My youngest son has insisted we watch Mortal Kombat (2021) as a movie night, not holding out a lot of hope for this one.
I liked it fairly well, but no, it isn’t amazing.
WIND RIVER (2017) Netflix.
Hawkeye and The Scarlet Witch search the winter for a soldier. Just kidding, a pretty good murder mystery that I somehow missed in 2017. Quite the intense ending.
REMINISCENCE (2021) HBOMAX
I enjoyed it but the ending was confusing or stupid. I’m not sure which.
Well it was exactly what it said on the tin , and pretty well done considering it was a movie about Mortal Kombat.
Cruella. Another “sympathetic villain backstory” film from Disney, in the vein of Maleficent. Emma Stone and Emma Thompson are hypnotic, with a nod to Joel Fry whom I found annoying in Plebs but who made a lot of his role here. A fair amount of suspension of disbelief is required to make the plot work and there are plenty of two-dimensional comic stereotypes but it’s a bit of fun overall.
I have to admit, I’m concerned it doesn’t have enough actresses named Emma in it.
I finally watched Tenet last night. An amazing film from a technical standpoint (if very confusing), but I didn’t really care about it. Except for Elizabeth Debecki who I will always find an excuse to watch in anything.
Chaos Walking - Hulu
Too little chaos, too much walking.
Just kidding, but it was pretty dull. I see that it was filmed initially in 2017 and then re-shoots in 2019 to fix it, but they couldn’t make it good enough.
It’s kind of dull and forgettable. This is a movie with Tom Holland, Daisy Ridley, and Mads Mikkelsen and none of them look like they have any real idea who their character is or what is going on. It’s a bad script and Doug Limon could not save it directing.
All this negativity and it was actually kind of OK in parts. There is a little life in it, but it is pretty dull.
I saw a movie called The Guard on DVD via the Netflix DVD-by-mail service (there are still a couple dozen of people like me still using it) although Justwatch says it’s available for streaming through Starz. It’s an Irish movie, directed by John Michael McDonagh, and starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle as two very different people (one an Irish Garda and the other an American FBI officer) who work together to investigate a major drug smuggling plan. It’s really very good.
I love that movie! Gleason is magnificent (as he is in almost everything).
It was a good book series. I can’t imagine how they thought it was filmable, though.
The Dope thread on the movie may interest you: Christopher Nolan's Tenet
Agreed 1000%. The scene where Cheadle is first briefing the Irish cops and Gleeson is messing with him is comedy gold.
A good weekend to see some movies.
Mogul Mowgli will immediately remind everyone of the recent Oscar nominee The Sound of Metal. Not surprising, because it stars Riz Ahmed as a musician who is hit with a potentially career ending medical issue. However, I found this movie to be the superior film, with a fuller treatment of the people around the lead character and a more realistic (fewer jawdropping dumb decisions) narrative arc. Catch it if you can.
Who You Think I Am is a Juliette Binoche vehicle about a fiftyish woman essentially catfishing a twenty-something man. Some nice narrative twists keep it from getting too stale, but the main reason to see this movie is that it offers up a sterling Juliette Binoche performance. On the other hand, it strains to make you believe that Binoche’s character won’t meet the young man in real life because he wouldn’t find her attractive. Below is a photo of the then 55 year old Binoche from 2019. 
I went to see Free Guy today. An enjoyable movie but I think I missed some of it due to not being a video gamer. I did spot an Easter Egg though.
Just saw Late Night on amazon.
Meh
It was ok but we never really see why Emma Thompsons character is supposedly such a good comedienne and enduring late night host, we are told but don’t ever get any feel or buy in that would offset her awful behavior. For Mandy Kalings character we also don’t ever really see why she is such a comic writer genius , we are just told she is, which also doesn’t help in buying into her character. For some reason they try to squeeze a couple of love interest story moments in there for zero purpose which adds to a quite disjointed story arc.
A couple of hours you wont regret but would probably spend half the time on the phone surfing the web and not miss anything.
NEWS OF THE WORLD (2020) HBOMax. This movie is proof that Tom Hanks can read the newspaper and I will be entertained. The reviews on this movie were a bit mixed, but I enjoyed it quite a lot. I’m a sucker for a good Western.
The little girl seemed like what Jennifer Lawrence would have been at that age.
THE OPERATIVE on Netflix, with Martin Freeman, was very good. I especially like the way they left the ending for the audience to finish rather than wrapping it up in a happy tidy bow. Also, I’ve noticed there’s a spate of recent movies made in or about Israel (that I’ve watched) that don’t exactly paint the Mossad in a terribly flattering light.
I watched Hot Rock with Robert Redford and George Segal. TMC ran it after airing Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief.
Hot Rock is quite a disappointment. It tried to combine drama and comedy and fails miserably. Hitchcock made it work by using dry humor and sexual innuendo. Hot Rock is simply a mess.
Redford made a lot of great movies. Hot Rock should be avoided.
I saw it yesterday. It was basically a live-action version of the Lego Movie - and while it wasn’t as good, I still mean that as a compliment.