This is quite a film.  It’s graphic and not for the faint of heart, but nothing here is gratuitous.  This film is about something.  See it.  It provides no easy answers.

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What a romp. Chloe Moretz steals the whole damn film. (No surprise why she’s now got more film offers than any other actress in Hollywood.) Turn off your critical faculties, suspend your disbelief from the top branch of the highest nearby tree, then sit back and let it happen.

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I enjoyed the hell out of this film. Proof that good actors and an engaging script don’t need much of a budget. One twist was easy to spot, one took me by surprise but was nicely set up. Well worth a rental. Really.

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For popular music fans, even if you aren’t a Nilsson fan (I am). A singer-songwriter whose voice was like a musical instrument. He wrote the sublime (“Without Her”) and the ridiculous (“Put de Lime in de Coconut”) before the rock lifestyle drove him off a cliff. I learned from the film that “One” (covered by Three-Dog Night) was inspired by a busy signal on his phone. (You can hear the D-minor chord going chink-chink-chink with the same meter.) Now THAT’s cool.

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She’s in her 70s and has had so much plastic surgery that only her lower lip has any genuine mobility. But her energy… sometimes I think I’m driven, but I’m a slug in a beer puddle compared to this old battle ax. (I don’t mean that as a pejorative. She’s an indefatigable warrior who’s been through a lot of battles and still takes no prisoners.)

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Am I missing something? Is there some Hollywood good-ol’-boy thing going on that ignited all the praise? Because I watched without FF-ing once, and after the film I don’t feel I know one more thing about Mark Zuckerberg than I did before. A cast of completely undeveloped characters. This is the great screenplay the reviewers are crowing about? Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t hate it. But I didn’t find any reason to call it best film of the year.  The low FF is because it’s a talking heads film and I didn’t want to miss any revelations. Unfortunately, there were none.

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Am I a wimp for getting all puddley at the end? I mean, come on, they’re toys! And they’re not even =real= toys, they’re animated!  Another amazing job by Pixar in giving more depth to their animated characters than many live actors can achieve.

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A very pleasant surprise.  A fascinating premise that takes some unexpected twists.  A very noirish turn at the end.  The less you know about it in advance, the better.

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The real-world scenes were a bit slow, but things picked up once we got down the rabbit hole.  I loved the look of the film and Depp’s take on the Hatter.

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What a pleasant surprise. I didn’t FF this once. Supposedly based on a true incident, it shows how a single error in judgment can set a disastrous scenario into motion. And of course that’s compounded by subsequent errors. No villainy behind it, just incompetence. And sometimes that’s worse. Denzel Washington showcases his chops in an understated performance as a laid-back, affable engineer who steps up when the situation calls for heroic action. See this. Really.

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