Catch Me If You Can is a cool and energetic crime-drama featuring great performances, a fascinating main character, an amazing score and excellent direction that holds up quite well today.
ParaNorman isn’t a perfect movie by any stretch and the story isn’t all that interesting, at least in the middle part, but one can’t help but admire the stop-motion technique and just what’s involved to make a 90-minute feature film. Along with the voice casting, the movie is absolutely fantastic to look at.
Savages isn’t a complete waste of time but it was a waste of potential. The main characters aren’t very well developed though it’s not helped that the actors don’t deliver better performances and the use of voice over from Blakely was annoying. There are a couple glimmers of light: the film looks great thanks to director of photographer Dan Mindel and Benicio Del Toro is fantastic in a small but integral role.
Contagion has some things going for it, but mainly from an acting and technical level rather than the story. The cast is mostly good despite having a limited amount of screen time and Soderbergh’s visual style, while nothing new from what he’s done in the past, still looks stunning and gives the film a certain gravitas yet at the same time I felt like I was more or less a spectator versus becoming involved or entrenched with what was going on.
The Bonfire of the Vanities was a critical and financial flop when it was released back in 1990 and considering its cast with Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis, it should have been better. For me, I don’t think it was that bad though I’ve never read the novel it was based upon so taking at face value, it’s at least an average, and biting, satirical drama-comedy.