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- Review count35
- Helpfulness votes6
- First reviewAugust 17, 2018
- Last reviewSeptember 25, 2020
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- Average rating4.6
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Cincinnati cardiologist Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell) lived an ordinary existence with his wife (Nicole Kidman) and kids... but on the quiet, he maintained an odd, paternal relationship with damaged teenager Martin (Barry Keoghan). As Murphy's children began to manifest strange illnesses, Martin takes the opportunity to insinuate himself into the doctor's home life... and as the shocking true nature of their bond is revealed, so too is the boy's twisted endgame. Yorgos Lanthimos' unnerving thriller co-stars Alicia Silverstone, Raffey Cassidy, Sunny Suljic, Bill Camp. 121 min. Widescreen; Soundtrack English.
Customer Rating
5
Lanthimos gives us a disturbing great movie
on April 17, 2019
Posted by: RBlenheim
from Daytona Beach, FL
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Iconoclastic Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has followed up last year’s dark comic gem, “The Lobster”, with another audacious film that bears his twisted mark on every frame: “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”, its title drawn from a line in the Greek play, Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides. Its story begins rather conventionally before veering off into the bizarre: A skilled cardiac surgeon seemingly befriends a strange teenage boy and introduces him to his family. The boy named Martin seems to have some form of a neurological disorder, and gradually we discover his connection to the surgeon and the threat he brings to the entire family. Colin Farrell plays the surgeon, Nicole Kidman his wife, but it is Barry Keoghan who takes center stage to the drama, playing the intruding boy with a perceptible mental unbalance that grows more sinister as the film goes on. Relying more on the tenants of psychological horror than the societal satire and the Kafkaesque fable of “The Lobster”, “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” is a masterpiece of the absurd, its every frame showing the influence of Stanley Kubrick at his most pristine with its pure cold visuals and precise razor-sharp cutting. It won best screenplay at Cannes, but it is Lanthimos’ perfect compositions and subdued anger that reaches out of the screen and shakes the viewers’ sensibilities that defines it. Disturbing on different levels and perhaps inevitably unpleasant to some, it is a film that will rivet you to your seat until its provocative conclusion, one that could have you thinking about it for days after.
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Furious with the local authorities' inability to name a suspect in the brutal murder of her teenage daughter, flinty divorced mom Mildred Hayes (Oscar-winner Frances McDormand) took out the titular signage to publicly challenge the competency of ailing sheriff Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson). As the controversy splits the small community, rising tempers cause the case to take even more bizarre and unexpected turns. Darkly comic thriller from director Martin McDonagh also stars Sam Rockwell, John Hawkes, Peter Dinklage. 115 min. Widescreen; Soundtracks English DTS HD 5.1 Master Audio, DVS 5.1, Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1, French Dolby Digital 5.1; Subtitles English (SDH), Spanish, French; Inchmaking ofInch featurette; bonus short InchSix ShooterInch (2004). Two-disc set.
Customer Rating
5
Great portrait of small town America
on April 17, 2019
Posted by: RBlenheim
from Daytona Beach, FL
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My favorite film of 2008 was “In Bruges”, the directing debut of Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, and now McDonagh furthers his art with his third film, “Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri”, a sort of dark comic crime film that is really a complex character study of a disgruntled mother upset at a town’s failure to solve the murder of her teenage daughter to the point she rents three billboards outside the town to call attention to the unsolved murder. Frances McDormand plays the grieving divorced mother, Mildred Hayes, in a performance that might even surpass her Oscar-winning role in the Coen Brothers’ 1996 “Fargo”. She’s cynical, angry at the core, street-smart while flawed, and her inner journey is rightly the film’s main focus. But she isn’t the only character sketch that fascinates in this film. Two other characters display important moral arcs: the town sheriff Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson, surprisingly the most likeable) and, most significantly, Officer Dixon (a career best performance by Sam Rockwell that seems the film’s most memorable). The movie’s brilliant wit and marvelous interactive dialogue is matched by McDonagh’s handling of the actors and control of the visual style, while keeping the humanity of the characters at the forefront as he deftly manages to circumvent the clichés always found in these kind of movies. Highly recommended as a remarkably composed portrait of small town America, it sends viewers out of the theater to contemplate moral questions concerning justice, revenge, anger and forgiveness.
