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Movies You’ve Watched Lately | OT | - 2026

The Shrouds

Not sure what to think about this one, seems like there's a bunch of ideas, but the movie never commits or dig into any of them. Dialogue is weird, doesn't feel like characters talking, more exposition/concept dumps.
Started really interesting and then kind of went nowhere I feel.
The score is worth mentioning since it's really good, it's by same guy who did Crimes of the Future, a movie I really like.

I'd give it a tentative 5/10, worth watching if you like Cronenberg I guess.
 
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★★★★★ / Always an orange cat
 
Watched one battle after another on HBO Max.

i enjoyed it even though its pure commie slop retardation
 
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Ghost Busters - I rewatch this once in a while and it's awesome.

Die hard - Rewatched it during x-mas. Excellent, as everyone knows.

Wake Up Dead Man - For me, it's the weakest of the saga, but still fun to watch.
 
The Big Sleep (1946), directed by Howard Hawks

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A barely comprehensible plot rendered irrelevant by Bogey deftly maneuvering through each scene and quipping 30 different innuendo laden lines a minute. The entire population of Los Angeles is either trying to kill him or is an implausibly beautiful woman he flirts with, from book shop employees to cab drivers. Hawks distills the essence of noir here with another winner. Bogart and Bacall fell in love in real life, too, making the pairing even more effective on screen.
 

This was a rewatch and it was just as good as I remember and maybe even better. Relentlessly intense from start to finish.

That descent into obsession and vengeance was very well done. I watched that Taxi scene several times, so brutal.

I'm rewatching The Man From Nowhere next
 
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The Shrouds

Not sure what to think about this one, seems like there's a bunch of ideas, but the movie never commits or dig into any of them. Dialogue is weird, doesn't feel like characters talking, more exposition/concept dumps.
Started really interesting and then kind of went nowhere I feel.
The score is worth mentioning since it's really good, it's by same guy who did Crimes of the Future, a movie I really like.

I'd give it a tentative 5/10, worth watching if you like Cronenberg I guess.

I love Cronenberg but his films can be hit or miss for me. I wasn't that big a fan of The Shrouds either

Is it me but do Lynch and Cronenberg look alike?
 
They do, but Cronenberg looks even more like the actor in The Shrouds which I think was intentional since the movie is driven by his own grief.

I always like seeing Cronenberg movies, but I don't love a lot of them. I think my favorite is Crimes of the Future, it's a low rated one, but I love its vibe and the cast.
 
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They do, but Cronenberg looks even more like the actor in The Shrouds which I think was intentional since the movie is driven by his own grief.

I always like seeing Cronenberg movies, but I don't love a lot of them. I think my favorite is Crimes of the Future, it's a low rated one, but I love its vibe.

Well when it comes to Cronenberg my favorite of his is Eastern Promises. He has a very interesting filmography and I noticed I mostly like his horror stuff more. As for Crimes of the Future, I really loved the concept of it but I wish it was explored more. I think it would have worked better as a Sci Fi Horror Series. People not feeling any pain and people evolving to eat plastic was such an interesting concept I wish he did more with it personally

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Resident Evil Death Island: B

I watched this last night and really enjoyed it. As a huge fan of the franchise, it was awesome seeing multiple protagnists from different games team up to take down a threat. And yes they really leaned into the fanservice with this one when it comes to the females. Especially Jill Valentine. They constantly showed off her cleavage. Not complaining but it is refreshing to see this in a modern film. One of the villain henchmen is a woman who wears a skin tight wetsuit that shows off her cleavage. As a straight guy, I really apperciated it. The action itself was pretty good and one of my favorite sequence was Jill Valentines and Lean Kennedy teaming up to taken a bunch of Lickers. The story itsef and the villain motivation were dumb but the film was a really fun watch
 
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Resident Evil Death Island: B

I watched this last night and really enjoyed it. As a huge fan of the franchise, it was awesome seeing multiple protagnists from different games team up to take down a threat. And yes they really leaned into the fanservice with this one when it comes to the females. Especially Jill Valentine. They constantly showed off her cleavage. Not complaining but it is refreshing to see this in a modern film. One of the villain henchmen is a woman who wears a skin tight wetsuit that shows off her cleavage. As a straight guy, I really apperciated it. The action itself was pretty good and one of my favorite sequence was Jill Valentines and Lean Kennedy teaming up to taken a bunch of Lickers. The story itsef and the villain motivation were dumb but the film was a really fun watch
I liked this one too. It's dumb but fun.

