[JonE(vil)]

Tootsie 1982.
A hard to work with actor dresses up as a woman.
Dustin Hoffman is the lead as a troublesome actor who argues with directors. When a female friend doesn't get a role on a soap opera tv show, he auditions with the idea of just getting enough money to fund his friends play.
Kinda dated, but still very funny comedy with alot of laugh out loud moments. Hoffman plays the arrogant actor and the straight edged woman very well. With a good supporting cast and well written plot, it never lags or gets dull.

[JonE(vil)]

The killing of a chinese bookie. 1976.
7/10
With the main character a strip club owner, it follows him as he travels to a poker game and runs up a massive debt. Slow crime drama that has multiple long scenes in one location. It produces a gritty character drama that could be for some quite dull and lifeless. There is a growing tension as the mob pressure him to kill the bookie. No dramatic action provides the film with a steady pace and a grounded feel for a film peppered with intense and airy characters.

[JonE(vil)]

Posetitel Muzeya (Visitor of a museum.) 1989. Russia.
6/10
Surreal horror about a man who has four weeks holiday from his job in the city, so he goes to a industrial dump by the sea to visit a museum that can only be accessed at low tide for seven days.
The film starts well enough, he takes a room at a house and the plot goes on with him getting ready for his trip.
Visually, the film is very dark. Lit sparsely and with red lighting. After a while he gets in with a bunch of outcast nutters that have their own church and goes completely nuts.
With a grating soundtrack of grinding scrap metal noise, the film takes itself seriously at all times, with some pretty amazing locations. But its a arthouse film for fans of slow depressing drama.

[JonE(vil)]

The manchurian candidate. 1962.
9/10
Excellent political thriller about a ambitious wife of a U.S. senator, who uses her son to gain power.
The plot explains right from the start how the army veteran is corrupted, then it follow a series of characters. One being a major who realizes something is wrong via nightmares hes having. The others are the war heros mother and her husband, (war heros step father senator.) Not a slow cooker film, but one that has to be paid attention to. A classic film that, it could said, 'exposes' a level of deceit and manipulation on behalf of the ruling class.

[JonE(vil)]

What is buried must remain. 2022. Lebanon.
6/10
Found footage in a haunted house.
Two blokes and woman go to a house with cameras to 'spend the night'. Typical set up, things get creepy quick.
Decent horror that sets up the characters and uses a house that has narrow hallways and lots of rooms. Gets a little wayward when it stops being seen from their perspective for a while as a forth character is introduced. When it picks back up with them it develops that 'legend' of the house nicely.

[JonE(vil)]

La grande vadrouille (Don't look now...were being shot at.) 1966. France.
8/10
Comedy set in WW2 about a a crew of pilots shot down, but with the help of some slightly unwilling at first frenchmen escape.
Laughable comedy with a two hour run time. The pace kinda slows after the one hour mark, and it did feel a bit drawn out, but the humour and physical aspects of it still shine through. Alot going on as is constantly has 'situations' where they get caught, break out, get chased, escape.

[JonE(vil)]

Touch of evil. 1958.
7/10
A bomb goes off on the american side of the side of the Mexican border. Two cops look to find to did it.
Good psychological drama written and directed by Orsen Wells. I watched that version not originally released by the studio, and tried to restore his original vision.
Two cops with very different styles try to solve a case. Dramatic without too much tension and a slow cooker plot. Wells being a large imposing figure gave a sense of menace being the 'bad cop'.
His choice of stylistic shots his added to the overall experience, and can be seen used by directors in years to come.

[JonE(vil)]

Гадкие лебеди (The ugly swans) 2006. Russia.
7/10
From the director of Visitor of a museum, this film is a surreal fantasy.
A school for gifted children run by a group of hooded mutants is surrounded and eventually poisoned by society.
Darkly light, the film has a plot of sorts. A teacher, sent there by the UN has a daughter at the school. No action or tension, just a lot of strangeness. Could be seen as weird mess or as how humans react to things that they don't understand.

[JonE(vil)]

Alien romulus. 2024.
3/10
​A young group board a ship in space, reboot the systems which activate the facehuggers.
The 7th film in the series. This one with actors whose parents wouldn't have either been alive, or still in single digits when the original came out.
Takes plot points of the first film and adds action elements from the second. This works well enough but the characters just come across as a paper thin, hard to say weather its a shit script or just young inexperienced actors. For the most part they are annoying.
​Sadly forgettable entry in a series whose best films were last 30 odd years ago.

[JonE(vil)]

Hijack 1971. South Korea.
8/10
A young bloke hijacks a passenger aircraft in the hope of getting a huge reward when it lands in the North.
Based on a true story, it opens with a hijacking that lands in North Korea, 1969. The instigator is rewarded by the state.
Decent thriller that has all the hallmarks of good S.K. drama.
The minor characters are simple but believable, the plot centers mostly on the co pilot and hijacker. Most of the film is on the plane, and it does a good job of maintaining a sense of a confined space. Some cgi but it works for the main part. The ending feels a little dragged out, but still a decent watch.