Steve Jobs (Danny Boyle, 2015)

7/10
I guess The Social Network set us on a path of movies showing us how clever jerks got to be really rich jerks as each global giant successively gets their entry into the canon (stay tuned this year for Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc! Who will play Colonel Sanders in his biopic in 2018?!). Aaron Sorkin scripted this one as he did The Social Network. The dialogue certainly crackles, thanks in no small part to Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet who are both terrific, but it does veer into portentousness at times, with characters in the heat of an argument delivering clunky lines that are heavy-handedly meant to be interpreted as a metaphor for the scene as a whole.
The three product launch sequences that make up the movie are impressively mounted, although each feels more rote than the last - the movie has Jobs commenting on this repetitiveness in an attempt at self-awareness ("I feel like before every product launch people get drunk and tell me what they really think about me") but it doesn't make it feel less paint-by-numbers.
Like Moneyball, another Sorkin adaptation, there seems to be a fear of getting too technical - there with baseball stats, here with computer specs. Any technical sequence is immediately followed up with a hammy father-daughter scene as if to scramble to pull the viewer back in but frankly, as in Moneyball, I found the technical stuff way more interesting than the Hollywood schmaltz.
Overall it's a decent movie, the acting is the strength by far and the writing is solidly in second. I'm just not sure what all we were supposed to glean by sitting through it. We already knew that Sorkin could write and Fassbender could act and Boyle could direct and Jobs was a jerk who took more credit than he deserved.

127 Hours (Danny Boyle, 2010)

6/10
I was conflicted about this movie the whole way through but the incredible, orgasmic ending almost had me convinced I liked it more than I did. James Franco was tremendous (as expected) and Danny Boyle has talent in spades, but I was disappointed in the movie's style, I guess. I understand Boyle had to pull out all the stops to make a movie about a guy trapped for 95% of its running time interesting, but I felt this movie was stylized to the point of oversaturation. Between all the glossy visions of ex-girlfriends and potential loves to be, memories of a family neglected, fantasies of escaping, hallucinations, jaunty, ironic pop tunes etc, I felt the realism of Aron Ralston's predicament was sacrificed. Maybe it's a pretentious take but I couldn't help but wonder how a director like Cristi Puiu or Bela Tarr would handle an identical story. I even wondered how it would compare to a movie like Buried, which I've yet to see. I probably should have expected it going in, but Boyle's version felt too much like a music video, tarted up with the predictable Hollywood themes listed above to make it more appealing. The flash worked very well in Slumdog Millionaire, not so much here.

Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle & Loveleen Tandan, 2008)

8.5/10
The acting was really good (by either the kids, the teenagers, or the adults), soundtrack was exceptional and the way the story is written and how it comes together in the end was really clever. It's a nice, simple (even old-fashioned) story told in a very refreshing manner. The Bollywood-style musical scene at the end was the best part IMO.
I "only" gave it an 8 because for a long time at the start I found it hard to care about Jamal and what happens to him...the movie did eventually make me come around very quickly at the end but there were parts where I felt it dragged a bit because I just wasn't particularly interested in what was happening to Jamal (mainly in his pre-teen days). It was one of those movies that relies a lot on its ending to deliver and it did because it was so well put-together.

28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002)

8/10
Wasn't really sure what to expect from this but I was surprised to find out it's not really a zombie movie...well there's zombies, but obviously the main message is how man's greatest danger to himself is himself and all that, which has been done before, but it was done very well here too. A pleasant surprise.