david macarelli

This work is nothing short of an astonishing piece of filmmaking, the direction is pitch perfect, the soundtrack is great, the cinematography is great, and as usual Stellan Skarsgard was masterful. The supporting characters are wonderful, it's a great story arc though it meanders at times, it's never dull, and this film is satisfying. This was perhaps my fifth viewing, and it really delivered. At the centre of the story, Nils (Stellan Skarsgard) is a soft-spoken snowplow driver who keeps the country roads in Norway clear and quietly endures abuse over the fact that he's Swedish. When his grown son is found dead, he refuses to believe it was a drug overdose. Abandoned by his grieving wife, he launches his own investigation, following the trail and quietly killing each thug up the chain as he tracks down the swaggering hothead mob boss who calls himself The Count (Pal Sverre Hagen). Along the way, he gets help from his ex-gangster brother (Peter Andersson), inadvertently re-igniting the war between The Count and rival Serbian mobster Papa (Bruno Ganz), whose own son has been caught in the crossfire. And the body count grows exponentially. The title refers to on-screen captions that offer a brief moment of respect for each person who dies along the way, which intriguingly puts every act of violence in perspective and on full view.

This movie far exceeded my expectations. Leandie Du Rant was outstanding, in addition to being delightful in appearance she was very convincing as an actress, and as a survivalist. The story was well done, the supporting characters were fun, though sometimes over the top, but that ended up being part of the fun too. The writing was quite decent, the settings were bleak and great, and the entire premise felt somehow credible. Definitely a well made film and a rather refreshing change of pace as I don't watch very many films from South Africa. The vigilante theme is always fun, and it was very well executed here.

The director Doug Liman has five very good films under his belt, several that are decent, and nothing but turkeys since 2017. This is right up there as one of his worst. Roadhouse was pretty difficult to sit through also, but at least it had decent writing and even though it was silly and dumb it was also humorous and it had two very charming leads who worked very well together. In this particular case I don't know how you can make a bad film with Casey Affleck, Matt Damon, Ron Perlmam, and Alfred Molina in it? It takes a special kind of skill to screw that up, but even though they are both tremendous talents, they just had nothing to work with here. The script was so thin and so unimaginative, the humor was so vapid, and so unfunny, it was a rather difficult film to sit through and it had very little in the way of entertainment value. The car chase was both unnecessary, too long andmikes beyond credible. So we're the scenes with fully automatic weapons being used on a small area, without anyone getting hit. Do the studios think we all have an IQ under 70? It is likely that they tried to save a lot of money on the script. Affleck has no experience writing good scripts and the other writer is also terrible, so had they spent 100k on a good script this might have been a good film. It was a very poor choice and it's hard for me to imagine a studio executive sitting down and reading this spectacularly unimaginative script, lacking even one funny line, and saying oh yeah this will work. Was the guy 15?

This movie was very well made, and it's a rather fascinating story, however what really is displayed in this movie from a legal point of view is a total fiction. Even the Insys founder Kapoor who this Garcia character was based on, was sentenced to five and a half years, the sentence was delayed due to covid, and when he finally served his sentence it was in a minimum security prison and he was let out after 2 years. That was a travesty of justice and that shows you just how weak the American judicial system is, how compromised they are, and just how unwilling they are to go after medical professionals and the Big Pharma mafia, for over prescribing drugs that kill. The problem for Pain Hustlers is that in humanising Liza, it loses its edge. It's too concerned with conventional storytelling and the need for a character to root for that, although Liza is doing dodgy things, you're never far away from a reminder that she's doing it for her daughter, who's in need of life-saving surgery. In the last several years only about 200 people have been tried for crimes of this nature out of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people that are engaged in these crimes. That is moral bankruptcy, that is ineptitude, that is pathetic, sickening, disgusting and deplorable. Law enforcement really needs to answer for this crime of not pursuing this with more vigor.

It's really nice to see Nicholas Cage back on form again, it seems like in the last few years he's taken on some more serious projects that have been able to showcase his extraordinary talent. This was a fun film, at times I didn't really know what I was watching, but it was quite absorbing. It has a slight horror element to it, but it's more of a kind of a police procedural film with a slightly occult twist to it. Nicolas Cage's performance was so much fun, he really hammed it up, and it somehow seemed very appropriate for this story. Maika Monroe was also very good. After successfully apprehending a local murderer, Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) is given a new assignment. Her boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), explains that Oregon has been home to a serial killer for decades – and an anonymous serial killer with no overt body counts or ties to the crime scenes at that. Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) is suspected to have caused the deaths of a dozen families over the last few decades, but the only evidence the police have is encrypted letters he left at the crime scenes. For all intents and purposes, the deaths are the result of murder-suicides in seemingly normal families. Given her aptitude for the unknowable, it is now Harker’s job to find Longlegs and bring him to justice. Well done. A good film, and a strong production.