Now do Welcome to Raccoon City lol
 
The Choral - 2/5 Supposed to be a period piece about a British choir performance prior to WW1, but all the young characters run around being extremely forward for the early 1900. One example a girl breaks up with a guy and then later they meet again he ask her for hand service, and she does it. It makes no sense.

Frackam hall - 2/5 - Dumb Downton spoof. The Tolkien running gags are funny, but everything else is awful. Damien Lewis should have to make this crap.
 
Life of Pi

Such a great movie. Love the message and the ending never fails to move me to tears. Only the actor of the main characters is a bit... meh. But from what I see it was his very first movie so one has to give him some slack.
 
Sew Torn - 3/5 weird movie about possible outcomes. Like a thread. I hated it at first but was satisfied by the end.

Tapawingo - 2/5 trying to capture napoleon dynamite vibes. it does not.

A big Bold Beautiful journey - 4/5 - about life and love and really made by the leads of the films. An interesting look at a life.
 

3/5
quiet neat little character story of people just sitting and talking and not talking at times.
Peter Dinklage has been a bit controversial from the Snow White thing, but that aside, the man can act and the way he seems to command the scene is strong. Even if in this one he plays someone that just wants to be left alone.
 

Just genuinely bad.

I honestly can't remember the last time I watched a film where this much hinges on everything breaking perfectly right. Coincidence after coincidence is stacked so neatly on top of each other that any sense of credibility just evaporates. It never feels clever. It feels convenient.

These characters are celebrity magicians. Their biggest heists were executed publicly through massive, high profile stage shows, broadcast and talked about everywhere. Their identities as the performers behind those spectacles are widely known within the world of the story

And yet somehow… nobody recognizes them. At all. The film asks you to ignore logic at every turn

And then there's the chateau scene, where they all try to outdo each other with magic tricks. It's supposed to be charming or impressive, I guess but it just comes off pointless

 
So sad that all of these tricks are just CGI...
Jup. Just digital effects doing the heavy lifting. For a movie about magicians that's kind of unforgivable

There's no skill, no craft and no misdirection. Watching a 'magic' movie where nothing actually could happen in real life completely kills the illusion
 
Watched 9½ weeks

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Interesting movie. Great compositions. Seems like the precursor to 50 shades of gray. Artistic and more grounded in a sense.

The book/memoir is supposed to be more dark than the adaptation.
 
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Jup. Just digital effects doing the heavy lifting. For a movie about magicians that's kind of unforgivable

There's no skill, no craft and no misdirection. Watching a 'magic' movie where nothing actually could happen in real life completely kills the illusion

What makes stage magic so fun is seeing something impossible and knowing it was done by sleight of hand and we're simply fooled.

But these movies take it so much further that a bunch of stage magicians become indistinguishable from wizards in fantasy books/movies. We expect Penn & Teller but the movie turns them into Potter & Dumbledore.
 
After completing the new audio book, I watched Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets again.

Hated it back when it released because of how fast they went through the events (yes, I was stupid) but grew fond of it over the years. Brannah as Lockhart is probably (aside Snape) the best cast of the entire series. He nails the character.
 

Just genuinely bad.

I honestly can't remember the last time I watched a film where this much hinges on everything breaking perfectly right. Coincidence after coincidence is stacked so neatly on top of each other that any sense of credibility just evaporates. It never feels clever. It feels convenient.

These characters are celebrity magicians. Their biggest heists were executed publicly through massive, high profile stage shows, broadcast and talked about everywhere. Their identities as the performers behind those spectacles are widely known within the world of the story

And yet somehow… nobody recognizes them. At all. The film asks you to ignore logic at every turn

And then there's the chateau scene, where they all try to outdo each other with magic tricks. It's supposed to be charming or impressive, I guess but it just comes off pointless



A cohesive plot was an illusion.
 
Lost Horizon 2025 - 0/5 - Probably the worst movie I will ever see. South African made for TV camp. The plot is nonsensical. The acting is awful. Dialog terrible. You should watch it.
 
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Lost Horizon - 0/5 - Probably the worst movie I will ever see. South African made for TV camp. The plot is nonsensical. The acting is awful. Dialog terrible. You should watch it.

Whew. For a moment I thought you mean Frank Capra's Lost Horizon from 1937. That movie is a classic IMO. Loved it.

