Confessions [Kokuhaku]

A spectacularly elaborate revenge tale illustrated with sumptuous slow-motion photography that builds incessantly to the most incredible crescendo.

Avengers Assemble [The Avengers]

More Iron Man & Hulk are always welcome, the rest is just killing time till one of them does something cool. Fortunately this begins to happen quite frequently toward the end.

Spirited Away [Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi]

Without doubt one of the richest (visually and thematically) animations to ever hit a screen.
Charlotte's one word summation: "Awesome!"

Black

Would like to be a super cool heist movie that subtly becomes a mystic parable about spirit animals of Africa, but only manages to be people running around to lazy funk, clumsily smashed into incomprehensible voodoo nonsense.

Carancho

The way the camera swung about in this skillfully woven tale of doomed romance amongst a villainous ambulance chasing cartel made me think of Scorcese, then a pervasive dismal bleakness slowly enveloped the film and I forgot all about him. Excellent.

Tamara

Not sure how I've ended up watching a revenge fantasy for nerdy girls. It did feature somebody stabbing themselves in the face though, so not a total loss.

The Cabin In The Woods

= (Evil Dead + Lost)^horror

Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter

Retrospectively a bit of a shit title for part four of ten.
This one's tough to get through, the characters basically partake in a series of leaden exchanges until they die or run into the rain then die. However, no matter how poor the film gets, its existence is justified by this.

Friday The 13th Part 2

An hour of nonsense story, a bunch of unintentionally hilarious deaths (The wheelchair bound arm wrestling champion in particular) then an insane ending that makes little sense. But c'mon, check the... shit I'm posting a day late.

The Ant Bully

Communist propaganda leavened only by the thought of what the film would be like if, instead of being miniaturised by a wizard ant, the snotty shitbag kid had been kidnapped in his sleep and shipped off to North Korea.

101 Dalmatians [1996 Remake]

Where to start.
There's the teeth grinding anger generated by an oafish American interpretation of London that begins with everybody living in houses across the river from Big Ben and culminates with an English countryside populated with racoons, skunks and vats of molasses.
There's the painfully keen embarrassment generated from Glenn Close's performance, clearly the only person committed to the concept only to end up garrulously over-performing to farm animals before being flung into pigshit.
Then there's the fact that, finally, here is a film that actually would benefit from talking animals, yet they're mute. Presumably to prevent them from out-acting Joely Richardson.
Shit.

Rosemary's Baby

A nagging insidiousness hidden beneath pregnancy paranoia.
Phenomenal.

Love Exposure [Ai no mukidashi]

An epic four hour meditation on love, family, religion, growing up, perversion, violence and the surreptitious photographing of ladies pants using Kung-Fu.
Remarkable.

Final Destination 3

A tired retread hamstrung by its own logic within the first 20 mins.
Still, as low points in drawn out horror franchises go, it's not as bad as some.

Slumdog Millionaire

Contrivance elevated to magic through excellent writing and direction.

About Schmidt

Jack Nicholson anchors a 'you gotta be fucking kidding me' expression to his grumpy face and then goes on a little sad old man adventure.

Our Day Will Come [Notre jour viendra]

Begins a bit like The NeverEnding Story in that a youngster being bullied (here for being red headed) has a chance meeting with a stranger that leads him to adventure. Unfortunately rather than a benign book keeper and a furry dragon, this chap meets Vincent Cassel in full-on, balls out insanity mode and so his adventure ends up involving holding people hostage with a crossbow whilst Cassel has a wank in a jacuzzi.

Agnosia

There's a quote on the back of the box that says "Wonderful looking film", I imagine the original context of the quote to be something along the lines of "Wonderful looking film, what a shame it's total fucking shit".
Likewise "Beautifully shot ... the film defies expectations" is most likely to be "Watching a cool draught goose-pimple the skin of a beautifully shot old man's ballsack would be preferable to this toss, the film defies expectations".

Memories Of Murder [Salinui chueok]

A Korean 'Zodiac'. Only made four years earlier and much, much better.

The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists! [3D]

Nothing feels quite right, which strikes me as a crying shame.
Charlotte hated it. Her words, not mine.

H.P. Lovecraft's Bride Of Re-Animator [Re-Animator 2]

Since the events of the first movie Herbert West has perfected his glowing serum so it will now reanimate and fuse body parts. He convinces his roommate not to move out by promising to rebuild his dead girlfriend starting with her heart which is then combined with various other discarded body parts. Meanwhile the bad guy from the first film, who was reduced to just a disembodied head, forces a surgeon through hypnosis into grafting bat wings to his temples so he can fly around West's house laughing maniacally.
The kind of thing that would've made Lovecraft shoot himself in the face.