When I watch a film like this I try to find something in the way of a redeeming quality, I try to find something in the way of a redeeming performance, I try to find something of value. Some little nugget something that's just slipped in there to prevent the film from being just an utter pile of garbage. Some level of redemption somewhere, and as hard as I searched with this movie, I could not find it. The film was supposed to have a sensuous element and yet there wasn't a single sex scene that was the tiniest bit hot. Marc Schölermann's slow-moving, oddly somber directorial choices, as the filmmaker's straight-faced sensibilities seem consistently at odds with the unapologetically tawdry nature of Neveldine and Taylor's script (ie the material almost demands a tongue-in-cheek, Crank-like approach). The inclusion of a nifty twist ending and a few admittedly effective kill sequences notwithstanding, Pathology generally remains unable to overcome its inherently flawed premise and it's finally impossible to view the film as anything more than a sporadically compelling yet hopelessly inconsequential piece of work. I have no idea how this film got made, why it got made, who the audience was, or what the intention was of the director, and writer. It had no entertainment value whatsoever, and there was not a single character that was the tiniest bit like about other than maybe the fiance. This movie was just an absolute piece of junk.

Barely 3 stars. If you're an indiscriminate film viewer and you like films like Wolverine and The Avengers you might like this film. While I went into this film with low expectations, I was simply hoping for a bit of entertainment. Emmanuel and Omar Sy are both excellent, and they really fill up the screen, but unfortunately they just did not have much to work with here. The action sequences were overly long, as is the Hollywood custom these days. Lots of action, very little beef. The script was the weakest part of the film, there were a lot of very implausible aspects of this thing and it seems like it was very PC version of the original film. And it felt like it did not need to be made. Zee getting hung up on saving the innocent just did not seem that plausible to me, and the amount of time spent developing their friendship and relationship was pretty ridiculous. Overall this film was not satisfying, not convincing, and Woo feels long past retirement age, at this point of his career. I really think he should hang up his spurs.

I found nothing but enjoyment from this film it was so well done it was presented in such an elegant fashion even the song song and dance routines which I normally find tiresome in many Indian films were delightful and downright funny this is a story of a truly heroic man who fought Against All Odds to achieve an absolutely fantastic dream put his Nation on the map and bring glory to his people, the Indian army, and his village. Kartik Aaryan and Vijay Raaz both give astonishing performances. The first few scenes take us back to his troubled childhood, where he's bullied by his father and his nasty peers who mock him for his dreams of winning an Olympic gold for his country. He's called a loser and is pushed to the fringes by a system that's designed to ridicule anything that's ambitious or unfamiliar. Pushed by his elder brother, he joins a wrestling camp in his village but finds himself driven out of it because he dared to win against a fellow wrestler kid of a village chieftain. He then joins the army, hoping to follow the likes of India's famous sprinter Milkha Singh and get his foot into the Olympic race. Petkar was the first Indian to win an individual gold medal in the 1972 Summer Paralympics with all odds stacked against him, and director Kabir Khan is careful about corralling together nuggets from his life that are designed to endear him to us. The emotionally-charged scenes like the one where he charges ahead despite a possible head injury are wonderfully acted and rendered. The movie soars when you see a bunch of the world's best specially-abled swimmers giving it their all. Those laps are swiftly handled but drive home the urgency and evoke incredible euphoria.

I wanted to like this film, I typically like Scarlett Johansson, and I'm indifferent toward Channing Tatum. I really don't think he's done that much good work, the conclusion that I've come to is that he's just not leading man material, he's not convincing, there's something about him that's off-putting, he's not particularly funny, and I think he would be much better suited to supporting roles. Harrelson's government spook makes Johansson stage, you guessed it, a fake moon landing, as a contingency in case the real one fails. She reluctantly goes along with this, unbeknownst to Tatum, as the real landing is taking place, even though she feels like she's betraying him. This extended finale is clumsily staged, but that's not what's offensive about it. The "Fake Moon Landing" narrative is one of the quintessential paranoid American folk legends, likely arising, I've always suspected, among the many people who insisted that the moon landing was a ridiculous folly and would never succeed--arising, like so much else in our toxic national discourse, from the common American inability to admit it when we're wrong. Fly Me to the Moon means it all facetiously, of course, but this doesn't strike me as the most auspicious time in our country's history to lend even that much credence to a conspiracy theory. This movie tried to be a lot of different things, it tried to be cute, it tried to be funny, it tried to be charming, it tried to be clever, and I don't think it succeeded on any of those fronts. I found it an effort to sit through and I did not find it entertaining, so if it's not entertaining what is it?

I'll say this right up front, this was not an easy film to sit through as it examines a truly horrific century of Canada's past, and the complicity of both the Canadian government and the Catholic Church in not only rampant sexual abuse, but also child abuse and outright genocide of the indigenous people of Canada. No benefit was afforded these children. These were not schools. This was not an education. It was a prison term, carried out by sadists. It's a harrowing tale not easily forgotten. There is some redemption, there is some admission of guilt, but way too late and not nearly enough. By setting the film in a Christian institution, Bones of Crows illustrates how the Catholic Church ran most of the residential schools contracted by the Canadian government. In Aline’s story, priests and nuns take on villainous roles as colonists, rapists, and abusers. Crosses hang prominently in hallways and rooms where Aline and Perseverance are imprisoned, hammering home the fact that injustice was trotted out in the name of Christianity. The lesson culminates in a dramatization of the 2009 apology by Pope Francis, used as an opportunity for Aline to look her oppressors in the eye and send them a proverbial mic drop. None of this critique comes with an ounce of subtlety, but it’s certainly important to educate and remind mainstream audiences of the atrocities doled out by the Catholic Church against Indigenous Peoples in Canada. Such an astonishing level of moral bankruptcy and downright perversion, carried out by an institution that's supposed to be representing the teachings of Christ.