Reviews In Short: Magic Mike, Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, The Swell Season & The Sixth Sense 0 1681

Reviews In Short Header - Magic Mike, Hara-Kiri, The Swell Season, The Sixth Sense

Reviews In Short is a new regular feature here on Thoughts On Film which will basically consist of short, paragraph-long reviews of movies I have watched recently, old and new alike, which I didn’t get a chance to review in full. As always feel free to comment with your own thoughts and opinions on each of the films.

Magic Mike

Magic Mike In Short Movie Review

This is the latest offering from director Steven Soderbergh, a man as comfortable working on mainstream fare like the Ocean’s trilogy and Contagion as he is in independent territory like Bubble and The Girlfriend Experience. Soderbergh successfully delivers what he set out to do; make an entertaining, flashy (pardon the pun) movie about male-stripping that knows when to play things for laughs and when not to. It’s let down, however, when it realizes it needs an actual plot and falls back on a cliched crime-related storyline which disrupts the good times set up in the first half. The cast, particularly Channing Tatum (drawing from his own life experiences as a male stripper) and a scene-stealing Matthew McConaughey, make potentially shallow and unlikeable characters amiable. Overall enjoyable but could have been a lot more substantial and memorable had it gone down a less familiar road. 3.5/5

Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai

Hara-Kiri Death of a Samurai In Short Movie Review

After the international success of his samurai masterpiece 13 Assassins (a film which has given him more exposure than almost anything else he’s made) cult Japanese director Takashi Miike delivered what could very well be described as the anti-13 Assassins. A stripped down, subtle and very slow-moving tale of love, honour and respect. The fact that it’s so similar to that film in setting, look and subject might mislead viewers into thinking it’s another samurai fight-filled epic but the slow pace is a refreshing yang to 13 Assassins’ yin. At once devastating, quietly moving and utterly gripping in its own deliberately paced way. Miike once again proving he is a master filmmaker. 4.5/5

The Swell Season

 The Swell Season In Short Movie Review

Fans of the fantastic 2006 doc-like musical Once should definitely seek this out, a documentary made about the success of that film (including its Oscar win for Best Original Song) and more importantly the key relationship between the two leads which blossomed into a real life romance before stalling for various reasons. Presented in crisp black-and-white which lends it an air of classiness and befitting the themes tackled within, The Swell Season is a lovely celebration of both Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova as people (both together and apart) and the wonderful music they make. 4/5

The Sixth Sense

 The Sixth Sense In Short Movie Review

Long before M. Night Shyamalan’s name produced groans and giggles from audiences due to his rubbish output over the last few years (The Happening, Lady in the Water and The Last Airbender chief among them) he was a highly respected director who made great films. The Sixth Sense is undoubtedly his most famous film and it’s remarkable how well it holds up after all these years (13 to be exact). Everyone knows the big twist at the end (even so I won’t spoil it here for anyone who hasn’t seen it) and looking back at it now it’s quite amazing how well it’s woven into the entire narrative, with subtle hints and clues throughout building up the big reveal. Therefore it’s not a cheat and has allowed it to sustain all these years beyond the initial shock. I still think Unbreakable is Shyamalan’s masterpiece but nevertheless this remains a great film for many, many reasons. 4.5/5

That’s it for Reviews In Short. Until next time!

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I'm a freelance film reviewer and blogger with over 10 years of experience writing for various different reputable online and print publications. In addition to my running, editing and writing for Thoughts On Film, I am also the film critic for The National, the newspaper that supports an independent Scotland, covering the weekly film releases, film festivals and film-related features. I have a passion for all types of cinema, and have a particular love for foreign language film, especially South Korean and Japanese cinema. Favourite films include The Big Lebowski, Pulp Fiction and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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Movie Review: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 0 1745

After so many sequels and reboots of the Spider-Man character on the big-screen, from Sam Raimi’s trilogy to the character being integrated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s hard to see what else they can give us that’s going to surprise. But along comes an animated Spider-Man to do just that.

Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is a normal teenager living in New York with his parents; loving but fairly easy-going mother Rio (Luna Lauren) and loving but tough police officer father Jefferson (Brian Tyree Henry) – the film has a surprising emotional through-line in how it depicts the father-son relationship.

