Arrival. I really wanted to like this but it just didn't work. Villeneuve does a lot of great things here and gets at a lot of big, interesting ideas and themes. It's an ambitious, mature, sci-fi movie but in the end, the plot device he uses is way too contrived to be any good. It's worth watching and I'm sure this thread is going to spend a lot of timing discussing the movie once it's out. 6/10.

The Bad Batch. Ana Lily Amirpour's new movie (she made A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night). There's not a lot of backstory here, but basically certain people have been branded "Bad Batch" or unfit for society so they are released into the desert wasteland in Texas. The film follows a new outcast (Suki Waterhouse) as she attempts to adapt to her new surroundings. Just pointing a camera at her face makes for an interesting movie and Jason Momoa is good as a massive, mostly silent, desert barbarian. Amirpour builds a really interesting world with one particular area that feels a lot like what I assume would happen if Burning Man just lasted too long. There are also a couple of ridiculous cameos, one of which belonged in an entirely different movie. I feel like it's becoming a bit of a theme for me at the festival but this was just another movie where the mood and theme of the film were much stronger than the actual narrative. I left just feeling confused about why the main character makes pretty much any of her decisions in the final third of the film. 6/10.

wait you got to see LaLaLand AND Arrival? Sick brag

Bastogne is my favourite episode of Band of Brothers

Norton was also great in The illusionist and of course Fight Club.

And rounders! Illusionist is a terrible movie.

American history x, Donnie Darko, American beauty, requiem for a dream.

About an hour apart too. I got pretty much everything I wanted to see this year. Paterson is probably the one I most wanted to see that I couldn't make work. About to watch Manchester by the Sea

You should google search the definition of 'terrible'.

What about the above films?

What's their common link!?!? It's a trivia question

Illusionist worse than American history x fo sho

People vs. Larry Flynt is a good underrated Norton movie, he plays the lawyer.

Illusionist is a poor man's Prestige.

Norton was pretty good in Birdman too

Norton plays an excellent "snarky unlikable guy". Not sure I believe much else out of him.

Yi jiu si er (Back To 1942). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2113822/

Set during the Henan Province famine in 1942 that left 3 million dead, two famileis join 10 million other refugees on a gruelling trek to find food and safety.

Facing starvation, disease and air attacks from the advancing Japanese army, their ordeal was unknown to the wider world until American journalist Theodore Harold White made his way to Henan and reported what he saw in Time magazine.

This is an incredible and harrowing story, told well by Assembly director Xiaogang Feng. Well worth a watch if you like sweeping war epics.

Manchester by the Sea absolutely floored me. Casey Affleck is brilliant as a guy who has been crushed by the weight of his past returning home following his brother's death and being forced to confront a lot of those demons. It's at times sweet, funny, and absolutely devastating. 10/10.

Two Lovers and a Bear. I liked this but I think I suffered a little bit from going into it directly after Manchester by the Sea. The story takes place in northern Canada (Nunavut) in a small isolated village. It centers on the relationship between a man who fled to this village to get away from the demons in his past (Dane DeHaan) and a woman who desperately needs to escape from hers (Tatiana Maslany). I guess the ideal location to explore loneliness and love is a setting where there is literally nothing but ice and snow for hundreds of miles in any direction. The film contains a piece of magical realism that I think might have been more distracting than it was useful. 7/10.

I kind of like the Arrival... I think its one of charlie sheenes better performances, of which there are not many.

Its lite sci fi.

primal fear tho

he was ****ing fantastic in death to smoochy which is a criminally underrated film.
and obv he was great as col eric byer of the national research assay group.

I liked it too, fun movie.

The Arrival 2 was a dumpster fire.

Replace the Sheen with Michael Sarrazin? The dude was twice the original characters age.
And the movie takes place two years after the first one,so it's not a plot point to have the guy older.

Only reason I watched it was I had a thing for Jane Sibbett,actually just lanky hot blondes in general.

Loved Jane,but making it thru this crapterpiece,God it was hard.

Norton was awesome in 25th hour imo as was Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

This is such an overrated movie

This probably isn't a popular view, but I'd like to have seen Norton's Hulk in the MCU.

Mark Ruffalo just looks like some random starstruck fan they picked out at ComicCon.

I haven't watched Donnie Darko so you've got me there.

Yep, totally agree.

Yeh what about these movies? Donnie Darko is awesome, American Beauty is a great film (just remove the bag scene please).

Haven't seen RFAD...

Yeh, i didn't like 25th Hour. Was boring as hell.

In Dubious Battle. James Franco's latest directorial project. He's moved on from butchering McCarthy and Faulkner to taking a shot at Steinbeck. I think he'd be much better off if he didn't also make himself one of the leads in all of these movies. I don't think he's completely talent-less behind the camera but Franco just doesn't act like he's in the 1930's. This one was an improvement over the previous two (Child of God and The Sound and the Fury). He somehow puts together a fantastic cast (D'Onofrio, Robert Duvall, Ed Harris) but it suffers a bit from what I'm guessing was a lot of these actors realizing the movie wasn't great and deciding that they were going to over-act to compensate. Too many scenes just have every character turned up to 11. 4/10.

The Headhunter's Calling. Gerard Butler plays a headhunter who is in competition with Alison Brie for a promotion at work. He spends too much time working and not enough time with his family. Then his young son is diagnosed with Leukemia. I'm pretty sure everyone in this thread could write the movie from there. I'm underselling it a little bit as it does have a couple of nice moments and manages to restrain itself from one moment that would have been much too far into manipulation territory. I thought I saw the movie on those tracks and was ready to just leave but it stopped just short. A couple of the moments did get me, and the woman behind me was bawling for a significant chunk of the ending, but I'm going to blame that on still being wrecked by Manchester by the Sea. 4/10.

Christine. This is the first movie this year for me that just didn't work at all. Rebecca Hall plays a small time Florida news reporter in the 70s. She's an emotionally stunted, likely mentally ill though the movie only barely hints at that, 30 year old who can't figure anything out in her life. She acts like a 13 year old in every facet from her relationship with her mother, to her lack of personal relationships, to her behavior at work. But the movie doesn't seem to have any interest in actually exploring any of that. It's just a jumbled mess that leads up to a moment in which we should feel badly for her but instead I was just glad it was over. 1/10.

by who?