Best

(Extended Edition) (As a trilogy: 1/3)

(Extended Edition) (As a trilogy: 2/3)

(Extended Edition) (As a trilogy: 3/3)

every scene is gold. Love Kevin Spacey. Love every one of the separate stories/characters (husband + wife, daughter + neighbour's boy etc). Only critique: wife is overacted; she's *never* likeable. Music's great. Has everything: cringy, funny, sexy, poignant, beautiful, frustrating (treating eachother so badly) etc.

I think it has the best ending to any film ever. It's so depressing. So good. It's one of those films that just gets better and better and better and better then it explodes in your face and grinds to a halt and cuts you off sobbing at the door. And Jack Nicholson (Y) and the 30s aesthetic and soundtrack (Y)

most of the film is plain good. But The ending is absolutely amazing. An ‘escape to the chopper’ scene + ‘alien back on mothership’ scene that's like video-game length: no hold-bars, full length ‘no man left behind’ + alien chase, huge suspense, extremely dramatic, heart pounding, apocalyptic atmospheric scene, intense emotional bond between Ripley + child, expecting tragedy that the ship's already left. Good length of silence, and no overused music: the deafening sirens and explosions *are* its soundtrack: it's great. And love the dirty, fierce heroine (no pretty girl nonsense) – fresh, genuine, passionate. It's also so iconic: I see HL2, Halo, Starship Troopers etc etc *all* get their influence from this. Love the turret defence concept. The marines are overacted though – humour doesn't match the tone of the other actors + Alien 1. Love the dystopia too: bleak wasteland outside, all colonial inhabitants dead, strung up to the alien hive inside (+ that 1 alive boy asking to be killed)

??? WATCH AGAIN technical, cinematic, aural, musical (Thomas Newman!). visual masterpiece. Such intensity: having 1 continuous shot made it feel like a video-game: had all the benefit of feeling like you're there, with no scene breaks or switching camera angles to break the feeling, just relying on excellently planned transitions. And some mastery too: how they got pale makeup on the supporting actor as he's dying in 1 cut stumped me (presumably a well-hidden cut) + the plane crash too!. The variety of scenes was an eye feast *and* felt realistic, which is amazing considering it could have just been mud the whole time (burned out village ruins at night, green countryside + blue sky, swampy no-mans land, dusty artillery mines, singing in the forest etc) and carefully chosen: had lighter moments of stories from home, encountering vulnerable sufferers of the war, silent crossing no-man's land, crying after scrambling over bodies, running through soldiers charging over the top etc -- but because it all felt like 1 shot the intensity remained the whole 2 hours of the film: the light moments felt short because, in real-time, they were! Parts felt like a realistic war-horror movie (on edge). Choosing an unknown actor to play the lead was a fantastic choice -- the film would be whole lot worse if it was Matt Damon running around French countryside. Got scared when I saw big British names: Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong, Andrew Scott; but they rightly gave them minor roles like 1-scene generals. Dirty, gritty, realistic -- death scenes, crying scenes all felt genuine in their British-understated way and not melodramatic; lead character wasn't a superhero but an average man: his weaknesses and limitations you felt like his failure to save the 1st wave, anticlimactically getting told to f off by superior, failing to stealth his way through Germans, his friend being killed just by a stab wound, ends with no sense of triumphalism etc. The pacing was perfect: fast when it needed to be, but slow enough (helped by the 1 continuous shot) that you notice details that felt uniquely captured: the feeling of trudging through soldiers in a trench shows how big the scale of the war effort; the slippy wet mud and steep craters in no-man's land showed how treacherous it was. Like Mad Max -- both in feeling like mostly 1 shot, but also in being mainly action and visuals, not plot or dialogue: was minimal and perfect. No background given: just starts with 2 soldiers kipping by a tree -- beautiful way to begin; no boring + cliche introduction to their boring lives; just starts with the first plot point: assigned a mission. Only small gripes: some bad CGI scenes (rat, jump into river, distant explosions when soldiers go over the top), Dean-Charles Chapman wasn't great (but definitely not awful). And a teeny bit of unnecessary racial diversity: blacks and mixed race and Indian in the BEF?? (at least it _felt_ overrepresented, historically speaking).

