Movies Rate and Discuss the Last Movie You Saw v.16

[HenryFlower]

First time I’m hearing of it. Joan Chen is a very good actress. I’ll have to give it a watch.

if you don’t get at least misty-eyed you might be a serial killer

 

[Fluffernutter]

Christmas Vacation (1989)

Middle aged man fantasizes about cheating on his hot wife with a lady who works at the mall.

5/10

 

[The_Renaissance]

Friendship (2025)
Oddball comedy highly recommended to me by mates with the same sense of humour as me, featuring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd. This seemed like a no brainer. I'm familiar with Robinson and liked his stuff that I saw. Basically, he's a boring married man who becomes besotted with a cool new male neighbour (Rudd) who brings excitement to his life (well.......very mild excitement but definitely an improvement on what he has). It's pretty low-key and nowhere near as weird/funny as expected, bit of a letdown but not terrible.
6/10

 

[Joe_Armstrong]

I saw the lates Knives Out movie.
Could be 45 minutes shorter, but the story was decent

 

[Jackonfire]

oh please, my 3.5/5 is basically right on target in the same exact 7.0-7.5/10 range you wormy lil street urchin.

fwiw though, it is the first Kelly movie i’ve rated lower than a 4/5

River of Grass was among the top 5 movies I watched last year. I really liked Showing Up as well. I'd place The Mastermind behind both. I think eddy has it rated a bit high.

 

[Roids]

Ben Hur (1959)

Amazing in every aspect. I never get tired watching it. Still puts modern epics to shame. Gladiator looks like a high school production in comparison. We reached the pinnacle of film making 60 years ago.

10/10

 

[The_Renaissance]

Dangerous Animals (2025)
Everywhere I look, Aussie cinema! Before this, I started trying 'Birdeater' which was another Aussie movie but it didn't snare me in so bombed it out after 20mins or so. DA = A Shudder movie, more of a survival movie than a horror. Of course, there's a highly dangerous passive aggressive lead bad guy - a serial killer who feeds kidnapped tourists / backpackers to sharks for his own thrills. An American rebel chick looking to find herself falls into his clutches and has to out-gut him. It was an okay 1.5hrs, nothing to recommend though.
5/10

 

[eddymotto]

Marty Supreme (USA, 2025)
Rating: 8.5/10

Josh Safdie certainly has a vibe. Some call it propulsive filmmaking. I think of it as a man obsessively trying to answer one question: can a movie camera physically ingest cocaine? (Film specific runner up – can a skinny guy with the world’s worst mustache consistently have sex with attractive women?).

Marty Supreme is a sweaty, chaotic fever set in the 1950s, shot like the 1970s and blasted with 1980s needle drops. If that sounds disorienting, it’s supposed to be.

Timothee Chalamet plays Marty as a walking motivational poster for unchecked self-belief. He’s a New York hustler with a gift for ping pong and an even greater talent for self-promotion, armed with the absolute certainty that greatness is owed to him. It doesn’t matter that he’s a shoe salesman living with his mother, that his girlfriend is pregnant and married to someone else, or that most of his schemes actively move him backward. Marty is too busy auditioning for his own biopic.

Chalamet makes him charming, annoying, magnetic, and exhausting, often in the same scene. Marty is a self-serving narcissist (is there any other kind?) and nearly a caricature of the Ugly American, convinced that confidence and momentum alone will bend the world to his will. His great strength—and fatal flaw—is an inability to think past the next obstacle. Consequences are someone else’s problem.

An enormous amount of stuff happens. Relentlessly. But plot is almost incidental. The real pleasure is watching Marty lie, scheme, and charm his way forward while leaving wreckage behind him. The film understands charisma as a kind of scam, and collateral damage as an essential part of the experience.

Marty Supreme isn’t interested in growth, humility, or wisdom—only escalation. Safdie gestures toward human feeling at the end, as if to reassure himself, but the film’s real conviction lies elsewhere. It’s a movie about ambition that never learns a lesson and doesn’t really seem to care.

 

[The_Renaissance]

Christmas Dead Zone now, between today and 30th I'm just doing small hikes, eating and catching up on movies I've yet to see.

Today.

