The first two thirds of this movie is pretty good, with the mob violence elements set against the works of Dante being entertaining and interesting. Unfortunately, the movie sucks when it pivots into the romance aspects, and that swallows up more and more of the movie. Also unfortunately, it involves Gal Gadot, who cannot hold a candle to any of the other actors in this movie.

It’s a movie with high highs, but they’re focused on the front half of the movie, and then it’s a complete slog that makes me feel like I’m completely wasting my time. It’s a shame, and maybe I’m marking it harshly because of its failure to live up to what it seemed like it might become.

Denoument runs a little long, even without there being three different endings. The cut that’s available for free on Youtube right now plays them all in sequence, which is fun, but the “trick” of having three different endings did its work during the original theatrical release, and is not really replicated here.

It’s funny, mostly, though suffers from some of the slow pacing of an older film, which is more of a killer for a comedy than a drama. And it’s a terrible mystery, which it virtually has to be in order for the three endings thing to work. It ends up with different red herrings that are given far too much weight, and contrived reasons for murder that are revealed too late into the movie. But it’s mostly a comedy, so … I don’t know, what matters is that it’s funny, in a sense, but it would have been great to have it all.

There’s a subplot in this movie where a pair of married archeologists arrive and having an end to their marriage because the husband is gay. It’s an odd choice that I think is probably explained by the fact that this movie is adapted from a book, where this subplot has more time to breathe. Everything else is more centered on death; Sutton Hoo is a burial site, the woman who owns the land is a widow and dying, World War II is impending and death is in the air. But while this subplot plays into the pervasive melancholy, it feels like it’s out of step with the rest of what the film is going for thematically. And because it has so little time to breathe, we get relatively few scenes about it, which makes it feel threadbare and underdeveloped, left to the imagination rather than an actual story.

Overall though, I quite liked it, and whatever distaste I have for historical characters wondering about their place in history was softened somewhat by this at least being in line with archeology as the study of the past. The score felt a little overdone though: too much stirring strings.

This was my third time watching this movie, with the first being in 2011 and the second in 2020. It’s one of the most accurate pandemic movies, which is startling given that it was made a decade before COVID, though when I look closely I can see a lot of things that aren’t quite right, visible only with hindsight. There are all kinds of things in this movie like social distancing, equipment shortages, hodge-podge PPE, Jude Law’s fraudster blogger character, etc., that speak to how thoroughly thought through and researched this movie was.

I’m not entirely sold on the style of filmmaking, where we have this ensemble cast that never interacts or really meets with each other, but Soderbergh keeps it from feeling like we’re watching an anthology series, which is the biggest risk here.

It’s funny, but there are definitely parts that haven’t aged well, particularly all the reference humor that got lost to time, or for a Millennial like myself, is something that’s known only as a reference to a reference, leaving me saying “yeah, I get it” but not laughing. There are also some scenes that just don’t work, or feel shoehorned in, rather than arising from the characters or situations. The diner scene at the end of the movie is a particular offender here, as iconic as the chest burster singing “Hello by Baby” is.

It’s also much more horny than I remembered it being, sometimes to its detriment, but definitely in way that made me think “they don’t really make them like this anymore, do they”. Maybe I noticed this more because I was watching this with my 10-year-old son, and while there was nothing that I objected to him seeing, I did think “huh, PG rated”.

I only watched this because the logline made it sound like it would be a roaring rampage against the S.W.A.T. team, and it is that, in a sense, but as written by someone who loves cops and wants to show that love on the screen, but also sucks at making movie. Terrible acting, terrible writing, total waste of time, which I guess I could tell from the opening 15 minutes.

It’s a romcom that’s a little too aware that it’s a romcom, and the podcast dating coach character at the start made me think that this would be a worse movie than it is. In the end, it skates by on its chemistry, tugging on some heartstrings, and once the characters actually meet, I enjoyed it. Obviously listening in on voicemails that weren’t meant for you and then arranging a meet cute is psychopath behavior, and in classic romcom fashion he takes his lumps for the deception but we don’t have to grapple with anything.

Honestly, I’m not sure if I would have liked this movie better if it didn’t go the “this is like in one of those cheesy romcoms!” route, but this sort of hollow literacy does get on my nerves a bit, like we can’t just make a movie where the characters aren’t leaning on the fourth wall.

Too many characters, and I cared about none of them. Say what you will about the Paul W.S. Anderson films, but at least they were schlocky garbage. This doesn’t even rise to that level, even if it’s in many ways better filmmaking on a technical level. I liked a few moments from this, but they were trying to do too much, and ended up doing very little. The Resident Evil series rarely has more than two protagonists in a game, and here we have Jill Valentine, Leon Kennedy, the Redfields … it’s just too much.

