Wanted to take a minute to recognize this incredible person who had a long, fruitful career with the Coen Brothers, starting with Raising Arizona all the way through to The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and then beyond with their solo films.

He also worked on tons of other films, from The Addams Family, to Twister, to the recent Warcraft movie.

What's especially interesting is his collaboration with the Coen Brothers. Joel and Ethan are famous for planning every last detail of their movies, including the shot composition and even the exact lines spoken in each camera setup, in pre-production (and sometimes even in the scripting stage). Actors would often get the storyboards in addition to their sides (the script pages they have to do on a given day). And the brothers would barely deviate, if ever, from those storyboards.

So I don't think its hyperbole to say J Todd Anderson played a very important role in the Coen Brothers' oeuvre. I'm pretty sure there's at least one, if not several, behind the scenes documentaries that show the Coen Brothers film as compared to their storyboards, and its near identical (I know there's one for Blood Simple, but apparently Anderson did not work on that).

I think J Todd Anderson is not one of those people who will be featured on the Academy Awards In Memorium, but I wanted to make sure at least a few more people knew his name and his contribution to many, many great movies.

In Infinity War Wanda and Vision are hiding out in Edinburgh, Scotland and plan on heading to Glasgow in the morning. While they talk about what they plan on doing there’s an exchange that goes like:

“There’s a train at 10 in the morning.”

“What if we miss it?”

“Then there’s one at 11.”

Which is just not even close to real life. Edinburgh and Glasgow are the biggest cities in Scotland by far and public transport between them is a breeze. Assuming Wanda wanted to go from Edinburgh Waverley to Glasgow Central they put on a train basically every 10 minutes. I can tell you if they really waited an hour to put on a train it would be anarchy.

For me, it's Olivia Colman. She's been in the odd stinker, but every time I see her in something, or I know she's starring in it, I am just absolutely and instantly delighted to see or hear her. She just has a presence about her. Even in some really dark/depressing movies like Tyrannosaur she's just the best part of that movie.

So who is this for you? Good or bad, who do you just delight in watching?

I’m looking for a movie that hits really hard emotionally and leaves you thinking about it for days after watching it.

I want something deeply emotional, meaningful, and thought-provoking — a movie about life, love, relationships, loss, loneliness, or just the complicated side of being human.

Not necessarily a movie that’s simply sad. I want something that makes you feel emotionally connected to the characters and leaves you sitting there in silence after the credits.

Basically, I want a movie that stays with me long after I’ve finished watching it.

To be clear I have nothing new to say about this amazing movie and this has likely been said before of course but I genuinely think this is one of the best animated films DreamWorks has ever made.

What impresses me most is how effortlessly it balances everything. It is funny without constantly undercutting itself, emotional without becoming mawkish, visually gorgeous without feeling like style is compensating for weak storytelling, and it actually gives its characters proper arcs.

Puss confronting his mortality is such a ridiculously strong premise for this character. The film takes this arrogant, larger-than-life guy who has basically treated himself like a myth for his entire life and forces him to deal with the fact that he is scared, vulnerable and very much capable of dying. His panic attack scene in particular is still one of the best depictions of fear I have seen in a mainstream animated film.

And Death is just an absurdly good antagonist. The design, the whistle, the voice performance, the way the film changes atmosphere whenever he appears. He does not need some enormous convoluted motivation. He works because he represents exactly what Puss has spent his life refusing to take seriously.

Then you have Goldilocks (Florence Pugh ❤️) and the Three Bears somehow getting a genuinely touching family story, Perrito being wholesome without becoming annoying, Kitty actually having believable chemistry with Puss, and Jack Horner being allowed to just be an unapologetically hilarious POS.

The animation obviously gets a lot of praise too, deservedly. I love how much more expressive DreamWorks became once studios stopped feeling obligated to chase the same polished pseudo-realistic CG look. The Last Wish has actual visual identity. The action scenes look fantastic because the animation itself is part of the filmmaking rather than just a way of rendering the characters.

It is also one of those sequels that makes the previous films better by association. Nobody needed the second Puss in Boots film to go this hard, but they made one anyway.

I know it was heavily praised when it released, but I still think it deserves to be talked about as one of the defining mainstream animated films of the 2020s rather than simply "that surprisingly great Puss in Boots sequel".

Thought of this game, I think it's a fun exercise, albeit so far I've only 2 examples in mind, but I'm sure there's plenty more.

