jeremyp

A great talent with a shallow life. It is a musical so it doesn't delve too deep. Over kill on the Freudian backdrop (hint: father issues) and definitely overkill on the Bacchanalia. The music is great though and like Bohemian Rhapsody it's entertaining throughout. It would be nice, however, to see a musical genius without gay and drug issues.

A by the cookie cutter British spy story that claims to be inspired by a true story then presents pure fiction. Had the pure fiction been less stolid and predictable it might be forgiven but this is just a churned out variation of the well known British spy genre of pre Deighton and Le Carre. It is based on a novel not history. Why isn't the truth good enough?

I have to think that the critics went for this one because it's by a famed Black Director. It's basically a not very good heist movie that's overly violent, full of plot holes, and some ludicrous suspend belief plotting. It lacks depth, and the action allows one to forget that, and the actual heist takes up less than a couple of minutes. Other than Viola Davis and Debicki the ladies get scant screen time, and they waste the great Carrie Coon, and there is not enough of Erivo, who steals the movie.

A well laid out movie about the terrorist attack by a malignant narcissist. The movie focuses more on the aftermath, which is just as well, as the mass execution of children doesn't bear watching for long. Breivik as a character doesn't bear lingering on, craziness rarely does, and it's hard to understand a Justice system that allows a sociopath a forum, then tucks him away in a comfy cubbyhole, hopefully for life. I guess we'll leave it to others to give us a better objective view of the tragedy.

It's worth it for the music and to see, and hear, Lady Ga Ga sans costume. The in between is so so, and some of the story seems to just appear without much explanation. The music which is rich and gets richer suddenly goes shallow until the final tour de force which they ruin by cutting away from it. For those of us raised on James and Judy, and bored by Barbra and Kris, this is more for the younger set.

A depressing and jocular view of a couple's journey into fertility land. No heroes here, just regular folks trying to adjust to a world in which they have been cast childless, despite considering every possibility. This results in the severe test of their relationship, and the relationship of close friends, with some very bad decisions thrown in to the mix. It's done New York style, so the characters are rawer, more transparent, and feistier than middle America.

A fairly straight forward Bio-pic and entertaining enough, but for the rather ridiculous, and fictional, perseveration over a signature that supposedly will make or break the mission. Like "7 days in Entebbe" it's a movie designed to enshrine the long reach of Israeli justice into the common memory. Historians will find fault with both movies, but that shouldn't bother the average viewer. Entertainment comes first, then propaganda. Facts trail in last.

A good beginning a slow burn middle and an unsatisfying ending. This time around the script isn't as tight or interesting. Blunt's absence is palpable. The plot holes are bigger and more obvious. The "Deep State" scenario is trite and paper thin. The action scenes are still worthwhile but they don't save the movie. For Sicario Tres let's hope they bring back Blunt and get our foreign policy with Mexico back to some sophistication.

Solid, fast paced, intelligent thriller set in....Beirut. Hamm as a washed up Diplomat soused and wasting away his life gets a reprieve to go back to Beirut and right the ship. Being Lebanon the issues are multi complex and it helps to know the territory. Pike is as good as always and with that pairing a display of pulchritude for both sexes. It'S an equal opportunity array of digs at all political sides and no-one should walk away feeling too maligned. It took me an hour to recognize Dean Norris, courtesy of a wig, which was good since his character was imprinted before I was able to have a "Breaking Bad" deja vu moment.

Probably the most boring movie I've sat through in quite a while. Oh I get why critics love it, because they look for deeper meaning and metaphors and symbolism, but all this is is a pretentious indie movie that did not need Affleck or Mara in it, since Affleck spends 90% of his time acting a sheet, talk about methud acting, and Mara gets 10 minutes. The best performance is by the house. Where was the Ghost therapist when they were needed, or the exorcist? See the ghost, see the ghost turn it's head (nice touch Casey), see the ghost floating around in limbo. Next sequel is ghost driver: a camera follows a Saudi woman driving through Riyhad, endlessly.

As a transplanted Brit I grew up on WW2 films where the English defeated the ****. This film goes inside the making of one such film (albeit fictional) and I'm afraid I found it all quite underwhelming. Bill Nighy can't save this one and neither can the supporting cast. Make it for TV but don't put this kind of tepid fare on the big screen. It's good to see an attempt to look inside the making of a film but I'm afraid the film they are looking at isn't really worth looking inside of. Add to this our heroine gets knocked down to her knees one to many times, and in the end her final disaster seems too contrived and comes so quickly it doesn't really come across as life changing.

