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Showing posts with the label mystery

MUTE - REVIEW

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Directed by Duncan Jones, Mute is a science-fiction thriller about a mute bartender who investigates the disappearance of the woman he loves armed with only a notepad and the occasional wooden bat. The film has received mixed reviews since its Netflix release. Having the film come out so soon after a full season of Altered Carbon might have been a bit of a mistake as comparisons between both would no doubt arise, seeing as the film and the show owe a lot to Blade Runner  in terms of tone and visuals. The relatively recent release of Blade Runner 2049 did not help either since, by this point, this vision of the future might not feel quite as unique as it once did. All this coupled with Warcraft 's poor critical reception, the usual straight-to-Netflix stigma and the fact that Mute isn't really what you'd expect, probably means that Duncan Jones' film is destined for cult adoration and mainstream disinterest. While, in a way, this is your typical sci-fi film noir

MUTE - VLOG REVIEW

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My thoughts on Duncan Jones' latest: Mute .

THE THIRD MAN - REVIEW

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Written by Graham Greene, The Third Man was a 1949 film noir starring Joseph Cotten as a writer arriving in post-WWII Vienna only to find that his friend was killed in a car accident. After some inconsistencies with that story come to light, he starts to look deeper into the case. A British production, Carol Reed's film is not your typical film noir with its unusually upbeat yet genuinely inspired zither-led score and the rarely seen broken Vienna setting offering a particularly atmospheric backdrop for the mystery to unfold. Joseph Cotten's Holly Martin is a likeable makeshift detective who wants to know the truth about what happened to his friend Harry Lime yet the closer he gets to figuring it all out, the darker his path becomes. Italian actress Alida Valli is very good as Lime's actress girlfriend Anna Schmidt who assists Holly on his search and Orson Welles almost steals the show when he shows up randomly near the end of the second act. The Third Man has some cl

THE VISIT - REVIEW

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M. Night Shyamalan had something of a mini-comeback with The Visit , a found-footage horror movie from 2015 about two kids going to live with their grandparents, whom they've never met, for a week. Audiences and critics didn't pan this one quite as much as the director's last few movies and it did well at the box-office so it was considered a success. The premise for The Visit sounded pretty silly and the trailers underlined that quite a bit as it showed two old people acting strangely and two kids being terrified of them for no real reason. The film itself, it turns out, mixes comedy and horror convincingly and is refreshingly self-aware. This was something The Happening attempted years prior but the whole thing ended up being unintentionally funny and the "scary" parts came off as goofy throughout, despite the sinister premise. The two kids who supposedly film the events in this movie, Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould), are decent actors

DARK CITY - REVIEW

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From director Alex Proyas comes Dark City , a modern film noir detective flick with a difference. While its story may develop in a similar way to other films in that genre, you've got a mysterious group of powerful, bald, vampire-like weirdos in there and a good bunch of bizarre twists which add a layer of surrealism to the whole thing. Dark City stars Rufus Sewell as John Murdoch, a man suspected of killing several prostitutes who finds himself on the run after waking up in a hotel room he doesn't remember. In fact, his memory is pretty much all gone so it makes finding out the truth even more tricky. William Hurt is the detective tasked with the case, Jennifer Connelly is John's concerned wife and Kiefer Sutherland is a shady doctor who appears to know more than he claims. As a piece of neo-noir, Dark City is pretty fascinating as it, about halfway through, defies your expectations and goes in a direction you wouldn't expect. As the plot moves towards more of a

THE HATEFUL EIGHT - REVIEW

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After much deliberation, Quentin Tarantino's 8th movie The Hateful Eight  finally exists and is finally out on the big screen where it belongs. After Django Unchained , here we have another Western, this time presented in a 70mm format with Ennio Morricone himself scoring it. I have a good feeling about this. Indeed, from the get-go the film sucks you in with its beautiful snowy setting, its haunting theme and its reliably great cast not to mention some sharp writing from the maestro himself. The plot sees two bounty hunters meet right before a blizzard is about to hit the region. One of them is John "The Hangman" Ruth (Kurt Russell) who is planning to bring a dangerous criminal (played by an unrecognizable Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the town of Red Rock to be hanged. The other is Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a mysterious man who proudly carries around with him a letter from Abraham Lincoln. On the way to Minnie's Haberdashery, they meet Chris Mannix

TOP 10 RUMOURS AROUND J.J. ABRAMS' STRANGER

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UPDATE (12/09/13): The book?! Really?!! Ok then. So J.J. Abrams recently released a trailer for an unknown project and everyone since has been geeking out and coming up with their own guesses as to what tat project might be. Some of them making more sense than others. Here are my favourite guesses that I've heard so far: 10 being the more probable/boring guess and 1 being the more outlandish/exciting guess. Here we go: 10 BELIEVE Nothing can stop J.J. from dipping his toe in the TV world, it seems. The man is always looking to find the next Alias , the next Lost or the next Fringe . And you gotta love him for that. Almost Human is, of course, the next big thing he's making that's coming out (yes, that robot Karl Urban thing) but he's also been working with Alfonso Cuaron on a grittier sci-fi show with some clear potential. Believe would follow a little girl with psychic abilities and a dude who's trying to protect her from some shady organisa

DRAGON - REVIEW

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Having missed most of the Donnie Yen craze ( Ip Man and all that), I went into Dragon expecting something conventional, a typical martial-arts flick with a straight-forward plot and loads of floating and kicking. Dragon is most definitely not something conventional. It's also not about dragons. Instead, here we have Donnie Yen playing a rather dodgy character who is being investigated by Takeshi Kaneshiro, who's basically Sherlock Holmes in this. The story kicks off with Donnie Yen defending an old man from two machete-wielding robbers, he kicks their ass but without really doing anything and in the end, one of them is killed. Self-defence or not, Kaneshiro's sleuth doesn't buy Yen as a simple fisherman and starts to dig deeper and deeper into what actually happened, focusing on details, Yen's past etc. It's gripping stuff and it works as a Holmes mystery because you're really not sure where the movie is going for most of it, what's truth, wha

LOST: SEASON 1 - REVIEW

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You all know the plot of 2004's TV phenomenon Lost by now: plane crash lands a group of flawed characters on a seemingly deserted island, weird things start happening, silly backstories aplenty, lots of talking, unlikely twists... A J.J. Abrams co-creation and the producer's first hit show since Alias , Lost was a re-invention of the whole Robinson Crusoe, stranded-on-a-desert-island scenario into a Twilight Zone -esque mystery but with a large ensemble. People either loved it or hated it and, to this day, you'll still find uneven opinions in regards to it. This first season boasts a whopping 25 episodes which makes binge-watching a chore more than a treat but, by the time the fourth episode kicks in with its nifty twist, you should find yourself, at the very least intrigued by Lost. The main characters include Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox), the goody-two-shoes hero doctor, James "Sawyer" (Josh Holloway), the Southern con-man hunk, Kate Austen (Evangeline Lill