In this not too good thriller the ever pretty Charlize Theron plays Sasha, who likes adventurous holidays a bit too much. After losing her partner in Norway, she goes to a single girl road trip in Australia where her partner was from.
Sasha gets boringly chased by a local madman and becomes the hunted.
There are beautiful shots of nature and Theron-in-action shots, but both the story and the execution and rather dull.
The film is based on a book by Michael Crichton. It starts interestingly.
A UFO was found deep in the ocean an different kinds of scientists are called to investigate. They are taken down to an underwater base and enter the craft. There they encounter a mysterious sphere.
As soon as the sphere is discovered, the story becomes less interesting. Of course the scientists get stuck under water. Of course there is a psychological play ‘who is the bad guy?’, etc.
After a promising start “Sphere” is but an alright science fiction film.
In Sorrentino’s latest we follow Mariano de Santis who has been the president of Italy for a long time and has a half year left in his last term. He has always taken the save route and steered the country through several crisises. For his last year he has a few ‘headache cases’ left.
It is not the first time that Sorrentino has old people looking back at their lives. De Santis never got over the death of his wife with whom he had been together for 40 years. He mourns her every day.
Being a jurist himself, De Santis has his daughter as the main jurist in his administration and she is both his professional and personal mirror. De Santis also has a few close friends with whom he goes back many years and which whom he shares his doubts and reflections. One of these old friends is the Pope, here portrayed as a black man with grey dreadlocks; also something not uncommon for Sorrentino.
It is all there. Deep emotions, modern music that is not entirely out of place, subtle jokes, beautiful women, drama and existential questions. “Grace” is again a good Sorrentino.
Young Matt Damon and Edward Norton play gifted card players who use their skills to pay for studies, rent, etc. Things do not always go well though.
Mike (Damon) looses everything in a high stake game and “Worm” (Norton) comes out of jail with debts. Trying to use their old game to solve their financial problems they make things worse than they were.
A rough drama playing during the prohibition against alcohol in the USA.
The Bondurant family is one of the many moonshiners in the state of Virginia making their booze on the countryside and selling it in the city. This is a cause of violent crime.
Then local ‘law enforcement’ picks up the plan to ‘regulate’ so that they get a part of the profit. The Bondurants do not like to be intimidated and a war ensues.
I saw a Sarah Jessica Parker in the 1993 film “Striking Distance” and thought: was this before “Sex and the City”? Indeed, the series ran only from 1998 to 2004 and the first film is from 2008.
I never really watched the series, but I have seen enough of it to know the characters and the series had a bit of a ‘light entertainment’ ring in my head, so I wondered if the movie would be any fun after all these years.
For starters, the film is a lot longer than I expected: 2:25 hours. It plays after the series (obviously). The four ladies are approaching the age of 50 and I suppose the director took it that the viewers know the series, so the film just continues from there.
What I did not anticipate, is that the film is not really ‘light entertainment’. Sure, there is the sexually tinted humour, the direct conversations between the ladies, the openness about the female body and mind, but there is a lot of heartbreak, missed love, failed relationships, in short: a lot more drama than I thought there would be.
Basically the film is a very long episode in the series.
When I have to pick a Netflix film unprepared I somehow often come to one of the old movies that are available and again this was a Bruce Willis title.
Tom Hardy (Willis) is a cop whose good behavior costed him to be transferred to maritime police. There an old case catches up with him, a case in which he was always convinced the perpertrator is a cop.
Trying to find the actual serial killer, Hardy wins the trust of his new partner (Sarah Jessica Parker) and the two set out to uncover the truth.
Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) was active in a left wing protest group, protesting againt immigration politics. Many years later he lives hidden away without his partner, but with his daughter, always paranoid that the past will catch up with him.
During one of the youthful actions, Bob’s former partner messed with a colonel (a great Sean Penn) who held his grudge long enough to interfere with Bob’s life 16 years after the incident.
In a lengthy (2:41 hours) movie, P.T. Anderson gives a peak into American left wing underground and comes with a nice cat-and-mouse game with a lot of drama and some tension.
A young American couple with a kid befriends another young family with a kid while on holidays in Ireland. The American couple now lives in London and the other in the English countryside. They decide to spend a weekend together.
A highly predictable story unfolds in which the man of the house proves to be a manipulative bastard with evil plans for his guests.
It is good that there are still ‘old films’ that I have not seen yet. They are usually more interesting than films that are produced nowadays as I again saw this weekend.
Bruce Willis is an FBI agend fallen from grace. Still he is dragged into a case of an autistic boy that somehow caught the attention of a variety of agencies. Jeffries (Willis) is the only one who seems to see the danger and he tries to protect the boy at all costs.