The Brown Note Movie Review

Most critics are like sheep. They read each other's reviews and are too scared to rate anything they don't understand accurately lest they get it "wrong". The latest by slow-movie auteur, Kelly Reichardt is case in point, winning numerous movie of the year awards. Though I gave warm reviews to both Meek's Cutoff and Night Moves, this is a weak and virtually empty film, devoid of any real substance...

John Adams is undoubtedly a triple threat worth investigation, as here he occasionally directs well, acts in a often dialogue free, nuanced performance very well, and creates a great soundtrack for this indie horror. But no way does this very limited and often ordinary film deserve the place in the pantheon of modern indie horror greats its 75% on Metacritic and 94% on Rotten Tomatoes suggests. No...

Exactly what it says in the title, in a very tepid year all round (lots of 8's, not many 9's!) my best and worst films of 2020, with the ten best and worst going head to head.

Bit of cross pollination here with the radio show (show with music https://www.mixcloud.com/julian-brown/the-brown-note-top-25-albums-of-2020/ ) My top 25 albums of 2020 in a very flat year all round. Best and worst films of the year next week.

David Fincher's return to his father's old screenplay, about the writing of Citizen Kane by the immortal Herman J. Mankiewicz, is awash with Hollywood lore and golden-era standard bearers. If a fairly soulless but utterly whip-smart script of back and forths from ridiculously clever people, in love with how clever they are sounds like your perfect night in, you'll love it. If that sounds like pret...

A recent unexpected TV viewing left me wondering if this is the Citizen Kane of Science Fiction Horror movies. Near perfect film making on every level from James Cameron, on a roll that would include Terminators 1&2 and the most perfect film of the lot. Even the sound effects or the machine guns are sublime. Full marks for production design, screenplay, effects that haven't dated, developed side c...

Already critically notorious, I was still impressed by how awful and cringe-inducing this latest from the master of Oscar bait and the worst half of trite-Spielberg, Ron Howard, was. Not so much toe curling as shin snapping, Howard's worst ever manages to make Cleetus from the Simpsons seem subtle and deep. Glenn Close will likely win an Oscar but this soft-core poverty porn is the years most misg...

Has director Thomas Bezucha coined an entirely new genre?  The senior shoot-em-up. With the instantly winning pairing of a (bulldog) Diane Lane and Kevin Costner, we don't get The Bridges of Maddison County but a Southern potboiler that builds patiently for through its first half of 1960's "white poverty" country folk, before barreling towards a violent denouement, as the leads try to extricate th...

This slice of extreme cinema barely made a splash on release in 2011 but has inexplicably attained a whole new life on YouTube through TikTok. Hugely controversial and easy to dismiss for either its amateur elements or its brutal content, none the less this internet predator horror is a valid film, that paints as nihilistic and confronting a portrait of young teens as the legendary film Kids and w...

Inexplicably given no America cinema release, despite being one of THE most 2020 films imaginable and easily making back it's budget with low-key overseas box office, Greenland is the latest - and one of the best - end of the world/societal collapse movies to feature annihilation by meteor and the best of its kind since Deep Impact. Ric Roman Waugh is a director who has quietly amassed a filmograp...

Hollywood's uber-writer Aaron Sorkin continues his well worn migration to directing (after the underappreciated yet not quite there, Molly's Game) with this timely, polemical and fascinating story of Nixon's show trial to punish the counter culture. Mark Rylance, Eddie Redmane and most shockingly Sascha Baron Cohen (by far the star of the show) shine. A really, really good film that perhaps falls...

Despite containing a lead character so gratingly stupid I wanted Russel Crowe's comical-yet-terrifying man-bear to eat her, terrible writing and almost no engagement in the modern themes it raises, Unhinged just clears a very low bar. It's short, focused, gnarly and tense.

One of the most exciting and talented new British directors of the last decade, Ben Wheatley, was either an inspired or bizarre choice to take on Alfred Hitchcock's celebrated only Best Picture Oscar winner. Here both visions of the 1938 Daphne du Maurier novel go head to head and it ain't pretty. After scratching my head as to why he even did it, musing that Netflix were solely appealing to the D...

