While a 65% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes suggests a movie should be checked out, sometimes you wonder why the score isn’t higher. Allied, the Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, The Walk) World War II love story set in both Casablanca and London about two intelligence officers from opposite sides of the world says a lot. The movie, set in both Casablanca and London, has been loosely referred to as Mr. and Mrs. Smith (because of Brad Pitt) meets Casablanca. While I understand the reference, this is far from the truth. I was not too fond of either of these other movies. Casablanca is one of the greatest movies of all time (yawn), but I really enjoyed Allied.
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Category Archives: Marion Cotillard
Two Days, One Night (2014)
While I am not the biggest fan of foreign language films, I am the first to admit that when a foreign movie is excellent, you get to the point where you don’t even notice you are reading subtitles anymore. You become so gripped by the film that it’s not just a great foreign film you are watching…but rather it’s a great film. However, on the flip side, when a foreign film is terrible, it tends to drag and drag and drag. I think part of that reason is that you’ve tuned out the movie so much that you have no idea where you are in the film when you do glance back. As a result, it becomes a dreadful movie experience. I feel that almost all foreign films I watch are based on recommendations. Rarely will I be perusing Netflix and seeing a movie and adding it to my queue because it’s a “foreign movie.” I am far more likely to eliminate a film in subtitles than I am to entertain it. As a result, I rarely find a foreign film to be mediocre. I usually end up either liking the movie a ton of feeling like I just wasted two hours of my life. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule, and that is exactly what Two Days, One Night is. It is a movie that is mediocre in every sense. It had nothing to do with it being a foreign film. Had it not had subtitles, it would have been equally mediocre.
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The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Christopher Nolan’s (Inception, The Prestige) last chapter in his Batman franchise is the exciting but imperfect The Dark Knight Rises. This is an excellent movie and successfully concludes the best trilogy I’ve ever seen. However, if you go in with the idea that it will be better than The Dark Knight, you will be disappointed. With Hedge Ledger’s to die for performance as the Joker, The Dark Knight is as close to a perfect movie as you will get. It holds a place on my Top 10 Movies of All-Time list. The Dark Knight Rises is very ambitious, a little too ambitious. At 2 hours and 45 minutes, you’d think they have plenty of time to tell its story and conclude the franchise, but there is so much to the story, and rushing its development and racing to its conclusion would not have resulted in a successful movie. This is one of those movies where a review such as mine won’t persuade you to see it or not see it. You most likely have it in your head that you will either see this movie or not. So why do I write it? Because I committed myself to reviewing every film that will be on my Top 10 list at the end of the year. I am very, very confident there will not be ten other movies released in 2012 that will be better than The Dark Knight Rises.
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