Rate The Last Movie You Saw

'Love Lies Bleeding' (2024)

I really liked Rose Glass' debut 'Saint Maud'. But this feels like she was elevated into a project that was way too big for her, too early. I thought this was a genuinely terrible film. Not even Kristen Stewart who is pretty tremendous as always, saved it. Or Clint Mansell, who's scores are normally great.....but here is tepid. There are tropes and cliches everywhere

This was a terribly written farce. If this film wasn't A24 with this cast, it would be ridiculed. It's awful.

Turtles All the Way Down (2024) This just came out today on Max or Crave (depending on your region). It's a romantic drama about a cute teen girl with OCD, her best friend, and the boy she likes, whose wealthy father is missing. Isabela Merced is very good here and I also liked Cree's performance. Felix Mallard fell a little flat and didn't make much of an impact. The subplot about the missing billionaire felt unnecessary and underdeveloped. Overall, there are some effective emotional moments here, thanks to a mostly well written screenplay and the strength of Merced's performance. This is my pick for the 4th best film of the year so far.

1st Rewatch...One of Clint Eastwood's most underrated efforts as a director. This film version of the Tony Award winning Broadway musical about the rise and fall of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons is a near perfect examination of the connection between the mob and show business, making it clear from the beginning that the group was originally fronted with mob money. I never saw the show onstage, but my instinct tells me that the show was severely altered for the screen, beefing up the mob elements of the story to give the film greater mass appeal. Despite that, the musical sequences in this film are what really make it roar. Orchestrations, sound, and sound editing bring great care to the musical numbers, giving them their own energy as opposed to just dubbing in original recordings. Especially loved "Sherry", "Walk Like a Man", and "Can't Tale My Eyes off You". John Lloyd Young is allowed to reprise his Tony Award winning role as Frankie Valli and his singing voice is like butter. The real acting honors though go to Vincent Piazza, who you might remember as Lucky Luciano on Boardwalk Empire, as Tommy DeVito, the smarmy and manipulative organizer of the group who allegedly put the group in so much debt that a wiseguy shows up five minutes before the group is to do The Ed Sullivan Show to collect a debt. Loved Erich Bergen as group composer Bob Gaudio, the only member of the group who really stood up to DeVito. Eastwood beautifully recreates 1960's New Jersey in this nostalgic and entertaining movie that got by a lot of people.

2nd Rewatch...David O Russell's masterpiece is a blistering and funny look at the relationship that develops between two very broken people. Bradley Cooper plays Pat, who has just spent eight months in a mental institution, after a meltdown he suffered after catching his wife, Nikki, in the shower with another man. With the aid of his mom (Jackie Weaver), Pat gets released against medical advice and has decided on a singular mission to get his ex-wife, Nikki back. Pat meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a friend of Nikki's sister and asks for her help in getting a letter to Nikki. Tiffany agrees to help Pat if he will be her partner in a dance competition. Russell's sizzling screenplay is the real star here and it is served by a spectacular cast. Jennifer Lawrence won the Oscar for Best Actress for her explosive Tiffany, but in my opinion, it is Cooper's tortured angry Pat that dominates the proceedings. This is the first movie where Cooper displayed serious acting chops in a heartbreaking performance that should have won him the Oscar as well. Shout out to Robert De Niro, whose sensitive turn as Pat's dad earned him a supporting actor nomination. That scene in the diner and Pat and Tiffany's dance at the end of the film linger with you long after the credits roll. This movie gets better with each viewing.

1st Rewatch...After this watch, this film feels like a serious missed opportunity. A pumped up Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who also wrote and directed the film) plays a serial womanizer who thinks he's God's gift to women and thinks he can treat women anyway he wants to because he goes to church every Sunday and goes to confession being honest about it. This guy also has a serious addiction to porn that he has no control over. He is observed having sex with a woman and when they're done, getting out of bed and going straight to his computer. This film could have been something really special, a bold character study about an addiction that has never really been addressed onscreen with any depth. We get a hint at what this film could have been during the scenes where the guy goes to confession, the strongest scenes in the film, but Levitt's screenplay always backs off just as it seems to approach the subject matter in a way that would benefit him and elicit sympathy from the viewer, which it does not. The central character is a sexual arrogant jerk who it's hard to like. The most likable element of the film is the performance by Oscar winner Julianne Moore as a flighty widow who he gets involved with.

