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Sleepless Night 2011
Tight action thriller that delivers interesting ideas in a confined location.
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Punch-Drunk Love 2002
The real achievement of this film, besides Sandler's excellent performance, is the building sense of tone and emotion. The whole film film's tone makes the viewer feel like what it must be like to be Sandler - on edge, uneasy, bizarre, funny and with a horrible sense of dread.
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The Avengers 2012
Pretty much fucking perfect. Saw it twice today.
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Young Adult 2011
Had moments of insight and greatness, usually when Patton Oswalt was on-screen, but ended up not saying anything, and the final conversation COMPLETELY undercuts the whole film.
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The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring 2001
Two minutes in I was already back to being the teenager whose imagination exploded in the cinema in 2001. One of my favourite film(s) of all time.
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The Hunger Games 2012
A stellar performance by Lawrence but a film that is hindered by its mediocre source material.
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The Muppets 2011
It's good fun, but I never grew up with The Muppets, so I feel like I was missing something. But the more I think about it, the more joy it gives me. But Jason Segal's constant mugging and horrible self-awareness takes its toll on me with everything he is in.
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy 2011
Ridiculously faithful and so pitch-perfect for the period. Oldman's performance is masterful. It's an interesting look at the actual world of spying, but it's so deliberately obtuse and cold that you don't care about any of the characters, and it's near impossible to understand the ramifications of what they are doing. Each character is so remarkably indistinguishable from the next that none of them engage you in the stakes of the plot, meaning when the final whodunnit is revealed, not only don't you care about whodunnit, but you're not entirely clear what it was they dun.
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Hugo 2011
It's pretty much the worst kept secret in Hollywood that Martin Scorcese adores old films. In Hugo this adoration comes through in great, heaping, sweeping sequences of pure, unadulterated joy. These are fun, but only to a point. The saccharine nature of this film's attitude towards its predecessors grates quickly. The other thing that quickly gets annoying is the dialogue. It's classic breathless, children's fantasy.
"Is it a secret?"
"Yes."
"Oh goody. I adore secrets!"It's Lion, Witch & Wardrobe stuff,…