The thread for movies that aren't going to get their own thread but are still in theaters

I’ll enthusiastically second Coherence. I don’t think I’ve seen After Midnight, because the reviews scared me off.

After Midnight is an acquired taste I’ll say that for sure however there is “a moment” at the end that for me made it entirely worth it.

Coherence was really good once it got going. That film was definitely out of the Twilight Zone playbook.

Hadn't heard of After Midnight but it's on Hoopla so just added that. Will check it out this weekend.

Did end up watching Resolution after posting. And did enjoy it but not as much as the other films. For me it was the weakest of the bunch but still had plenty of good moments.

It also offered a nice bit of deja vu for me at the start of the film. There's a scene where Chris is on the deck of the run down house shooting at birds that don't exist. I swore I saw that house before and a similar/same scene of some guy shooting from the deck. I almost stopped watching figuring that I did see it already and it must have been so bad that I forgot the rest of the film.

Was only later that I read on IMDB that those characters appear in The Endless, like you mentioned BadKen. So now I have to watch The Endless again since it's been awhile. Very neat connection.

It was probably mentioned in this thread, or the Hulu one, but Palm Springs is another film similar to these but more of a dark comedy with heavy sci-fi elements. It's the one with Andy Samberg living the same day over and over. Other than a bit of cheating at the end with the timeline rules it was pretty solid.

Watched After Midnight but didn't care for it. There wasn't enough for me to grab on to. Particularly that there was no explanation for was going on with the monster - like nothing. I don't mind keeping some things to imagination but not everything. I just needed a few crumbs to chew on. And didn't care much for the relationship with the boyfriend and girlfriend. The guy was pretty much a jerk. The only scene that I really did enjoyed was the dinner scene at the end. There was some really nice moments with all the characters throughout the whole dinner but it came too late. Then of course it was over right after that. So a thumbs down for me.

But I did watch another one of this actor/directors film called Tex Montana Will Survive! (Prime). This one is about a YouTube or low budget TV survivalist who is fake as all hell. He gets called out for his fakery and to prove that he isn't faking it he heads out to the middle of the woods, alone, to prove he can survive for 30 days using the skills he's shown on his show. But gets lost and can't get out of the woods.

It's a dark comedy. And the actor is channeling Jack Black throughout most of the film. But I laughed quite a bit. Some really funny ad-libbing from the actor/director.

Watched Minari and liked it. Didn't know much about the film before watching it. Came onto my radar for the controversy of it being labeled a foreign film. Its a film about a Korean family trying to make a living in America by staring at baby chicken butts and running their own farm.

Pretty much the apple pie of American movies so I wouldn't call it a foreign film. Foreign language maybe since half of it is in Korean. You will need to know how to read to enjoy the movie. It is a easy read for those fearing subtitles.

I think the only downside for me was the ending. The ending wasn't bad just not connected well.

Space Sweepers has a storyline a child could have written but has a sense of glee that really carries the film through and was really very fun to watch. It also uses every language under the sun at times (well OK it doesn't, but there's Thorin Oakenshield's gravelly English, the core Korean cast and then a host of minor characters speaking everything from French, Spanish, Russian, Danish, Arabic and a load of others) - which was a really interesting idea and the film pulled it off really well. The characters could all understand each other because of a universal translator device, it just didn't translate for the viewer beyond Subtitles. It does make watching the dubbed version a little redundant though.

I can see some people probably won't like it, but I thought it's charms overcame it's limitations.

I thought Space Sweepers was a great watch. No stress, just a nice simple story and plot.

Watched Space Sweepers and liked it. Fun would be the right word. However, it was to long and badly edited. The basic story is simple but there is a lot of fluff that might get people lost. If you liked Flying Earth this is a much better movie.

So Flying Earth was pretty bad?

Baron Of Hell wrote:

If you liked Flying Earth this is a much better movie.

Did you mean the Chinese movie Wandering Earth?

OG_slinger wrote:
Baron Of Hell wrote:

If you liked Flying Earth this is a much better movie.

Did you mean the Chinese movie Wandering Earth?

Yeah Wandering Earth. Placing big rockets on the planet and flying it through space movie.

I enjoyed it well enough, just like the unrelated TV series that featured activating big rockets on multiple planets and flying them through space.

Watched a lot of movies this weekend including watching Eurovision: Fire Saga for the second time since its release. I loved that movie when I first saw it (I legitimately teared up at the end), but I thought it was possible that my response was because of seeing a decent movie 3 months into a depressing pandemic.

I’m happy to report that the movie is still great, especially every scene with Dan Stevens and his ridiculous Russian accent.

Freaky is rentable for $6 now. Been looking forward to renting this!

The Wandering Earth is great not just because it's audaciously aspirational, but also as a vignette of Chinese culture. I've loved seeing lots of Korean stuff get into the mainstream in recent years, like Kingdom, Seoul Station, and Train to Busan, as much for how they implicitly or explicitly demonstrate their cultures as for their genre content.

Liu Cixin's "The Three-Body Problem" is also built on Chinese social principles. Very good series.

Yoon Ha Lee's "Machineries of Empire" is Korean, I guess, but it's fantastic. Bizarre and fascinating by turns.

And Ken Liu, the principal translator of Chinese SF in the US, is making a splash in the pool with his own fiction.

Watched Willy's Wonderland which is Nick Cage movie about animatronics killing people like the Banana Split movie. Its very wacky, not serious, and pretty fun movie. Obviously inspired by Five Nights at Freddy's.