This is a film that somehow slipped under my radar back in the day. It is a fairly dark and somber crime thriller. It opens with a chilling scene as we see these three criminals: Ray (Billy Bob Thornton), Pluto (Michael Beach), and Fantasia (Cynda Williams) murder six innocent people. But then it just lets things simmer as they head out to Star City to the inevitable clash with Dixon and the police.

There are numerous positives here. From the way the film draws you in with this story about this charismatic cop that craves to be a hero to Carl Franklin's confident direction and pace as he builds up the tension around this inevitable confrontation. This is helped by solid performances from pretty much everyone involved. Thornton, Beach, Williams. But as is usual in any film he's in, Paxton is the scene stealer as he adds layers to this character, beyond all the enthusiastic "happy pup" hollers he gives now that he feels like a "real cop".

Grade:


Full review on my Movie Loot

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Teenagers from Outer Space - 14,000 dollars. I don't think that even qualifies as a shoestring budget. But writer/director/editor/producer Tom Graeff persevered. And brought us this z grade scifi offering from 1959. Z as in the overall costs because even though the results are readily apparent onscreen and the acting is about what you'd think it's surprisingly entertaining. Not shockingly entertaining mind you but it doesn't bore you. I didn't check my watch once during it's 86 minute runtime. I did wonder how much time was left but I never checked and that has to count for something. I thought the credits started out on a bit of an odd note with "Tom Graeff presents David Love in" and then the actual title but according to IMDb Graeff made this as a vehicle for his boyfriend Love.

The movie starts out at an observatory where a guy spots a "screw shaped craft." After landing by literally screwing itself into the earth (and maybe smoking a cigarette) the tiny clown car of a ship starts disgorging several of its occupants, none of whom look remotely like teenagers. They're here to scout Earth as a potential home in which to raise their food supply, a Gargon, which looks a lot like a superimposed lobster. They plan on leaving the vicious, man-eating creatures somewhere they can procreate and grow to an enormous size and then return to harvest them safely. One of the spacemen, Derek, is understandably squeamish about this. When his shipmate Thor opens fire with his disintegrator raygun and turns a dog into a pile of bones Derek finds the tags and realizes that Earth is not only populated but that the species is advanced. Being the iconoclast he runs off to find the dead dogs owner while the overachieving Thor blasts away with his raygun. Derek finds the address and makes the acquaintance of Betty Morgan and her grandfather. The rest of the movie involves Thor hunting down Derek while making liberal use of an itchy trigger finger.

Whoever this guy Graeff was he did as commendable a job of cranking out a lowest of budgets scifi movie as anyone could ask. His sweetly naive message of empathy and of belonging may be hard to discern given it's mode of presentation but it still somehow comes through. It's like the little engine that could of 50's schlock scifi.

70/100


Werewolf in a Girls Dormitory - The title says it all. It's an obviously foreign made affair but attempts to pass itself of as taking place somewhere in the United States. The dialogue is obviously dubbed in with differing characters exhibiting noticeably different rhythms and cadence. It's an Italian production with one participant describing it as a chaotic set with four different languages being spoken. It has sort of a giallo vibe to it and opens with one of the girls at a reformatory school sneaking away to meet her older lover. She's followed and attacked by a snarling creature. The wounds on her body suggest that she was killed by wolves but there's plenty of suspects to choose from. The new science teacher who left his old job under a cloud of scandal, the headmaster and his wife and then there's the caretaker who's sort of a bargain basement Peter Lorre. There's plenty of secrets alluded to as well blackmail and illicit affairs. If you can look past the luridly silly title there is a mystery of sorts to be solved. All taking place within that distinctly European vibe which somehow makes it a bit more palatable. It's still not enough to recommend it although it might serve as a conversation starter if you should name drop the title.