Presence (2024)
Supernatural movie with Lucy Liu who seemingly doesn't age. Bog standard 'family moves into new home with a weird presence', hence the title. It's filmed weirdly, like 2min long segments followed by black-screen cuts. The general vibe felt more like an extended episode of some teen scary show like 'Are You Afraid of the Dark?' until the final act which was actually dark as fuck and unrelated to the 'ghost'. Only saving grace was it was less than 1.5hrs long so it flew by.
4/10

Companion (2025)
I went in blind here and I don't think I should've liked this movie as 'much' as I did, which wasn't a great deal but more than you'd think. Guy takes his new girl to a remote woodland home owned by a dodgy Russian, where some of his friends are for the weekend. In a nutshell - it's about robots, which going in blind I didn't expect. Said robots / sexbots go a bit rogue - main guy has set it up for his sexbot to kill the Russian so they can steal his fortune. It's simplistic and nothing remotely special but it was fairly enjoyable.
6/10

 

[TKing]

Watched a couple of movies over the holiday, maybe the holiday spirit had me feeling generous but I enjoyed 2 critically blasted movies lol.

Five Nights at Freddy's 2 - 5/10 not a masterpiece by any means but not a 20% rotten score either imo, they filled it like crazy with Easter eggs and pivoted the story. I had a fun time with it and hopefully the next movie takes a step forward. This one played it safe and was more of a set up movie.

Anaconda 2025 - 7/10 went in with low expectations due to reviews and I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun I had. This is a classic shut your brain off and enjoy the ride movie. There were a few scenes that had the theater laughing out loud for a while, a genuine good time that I did not expect. I'm not the biggest Jack Black fan but he toned it down and actually was an asset to the movie for that reason.

The movie is also very much about them making the movie and the actual Anaconda is very much a side plot. The ending is so random that is sealed it up as a win for me. Paul Rudd can do no wrong and Steve Zahn was the mvp for sure.

 

[The_Renaissance]

Havoc (2025)
Dead Zone Day II's offering was this Netflix Tom Hardy action number. I knew this formulaic shoot 'em up had bad reviews, but I thought at 1.5hrs it would be hard for it to be boring - dirty cops, warring factions, mindless action, grimy setting, Tom Hardy. Seems like a guaranteed 6 or 7/10, reliable effort. I was wrong - it somehow managed to be boring as hell, generic as hell and just really forgettable. I couldn't care less about any of the characters or the storyline and just wanted it to end.
4/10

 

[revoltub]

Marty Supreme (USA, 2025)
Rating: 8.5/10

Josh Safdie certainly has a vibe. Some call it propulsive filmmaking. I think of it as a man obsessively trying to answer one question: can a movie camera physically ingest cocaine? (Film specific runner up – can a skinny guy with the world’s worst mustache consistently have sex with attractive women?).

Marty Supreme is a sweaty, chaotic fever set in the 1950s, shot like the 1970s and blasted with 1980s needle drops. If that sounds disorienting, it’s supposed to be.

Timothee Chalamet plays Marty as a walking motivational poster for unchecked self-belief. He’s a New York hustler with a gift for ping pong and an even greater talent for self-promotion, armed with the absolute certainty that greatness is owed to him. It doesn’t matter that he’s a shoe salesman living with his mother, that his girlfriend is pregnant and married to someone else, or that most of his schemes actively move him backward. Marty is too busy auditioning for his own biopic.

Chalamet makes him charming, annoying, magnetic, and exhausting, often in the same scene. Marty is a self-serving narcissist (is there any other kind?) and nearly a caricature of the Ugly American, convinced that confidence and momentum alone will bend the world to his will. His great strength—and fatal flaw—is an inability to think past the next obstacle. Consequences are someone else’s problem.

An enormous amount of stuff happens. Relentlessly. But plot is almost incidental. The real pleasure is watching Marty lie, scheme, and charm his way forward while leaving wreckage behind him. The film understands charisma as a kind of scam, and collateral damage as an essential part of the experience.

Marty Supreme isn’t interested in growth, humility, or wisdom—only escalation. Safdie gestures toward human feeling at the end, as if to reassure himself, but the film’s real conviction lies elsewhere. It’s a movie about ambition that never learns a lesson and doesn’t really seem to care.

View attachment 1127851

So it's like...ping-pong Nightcrawler? I really liked good time and uncut gems. So looking forward to seeing this from Safdie.

 

[Kardashians]

Watched Tombstone for the first time. Better than I expected. Val Kilmer was my fav character tho the cast was stacked. Needed more Billy Zane imo.

 

[johnsmithjohnson]

Avatar 3 9/10

 

[eddymotto]

So it's like...ping-pong Nightcrawler? I really liked good time and uncut gems. So looking forward to seeing this from Safdie.

Marty is not as dark or reptilian as the Jake G character in Nightcrawler.

More like Howard from Uncut Gems - but younger, better looking and more charismatic.

