The DJH Great Movie Thread

Barbarian on Disney+ is creepy af. First time a film had me genuinely scared in years. More tension than gore. 5 stars.

Edit: And +1 for The Menu.

Thanks for the tip, watched this over the weekend and it was great fun.

1 Like

Loved Barbarian. One the best horror films I think I’ve seen.

Recently watched Triangle Of Sadness https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sWrS7f_nS9w
and The Marriage Of Eva Maria Braun on Criterion.

1 Like

Babylon last night on the big screen. I think my brain is still a bit fried today. 3hrs of utter madness that left us feeling exhausted at the end. I’m a fan of Damien Chazelle but maybe this one’s a bit self indulgent. Another ode to Hollywood in the 20’s and 30’s but this time it’s the debauchery that takes centre stage. It noodles a bit and could have been 20mins shorter, but that being said it was a wild ride and great fun and I’ll be thinking about it for a while. Margot Robbie is brilliant in it.

1 Like

Knock at The Cabin is not a great movie.

Fun fact: M Night Shyamalan is known to his friends as “Night”

2 Likes

Empire of Light is a very good film. Set in Margate, for those of you who like that sort of thing.

Has anyone noticed how cold cinemas are nowadays?

Just come back from watching Babylon… Beautiful filmed, great sets, the costumes were mostly good though Margot Robbie was inexplicably styled throughout as though she was from the 1980s (her scenes were set in the 1920s and 30s)…but I found it over-long and self-indulgent. Much of it was written and played as farce yet the film also aspired to something loftier, more intelligent and much darker which - for me - made it very uneven and difficult to get into. Ultimately me and the missus were left baffled and bemused by it. I really tried to like it, I thought Brad Pitt played his part well, but I struggled to care much about any of the principal characters, particularly Margot Robbie’s whose character began to grate after a while.

Oh, and there was a brief guest appearence by Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers :upside_down_face:

A short follow up to my post about Babylon… Thought I should say something about the soundtrack, this being a music forum and all… The all-jazz score was completely original. It was uniformly excellent, and equally well played, I didn’t think that it had an entirely 20s or 30s feel but perhaps that was in order to avoid pastiche. The score was also the vehicle for a storyline focused on race - perhaps intended to deflect from some of the ‘whitewashing’ criticisms of the directors’ previous film La La Land (the storyline features a black trumpeter whose career appears to take off with the advent of the ‘talkies’ but who late in the film is persuaded to ‘black up’ in order to appear more obviously ‘black’ on film - this appeared to be set against the backdrop of the contemporary success of the ‘Black-face minstrel’ singer Al Jolson - who was, of course, white). I may be overlooking something, but I’d guess that the intention was to demonstrate some requirement on the part of Hollywood’s establishment for blackness to be something that needed to be enacted, usually in ways that were divorced from reality. If that was truly the intention then, to my mind at least, it seemed pretty clumsy.

There has been a glut of overlong and self indulgent films the last couple of years and usually the big shot directors are the culprits

In contrast watched Nope last night. An excellent tight and taut mystery thriller with some good twists. Awsome sound design too. Cant really talk about it too much without spoiling it

Just home from seeing it. Bang average

Watched the French film Between Two Worlds on BFI player. Was excellent. One for fans of Ken Loach-type social realism.

@Plum Oddly enough, I’ve literally just come back from the BFI. My missus booked tickets for us to see Goodfellas, but got the date wrong (it’s next Wednesday :upside_down_face:), so we used the BFI Mediatheque to watch a Mark Gatiss comedy/horror short and an episode of a BBC disco dancing competition from 1979.

This is another cracking film…

https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=bait2023&BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::context_id=

Watched that a couple of years ago. Very distinctive and memorable.

I remember when it came out, got v good reviews, thought it sounded right up my street but i didn’t manage to catch it at the time. Thanks for the reminder!

Future cult classic.

I have just thoroughly enjoyed a trio of Jean-Pierre Melville - Alain Delon movies: Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge and Un Flic. Late 60s-early 70s France with lots of cigarettes, beige raincoats, moody atmospherics, French underworld, not much talking and not much action but I was completely immersed.

3 Likes

Thanks for the tip, watched this over the weekend and it was great. Best film I’ve seen in a while

Yes, incredible film. Interesting how different people have interpreted the ending.

1 Like