If a movie about a man's repeated failures at suicide can be called poignant and funny, then this one is for you. Ove is a "Condo ****", a stickler for community rules and regulations, a crabby neighbor, and a depressed widower. Flashbacks fill us in on salient details that shaped his life, and the people who he admired, and who were, for the most part, sounder humans than he. But for them his inner nature of withdrawn reclusiveness would have **** him dry. In the end it's an Iranian neighbor who keeps him afloat long enough for him meet his maker naturally. Always funny, always quirky, and ultimately always human, this movie is a must see for anyone needing a boost.

A solid serious movie about a mixed race country couple whose court case changed the miscegenation laws in 24 states. In the 1960's no less. The acting is superb. Edgerton captures the sullen, withdrawn husband and Negga the more outgoing wife. It was the wife's letter to Bobby Kennedy that set off the case. The movie captures the era well, the Sheriff and Judge are straight from "deep south white racists" central casting. A true human interest story about a rural couple caught up in government legalized racism. It never strays from this path keeping the legal issues as sidelines and not the high drama it could have been portrayed as. A must see movie for all High Schools history classes

Absolutely awful! It's like watching an embalmed corpse traipse across the stage for an hour and a half. They have their tongue so far in their cheek it comes out in Australia. The TV shows were always 10 minutes too long. One long drawn out teeth grinding prolonged joke that isn't funny.

This is a disaster of a movie. The script is awful, the plot inane, and a teenager out acts the stars. Excruciatingly boring, alleviated only briefly by Ryan Gosling's occasional forays into slapstick, Crowe is along for the ride and calls it in. It's supposed to be a retro film Hollywood noirecom, but it would have bombed in the 60's. An intelligent script might have saved it but the writer(s) went in for teenage violence and dialog.

It's tense and entertaining enough until the plot is moved out of the studio. Then it declines steadily into another crime story expose with half of NYPD in attendance. Clooney is Clooney, Roberts is Roberts, and what could have been an educational movie about Wall Street ends up as predictable as any Hollywood by the numbers yawner.

A tense, reasonably educated and realistic movie about drone warfare. The action has been slowed down in order for talking heads to argue the issues, which works less and less as the movie progresses. British political sensibilities meet American pragmatics. The biggest weakness is the drone pilot played by Aaron Paul, who seems free to over rule his superiors on a whim: an innocent in the target zone. 1 innocent to be balanced against dozens. The myth projected is that sensibility over rules pragmatics. It hasn't so far.

A slow, subtle movie that requires patience and a willingness to imagine rather than merely observe. Picking one central character, played by Charlotte Rampling, and having Tom Courtney's grieving husband secondary lessens the depth of the movie. She is shown as the victim, while he comes across as self centered, which makes his grief shallow, thus trying to force us to pick her as the aggrieved one, where in reality both stories deserve our respect. Rampling is very good as the emotions cascading inside her broil under the surface while she struggles with the ever expanding revelations that devestate her.

An unsophisticated, vapid look at Wall Street, with Gavras' politics on his sleeve. Difficult to follow, with little to offer educationally, it depicts the world of high finance through the lens of a far left radical way past his prime. Most puzzling is a pointless side story involving a super model that telegraphs it's agenda from the outset.

Up there with "All The President's Men" as a Journalistic tour de force. Never over or underplayed, incredibly intelligent script with a slew of great actors willing to share the screen almost anonymously. Like an unraveling detective story about a subject we know too much about, and yet not enough. They walk among us still.

A good movie for Warren and Sanders fans. American Capitalism on trial, and the lure of greed on Joe Normal. Shannon makes the movie come alive as a cool, amoral predator. Garfield is also great as the too easily manipulated and quick to be converted blue collar Everyman. It could have done with a little more education on the Real Estate collapse's causes, but suffice it to say the world is 95% **** and 5% predator.

The best directed movie of the year, so far. Very intense, taut, and engrossing. Zero Dark Thirty in Juarez. It's more than morally ambiguous, it's Real Politik on steroids. Along for the ride, and used primarily to put a imprimatur of legality on nefarious spec ops is a "do it by the book" FBI agent played by Emily Blunt, whose shock rather than awe attempts to balance out the amoral and illegal methodology of the pragmatic Alpha males. Her remonstrations do get a little tiresome, and she never seems to get it. Whatever works, do it, and to hell with the book. The score is amazing, Oscar worthy.

