Rate the Last Film You Watched

I'm really conflicted on how I should rate Abel Ferrara.
Part of me isn't interested in many of his films due to the content.
He obviously has skill as there are things of his that I love.

Crime Story.
A Michael Mann produced 80s cop show starring Dennis Farina.
He directed the feature length opening episode.

Miami Vice.
A Michael Mann produced 80s cop show.
He directed 2 episodes.

Even to my eyes, these stand out as better than the rest.

And of course, The King of New York.
 
Just watched Colorful Stage-The Movie: A Miku Who Can't Sing last night and all I can say is wow! The soundtrack must heard to be appreciated, it's fantastic. Of course if you don't at least know who Hatsune Miku is you'll be totally lost but still the movie is fast paced and cuts back and forth between 5 groups and 20 people. A must watch-I rate it 8 out of 10 possible points.

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Sinners

A pair of successful gangster twin brothers (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return to their poor, segregated hometown in depression-era Mississippi to open their own dance hall, but as they collect a crew of familiar faces to put on an unforgettable opening night, including their preternaturally gifted guitarist cousin (Miles Caton), an evil even greater than the sneering racist landowners may be already be circling.

Go see this. Go see this now. This is a staggeringly good film that had me glued to the screen from beginning to end. It has such richness as a character drama in the first half, that I think even if they hadn’t brought the genre movie thrills out to play in the second, I’d still have left entirely satisfied.

The narrative lurches a little awkwardly towards the end (could they not have fought the vampires and the KKK at the same time, rather than one lot after the other?), but really, this is as close to a pitch perfect movie-going experience as I’ve had in a very long time.
 
Wolf Man (2025)
Coming from the same writer/director as the excellent 2020 Invisible Man movie, I had high hopes for this, but they were tempered when I saw the tepid reviews it received.

First, the good. It's an excellent audiovisual experience: cinematography, lighting, sound design and music are all top notch. It's also ambitious. Rather than going the slasher or gorefest routes, it's instead a character-focused body horror that's clearly trying to channel Cronenberg's The Fly. The tension comes from the dynamics of a loving father who wants nothing more than to protect his daughter, and increasingly becomes the thing she needs to be protected from. Like The Fly, Wolf Man spends its first hour giving the viewer reasons to become attached to the characters before putting them through the wringer. The first 80-ish minutes of Wolf Man are all solid stuff.

Where it falls apart is the last 20 minutes. There are several directions it could have chosen to go for the climax, but the one it picks doesn't really push far enough in any one direction and ends up feeling generic and underwhelming. The movie plays hide-the-monster for a long time, and when you do finally see a fully transformed wolf man the design feels too reserved to have much impact. Don't expect an extreme transformation of the type that has been the signature of werewolf movies for the last 40 years. Wolf Man mostly rides the line of the kind of physical deformity and behavioural changes that could conceivably be caused by a disease, and only pushes about 20% beyond that at the final stage of transformation. On the plus side it's all done with special make-up effects, so there's a visceral sense of the wolf man being a living creature that you wouldn't get from CG or a puppet.

The biggest disappointment is that the character side of the plot falls apart during the climax too. When the father becomes the primary threat, the character focus shifts to the mother and daughter. Their dynamic is a missed opportunity though. It's established early on that the mother feels distant from her in comparison to the close bond between the father and daughter. The obvious angle then would have been for the mother to need to slowly win the daughter's trust as the situation escalates, but there's no tension between them and so no sense of their relationship developing; they just automatically run around together when chased.

It feels like a movie that either ran out of ideas or had too much trimmed from the edit. Coming in at a lean 100 minutes as the credits roll, I suspect the latter. There's enough good here to recommend at least renting it, but expect to be left with a creeping sense of missed potential by the end.
 
The Substance
I've always been fascinated by SF body horror, since there are few ideas more terrifying than your body being turned against you. I've hardly watched any of it in the last couple of decades though, as I've mostly lost interest in the horror genre, except where there's an especially strong story concept. The Substance has that by the bucketload.

A middle-aged TV star becomes desperate when she realises she's about to be fired and replaced with someone younger. When a doctor tells her about a mysterious substance that can turn her into a younger, more beautiful version of herself, she becomes her own replacement. The catch? The process requires the self-discipline to switch back and forth between her new and original bodies every seven days. Unfortunately her younger self is immature and selfish, and if she doesn't maintain the weekly schedule's balance...things will get ugly.

The Substance is a pitch-black satire about the impossible pressure society places on women to be young and beautiful forever, and how one woman's vanity and self-loathing turn her into her own worst enemy. If this story had been played straight, I think it would have been unbearably depressing. Fortunately it has a bizarre and quirky sense of humour. This takes the edge off in the right places, but be in no doubt that the movie still packs a punch. A lot of that comes down to a powerfully sympathetic performance by Demi Moore in the lead. The rest is from how visceral and in-your-face the movie is with its gore, from the graphic depiction of the younger body being birthed through the spine of the older, to the manic excesses of a blood-soaked climax that channels Shinya Tsukamoto.