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Just came back from Hamnet. It's a good film on average, but one which veers between some extraordinarily powerful scenes, anchored by astonishing performances from Jessie Buckley and the boy who plays Hamnet, and others which were leaden and obnoxiously heavy-handed. It's a very solid 7/10, at its best pushing a 9 and its worst scenes going sub-average. All the child actors were very good but as mentioned, the boy who played Hamnet was truly exceptional, and there's a scene between him and his sister at the midpoint which is incredibly powerful and the high point of the whole film. I'd read that the ending was a real gut-punch but unfortunately the film's worst instincts towards hyper-literal, treacly American sentimentalism (plus some extremely on-the-nose foreshadowing) made it more eye-rolling than emotional. The worst part is that the scene almost immediately preceding it, which plays out Hamlet confronting his father's ghost, works brilliantly, observing the play from an alternative point-of-view and bringing emotional catharsis without labouring the point.

That's the trend throughout, alternating between scenes which are content to let the story and the acting convey the themes, trusting the audience's intelligence to pick up on them, then others which go in completely the opposite direction. The references to Shakespeare's oeuvre outside Hamlet are similarly inconsistent in their success: Agnes being considered the daughter of a witch for her family's deep connection to nature and allusions to premonition could have been atrociously obnoxious had they not been woven into the story relatively smoothly, instead giving a little esoteric flavour to a drama otherwise played straight. On the other hand, the scene in which Shakespeare recites the 'to be or not to be' solilioquy is about as bad as it gets, one of those 'THIS IS WHAT INSPIRED THE FAMOUS THING YOU KNOW' scenes which are both patronising and self-important.

It's still a good film overall, with a number of tremendous performances - Mescal is the weak link because he struggles to convey much when subtler emotion is required, unlike Buckley's amazingly deep performance, but when the emotions get bigger, he plays it very well - and the good-to-great scenes outnumbering the bad ones. It's such a shame it really couldn't let itself trust the audience more - when I saw Spielberg and Sam Mendes named as producers, it suddenly made sense how the film's worst moments ended up as emotionally unsophisticated indelicate as they are - because when it does, it works very, very well. A few thoughtful cuts could have made the world of difference, instead I came away frustrated at not having liked it as much as I wanted to be able to.
 
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Creature from the Black Lagoon

The final monster film from the Universal Classic Monsters collection box was also one of the last monsters Universal released, this film came out in 1954, over twenty years after Dracula and Frankenstein. There was a short time back then when studios released films in 3D and this was one of them. The Blu-Ray even has a stereoscopic 3D version available, so I watched that.

The film is quite clumsy and predictable when viewed today, and doesn't really have enough story for the 1 hour and 20 minutes of it's runtime. I have to give them a credit though, as this was one of the first "man in a rubber suit" monsters on film, as well filming underwater scenes with 3D rigs back then. But as a movie, it's very by the book monster movie. Not bad, but not great either.
 


Last night I watched Giant, the Prince Naseem Hamed biopic, or more accurately, a film about the relationship between Hamed and his trainer, Brendan Ingle. The focus is split between them, and arguably leans more toward Ingle, which isn't surprising given that his family were involved in the production.

It's a decent watch. I feel like boxing biopics are kinda like pizza in that the floor for them isn't that low. The limited budget does show at times, particularly in the attempts to recreate the spectacle of some of those fights.

Hamed has criticised it for not being accurate but the film is more balanced about their dynamic than I expected, considering only one side was involved in the production. I assumed it would follow the typical arc of trainer and athlete rising together from humble beginnings, only for the athlete's success and ego to drive them apart, with the trainer cast as the moral centre, having been the one to keep the athlete grounded and true to themselves. While that structure is there, the film is critical of Ingle too, more so than I would have expected given his family's involvement.

For me the most interesting part was at the end where they have a "what could have been" imagined reconciliation and the film makes the point that telling a 7 year old he's going to make millions and should lean into his cockiness to get that success might be good for shaping someone into a boxing star, but not a well-rounded person. The same goes for getting that 7 year old to commit to a long-term financial agreement. But with their real-life relationship not reaching a resolution, the film can only explore that thread in a moment that doesn't actually get to happen.
 
Horror Monkey GIF by Primate Movie


Primate 2026

I watched this insane horror movie I really liked and not many effects they just know when to implement music, the skillful camera work, just right in front of the ape, it was bananas (no point intended) unless your expectations are high you can enjoy this movie.
 
Dracula (1979)

Ot must have been over 20 years since I last saw this movie. It was around 2004 when Van Helsing released and I was interested into anything vampire related. Even rediscovered Castlevania around that time, after not playing it since Super Castlevania IV.

