Film Reviews by GI

Dustin Hoffman had the showy role as an autistic man thrust into the real world by his selfish brother but it's Tom Cruise, as that selfish brother, that takes this film. His performance here shows a depth of emotion that marks him as a significant actor and it's a shame he is overshadowed by the attention given to Hoffman in this film. A road movie drama that has laughs, tears and plenty of heartbreaking bromance vibes to make it a favourite of many to this day. Cruise plays Charlie, a self centred luxury car dealer whose business is on the rocks. He's a fast talking schemer who has oodles of self confidence believing he can get by on his wit and charm. But his world is turned upside down after the death of his estranged father and the discovery that his father's wealth has been left to an older brother Charlie never knew existed. The brother is Raymond (Hoffman) who is an autistic savant, and who lives by a carefully nurtured routine in an institution. Charlie craftily takes Raymond onto the road initially to figure out a way to get half the inheritance but, of course, despite the frustrations that Raymond's condition brings out in Charlie, he inevitably begins to discover aspects of his past through his brother and they bond. It's more a journey of Charlie than Raymond. His close proximity to his very disabled brother helps Charlie find his humanity and reinstatement of the moral compass he lost years ago. It's still a moving film and arguably one of Cruise' best performances before he decided he needed to be the most elderly stuntman in Hollywood!

The first and the best of the Indiana Jones franchise and even if there had been no sequels this would still stand out as one of the great Boys Own action adventure films of all time. Because it's so familiar it's often a film that gets overlooked when considering some family viewing but it really is so good it will continue to excite and enthral for years to come even those that have seen it many times. Although intended by writer and producer George Lucas to be reminiscent of the Saturday serials he enjoyed as a child and to be enjoyed by all ages it is a surprisingly bloody film with blood squib gunshot wounds and some very brutal fistfights and director Steven Spielberg included some horror film style deaths to really up the ante. A short recap: Adventurer archaeologist Professor 'Indiana' Jones (Harrison Ford) is hired by US Intelligence to try and acquire the Ark of The Covenant before the Nazis get ahold of it. Along the way he reunites with his old flame Marion (Karen Allen) and has to go to some desperate measures to get it. The film has some really iconic scenes not least the opening tomb raiding in South America, the chase sequence with the truck and the death of the sabre twirling warrior in the Cairo market. The film has magic, comedy and a nice romance chucked in. It's still a masterpiece and if you only watch one from the series then make it this one.

This is a very entertaining period drama, funny, sexy and at times a little challenging. Set in Napoleonic France in an insane asylum run by a young and idealistic Abbé (Joaquin Phoenix) who believes that care and compassion is what is needed for his patients. One of whom is the notorious Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush in a tour de force performance) who has been committed for depraved acts with young servant girls. When some very saucy novels, suspected to be the work of the Marquis, begin circulating around Paris the prudish and nasty Dr Royer-Collard (Michael Caine in a juicy bad guy role) is sent to deal with the culprit. But despite restrictions placed on him de Sade continues to write his sexy stories and smuggle them out of the asylum with the help of Madeleine (Kate Winslet), one of the servants. Royer-Collard is determined to stop them but the Marquis is equally determined and very resourceful! Based on a stage play this is brilliantly acted, raunchy, clever and whilst it plays fast and loose with real events it is based on a true story. A period drama/dark comedy that circles around perversions in a really entertaining and fun way. It's a film that deserves a reissue and rediscovery.

An erotic drama with Nicolas Roeg's usual strangeness that marks his film's as very original and here with the addition of a brave performance from Mimi Rogers, an American actor that deserves more recognition for her work than she often gets being more remembered for her brief and inconsequential marriage to Tom Cruise. Full Body massage will probably be more remembered for Rogers nude scenes, indeed she spends much of the film undressed and being very intimately massaged. The narrative concerns Nina (Rogers), a wealthy yet bored art dealer who is home awaiting her usual masseuse to arrive. She dreams of the previous massages as they have skirted beyond the professional line but she is taken aback when Fitch (Bryan Brown) arrives as a new masseur. He's a challenging individual who then spends the remainder of the film's runtime discoursing with Nina over various aspects of their lives, character, views on spirituality etc etc all the while massaging her in a very overtly sexual way. Ultimately the film is dull despite the intense script and the all pervading increase in sexual tension. A film that is more of interest as a Roeg film than anything else but it's certainly not one of his better films.