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Blu-ray + DVD + Digital. Mute since birth, Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins) works as a janitor at a secret government lab in the early 1960s. When she discovers an amphibious humanoid (Doug Jones) being held there, she forms an unexpected bond with the creature. Learning that her new friend is to be dissected, Elisa hatches a plan for him escape, keeping him in her bathtub until he can be released in a nearby canal. Winner of four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Guillermo del Toro's fantasy also stars Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer. 123 min. Widescreen (Enhanced); Soundtracks English DTS 5.1 Master Audio, DVS 5.1, Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1, French Dolby Digital 5.1; Subtitles English (SDH), Spanish, French; featurettes; interview; theatrical trailers. Two-disc set.
Customer Rating
5
Another Del Toro fantasy masterpiece.
on April 17, 2019
Posted by: RBlenheim
from Daytona Beach, FL
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Guillermo del Toro is today’s master of fantasy, having been a childhood lover of monsters growing up in Guadalajara, Mexico, before making some of the finest films of recent years -- from the ghostly horror of “The Devil’s Backbone” in 2001 to his gothic horror/romance, “Crimson Peak” in 2015. Indubitably, however, his greatest film is “Pan’s Labyrinth”, the 2006 film many of us consider the finest fantasy film ever made. Now he’s broken new ground with “The Shape of Water”, one of the year’s most beautiful films. Set in Baltimore in the year 1962 at the height of the Cold War, the plot follows a mute janitor at a secret government laboratory who forms a bond with a captured amphibian of the “Creature of the Black Lagoon” variety. Her name is Elisa, and Sally Hawkins plays her with an artistry that seems to reach back to the silent days of Chaplin and Keaton. Michael Shannon, with devoted viciousness, plays the right-wing Colonel Strickland, someone more interested in dissecting the creature for exploitation purposes than he is concerned over the space race with the Soviets. Del Toro saw “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” on TV at 7 years old and it changed his life. Wishing a different ending for it in which the Gill Man and co-star Julie Adams would consummate their romance and live ‘happily ever after’, he wrote various scripts of a remake through the years that Universal studio executives wound up rejecting. “The Shape of Water” is the result of del Toro’s dream, and now today, with more permissive filmmaking allowable, he’s able to deal with the previously verboten issue between fish and human. The resulting film is a worthy accomplishment not only for its production design (embodying various shades of green) and its special effects, but also for attaining the level of a genuine adult fairy tale that deals with issues of trust, tolerance, and love in the human condition -- but most of all what it’s like to be an outsider (whether a lonely mute woman, gay man, overweight black woman, or an amphibious sea creature). “This is a healing movie for me,” del Toro states; one likes to think it would be for viewers as well.
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![I, Tonya [Includes Digital Copy] [Blu-ray/DVD] [2017]](https://pisces.bbystatic.com/prescaled/500/500/image2/BestBuy_US/images/products/304b2327-370a-41e7-956a-951dd4939472.png)
Customer Rating
5
Margot Robbie brilliant in this wonderful film
on April 17, 2019
Posted by: RBlenheim
from Daytona Beach, FL
Verified Purchase:Yes
Australian Margot Robbie not only has had a prolific acting career in various media from Australian television soap operas and independent films to American TV dramas and motion pictures (the most important of which was Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street”), and as a producer, she has launched her own production company named LuckyChap Entertainment. She has also been involved in commercial endorsements, being the face of Calvin Klein’s “Deep Euphoria” perfume and a BladeGlider driver for Nissan electric vehicles. Her fame has been such that last year Robbie was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. After acting in various films from “Focus”, “The Legend of Tarzan” to “Suicide Squad”, Margot Robbie has finally nabbed her most important role: playing infamous Olympic ice skater Tonya Harding in Craig Gillespie’s iconoclastic biographical comedy, “I, Tonya” -- and she infuses the part with utmost skill and commitment as well as mastery in the art of acting. And the film itself is a near-masterpiece, and one of the most entertaining films of 2017.
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Customer Rating
4
Imperfect but intriguing Ridley Scott film
on April 17, 2019
Posted by: RBlenheim
from Daytona Beach, FL
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The Ridley Scott film, “All the Money in the World” – a terrific film telling the 1973 real-life abduction of the 16-year-old-son of the richest man in the world, J. Paul Getty – might have been a Best Picture candidate (due to its excellent scripting, production design, directing and acting) had it not been for the totally gratuitous scenes of the security man advising Getty’s wife, poorly played by Mark Wahlberg as if he were the film’s main star, scenes that bog the film down in talky, contrived plot padding. He is an irritating wrong note in an otherwise superb movie that I highly recommend. My guess is that Wahlberg created this unfortunate infirmity by insisting his part be expanded to make his character assume an ersatz importance. But, by all means, check out this excellent movie anyway.
