What is The Last Movie You Watched?

[Stavros]

I have seen this film twice and each time it makes me want to read the whole of Howl again, and I also thought the animation worked too in giving the film an edge of fantasy or a dream-like, junk-induced pall to contrast with the sobriety of the court room. Curious that I don't think we ever had a drama on the trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover in the UK.

[Stavros]

Outland (Peter Hyams, 1981)
This is a disappointing attempt to re-locate a western to a mining community on one of the moons of Jupiter, Io. Instead of cattle rustlers of bandits, the villain is the union boss of a large community of miners involved in a narcotics scam -Connery is the Sherrif/Marshal who cleans up the town. Unusual for a film set out there in space, there are no reptilian aliens, no special effects worthy of the name, computing seems to be limited to an early version of skype, and it hosts a large community of workers, cooks and whores where normally space adventures, Star Trek and Star Wars aside, have few people. The curios are James Sikking who headed the SWAT team in Hill St Blues, Steven Berkoff the maverick actor/writer, and Clarke Peters, the British-based American actor from The Wire. Peter Boyle, the union boss, has hair -though it might be false. 4/10 for entertainment value.

[Stavros]

Mystery (Le You 2012)
Le You was the director of a film Suzhou River (2000) that I saw over 10 years ago and which was as disappointing as this film nominally set in Wuhan though some of it was filmed in Shanghai and Beijing. You's films attempt to deal with the impact of modern life on youngish Chinese people, in this case a menage a trois that goes badly wrong when a young woman is killed in a road accident and the police investigation threatens to uncover a difficult secret. The attempt to give this film a sense of realism through a hand-held camera that jerks all over the place is but one irritation in this feeble film, another example of the lack of really interesting films emerging from China.

[Prospero]

"The Great Beauty" Well after all its awards and rave reviews i finally got hold of a DVD copy of this film. To say its the last movie i watched is not wholly true. i watched about 20 minutes and had to turn it off. Maybe it was my mood but it seemed to be god-awful. Self indulgent and vacuous. Beautiful imagery, beautifully shot. But.....

[Stavros]

I don't usually walk out on films or turn them off, and I did soldier on to the end but yes, it is vacuous rubbish. It doesn't even look like the Rome most of us see, and seems at night to have been shot when nobody is on the streets.

[Jimmy W]

The Monuments Men - This George Clooney turd is so bad it doesn't even deserve a review.
Rush - This Ron Howard turd is so bad it doesn't even deserve a review.

[robertlouis]

The Invisible Woman . A film about Ellen Ternan, Charles Dickens' much younger mistress, based on Claire Tomalin's terrific biography.

It's had mixed to poor reviews, but I was determined to see it for three reasons: I'm a huge fan of Dickens' writing and of his huge social impact in Victorian times; secondly, Ralph Fiennes, who directs and stars, made an excellent job of filming Shakespeare's Coriolanus; and thirdly, the showing at York's Cityscreen was followed by a Q&A session with the historical consultant to the film Dr Suzanna Fagence Cooper, a specialist in the role and place of women in Victorian society

The film itself is slow and claustrophobic as Ellen adapts to the cruel reality of her position - Felicity Jones as Ellen is wonderful, luminous and fragile. The other leads, especially the comedy actress Joanna Scanlan as Dickens' cruelly-traduced wife Catherine, are excellent too. It's not a great film, but it's much better than the reviews would suggest.

And Dr Cooper was engaging and deeply perceptive. It was a very worthwhile way to pass a Saturday evening. And on the way out, I suggested to Dr Cooper that Claire Tomalin's biography of Thomas Hardy, The Time-Torn Man, also offered plenty of scope for a movie. Here's hoping.

[SexSlave1972]

I did try...
Gallowwalkers (2012) - IMDb

Actually I managed to watch it 20min after I need to stop..
Theres a class A movies, class B also, this has it's own class somewhere far end of letters

[Prospero]

"Lore" a rather obscure - in that I've not seen reviews anywhere mainstream, not listings of it at any cinemas - film called Lore", an Australian-German co-production about the fate of a group of children in the immediate aftermath of World War Two in Germany. They are abandoned by their parents, (the father was in the SS) , and undertake a troubled journey across occupied germany to reach their grandmother. It is a bit too beautifully filmed with overly precious lingering and overcomposed shots and is too lyrical and rather slow, but does deal with some serious issues little touched on in fiction or cinema. It is the third film by a young Australian director Kate Shortland who I'd not come across before.

[Stavros]

Hunger (Steve McQueen, 200
I came to this having seen McQueen's two other features -Shame (2011) and 12 Years a Slave (2013). Hunger was McQueen's first full-length feature after years of making short films and 'video installations'- he comes from a mixed background of Art School and a brief and unhappy graduate experience at the NYU film school. The film is not so much about Bobby Sands as about the experience of confinement in a claustrophobic space, on both prisoners and prison guards, with the first half-hour establishing the routines and the prisoners resistance through well-documented 'dirty protest' in Northern Ireland - the refusal to wear prison clothing, smearing shit all over the walls and the hunger strikes of 1981 that I remember vividly having been politically active at the time. Although the film is about feelings rather than politics, recordings of Margaret Thatcher, and the long confrontation with the priest do explore political issues and the first half hour does present the confrontation between Republicans and Nationalists in a brutal way.
The almost silent depiction of routine is suddenly broken with an astonishing 22-minute conversation between Sands and a Catholic priest, in which the camera does not move for 16 minutes before ending the 22-minute sequence with two sustained close-ups of Sands, and then the Priest -this is followed by a wordless six minute sequence of a prison warder mopping he floor of the urine poured under cell doors, working his way up the corridor toward the camera. Michael Fassbender lost as much as he needed to before endangering his own life, and while he doesn't look like Sands or offer much resistance to the staff, the aggressive, violent attacks on Republican prisoners at the beginning, is replaced by a caring attention to physical need at the lyrical end, when the sense of release from the burden of life is characterised by the smallest details -such as a feather floating through the hospital room where Sands is dying. A stunning debut by any standards.