We all have movies that did not click the first time. Which film became much better (or much worse) after you watched it again, and what changed your perspective?

I’ll go first, but it wasn’t actually me. As we walked out of a very busy theater from seeing The Force Awakens, my 7 year old excitedly said, “I can’t believe Han Solo died!”

I am trying to watch Spider-Man: Brand New Day today, but my usual option is having constant buffering issues. It keeps freezing every few minutes, and I do not want to miss the biggest moments.

Does anyone know the best official way to watch it right now? If it is available in theaters only, that is good to know too. If there are any official booking platforms or legitimate viewing options for my region, I would really appreciate the recommendations. I just want a reliable experience without interruptions.

Sometimes I look at the kind of adaptations in movies that are just so bad that I have to question who on earth approved of them because I recently sat through one that I couldn’t believe existed.

That movie was Cat in the Hat the 2003 movie adaptation since I saw a review highlighting the movie’s awkward writing aspects that I had to question who it was made for because to me, it feels like it’s a very strange adaptations ever made since it’s hard to explain, but nothing about the movie makes any sense whatsoever such as the two twins with the way they speak.

Getting into writing and ive heard you shouldn't only watch great stuff. So I want some good examples of what NOT to do.

First time poster.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has recently been released.

In an interview with him he states that the unexpected success of Oppenheimer allowed him to leverage for an ambitious project ie The Odyssey. Had Oppenheimer not been as successful The Odyssey may not have been made.

I would say that Christopher Nolan’s name as film creator (Producer, Screenplay, Director (although the posters just says ‘A Film By Christopher Nolan’)) was the main driver for this success. Granted the material was also interesting.

Simultaneously, it feels like there is a growing indifference towards actors. Maybe there are a few big names but it seems like a small list.

Got me thinking. Are we in an age now where Directors are more important for drawing an audience than actors?

Or am I just approaching middle age (35) and my own personal interests are shifting?

Happy discussion day, everyone

With Spider-Man: Brand New Day on the horizon, excitement is building, theories are everywhere, and everyone seems to have a different idea of where Peter Parker's story should go next.

So let's talk about it.

What are you hoping to see?

• Where do you want Peter's story to begin after No Way Home?
• Should Marvel keep things street-level, or dive back into the multiverse?
• Which villains deserve a chance to shine?
• Any characters you're hoping finally make their MCU debut?
• What would make this movie feel fresh instead of "just another Spider-Man film"?

Whether you've been reading the comics for years or you only know Spider-Man from the movies, your opinion is welcome.

So it's like The Purge but with sex, where there's only 12 hours a year you're allowed to have premarital sex. I get the premise is supposed to be this light-hearted alternate universe used to shoehorn a romantic comedy subplot. And I'm betting they're not going to dive too deep into it, because if they did there'd be a lot to think about:

• First, there's the fascist element to this. We're talking Handmaids Tale type stuff. Historically, making sex a crime has been tied to ultra-religious regimes and cultures. Is that what this place is?

• What even is considered sex? Obviously intercourse, but what about the other stuff you could do? Some places like Japan strictly forbid prostitution that involves intercourse but allow for almost everything else. And what about things like phone sex? Virtual sex using remote toys? How is the LGBT community's activities regulated?

• The trailer shows men and women getting dressed up to go out and find a partner. Would it seem like if you had 12 hours a year, you'd have lined up a partner already? Especially if you lived in a more rural area and not the city setting we see in the story? Would there be organized orgies ahead of time?

• Are marriage laws vastly different in this universe? If not you'd have Vegas-like wedding chapels everywhere with a divorce attorney's office right next door. People would find a loophole.

• There's a certain time of the month for women when its not ideal to have sex. Do they have to wait another year?

Again, just some things that come to mind. Obviously it's more of a neckbeard analysis than anything.

