When you watch as many movies as I do, there are sometimes titles which you really don’t want a review about. Movies which are nice to watch and can be good, but of which you really don’t want to be too critical (or simply don’t have much to say about). And it sometimes happens that I decide not to write about such a film, despite it deserving some attention. A Kind of Murder is a movie which does a lot of things right, but which at the same time isn’t one everyone should see. Continue reading
Category Archives: Drama
Okja (2017) – Recensie
Okja, by South Korean director Bong Joon Ho, can be compared to a baby chimpanzee which grows up in two hours. At the start it is cute and you feel at ease letting it play with your children. But if you allow it to stay with them in those two hours it will cause some very shocking moments. In this case the movie itself isn’t about a primate, but about a specially bred superpig which could mean a lot of profit for a big multinational company. Continue reading
Thor: Ragnarok (2017) – Review
When you take a look at the Marvel Cinematic Universe there are some characters who are used more often for comedy than others. The Hulk is often comic relief, usually physical stuff (just think of him slamming Loki back and forth), but if you take a look at the other super heroes it’s Thor who is also the source for a lot of jokes. In the first movie he was a fish out of water who stood out because he talked differently and didn’t know how everything on earth worked. But also in the other Marvel movies a lot of comedy came from him. So it was great news to hear that Taika Waititi would be directing Ragnarok. Hunt for the Wilderpeople and What We Do in the Shadows were extremely funny and Boy was also a very good movie. But as we’ve seen in the past with Edgar Wright and Antman, there is always a risk that the comedy a director wants to bring doesn’t align with the ideas the studio has. Fortunately Waititi has been able to finish the movie and keep his brand of humour intact. Continue reading
The Towering Inferno (1974) – Review
When I picked out The Towering Inferno as a blindspot movie for this year, I didn’t know yet that this quote from Steve McQueen at the end of the movie, more than 40 years later, still is relevant with the events in Grenfell Tower earlier this year in the back of your mind. “You know, we were lucky tonight. Body count’s less than 200. You know, one of these days, you’re gonna kill 10,000 in one of these firetraps, and I’m gonna keep eating smoke and bringing out bodies until somebody asks us… how to build them.”
When the World Trade Center was being during the seventies it inspired a number of writers (Richard Martin Stern, Thomas N. Scortia en Frank M. Robinson) to write stories about the dangers of such high buildings in case of fire. It resulted in the books “The Tower” and “The Glass Inferno”. After the success of the disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure the studios wanted to make other ones and started looking for material they could adapt. Warner Bros bought the rights for The Tower, 20th Century Fox for The Glass Inferno. This would mean both studios would be releasing their own version of basically the same story. The studios decided to negotiate though, which resulted in the first cooperation between two big studios and the movie was filled with famous actors of the time, including Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire and Richard Chamberlain. Continue reading
To Be or Not to Be (1942) – Review
For the past couple of years I’ve been making a selection of twelve movies for my Blindspot list at the start of the year. Movies which for example have been on my “to watch” list for ages or ones for which I’ve got the feeling I should have seen them at least once as a movie lover. I’ve also made a list for this year and as we’re already in october I noticed that I almost hadn’t watched any of them. So it was necessary to change that so I decided to check out this 1942 movie, by director Ernst Lubitsch. I hadn’t seen any of his previous work, but this one often is named as one of his best. Continue reading
The Wailing (2016) – Review
Maybe I’m slowly starting to sound like a broken record, but South Korean cinema has been offering the most interesting and unpredictable movies in years. An action movie can contain humour or the hero turns out not to be exactly who he seems to be. The director of The Wailing, Na Hong-jin, previously made the tense and dark The Chaser and The Yellow Sea, in which a cab driver with a debt gets an opportunity to get rid of it by committing a murder. It managed to get the adrenaline pumping. The Wailing is no exception and is a true rollercoaster ride of emotions (and genres). Continue reading
Despicable Me 3 (2017) – Review
The return of the yellow creatures was looked forward by many, this time together with their boss Gru again who is working for the Anti-Villain League (AVL). He has to fight Balthazar Bratt, a bad guy who seems to still think he lives in the eighties, when he was successful as a child actor. Gru’s mission doesn’t entirely goes as planned and together with his wife he’s fired. No longer making money he has to wonder what he is going to do now, but when he hears he has a twin brother, Dru, he decides to see him, together with his family. Continue reading
Silence (2016) – Review
Martin Scorcese basically has nothing to prove anymore as a director. The number of classics he’s made is enormous and when he makes a new movie as a film fan you know you can’t miss it. What does he offer the viewer with Silence? Continue reading
Rakka (2017) – Short film review
In 2009 director Neill Blomkamp managed to impress the world with his District 9. With an estimated budget of “only” 30 million he managed to make a science fiction film with lots of special effects, which got Hollywood interested. The next two movies he made, Elysium and Chappie (both of which I enjoyed) generally weren’t received as positvely. A while ago Blomkamp announced he would be starting Oats Studios, with which he’ll make short experimental films. The first one is the alien invasion short Rakka, which is available through YouTube. Continue reading
Loveless (2017) – Review
Yesterday the 17th edition of the PAC-festival took place at one of the biggest cinema chains in the Netherlands. It’s an event I always enjoy visiting as the atmosphere is fun (usually running into some other movie bloggers), movies are shown which won’t be released for a couple of months and usually there are at least two or three titles which are awesome. This time the festival opened with the Russian movie Loveless. Continue reading