst his disasters. It really is a terrible film with pretensions of cleverness. Connery and Lumet worked together brilliantly elsewhere - The Hill and The Offence are both fantastic. This is horribly dated - the electro-jazz Quincy Jones score sounds like it was cut and pasted from the cheapest porn film of 1971, the editing is messy, the script is lamentable. Connery himself looks and sounds ridiculous (dispensing his toupee for the first time, but unable to shift his Scottish accent) amongst a cast who all seem miscast - Martin Balsam possibly giving a career worst turn as an effeminate antiques dealer. Christopher Walken barely bothers. You probably shouldn't either.Movie comment on Ride the High Country
dombrewer
This was one of Sam Peckinpah's first features and it's clear he was still finding his feet in terms of tone and content, as this is a surprisingly straightforward and old-school western for the most part, with traces of his later trademark bloody violence and violence toward women - in fact the best scenes are exactly the ones that raise the temperature of the film out of its comfort zone - the near gang-rape of naive new wife Elsa, the night time confrontation of the two old friends, and the grim five-man shoot out at the end. What makes it a better than average western is the surprisingly witty script and the two really excellent central performances by Hollywood veterans Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott - the latter in his final screen performance before retirement. What lets it down is a clumsy overblown score and, for my taste, an unlikely and unsatisfying conclusion.Movie comment on Il generale Della Rovere
dombrewer
Fantastic, inspired-by-true-events WWII drama by Roberto Rossellini starring Vittorio De Sica, in what many consider his greatest performance, as the opportunistic conman Bardone. Landing up in prison he is persuaded to impersonate the partisan Italian general of the title to uncover the captured head of the resistance. Rossellini expertly negotiates a moral maze for Bardone, desperate to save his own skin yet increasingly hesitant to betray his fellow prisoners to his equally cunning protector Colonel Muller (a great complementary performance from Hannes Messemer). With a powerful message of moral transformation and courage it deserves a place alongside Rossellini's earlier similarly themed trilogy as one of the best films of the war genre and Italian cinema - it rightly won the Venice Golden Lion.Movie comment on Billy's Balloon
dombrewer
Very simple idea, very dark, very funny.Movie comment on Genre
dombrewer
Terrific animated short - a clear progression of Hertzfeldt's talents and featuring some wonderful ideas... think "Duck Amuck" via Monty Python and "Itchy & Scratchy" violence.Movie comment on Lily and Jim
dombrewer
Not as hilariously insane or ground-breaking as Hertzfeldt's next film "Rejected" - but packed with wonderful details of the pitfalls of dating and some great laugh out loud moments all the same. Genius.Movie comment on Ajeossi
dombrewer
Stylish and punishingly violent - in other words typically Korean - revenge/cop/drugs/kidnapping film. It never reaches the heady heights of Park Chan-Wook's Vengeance trilogy (although it owes a big debt to them, as well as to Kim Ji-Woon's A Bittersweet Life), because it's hampered with a sentimental streak a mile wide thanks to an tortured hero with an engaging moppet to rescue, but is still one of the best of the recent batch of Korean action thrillers to reach our shores. For one thing the characters are well defined and well performed, even if the leading man's model looks and perfectly sculpted hair are slightly ridiculous. Crucially the action sequences are all very impressively done: the fight in the nightclub toilet stood out particularly. It's not very subtle, and there's a nagging sense that it's all trying a little too hard, but when it works, it really works. Definitely worth a look.Movie comment on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
dombrewer
I think it's called "being a fuckwit". Seven checks and three favourites so far...Movie comment on Helen of Troy
dombrewer
A not entirely convincing retelling of Homer's Iliad, with some suitably epic battle sequences but a vacuum where there should be passion and drama - pretty blondes Paris and Helen never bring their scenes to life, perhaps because both have been over-dubbed by other actors, perhaps because the script never rises above the two-dimensional. Niall MacGuinness, Stanley Baker and Torin Thatcher all chew the scenery as unpleasant Greeks (the last of these playing Ulysses, oddly named the Roman way, rather than Homer's Odysseus) - in fact all the Greeks are painted in a negative light, the Trojans fare much better (including a young Brigitte Bardot as Helen's servant girl) although it makes for an odd imbalance in the story.Having said all that it's a lot more plausible and entertaining than "Troy" - Wolfgang Petersen's miserable attempt at the same story - aptly proving there are worse ways to spend your time.
Movie comment on Madame de...
dombrewer
An altogether classy affair from Max Ophuls, immaculately shot, intelligently written and featuring great performances from Charles Boyer as a possessive cold-hearted General and the very beautiful Danielle Darrieux as his manipulative wife who sells her husband's wedding gift of a pair of diamond earrings to clear her debts and increasingly gets caught up in her own lies when she falls in love with another man. Brilliant.Toplist comment on IMDb's Top 250
dombrewer
@KatForsyth - that is a fascinating website, thanks for pointing it out, it's incredibly impressive work.The only thing to say against the fact that some of these films have come and gone before and may well do again is that the majority of the recent losses (in my mind essential inclusions to a list of the greatest films and worth the discovery by inquiring minds c/o the Top 250), will never come back into a list with a 30'000 vote limit. How can they? "La Grande Illusion" has about 17'000 votes and "Come and See" around 14'000, "The Passion of Joan of Arc" 16'000, "The Wages of Fear" 20'000, "Les Diaboliques" 22'000 (which maintained a respectable hovering position of 140 to 180 on the list for the last six years, now dumped, deemed "not popular" enough)- all of these votes accrued very gradually over ten to fifteen years.
