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SMB Film Thread 2025

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Monty Pigeon said:
Burton was between marriages to Elizabeth Taylor, and I don't think he'd have been capable. He spent two years drunk. Sophia was famously loyal to her husband, Carlo Ponti. Plenty of stars had a crack at her (including Peter Sellers, who ended his marriage in order to be with her - and got comprehensively rebuffed), and I don't think any succeeded.
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Marriage to who?
I worked in the house in Hampstead he had built for Britt Eckland when they got married. It looked like a 60s-70s new build suburban library or medical centre. Central courtyard with a water feature surrounded by full height windows all round. She hated it apparently.
fyl2u said:
I've decided to do a Robert Redford deep dive. The ones I can find anyway.

Started with...

Tall Story (1960)
Redford's only a non-speaking basketball player in this early Anthony Perkins movie. Enjoyable film though! 7.3/10

The Chase (1966)
Slightly bigger role for Redford this time as an escaped convict in a movie that sees Marlon Brando as the main lead as the sheriff. Fairly confusing start with multiple plotlines seemingly unrelated, but they tie together quickly as the film turns unsettling and then utterly brutal. Great film. 8.5/10
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Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)
Weird. I expected this to be better. Haven't seen it since I was very young but for a movie considered a classic it was very disappointing. A handful of iconic scenes interspersed with a lot of filler, a bizarre slideshow in the middle that went on for way too long, and more musical montages than a movie this long should really have. If it had've been 30 minutes long it probably would have made a really great mini-story.

All in all, the good bits were worth watching but for all the filler I can't give it more than a 6.7/10.
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The kids sister reckoned he turned up at her house a couple of times for quick visits decades after he was supposed to have been killed.
 
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riffraff said:
Marriage to who?
I worked in the house in Hampstead he had built for Britt Eckland when they got married. It looked like a 60s-70s new build suburban library or medical centre. Central courtyard with a water feature surrounded by full height windows all round. She hated it apparently.
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His first marriage to Anne Sellers. They divorced in 1963. He told her he was going to marry Sophia Loren, who at the time he hadn't even been on a date with. Sophia repeatedly knocked him back, and eventually he diverted his attention to Britt Ekland.
 
28 years later.

Fiennes, Jodie comer

Best of the three films for me, loved it, some brilliant tension filled scenes. Loved that little cameo at the end. 😎

Hope garland and Doyle make another.

A cobra rating if 8.5/10.
 
Motor City Cobra said:
28 years later.

Fiennes, Jodie comer

Best of the three films for me, loved it, some brilliant tension filled scenes. Loved that little cameo at the end. 😎

Hope garland and Doyle make another.

A cobra rating if 8.5/10.
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When I first saw the trailer, I was thinking this was a cameo

Cillian Murphy as a zombie but I don't think it was


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Motor City Cobra said:
28 years later.

Fiennes, Jodie comer

Best of the three films for me, loved it, some brilliant tension filled scenes. Loved that little cameo at the end. 😎

Hope garland and Doyle make another.

A cobra rating if 8.5/10.
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Part 2 comes out in January, written by Garland and directed by Nia DaCosta:

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Mission: Impossible (1996) 7/10
I'm planning to watch them all over the next few weeks. Tom Cruise looks about 12 here. Some good action sequences, but the channel tunnel finale is a bit stupid, and Jean Reno plays his role like a pantomime villain.
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$ (aka Dollars) (1971) 6/10
German-set heist movie let down by a lack of chemistry between Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn and a chase sequence at the end that goes on way, way, way too long. (Arthur Brauss, as the main villain, looks eerily like a cross between Vladimir Putin and Daniel Craig.)
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The Alto Knights (2025) 8/10
It's had bad reviews, but I thought it was a pretty solid mobster movie, based on the real life friendship-turned-rivalry between Vito Genovese and Frank Costello. No idea why De Niro was cast in both roles. Despite lots of make-up - and one especially ridiculous nose - both characters are clearly him. Would have been better with Al Pacino or another De Niro contemporary in one of the roles.
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Buffet Froid [1979] 7.5/10
Darkly, absurdly funny.

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Riefenstahl [2024] 7.5/10
Director Andres Veiel is given full access to Leni Riefenstahl's personal archive of films, letters and recorded phone calls and uses these to methodically expose her contradictions and lies that she was nothing more than a naive artist who had no idea about the Nazis atrocities until the war was over. Even going as far as directly implicating her in a massacre of Polish Jews so she could get a better shot for one of her films.

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Fletch73 said:
Riefenstahl [2024] 7.5/10
Director Andres Veiel is given full access to Leni Riefenstahl's personal archive of films, letters and recorded phone calls and uses these to methodically expose her contradictions and lies that she was nothing more than a naive artist who had no idea about the Nazis atrocities until the war was over. Even going as far as directly implicating her in a massacre of Polish Jews so she could get a better shot for one of her films.

