djross
Criticker Zealot - 5509 Film Ratings
Member Since: 16 Apr 2006
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Age: 53
Bio: Films receiving a score between 91 and 100 are considered to be a masterpiece.
Longer reviews: https://www.criticker.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5869
X: https://x.com/DJRoss70
Recent Ratings
Check out djross's...
| 60 63% | The Trip to Spain (2017) - Rated 18 Nov 2024
"Still amusing."
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| 72 82% | Megalopolis (2024) - Rated 18 Nov 2024
"When a phase-shift becomes unavoidable, civilisation either dies by suicide or lives by reinvention, and this is the true function of art. Coppola aims to espouse this thesis and embody it, and, whatever the flaws, the ambition should be applauded: it is a work constructed not as a hermetic whole but as an invitation to exceed its own limits. His challenge to rethink the polis hits the mark, even if the METROPOLIS-style handshake to round things off is no more persuasive now than it was in 1927."
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| 30 12% | Wonka (2023) - Rated 17 Nov 2024
"Timothée Chalamet’s Wonka is devoid of ambivalence (not his fault), and the film is without interest. The songs are forgettable and the main one is worse than that. The plot about the orphan girl could not have been more calculated. Hugh Grant adds some slight spark, but really, the whole thing should be filed under “mill, run of the”."
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| 45 34% | Poison (1991) - Rated 17 Nov 2024
"“A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness”: none of the three stories really went anywhere interesting enough to justify ending with this quotation from Jean Genet. Nevertheless, effort was expended to make use of all kinds of techniques, and there is some kind of thought going on about the strangeness of sexuality, the relationship between repression and transgression, and so on."
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| 40 26% | Shackleton: The Greatest Story of Survival (2023) - Rated 15 Nov 2024
"It’s undoubtedly an incredible tale of battling against the odds, and the effort to go to the locations and really convey something about what it would have been like makes a significant difference, but there’s something a little offputting about the presenter’s fixation on “leadership”, and one can’t help but feel that Jarvis just can’t resist the urge to make it about himself."
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| 55 53% | Sleuth (1972) - Rated 13 Nov 2024
"A lot of good lines, but tends to wear out its welcome, and to me Michael Caine seems miscast."
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| 78 90% | A Letter to Three Wives (1949) - Rated 11 Nov 2024
"Three women doubt their marriages because of a seductive and impressive woman about whom the audience is nevertheless not supposed to care – presumably because she’s the kind who’s willing to play around with other women’s husbands. Despite that, dialogue and performances are excellent (especially the second and third flashbacks), and the critique of radio is really ahead of its time, even if one can’t help but notice how George for some reason mocks the idea that cigarettes might cause cancer."
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| 50 44% | These Are the Damned (1963) - Rated 08 Nov 2024
"A young woman is torn between a somewhat lascivious man of an older generation and a brother whose own incestuous desires combine with the rage of a generation that is already beginning to feel the meaning of the “no future” motto of what will become the punk generation, while at the same time a group of children are being raised without any awareness of the degree to which the work of rationalisation and the dialectic of enlightenment are thrusting them headlong towards nuclear apocalypse."
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| 55 53% | Agatha et les lectures illimitées (1981) - Rated 07 Nov 2024
"The slowness and choice of seaside images at times reminded me of THE ISTER: is that a good thing? Possibly not. Duras is clearly trying things, and one feels that this is something like a culmination of that experimental path, which means it might not have been the best selection as my first exposure to her directorial work. Still: hot!"
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| 50 44% | Mr. Nobody (2009) - Rated 05 Nov 2024
"Our lives are the sum of the choices we make, but the focus here is on how such choices create different stories rather than on how each decision involves us in a question of responsibility. Instead of asking what it means to make local decisions in the face of irreversibility, there’s a lot of physics mumbo jumbo about whether time could be universally reversed – note that the “scientific advisor” was Isabelle Stengers. So the accidental is seen in terms of chaos rather than quasi-causality."
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