#FF24 Blog post: Film Fight 2024: November is now up

#FF24 Kneecap was surprisingly great. About a hip-hop trio who rap in Irish, it's silly and fun, visually inventive, and well-paced throughout. I didn't expect much and it massively overdelivered - even if the Fassbender plot was a bit much. Very good.

#FF24 Gladiator 2 is a bit too much of a retread. Mezcal is great as the lead, but his journey follows pretty much the same arc as the original. Washington is fantastic - but is the only fresh injection of energy. Everything else is stale. Okay, as an imitation.

#FF24 Conclave is about a Papal conclave frought with drama. Fantastic performances throughout, and each of the main threads keeps things twisting nicely - if a little melodramatically. The final twist is silly and heavy-handed, but I can't say I minded much. Good.

#FF24 Time Cut is a somewhat generic time-travel/killer film, very similar to one from last year. A girl tries to prevent her sister's murder but in doing so causes ripples. You'll see basically everything coming and won't really care about what happens. It's fine, not terrible

#FF24 Caddo Lake is one to see cold. Ostensbily about a young girl missing in a swampy lake, it quickly becomes clear something else is happening. Slow, methodical, and does a great job of slowly revealing the back half. Very good.

#FF24 Heretic is a fine piece of psychological horror. Grant is clearly having a great time as the antagonist, and is delightful in the role. Keeps the tension up. It nearly fumbles in the end (and in a handful of shots of a maze), but I think it just about pulls it off. Good.

#FF24 My Old Ass is a bit shapeless, and takes a long time to go nowhere. I didn't care about anything that happened and it all seemed a bit obvious - and dull. The central romance didn't work for me, which is probably why I didn't enjoy this much. Skip.

#FF24 Blog post: Film Fight 2024: October is now up:

#FF24 Strange Darling is a strange but well structured movie. We start in the middle, and jump backwards and forwards through multiple chapters - that couldn't really be told in any other order. It doesn't quite know when to end, but the journey is well worth it. Good.

#FF24 Woman Of The Hour is a bit of a mixed bag. It's a weird framing (killer on a dating show) of what would have been a better film if told in a more straightforward way. There are moments of levity and moments of well-earned tension, but it's all a bit odd. Okay.

#FF24 Brothers is proof a great cast can make a bad film. Ostensibily a comedy, I don't think I laughed once. The plot is forgettable and the characters are flat - nothing that happened was particularly interesting. Avoid.

I was 9 years old when this aired and it was absolutely terrifying.

Oh man, The Substance hits @mubi on Halloween. You’re all in for quite a treat. #youareone

It’s really been 10 years since we first saw actual cannibal Shia LaBeouf.

@kenwarner @skamille Text to audio isn’t transformative - in a practical or legal sense. Getting an AI to do the transformation isn’t any different to paying a voice actor to read it. Copyright matters - and just taking someone’s work and republishing it is kinda off.

@simonw This is one of the few loops I’ve done with LLMs (manually) in less subjective coding that I think make a lot of sense. It’s like ping-pong pairing with an indifferent genie. It’ll sometimes write good stuff, sometimes garbage. You can fix it by writing better tests.

#FF24 It's What's Inside mixes a simple sci-fi/horror premise with the jealousy of influencer culture. You can very quickly see the possibilities, and the movie has a lot of fun with the what-ifs. It overcomplicates the ending, with too many expositional twists. Fun.

#FF24 Speak No Evil is a secluded horror about a family who go somewhere they shouldn't. McAvoy's shifting accent aside, it keeps the tension high, constantly letting you know that things aren't right, but not stepping back. The ending is a little weak, but doesn't spoil. Good.

#FF24 The Platform 2 is similar to the (very good) original but with some twists. Here the focus is more on doctine, belief, and zeal, than the slightly more random chaos of the original. I wouldn't watch them back to back, but both are worth seeing. Solid.