Archive for Release Year: 2019
45 posts from 16 February 2019 to 20 March 2025.
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Really puts a human face into the so called “economic migrants” we hear so much about. If this can’t shift policy, nothing can.
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A low rent Alex Garland film with lower budget and amateurish acting, brought to you by The Hot Jesus.
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More Wick, plain and simple. This is the greatest hits of close combat action films, now with added Halle Berry. Eat your heart out, Bond!
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Rah rah, variably sized monsters run amok. I’m just here for Ziyi Zhang, not just a cameo at least! And she doesn’t die at the end.
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Meh-ish Jarmusch lighthearted romp. Some incredibly funny skits. Like a good version of Zombieland.
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A series of vignettes about 60’s Hollywood, very loosely based on what happened, with the reenactments being played by Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio. Psycho Tarantino fans get a couple of scenes of blood and gore to put butts in seats.
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Mad Max, Gravity, Space Cowboys (Donald Sutherland even!) and Moon stuffed in a blender.
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The fictional biography of Ricardo Salgado, by way of Os Maias. Direct political answer to Raiva. Visually, it’s almost 3 hours of people chain smoking and gobbling litters of whisky.
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A masterful story, breaking the ice with black comedy, but leading to chilling societal commentary.
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A seemingly faithful diorama of the 5 months in which Varoufakis lead the Greek finance ministry, until being ostracised by the European institutions that turned Tsipras into his own anathema. ευχαριστώ.
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The closest Terrence Malick gets to insulting Trump. By making a 3h-long bucolic meandering through rural Austria, right after the Nazi invasion. The unbreakable shield of (Catholic) Christianity meets the unstoppable force of Nazism. Only innocents perish.
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Simple but powerful treatise into Church sexual abuses in Lyon. Sometimes, just reading the allegations suffices.
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Not the best “fake” single shot film, perhaps the most expensive one. Utøya: July 22 was more intense.
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Joaquin Phoenix does his thing and the mainstream goes wild! Welcome to the fan club.
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Roman Polanski tells the Dreyfus story, making it about himself twice. The second one is to cast Emanuelle Seigner as the hero’s wife. Still worth it, though.
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Cry me a frozen Massachusetts lake. An upbeat Civil War-era story. Too many flash back and forth. Sadly, the plot clothesline where to hang the contemporary elements turns into a straightjacket.
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Landlubber Ephraim Winslow and old sea wolf Thomas Wake heave their belongings to the rock, eagerly waitin’ for the two fortnights of their shift. Two man in, how many men out? The sea. Sums. Dichotomy between good and evil.
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Better title: Black Bloc: La prochaine.
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Daugther of Sam. Naomi Watts in an apartment being the self-destructive writer. Good prevails, somehow. Not much to do with the similarly named Bergman film.
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Another take on The Thing / Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but without communists. A man-made fake happiness creator, must be Instagram.
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Quadrilaterally fantastic. So close to you, it’s like it lives on your nose and wants to get back home.
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That cold opening! Only slightly hagiographic history of the OG Bauhaus movement, brought to life in Weimar republic.
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As he listens to the biggest lies used to legally support his actions, the fascist spook nods along everything and signs his name to the farce. He stands up, and “Truth and Justice” is written is big letters just behind him. Powerful images.
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Lovecraftian The Thing, with added Nic Cage. The black dude doesn’t even die, eat shit Lovecraft!
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Let’s go Brandon! Just an Evil Supes.
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As the name implies, these are the opposite of paradisaical greenery. Nice costumes, with a mere clothesline plot to show them off.
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That’s no Sonnenfeld Men in Black. Strictly worse than the second one, with added Tencent cash and so much product placement.
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The Neil Marshall version, Neil Marshalled up to eleven. Gory as hell, in a fun way.
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The nostalgia for kids stuff is a powerful drug. So powerful, it makes oblivious to how stupid this whole thing is. The Emoji Movie-levels of stupidity.
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This should include triggers warnings for extremely downer mood inducing, the synopsis calls this a comedy, for crying out loud. And I’m not even talking about the Welsh countryside.
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Forbidden love in the 1700’s, remains mostly the same until about the 1960’s. You will be disappointed if you go in expecting Blue Is the Warmest Color.
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Hot damn, it’s a twofer: turns Charlie’s Angels into something other than braless woman running around, and proves you can do a modern feminist-ish big blockbuster without condescension nor Clinton-esque girlboss nonsense.
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Some kind of mesoamerican Blade Runner, bots hunting bots. It’s mostly self-contained, by way of the tried and true method of amnesiac protagonist that keeps discovering things about herself.
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This is yet another female version of John Wick, but much less po-faced. There’s more than just smouldering rage, there are attempts at humour and drama. The lead is not Charlize Theron, though.
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Hot damn, that’s a nice modern detective story. Just like most modern plots, it incorporates the detective into the plot itself, even though our Kentucky Fried Poirot bills himself as a dispassionate, cold, calculating observer, seeking only the truth. In the end, all is good, even after all twists, double twists, and even untwists. The butler did not do it, in the attic, with the morphine injection.
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This was not what I was expecting for a “political allegory”. Surely not Tarantino-esque shootouts and actual characters saying “Wanna fuck?”. This is not Parasite, not by a long shot.
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Yes, I also read The Shining, and saw the film. Doesn’t make you special, director man. And in case the meaning wasn’t obvious, the Overlook Hotel BURNED DOWN, finito, dead.
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Come with me if you want less money. I only watched this for Mackenzie Davies, she hit the gym hard, but does nothing but kill people like crazy. It’s a CGI fest in the worst possible way.
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My god, the CGI face is so bad! Smack in the middle of the uncanny valley. Mixing it up with real actors of the calibre of Will Smith and Mary Elizabeth Winstead only makes it more cartoonish, but not in a good way like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.
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A gender swapped Bonnie and Clyde, with a bizarre framing device as a smartass little girl as narrator, like the Inspector Gadget niece, or the protagonist of The Nice Guys.
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Esoteric AF. I didn’t get it, needs a second view.
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A slow burn over Christian superstition. Burns it out to the ground, not even the ashes remain. It seems God speaks Welsh, a gentleman of ill repute.
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This is very suspenseful, it’s only about half way through, in that silly flashback, that the politics of the thing reveal themselves. You can watch the first half and see only the hardcore Floridian Cuban POV, even inside Cuba.
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A Senate-based Three Days of the Condor released post-Snowden, in the Trump years. Delusional insanity, trust the process? The slimeballs hint at but never fucking say the name Gina Haspel!
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Whaddaya mean, The Rock is an old Jewish guy from Brooklyn? Ya know, he’s on the ‘burbs!