Movies: Last Movie You Watched and Rate it | New Year New thread

[x Tame Impala]

The Conclave (2024). The Pope is dead, long live the Pope! Ralph Fiennes, in the first unequivocally positive role of his career, plays a cardinal tasked with watching over the process of electing the new pope. This movie’s first 30 minutes are excellent: intense, suspenseful, foreboding. But then it suddenly becomes very boring. Nothing happens, the suspense is gone by the wayside, the conflict feels trivial and underdeveloped. The Big Reveal is not only mega-woke, it’s lame. His Wokeness becomes his Holiness. I am not Catholic but, to me, on the scale of 1 to 10 (10 being certain and concrete, 1 – completely unrealistic) this event happening in reality is somewhere in the “-20” range. It makes the Vatican in-fighting in Angels and Demons seem positively credible. It can fire up the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Improbability Drive. This is what happens when you woke-program ChatGPT and let it write scripts. 3/10 (for Fiennes and the first half an hour).

I didn't see this one but someone I know did. She was telling me about this plot twist and saying how it's just totally tacked on at the very end. So not only was it a stupid twist but it's insulting to the viewer because it came off as them just sneaking it in there. If that's what you want to make the movie about, fine, but waiting until the end is cowardly.

 

[KirkAlbuquerque]

Saw Nosferatu, 8/10

Great visuals and direction, some uneven writing and acting performances .

I did like that it really was a straight remake of the original which I didn’t expect.

 

[Tasty Biscuits]

Killer Heat (2024), 5/10
I'm a fan of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Shailene Woodley is in it too.

From IMDB, the premise "follows twin brothers who find themselves in a dangerous love triangle on an isolated Greek island. The investigation is given to The Jealousy Man, a wounded detective."

It's a strange movie because it has interesting elements and ideas, but always felt a bit underbaked. There was not much depth to the movie, and the attempts at creating that depth fell flat for me. As a result, I didn't care about any of the characters or their fates.

Not a terrible way to spend a few hours on a plane ride, but there are much better options.

Oh yeah that's definitely a plane movie.

My biggest criticism is it's neither good enough to be good, nor is it bad enough to be entertaining. It just mostly...is. Unlike my juice, I would've preferred a lot more pulp.

 

[Tasty Biscuits]

Flow (2024) Directed by Gints Zilbalodis 9A

A brave cat tries to survive in the forest after a great flood has wiped out human life but spared some animals. There is no dialogue, and this wondrous piece of animation doesn't need any--the story telling is superb. Along the way, the cat is befriended by a capybara, a ringed-tail lemur, a golden labrador and a stork along his and their journey on a skiff sailing to who knows where. These animals are only very slightly anthropomorphized--this is Miyazaki territory, not Disney. They all seem to know how to use the rudder on the skiff, and they all show moments of cooperation and kinship. But other than that director Gints Zilbalodis' approach is naturalistic and thoroughly captivating. The animation complements the story perfectly, and the cat's journey is an eventful and occasionally nail-biting one with a surprising number of genuinely suspenseful moments. Latvia's submission to the 2025 Oscars' international film category, Flow is the equivalent of a top-of-the-line Ghilbi Studios work. I can't say enough good things about this movie; I just loved it.

Sidenote: While there are gracefully treated themes about resourcefulness, friendship and especially cooperation clearly evident in this movie, I'm not sure Flow is suitable for very young children. There are too many intense scenes, and the movie seems pitched as much to an adult audience as to a young one. Older children will love it, though.

Having just seen it, the sidenote applies to me as well . As a certified cat lover and cat owner my entire life, I found myself overly uncomfortable at all the cat's distress. Not that I had any doubt about the outcome, but just the depictions of the events were enough for me to immediately find my cat and give him some well-deserved scritches when I got home (my short-haired, mostly black-and-grey furred cat at that).

All that aside, and a day later trying to remove myself from my personal biases, yeah, there's definitely a lot to like and a surprising amount to dig into from a thematic perspective. There's a bit of a Noah' Ark vibe, an evolution of life angle to be had, there's climate change...you can easily look at some of animals as stand-ins for commentary on humanity (the various lemurs all wearing different crowns was bang-on for that). All of that underneath your basic (but ever-relevant) themes of needing to put differences aside to work together and survive.