Since you like Sadie's other films, high likelihood that you will like Marty Supreme.

 

[eddymotto]

Jay Kelly (USA, 2025)
Rating: 6.5/10

Jay Kelly is a film about the quiet humiliations of adulthood: the moment when people realize, far too late, that they have become slightly worse versions of themselves.

That realization hits Jay Kelly, a sixty-year-old movie star played by George Clooney, in the form of a slow, nagging mismatch between story and reality. Jay has spent decades curating a personal mythology about talent, success, and sacrifice. Now the mythology is fraying. He’s estranged from one daughter, drifting toward the same outcome with the other, haunted by what he traded away to remain famous, and left with what appears to be exactly one real friend. Maybe. Depending on what he needs at the moment. Even that relationship comes with a fee: his long-suffering manager, played with weary precision by Adam Sandler, still takes fifteen percent. This is what friendship looks like when it’s been professionalized for decades.

Jay’s response is avoidance disguised as motion. He flies his entourage to Italy on short notice, half to pursue a possible reconciliation with his daughter, half to accept a lifetime achievement award that should mean nothing but increasingly feels like it means everything.

Clooney anchors the film with an easy, self-aware charm: articulate, thoughtful in theory, emotionally evasive in practice. Jay isn’t cruel or monstrous. He’s simply a narcissist committed to self-justification. The film understands that this is often more corrosive.

The clearest expression of that divide comes in a small but telling gesture. At a funeral, Jay accepts a neckerchief from the son of an old friend—gracious, composed, fully present. The moment reads as sincere. It also barely lingers. Almost immediately, Jay hands the neckerchief off to his manager, as if meaning were something that could be redistributed once acknowledged. Sandler wears it in every subsequent scene, quietly illustrating the difference between performance and feeling.

For a brief moment, watching the lifetime achievement montage together, the two men occupy the same emotional plane. It’s real. It’s shared. And it doesn’t last. By the end, something irreversible has happened. Jay will miss a loyal companion. The manager will miss his best friend.

At its best, Jay Kelly lets rich, self-absorbed Hollywood types roast rich, self-absorbed Hollywood types. It’s dryly funny and smart enough to resist forced catharsis or tidy moral reckonings. Growth here is modest: partial insight, mild regret, and the vague hope of doing slightly better next time.

Where the film falls short is in its lack of bite. It never quite finds the meanness needed to fully skewer its protagonist, and Italy is rendered like a stereotype filtered through prestige cinema and lifestyle tourism.

Still, there’s value in that restraint. Jay Kelly is tuned to people who have made peace with disappointment without fully admitting it. By the end, Jay hasn’t changed much. He’s just learned which parts of the truth can be safely outsourced.

 

[eddymotto]

House of Dynamite (USA, 2025)
Rating: 6/10

House of Dynamite feels engineered in a lab somewhere deep inside Netflix HQ. You can practically see the flowchart: lean runtime, recognizable faces, limited locations to keep costs down, and a premise designed to hook you in under five minutes. Based on this modest parameters, it mostly works.

The setup is simple. Certain people spend their entire lives preparing for a nuclear Armageddon that, deep down, they believe will never come. Until one day it does. Systems designed over decades suddenly collide with chance, emotion, and human beings asked to decide the fate of the world in the next ten minutes.

This is where the “very Netflix” part shows. The characters are sketched efficiently rather than deeply. Backstories are established with a line or two of dialogue, emotional beats are functional, and the movie is more interested in momentum than resonance. You won’t be thinking about these people a week later. You might not even remember their names. But you will care what happens to them in the moment, which is the harder trick than it sounds.

A lot of viewers will hate the ambiguity. To me, it’s essential. The film isn’t about answers; it’s about decision-making under radical uncertainty, with stakes so high that no human being should ever be asked to carry them.

House of Dynamite succeeds as a piece of controlled, watchable tension, but it never escapes the feeling of being optimized rather than authored. The suspense is real, the ambiguity thoughtful, and the craft solid—but the experience ends where it begins: as something you watched, appreciated, and immediately replaced by whatever auto-plays next. It’s good at what it does, but nothing more.

Note: For a much deeper—and far more depressing—exploration of the same subject, Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario makes this movie feel almost comforting.

