Recently Watched Films

I love this movie. 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7752126/

Beautifully shot, but narratively harrowing, Soviet war film. Very powerful stuff. 

Not bad but couldn't get completely invested in it either. 

Watched Death Proof for the first time, and I liked it. Not one of Tarantino´s best movies, but still entertaining and full of sharp mouth dialogue. Half of it going nowhere, but still entertaining. The death scenes are over the top and incredibly brutal, but that´s Tarantino for you there.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1028528/

What happens when you set up an intriguing sci-fi premise, then set it as the backdrop and instead tell a standard drama story?

This film.

Watchable, but hard to get invested in and stinks to high heaven of wasted potential and set up. The sci-fi does play a part in the end of the protagonist's redemption, but mostly everything we might want to find out about it is never addressed. It then ends on a cliffhanger and it's been ten years with no sequel. Not that this film inspires watching one if it existed. 

French thriller. Hitchcock wanted to make this but lost out on the rights. It's very good as is, though it still hasn't clicked quite to the level of its reputation even after two watches for me. The director's previous movie to this on the other hand, The Wages of Fear, had instant hints of five star potential. He's a director I need to explore more.

From a could have been Hitchcock, to an actual Hitchcock. An underrated movie for me, though it did lose a little something on re-watch I feel. Actually probably the best thing about this film for me is that throughout it I keep feeling like I need to switch on some suspension of disbelief, because the story seems absolutely absurd. And yet it all actually happened in real life. Reality sometimes is stranger than fiction! The movie follows closely real life, except a happier ending than really happened, which may have been forced on the movie by Hollywood. 

Hitch sneaked this one out in the 50's between Jimmy Stewart fronted standards The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo, falling back on black and white cinematography when colour was becoming his standard, something he would again do for Psycho. It was the only movie of his in which he worked with Henry Fonda. The movie provides a great thematic pairing with 12 Angry Men, since in this one Fonda plays a man falsely accused of a crime and in that one, he plays a juror advocating for the innocence of a man on trial who based on flimsy evidence is in the same position. 

This went a lot better on the re-watch. 

I'm still none the wiser about it, but I can see that we're not really meant to be.

I do still highly disagree with the 'best movie ever made' pedestal that RYM puts it on though.

Solid Pixar as expected....but sadly I think a lot of the hype for this one basically just amounts to people going 'OMG Pixar made a movie about a black man'. Black Panther all over again in other words. It's good, very good even, but it's not that good. The studio has made considerably better movies, including Coco, which also explores afterlife themes.