I didn't know anything about this movie before seeing it. Didn't even know Cage was in it. The tone of this movie is Evil Dead 2. Thinking back on it some of the camera work was the same. One thing I didn't like were that a couple scenes had blinking lights that I found hard to look at.

minor spoiler about the deaths.

Spoiler:

I really liked the death scenes of the monsters,. The people dying wasn't that memorable. They were just over the tall wacky,

Watched Sputnik, a Russian sci fi horror movie about a creature from space that is living in a astronaut. I mostly liked the movie. The creature was cool. The acting was okay. The score was pretty good. The mystery wasn't all that good. My biggest problem was that the subtitles were done poorly. I watched half of it with subtitles then started it over dubbed.

I think it is worth a watch but doesn't hit any new ground.

The Little Things with Denzel, Jared Leto and Rami Malek (first I've seen him in anything).

Watched it over two nights since time is at a premium.

If you're in to non-flashy crime thrillers like The Pledge, check it out.

Top_Shelf wrote:

The Little Things with Denzel, Jared Leto and Rami Malek (first I've seen him in anything).

Watched it over two nights since time is at a premium.

If you're in to non-flashy crime thrillers like The Pledge, check it out.

Saw it too and thought it was pretty good.

Monster Hunter is a bad movie. You might want to go out and see it for the big set pieces but if covid doesn't kill you the movie might. No it isn't worth a $20 rental. I put in hundreds of hours into monster hunter and like the references to it but this isn't monster hunter. This has tanks and helicopters in it. The movie is dumb and long. I was looking at the time thinking it was almost over and still had a hour to go. Oddly enough the meat of the monster hunter ties come in after a hour in.

I never done drugs but wish I did while watching this movie. Don't do drugs unless you are watching this movie.

Freaky is outstanding horror comedy. It’s also available to rent for six bucks now.

Baron Of Hell wrote:

Monster Hunter is a bad movie....I put in hundreds of hours into monster hunter and like the references to it but this isn't monster hunter.

As someone who hasn't played much Monster Hunter, I rather enjoyed it, but it is pretty forgettable. The RPG-ish part of the game loop where you take monster bits to improve your stats wouldn't be engaging to watch, so what you have left is basically the action pieces with the monsters with just enough character development to make the main characters sympathetic. It's not the most complex plotting, nor the most original (you may recognize bits taken from Land of the Lost, Game of Thrones, How to Train Your Dragon, and more), but Tony Jaa and Milla Jovovich work well together, the Palico is fun, Ron Perlman's in there for some reason, and this wasn't pitched as a prestige film of any sort. With expectations in check, I think there's a lot of fun to be had.

Grenn wrote:

Mark Dacascos. Most recently of John Wick 3 fame, I will always remember him as lead in the capoeira movie Only the Strong. Not a good movie, but a fun one.

The real caoperia maestre! I love that movie. Haven't seen it in year.

Kurrelgyre wrote:
Baron Of Hell wrote:

Monster Hunter is a bad movie....I put in hundreds of hours into monster hunter and like the references to it but this isn't monster hunter.

As someone who hasn't played much Monster Hunter, I rather enjoyed it, but it is pretty forgettable. The RPG-ish part of the game loop where you take monster bits to improve your stats wouldn't be engaging to watch, so what you have left is basically the action pieces with the monsters with just enough character development to make the main characters sympathetic. It's not the most complex plotting, nor the most original (you may recognize bits taken from Land of the Lost, Game of Thrones, How to Train Your Dragon, and more), but Tony Jaa and Milla Jovovich work well together, the Palico is fun, Ron Perlman's in there for some reason, and this wasn't pitched as a prestige film of any sort. With expectations in check, I think there's a lot of fun to be had.

Ron Perlman is in it? Oh great, now I have to watch it!

Watched Freaky and it was freaky good. Jason switches body with last girl. Freaky stuff happens, The end. Good movie

Saw The Swordsman (Hoopla) the other night. It's a South Korean take on a samurai film genre. Particularly taking cues from the Zatoichi films where you have a swordsman that's going blind but is deadly as hell. It's really well made and has a decent villain and some henchmen that stand out. Some exciting fight sequences but doesn't break any new ground for the samurai genre. Was enjoyable none-the-less.

Do have to say Hoopla has surprised me with getting some more recent known, but not quite well known, films on there. In the last few months I've watched The Peninsula (semi-sequel to Train to Busan), Synchronic, and After Midnight. And see they have Color out of Space and Sea Fever, which I've seen on other platforms. Plus they had one of my all-time favorite post-apocalyptic films from the 80's which I had forgotten about, The Quiet Earth. I probably hadn't seen in like 20 years.

The downsides to Hoopla are that you can only borrow 10 (?) movies a month, the interface sucks, and the search is downright awful with not returning correct results until you enter in the full title. But I use JustWatch to find movies on there and that works fine. Also I think some of the films are not in HD. Noticed The Swordsman and Peninsula didn't look as clear as they should have been. Oh well it's a free service so can only complain so much.

The number of items you can check out with Hoopla (or Kanopy) depends on your library.
We get 10 items a month with our library while the next county only gets 4 a month.

Hoopla is fantastic overall, because you can also get digital books and audiobooks.

And our library has a great selection of graphic novels and comics too.
I’m able to keep up with Rivers of London comics that way