??? WATCH AGAIN

(As a series: 1/4)

it's use of emotions is amazing -- the sacrificial love you feel from Catniss to younger sister Primrose is deep and well-acted (surprising for a child actress); the growing sense of dread before the games is palpable; the fear at the unknown of reaching the alien capitol is strong and the anxious drive to succeed and perform as they go on show feels real, the panic as she's chased alone by her laughing aggressors without any cheesy music or glitz; it's intentionally the complete opposite to battle royale, which is superficial (not about the plot; about survival); although, this lacks the sort of singular focus that Battle Royale has as the backstory of the Capitol and the uprising and district 12 home comes back now and again in flashbacks; but this makes the games more meaningful: eg the poignancy when the last competitor to District 12 has his monologue: realising that the game is rigged and he never had a chance to succeed in the first place; he's not the black-and-white bad guy he appears to be. The sound design is brilliant: Catniss going deaf as she walks on stage; hearing silence as the tube closes as she ascends on her platform; starting the match in frenetic silence. Only reason it's not higher is it still somewhat has a Hollywood vestigial feel to it -- you can tell it's from an AAA production company, not an indie cult classic -- some romance and character development feels artificial and shallow. CGI dated. It's very black & white (dystopia, capitol is super rich, district 12 super poor; but that's fine: it's intentionally surreal). Dark/harsh (in a great way): infanticide. I still really don't like the Peter-Catniss romance, but I get that it's an act for the in-film audience. The genius of the setup is that anything that feels artificial works, because they're an artificial environment: they're in a game-setting where the puppet masters pull the strings and bring medicine and start forest fires and dog attacks at the 'perfect' moments.

by the end of Part 2 I'd changed my mind -- this is one of my top fav films. Now wholly onboard with how the romance ends. The ending is so, so gritty and dark I adore it -- it leaves a sick feeling in my stomach because of the despair and brokenness and pain and how reminiscent it is of the tragedies of WW2. Some acting is hit or miss. Eg hit: Katniss cry Primrose

(As a series: 2/4)

(As a series: 3/4)

(As a series: 4/4)

probably Great, not Best, but ahh man, those 00s emotional vibes – the music, the tragedy... although the acting + plot is limited. WATCH AGAIN

desire & lust, grief & regret, religion & apostasy, supernatural & medical – you go from wondering if it's a ‘Christian girl goes bad’ movie to a horror movie to a superhero movie to a crime drama: it's great! You start off hating the dad, then pitying him; pitying the girl then unsure felt so fresh – haven't seen a movie like it. Closest I can describe is Raw + Let the Right One In, and both of those are unique movies in themselves horror + mystery – genuinely no idea what would come next, amazed at each turn v. real acting, no clichés Norwegian indie instead of Hollywood – excellent it's strange and surreal without being off-the-wall – unsettling not outlandish; makes you feel curious and uneasy instead of funny plays with the idea of victim + perpetrator: it's like a very down-to-earth supervillain origins story, except the conclusion is her powers remain hidden within society I love the way it breaks expectation as we wonder how her life will compare to her grandmother's and whether she'll live in regret without Anja ever how he visually + aurally depicts her experience is brilliant too: feeling her seizures and the surreal world she enters when trapped (upside-down pool, snake in her mouth) also use of tech was contemporary, realistic and not eye-roll worthy (were messaging + calling on iPhone and using Wiki + FB, not some cheesy substitute for those) loved these review descriptions: "muted and moody supernatural chiller", ‘an ecstasy of disquiet’, ‘away from the monstrous, toward compassion and understanding’, ‘makes vivid the protagonist’s loneliness and despair’, ‘an unnervingly effective slow-burn, and those with the patience for Trier’s patient accumulation of detail will find it pays off in unexpected ways.’ ---160422 rewatch still brilliant halfway through I was fearing it had lost its charm, since it's a mystery that I know the answer to (well, it's intentionally enigmatic; but I remember scenes at least!), but there's so many parts to it that I thankfully forgot them the build to end is like Chinatown: how it just gets better and better and the 'slow-burn' the reviews describe gets faster and faster at the end, where suddenly lots is being revealed in a short time, and it's a brilliant to end both showing us so much yet leaving so many Qs unaswered and leaving us on that cliff hanger. 80s-inspired soundtrack is fantastic balances symbolic and literal perfectly -- not so artsy fartsy and surreal one can't get a handle on, but not so literal it's boring some really powerful scenes as well: the romance, the baby under ice, the father immolating all beautifully shot love it's slow quietness: not screaming in your face to get your attention

the most brutally real and powerful scene of death, its fear, its guilts, its longing for love and reconciliation, I've ever seen. Strongest Christian film I know. Great acting from Sean Penn – revolutionised my opinion of him as an actor.

---1st time (Great) down-to-earth, serious drama, nice to have different culture (Danish film), well filmed (nice cinematography + shots, Mads could have acted more emotional, didn't like time jump (1 year later) ---2 (Best) so moving: a painfully realistic story of the world turning against an innocent man. All the acting was great, even the children (which is rare, so it felt especially natural)