Reviews

Well, I was surprised in the first place when I learnt that Ridely Scott had picked up J.P. Getty's kidnapping for his next movie; at the time of the event I was a teenager living in Italy and ai do have a recollection of the facts and of the echoes it produced. Despite the dramatic nature of the event, the whole thing turned rapidly into a shameless tragicomic comedy in which you could not figure out who was acting more like vultures, if the kidnappers or the family. So my curiosity (leaving aside the anecdotal part of Spacey's replacement) was about what kind of movie would Mr Scott make out of this story; he had the option of making a kind of drama out of it, or alternatively to present it for the farce that it was. Well, it seems to me that he went for a bit of both and, as always when you trying to do too many things in one, the result is so-so. It has also to be remarked that the level of fictionalisation of the story is pretty high vs the actual facts and real characters, which anyway does not serve the purpose of making the movie more exciting.

When I read on the posters « The Taxi Driver Of The XXI Century » I put it immediately on my watch-list; well, after seeing the movie, the comparison is almost blasphemy. Despite the strong performance delivered by Phoenix and the good cinematography, the movie is a total downer. Instead of a plot, what you have is a series of disjointed fragments which you try desperately to make sense of, but the task is hopeless. To add to it, as if it were needed, the director injects more fragments of flashbacks which hardly relate to anything happening in the present. Maybe I just grossly missed the whole thing, but I found this an irritating piece of self- indulgent cinema.

OK, let's stipulate upfront that the visuals are stunning (stunning visuals are a commodity in today's cinema); the rest is a total downer. The storytelling is slow and boring, unfolding for nearly three, excruciatingly long and unnecessary hours. The plot is weak and implausible, with a final twist, except that the plot is too thin to support a any twist. Still, the movie carries such a pretentious air, kinda "hey, watch carefully, I am really an important movie", that I found irritating. Now, I walked into the cinema after a self-brainwash: don't expect to see a sequel to Blade Runner, I told myself, icons cannot be replicated; I did not want my judgment of the new movie to be biased by a nostalgia effect for the original; yet I was still hoping to see a great movie. Well, it's not...and it was painful too see Ridley Scott giving away, after Alien, another of his franchise.

I am a huge Christopher Nolan fan, I cannot count how many times I have watched and re-watched Inception and even more Interstellar, I consider his Batman trilogy the best ever produced. I must admit I was a littler doubtful about Dunkirk, I was wondering how Nolan could make a Nolan movie out of such story; but then I thought, "hell, this is Mr Nolan we are talking about, he will do the trick!" and I went to see it. Well, sorry for saying so, but he didn't, this time Mr Nolan's magic did not work out as expected.... I thought the movie is totally overrated, it is still a decent, watchable movie, but not a great one. The plot is rather linear (hey, this is not fiction, so what did you expect? exactly, that was my original doubt as above...), the cinematography is very nice...so, there is nothing terribly wrong, simply this is not one of the great Nolan movies.

The Matter of Britain provides the source for all versions of King Arthur's legends, and it has originated a large number of versions of it; they have inspired more than one movie, ranging from pretty good (Excalibur) to OK (King Arthur). Now the list has increased by one, which gains a place at its very bottom: The Legend Of The Sword is a bad movie with some moments of greatness. What makes it bad is the way the story is twisted: for sake of being original, all the magic of the legend is gone, the myth is all lost. We are moving in a scenario between The Lord Of Rings, Indiana Jones and Zack Snyder's movies. As fashion commands, we are overwhelmed by the usual orgy of CGI, including unlikely monsters, gigantic snakes et similia. An element which is particularly ridiculous is about costumes: some of the characters are dressed more like John Wayne in one of his westerns than in an early medieval style. As I said, there are some moments of greatness: the soundtrack is actually pretty good, and a few scenes manage to capture the sense of epic that should have informed the whole film.