40/100

The Gorgon - Hammer time. Again. I thought I had seen this one and I kinda sorta had. But it had been so long that I conflated it with another Hammer offering, The Reptile. This particular Hammer however costarred Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and those three names are as close to a gold standard in the suspense/horror genre as there is. People are dying in the village of Vandorf in 1910 Germany. The authorities and local doctor are engaged in a coverup of sorts. the victims have all been turned to stone which you would think merits a second look. A young artist is found hanged and his death ruled a suicide. He's also blamed for the latest bizarre murder. His grieving father comes into town and starts digging around. When he meets the same fate his other son also travels to Vandorf looking for answers.

Cushing plays Dr. Namaroff, the resident alienist at the local mental asylum. Barbara Shelley plays his assistant Carla and Lee is Professor Karl Meister of Leipzig University. They gift Lee with the role of heroic curmudgeon and he turns in his usual peerless performance. Cushing does the grunt work and Shelley is there as the object of desire/wild card. It's Hammer so it's definitely worth watching.

75/100

From the Earth to the Moon - Got all confused from the get-go with this one. I thought I had seen it before but turns out I had only watched the first 20 or so minutes. Then I had also mistaken it for First Men in the Moon, an all around superior film. In this one Joseph Cotten and George Sanders play Victor Barbicane and Stuyvesant Nicholl, competing inventors and manufacturers. The Civil War has just ended with Sanders side on the losing end and Cotten has just invented Power X, the most powerful explosive know to man. Sanders is the more religious one and considers the rapacious Barbicane a danger to humanity. They make a bet and when Barbicane's explosive projectile not only disintegrates Nicholl's armor but the entire hill behind it it also inadvertently fuses the armor into a ceramic.

Barbicane, knowing he could never test it on earth, had been toying with the idea of launching an explosive projectile at the moon to show people the true enormity of it's power. But with the danger of re-entering Earth's atmosphere now solved he decides to make it a manned flight and, appealing to the other man's scientific curiosity, talks Nicholl into helping him. Nicholl however, consumed by equal parts jealousy and religious fervor, has his own agenda. The two men, along with Barbicane's assistant and Nicholl's stowaway daughter, succeed in launching themselves at the moon.

This is when the movie veers away from what I thought it would be. The rest of the plot more closely resembled something like Apollo 13 with the four passengers having to deal with Nicholl's attempt at sabotage. RKO studios, which was producing the film, was in the process of going belly up with the once healthy budget for the project having dried up. The script had originally included them landing on the moon but it was scrapped, resulting in a largely static and talky third act. Viewers are left scratching their heads and trying to find some kind of reason to keep caring.

50/100

The Monster of Piedras Blancas - Serviceable creature feature from 1959 with a lot of recognizable faces. Mostly character actors that fans of shows like Andy Griffith will spot right away. The young heroine didn't look familiar at all but her doe eyed costar also starred in The Giant Gila Monster. There's a lighthouse and a surly sort of a lighthouse keeper with a comely daughter. Then all these decrapitated bodies start turning up. Like most of these types of movies the actual monster of the title doesn't fully materialize until the third reel. His shadow and lower extremities are seen skulking around and he's basically a Creature from the Black Lagoon knockoff. When he finally has his coming out party he kind of resembled one of those half boar/half lizard guards from Jabba the Hutts palace. The budget was low but the acting respectable. Everyone came off as sincere in their efforts and that earns points no matter what the genre.

It was surprisingly explicit for a late 50's movie in showing it's body count. Severed heads not usually being featured for a few years. 71 minutes long and there were some lulls but all in all not bad.

65/100

Flanders (2006)

Back in the day I rented this from our local library - them were the days! A story about gritty existential ennui which seems to haunt Dumont's films. Here, loose friends have fraternity and sexual relationships to a backdrop of dull agricultural work and little ambition. 2 get called away to an un-named middle eastern country to fight, and ultimately see and partake in atrocities. That and their joint "conquest" back home changes their lives forever. This film is not for everyone and can be taciturn. I like Dumont's style (Humanite and La vie de Jesus) and this was a return to form after the frankly laughable Twentynine Palms. I havent watched any of his films since Hors Satan simply as they sound dull. Flanders is good though.

Crikey.

The talent being portrayed in this rags-to-riches biopic is unknown to me; however talented they are, however, they probably deserved a better movie than this, which just about follows every beat you know by heart and dutifully checks every cliche in the book.