I would also recommend it, but also provide a "cat owners beware" disclaimer, depending how sensitive you are.

 

[Tasty Biscuits]

Hundreds of Beavers. Man, I have never felt like more of a grouch than when I was watching this movie. I was excited going in. Everything I heard or read sounded like something I would enjoy.

Spoiler

 

[The Macho King]

[Reposting from locked thread with additions] Been awhile since I posted here but I just watched for the first time The Grandmaster.

I didn't really know what to expect. I knew it was about Ip Man and id seen the Donnie Yen movies, but also... i mean WKW isn't exactly known for Kung Fu. What i got.... was definitely very WKW. So much melancholy permeating through it. Ridiculously beautifully shot - a step down from In the Mood For Love and 2046 but like.... what isn't?

It also got me thinking about how some of WKWs tackle HKs relationship with the mainland. A large part of this one's melancholy is the separation it caused between both Ip Man and Gong Er from their previous lives, and how it impacted them. Days of Being Wild, 2046, and In the Mood For Love have it as a backdrop, but I think all of them featuring characters who have to leave frequently for economic opportunity is interesting. And Happy Together is probably the most directly about HK and China despite literally not taking place there, because it kind of casts a shadow over the movie as a whole.

That's all to say WKW didn't make enough movies.

 

[Rodgerwilco]

The Substance (2024). No reality here at all. A fading has-been celebrity takes a mysterious drug that splits her body into two: herself and her much younger self. Predictably, things deteriorate rapidly. Despite the name, this movie is more “style” than “substance.” Imagine Stanley Kubric going for the full-scale, gross-you-out effect, like The Shining meets Requiem for a Dream meets Doom but far more gross. This movie is masterfully made but I will be honest with you: we could not finish watching it and had to first fast-forward it and then simply turn it off. I hate horror as a genre but my wife loves it and yet it was too much even for her to stomach. So I cannot tell you exactly how it ends. After last year’s success of The Poor Things, it’s not surprising that directors will attempt to outdo each other in sheer shock factor. If you are in the least bit sensitive, stay the hell away. The allegory is clear (too clear) and Demi Moore is very good here (people looking to reward her with some kind of an award after such a successful career finally got a good excuse) but it’s just too revolting (another thing that’s revolting is all men in this film, from Dennis Quaid on). 4/10.

I sort of wish I had taken the same route. The ending just felt so ridiculously unnecessary. I was belly laughing at the absurdity, I'm not really sure what angle they were going for there.

I was very surprised to see this film getting so much acclaim... I thought it was fairly basic. Not much subtlety to the message they're sending... Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley were great in the movie, but that's about it. I also think the director has a thing for Qualley's booty. There were so many butt-shots I'm surprised her ass didn't get a mention when the credits rolled lol.

 

[kihei]

The Substance seems to be having a rough go of it around here lately, so I thought I would file a minority report. What I liked primarily about the movie was Fargeat's treatment of themes. Here is the final paragraph from my review at the time:

"As was true of her debut film Revenge, director Coralie Fargeat makes horror films with clever, relevant and well integrated feminist angles. On a thematic level, The Substance tackles how some women internalize sexist conceptions of beauty in order to seek male approval or, simply, to continue to appear young. These efforts to remain youthful and beautiful often result in women being literally at war with their own bodies. The Substance is basically a brilliant exploration of these attitudes, cleverly executed in the extreme. Fargeat provides her movie with a stylish but superficial look, something like what you might see in a high concept perfume commercial. The pacing is perfectly timed to allow the tension between these two women to build incrementally, culminating in a payoff that has to be seen to be believed, a gorefest of a final act that rivals anything in Sion Sono or David Cronenberg's catalogue. In short, the incisive social criticism in The Substance complements rather than compromises a masterful horror film, one with a lot more meat on the bone than we have come to expect from the genre."

The Substance certainly is a divisive work, but, along with Heretic and Nosferatu, it was easily among the most interesting horror films that I saw this year.