Boy what a dreary movie. Weak characters drive me nuts, and this has two of them. A spineless dependent male, and a woman who keeps caving to his blackmail. One can't feel any sympathy for either. Watson is great, but that's about it.

If you're young and love CGI and minimal plot and writing, then you'll enjoy it. I've seen the first 3 and got bored with part 3, and am content to leave it there.

It's all about people talking about a play that is being redone and an actress who has to switch her role from predator to victim. If you like metaphors and symbols being dropped galore then you might get into it. For me it's a too long, too overdrawn conversation by boring people on a boring subject. When the French use English as their main language the intelligence seems too obvious and the dialog too faux. Actors talking about acting is never as interesting as their performances. I'd rather see a movie about a dialog between a screen writer and a director.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

A wonderfully madcap, perverse, and riotous movie. We saw it just after the Plane crash in the alps so the opening story didn't work well. Too much like DejaVu. After that though it kept up a brisk pace, and each story was completely different, ending with one that went on a tad too long. It reminded me of a much more gritty version of "Kind Hearts and Coronets," with it's droll look at revenge.

A serious, serious movie. Dostoevsky would have approved. While the metaphors and symbolism are never subtle, their subject has never been either. Vodka, corruption, depression, all the things Russia is most infamous for.

This is a "we've been here before" movie, so I hoped Jolie would give us "Zamperini the complex," and instead we get "Zamperini the stoic." My guess is this movie works for those who don't know his amazing life. Those of us who do know he was a tough nut, a great runner whose career was cut short by war, and ruined by it. Broken, he resurrected himself through religion, but only after skirting too long with self destruction, a poster boy for massive PTSD, courtesy of war and the sociopaths it breeds. What we get from Jolie is a hagiography of stoicism. We see the toughness, we just don't see the turmoil.

A bleak and depressing story that never lifts itself out of it's deep cynicism. The actors are superb but the material drags them down. What really kills the film is the empty roles given the three "madwomen" reduced mostly to catatonic stares, which robs the story of badly needed central solidity, and then it gets worse.

As a made for TV biopic it would be passable but as a movie it's insistence on pursuing a pastel course makes it tame stuff indeed. Redmayne does yeoman work with the physicality, but has little else to do. Is there a personality under that shell? Or just a brain. Far too much is left for the imagining, almost as if getting deeper into the reality of Hawking's life would detract from the hagiography.

A great little movie. Worth most of all for Thomas Hardy's amazing turn as a socially awkward, don't rock the boat, bartender to the Chechyan mob. He completely mesmerizes in tough company. It's a Dennis Lehane story so we know it will show the underbelly of Bos....... nope New York. The movie is taut with tension from the outset and it never lets up, and the end upturns all our preconceptions. Hardy deserves an Oscar nod. I tell you these Brits are stealing our accents, and our characters.

It's a better movie than the first sequel, and the CGI is pretty flawless, but in the end it's Just another "humans screw up again" movie, with an added "noble savage" theme tacked on. I think the critics like it because it's superior to most summer sci-fi crap. Andy Serkis is the best part of the movie, and he better get a nomination for it. His skill is in his facial expressions being so subtle, necessitated by having such little dialog.

A rare gem of a film that shows you the surface and allows you to plumb the depths in your own mind. A novitiate is told to visit her (previously unknown) Aunt by her Mother Superior. Reluctant, but obedient she visits the woman and finds her world over turned. Abandoned as a child to a Catholic Orphanage she has her unknown history revealed, born Jewish to a family killed by the local Poles, and all it's property stolen. We see little of what she thinks of all of this revelation, the film focuses mainly on the Aunt's transparent rage , grief, and guilt. The choices Ida makes next are not what many viewer's might wish, but the Director rules.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

The dwarf quest for their home went stale one hour into episode 1. Now it' s become torture. Good actors gone to waste, an endless conversation with a too loquacious Dragon, and too little of the gorgeous elf elf lady who kicks butt.

If you like to see our better actors chew some scenery and pay homage to Meryl, the queen, then it' s a worthwhile endeavor. The problem for me is caring for this much dysfunction and so much soul slapping vitriol.

