Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
The Thing (2011)
Useless
This prequel is just an excuse to rehash The Thing for the modern market. It's a tipical action monster movie, with a mediocre script, bad dialogues, and awful charachters. The CGI doesn't help. Prop design, photography and colors are terrible, because they're crystal clear: the exact opposite of these features from the first movie. They should've at least tried to recreate a similar atmosphere for a story that happens literally just hours before The Thing.
Finch (2021)
Pointless and predictable
It's one of those movies you've already watched even if you didn't. Ridden with clichés, predictable, and shallow. Ultimately boring. I couldn't relate to Finch, nor the robot or the dog. This is the era of industrially produced movies, and Apple is no different from Netflix or Amazon.
No Sudden Move (2021)
Almost average
Boring, clunky, never takes off. Mild twist after mild twist, it drags till the end. It's a crime story you've watched one hundred times before. If not for the cast and the scenography, it would have been a bad movie.
Old (2021)
A black hole of plot holes
You can find many told around the internet. I'll add another one I didn't found yet: why the children have perfect dresses for their teen and adult phases?
The Devil All the Time (2020)
Surprisingly well executed
The bad: it's really slow. It has not much depth.
The good: it's a gut-wrenching tragedy, soaked in blood, well written and directed. It's rare to see these levels of craft these days. The most terrific acting performance in recent memories by an ensemble cast.
Apt Pupil (1998)
Nice
The story is very original, indeed. Singer does a very good job at keeping the thrill high until the end. Some scenes are very well filmed. I didn't like the ending much, but thid is just my opinion. Surely worth a watch, 6.5 stars.
Saw (2004)
Poor
Starts good, looses steam and becomes a conventional action-horror movie. The direction and editing are very shaky in pace and fail to engage the audience, let alone explain things coherently in the first two acts. It'a mess, really. Danny Glover's character is a mess too. The ending is an idiotic flurry of twists without much reason.
Death and the Maiden (1994)
Awful
Good subject, pedestrian development, terrible screenplay.
Solace (2015)
Garbage
It's obvious that the level of the reviews here has fallen underground. Premonitions features amateurish direction, awful dialogs, and an absolutely boring plot.
Triple 9 (2016)
Good
It's not a masterpiece, but it absolutely stands out in the landscape of the last few years productions. Triple 9 is gritty, hyperrealistic, dramatic, and cursed. No millennial fancies. Great acting, good direction. Solid. Surely worth a watch.
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)
Expected more
It has its own merits, clearly, but it's hard and outdated. It's an oniric trip where atmosphere is everything and the rest doesn't really matter. Beautiful and haunting, but narratively it's quite unsatisfying.
The Tomorrow War (2021)
Makes me wanna cry
First off, here is the mandatory unfalsifiable argument: I'm fully prepared for the flurry of downvotes that the notorious platform-driven bots will gracefully give this review.
Not much to review though, I was nauseated from the early stadium scene and couldn't keep watching. This is the way you tell a story when your audience is 10 years old or younger. Period. Not a kind of communication you can adopt with grown people with grown brains that appreciate cool or even barely adequate storytelling, even in a low profile action movie. Point is, I feel insulted.
As long as "we" keep giving this flaming garbage a 6.7 score, these platforms will keep feeding flaming garbage.
Go with Me (2015)
One of the worst movies ever made
Yet hordes of patently fake reviews from subscription distributors.
Every Secret Thing (2014)
Good drama
Inexplicably undervalued by the critics. It's gripping, it's saddening and disturbing. Well shot and well directed. Psychologically very sound. The only flaw is that there's a bit too much of a "crime episode" flavour overall, but not every movie aims for the Academy. Good one.
Serenity (2005)
Awful
Two hours of one-dimensional characters, cheap direction, cheap music, and bad humor. The story is a perfect anticlimax that starts with the intriguing premise of the mysterious girl, then melts into pulp nothingness. Serenity is an awful wannabe classic saga, and it never comes close. I'm quite upset for wasting two hours over this unexcusable 7.8 rating.
Return to Sender (2015)
Haha
It's beyond me how this mess of an amateurish thing can get a 5.1. Beyond me! This movie managed to make a rape scene hilarious, because it was so badly filmed and acted. Shame.
Mare of Easttown (2021)
Eye roll
Yet another series featuring homosexuality. It's unbearable. Something that interests 1% of population is featured roughly in 33% of the products I watched the last couple of years. The more they feed it, the more I stop watching. Because humanity doesn't revolve suddenly around that. Thanks but no thanks.
Arrival (2016)
Great concept
But what an awful director Villeneuve is!
(Adding words just to meet the quota)
The Woman in the Window (2021)
What a mess
The woman in the window is like a big pot with lots of random things in. Drama, mystery, psychiatry, something new, lots of things old, slow pace, fast pace, hysteric direction, top notch acting, awful acting, a trope here, another trope there that messes up with the previous one, then another one, and then more, so you don't know what you're watching but seems like you've seen it before anyway. The screenplay is beyond messy, the characters feel like lifeless ghouls from the mind of somebody who has no empathy but tries hard to show some.
I rarely watched something bad like this. And it's saddening the number of fake reviews here.
Blow the Man Down (2019)
Not bad
Nice, well filmed story with a hint of grotesque. Just a little bit too slow. It's engaging, but strangely unengaging at the same time, maybe because overall it's stuff you've seen before (a bit of Fargo; the old theme of "covering the tracks"). The best thing is the old ladies, but it feels like an underdeveloped theme.
The Little Things (2021)
Meh
Quite uninteresting until the end, when some of the characters' choices are so unbelievable that every bit of faith you try to put in this story instantly vanishes. Also, I have a hard time believing that Rami Malek is an actor.
Presumed Innocent (1990)
A comparison with the book
I watched it right after reading the book, that's a good exercise to evaluate the quality of a movie without the "distraction" of the plot.
The book is a masterpiece in my opinion, and the movie is a very uninspired attempt to exploit its thrills. There's some craft I guess (at least for 1990 standards) but it's clearly not enough.
The worst thing is the direction. Dull, dull, dull. Most of the running time feels like a staged, cramped photocopy of the book, without much pathos or suspence. Some scenes are quite hilarious, feeling rushed, fake and badly edited.
The final twist is well pulled, but still a far cry from the beautiful, astonishing triple twist that ends the book.
Most of the characters are paper-thin (Caroline, Horgan, Sandy, the Judge), while the District Attorneys are just useless.
Ford and the wife do a very good job, but the rest of the acting ranges from awful to exaggerated (including Raul Julia). Scacchi is terrible, in a role that would've been perfect for Sharon Stone.
The score by John Williams is uninspired.
Photography is quite bad, with all that dim artificial lighting typical of some production from the eighties.
Overall it's a derivative movie that aged bad. I would recommend it just for the fans of the book, out of curiosity.
Ordeal by Innocence (2018)
Nice
Entertaining mystery, with top notch production values. Wonderfully acted by the mother's character, Jack and the doctor. A bit boring, but gains momentum. The last 30 minutes are very satisfying.
And Then There Were None (2015)
Really unimpressed
It's overlong and quite repetitive. It's quite easy to spot the culprit, because he's the only one that's innocent in the flashbacks.
Edit to add a couple of things: the judge's death is quite anonymuos and downplayed, while in the book it's a powerful image that still haunts me after decades. Second, on another note, why do they changes "indians" with "soldiers"? Is it politically uncorrect to even name people by their name? It's like saying 10 little norwegians... and it's just a rhyme!
11.22.63 (2016)
5 minutes in
And my intelligence feels insulted.
Nothing to add.