Another in the prequel series that hopefully is building to the events originally portrayed in the 1968 film with Planet Of the Apes. This one is set 300 years in the future since the last War For The Plant Of the Apes (2017) and I suppose sets the scene for the divisions and tyrannies within the ape culture that were evident in the original story. This new blockbuster is impressive to look at with its visions of the future jungle world with the old human civilisations now ruins in amongst new forests. But the story is all a little anti-climactic and it certainly begins to drag due to its overly long runtime. Here we have an ape colony attacked by an another led by a villainous gorilla who enslaves apes for his own ends. In fact he's trying to get into an old human bunker where he can hopefully access human technology and weapons. Humans are now just grunting scavengers. A young ape, Noa (Owen Teague) wants revenge on the bad guy and finds a strange ally in Mae (Freya Allan), a human who can talk and think and is out to stop access to the bunker at all costs. Really this doesn't take the franchise anywhere and it's an appeal to fans only. A decent remake of the original story seems to be coming to fit into and conclude this series but we will have to wait and see.

A distasteful, unique, at times very funny dark comedy drama about sexual frustration and the efforts to connect while harbouring deviant tendencies. The writing here is absolutely spot on even though it will make you squirm in scenes, for example, where a paedophile explains himself to his son. This is a film of interlocking stories of a group of people who have some connection with each other including a renowned doctor and family man (Dylan Baker) who lusts after boys and eventually begins raping his son's friends. A frustrated man (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who lusts after his sexy neighbour (Lara Flynn Boyle) but can only resort to making dirty phone calls until she reacts in a way that offers him the opportunity he craves; and a young teacher (Jane Adams) who is lonely and foolishly falls into the trap of an adult pupil who seduces and manipulates her. There is an older couple (Ben Gazzara, Louise Lasser) who decide to be apart but avoid divorce but uncomfortably stay living together. None of this sounds like a comedy and it also includes a woman (Camryn Manheim) who hates sex and has the body parts of a man who attacked her in her freezer, yet writer and director Todd Solondz creates a vignette of tales that is bizarrely compelling. He makes no attempt to give any of reprehensible characters or their acts any justification but does try to explain them. It makes for a challenging, interesting and quite bold film.

The longest in the franchise and it feels it mainly because the first hour is made up of so much poorly written exposition that one starts to be concerned that the film is a misfire. With its plot that warns of AI and has a pop at the internet in general this certainly turns up the ludicrous levels into the red. Indeed the plot is almost secondary to the two huge action set pieces that allow Tom Cruise to up the stunts that he performs to the maximum. Don't get me wrong, for the most part this is cinematically entertaining but it doesn't leave you wanting the gritty thriller vibes that others in the series have kept to the fore, indeed I thought the previous film was sharper. This film carries on where the previous one left off with agent Ethan Hunt refusing to hand over the magic key to his Government despite the President asking personally. Eventually though he agrees to an impossible mission to trap the 'Entity' (a ridiculous name for the villain) and has to marry up two devices. This leads to a quite tense set piece in a sunken submarine and finally to a battle with bi-planes that features prominently in the trailers. The crew from the previous film are back including Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Hayley Atwell and Pom Klementieff. The film lacks a good chase sequence, and scenes of Cruise endlessly running at full pelt don't make up for it. In many ways this is a bit of a disappointment but as it's still an action film that pushes the boundaries. It may say Final in the title and Ethan does get to save the world but you can never know if the temptation for yet another film will be too much. If not it's a fitting ending to this action franchise.

