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Reviews
Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)
No idea what the appeal is. Horrendously overrated.
I really don't understand what everyone, Oscars included, saw in this movie. Rami Malek is horrendously overrated and overacts in everything. There is barely a storyline. The main character has no redeeming features. He is a total a**hole to every person that cares for him, for which nothing is offered in explanation except that he is a quippy diva and it's fine for quippy artists to be like that. The only other explanation, in what has to be one of the weakest villains in movie history, is that his boyfriend was sort of manipulative. The finale is about Mercury coming back onto the public scene after a period of unbridled self-indulgence, not for the good cause of helping starving people, but because it serves his own massive ego. What a character.
This is not to say of course that Freddie Mercury wasn't a massive talent and that Queen was (and is) a band full of generation-defining talents. But rather than deal with this and the (I'm sure) incredible personal journey that Mercury went through, we instead get a bunch of power ballads stitched together with some sassy, trailer-ready one-liners and a smattering of almost-complications.
The Postman (1997)
God awful
The one thing you need to know about this movie is that it won 5 razzies, in the same year where Batman and Robin, Speed 2 and Anaconda were in contention.
Killing Them Softly (2012)
A pretentious, boring squandering of talent
If you've ever wanted to spend 2 hours alternating between being bored out of your mind, groaning at overdone Obama/GFC symbolism and wanting to punch Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelssohns' characters in the face, this is the movie for you.
Sicario (2015)
Good
A movie I didn't get around to watching for a long time because (a) I thought the title (more the subtitle) was stupid and makes it sound tacky in plane movie and (b) it kind of looked like you needed to be a chest-thumping, flag-waving American to enjoy it (no troubes if you are, mind, it's just I'm not American)
All the same, I thought this was a pretty good flick. An incredible line up, good twists , raw energy.
Dream Horse (2020)
Ok
A pretty standard feel-good piece that was pretty hard to connect with become it was so predictable and full of old tropes.
If you piece together any "village unites against {X}" movie you've ever seen (Pride, Calendar Girls, The Full Monty) with any horse movie you've ever seen (sea biscuit, secretariat, black pride, etc), you get the idea.
Expect the same old working-class/upper-class stereotypes, the same horse injuries and recoveries, the same small-village characters.
On the plus side, the actors I thought did a great job, particularly Toni Collette and Damien Lewis in the lead pulling off, to my (untrained) ears, very decent Welsh accents (there is a question why they couldn't find Welsh leads, but anyway)
Robin Hood (2010)
So much potential, so undelivered
Have to agree with everything else written here. The talent and potential of this movie was so high but the entire plot devolves into senseless gibberish if you poke even slightly at it.
Woman in Gold (2015)
Excellent, shame that real life tarnishes the story a bit
As written elsewhere, this was a compelling, well acted film.
Mirren, as always is incredible and Reynolds holds up.
The only thing that ruined it really for me was googling it after - don't if you want to enjoy the story.