This deserves the hype it was getting last year.
 
Otomo said:
Crime Story.
A Michael Mann produced 80s cop show starring Dennis Farina.
He directed the feature length opening episode.
Click to expand...

I watched this when it originally aired, and liked it quite a bit, though I don't remember much about it now. I know it's on DVD and I should get that.
 
cfx said:
I watched this when it originally aired, and liked it quite a bit, though I don't remember much about it now. I know it's on DVD and I should get that.
Click to expand...
I can remember getting from the video shop in the late eighties. On video.
It's easy for me to recommend as I love cops and gangsters, especially in the fifties and sixties and set in Chicago.
I do tend to be over the top with my praise in these situations.

Lots of before they were famous actors.
Michael Mann obviously has his favourite bit part actors.
Dennis Farina is usually great in what ever film.
Get Shorty and Midnight Run in particular.
He's a hoot as Jennifer Lopez's dad in Out of Sight
 
Otomo said:
Dennis Farina is usually great in what ever film.
Click to expand...

I've always liked him. And when he plays a cop it's like he is a cop, not just an actor playing one. I liked him in Law and Order too.

Otomo said:
He's a hoot as Jennifer Lopez's dad in Out of Sight
Click to expand...

Haha. I've never seen that and didn't realize he was in it. I have it on blu-ray but it is one of many I haven't gotten around to watching yet.
 
The Killer (David Fincher)

Didn't enjoy this much. I get it's meant to be a satire of insipid hitman revenge type movies, but it's the sort of satire that veers so close to what it's meant to be sending up, so I just felt like I was watching an exceptionally boring, poorly written, hitman film. The fact it was intentional doesn't change that for me, it just gives the film an air of smug self satisfaction. Like it was just an exercise for Fincher to prove how smart he is. Except, much like its smug self satisfied jerk assassin, I don't think the film is as clever as it thinks it is. That was probably Fincher's real message, that he's every bit as much of a The Smiths loving hypocrite poser trying to have his cake and eat it as mr assassin. But it's still just so dull, I think subversivenesss still needs to be fun or interesting at least. Maybe I reacted to this particularly negatively because I watched Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future yesterday, man that's a hoot, utterly ludicrous but in all the right ways.
 
Vashdaman said:
The Killer (David Fincher)

Didn't enjoy this much. I get it's meant to be a satire of insipid hitman revenge type movies, but it's the sort of satire that veers so close to what it's meant to be sending up, so I just felt like I was watching an exceptionally boring, poorly written, hitman film. The fact it was intentional doesn't change that for me, it just gives the film an air of smug self satisfaction. Like it was just an exercise for Fincher to prove how smart he is. Except, much like its smug self satisfied jerk assassin, I don't think the film is as clever as it thinks it is. That was probably Fincher's real message, that he's every bit as much of a The Smiths loving hypocrite poser trying to have his cake and eat it as mr assassin. But it's still just so dull, I think subversivenesss still needs to be fun or interesting at least. Maybe I reacted to this particularly negatively because I watched Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future yesterday, man that's a hoot, utterly ludicrous but in all the right ways.
Click to expand...
The only part I liked was the lengthy opening scene about all the mundane aspects of being an assassin. After that it was just a generic snoozefest. I didn't twig that it was supposed to be satire; if that's what it was aiming for then it missed the mark.
 
Leave The World Behind

I mainly decided to give this a try due to the strong cast, and I actually enjoyed this more than I thought I would. Its audiovisual aesthetic is really not my cup of tea it has to be said, it's very modern in ways I mostly dislike with obnoxious flashy camera work and annoying loud sounds. Also it's true that most of the characters are pretty annoying and or unbelievable. But I enjoyed the casts' performances nonetheless (Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke and a bit of Kevin Bacon too!)
and the growing tension and dread that the film manages to build. I particularly liked the pretty obvious subtext about the role of media as providing us an escape from society and harsh reality.
I like how the young girl is more genuinely disturbed by the prospect of never getting to know how Friends ends than anything else as the real world falls apart around her. And the closing shot of her happily popping the Friends DVD in the underground bunker's DVD player as outside New York is being nuked to smithereens, is the perfect ending
It's funny and sad and relatable, as I suspect there's many of us out there who are essentially doing the very same thing even if our dystopian reality hasn't become quite so acute yet.
 
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Maniac Cop (1988)

Possibly most famous for its striking cover art, which seemed to be ever present in rental places during the 1990s, this is a workmanlike b-movie thriller about a tall, super-strong killer roaming the midnight streets of New York dressed as a police officer, leading to a young patrolman (Bruce Campbell) being fitted up the crimes.

By all accounts, the second film is the best of this series, so I kind of just wanted to get this one under the belt before moving onto that, but it’s actually not bad - it’s a little basic at times, but it clips along at speed, Bruce Campbell is always good value, and it’s nicely shot, even if it lacks the real exploitation movie grunge of something like Ms. 45, which would have fit the subject matter well.
 
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