Letterboxd — Your life in film

Quite simply, this is a great LA movie. The more knowledge of this style of cinema you bring to it, the more you get out of it. Not just highly stylized and sophisticated eye candy - this is well written yet calculated for mainstream appeal. It’s best of genre stuff, and the first must-see film of the year for me.

Michael Cera plays the same scrawny twentysomething he does so well - this time he is tasked with defeating his new girlfriend’s seven evil exes in order to win her heart. Drawing heavily from comic-strip and video-game influences, this really should have been film I liked a lot - but I only saw half a good movie, and the rest was repetitive and tiresome.

The prospect of watching a 27-year-old guy (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) progress from a cancer diagnosis through to an eventual outcome is surely nobody’s idea of a good time in the theatre. The partial solution is to feature Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air) as the love interest and Seth Rogen for comedic lift. The outcome is unfortunately unbalanced and does not add up to much. Some aspects fall flat and others are manipulative and predictable. However, there’s enough good stuff and bittersweet performances to make it worthwhile.

Regarding Lars von Trier - I have seen his last ten feature films and openly declare I’m a huge fan. Add to this that Melancholia is clearly a very personal work for him about his own struggle with this very subject matter. But I just wasn’t feeling it with this end-of-the-world drama. That’s not to say it isn’t expertly made - the themes work well with the visuals and the atmosphere is suffocating in depression. But it doesn’t offer anything the resonates at the same level as his previous portrayal of the same material, Antichrist.

A nicely made political thriller with all the cynicisms of the current era in US politics. But the script isn't up to the weight of the acting talent involved - it needed more wit and/or and higher stakes.

A handful of laughs and a few interesting performances hold together a flimsy story about a group of three friends who conspire to kill their intolerable bosses. However this is low grade crude comedy and you could save yourself the time and catch all the best moments nicely summed up in the trailer. Disclaimer: I caught this on a plane and so my capacity to laugh was severely impaired by a 24 hour transit period.

Set inside a New York apartment, two couples meet over a schoolyard tussle involving their sons. This is classic Polanski material as he analyses what lurks beneath and the characters primal motives. It's a cynical take on liberalism and the hypocrisy in contemporary society. Good performances from Foster, Waltz and Reilly - not so great from Winslet.

I truly did only watch this to see Emma Stone - her voice does things to me. But I unknowingly fell into a clever trap by the studios to get me to endure a ghastly overly simplistic tale about white families in the 1960’s and their treatment of African-American maids. Make no mistake - this is a chick-flick masquerading as an award season darling. Using the civil rights movement as a vehicle to pedal this kind of chick-flickery does an injustice not only to history, but the people who lived it.

Preppy college kids clash with West Virginian hillbillies in a dilapidated mountain cabin. Shaun of the Dead Snow? A brilliant role-reversal parody.