MCProust
Film Freak
Member Since: 27 Oct 2011
Recent Ratings
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The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) - Rated 03 Jul 2025
The Last Duel (2021) - Rated 10 Jun 2025
"The film doesn't escape a certain costume drama hokiness with its too-familiar scenes of chaotic warfare, effete courtiers and bawdy merriment, compounded by the very recognisable American leads (and, to be fair, my own Frenchness); still, the 'Rashomon' structure is well-built, and there is an earnest (if often too explicit) stab at presenting both the alienness of the period's attitudes and whatever universal truths about justice this medieval court case might reveal."
Coco (2017) - Rated 10 Jun 2025
"Artful rather than artistic in most respects. One does start to question how deep the drive for cultural diversity within Disney can be when the resulting films adopt the aesthetic trappings of certain belief systems while replacing their core tenets (both indigenous religions and syncretic Catholicism in this case) with a distinctly Californian strain of therapeutic banality."
Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025) - Rated 09 Jun 2025
"I think the reason this is one of the only successful revivals of a long-running horror franchise (with all the reservations I have towards that notion) is that there is no reverence needed, no mythos to pay homage to except for the presence of the late Tony Todd; 'Final Destination' is less a series than a broad comic concept akin to the 'Keystone Cops'—and when the pratfalls are good, they're good. A few bonus points for the gasps and shocked laughs of a packed and very entertained cinema."
Carlito's Way (1993) - Rated 07 Jun 2025
Nightmare Alley (2021) - Rated 05 Jun 2025
"Unambiguously a remake of the 1947 film rather than a new adaptation of the novel, with some plot changes that are mostly for the worse (notably to the Pete/Zeena dynamic, which is strangely insubstantial despite the much greater running length, and to Lilith, whose plan is now quite muddled). The bigger problem is, I think, that the tone is too serious and the pace too languid for such a ridiculous, melodramatic story; better not to let the viewer think too much about what's happening."
West Side Story (1961) - Rated 02 Jun 2025
Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) - Rated 02 Jun 2025
"The memorable punchline is the worst part of the film, which actually takes great care not to draw too obvious a parallel between both protagonists' flaws beyond their fatal impulsiveness, and avoids the kind of moral equivocation that would lessen its shocking and credible depiction of racism. In fact, its social realism seems to exist mostly in support of something like a classical tragedy, to establish forces that we know will lead the characters inexorably to their destruction."
The Phoenician Scheme (2025) - Rated 01 Jun 2025
Alien: Romulus (2024) - Rated 29 May 2025
"Alvarez, with his considerable talent for gore and discomfort, gives Romulus the old college try, and at times even manages to come up with a genuinely shocking image, but the entire exercise is just too reverent and derivative—plus the cast of blandly attractive twentysomethings lacks the required grit for this kind of working-class sci-fi, and the dialogue amounts much too often to flat, redundant exposition."