For a movie about a man killing people for money and over a personal grudge, it sure never made me feel like I knew that he was on about. It’s also not particularly clever about the kills, though it feels like it wants to be clever. And when it comes down to it, the film doesn’t work as a revenge story.

I’m also a little unclear on why there were two love interests. I guess I would have thought that they were both foils to the character in some way, but Margaret Qualley feels like she’s doing her own thing in this movie, and it makes any comparison between lives pretty incoherent.

I enjoyed the first half of this, mostly because “colony ship where they have to enter the dreams of people” is a great setup for interesting fight scenes and wild, imaginative style, which the film does well enough.

But that second half … yeesh. There’s too much convoluted garbage, a villain that doesn’t need to be there, and the whole dream thing feels like a hollow imitation of better movies, which I think can be said for the movie as a whole. It’s also particularly Chinese in its sensibilities, which doesn’t help matters, and feels the need to spell out a lot of things that hurt it significantly.

I liked this movie a lot, though I’m not sure if I have the intended reading of it. It seemed to me like a movie whose horror was more about mental health than anything else, the fear of someone doing irrational, harmful things and not being able to do much aside from getting them involuntarily committed (which, absent thinking wishes are real, is absolutely what he should have done). There’s a sense of helplessness that pervades the film, and some of that is down to our trashbag white guy with no dreams or ambitions, but I think it makes for effective horror if that horror is of the “my girlfriend is acting absolutely nuts” flavor. They do mention at various times that she appears to be going through some kind of psychotic episode.

As a monkey’s paw curling kind of thing … it doesn’t really work for me? The thing he wishes for is that she would love him, and what comes out of the wish is not even remotely that; the classic monkey’s paw compliance would be that she loved him too much, but instead she gets replaced by a demon or whatever, and there’s just not that much connection between his obsession with her, and her obsession with him. She’s a girlfriend with borderline personality disorder, or the heightened horror version of that.

(There is also the horror of Nikki’s lost autonomy, but this really seemed like it was secondary to what the film was trying to do, at least to me.)

A very undone timeloop comedy that buries the things it’s doing with the time loop until too late into the movie, and is saddled with a bunch of extremely unlikeable characters who don’t find any redemption, even in the end. It only occasionally rises to the level of serviceable, and doesn’t pay off everything that it sets up, nor is the fact that it’s set in 1999 all that relevant; it feels inaccurate as a period piece, and more like everyone doing the costume thing is cosplaying the 90s instead of living it.

The main character also really wants a child, which … you know, that’s fine, this is a thing that people want, and they feel like their life has slipped away from them, they’ve lost their chance. But it feels weird here, too much like someone was either grinding an axe or exposing their personal problems. It’s really a movie with a lot of baby stuff in it, very child-motivated in spite of no children appearing for the vast majority of the runtime. I’m on the fence about whether this properly drives the film, but it’s definitely one of the preoccupations. Weirdly, the movie takes place over a single night and is really about how much better and different it would be to redo things in the more distant past, which is thematically rich but isn’t explored as much as I’d like it to be. I think I’ve talked myself into giving this film a higher rating than I was going to, but do wish that it had spent more time on the weightier stuff and less time on repeatedly smashing into a plate glass window.

I liked the first half a lot better than the second half, mostly because the excessive gore and gross out humor got to be a little bit much for me. I think this is the third “kill your spouse plot that brings the two of you closer together” movie I’ve seen, with the other two being Psycho Therapy and Untitled Home Invasion Romance. The other two also feature sad sack creative-types for the husband, and I would guess that all three might trace their origins to The Trip, the Norwegian film this one is directly an adaptation of.

The movie is funny in parts, but as it loses its grounding becomes less so, and eventually there are action scenes that aren’t that funny and the tone shift doesn’t really do it for me. I guess the movie also fails to sell what these people ever saw in each other, and how any of the trials and tribulations actually solve anything. But I did like the ending, so maybe I’m just nitpicking.

Mediocre movie that didn’t fully hold my attention, maybe because it all takes place on a single remote farm and doesn’t have much depth to the characters. There’s a twist, and it’s extremely unsurprising. I feel like this is the sort of “closed location” movie that must be pretty cheap to shoot, but if you’re going that route, I feel you need to have either really top notch filmmaking or top notch writing to compensate. This film just doesn’t really have either, even if it’s competent on a film level.

There’s something about sniping that I find really compelling, but this movie doesn’t really capture it; it compares very unfavorably to that scene in Civil War with the sniper, which felt properly tense and unexpected.

It’s a fine movie, but I’m not sure how well the mixture of magical and mundane works here. Both of them seem like they undercut the other? It’s a thorny writing problem that the movie never quite escapes, at least to my tastes. The inclusion of psychadelics also undercuts the horror a bit, in the same way any question of what’s real does for fiction. Adam Scott delivers a good performance, and there are certainly enough twists to the thing, but I don’t know, it never rises above the median movie for me.