I just LOVE the dialogue in this film; so many witty remarks, but you have to pay attention.
One of my favorite movies.
Likewise.
I love Appaloosa.
[after a shoot-out]
Everett Hitch: That was quick.
Virgil Cole: Yeah, everybody could shoot…
And I enjoyed Hostiles (bit of a downer at the end, though).
But recent? Appaloosa was 15+ years ago and Hostiles was 6+ years ago.
More recent was Old Henry, which I also enjoyed a lot, especially for Tim Blake Nelson’s performance.
I did say “relatively.” They’re not Shane, after all. 
I saw Argyle and laughed in enough places. It’s a movie about an author being sought by spies who think her writing is too close to their cases. It had some unexpected reveals, which was cool. It’s mostly played for laughs, which it delivers.
I had moments when I was thinking, “anyone who took that many hits would be dead and/or maimed about now.” And there’s an obvious body count that you’re supposed to ignore as anything but keeping score. You have to be able to ignore that except in passing to enjoy the movie. It gets whackier as it goes along.
Never heard of it so I was curious when mentioned upthread.
What is Liquid Sky? - was 3 1/2 minutes of worthwhile viewing, but that was enough to know this was not my kind of film either.
I liked Liquid Sky but it’s definitely not a film likely to appeal to a majority of viewers.
Yes, definitely one of those movies I feel no need to rewatch. Although, what with all the blood-sucking vampires and brain-eating zombies, endorphin-leaching aliens (or any other entity) is a premise worthy of further exploration. Star Trek had it in “Day of the Dove.” The outrage-seeking internet algorithms are another example.
Satan’s Slaves
Recommended…again.
I’d seen it before, but Shudder offers an English dub now and it was fun to see it again and pick up on some things I missed in the original language. Great movie, very effective. Joko Anwar is one of my favorite directors, though this is not his best work(his best is Impetigore).
Worth a viewing. It’s sequel is as well.
The Lobster (2015). Obviously continuing on my Yorgos Lanthimos kick, working backwards in time. The typical Lanthimos fingerprints are all there: bizarre, fantastical story line, weird music, intentionally contrived dialogue
Enjoyed it but I thought it was the lesser of his three recent releases: this one, followed by The Favourite and Poor Things. It was also (to me, at least) the most cryptic of the three. The article below from “Entertainment Weekly” ranks Lanthimos’s films, and I was rather surprised to see The Lobster in the #1 spot. It was a fine film, but not his best by any means IMHO.
I love The Lobster, and right now it’s tied with Poor Things as my favorite Lanthimos. Though he did also make a short film called Nimic that’s very high on my list.
The Reflecting Skin
Highly recommend.
It is incredible to me that this movie isn’t considered a classic. It’s an incredible movie, beautifully shot, has an incredible score, and just an incredible experience from the beginning to end. I’m not even sure how I would categorize it other than “an experience”.
I’d seen it once before, but appreciated it even more a second viewing. It’s an essential movie, I think.
Last night I watched Stargate. The original movie that spawned several long running TV spin offs. The Star was The Computer wore tennis shoes/ole Jack Burton/Snake Plisskin himself. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
Killers of the Flower Moon.
I was prepared to conjure a cynical take on it, an exploitational film etc etc… it’s much better than that.
Kudos to the director and the editing team for keeping a film 3 hrs plus moving and not frustrating me.
I’m still fulminating about whether I think it’s a flaw of the movie that we don’t know whether Ernest is fundamentally stupid and can’t figure out that his evil uncle is going to kill his wife and then him, himself… or if he’s a cunning plotting opportunist himself who has found that presenting as somewhat stupid works for him.
Because I wasn’t sure, I was annoyed that the movie didn’t reconcile that well. The closest was at the funeral of his daughter where his Osage wife finally confronts him… not about his role in fucking KILLING her sisters, which she seems amazingly willing to overlook? …but about his role in poisoning her. He seems oblivious, despite having included additional substances that his evil uncle, the orchestrator of all the murders, told him to add to his wife’s insulin. He looks back blankly. She walks away. We’re given to understand that this was the last straw for her. All along, though, I wondered why she didn’t hold him to blame for killing her sisters. Maybe she thought him stupid and malleable and under the control of his uncle? Either way, she seems to have decided he was either too stupid to be a useful husband or evil beyond tolerable and walked out on him.
I did like her performance (actress Lily Gladstone) and that of Robert DeNiro as King Hale and Leonard DiCaprio as Ernest.
Last movie we watched in the primary Oscar nom category, and neither of us consider it the winner. (We’re rooting for Poor Things). But it’s entertaining and intense and well-done.
Well, our perspective. Ernest is basically a not too intelligent petty criminal, drawn into a plot bigger than himself; weak, malleable, suggestible, and way more driven by a desire for approval for the most part than actual love.
Does any of your post need spoilers? I’m not sure how that works in this thread.
Dogtooth (2009). Yorgos Lanthimos again. This is one of his earliest features, and was performed in his native Greek. As always, he doesn’t hold back on sex and gore and extreme weirdness. This one is about a family living in an isolated country house that is completely fenced in. The two adult daughters and adult son have apparently never left the fenced property, and continue to be raised with completely bizarre fictitious ideas about the outside world, including even crazy ideas of what specific words mean.
This is probably my least favourite Lanthimos so far, mostly because it seems less developed, less coherent, and less substantive than his later work, and partly because it verges on being a “message” movie in which one can find all sorts of potential metaphors, with the over-arching concept being a kind of metaphor about authoritarianism and control of information. But it doesn’t lack for Lanthimos’s creative energies.
Same here on all counts. I saw this many years ago, it was my first exposure to Lanthimos. I didn’t love(or hate) the movie itself but I was intrigued and have looked forward to his films ever since. I think I would rate the Favourite slightly above The Lobster but that’s probably due to my love of English history.
Sorry for the highjack.
I watched Wonka last night on HBO. Better than I thought it would be. Decidedly weird. It doesn’t exactly fit into the Wonkaverse as it appears in previous films, although it’s clearly closer to the Gene Wilder version (they use bits of the songs from that version). . The Scrubitts are bargain-basement Thenardiers out of Les Mis. The city is Mixed European, with German signs and French names and everyone speaking English.
And I kept expecting Chalomet to come up with Dune Spice chocolate. Og knows, the ingredients in Wonka’s chocolate recipes – Giraffe milk, Tears of a Russian Clown, Hoverfly larva – are kinda gross.
Hugh Grant as the sole Oompa Loompa was definitely better than expected. Rowan Atkinson was unexpected – I didn’t even realize that it was him the first time I saw him.
Love Lies Bleeding
Not sure what I think of this one. I was expecting a more dramatic, but pulpy version of Drive Away Dolls (not expecting the same plot, just the same feel); It is certainly very pulpy, with a frantic performance by Kristen Stewart, a deliciously evil Ed Harris villain, and a performance by newcomer Katy O’Brian that stands up to these two, but it kind of falls apart in the final act as some sort of magic realism (which culminates in a hilarious final fadeout scene).
Is it Katy O’Brian’s Stay Hungry breakthrough? (for those who haven’t heard of it, it is the picture that convinced major studios that Arnold Schwarzenegger could act as well as flex). Maybe. I’m still mulling.