MOVIE - Hostiles

R (2:15)

Wide release 1/26/18

Viewed 1/25/18

RT Critic: 71   Audience:  73
Critic's Consensus:  Hostiles benefits from stunning visuals and a solid central performance from Christian Bale, both of which help elevate its uneven story.

Cag:  5.5  One helluva movie

Directed by Scott Cooper

Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures

Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike

My comments:  I'm pretty sure this is one of those movies that you don't forget.  A tragic story, but one that mesmerized me.  Super performances, Christian Bale just can't be beat.  He lives and breathes his part.  Indigenous people versus those who took them over.  This movie is  about relationships between people, friendships past and present, the ties that bind and those that are fleeting or even meaningless.  I think this was a brilliant movie, a huge piece of US history, and a story that will stay with me for a long, long time.

RT/ IMDb Summary:  Set in 1892, Hostiles tells the story of a legendary Army Captain (Christian Bale), who after stern resistance, reluctantly agrees to escort a dying Cheyenne war chief (Wes Studi) and his family back to tribal lands. Making the harrowing and perilous journey from Fort Berringer, an isolated Army outpost in New Mexico, to the grasslands of Montana, the former rivals encounter a young widow (Rosamund Pike), whose family was murdered on the plains. Together, they must join forces to overcome the punishing landscape, hostile Comanche and vicious outliers that they encounter along the way.

MOVE - Hector and the Search for Happiness

R (1:54)

Limited release 9/19/14

El Con - by myself - 10/9/14

RT Critic:  31  Audience:   66

Cag:  6/Awesome  5/Loved it  4/Liked it a lot  3/Liked it  2/It was okay  1/Didn’t like it

Directed by Peter Chelsom

Relativity Media

Based on the book by Francois Lelord

Simon Pegg, Rosamund Pike, Toni Collette, Stellan Skarsgard

My comments: This is a movie that stays with you.  It's stayed with me - for days now.  I've created my own list, trying to figure out what makes me happy.  The movie?  I loved it.  I really loved it.  I'd like to go back and see it again.  It didn't get good reviews from critics, and I haven't even read them.  This will go down as a favorite movie for me, I think.  Definitely quirky.  Off-beat.  Tongue-in-cheek.  Clever.  Absurd.  
       There was one, somewhat disconcerting element.  Two days before I saw this I saw Gone Girl, where Rosamund Pike is a psychopath.  She has a pretty-decent-sized part in this story, with an entirely different persona.  It was hard not seeing her as the psychopath!d  She did a wonderful job, though, I almost wish I hadn't just seen her play such a seriously different part.

RT Summary: Hector (Simon Pegg) is a quirky psychiatrist who has become increasingly tired of his humdrum life. As he tells his girlfriend, Clara (Rosamund Pike), he feels like a fraud: he hasn't really tasted life, and yet he's offering advice to patients who are just not getting any happier. So Hector decides to break out of his deluded and routine driven life. Armed with buckets of courage and child-like curiosity, he embarks on a global quest in hopes of uncovering the elusive secret formula for true happiness. And so begins a larger than life adventure with riotously funny results. Based on the world-wide best-selling novel of the same name, Hector and the Search for Happiness is a rich, exhilarating, and hilarious tale.

MOVIE - Gone Girl

R (2:25)

Wide release 10/3/2014

Viewed 10/6/2014 at ElCon with Sheila, Connie, & Gwen

RT Critic:  87  Audience:  91

Cag:  5/It was a really well-done movie

Directed by David Fincher

20th Century Fox

Based on the book by Gillian Flynn.  My review here.

Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Tyler Perry, Neil Patrick Harris, 

My comments: I liked the movie more than I liked the book (a bit unusual....). I considered Nick Dunne a jerk-of-an-idiot in the book, and I considered Amy Dunne a psychopath.  I felt a little better...though not much....of Nick in the movie, and considered Amy even crazier than in the book.  You had to like Nick, because no matter how sleezy a character Ben Affleckk could ever play I'd HAVE to root for him.  So I wonder how I would have felt with another actor portraying Nick?  Both Affleck and Pike (as well as Perry, Harris, and Carrie Coon, who plays Nick's twin sister Margo) were terrific.

RT Summary:  GONE GIRL - directed by David Fincher and based upon the global bestseller by Gillian Flynn - unearths the secrets at the heart of a modern marriage. On the occasion of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) reports that his beautiful wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike), has gone missing. Under pressure from the police and a growing media frenzy, Nick's portrait of a blissful union begins to crumble. Soon his lies, deceits and strange behavior have everyone asking the same dark question: Did Nick Dunne kill his wife?

Movie - Jack Reacher

PG-13 (2:10)

Wide release 12/21/12

went on Saturday, Dec. 22nd to the Ellsworth Theater with Brian

RT Critic: 60    Audience: 75

cag: 3.5 (Very entertaining)

based on the series written by Lee Child

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie

Paramount Pictures

Tom Cruise,  Robert Duval

Rotten Tomatoes synopsis:

MOVIE INFO

Six shots. Five dead. One heartland city thrown into a state of terror. But within hours the cops have it solved: a slam-dunk case. Except for one thing. The accused man says: You got the wrong guy. Then he says: Get Reacher for me. And sure enough, ex-military investigator Jack Reacher is coming. He knows this shooter-a trained military sniper who never should have missed a shot. Reacher is certain something is not right-and soon the slam-dunk case explodes. Now Reacher is teamed with a beautiful young defense lawyer, moving closer to the unseen enemy who is pulling the strings. Reacher knows that no two opponents are created equal. This one has come to the heartland from his own kind of hell. And Reacher knows that the only way to take him down is to match his ruthlessness and cunning-and then beat him shot for shot. --

Thoughts:  It was fun to go with Brian, although the theater was FREEZING.  If I didn't KNOW that part of Jack Reacher's appeal is that he's something like six-foot-five I would have been quite pleased with Tom Cruise's depiction of Reacher, but I couldn't get Cruise's under-six-foot stature out of my head.  The antagonist is a ruthless bad guy, an Reacher is not going to let him get away with it.  Very entertaining movie, especially if you're any sort of fan of the Lee Child books.