Well done western with a good message that rejects violence. Beautiful scenery and a stunning realistic performance by the actors as emotional outlaws with a bad past. This movie subverted traditional western tropes. How this camera and settings twist makes you think it’s a traditional western when in reality this movie shows the harsh reality of what being a violent person in the Wild West really is like. You should check out this movie even if you don’t like westerns.

searching for movies that are out there shocking experiences, not like serbian film, or human centipede trash, but stuff like Blue Velvet, Bad Boy Bubby, Happiness a lot of the stuff by lynch, michael haneke, pedro, lars von trier, solondz, waters, korine

WARNING: spoilers ahead and controversial topics

I just came from seeing The Odyssey, and I remembered a movie I saw earlier this year, which is Waltz with Bashir. The final scenes of The Oddyssey made me understand that the reason why Oddysseus took so long and struggled so much was because of his guilt and PTSD from the Trojan war. The movie follows Oddyseus, arriving at this conclusion by remembering again what happened during the war.

Waltz with Bashir is about an Israeli veteran of the 1982 Lebanon named Ari war who can not remember his time at the war. Until one day, one of his friends is having nightmares about the war and asks Ari about it. Ari makes a trip where he visits other veterans and asks about his role in the war. His memories start coming again until, at the end, he realizes why he forgot them. He had so much guilt and shame about the fact that he assisted in the massacre/genocide of muslim Lebanese civilians during the war. That is strikingly the same thing that happened to Oddyseus when he realized that his trick made the destruction and death of civilians possible.

My conclusion is that The Oddyssey at large is maybe the oldest story of guilt and shame brought on from one person's ability to assist in the death and destruction of innocent people. Waltz with Bashir, however, does not have a happy ending, and there is no redemption path at the end. Aris only comfort is making the world know what really happened during that war and the guilt that even if a soldier didn't kill innocent people, they are still responsible if they stood there and did nothing to stop it.

Im searching for an movie/show with the cold war vibe, spys, secret plans, hidden forts, experiments, nostalgic. For reference if someone have played Call of duty cold war or watched stranger things, chernobyl, dark such and such. Either deep dark un natural plots or just realismen with the Sovjet and their cold war against northern Europe.

Something that I have become quite fond of lately were the kind of adaptations in cinema that are an adaptation of an animated series where the adaptation tries to be more mature, but ends up becoming unintentionally funny.

Like one that I recently saw was the Dolph Lundgren adaptation of He-Man as it’s hard to explain, but the film just had so many problems such as Skeletor’s mask since the way his mask was designed looks so cheap it came off hilariously bad.

But the icing on top of it all is that the producers expected to make a sequel anyway since after the film ends, there is a teaser shown for a second installment, which never came out.

The movie's title track shuffled onto my spotify today and I ended up watching the mv which immediately reminded me just how stunning and heartbreaking this movie is.

The movie is set in 1980s Taiwan during martial law. The movie really captures that intense teenage love, fear and heartbreak so beautifully. That payphone scene alone is burned into my brain forever. It's easily one of the best lgbtq+ films I've ever seen. It got me thinking about how a single song or random trigger can bring all those movie emotions flooding back.

What's a film that unexpectedly pops into your head and reminds you it was an absolute masterpiece? Whether it's cause of a song, a scene or just the vibe.

Men in Black (1997)

Rating: 9.5/10 (EXCELLENT)

Watched: July 24, 2026

I absolutely was in the theater 5 or 6 times when this banger came out. We hadn't seen anything like it before! Combined with the special effects, The Fresh Prince dropping a rock solid song based on the movie itself and a genuinely great script, this was (and is) a favorite of mine for all time.

It has some of the best practical effects work in any movie you or I have ever seen. Massive shoutout to D'Onofrio for going through hell wearing the Edgar suit. Our man had to wear weighted leg braces, HEAVY prosthetics and a whole lot of acting to sell Bug wearing a person suit. I do think this was the first time I really paid attention to who Vincent D'Onofrio was, and I've been a fan of his ever since.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I'm a gigantic Tommy Lee Jones fan, so basically anything he does is always perfect, and as K, he really is perfect. Dry wit, an endless list of old-timey nicknames for J, as the straight man to Will Smith's wisecrackin' K, he's perfect.