A mesmerizing ensemble production. Amy Adams shows her acting chops again (following "The Fighter"), and she is so delectable to look at. Joining her are Christian Bale and Jennifer Lawrence doing wonders with a great script. As it states in the beginning "some of this stuff actually happened," and it's a nod that the writers are going to mess with the plot for arts sake. The pace never slackens and when the first stringers are off camera the subs are almost as good. I found the movie reminiscent of "Goodfellas" but with a heart instead of a fist. Bale deserves chameleon of the year award, Amy has put the saccharin behind her for good and Jennifer does her best work since "Winter's Bone." Worthy of an Oscar nomination and maybe a statue, in a tough year to pick.

A taut tale of a rush to judgement. A little girl's fantasy is turned into fact and fast friends turn into fast foes. We've seen this story before. Meager evidence is turned into hysterical reality, and no-one questions the messenger and her attempts to change course are ignored. Mads (the face) Mikkelsen is wonderful as the innocent accused in the village of the happy Danes that turns into the Village of the Damned. The only question is how will it end, and here the movie makes a big mistake by veering from authentic tale to fantasy, from horror story to amnesiacs united.

While certainly being an entertaining and watchable movie it doesn't quite rise to the level of being a good one. The quirky characters seem to often to be caricatures and too often of 2 kind: dumb and mean. It's too much a riff on lower middle rural America, which is fine if it had any depth to it, but only Bruce Dern's son shows us complexity. The laughs are often cheap and at the expense of ageism. I'm old and know plenty of people older than me and we're not that easily type cast. Dern does an excellent job as an old coot who has withered with alcohol and the abuse of an acerbic wife, but it's Will Forte's movie as a kind son who still sees worth in his rancorous father, and who is the only one who shows him charity. Lastly why is it that we still have to offer up old women who spew sexual innuendos as humorous?

A compelling if derivative and predictable fable that seems like a cross between "The Deer Hunter" and "Deliverance." Whenever Woody Harrelson is on screen trepidation hangs like heavy mist in the air. The poster boy for incest. He is the best part of the movie. Who woulda thought Appalachia could exist in Jersey? Christian Bale continues his good work from "The Fighter" with a much more centered character, and welcome back Casey Affleck. Unfortunately the ending is a let down. I expected a manhunt and a mano a mano fight but instead we get a treatise on cold blooded euthanasia. There are holes galore but the steady pacing of the film gives it a tightness and seriousness that make most of them forgivable.

While I found the story interesting, I found the persistent focus on comedic patter to be annoying. I'm all for lightening a serious subject from time to time, but the lead male actor plays his role as if he's on Monty Python, with so much self reflective irony that his character ends up buffoonish. Dench is also given a character to play that the real Philomena has criticized for making her look like a "silly billy." She seems concrete and dense and rather vacuous. This story deserves better.

It's the most tense 2 hours I've spent in a movie in a long time, and the angriest. To hell with white guilt, what about human guilt? We learn again that all humans need to do to become monsters is to consider another human to be not one. It's been our evil legacy since we stood upright, the ape genes we cannot seem to rid ourselves of. What strikes close to home for me is that our own history is as full of vileness as was the **** period, the Pol Pot period, Mao and Stalin's, Idi Amin's, with the difference being that it lasted for 300 odd years in our not to distant past. The movie has no gratuitous violence, no one dimensional characters, no political correctness. Just truth.

You start off not liking the main character, Jacky, seemingly a low IQ brute on massive steroids. Then we see why, or at least what, caused him to end up a battered human. Just when we get that message he shows us he is a brute after all, but a complicated one, and quite intelligent, when he can see through his steroid haze. The movie unfortunately decides to take on more than a character study and throws in so many additional plots, which take time to unravel, that it ends up distracting from the fascinating human tragedy that is at it's core. There is a Quasimodo sense of a tortured beast, but with no heroine to rescue, and a predictable ending.

It tries hard to be a "coming of age" movie, but in deciding to focus on sexuality as the sole issue for three teens it simplifies and degrades itself into a one trick pony i.e.message) short story. Alan Cumming has a juicy, if self righteously preachy, role as the "messenger" but the message is rather sophomoric, as is the film. Zach is his usual persona: overtly complex, but basically angst ridden. The character of Ben is ridiculously shallow; a gay teen not just coming out but spewing out. The parents are all shallow characters, as they always seem to be in these teen "who are we?" movies. It's mostly pretentious drivel chock full of quasi intellectual writing.