Director Todd Phillips was apparently given full control of this sequel to Joker (2019) to the point that he decidedly refused any contact or liaison with DC. That is very much to the film's detriment. I found the original film to be rather bizarrely overpraised and hyped and it was for me a wrong footed departure from the bleakness and dark narratives that were DC stories trademark. Here with this sequel we are given a very tedious, drawn out character drama that bears no resemblance to the character that has dominated the DC universe villainy. Some admire this because it's a sort of musical in some ways but really it's a warped romance and Phillips has been vocal in trying to convince everyone that this is not an origin story of 'The Joker' but about a character that probably influenced that adversary of Batman. Who knows but it seems a lame excuse for creating a story about one of the iconic superhero villains. Central to this film is a courtroom drama where the main character Arthur (Joaquin Pheonix), held in an asylum pending trial for the murders from the first film, is put on trial, his only defence being insanity. Whilst all that is going on he faces routine abuse from the asylum guards led by Brendan Gleeson and manages somehow to start a romance with Lee (Lady Gaga) who is some version of Harley Quinn. It all makes little sense, is very dull and at the end leaves you feeling rather fed up with the whole pretentious mess. A dud.

Basically a film that replicates more or less every other Jason Statham film adding nothing new as it's just another of those plots where an everyman who has a special set of skills goes on the rampage all in a good cause. This is a clumsy action film with a lead character that comes from a series of books, a bit like the Reacher series, and here adapted for the screen with that worrying hint their maybe a sequel or two! Statham plays Levon Cade, a construction foreman who used to be in the military. When his bosses daughter is abducted for the sex trafficking trade Cade agrees to find her. This leads to the Russian mafia, loads of ever more cartoonish villains for him to despatch as the film goes on, lots of violence and zero originality. Scripted by Sylvester Stallone, who no doubt still thinks he's the ultimate avenger, this rips from Taken (2008), The Equalizer (2014) and loads of similar films. Jason Flemyng hams it up as a Russian gangster and David Harbour has a cameo but does essentially nothing. It's rather pointless and daft and hardly worth the time.

This British indie is a strange film, a slow burner that has been described as a sort of fairy tale yet is more a story of grief and mental health. An unnamed young man (Rory Alexander) returns to his home in Gloucester after spending many years in a mental health institution following his traumatisation after the mysterious disappearance of his mother. But this is not a film that explores that with any sense of a mystery plot it's a slow burning examination of his attempt to return to life but unable to fit back in as the trauma still haunts his entire being. Mark Rylance as a sort of uncle figure to the young man is what draws you to watch this film as he's superb. But it's a testing film that ends up feeling a bit of a drag.

Unapologetically ambiguous and odd this is another Lynchian surreal horror from director Yorgos Lanthimos. Three stories that are linked by having the same cast led by Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons aided by Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley and about which there is the sense of a link but it remains annoyingly elusive. It's also the directors longest film to date and unfortunately it feels like a bit of a slog at times. It's an unwieldy film that borders on being an uncomfortable experience with its depictions of auto-amputation, cannabilism, drugged sex and delusional emotions. The first story has an employee under the entire control of his suave employer even down to when he has sex with his wife and what he can eat and drink. When he rebels over a particular awful demand and is cast aside he suddenly finds he can't function without that control. In the second a police officer grieves for his wife who has been lost at sea but is overjoyed when she is found having survived on a desert island but soon begins to suspect that she is not actually his wife. The third follows two members of a strange cult searching for a woman who has the power to raise the dead. It's difficult to pinpoint any unifying idea or theme between these three tales other than kindness is basically and mysteriously absent from all of them and I can only argue the director seems obsessed with issues of control and subjugation of free will. It's certainly a different sort of narrative and in a way you have to respect the idea behind the film even though it's a very difficult one to enjoy.

