7/10
I find myself saying the same thing for a lot of these Oscar pix from the last year - fine, well-acted, nothing offensively horrible, nothing very memorable either. Cate Blanchett is immaculate and Rooney Mara is very good too. It is directed, ah, adroitly and I have no complaints.
8/10
I wasn't expecting much but this was actually a pretty funny movie. Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe are both very good, the script has a lot of good gags (physical and verbal), and it really nails the late 1970's feel. At times the plot of the film feels overly scripted. Writer/director Shane Black seems to be going for something like a Coen Brothers take on Inherent Vice (without the weirdness of either the Coens or Pynchon) and doesn't quite get there, but it's a credible stab and at least manages to remain funny throughout.
As good as Gosling and Crowe are, Angourie Rice arguably steals the show as their 13-year old sidekick. It's nice to see a young female character given room to actually be funny, as opposed to the precocious, insufferably quippy types they're usually cast as in movies like this. It felt like the "buddy movie" genre was dead and buried with all of those awful buddy cop movies that were such a big trend in the early 2010's, so The Nice Guys is a welcome breath of fresh air in that field too.
9/10
As far as biopics go, this one hits pretty much all of the good notes. The only criticism I can really level at it is that it's self-serving, but it wouldn't be the first biopic guilty of irreverence. To go along with that, the movie does a great job at portraying Eazy E as a complex central figure, but frustratingly refuses to cast judgement - was he a shrewder-than-he-looks businessman complicit in undercutting his N.W.A. cohorts, or was he as naïve as the rest of them, being taken advantage of by an unscrupulous manager?
I suppose it's only fair, though - all of the other main figures are still alive, and so control how they come across, and let's say nobody in the group comes out looking too badly. Cube a genius wordsmith, master intimidator and sharp businessman, Dre a genius producer, tortured over the death of his brother and trying to put food on the table for a family, etc.
The strength of the film by far is its acting, especially considering most hadn't appeared in major film roles before. At 2 and a half hours it somehow never really feels long - there are a couple of parts you could probably ditch (let's face it, 2-Pac is only really there so people can go hey, it's 2-Pac) but it remains taut despite its length, and never uninteresting throughout. Pretty close to perfection.
8/10
It is hard not to be slightly disappointed at the end of Sicario, but this is clearly not a movie designed to send audiences home happy, so I'll try not to hold that against it. It's so unrelentingly bleak and so devoid of any kind of comeuppance you'll say "well that's the point", but it doesn't exactly make for a fun film-watching experience. It almost feels like there should be an extra half-hour tacked on to tie up loose ends. But, of course, that's not how real life works. Sometimes we have to swallow the ugly truths presented to us and we don't ever get closure.
Nevertheless, it's extremely well done and well-plotted. Benicio del Toro is great, and Josh Brolin plays his part so well it's hard to stop hating him when the movie's over. A Rotten Tomatoes review commented that they felt Emily Blunt was miscast, because she so often looks like the smartest person in the room, and in this movie, she so rarely ever is. That's a pretty on-point complaint, and the movie does kind of stretch the bounds of believability with her character.
That aside, everything else was top-notch, and a particular set piece involving a tunnel near the end of the film is eye-popping in how well it's crafted and how tense it is.
7.5/10
Another "fine" movie, slightly more "fine" than The Danish Girl and with a more interesting, knottier story, but still not exactly a classic. Tom Hanks plays this kind of role in his sleep - the affable everyman in a situation where he's out of his depth. Not that I think Russian spies would have been well-received in America during the Cold War, but the movie's insistence on treating Hanks' character as the only sane man in the country (even his own wife can't understand why her husband - a lawyer - would defend a spy) is grating. Other than that, everybody does their jobs well and I probably won't remember much of the movie in a few months' time.
4/10
I'm not much of a Bond fan, but I did enjoy Skyfall. This is scripted by many of the same minds who wrote Skyfall, and shares a director, Sam Mendes. My feeling was they went back to the well a bit too much - is it the trend in every Bond film now where the events have to be so deeply connected to Bond's psychological profile, or his upbringing as a child? And does every gesture have to threaten the entire existence of the '00' section as we know it? What happened to Bond just trying to save the world from a bad dude in a movie that clocks in at a more reasonable, non-epic length?
These re-hashed themes feel very tired in Spectre. After a great opening sequence the movie quickly plunges into monotony. Christoph Waltz finally shows up as Blofeld about 4 hours in, but is totally wasted with a boring backstory that has him acting more like a passive aggressive math teacher who ends up with a cool scar in the end. Not only that but he's on-screen for roughly sixteen minutes of the whole thing. Why hire such a great actor only to give him such a milquetoast part and barely show him? Lea Seydoux, at least, was a pleasantly inspired and thoroughly successful choice as a Bond girl.
I don't blame Daniel Craig for wanting to be done with the franchise after this bloated, boring entry. Let's pick up some new writers and a new director to get some fresh looks all around while we're re-casting the lead role.
7/10
The cynic in me says that this was a movie that was made not because it was great material for this movie, but because it was 2015 and somebody had to make a movie about a pioneering transgender woman. So that's all well and good. I wasn't cynical enough to hate it - it's perfectly fine. The costumes and sets and cinematography are lavish and gorgeous. Eddie Redmayne and Alicia Vikander turn in two fine performances but their chemistry is the real stand-out. The movie goes through the paces without too many dips and turns, although it ends very abruptly. Thankfully much of the focus is on the main characters' response to Einar Werner's struggle, and not a boring exercise in "what will society think", save for a rote scene of Einer (as Lili) getting beat up. I wouldn't say it rises too far above its claim to being Oscar bait, but it's not the worst offender I've ever seen.
