Laura H.

Wow. This is the kind of movie that leaves you frozen in your seat when it fades to black. Intense. Beautifully acted and directed. Beautiful to look at. A quality film, through and through.

I really wanted to like this movie and made a special effort to get to town to see it in the theater. With such an A-list cast and Apple's reputation for quality content, I figured it might be a gem, despite some less than stellar reviews. Maybe I could look forward to "Romancing the Stone" meets "Mr. and Mrs. Smith"? Ow. Wow. No. That's two and a half, long, excruciating hours of my life I'll never get back. The movie tries really hard to be a clever, funny, send-up of spy/thriller/romance/action genres, but it fails. Such an epic, epic fail. Everything about the movie lands with a thud. Like the kind of thud you might expect if you were watching Bryce Dallas Howard in a slinky gold ball gown "power skate" across an oily floor on knives embedded in her combat boots (where'd those come from?) as she goes all Crouching Tiger, HIdden Dragon badass on the bad guys. It's not funny, it's not even clever, it's just...weirdly uncomfortable to watch. This was a cute premise, and could have been great. But oh, man, it wasn't.

DiCaprio was superb, as usual, but I found the stereotypical, over-the-top, technicolor, Luhrmann spectacle and edgy cinematography and soundtrack distracting from what is essentially an elegant romantic tragedy.

This was hands-down the best Indiana Jones movie since the iconic original. The special effect de-aging of Ford and Mikkelson in the opening scenes was seamless, reinforcing the film's central premise of time travel. At first I thought that the film was going to devolve into one chase scene after the next (which, to be fair, is a foundational premise of the entire franchise), but Spielberg pulled it up out of the exhilarating dive by weaving plenty of plot twists and storytelling into the fabric of the film. Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones has still got it, and Phoebe Waller Jones was a superb sidekick, worthy of carrying the films forward to the next generation if given a chance.

All I can say is that I can relate to Augie’s desperate plea, “Does anyone know what this play is about?” It’s like Bad French Cinema and a an early ‘50’s Western had a threesome with a late ‘50’s SciFi flick. Found myself looking at my watch wondering how much longer until I could go home.