Films you've seen recently and would unreservedly recommend:

constant escape

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Always recommending Children of Men, but I would assume that is already popular among folks here.

Another favorite is City of Lost Children by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Loving Vincent, which is fairly recent but I forget the director.

Anyone here have any Chantal Akerman to recommend? I've only seen Les Rendezvous d'Anna (I think its called), but I'd like to see more.
 
B

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I guess Jeanne Dielman is a must see, but by the same token it's also the only Akerman I've seen. Interested in hearing others' answers.
 
constant escape

constant escape

winter withered, warm
I'm looking forward, in a masochistic way, to that one. Need to be ready for that kind of drain. All of this is anticipation, to be sure.
 
shiels

shiels

_
Uncut gems was masterful. Really really good. Annoying and compelling and garish and beautiful. Stunning and stressful soundtrack. Julia fox. Won’t be watching it again anytime soon though...
 
shiels

shiels

_
They make sense as a pair, I hope opn produces a few things on this next album, the last few singles from the weeknd have been the best things since house of balloons, went off him for years.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Again, not an unreserved recommend, but yesterday we watched this 90s film called Fire in the Sky which is the (supposedly) true story of the alien abduction of some US logger guy. Seems that he disappeared and there were loads of searches for him to no avail while his fellow workers did nothing to get dissuade people who suspected them of killing him and hiding the body by blathering about lights in the sky and alien abductions. Then, five days later the guy turned up out of the blue, naked and confused and so on. Big news in the UFO community apparently but I think I can see a few ways they might have managed to fake it... anyway the film plays it all straight and does quite a good job of representing both the redneck community where it occurred and SPOILERS (kinda) also making it entirely clear that it was little grey men who were responsible, showing their really pretty freaky and seemingly senseless body horror experiments on their harmless victim. Those scenes, despite the lack of anal probing, being genuinely quite disturbing - partly specifically because of their inexplicableness (or is it inexplicability?).
Despite the above praise, the film is slow at times, in a sense there isn't really more to the story than stated above and arguably it doesn't stretch out to keep you interested for feature length. Also, not sure that the idea of showing it partly in flashback worked as it removed tension letting you know he was gonna survive.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
How about this one?

250px-Variola_Vera.jpg

The film follows the journey of a Kosovar pilgrim on his way back to Belgrade from the Middle East. While at a bazaar, the pilgrim buys a flute from a man who is visibly ill. Upon his return to Belgrade, the pilgrim starts to show signs of illness and is transported to the city's General Hospital. His disease is initially misdiagnosed and the smallpox virus starts spreading through the hospital very quickly. Once the disease is correctly identified, the authorities attempt to subdue the outbreak by declaring martial law, enforcing quarantine and enlisting the help of the World Health Organization.
Click to expand...
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
When I was young I read quite a few Agatha Christie books, then I got to about ten and realised that they were basically all the same, simplistic, boring etc etc and moved on to... whatever it was. Now I'm old, I think that they must have made some kind of imperceptible mark of which I was unaware, and once again I have a soft spot for seeing them pop up on telly (especially when they have these beautiful art deco backdrops) although I probably won't ever read one again to be honest.
So that's a long intro explaining why I was sort of interested in this film Knives Out when I read about it cos it's basically an AC pastiche with a murder in a country house, an enigmatic (but blank) private eye - called Benoit Blanc in this instance - loads of backstabbing relatives, a will reading, some servants who might also be suspects etc etc
So we watched it, and it's just exactly what you would expect really. Good cast (Daniel Craig, Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans, some others I recognise... oh that guy out of Uncut Gems in fact) going through a slick Poirot homage. Some twists, a few turns, nothing too ridiculous but enough to keep you on your toes. Not really funny but just sort of faintly ridiculous enough all the way through to have you just low-key smiling. I dunno, I can't really say it's great art and the reviews and so on have gone way overboard, but for light relief in these troubled times I would say you can't go far wrong.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Also, the other day we were in the cinema and there was a trailer for a film called A Quiet Place 2 and I thought, that's weird, how come there is a sequel to a film that I've never heard of that can't have been a big success? Anyway, I googled the first A Quiet Place and discovered that I was totally wrong, it was a massively successful so-called brainy horror with almost universally good reviews set in 2020 about humans living in a deserted post-apocalyptic world (so far so just like what's actually happening) and being hunted by alien monsters that are blind but have incredibly sensitive hearing. Anyway, I watched the film and, despite all the reports of how smart and original it is, I don't think it was that great. Yes, the idea that the main characters virtually never speak and communicate with (subtitled) sign-language IS a good one and the constant need to make no noise whatsoever does add tension... at first, but then it just gets repetitive quickly "oh no, someone dropped a saucepan, is the alien coming? Yes it is, let's still for ages as it walks really close and may or may not eat us!" can only happen so many times. What's weird is that, while there isn't really enough story to sustain the film, they made a deliberate choice to start in the middle of this situation. For me with these kind of films I think that the bit when the aliens invade or whatever and society slowly collapses is normally the best bit, even if it's not it seems a strange choice to not feature a big bit that would have been different when the film's main problem is samey-ness.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Ripley's Game was just on telly so we watched it. Never seen it before - although have seen The American Friend which is apparently based on the same book, albeit, as I remember a little less action-packed somehow - well worth watching I thought. John Malkovich I find creepy at the best of times so as Ripley he works rather well, although in a rather skewed sense at least, Ripley ultimately feels somehow less evil than in some of his other incarnations. Dougray Scott takes the role that Bruno Ganz had in the Wenders version (if I remember correctly) and a young Queen Cersei is his wife. Oh yeah and Ray Winstone stretches his range as a cockney gangster type. Stylish locations in Italy contrast effectively with grimier ones in Berlin, the pace is slow enough to make you think you're watching a thoughtful art film but it's leavened with more than smattering of gritty violence and an air of menace always threatening to develop into something more so it kinda has its cake and eats it. But that worked for me.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Devil In A Blue Dress was on telly at 3am this morning. I remembered in fact that I have read some of the Mosley ones featuring Easy Rawlings (and some not featuring him in fact) and somehow I'm not sure that Denzel Washington was exactly how I pictured him. Whatever though, it was a perfectly good noir film with femme fatales and twisty turns and a complex plot (in fact at the end, as with The Big Sleep, there were a couple of bits that didn't entirely seem to make sense to me after the main stuff was sorted out - might be cos I was a bit tired when watching and lost concentration at times) and a little dash of race stuff in there too. Don Cheadle was good as the semi-psychotic Mouse, though again not as I imagined him, but probably more an issue with me than anything else. So not hugely above any other solid, decent neo-noir, but recommended for anyone in these troubled times who is looking for a well-acted nice-looking mystery thing with all the tropes in the right place yet never quite feeling that you've seen it before (well maybe a bit).
 
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