My vision of hell is a young adult dystopian future romance, yet the major debut by South African director Michael Matthews is kinda wonderful. Nowhere near the self-serious, po-faced dreck of Maze Runner-like films nor bombastic and broad, 'Monsters is surprisingly thoughtful and soulful, with some gorgeously understated effects, an effecting lead in Dylan O'Brien and after she totally stood up K...

Alongside the brilliant, The Long Goodbye (reviewed elsewhere in this podcast) one of the two lost classics and twin pillars of neo-noir. Master-director, Arthur Penn( Bonnie and Clyde), helms Gene Hackman in a highly unusual, cerebral, existential gum-shoe tail, where the characters live on shifting sands, the protagonist has only a limited idea of what's going on and is the unknowing creator of...

On the very day Johhny Depp was railroaded (I think) in a UK court, this almost invisible 2018 non-release about the deaths of Tupac and Biggie, and the rampant corruption of the LAPD Rampart division that inspired Training Day, should've been far more interesting but it's very inconsequential and I left feeling confused.

With low-budget Sci-fi (and horror) undergoing a revolution this last decade, where artistic powerhouses like Annihilation and Under the Skin exist, and Australia routinely pumps out films like Upgrade, I Am Mother, Predestination and The Rover - a trite, rote dystopian-future subject and bad writing were always going to render 2067 a non-entity. Add awful casting and bad acting to the mix and it...

Perhaps slightly too high a score here for this divisive, critically reviled, Janelle Monae starring Civil War/Most Dangerous Game hybrid but still a far superior, better structured and more successful film than the awful yet praised Da 5 Bloods. Flaws certainly but it gets an awful lot of film making aspects right and is perhaps being trashed for not living up to its hugely ambitious racial parad...

It's 2020 and until a week ago I had never seen any Harry Potter movie, so after catching the first on TV, I binged the lot. So this is a previously very reluctant outsiders view of the Potter universe. Every single film reviewed and my top 15 pros and cons.

Having grown up watching Scarface on poor quality VHS transfers, a recent re-watch (the first in many years) on a wide-screen, high-definition, gorgeously colored print, was a revelation. Also an opportunity to reward the lurid, populist gangster classic with the critical acclaim it deserves but that commonly eludes it. Three already high octane personalities in director Brian de Palma, screenwrit...

Call Me by Your Name director, Luca Guadagnino's remake of Dario Argento's stylistic Gallo-horror masterpiece interestingly abandons the striking color and sound of the original for an opposing grey-noir cold war aesthetic. It is indeed still and not much happens, too little, but I found the world a quietly compelling one all on its own merit, deeply atmospheric and odd and with a denouement that...

Did you think you were a Facebook customer and not their product? The years most essential documentary paints a terrifying portrait of how devastating and deep the impact of social media has been on society. Not so much a review as an overview of the incredibly important themes the documentary raises.

Writer, Donald Ray Pollock's debut novel is brought to the screen by director Antonio Campos and with a great cast and strong production values, it's exactly the kind of grimy Hillybilly-noir I should adore. Sadly it's a boring, indistinct, meaningless mess of a film that takes far too long to give us the salvation of Tom Holland and Robert Pattinson.

I've been trying to start THE AGE OF CAGE for some time now and with both this from 2018 and The Color out of Space this year, I feel we are really there. Cage is the Omega to Keanu's Alpha, and this utterly magnificent gonzo-horror is the real deal. Director Panos Cosmatos weaves some of the most heavily stylised visual palettes ever (Benjamin Loeb) and music (nearly the last from Jóhann Jóhannss...

This latest home invasion horror has a couple of interesting paradigms to throw at the genre (income inequality and the hunter becoming the hunted) but peruses neither effectively with a wayward screenplay and a first half dominated by some of the most obnoxiously stupid characters imaginable. It gets better but only like an awful party improves now the worst people have gone, it's still terrible,...