This is a no nonsense classically structured science fiction thriller that is at times excruciatingly tense. The film begins after some sort of apocalyptic event has occurred, we never get told what happened although there are clues in the various newspaper clippings shown during the film. Whatever occurred has led to the arrival of predatory creatures that are blind but hunt with acute hearing meaning any sound draws them extremely quickly. Emily Blunt and John Krasinski are husband and wife, Evelyn and Lee, who live on a farm with their children and attempt to survive by foraging the surrounding area all the time maintaining complete silence. They have one small advantage in that their eldest daughter, Regan (Millicent Simmonds) is hearing impaired and so the entire family are able to communicate by sign language. But with Evelyn expecting a baby they have to prepare ready to raise the newborn in a silent world. Cleverly the creatures are kept mostly in the background although they are pretty fearsome and the design is quite original. There are some nail biting scenes especially with Blunt who is awesomely good here. The film works so well because it has a simplicity and a punchy story that really keeps you on your toes. Thematically it's a film about family and in particular children thrust into an adult survival narrative with the subsequent loss of innocence. It has some big shocks so be prepared if you've never seen this but I really recommend it if you haven't.

The Quiet Man is a Taming of The Shrew story, a romantic comedy that has a picture postcard vision of Ireland and it's a sheer joy to watch. Director John Ford had held the rights to the short story on which the film is based for 20 years and he had to beg and bribe the studio to make the film. It went onto win him the Best Director Oscar. John Wayne is one of his most powerfully romantic roles plays Sean Thornton, an American, who arrives in the sleepy backwater of Innisfree hoping to buy the cottage where he was born. He soon becomes embroiled in a feud with the local rich farmer Will Danaher (Victor McLaglen) who has long held ambition to buy the same cottage. When Sean falls for Will's sister, Mary Kate (Maureen O'Hara) Will makes it his mission to stop them marrying, with hilarious results. If you've ever doubted that Wayne was an accomplished actor then this film will prove otherwise. It's one of his best performances and it's in the little scenes where this is most apparent. In a film with some major scenes, such as the turbulent thunderstorm, the horse race or the big climactic fistfight, it's easy to lose sight of Wayne's gift in the close ups and gentle scenes. He wasn't the No.1 box office star for 40 years for nothing. The Quiet Man remains a lovely film and it holds up because of the romance and humour in a story about passion, love, redemption and a search for peace. A masterpiece by a master director and one of the greatest films you could ever wish to see.

This pseudo-noir thriller tries a little too hard and adds scenes that would have been better left out but has an interesting premise. It does though follow the time worn narrative path of a victim who turns out to be more of an adversary than the bad guys banked on. American character actor Dale Dickey stars as Ann, who along with her ailing husband have retired to a quiet life. Her granddaughter Emma (Romane Denis) has nicknamed her The G, short for granny, and is close to her although Ann is a hard nosed grump who likes her vodka a little too much. Events take a turn for the worst when Ann and her husband are victims of a scam where a criminal, Rivera (Bruce Ramsey) with the help of a corrupt doctor and some nasty henchmen have the couple declared incapable via the courts, he then seizes their assets and imprisons them in a grim care home. Rivera is unprepared for Ann's ability to turn the tables. It's interesting and different to see the an elderly woman in the role of avenger and Dickey carries this off well. But overall the film is a little overcooked and would have been better served by a tighter narrative. Worth checking out though.

A crime thriller that feels like a throwback to the 90s with Pierce Brosnan starring in a role that feels it was written for a slightly younger man. He's Charlie, a fixer for mob boss Stan (James Caan in his final film). When Stan's crew gets assassinated Charlie, surviving the attempt on his own life, goes all vengeful on the gang that are responsible. The film is thankfully short and sharp, it offers no real surprises and boasts a couple of solid action set pieces and Morena Baccarin as a resourceful love interest who helps Charlie on his mission. This is a reasonably entertaining thriller with dark comedy vibes that does exactly what you expect.