So, as it says on the tin, movie A's plot with movie B's title. Bonus points of the title switch feels better

My 2 ok examples:

Project hail mary -> the fault in our stars

Amelia (2009) -> Gone with the wind

Keen on some clever ones from all y'all.

I watched this for the first time recently after never even hearing about it before. I thought it was such a fun movie and it really reminded me of The Princess Bride in its humor and adventure. I make the comparison not only because the vibe the movie gave me, but The Princess Bride is one of my movies on constant rotation since it’s something I grew up with.

I was shocked that I had never even heard of Stardust before and am hoping it’s just because my age and the timing wasn’t right when it came out. It feels like this should be one of those classics that people watch again and again if they saw it as kids. Maybe it is and I just don’t know.

Is it?

The movie was a genius work of art, a pure claustrophobic, voyeuristic thriller that wasted no time across its entire runtime. It got me right from the start, never complicated its simple plot, and delivered an amazing climax.

While the sound design unsettled me, the camerawork doubled it. It was incredibly sophisticated. I loved how most of the film played like an actual surveillance tape, someone secretly watching someone else the whole time.

John Travolta and Nancy Allen were both excellent. John Lithgow was menacing, and the ending felt satisfying yet deeply poignant given everything the film built toward.

The movie had an incredible, highly distinct camerawork from De Palma. The use of split-diopter shots clearly served the purpose of two characters thinking at once, the prying, peeping-tom angles slowly built a sense of paranoia and made me feel watched myself, and that revolving oner in Travolta's office left me physically uneasy, almost motion sick, like nothing before. That shot was truly amazing. It deserves to be mentioned separately.

First the camera revolved slowly as if to show another character across the room, turns out, it didn't. It then gradually picked up pace until it nearly blurred most things. The camera was essentially Jack's own mind trying to put everything in its place, until it couldn't, so as he got more and more frantic, the camera did too, until his shock and unease overpowered him until someone else entered the frame. Simply spectacular. My eyes were hurting after the sequence lol.

I'd place this right in the DNA of The Conversation by Coppola. Both films felt extremely similar to me, and I think De Palma had it in mind along with other paranoid thrillers while making this one. Both dealt with surveillance, bugging, voyeurism and isolation. Both leads were true masters of their craft, both stories hinged on sound and its manipulation.

But where The Conversation sat in uncertainty is that Harry Caul's dread stayed internal, we were never sure if the threat was even real, Blow Out externalized it early. Jack was right, the conspiracy was real, people really were trying to silence him, so the horror came from watching a correct read get disbelieved and buried rather than from not knowing what was true at all. The Conversation was more paranoid, this one was more conspiratorial.

And structurally, this was the simpler, tighter film of the two. The Conversation unfolded more like a character study that slowly tightened its grip, while Blow Out was leaner from the jump, a clean, forward driving plot that never lost momentum. The story, despite how it felt, never really leaned on big twists. The narrative just flowed clean and smooth throughout.

Another brilliant thing was the real life events taken as inspiration. I loved how the movie pulled from and blended the mechanics of the JFK assassination with the political cover-up instincts of Chappaquiddick. It fused both into something original and gripping rather than just referencing them.

And that climax was freaking brilliant. The catharsis was bleak but still earned. Jack actually stopped Burke, a voyeuristic psychopath murdering women for sport, dead in his tracks. That was real justice.

But the tragedy underneath it was separate. That his one piece of proof, that scream, ended up stripped of all its meaning, recycled into a C-grade horror flick soundtrack. Real justice on one hand, total erasure of the truth on the other, both true at once. The movie closed all its dead ends. That's what made it a masterpiece.

I usually do not watch these sorta movie and drag my son to it because of our heritage. It is the first completely spoken in a local dialetc ( Teochew ) not cantonese and mandarin to hit the US cinema.

I dont want to give it way too much but the trailer does not do it justice. Its a bit slow in the begning but after 2/3 it will hit you in the gut again and again. Unlike most types of these movies the drama were very restraint and the trauma is revealed as the story unfolds.

This story had so much layers to it I can't stop talking about it without giving to much away. Anways, just wanted to come here and share my experience and if you get a chance i highly recommend going to see it.

Its liteariraly the best movie ive seen in 10 years and im usually a action/thriller guy and not much for these multi generation foreign dram film.