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![Phantom Thread [Blu-ray] [2017]](https://pisces.bbystatic.com/prescaled/500/500/image2/BestBuy_US/images/products/c99e340d-82bc-4d1b-8c18-2add0b27ac95.jpg)
Customer Rating
5
P.T. Anderson's masterpiece
on April 17, 2019
Posted by: RBlenheim
from Daytona Beach, FL
Verified Purchase:Yes
Perfection in cinematic form is rarely achieved, even in the greatest of films, but one that comes close is Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread”, the story of a fictional renowned fashion designer in London in the mid-1950s who finds his muse in the body of a clumsy, lower class immigrant girl (who might have been a Jewish refugee). Daniel Day-Lewis plays the obdurate couturier Reynolds Woodcock; Vicky Krieps, the muse Alma; and Lesley Manville, Reynolds’ sister and manager Cyril – the three characters comprise the trio of ‘instruments’ of P.T. Anderson’s cinematic chamber film in which every composition, every camera movement, every character nuance is marked by his superior directorial control. The acting of the three stars is incomparable, each perfectly matched to play off each other – sometimes in harmony, sometimes in extreme dissonance – and this may be the finest performance of Day-Lewis’s career, even considering his “Lincoln’ of 2012. But it is Anderson who controls the film with utter mastery, his camera lovingly focusing on close-ups of colored threads guided through lace and thick fabrics, gliding sensuously over luxurious dresses, traveling through the many ornate rooms of the House of Woodcock. Anderson not only directed, he co-wrote the script over several years with Daniel Day-Lewis, and even served as his own cameraman (uncredited). Actually a precise cinematic allegory of the romantic relationship paradigm, the film often echoes Hitchcock (“Vertigo”, “Rebecca”, even “Psycho”) in its portrayal of an obsessive love that serves as a direct metaphor for the forming of a romantic bond with another, yet it also reaches into the rich baroque luxuriousness of Max Ophüls. How much does one have to give up in a relationship? How does one balance a personal creative calling with another’s needs? Do we always “hurt the one we love?” Clichés are both encompassed and transcended in “Phantom Thread”, one of the most intimate, insightful and stylish films of recent years. P.T. Anderson himself operates uncompromisingly here, using every filmmaking technique on a creatively heightened level, and in the service of his own personal art. Even Jonny Greenwood’s opulent score with its twisting piano chords and rapidly-moving strings conveying hallucinatory neuroticism with ghostly melancholy occasionally runs simpatico with the characters, but sometimes intriguingly counter to the image, conveying relationship disharmony, becoming an emotional synthesis for the moment. In future years there is no doubt this film’s reputation will tower. This is the film Anderson has been working towards his whole career, and, so far, his masterpiece.
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Cellular biologist Lena's (Natalie Portman) husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) suddenly returns from a mysterious region known as Inchthe ShimmerInch after being missing for a year. When Kane falls into a coma, Lena joins a scientific expedition to the area where she and the rest of her team encounter mutated creatures and strange hybrids of plant and animal life while realizing that they themselves are being altered in bizarre ways. Based on Jeff VanderMeer's novel, this visually stunning sci-fi tale co-stars Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson. 115 min. Widescreen; Soundtrack English. Two-disc set.
Customer Rating
5
Brilliant Science Fiction
on April 17, 2019
Posted by: RBlenheim
from Daytona Beach, FL
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Alex Garland's directorial screen debut in 2014, “Ex Machina”, heralded a truly imaginative filmmaker of mature, intelligent science fiction, and brought him a well-deserved Oscar for its original screenplay. Now he’s followed it up with "Annihilation", a screenplay he considered to be ‘a memory’ of the book by Jeff VanderMeer rather than a straight adaptation in order to create a dream-like atmosphere, and he succeeded splendidly. Seemingly inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s essential 1979 Russian masterpiece, "Stalker" (mixed with some H.P. Lovecraft and "2001: A Space Odyssey" elements), the film tells of a group of women military scientists led by Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh who journey into a mysterious quarantined ‘zone’ of strange animals and mutating landscapes in search of a lost Special Forces soldier who had vanished. After shooting test footage in St. Marks, Florida, it was decided to film at a national nature reserve in Norfolk, England due to its vegetation. Paramount pictures considered the film to be too intellectual and too complicated, so they put pressure on Garland to change the film, but the director refused. Thank god: it’s depth and ambiguity help make this a treat for the thinking filmgoer, sometimes eluding clear interpretation and stretching in its climax towards some spiritual resolutions. This was perhaps why it wasn’t successful at the box office. If you want an easy film that does not require you to use your brain pan, this is not your film. I loved it, although many will be befuddled and walk out scratching their heads. With amazing visuals that evoke a believable alien landscape as a setting for its exploration of challenging themes, “Annihilation" is a science fiction gem that even transcends the genre. Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers called it
“a bracing brainteaser with the courage of its own ambiguity”, and it was one of President Barack Obama’s favorite films of 2018. You should check it out but don’t leave your brain behind when you do.
