The Brown Note Movie Review

I sat down on a Friday night to watch what I thought from memory, was an agreeable mash up of Platoon and The Sixth Sense. I was wrong, and immediately regretted my choice. It was closer to a mash up of Requiem For a Dream and Uncut Gems. The film from my youth was far more unrelentingly intense, harrowing and depressing than I'd remembered. It was also far more profound, beautiful, moving and unusual than it's ever given credit for. Tim Robbins stars as a man driven to psychosis by his post Vietnam waking nightmare, in director Adrian Lyne's hugely influential yet still underappreciated near masterpiece. Be warned though - this is an unexpectedly tough ride.

29% on Rotten Tomatoes for the new Netflix, Gal Gadot starring, Mission Impossible rip off, a right royal trashing. For the first half hour, I toyed with turning it off - the dialogue was so trite and the tech angle so grating. But after the film calmed itself down, it was a perfectly well plotted and performed hokey fun spy film, with plenty of action, that was less generic than I'd been led to believe, and not as bombastic as something like The Grey Man. Gal is great and the whole shebang is surprisingly agreeable - I wouldn't mind them coming back tbh.

I know next to nothing about the rapper That Mexican Outta Texas but he sure sounds like fun, on this personality filled, eminently agreeable album.

I've no idea why this second album from the new wave of British Indie Titans doesn't appear to have been more successful than the first. It's certainly more accessible and the yelping has been toned down, the melody increased and the songs shortened. With a great lyrical and musical cohesiveness - it's one of the years finest albums and a worthy answer to last years fantastic Black Midi album.

Oh dear, I'm not making any friends with this one (and for the record, I gave the original a great score). Along with GOTG3, one of only two MCU (or even comic-book/superhero movie) bright-spots post Endgame and the most loved with both critics and audiences in years. Thanks, I hated it. The story takes an hour and a half to even properly start, and then it's just "to be continued". WTF!? NOTHING HAPPENS. And the highly praised visuals are sometimes 10/10 inspired and sometimes gratingly jerky and appallingly, Michael Bay style, over-edited. But the lack of story is unforgivable.

A film about transformers, who are robots in disguise.

The one true post Endgame MCU film that is valid, is of comparable quality and has a reason to be. It's also the most upsetting and extreme comic-book, super-hero film post Iron Man - conjuring up, not only horrific animal testing but the experiments on humans by the Nazi's and WW2 Japan. Somehow Rocket Racoon and his three compadres guileless optimism in the face of such horrors, makes it all far worse. How the hell did the extreme content here get a PG rating?!

Alongside Get Carter and Performance, one of the greatest hard edged 70s British gangster films. Despite being hugely influential on more trite post Lock Stock fair, this is a hugely complicated screenplay, with massive, almost Shakespearean themes as a never better Bob Hoskings, goes through a proto-Uncut Gems nightmare. With deals he cant hang onto anymore than what he already has. Visions of a fading and rising Thatcherite UK merge into a fever dream - with a stunning soundtrack - as Hoskins and a superb Helen Mirren, realise too late, the Barbarians at the gate are more than they can handle.

My irregular series on usually albums either denied classic status on release or forgotten about since. I'm not sure this album has been (completely) forgotten, but with the immortal duo Clipse reforming, a time to look back at what I call the best rap album released this century.

Perhaps the most valuable of the three unreleased pearls in Neil Young's archive series, this never released album features some of Young's most worshiped songs, and nearly all have ended up elsewhere, but it's a suit of songs of such quality that it would've been one of the best albums of the 70's.