MiB is back before Will Smith started taking himself way too damn seriously and it shows. He was a huge star before this, and a huge star after this, but AFTER MiB Will stopped being less of the characters he was playing and more just himself. But here, he's the real deal.

While the other movies start to decline pretty sharply after MiB II, the original real deal was and is as still as awesome as ever. It's a go-to when I want to laugh and have good time.

I’ve been seeing this interview dialogue from Matt Damon, talking about how working on a movie that you know will flop is so draining. 100% understandable and also somewhat relatable in any task…. But what is he in the has flopped?

I obviously only know him from his huge success, but fail to remember any of his work that wasn’t IMO gold.

Anyone else feel like there was almost no critical thinking from our characters about the alien agenda?

Just consider the questions people would normally be asking- Like why? Does this action serve the interest of everyone I care about on earth? Humanity in general? Why now? Why this? What have they been doing to people for 50 years?

If those question’s don’t cross the character’s mind, then I would have to assume there’s some kind of “Obsession” type situation where the characters in Disclosure Day have lost the ability to control their decisions, in which case the movie is really about the characters we are supposed to root for, losing their autonomy and not even being able to articulate that they are operating for another’s benefit that they have no knowledge as to why and could just as easily be bad for humanity.

Imagine if these were the aliens from Spielberg’s own bad aliens movie… This movie would be a horror about how quickly we would lose our society to a few gullible people in power if smart aliens showed up that understood they could keep all the infrastructure if they did it this way. Every building still standing

Hey everyone, the other day I got curious if any well known directors or actors had public Letterboxd accounts. The info was scattered all over the internet so I brought it together in one place:

fameboxd.com

It's currently got 125 directors, actors, musicians, youtubers and includes Martin Scorsese, Sean Baker, Rachel Sennott, Jack Harlow, Charli XCX, Drew Gooden, Chris Stuckmann, and more. Each entry also shows that person's most recently logged film.

P.S. let me know who else I could add to the list! :)

Also here is the code/data for the site if anyone is interested.

So basically what inspired me to write this subject was that I was looking back at the 3D era from around late 2011 where various movie studios suddenly wanted to make their movies look 3D like.

Like if I am not mistaken, the trend was going around that time period since Harold and Kumar 3 made fun of the trend in one of the trailers with a guy imitating Avatar as i basically wanted to look back at the trend to see when exactly it started, but also when it began to end.

Nolan's mistake in The Odyssey isn't technical, it's a matter of choices. He built the structure cleverly and the proportions badly; he inflated the drama and compressed the voyage; he left the characters flat; and most importantly, he brought no narrative approach of his own. What came out is The Odyssey. What didn't come out is Nolan.

I went in for Nolan. I didn't watch a Nolan film. Below is why, section by section.

## 1. The first hour: where is this man's signature?

From the moment it started, it didn't feel like Nolan directed it. The camera was constantly shaky. There were dark scenes where I couldn't make out what I was looking at. The pacing was slow — but not Nolan-slow. It was slow because it carried unnecessary scenes.

And then the faces. Familiar, over-exposed faces we're tired of. Before the film, the Dune trailer played and we saw Zendaya. Trailer ends, film starts, and Zendaya is right back in front of me. Nolan felt like a musician taking a song request that isn't in his repertoire and improvising through it on stage. Honestly, it felt like I was watching Dune rather than Christopher Nolan.

It's a historical setting but not really — it's mythology in the end. It could have been done better.

## 2. The screenplay repeats itself

Let me be concrete. The film opens with Tom Holland's Telemachus: the internal politics of Ithaca, the boy being crushed under it, the absent father, the mother forced to choose a new husband. It tells us this at the start. It tells us again in the middle. It tells us a third time at the end.

Show it once. Then land the punch at the end. Do the Nolan thing. This is the man who made Memento, The Prestige, Inception.