This film is not the best adaption of the book. It's more of a remake of the old Dracula movie with Lugosi, with many similar scenes and ideas. This one takes too much liberties, though: Seward is an old man, Lucy is his daughter, Mina is Van Helsing's daughter, Jonathan Harker is engaged to Lucy instead of Mina etc. Frank Langella was a good cast as Dracula, though.
 
From Russia With Love (1963)

i haven't watched a ton of Bond movies, but this was by faar the best one i've seen. it was basically everything i assumed a Bond movie would be back when i first played the 007 game for Gameboy. it's like if The Spy Who Came In From the Cold was a Bond movie, if that makes sense. also, doesn't hurt that youngish Sean Connery was incredibly hot :o

ranking of Bond as of now:

From Russia With Love > Goldeneye == Goldfinger >> Casino Royale > Dr No > Skyfall > Die Another Day

up next might rewatch Battles Without Honour and Humanity.
 
From Russia With Love (1963)

i haven't watched a ton of Bond movies, but this was by faar the best one i've seen. it was basically everything i assumed a Bond movie would be back when i first played the 007 game for Gameboy. it's like if The Spy Who Came In From the Cold was a Bond movie, if that makes sense. also, doesn't hurt that youngish Sean Connery was incredibly hot :o

ranking of Bond as of now:

From Russia With Love > Goldeneye == Goldfinger >> Casino Royale > Dr No > Skyfall > Die Another Day

up next might rewatch Battles Without Honour and Humanity.
I tried to watch Dr. No, but I found it to be really slow. I do want to get into the old bond movies one day.
 
Watched Toire no Hanako-san from 1995. IMDB calls this "School Mystery", which is dumb. Letterboxd calls this "Phantom of the Toilet", which is more accurate, and personally I find the name hilarious.


Not really sure the best way to classify this one. It's a classic j-horror from the 90s, but the vibe felt more like "Lost Boys" or similar non-scary 80s and 90s horror movies from the US that were made for teens. A few small jump scares here and there, but nothing exactly scary or even that spooky. If nothing else, this was a fascinating slice of life of Japanese grade school culture and customs from the 1990s. The ending was the most Japanese ending ever: the killer gets surrounded by kids and gives up because he knows he can't kill them all.
 
Infinity Pool

2nd watch, still really solid, good concept and cast, Mia Goth is super fun as usual. I find the movie's focus on the "cult" vs the sci-fi "thing" a bit disappointing, there's much more to do with the concept, it's a bit frustrating.
The scene where her character's on the car hood is hilarious.

I wanted more weirdness, more crazy, even though it's already intense, not sure why. 7/10.
 
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025).

I really like Rose Byrne, she's great in both comedies and dramas.

She plays a mother left to her own devices caring for her daughter who suffers from being very picky with food needing a gastro tube to feed her at night.

Her husband is a Cruise Captain who is away a lot and is played almost exclusively on the phone by Christian Slater 😄

People interacting with her are almost always condescending or borderline hostile.
I'm still figuring out if this is her perception or reality.

Anyway if you're emotionally invested in movies like me it gets gradually anxiety inducing but I really liked the ending.

Oh and that hamster bit was great 😆
 
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Knowing 2009

3.5/5

Interesting movie, was fun watching it. Some believable problems in middle, and acting wasn't the best but enjoyed it.

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Dredd 2012

4.5/5

Absolute loved it, great acting. Enjoyed every part of it.
 
Our House

This is a milquetoast, paint by number ghost house movie. There's nothing standing out, but at the same thing nothing egregious about it.
Characters are pretty realistic and down to earth, performances are ok.
5/10
 
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025).

I really like Rose Byrne, she's great in both comedies and dramas.

She plays a mother left to her own devices caring for her daughter who suffers from being very picky with food needing a gastro tube to feed her at night.

Her husband is a Cruise Captain who is away a lot and is played almost exclusively on the phone by Christian Slater 😄

People interacting with her are almost always condescending or borderline hostile.
I'm still figuring out if this is her perception or reality.

Anyway if you're emotionally invested in movies like me it gets gradually anxiety inducing but I really liked the ending.

Oh and that hamster bit was great 😆
I really want to see this. The plot and trailer reminds me of A Serious Man, which I like a lot.
 
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025).

I really like Rose Byrne, she's great in both comedies and dramas.

She plays a mother left to her own devices caring for her daughter who suffers from being very picky with food needing a gastro tube to feed her at night.

I really wanted to like it, but found it so-so. I'd rather rewatch Zulawski's "Possession" (1981).
 
Watched First Blood again yesterday.

One of the few films that refuses to get old. Probably because of the short run time and the phenomenal ending. One of the greatest in movie history.
 
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