The Brown Note Movie Review

The Rental (2020)

The directoral debut from James Franco's brother immediately marks him as someone to watch, as he does nearly everything very well indeed. Taking the overused trope of the cabin in the woods and updating it to the AirBnB age, everything is classy.

Project Power (2020)

For a few years Netflix were one of the best movie "studios" on earth, providing many of the best, most artistic, most original and most challenging films each year. Now they seem stuck in a new and distressing paradigm. Great idea for an action movie, big budget, name actors combined with terrible directors, screenplays and scripts. Not QUITE as terrible as The Old Guard but still annoyingly so.

Waiting for the Barbians (2020)

A massively heavyweight effort featuring Noble Prize winning author J M Coetzee adapting his own acclaimed novel and the first English language film from Colombian Embrace of the Serpent Oscar nominated director, Ciro Guerra and actors Johnny Depp, Robert Pattinson and Mark Rylance. Sadly its too flat, uninvolving and heavy handed to be a masterpiece but it's still far better and more interesting (and beautifully shot and acted) than most reviews recognise.

The Tax Collector (2020)

My endless appetite for LA crime films is making me follow one of the kings of the genre, director David Ayer, all the way down to this, just passable as a once through Shia Lebouf starring and fairly low rent, base-line effort. I still don't agree with the consensus of how awful it is, if you think Training Day is a masterpiece this is still - just - worth a once through but only just.

Bad Education (2020)

A possible career best performance for Hugh Jackman in this hugely watchable, classily written, warm, amiable and funny reading of America's biggest public school fraud.

Miami Vice (2006)

Michael Mann's signature style given arguably its purest outing in this hugely aesthetic remake of his own iconic TV series. A bit of a failure on release and without the strong narrative or characters of Heat but near sublime as a very expensive, now cult mood piece.

Greyhound (2020)

Tom Hanks acts his own screenplay in this WW2 naval cat and mouse thriller, that is completely solid but needs to offer a bit more to be great.

Sorcerer (1977)

Director William Friedkin may have destroyed his career and gone through his own Apocalypse Now journey through hell making it but for me, his remake of the equally classic, Wages of Fear, is a better film than even The French Connection or The Exorcist and his third flat-out masterpiece in a row.

We Summon the Darkness (2020)

A big fat zero out of ten for by far the worst film I've seen this year. It's difficult to be a pastiche of bad 80's horror films when you are a much worse film yourself. Dreadful in every single film-making way possible - the T'Pau song over the closing credits is literally the only good part to this travesty.

Vivarium (2020)

I've rarely felt more depressed after watching a film. This underappreciated sci-fi eviscerates the perfect suburban life like no other and completely changed my opinion on the abilities of star Imogen Poots.