“a bracing brainteaser with the courage of its own ambiguity”, and it was one of President Barack Obama’s favorite films of 2018. You should check it out but don’t leave your brain behind when you do.
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Customer Rating
5
Another bizarre masterpiece from Lanthimos
on March 22, 2019
Posted by: RBlenheim
from Daytona Beach, FL
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In his amazingly creative recent films (“Dogtooth", “The Killing of a Sacred Deer”, and, most of all, "The Lobster”), Greek iconoclast Yorgos Lanthimos has shown himself to be the successor to Stanley Kubrick, most of all by his long tracking shots and perfectly composed, pristine images. In that sense, “The Favourite” is his “Barry Lyndon", but skewed as if watching demented goings-on in a fishbowl, and outright uninhibited in its dark examination of the deadly power struggle around manipulating Queen Anne in 18th Century England. If less perfect than Kubrick’s rightly praised film, this is more realistic (in its dark dinginess -- even a room with many candles looks nothing like Kubrick's postcard-pretty posturing), and certainly more contemporary. It is also more accessible than Lanthimos’s usual, and more ‘commercially' entertaining (it is a funny dark comedy), while it still is unabashedly pure Lanthimos: profane, disturbing and sometimes offensive. Most distinctive of all however is the cast, three grand dames acting their hearts out: Rachel Weisz as Lady Sarah, close friend (and sometime lover) of the Queen who governs the country when the Queen can’t manage it; Emma Stone as the new servant Abigail whose appearance to the Royal Court begins the film; but most of all is the brilliant Olivia Colman as the somewhat mentally-confused Queen Anne escaping her duties by charming her pet rabbits, arguably the most memorable female performance of the year. To see these three artists, at each others’ throats as well as breasts, makes this film an incredibly delicious drama, sort of like Masterpiece Theater invaded by salacious figures from Beardsley’s Victorian erotica. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but it is the very best tea Britain has offered the movie screens in many a year.
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Customer Rating
5
A wonderfully provocative thriller from S. Korea
on March 8, 2019
Posted by: RBlenheim
from Daytona Beach, FL
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Don’t be fooled by the sparse output of South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong, who has made only five films since his debut feature in 1997, “Green Fish", a gangster film influenced by Martin Scorsese’s "Mean Streets". Lee is a major artist, one of the world's great filmmakers, and his slim oeuvre is partially explained by his being a novelist as well as having a long involvement with political activism -- even serving as South Korea’s Minister of Culture and Tourism for a few years. One of the great directors of women (winning many international awards for his previous three films “Oasis”, "Secret Sunshine” and "Poetry" – all three having women as central characters), "Burning" is his sixth feature, and arguably his richest if most obtuse. This time a male is his main character (while the mystery of Woman and her effect on the male is arguably its underlying main subject). He is a rather timid, weak-willed part-time worker named Lee Jong-su who runs into a young woman from his early schooldays. She is named Shin, loves pantomime, and asks him to feed her cat while she takes a trip to Africa. She leaves, and he proceeds to feed her cat daily – but never sees it. (Is there really a cat?) When Shin returns she brings back a male friend she had just met, an overconfident young man named Ben (a Gatsby-type mystery man played distantly by Steven Yeun of “The Walking Dead” fame), and then the drama begins: a sort-of psychological mystery that builds to a level of guessing what’s true and what's an illusion. Having already won 27 international film awards, this is a marvelous if perplexing film, with a long sequence of the three hanging out on a farm during an evocative twilight being the film’s great highlight (a scene that necessitated a month of shooting only a few minutes a day exactly at the ‘magic hour'). The conclusion of the film is tragic, and you’ll have to decide your own feelings about it, but this is a film worth seeing as well as requiring lots of time thinking about after.
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Customer Rating
4
A good film of an unforgettable story
on December 12, 2018
Posted by: RBlenheim
from Daytona Beach, FL
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Everyone should read this original diary as it is an important true story from a very tragic time in history. The movie is a very moving version of the story with good acting and directing (by George Stevens). Even though it's not a classic film on the level of "Casablanca" or "The Best Years of Our Lives", it is one that you'll never forget.
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