Having said that, the cast really seems to give it their all and I particularly enjoyed watching Terry O'Quinn back on the big screen again, doing a fairly good Australian accent (not sure if actual Aussie viewers would agree, of course!)




David Leitch has probably failed to live up to the expectations he might once have raised as a director, but he's probably not likely to end up in director's jail - at least for now!

While not the best action director around, found a niche with action movies that are thoroughly mediocre but not totally awful and which somehow still have enough power to attract a decent amount of moviegoers.

His latest film coasts along largely on the charisma of its stars, and the impressive team of stunt performers who, well, finally get to make a movie that's all about their craft... while at the same time suggesting they don't get to hang out with the best people around.

The movie is enough to satisfy very modest expectations, albeit barely... as for fans of the original show....

I don't get to hear many that can entirely convince me (I only managed a small sample of O'Quinn's in that film, so I won't judge his too harshly yet.) The one I thought was really exceptional was from Caleb Landry Jones in Nitram - and he had to pull that off in a lead role. I was really impressed with it, and I've been moving around awkwardly in my seat for my entire life watching non-Aussie actors give it a go.

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Piercing (2018)

Quirky adaptation of a book where a man meticulously plans the perfect murder. Things do not go as planned though. 2 good performances and a fair amount of jumps. Lashed with black humour this fair zinged past which I didn't expect after reading the blurb. Wasikowska and Christopher Abbott both do great jobs with the latter seeming to specialise in this type of role. A few of the drug-induced scenes are a bit hard to fathom but this is good.

Unfrosted (2024) Featuring a sweet cast, Unfrosted is deliciously silly and goofy goodness. The dialogue is ridiculous and the story is zany fun, frosted with tasty performances, including two of the most surprising and unlikely cameos you could imagine. I laughed and had a good time. Unfrosted may not be cinematically nutritious, but it is a light and enjoyable treat.

1st Rewatch...Fans of Terms of Endearment will have a head start on this dark and loopy comedy drama about a woman named Terry (Joan Allen) who is consumed with anger over the fact that her husband left the country with another woman and is taking it out on everyone in her orbit, including her husband's best friend (Kevin Costner), an ex-baseball player who now has his own radio show and her four daughters (Erika Christensen, Keri Russell, Alicia Witt, Evan Rachel Wood). The screenplay by Mike Binder (who also directed) is unapologetic in its political incorrectness and unpredictability and just when you think it's about to wrap itself up in a neat little bow, there's a 11:00 reveal that we never see coming. Joan Allen was totally robbed of an Oscar nomination for her ferocious performance as the angry and unforgiving Terry who just can't get past her husband's betrayal and Costner effectively channels Jack Nicholson in his breezy ex-athlete. Director and writer Binder also wrote a juicy part for himself as Costner's boss who falls for Christensen, a role that reminded me a lot of Flap in Terms of Endearment. Trivia note: Wood's wanna be boyfriend is played by Erika Christensen's real life younger brother. This is explosive, sad, and funny entertainment from beginning to end, thanks primarily to Binder's work behind the camera and the divine Joan Allen in front.

1st Rewatch...I love Tina and Amy but this movie is just a hot mess. They play Kate and Maura Ellis, sisters who are informed by their parents that they are planning to sell the Florida home they grew up in, so they travel to Florida so that they can throw a wild party to say goodbye to their childhood home and so that Maura can have sex in her childhood bedroom. First of all, Tina and Amy are playing the wrong roles and too much of this film appears improvised, but nothing like the quality of Curb Your Enthusiasm improvisation. The scenes before the party are deadly dull and the actual party starts off OK, but just gets more stupid as it progresses. Most of Tina and Amy's SNL and showbiz pals agreed to appear, mostly in thankless roles, though Maya Rudolph, Ike Barinholtz, and Jon Cena do manage to garner some laughs and I LOVED James Brolin and Dianne Wiest as the girls' parents, but his movie is silly and pointless, made even worse by an almost two-hour running time. James Brolin looks amazing.

Love this movie.

Landry Jones made this movie.

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I’m here only on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. That’s why I’m here now.

Interesting story line. Good movie once one gets used to Scanlan as a Muslim.



Quirky little British movie about teens on vacation in Europe. A lot of drinking.

I agree, it was really poor.