Recently watched movies 2025

[HuskyHawk]

Frankenstein. Netflix. Guillermo del Toro directs, so visually fairly stunning. It’s a reimagining of the classic tale and is well done. I’m not really an Oscar Isaac fan, who plays Victor Frankenstein. Jordi Elordi is great as the creature. Mia Goth is potentially a perfect bride if Frankenstein and yet…that isn’t used. The story is good, it’s not perfect, maybe a bit slow at times, but ultimately this is quite good.

 

[Dove]

"Train Dreams" was briefly in theaters a few weeks ago, now on Netflix. I'd read a bit about it, got really good reviews. Just watched it. Huh. It's different than anything I've seen before. Contemplative is probably the word I would use to describe it. Stars Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones.

I liked this movie a lot. Surprised that I did, too.

Not an Edgerton fan thanks in part to the crappiness of "They Came at Night."

Here, a loner loggerman making a living, finds love. "Marries", builds a house, has a daughter and...tragedy."

Lives the rest of his life living, waiting.

 

[Bomber36]

I liked this movie a lot. Surprised that I did, too.

Not an Edgerton fan thanks in part to the crappiness of "They Came at Night."

Here, a loner loggerman making a living, finds love. "Marries", builds a house, has a daughter and...tragedy."

Lives the rest of his life living, waiting.

I enjoyed this. Definitely makes you think about life. It’s deep and contemplative. A good movie to watch by yourself. I found this line in a review of the movie to be especially descriptive of what the movie is trying to achieve. It’s about “The things we lose, the things we gain, some of it important, some of it not at all, some laced with love, happiness, pain, grief. The bitterest of sweets, the sweetest of bitters, life.”

 

[HuskyHawk]

Weapons. Stars Julie Garner as a somewhat quirky elementary school teacher named Justine in suburban PA. Josh Brolin is a dad of a kid in her class. It’s starts off narrated by a young boy. Explaining what happened in town, 17 kids all got up at 2:17 AM ran out the door and were not seen again. They were all from Justine’s class, which now had only one boy show up, Alex. There is some gore here, and a mystery to be solved. It maintains suspense for quite a while then the intensity increases. I thought it was good.

 

[ZooCougar]

Weapons. Stars Julie Garner as a somewhat quirky elementary school teacher named Justine in suburban PA. Josh Brolin is a dad of a kid in her class. It’s starts off narrated by a young boy. Explaining what happened in town, 17 kids all got up at 2:17 AM ran out the door and were not seen again. They were all from Justine’s class, which now had only one boy show up, Alex. There is some gore here, and a mystery to be solved. It maintains suspense for quite a while then the intensity increases. I thought it was good.

I don't really like horror movies. I find them really boring. But this is one of the best movies I have seen in a long time.

 

[HuskyHawk]

I don't really like horror movies. I find them really boring. But this is one of the best movies I have seen in a long time.

Spoiler: Spoiler

I think old school Baba Yaga style witchcraft is underutilized in these films. Serpent and the Rainbow is fantastic because the leap to believe in voodoo or witchcraft is a smaller leap

 

[HuskyHawk]

Watch the Skies. Swedish movie, dubbed into English using "artist friendly, SAG approved" AI. It kind of works, sometimes better than others. Stars Inez Dahl Torhaug as Denise, who's father founded a UFO society. He disappears when she's very young sometime in the 80s. Fast forward to the late 1990s and she's 18 or so and living with foster parents and often in trouble (and quite smart). Some stuff happens and she tracks down UFO Sweden, who her dad more or less betrayed before his disappearance (was it aliens or just winter in the mountains?). She convinces the motley, aging UFO Sweden team to help her find the truth. It's a bit of a throwback sci fi adventure movie and is pretty good and has some feel good moments and some villains.

 

[nwhoopfan]

Finally watched the latest "Superman." I've gathered this is a fairly love it or hate it kind of movie. I won't say I hated it, but I definitely didn't love it. Making Supes kind of a weenie is a...choice. He lost just about every fight, and he was kind of a whiny guy.

Another choice was just all together skipping the origin story, which you usually do with a reboot. I guess Gunn just figured everybody knows the story, so he didn't bother with it. But it's kinda jolting to start the movie and feel like you already missed half of it.

I'm not gonna try to break down everything, but I thought Clark's parents were terrible. Presented as stereotypical hillbillies. Their accents, especially the mom seemed more like Deep South than Midwest to me. Interestingly Gunn did the same thing w/ the Peacemaker series, his hillbillies from the Northwest also came across as Southern. Does Gunn have a thing against Southerners?

This movie had a lot of characters, some of which did literally nothing, they were just there. Several of the staff from the newspaper were place holders, as well as some of Lex Luther's crew. Did Jimmy Olsen and Clark interact at all? I don't recall that they did. It seems like that was usually a fairly important relationship, and here it was pretty much nothing. But there wasn't much of Clark in this movie. The balancing act between being Supes and Clark is usually emphasized more than in this movie.

I didn't care for Lex. Too over the top, it seemed like caricature to me. I usually like Nicholas Hoult but this didn't work for me.

I like the Guardians of the Galaxy films. It's not that Gunn used exactly the same formula here, but whatever it was he did in his treatment of Superman was a big swing and a miss IMO.

One last thing I'm gonna hide as it's a spoiler: I HATED what they did to Supes' biological parents, the Kryptonians. They sent him here to be a conqueror and a tyrant?! Really? That was a HORRIBLE choice. Could've easily just had Lex alter the recovered portion of a message from them that Superman had never heard in order to turn the world against him, but it went to great pains to have various characters say the message was not a fake. Why?

 

[nwhoopfan]

I just signed up for a month of HBO/Max so I could watch Superman and Legend of Ochi. I really wanted to like that second one, but it fell a bit flat for me. Now I have a month of streaming left with not much else I want to watch, and fairly disappointed with the 2 movies that were the whole reason for doing it.

 

[nelsonmuntz]

Belfast (2021-Amazon) - Kenneth Branagh's coming of age story about a boy living in Belfast at the beginning of The Troubles. Well done movie that combines the innocent perspective of a 9 year old boy with his dawning realization that the world around him is pretty awful. The details made the story richer. His girl cousin's twisted rationalizing of the tribalism taking over the community seems both innocent and disturbing at the same time. The desperation of his dad trying to convince his mom to get the family out of a place that was spiraling out of control. I am probably going to watch it again, because I am sure I missed a lot.

The acting was awesome. Dornan, Hinds, Dench, the kids, Colin Morgan as the bad guy, all good, and Caitriona Balfe was great as the mom, but I could get past the fact that Kenneth Branagh cast someone this beautiful in the role of his mom. It reminded me of the casting of Kim Bassinger in 8 Mile, and then I couldn't stop thinking about it the whole movie.