One day while doing some secretive spray painting with his chummy uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali), he is bitten by a mysterious spider that gives him special powers from web slinging to a tingling Spidey Sense.

This leads him to eventually crossing paths with Peter Parker (Jake Johnson) who, due to the villainous Kingpin (Liev Schreiber) meddling with a dimension-altering weapon, has inadvertently been sent over from a parallel universe and who eventually teaches Miles how to be Spider-Man.

But it doesn’t stop there;many other diverse versions appear, from Gwen Stacy AKA Spider-Woman (Hailee Steinfeld) to Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage). Sony’s dazzling animation is as fun because it takes that idea and just runs with it.

Anyone can wear the mask seems to be its mantra, conjuring the everyman wonder that drives much of comic book fandom. For all its eye-popping, modern visual aesthetics, it has a refreshingly old-fashioned spirit. The old and the new meet in the film’s beguiling combination of traditional hand-drawn animation and contemporary bells and whistles computer rendering. It’s about as close as a film has come to feeling like a comic book come to life.

Inventive direction by trio Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman works in lovely harmony with the eclectic, knowing style of scriptwriter Phil Lord (The Lego Movie, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) to find quite a miraculous way of breathing new life into the overflowing comic book genre.

From its sharply-written dialogue to its very animation style itself, the film is beautifully self-aware of its own station within the overall comic book movie catalogue, cleverly lampooning yet dotingly celebrating the attributes that have become such a part of pop culture. And yet it feels like it puts its own fiercely original stamp on that most famous of heroes.

This is a visually stunning, innovative incarnation of the character; propulsive in its energetic action, engagingly voiced, tightly written as a heroic narrative arc, reverential yet forward-thinking in its ethos and with a real sense of heart and soul at its core. It’s a particular treat for fans and a welcoming,imaginative embrace for everyone.

8.8 out of 10

Movie Review: Mortal Engines 0 1603

Few films in recent memory have demanded a big-screen as much as this high-fantasy adaptation. It compensates for a fairly generic hero story beating at its heart by giving us good mythologizing and just being the biggest one in the room.

Based on the 2001 young adult steampunk novel series by Philip Reeve, events takes place hundreds of years in the future. Humanity has all but completely fallen thanks to something called the Sixty Minute War, wherein a series of quantum bombs were set off that left the world a wasteland where resources are scarce.

In order to survive and assert dominance, humankind came up with the idea of making the world’s great cities into mobile machines that traverse the land in perpetual war with one another. The larger cities “absorb” smaller surrounding communities whose on-board societies live hearing stories of, and scavenging old tech (iPhones, computers, toasters) from, a time gone by.

Our hero is an enigmatic young woman named Hester (Hera Hilmar) with a scar on her face who boards the almighty London to exact revenge against leader Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving), whom she blames for the death of her mother. There she meets wide-eyed Tom (Robert Sheehan) who, after they are forced out into the wilderness, band together in a larger fight.

The idea of mechanised cities roaming the earth is a bold concept indeed, one that that takes sometime to convince. But it gets there after an iffy warm-up act thanks to a nice,tangible sense of world-building (despite its CGI-heavy aesthetic) and an eye-popping epic scale.

The film’s greatest strength is the sheer size of it; these humungous mechanical cities with ever-moving parts and on ground-shaking wheels are a sight to behold. It’s a spectacle that does a lot of the heavy-lifting, so to speak, as the quest that propels the story forward leans on the familiar and doesn’t have a great deal of chemistry to speak of between the two leads; Sheehan has a fairly thankless, put-upon role compared to Hilmar’s more action-packed one.

Directed by first-timer Christian Rivers – a former storyboard artist talent nurtured by the film’s long-time developing producer/co-writer Peter Jackson – it also solidly works on its own terms as an escapist yarn propped up by an imaginative and intriguing mythology that feels lived-in and “believable” as far as these things go.

It has flaws to spare, not least an over reliance on a pedestrian hero arc bolted onto a quite standard adventure story. But it’s fairly rewarding in its sense of immersion in a well-designed world and a sense of towering scale that reminds us why the big-screen is referred to as such.

6.1 out of 10