Amazingly enough, the director who's created some of the everlasting iconic cinema features (Alien, Blade Runner), which have set the standards of dozens of sci-fi movies to come, keeps destroying his franchise by spitting out one bad copy of the original after the other. If Prometheus was a flat, predictable sequel of the infinite Alien saga, Alien:Covenant is an irritating piece of works, managing to deliver a worse performance than its immediate predecessor. The usual stunning special effects from CGI don't compensate for the cockamamie plot, the less than impressive acting from a less than impressive cast (with the only exception of Fassbender). All the magic, all the mystery of the original franchise is lost in the midst of splashes of bloods (litres of it....), Jurassic Park monsters jumping all over the place, star-ships driven like fighter jets and so on. Is all this a concession to our times, the ti es of The Guardian Of The Galaxy, Avangers, etc? Maybe, probably...and they do have a public, so long live the box office and RIP good old Alien.

Enter Blade Runner, mix with Matrix, beef up with state-of-the-art special effects. Introducing Ghost In The Shell: stunning cinematography, though not totally original; loads of action, though with a feel of deja-vu; a few nice in-the-nude sights of Scarlett Johansson, which do not harm. This is today's cinema folks, where relatively easy access to digital manipulation can produce amazing visuals which can fill the void left by weak storytelling. Chapeau to the brave directors and producers of the originals, made 30+ years ago when image technology was at stone-age levels; yet they set standards copied still today. Considering that Blade Runner 2049 is going to be released in fall this year, I am just wondering what tricks mr. Dennis Villeneuve has in his sleeves to avoid the paradox that this re-make is not made obsolete by its copies.

This was huge fun! I immensely enjoyed this movie, as a big fan of the King Kong story, I walked in with great expectations but also with some fear of disappointment....I was wondering: how can such an iconic story be proposed in a way that is still engaging after so many remake? Well, they did it!Great special effect, superb cinematography, super cool music and above all a story that manages to successfully innovate the King Kong story. The movie is action-packed, you have to cling to your seat for the entire movie, it is like a two-hour roller-coaster.

Ye gods, this was bad! I notice only now IMDb does not offer 0 as a possible raring, so I guess I gotta go for 1, so be it. My skin is getting covered with red spot just thinking that the Academy is ready to pour plenty of awards on what I think is the most idiotic movie of the year (and possibly beyond). The world is sinking? The Titanic's orchestra is always ready: sing a song, evil will go away. Why awarding movies that hurt, that make you feel uncomfortable? I know, I know what you're going to tell me: "right because we are surrounded by problems, we need to dream". Yeah, well...except that there's a difference between dreaming and going numb, between lightening up and unplugging your brain. So, at least you're warned; but if you still like the Titanic's orchestra, here it goes: the silliest blend of deja-vu's and clichés (the starving artist giving up the bucks for his dreams, the starving artist giving up the dreams for the bucks, the evil star-system in hateful Hollywood, etc etc) delivered through a dead and buried genre (the musical, yeah).

I don't think this belongs to the league of cinema masterpieces, nevertheless I think it is still a decent movie, with its own dignity, worth seeing. I think that dismissing quickly a movie just because it's not based on a totally new concept is a bit unfair; if we were to allow only this kind of movies to be produced, we would go to the cinema once every year or two; movies, like books and other forms of storytelling, build on each other, they can look at the same theme from different angles and perspectives, still maintaining all their raison d'être. The most immediate, obvious link of the Les Heritiers is The Dead Poets Society, which was proposing a similar situational context (a teacher trying to motivate a group of disengaged students) but a very different socio-cultural one. I happened to watch Les Heritiers a few days after I saw American Honey, which on the contrary offers a different situational context, against a pretty similar socio-cultural background; I thought they all contribute to an interesting debate, one point of view about a lost, hopeless generation and the other one just opposite to that, offering a "yes, we can" message. Specifically, I think Les Heritiers has the merit of prosing a rather honest look on a rather sensitive subject like the coexistence of different cultures and religions in the French marginal society. The movie is able to do that avoiding any moral judgement or patronising position, using a realistic style and leveraging good acting by most of protagonists.

