The Brown Note Movie Review

Probably as close as I'll get to participating in movie history as I bizarrely sat behind Jimi's ex-girlfriend and her team of lawyers at the Australian premier of this so-so biography of Hendrix, featuring a superb titular turn by Outkast legend Andre 3000. Her enormous, vocal and understandable displeasure at the way she and Jimi were portrayed may have curtailed any wide release for this.

Director Denis Villeueve is the most convincing next generation replacement for the likes of David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson - pretty much the Scorcese's, Spielberg's and Coppola's of this era. Like those, brings his own problems and talents to the table - Nolan's inability to reign in a screenplay or Fincher's ability to adapt to entirely different settings. As an artist, he is happily closer to Anderson and it's difficult imagining any of those directors presenting us with as an austere, unforgiving and art house film as Enemy. Happily one of this generation's greatest talents on the acting side of the camera - Jake Gyllenhaal - is almost the only actor that matters here. What begins as a Sci-Fi mind-bending thriller, gives way to a hugely challenging and difficult near masterpiece, that makes far more common sense than its oblique presentation would suggest. Watch out for the spider.

Almost every word screams stay away, found-footage, low budget, vampire, horror but this unexpectedly great and for once decent cinematography isn't the first casualty. A top tier entry into a deservedly maligned arena of film-making.

I'm probably alone but I found the sequel to 300 slightly agreeable and certainly better than Gerard Butler's gurning predecessor, with a slightly more interesting lead but mostly for the Greek goddess presence of a fabulous Eva Green. It looks pretty too.

My opinion of this Scorsese hit has weakened even further over the years, to the point I think it's his emptiest and most soulless film this side of The Color of Money. Di Caprio is magnificent on any metric and his pairing with Jonah Hill is as good a pairing as Gene Wilder and Richard Prior but the screenplay presents us with vapid nothing characters in a holding pattern for the same repeated half hour for three hours straight, a time-frame The Irishman earned.

Where I review the world's Oscars in alphabetical order.

These two touchstones of 70's cinema are far more arty and weird than expected and the underappreciated, divisive sequel is punishingly challenging. It's rare for any actor to shine as brightly as Gene Hackman but even rarer for a sequel to a multi-Oscar winning film to replace the director with someone equally exciting, going from William Friedkin to John Frankenheimer, both at their peaks. It maybe ground zero for the cynical modern cop drama but are as were as artistically dazzling as these films.

A future cult classic. I've often criticized director Ridley Scott but never his taste or understanding of what great cinema is (just his ability to reproduce it). Here we get an insane cast try their hardest to make human sense of the first ever script by one the world's greatest living writers, Cormac McCarthy, who has fared significantly better with other people adapting his novels (No Country for Old Men, The Road). This though is unlike anything in cinema and almost has its own entire language, one that falls down constantly but is often transcendent in ways most films never are. Horrible, dark, bleak and with indelible dialogue, Scott needs to treat this to a directors cut and shave off at least some of the rough edges to Cormack's script and the near impenetrable story and this one will be looked back on.

Massively underappreciated cat-nip for fans of the grimy, poverty stricken, violent Southern pot-boiler, this time moved north. Heavyweight producers (inc. Di Caprio and Ridley Scott) and an envious cast (Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Casey Affleck, Zoe Saldana, Woody Harrelson all on top form) up the class factor here immensely. Flawed but with such top notch talent and the cinematic environs of run down Braddock, factories and the (extremely pissed off) Ramapugh Mountain Indians that it's far more than a guilty pleasure.

The only time I reviewed a film and gave it 10, though a retrospective review (I mention I would also give its predecessor a 10 too). The five major films from Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone, remained for many years the most undervalued artistic asset in cinema. It would take until the 2010's before either would even be tossed an Oscar and ironically for a film that is an extended version of a scene in this movie. All five are classics and different, here Once is the Illiad to The Good, The Bad and the Ugly's The Odessy. Perhaps as majestic as either man got or as cinema ever has been. I've never given a new release a ten but see the Twin Peaks controversy for the only new release 10/10.