All that will happen is major blockbusters which pick up the requisite 30'000 votes quickly will enter and exclude the smaller films at the bottom end and movie diversity in the mainstream taste will dwindle. It's a travesty.
Movie comment on The Stranger
dombrewer
There's mastery of the camera as you'd expect from Welles - the B&W cinematography and the use of shadow in particular is brilliant - but the story doesn't hang together quite as well. Welles' Nazi war criminal, hiding out as a history teacher in Smalltown USA, is shifty and suspicious from the outset making you wonder how anyone didn't suspect there was something up with him from the start - it's not a subtle performance by any means, and with the cat out of the bag from the very beginning it doesn't make for great thrills. Loretta Young's Mary seems all the more foolish for not seeing the obvious, but Edward G. Robinson is excellent as the man sent to hunt him down. The denouement is preposterous in the extreme andMovie comment on Turks fruit
dombrewer
I like Verhoeven's films on the whole, I like his guts and his satire, but this early effort got on my nerves pretty quickly - the almost constant hysterical tone gets tiresome and the need to shock with shit, puke, blood and come just feels infantile without some balance. Hauer is as good as ever, but is saddled with a two dimensional character, Van de Ven is even less likeable and has to contend with a eye-rolling conclusion for her character. A decade later Jean-Jacques Beineix did something similar with "Betty Blue", but better.Movie comment on Nostalgia de la luz
dombrewer
Beautiful and harrowing documentary which manages to draw together the seemingly disparate strands of astronomy, archaeology and political atrocities - and it does so superbly. The Atacama desert in Chile is the driest place on earth and so also has the clearest skies allowing high powered telescopes to look further into the solar system. It was also the site of Pinochet's death camps and the place where thousands of prisoners were "disappeared". Guzman's film is by turns poetic and awe-inspiring, thoughtful and upsetting, and is highly recommended.Toplist comment on IMDb's Top 250
dombrewer
This - is - appalling! Seriously. This list used to be a great starting point for people actually interested in getting into cinema beyond the mainstream - with tasters of work by great film-makers unknown to the casual film goer - it introduced me to films that I'd never heard of before when I was looking for something more than the mainstream. With the films nawi has listed below now gone that's a guaranteed decline in film knowledge for the future. A Top 250 films that doesn't include Come and See, Wages of Fear, The Grand Illusion, Les Diaboliques and The Passion of Joan of Arc is not a list worth reading, not to mention wonderful films that exist just below the radar. How are these films expected to get 25,000 votes? I am actually shocked.Movie comment on The Dark Knight Rises
dombrewer
Unlike the majority of the Western world I went into this with lowered expectations - I enjoyed BB and TDK when they were released, with reservations, but re-watching them both recently I was reminded at how clumsy they sometimes are - the confusing plots, the length and poor pacing issues, the tonal inconsistencies, the desperate "seriousness" of them... Nolan has gone all-out in this series to make Batman as "real world" as possible, but by throwing out the comic book sensibility and ramping up the grit he made the whole concept of a man fighting crime dressed as an armoured bat seem more and more ridiculous. Bale has never particularly convinced me in either of Bruce Wayne's personas, and he was practically a supporting character in TDK he was so swamped by the grandstanding villains and fancy gadgets: "wheeeeere is he?" indeed.This conclusion not only ends the trilogy on a high but is a much more satisfying film than its predecessors (again, I'm not expecting many to agree); the pacing is better - it builds properly to its suitably large denouement - it makes more sense, and best of all by tying in smartly and directly to the other two films it completes a saga that improves all three films as a brilliant, ever escalating sequence of events.
I have gripes: Bane is not an interesting character, never was, purely invented to "kill Batman" when comic book sales were plunging in the mid-90s. Hardy struggles with the mask and a bizarre plummy accent (I understood virtually all of his dialogue - I guess my cinema got the mix right) although the sewer fight is impressively brutal; Caine (miscast from the start) gets to deliver more watery-eyed platitudes - I was never convinced, particularly the clumsy Florence anecdote.
Vitally though, Bale comes into his own at last, Hathaway is brilliant as Catwoman bringing some much needed lightness of touch to her moments and some good one-liners, and Oldman and Levitt are solid and compelling real-world protagonists. It was great to see Murphy and Neeson cameoing too. Couple of major plot spoilers here.....
All in all I'm sorry that Nolan is leaving the franchise here, because he's finally made a great Batman movie.
Movie comment on Batman: Gotham Knight
dombrewer
Having missed this on the original release I was interested to catch this prior to seeing the last in Nolan's trilogy. As Lang Welles said - very much a hit and miss affair, although contrary to his opinion I thought the first of the six was probably the best, stylistically and in the script. The tales are all vaguely interlinked to a larger and not particularly interesting narrative but there are some nice distractions from rogues gallery alumni Scarecrow, Killer Croc and Deadshot. All in all very average, but with some good moments.Movie comment on The House of the Devil
dombrewer
This excellent little film is a loving homage to the classic 70s and 80s slasher and supernatural horror flicks, complete with 80s electronic soundtrack, chunky yellow opening credits with freeze frames and grainy, washed out cinematography, but with a couple of distinct advantages: first and foremost the acting is largely excellent including Tom Noonan - my favourite screen psychopath in "Manhunter", indie chick of the moment Greta Gerwig, and unknown but beautiful actress/model Jocelin Donohue (very easy to watch). Secondly the special effects when they come are more sophisticated than the bright red paint of latter days. The pacing and build of tension is excellent, only let down by a fairly standard final 15 of straightforward blood letting that is true to the horror tropes but feels a little pedestrian now. Nice epilogue though. If, like Ti West, you have a hankering for the old school, you'll love what he's managed to achieve here.Showing items 201 – 225 of 429