The Brown Note Movie Review

Maybe they made it just to do it but they pulled it off with some style. Tom Hardy natural and human in a movie set entirely in a car, with no one else on screen.

Paul Thomas Anderson ranks first amongst his likely peers, the Finchers and Nolans of the directing world but this detective yarn written by the legendary Thomas Pynchon (author of the only book I quit on) really threw me on first viewing. Without a satisfying plot, a story like this should be sunk but it's actually closer to the existentially gumshoe classic, The Long Goodbye. On second viewing I loved it, which made it the only film I've posted a correction review about.

Highly impressive, brilliantly acted and even well directed but obtuse and unlikable true-life wrestling drama.

Kinda weird to see Ridley Scott turn in such an incompetent mess or being able to spend such a large sum of other peoples money making such an odd film, so badly, about a subject no one was asking for.

Laura Poitras' essential, Oscar winning documentary about Edward Snowden's whistle-blow is incredible in what happened but sadly not that great of a film.

Director Kevin MacDonald is one of the only modern directors of his stature to push on with both documentaries and films simultaneously, often to superb effect. Jude Law is excellent against type as a Scottish submarine stealer in this imaginative and criminally ignored heist drama.

Both director, J.C. Chandor, and star, Oscar Isaac, have quietly amassed excellent and rather underappreciated filmography and this near-superb talky about city corruption during a particularly violent year in New York, fits that mold exactly.

Great idea but overrated debut from director Yann Damange, who puts the excellent Jack O'Connell as a soldier in Belfast, during a riot in 1971. Good but not great.

This superb French entry into the perhaps non-existent, rich-man-gets-kidnapped genre from director Lucas Belvaux is a winner. The brilliant Yvan Attal finds his kidnappers are just the start of his problems as EVERYONE turns on him, as a deeply sympathetic character, who can't find solace anywhere, not from even from his own children or the police. A minor classic.

I'm being generous here not paying out on this travesty more, as only the first film was even watchable. Bearing all the hallmarks of many Stallone written or produced movies, mainly and atrocious script. Leaden and obvious in every way.