Entering the Cormac McCarthy world is not dissimilar to entering Dante's Inferno as painted by Breughel, or Dali. The best way to view it is to sit back and watch the evil as it is displayed while listening to the morality tale as it unfolds from the chorus of actors who put McCarthy's words to life. This one is about the long and unerring reach of a Mexican cartel who, if we believe the movie, have eyes and ears better than the NSA, and a brutality that exceeds the Taliban. Fans of McCarthy know that the violence is as inevitable as it is preposterously excessive. This time he sends us a telegram in the early going about just how it will occur. and then it's just up to the viewer to decide whether the message was worth delivering. For me it wasn't. The endless philosophizing about death, evil, and the inevitability of justice "Cartel style" wasn't just depressing but boring. Oh it's stylish enough and Ridley Scott has a great visual bag of tricks, but it's choice of looking at evil with sophistication simply shows it's banality, and that wasn't the point of the movie. Cormac over reached and it shows in the lack of dread as the action unfolds, and dread is usually McCarthy's forte.

A descent into a dysfunctional family in the french style of film as observation. Isabelle Huppert plays a divorced mother of two young male adult sons, who seem like dumb and dumber with anger and dependency issues. There are hints that the mother is unclear about boundaries, and unclear about the role of motherhood, and aching for some freedom. However the ties that ensnare them run deep and the immaturity and shallowness of the sons is matched by the mother's impotency, Scariest of all is the blond son, a teeming morass of a budding infantile sociopath, but as impotent as his mother, but not quite as dependent as his simpler brother. We know there is not going to be any acceptable resolution to the pathology, and it will take a tragedy to break the force of gravity that holds them enmeshed, but that break will be temporary.

A delightfully subtly subversive movie from Saudi Arabia. I'm not sure how it got by the censors, unless they missed the undertone. It's a fascinating glimpse inside the desert kingdom, and it's cultural grips on the freedom of women. The symbolism is there to see. A girl wants to own a bicycle so she can race her friend, a boy, who has one, but girls riding bicycles is frowned upon (it could break the hymen.) The mother cannot drive a car so she has to put up with a churlish "driver" hired by the husband. Not only churlish but foreign. Daughter, like mother, has severe restrictions on her ability to move freely. The girl is headstrong and proceeds to try and find a way to buy a bike, by entering a competition on reciting and memorizing the Koran, not for the sake of her spirituality, but for pragmatics: there is a money prize. The girl's goal is not piety but the chance of some freedom. The mother is struggling with the fact that her husband is about to marry a second wife, but tells her daughter it is her Uncle's wedding. She finds her daughter's dream of a bike counter to her own imprisonment and impotence, and projectively lashes out at her. In the end the girl gets her wish, but we all know her freedom will be fleeting. It's a simple but powerful film, and the Director let's the actions speak for themselves without over reaching and moralizing.

It's a long movie but an engrossing one. The first half of the movie seems to be a metaphor for Guantanamo. Impotent rage leads to torture and possibly justice but definitely injustice. And at what cost? Scattered clues lead, if read correctly, to the inevitable truth about the kidnapping of the girls, but leave open to interpretation the moral paths taken and the outcome of a major protagonist. The audience is manipulated hither, thither, and yon, and it's all great fun if you stay objective and quite teeth grinding if you don't. The Director borrows heavily from many sources-these days who doesn't, and who can't-and it's quite a Pot Pourri of memory lane goodies. The last shot seems to be leaving us with an open ended question: "You decide!" Jackman is great as a very loose cannon (Wolverine was a warmup?). Gyllenhall is all ticks and props and gimmicks. Dano is paid well for a mute, and Maria Bello is oh so wasted. Of course.................SPOILER................. there is one actor who is in this for an oh so obvious reason.

Another paranoid, conspiracy theory, bad government movie, and a rather dim witted one. If we're going to keep resurrecting this theme let's make it somewhat believable, and vet the plot holes. Bana and McAdams play two attorneys on opposite sides in a terrorist bombing case, which has been deemed too sensitive for open court. Bana figures out why, how we never know, and he and ex girlfriend McAdams go rogue with MI5/6 in hot pursuit to stop them revealing the "secret which would (of course) bring down the government." It's "State of Play" lite and the intrigue barely simmers at best, and the bad guys win, and the good guys slink off sadder but no wiser.