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Already have that on my watch list. Amazing how successful she was at whitewashing her reputation, to the extent that she became acclaimed as the great female director of the 20th Century. Always suspected there was plenty hidden.
 
Monty Pigeon said:
Mission: Impossible (1996) 7/10
I'm planning to watch them all over the next few weeks. Tom Cruise looks about 12 here. Some good action sequences, but the channel tunnel finale is a bit stupid, and Jean Reno plays his role like a pantomime villain.
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Just watched MI:2 today on Netflix.

It was pretty good, but lacks the confidence and sophistication of the later efforts. I’d say it’s overlong by about 30 minutes. I know Woo is a legend in HK cinema, but the slo-mo, balletic gunplay and martial arts bits don’t really work for me in Western films. They just look cheesy, rather than mesmerising and otherworldly, like in Hard Boiled. It’s not much better than the crap Michael Bay copied in the mid-90s onwards. I really like Woo’s stuff from Hong Kong, but the aesthetic here doesn’t feel right.

The film works best when Cruise is relied upon to do proper stunts in genuine action scenes. That’s why the second half of the series is so strong. I dismissed Cruise for a long time, for no good reason, but I’ve come to appreciate that he’s excellent in roles like this, Maverick and Edge of Tomorrow. You have to respect someone so dedicated to doing their own stunts.

As an action film, though, this is mid-tier for the most part with a few good scenes to elevate it.

6.5/10 for me. 7 on a generous day.
 
Robert Redford deep dive continued....

Jeremiah Johnson (1972)
Pretty much a slow-paced "Falling Down" in a frozen wild west setting. Solitary man vs snowy nature vs injuns. Pretty brutal in parts. Redford shines as the "just wants to be a lone mountain man" who gets shit on by life repeatedly yet makes the best of it for a while then eventually snaps.

Worth a watch. 7.8/10

Also the movie that gave us this meme...


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fyl2u said:
Robert Redford deep dive continued....

Jeremiah Johnson (1972)
Pretty much a slow-paced "Falling Down" in a frozen wild west setting. Solitary man vs snowy nature vs injuns. Pretty brutal in parts. Redford shines as the "just wants to be a lone mountain man" who gets shit on by life repeatedly yet makes the best of it for a while then eventually snaps.

Worth a watch. 7.8/10

Also the movie that gave us this meme...


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I think it's also the film that made Robert Redford decide he wanted to live in Utah, chill out and set up the Sundance Film Festival there
 
Cockney Mackem said:
I think it's also the film that made Robert Redford decide he wanted to live in Utah, chill out and set up the Sundance Film Festival there
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That sentence has at least THREE things I never knew.

Robert Redford wanted to live in Utah.
The Sundance Festival is in Utah.
Robert Redford set up the Sundance Festival. (I'd obviously made the "Sundance Kid" connection but thought it was just an homage from fans, not that Redford himself had created it.)

So... thank you!

Oh, and FOUR... that it was the film that triggered these events.
 
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fyl2u said:
That sentence has at least THREE things I never knew.

Robert Redford wanted to live in Utah.
The Sundance Festival is in Utah.
Robert Redford set up the Sundance Festival. (I'd obviously made the "Sundance Kid" connection but thought it was just an homage from fans, not that Redford himself had created it.)

So... thank you!

Oh, and FOUR... that it was the film that triggered these events.
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Right so everything I said was correct except the Jeremiah Johnson bit. That was a "fact" I learned before the internet enabled fact checking and either I red it wrong or someone else got it wrong. His first wife was from Utah even though they met in California and that got him interested in the area. He bought some land in the area in the late 60s and insisted on JJ being filmed in the area because he knew how beautiful it was
 
The Falling Star [2023] 8/10
The fifth film acted, written and directed by Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon and I'll be adding the other four to my watchlist now.
For fans of Wes Anderson, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Aki Kaurasmaki.

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In Order of Disappearance [2014] 7.5/10
Stellan Skarsgard is a father out for revenge after his son is murdered by drug dealers. Remade by the same director as Cold Pursuit with Liam Neeson. This is WAY better.

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Cockney Mackem said:
Right so everything I said was correct except the Jeremiah Johnson bit. That was a "fact" I learned before the internet enabled fact checking and either I red it wrong or someone else got it wrong. His first wife was from Utah even though they met in California and that got him interested in the area. He bought some land in the area in the late 60s and insisted on JJ being filmed in the area because he knew how beautiful it was
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Still, learning three new things from a single sentence has got to be some sort of record. :lol:
 
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