Yeah, Douglas was doing the calm scary thing. He went on a pretty serious heater right out of the gates. He popped in more minor roles in that one and A Letter to Three Wives, and then he got going with starring roles in Ace in the Hole, Detective Story, and The Bad and the Beautiful that are all great movies.
I’ve been doing a chronological walkthrough of film history - obviously am in 1955 now - and Douglas absolutely showed up and took his dick out. Not literally of course, but probably only because that wasn’t on the table then. Very impressive run right away.
Right. He was good-looking enough to be a lead, but he also exuded some slimy quality, which is why the starring turns I named all have him playing a pretty shitty dude to varying degrees. He wasn’t the stuff of white-meat babyface characters.
All this talk about Night of the Hunter and no one has mentioned Lilian Gish, who was basically the OG Ellen Ripley? Completely subversive at the time to have a horror movie where an older woman comes out blasting the monster in the ass instead of having a man come to her rescue.
A college professor finds herself at a personal and professional crossroad when a star student levels an accusation against one of her colleagues, threatening to expose a dark secret from her own past.
Astonishingly bad. Holy shit. Literally nothing about this works. The editing and sound design are so bad that it’s actually hard to watch. Was this scored by Christopher Nolan I mean wtf?*
I would rather watch Amazing Spider-Man 2 than this. Andrew Garfield has never been in a worse spot. He gives us a character who is guilty in all the wrong ways, so the question of whether he did the bad thing THIS time really felt irrelevant.
Julia Roberts. What are you doing in this movie. At no point does she give us a reason to hope for her epiphany or catharsis.
Ayo Edebiri is great. I mean when is she not? But she can’t save this movie.
Compare this to the far superior The Hunt (2012) with Mads Mikkelsen.
Please note I didn’t enjoy Challengers either, so hey, maybe give this a shot if you were into that movie for anything else the director makes.
*The score is actually by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross wtf
Another one where the title is a lie (this is absolutely not a spy story), this one’s great though
Brazilian movie set in the 70s, following a man arriving into the provincial city of Recife, seems to be on the run. Backstory then slowly gets revealed, side characters are introduced, events happen.
Nice snapshot of life under the Brazilian dictatorship and the associated troubles. The movie is explicitly about the importance of remembering these times that tend to get swept under the rug (or worse) today.
Great performance from Wagner Moura, very charismatic (glad he recovered from Civil War, where I thought he was pretty terrible although maybe not his fault).
It’s a long one (2h40) but I was never bored, it deals with some political themes but is still conventionally entertaining. Apparently this is a hit in its home country which is great. Close to beating the PTA as movie of the year for me.
Since it was at a discount I watched “The long walk”. Thank god I didnt go to cinema for that and if it wasnt Stephen King attached to it I probably shouldnt have wasted money for that. Dont know what to think about it. I would almost say it was boring; it wasnt even shocking. Might be because the premise of the movie was already known.
