The Brown Note Movie Review

Everything outside of the climactic face-off, in this "true" war film (based on ex-Navy Seal Marcus Luttrell's best recollections) is garbage, the lowest rent flag-waving. But the hour or so from engagement with the enemy is jaw-dropping. Director Peter Berg may have next to zero skill when it comes characters talking but the actually bone-crunching carnage, is some of the most brutal and hopeless to underpin a major Hollywood patriotic exercise.

Writer-director, Spike Jonze, is still undervalued and rightly picked up every screenwriting award going Her, with I think what was my film of the year. Scarlett Johansson is the magnetic, automated love interest for Joaquin Phoenix, that goes from operating system to all too real. Not just a prescient look at technology and romance but love and relationships themselves.

Maybe a shade too high but not much, still amazed four performances like this could walk away without a single Oscar. David O. Russell had a seismic year and followed up Silver Linings Playbook with yet more unforgettable characters and performances, this time with consummate, dynamic, Scorcese-worthy cinematic skill.

It sounds like I was on the right path with this one but 8.5/10 is still too high for a weirdly empty and hugely overrated (and very stiff) film.

Brad Pitt's mega-budget zombie production seemed troubled during the making and doubly so on the watching. Bizarrely unfocused and lacking a compelling screenplay, a misfire with a weirdly flat final third.

Perhaps a tad harsh here. This drug mule caper comedy is a very poor film but often hysterical and the cast is perfection.

The wonderfully varied and unpredictable Danny Boyle was always going to be horrendous, brilliant of a combination of the two. This messy, unfocused, ill-conceived art heist thrilller leans quite heavily into the former.

This successful but tepid and bland, rote, atmospheric horror taped into the new wave on interest in horror but was bested by a superior sequel. One that thankfully spent less time with the underwhelming leads.

Much of what was so great about the first Star Trek reboot is sadly missing here, and they almost waste the best franchise antagonist in Khan, and the perfect actor to play him in Benedict Cumberbatch. The tone here as shifted more to jokey and not for the better, neither is the increased rom-com focus on Spock.

Ben Wheatley remains one of the UK's most original, unpredictable and gifted new directors, though perhaps one who still hasn't a definitive film, unless that would be the utterly horrifying Kill List. Here he jinks to pitch black comedy and the underused genre of British country holiday serial killers.