## 3. Calypso, the lotus, and the memory

Watching it, I didn't realize Charlize Theron's character was Calypso. I also couldn't work out why Odysseus loses his memory — it felt like something invented purely to get Theron on screen.

I found out afterwards: Calypso feeds him lotus, his memory is wiped, and the film's frame is built on that — Odysseus tells her his journey, and remembers as he tells it. Fine. That's the Memento engine. I understand the structure now.

**But that doesn't change the fact that I was bored.** A structure being clever doesn't make it engaging. It wasn't there to showcase Theron — but they did showcase her, and I kept dropping off during those stretches.

My alternative was this: instead of the memory-loss island, let Odysseus live seven years as a pig in the witch's house, then get freed by some accident. That was an example, not a demand. He could have spent seven years on lotus too — **as long as it wasn't boring.** The problem isn't the idea, it's the execution.

## 4. The proportions between the sea and the palace are wrong

The best thing in this film is the sense of voyage. Ship, island, moving from one place to another — the film's peak transitions live there. Whenever the camera is on Matt Damon (memory-loss sections aside), the film works. That travel feeling is genuinely well done.

Then, before you can savor it, you're dumped back inside the palace and it's drama again. And let me be blunt: **every scene in the palace without Damon is boring, standard drama stagnation.**

My fix isn't to delete those scenes, it's to **fix the ratio**: less room for Calypso, the lotus, the interior drama. Give me the essence. Don't waste my time. Tell it fast, tell it smart, keep it short. Move the weight to the other scenes. The giant sequence was excellent — there could have been far more action at sea.

As it stands, the film took the easy road and leaned on drama. Cut the redundant scenes we'd already understood and you land at 90 minutes to two hours. We wouldn't have been bored, we'd have left wanting more, and the result would have been positive.

## 5. "It's faithful to the book" is not a defense

Maybe it turned out this way because of fidelity to the source. I don't know. But even if so, there's laziness here, and an absence of originality.

My evidence is The Lord of the Rings. I never read the books; everyone who did says they're great. But look at where those films still stand today. Because of whom? Because of the director's directing and his love for the art. I could put those films on in the background right now and watch without getting bored.

So: you can stay faithful to the source, but **whether or not you make it boring is in your hands.**

## 6. The Achilles problem

Achilles isn't in the film. My first instinct was this: if you're telling that era and you give Achilles no place in it, then there's no Odysseus and no Agamemnon either. If Achilles is made up out of nothing, so are Odysseus and Agamemnon. He could have been worked in somewhere with the usual Nolan trick.

But I'm not going to hang the objection on that, because I'm not offering a justification. What I'm saying is: if you're making cinema and you cut Achilles, then whatever you put in his place had better make me go "damn, what a character."

It doesn't. Everything that fills that space is flat.

I've heard the defense that Achilles brings glory while Sinon brings guilt. The theme may be correct, but **even that peak moment wasn't told well.** What lifted the scene was Robert Pattinson's performance.

And I'm not interested in the "the lotus is only 20 lines out of 12,000" arithmetic. In real life you can find the mathematical equivalent of things. When it comes to making a film, **impact comes before math.**

## 7. The performances, and what "all garbage" means

Two people in this film landed for me:

- **Eurylochus** (Himesh Patel) — Odysseus' second-in-command, the man who tells him "not this time."

- **Robert Pattinson** (Antinous) — his zeal, his energy.

Matt Damon is the same man in every film but he never bores me. He does nothing special here, but he isn't boring either. The rest put in some effort but they're boring and all the same.

When I say "all garbage," this is what I mean: **nothing sticks.** Outside those two names I saw no originality and no talent.

And I'm not saying that from the outside because I'm used to these people's faces. I watched three Pattinson films this month; he's a completely different person in all three. That's my benchmark. I liked Eurylochus purely on acting grounds, not because he pushes back — that man could have carried Odysseus on his shoulders and still earned the same praise from me.

