Archive for Release Year: 2014

43 posts from 05 October 2024 to 23 March 2017.

  • Exodus: Gods and Kings

    The grimdark realistic remake of Prince of Egypt that everyone was pinning for.

  • The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box

    This might as well be the quintessential Young Adult novel turned prospective franchise.

  • Edge of Tomorrow

    This is the weirdest thing. A big budget Hollywood flick that adapted an obscure Japanese novel featuring mecha and thinly-veiled metaphors for WW2? How this that happen?

  • I, Frankenstein

    This is a nominal sequel to Frankenstein, the book. Except there are daemons and gargoyles too.

  • Coming Home

    Yimou Zhang goes minimal and makes a film with only three characters, a nuclear family.

  • Kingsman: The Secret Service

    This is a Bond film as directed by Tarantino, which leads to a black hole of bad taste. At least the villain is interessting.

  • Divergent

    Hunger Potter: A Twilight Fan Fiction.

  • Helicopter Mom

    Insultingly terrible “comedy” staring Nia Vardalos.

  • Pompeii

    Not as disastrous as it seems.

  • Night Will Fall

    A documentary about a documentary about the Nazi concentration camps buried by the British after the war.

  • Clouds of Sils Maria

    Meta film about a play that was to be adapted into film. Juliette Binoche plays almost herself, being tormented by her lack of youth, personified by Kristen Stewart and Chloë Grace Moretz.

  • 300: Rise of an Empire

    300 ways of dying in the cradle of western civilisation in which more than 300 ships stop(?) an empire from raising. The title is just stupid. What empire has risen, Persia? Greece ends up united in defeat! Or do they mean the Gondor cavalry at the end actually made a difference? So confusing.

  • Transcendence

    Neo-Luddites vs Singularity-level AI. Who will win?

  • Need for Speed

    Laughable waste of resources. A very talented cast doing fuck all, a preposterous script that resembles Yu Gi-Oh and children’s card games, millions of dollars in cars getting wrecked.

  • Brick Mansions

    The American remake of Banlieue 13, with less parkour and more Paul Walker punching and shooting people.

  • Ex Machina

    Another Garland high concept film. I really like the portrayal of the nutjob head of a tech giant, very Jobsian. Better than Antitrust.

  • Guardians of the Galaxy

    Childish BS, what a crock of shit.

  • The Grand Budapest Hotel

    This is what passes for a soft Wes Anderson film. Not something profoundly sad as The Royal Tenenbaums, a fun romp, visually and orally bliss.

  • Predestination

    A story that warps around itself so much, it exists on a vacuum. The best metaphor are those Teletubbies pink sludge bowls.

  • Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

    Not worth it to break my Iñarritu self-imposed ban(it’s not clear on the marketing he’s directing). Not even Naomi Watts can rescue this.

  • Noah

    Good Old Testament scumbag God massacres His creation for the lulz. Humans must decide to stop being submissive or go mad from their actions.

  • Os Maias: Cenas da Vida Romântica

    A faithful adaptation of the seminal XIX century story, but poor in production values and plot. The important plot beats are presented in a matter-of-fact way, for such emotionally powerful moments.

  • The Salvation

    Oily western that doesn’t let its amateurish CGI brighten its dark soul. Nearly everybody dies, and the living are left broken beyond words.

  • The Equalizer

    John Wick for even more middle-class middle-aged men. The big showdown is in a Home Depot, for crying out loud. He even turns a whore into a wholesome girl.

  • The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

    LotR with dwarves! The payoff where the party splits up, fights loads and loads of battles, and resolves are tested and found not wanting.

  • Eclipse em Portugal

    A failed attempt to make a sort of remake of Braindead, without the budget or the script. It has heart, but no guts.

  • Seventh Son

    Bog standard fantasy action flick, featuring Jeff Bridges as drunk Gandalf/warlock Rooster Cogburn and Julianne Moore as evil half witch, half dragon. For some reason Kit Harrington appears in a cameo, Olivia Williams in a bit part, and Alicia Vikander as the good kind of witch. A CGI fest all around, completely skippable.

  • The Lego Movie

    Another ensemble Intellectual Property lollapalooza like Wreck It Ralph, but with Lego. Pretty funny series of gags, but a mediocre film, something like a worse Airplane!.

  • The Face of an Angel

    Random hodgepodge of stuff about Meredith Kercher, a Briton murdered in Italy. Based on a tabloid writer’s book, so you get what you pay for.

  • Gemma Bovery

    Middle aged guy lusts for hot PYT, but others bang her hard. Misunderstandings lead to death. The ending is hilarious, just like most of the others scenes.

  • The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1

    The sub-rosa raises above the roses. The Mao Tse-Tung followers assemble in the ruins of a nuked District 13.

  • The Maze Runner

    Goes from tasteful Bildungsroman to generic Young Adult big budget conspiracy way too fast. And the body count is way too high to be for kids, there are scenes of literal war where some of their buddies are killed horribly.

  • The One I Love

    Weird comedic take on the romance genre, but it’s not really a romantic comedy. Just a weird doppelgänger love quadrangle between themselves…

  • Selma

    A fantasy story about a land far, far away, where massive organised protests leads the President of the United States of America to sign a law re-guaranteeing the right to vote to all people. Imagine what could happen if a black president was elected and on his watch there somehow a rollback of these protections, the riots would be immense.

  • Famel Top Secret

    What the fuck is this? What the fuuu… No, life is too short.

  • Inherent Vice

    Stream of consciousness book? The narrator is perma-stoned, so it’s like glimpsing at a larger plot without long-term memory.

  • Dying of the Light

    Whaddaya you know, it’s a Paul Schrader film. Of course the protagonist is a jaded older guy, dying, raging at the world for its corruption, greed, general right-wing behaviour. Not as polished as First Reformed, there are too many rants to be accepted as a mainstream affair.

  • A Most Violent Year

    That was not what I expected from that title. A deep character study about American immigrants, several possible paths for the same starting point. You either die a hero, or live long enough to become a villain, and our protagonist has been around for a long time.

  • RoboCop

    I mean, if you remove all the RoboCop references this is not a bad film. A bit on the nose, but much less po-faced than Elysium. They even brought in the guy from The Wire for street cred, not to mention Batman and Commissioner Gordon.

  • Kill the Messenger

    A bog-standard biopic about a very interesting story of CIA drug dealings, basically vindicated by internal CIA investigations. Of course the guy that re-broke the story killed himself with seven shots on the back…

  • Fury

    This really tricked me into being another fascist interpretation of Saving Private Ryan, bit it’s a much more humane and hopeful film. Doesn’t reach the technical heights of the D-Day landings, but the again, what does?

  • While we're Young

    My god, the first part has some hilarious shit. It gets really serious in the last 30 minutes, for the conventional reconstruction, but it could have just been the funny parts, structured as a fall from grace into an abyss. It’s self-referential, but broad enough to make sense to most people.

  • Winter's Tale

    Narnia for adults, since it deals even more explicitly with death of young girls and children, plus sex, but then it’s PG-13 for no fucking reason whatsoever. Just because it’s magical realism, doesn’t mean it’s for children.