The film is definitely very, very realistic; and that is what makes it very, very boring. With all respect for the real victims of that action, I am still bound to review a movie, and the paradox is that the movie pays a big price to hyper-realism; essentially, you see three men jumping on three mines on a goat track at the bottom of a valley in Afghanistan, and you then spend a hour and half watching them suffer, bleed, scream. The camera indulges very often in very realistic and crude close up of truncated legs, arms, fingers and various injuries. The reality of the action must have been absolutely dramatic, and the courage of some of the soldiers remarkable; unfortunately, this does not make a good movie.

As an old and picky consumer of espionage stories, I was attracted to this series by its title, besides the excellent reviews. After finding myself wasting 5 hours of my life, let me just cry: "don't you dare call this a spy story!" For the review of such bummer, I propose the technique of the "onion peeling", i.e. you remove layer after layer and see what is left at the core. Well, the first layer is the photography, the visuals, the imagery: very sleek indeed; next layer, soundtrack: very cool; then the layer of acting performances: pretty good, as the strong cast was promising. So we have removed all the layers supposed to wrap the core, i.e. the story, the plot, the idea.....ooops, there's nothing less....or, the little that is there is so implausible, so absurd that you would prefer the total absence. So in summary, a lot of window dressing, not much more....

It is difficult to find the words to review a movie - and even more assign a rating - on a subject like the holocaust, drawing a line between an objective review of the filmic qualities of the movie and the emotional impact of its context. Nevertheless, I found it beautiful, delicate, moving, excruciating - even more so knowing it comes from a true story. The performance of the key actors is impeccable, always perfectly measured even in the most dramatic moments; the narrative tension is maintained high throughout the whole movie between the brutal reality of the events and the poetry of such reality seen through the eyes of a little, brave kid. Personally, I place Un Sac de Billes next to Schindler's List and La Vita é Bella; a movie that needed to be made and needs to be seen.

This is definitely a very spectacular movie, some scenes are breathtaking, the photography and special effects are superb. I liked the dark atmosphere, slightly different from the typical StarWars one, You can find all along the movie several references to other cult movies of the past, on top of some nice cameos from the previous StarWars: Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner to mention only a few. Yet, the movie has some downs, the action gets somewhat confused at times and some scenes are definitely overlong (especially the final battle...). So I enjoyed it a lot, though I was expecting a great movie I "just" found a very good one...

I went to see Sully with a good deal of curiosity, curiosity to see how two heavy-weights such as Eastwood and Hanks would put up what could only be as a minimum a strong movie in absence of an underlying story. In fact, the events involving flight US Airways 1549 present a very thin story indeed: take-off, engine failure, emergency landing on the Hudson - all taking 208 seconds, plus rescue operation. A miracle indeed, but paradoxically a pretty simple and linear one, without much else attached to these sheer facts. So what was left for the movie was another superlative performance by Tom Hanks and the very professional direction of Clint Eastwood, but it remains a very thin story, with an attempt to inject some tension through the NTSB investigation, which is a usual routine after every incident, which is the movie is artificially dramatized. So, I walked into the cinema with great curiosity and I left with the question why did Eastwood picked up such a light story for his movie.

Here is what happens when a book is used - plain and straight as is - as a script for a movie; some will say " very good, it's so loyal to the book!", in reality what happens is that you get a rather boring movie. This is the case of 11.22.1963, one of my preferred books by Stephen King; when I discovered they had produced a mini-series, I was so excited that I bought it immediately and I watched all the 8 episodes in two days. At around half I was so bored that I was about dropping it, what kept me going was just the curiosity to see the end of it. This long movie is the sheer transposition of the book into images, but all the lightness, all the magic of the book is lost; all the nice touches that King added all over the story are gone; the texture of the key characters is so thin.... So, in essence, a long, painstaking disappointment....

Now, if one puts together Oliver Stone and a subject like global cyber-surveillance the minimum you would expect is an explosive outcome, a rallying cry for civil liberties, a raging attack to the global powers. The potential offered by the combination was huge, hence my high expectations; I have regularly disagreed with Mr Stone's points of view but I always liked the intellectual challenge....instead what you get from Snowden is a glossy, soft, ordinary espionage thriller, with attached love story. The potential opportunity has been totally diluted and lost, it ends being neither informative nor entertaining, just a bland, conventional movie.