 

[The_Renaissance]

The Dead Zone - day 4

Red Right Hand (2024)
I have a soft spot for these slow-burning, rural American action movies. Orlando Bloom is a former enforcer for an Appalachian drug kingpin who just wants the quiet life working with his alky brother-in-law on the farm. But his former employer has other ideas. You've seen this many times before - cooking drugs in the woods, ruthless Appalachian criminal gangs, hillbilly heroin and lots of vengeance and bloodshed. When the violence comes, it's pretty visceral. Nothing special or memorable but worth 1.5hrs of your time.
6/10

Daddy's Head (2024)
Cracking title. Psychological horror of sorts with very little substance or depth to it - just a grieving son and stepmother being menaced by a weird monster that - you guessed it - has the head of the dead dad. It's a shit film, but I will give a couple extra points for the creature/thing which is genuinely fucking creepy and weird looking.
3/10

Caught Stealing (2025)
I had reasonably high hopes for this, for some reason. Austin Butler is a slacker who gets caught up in the crossfire with several wrong 'uns chasing him down. I must have zoned out with boredom and missed a major plot happening here because I genuinely had no clue why they were after him or what exactly he had that they wanted. It just seemed to be various shots of Butler running around being followed. No idea why this got decent reviews, it was boring and shit.
4/10

 

[Batjester]

Caught Stealing (2025)
I had reasonably high hopes for this, for some reason. Austin Butler is a slacker who gets caught up in the crossfire with several wrong 'uns chasing him down. I must have zoned out with boredom and missed a major plot happening here because I genuinely had no clue why they were after him or what exactly he had that they wanted. It just seemed to be various shots of Butler running around being followed. No idea why this got decent reviews, it was boring and shit.
4/10

Only thing that kept me watching is to find out what happened to the cat.

 

[revoltub]

Jay Kelly (USA, 2025)
Rating: 6.5/10

Jay Kelly is a film about the quiet humiliations of adulthood: the moment when people realize, far too late, that they have become slightly worse versions of themselves.

That realization hits Jay Kelly, a sixty-year-old movie star played by George Clooney, in the form of a slow, nagging mismatch between story and reality. Jay has spent decades curating a personal mythology about talent, success, and sacrifice. Now the mythology is fraying. He’s estranged from one daughter, drifting toward the same outcome with the other, haunted by what he traded away to remain famous, and left with what appears to be exactly one real friend. Maybe. Depending on what he needs at the moment. Even that relationship comes with a fee: his long-suffering manager, played with weary precision by Adam Sandler, still takes fifteen percent. This is what friendship looks like when it’s been professionalized for decades.

Jay’s response is avoidance disguised as motion. He flies his entourage to Italy on short notice, half to pursue a possible reconciliation with his daughter, half to accept a lifetime achievement award that should mean nothing but increasingly feels like it means everything.

Clooney anchors the film with an easy, self-aware charm: articulate, thoughtful in theory, emotionally evasive in practice. Jay isn’t cruel or monstrous. He’s simply a narcissist committed to self-justification. The film understands that this is often more corrosive.

The clearest expression of that divide comes in a small but telling gesture. At a funeral, Jay accepts a neckerchief from the son of an old friend—gracious, composed, fully present. The moment reads as sincere. It also barely lingers. Almost immediately, Jay hands the neckerchief off to his manager, as if meaning were something that could be redistributed once acknowledged. Sandler wears it in every subsequent scene, quietly illustrating the difference between performance and feeling.

For a brief moment, watching the lifetime achievement montage together, the two men occupy the same emotional plane. It’s real. It’s shared. And it doesn’t last. By the end, something irreversible has happened. Jay will miss a loyal companion. The manager will miss his best friend.

At its best, Jay Kelly lets rich, self-absorbed Hollywood types roast rich, self-absorbed Hollywood types. It’s dryly funny and smart enough to resist forced catharsis or tidy moral reckonings. Growth here is modest: partial insight, mild regret, and the vague hope of doing slightly better next time.

Where the film falls short is in its lack of bite. It never quite finds the meanness needed to fully skewer its protagonist, and Italy is rendered like a stereotype filtered through prestige cinema and lifestyle tourism.

Still, there’s value in that restraint. Jay Kelly is tuned to people who have made peace with disappointment without fully admitting it. By the end, Jay hasn’t changed much. He’s just learned which parts of the truth can be safely outsourced.


View attachment 1128175

Yeah I'd probably give it around the same score. Decent but doesn't live up to its potential.

I thought things were most interesting when Clooney ramps up the showmanship charm he mastered over the years. But then it tries to add some quirky relationship/dramedy stuff in there. And..idk what it is with Netflix productions, but with some films you can see the border lines between the puzzle pieces a bit too much. There's something missing with the wholeness of it all, if that makes sense.

And Sandler, idk. Hes one of my favorites but he didn't seem comfortable here the same way he did in Uncut gems or Hustle.