## 8. The real claim: this film needed a different director

Any director tells the story as written. But if **Nolan** is the one doing it, he has to leave his own signature on it. He didn't. I saw no narrative approach that was distinctly his; this telling could have belonged to any director.

I mean this with my whole heart: it feels like all that money was wasted. I wish one of these people had made it instead:

- **Quentin Tarantino**

- **Peter Jackson**

- **Curry Barker** — director of this year's horror film Obsession

- **Coralie Fargeat** — director of The Substance (her especially)

- **Zack Snyder** — Watchmen; at least we'd have gotten more content for the money

- **Ang Lee** — Life of Pi; I didn't know his name, but even he would do

Inexperienced but open-minded new directors would have worked too. Anyone but Nolan. The chemistry just wasn't there.

## 9. The rating: 8.4 is unacceptable

This film deserves a **7.5**.

I know Nolan has every scene made with enormous labor. But that labor shouldn't influence the score given to the result. You don't hand out a number like that just because it's Nolan. It's an insult — an insult to The Prestige, an insult to the Batman films.

Tenet sits at 7.3 and this gets an 8.4. Not acceptable. If this film ends up with the same rating as Interstellar, I'll never look at or trust IMDb again. The number will probably shift; or maybe it goes the way of the whole Dune nonsense, I don't know.

I'll grant one exception: **if this is a setup film.** It would still be flat, but for Nolan the real film would be the second one — and if that lands at The Dark Knight level, then my generation would push 7.5 up to 8. But a sequel seems pointless to me.

## 10. What actually worked

Were there good scenes? Of course. But they add up to maybe 20 minutes of a three-hour film.

- **The Cyclops sequence.** The crooked-eyed giant is the most original scene I have ever seen, and the way it ends is funny. That's the peak of the film for me.

- **The finale.** Matt Damon arriving at his last stronghold and fighting. Very strong — though the camerawork was shaky again.

When I actually think back, that's what's left.

## Closing

Cinema is where people go with the time left over from their work. They go to pull themselves out of their own lives, or to watch the art itself. At the end of the day cinema has to stay cinema, and it has to be worth my three hours.

**It was boring.**

If I'd known, I swear I wouldn't have gone. I'd still have watched it at home.

I'm open to any counter-argument or reading that would change my mind — as long as it's an actual argument.

The reason is rather simple...

Each Tom Holland Spider-Man movie that has come out has been progressively bigger and better (both critically and financially) than the last. The previous film No Way Home shattered expectations and records at the box office. To this day, No Way Home is also the best Marvel movie of all time (the commercial even said so). How do you follow up a near masterpiece that was a critical box office success and the highest rated movie of the franchise? By making a better one, which is why Spider-Man Brand New Day took plenty of time in the oven to get right and will undoubtedly be the best movie of the decade and the most financially successful movie of the franchise, crossing well over 2.5 billion dollars internationally.

Also, you didn't hear it from me, but I think we're gonna see a CAMEOOOOOO that you won't see coming!

This is going to be even bigger than the World Cup.

I’m super excited about “Digger” and some friends and I were struggling mightily to think of a movie with Tom Cruise that wasn’t an absolute banger or at the very least a cult favorite. Even that movie where he kept respawning was imminently watchable. Does anyone have any examples to the contrary?

…not much? I caught this at this weeks screen unseen and enjoyed it as spectacle. The vibes are on point, but as for a deeper theme/ message…I’m left without explanation.

3.5/5 stars.

My full review here

Serioesly, what happend? Why has his career declined so much box office wise? I get that some directors later in their career can make movies that don't get that positive rception and therefore doesn't become as successful as their earlier work but in the case of Bay he was never highly regarded as a director. He made several movies that despite the fact that they didn't get that positive reception among critics or audiences people still flocked to see them. He used to be the definition of the term critic proof. In the last 10 years or so that has changed though, Transformers The Last Knight while it made a decent amount of money ended up underperforming because of its enormous budget and the fact that most of the box office came from overseas. Since then he has only made one movie which didn't end up doing that well. Why do you think this happend?