The Brown Note Movie Review

The only reason you ever came across this no-rent endeavor were the combination of Bruce Willis and a zero on Rotten Tomatoes. I struggled to give it a zero myself as unlike We Summon the Darkness, it didn't really earn it, though alongside The Prince it, I think, makes him the only double recipient of a 0/10 on this podcast. But it's not really a movie, more a filmed paintball session.

The esteemed Charlie Kaufman's latest is a dark, bleak and most depressing existential, near plotless retread of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And my favorite film of the year so far. Enjoy in a double-bill with Vivarium to lose all hope in living. (NOTE: This radio show is movie heavy as the music is my favorite scores and soundtracks from my list, last year, of my top fifty films of the...

The years most exciting and eagerly awaited cinematic experience is here and its the dullest and most disappointing movie imaginable, in almost every way a film can be and Nolan's worst film by a long margin. Booo indeed. (NOTE: This radio show is movie heavy as the music is my favorite scores and soundtracks from my list, last year, of my top fifty films of the decade - https://www.mixcloud.com/j...

No doubt this Megan Fox starring actioner (think Triple Frontier with schoolgirls instead of money, in Africa, with lions) will head straight for sub 15% Rotten Tomatoes land, pretty much solely on the lion special effect, which will be meme'd to death. Outside of that it's a perfectly reasonable shooter-horror straight-to-video affair, that's richly shot and has perfectly acceptable action.

The directoral debut from James Franco's brother immediately marks him as someone to watch, as he does nearly everything very well indeed. Taking the overused trope of the cabin in the woods and updating it to the AirBnB age, everything is classy.

For a few years Netflix were one of the best movie "studios" on earth, providing many of the best, most artistic, most original and most challenging films each year. Now they seem stuck in a new and distressing paradigm. Great idea for an action movie, big budget, name actors combined with terrible directors, screenplays and scripts. Not QUITE as terrible as The Old Guard but still annoyingly so.

A massively heavyweight effort featuring Noble Prize winning author J M Coetzee adapting his own acclaimed novel and the first English language film from Colombian Embrace of the Serpent Oscar nominated director, Ciro Guerra and actors Johnny Depp, Robert Pattinson and Mark Rylance. Sadly its too flat, uninvolving and heavy handed to be a masterpiece but it's still far better and more interesting...

My endless appetite for LA crime films is making me follow one of the kings of the genre, director David Ayer, all the way down to this, just passable as a once through Shia Lebouf starring and fairly low rent, base-line effort. I still don't agree with the consensus of how awful it is, if you think Training Day is a masterpiece this is still - just - worth a once through but only just.

A possible career best performance for Hugh Jackman in this hugely watchable, classily written, warm, amiable and funny reading of America's biggest public school fraud.

Michael Mann's signature style given arguably its purest outing in this hugely aesthetic remake of his own iconic TV series. A bit of a failure on release and without the strong narrative or characters of Heat but near sublime as a very expensive, now cult mood piece.

Tom Hanks acts his own screenplay in this WW2 naval cat and mouse thriller, that is completely solid but needs to offer a bit more to be great.

Director William Friedkin may have destroyed his career and gone through his own Apocalypse Now journey through hell making it but for me, his remake of the equally classic, Wages of Fear, is a better film than even The French Connection or The Exorcist and his third flat-out masterpiece in a row.

A big fat zero out of ten for by far the worst film I've seen this year. It's difficult to be a pastiche of bad 80's horror films when you are a much worse film yourself. Dreadful in every single film-making way possible - the T'Pau song over the closing credits is literally the only good part to this travesty.

I've rarely felt more depressed after watching a film. This underappreciated sci-fi eviscerates the perfect suburban life like no other and completely changed my opinion on the abilities of star Imogen Poots.

A deep-water monster flick that barely lives up to its great environment and hint at Cthulhu and whose main purpose seem to be to reaffirm that Kristen Stewart cannot act.

Corona binge watch heaven. It's been long enough to do a retrospective of one of televisions finest ever shows. All five seasons of The Wire reviewed and rated.

Almost shamefully aims at the Oscars and in a tepid year has every chance. Ben Affleck is magnificent, especially by himself, in a painful performance that reeks of personal reckoning - it stops shy of greatness by tacking on a rote sports film.

Yet another of the recent streaming friendly franchise hopeful actioners has inexplicably good reviews. The mythos, Charlize Theron and Matthiias Schoenaerts set things up magnificently but from there on in almost everything is dire. Painfully bad.

More proof that modernist new horror is where it's at as far as filmmaking is concerned. Ultimately surprising and disturbing and one of the years best.

The most surprised I've been by a movie in ages. After years of relentlessly bagging Guy Ritchie as one of the most consistently bad directors working (even giving his last outing my worst film of the year) I was shocked to see a massive uptick in his writing and direction here. A film that enthralls whenever Hugh Grant, Charlie Hunnam or Colin Farrell are on screen - which they nearly always are.

After an inspired Aussie TV network showed every Bond film in order, not only showing me lesser films I hadn't seen since childhood but also in detailed wide-screen for the first time, enabling back-to-back comparisons. So here it is - every single Bond film ranked and scored in order, my best and worst bond villains and girls and the top fifteen theme tunes.

Definitely one of the years best and most surprising films, expertly helmed by director Leigh Whannel - whose low budget Aussie sci-fi, Upgrade, I recently raved about. A thrilling new take of an old story that perfectly fits with modern concerns.

Despite a brilliant performance from Chris Hemsworth and great visuals, far too much action and far too little writing spoil the party.

The age of Cage is returning (though this isn't quite as good as the insane Mandy). A welcome return for long absent director, Richard Stanley in this vivid, psychedelic take on H.P. Lovecraft.

One of a raft of streaming friendly actioners released this year. Vin Diesel stars in a promising, yet ultimately underwhelming attempt at franchise starting.