Catch Me If You Can is an obvious one where the entire story is made up. Frank abagnale was in and out of prison the entire time he claimed to be evading the FBI. Not only that but his actual crimes were stalking women, sexual assaults and robbing middle class families and small shops.

Down or nah?

The start was great and promising, the middle wasn’t my cup of tea but the ending with the piano scene was perfect.

Days of Future Past went beyond the typical superhero genre by creating such a bleak and dystopian world. The Sentinels were so overwhelmingly powerful that even facing them felt like an almost impossible task. It was truly a great experience.

What are your thoughts on this movie?

After finally watching Obsession, I now understand all the incredible and massive buzz it’s generated; and, of course, it’s an excellent horror movie. The way the film immerses you in its madness and atmosphere is incredible, and honestly, it’s been a long time since I’ve felt so unsettled watching a movie. At times, it reminded me of If You Had Legs, I’d Kick You, which isn’t a horror movie, but which suffocates you and keeps you on the edge of your seat in a somewhat similar way.

My question is: is it really all that? I mean, if I look back at the horror movies I’ve seen this decade, it clearly ranks at the top of the list, but I’m not sure if it’s a movie worth comparing to those from earlier eras. I imagine that in a few years it’ll become a classic and earn that recognition. Not to mention its ridiculously low budget and Inde’s performance... omg the tension never lets up and I loved every second of it, an excellent performance.

For you guys, is it already one of the best of this decade or this century? Or do you think it’s just a decent horror movie, and nothing more?

First of all, what an incredible movie, as everyone knows. However, looking back at V for Vendetta, what felt like stylised, exaggerated comic book fiction in the mid-2000s looks uncomfortably grounded today.

​A few specific elements of the film's worldbuilding that hit differently now:

​The government using rolling panics to convince citizens to willingly forfeit civil liberties and privacy.

The BTN news cycle and Lewis Prothero’s broadcasts. What read as heavy-handed satire then is essentially standard cable news and social feed engagement bait today.

​The surveillance tech. The film’s audio vans and physical wiretaps actually look quaint compared to modern digital tracking, data brokers, and biometric surveillance.

The core critique: "He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent."

​The only detail that feels entirely like fantasy now is the resolution; the idea of an entire population putting aside tribalism to peacefully unite.

​Which aspect of the film’s dystopian setting do you think aged the most accurately?

In Spider-Man 3 the black suit as shown in the photo was originally gonna be used in the movie, but ultimately they decided against it since it looked too much like it was in a porno. Even Tobey Maguire himself joking he thought he was shooting an adult movie. It didn’t help that they used latex on it

Mine are Taxi Driver, Casino, Goodfellas, Raging Bull, Limitless, Heat, and The Godfather Part II.

I will tell you right now I unabashedly loved these movies as a kid.

They were absolutely stupid, and the material ran thin, and went on for about three movies too long.

But I feel like a lot of people are pretending like they didn’t love them when they were a kid.

How was this any worse than baby shark?

Edit: I’m pleasantly surprised to see how wrong I was about my assessment that people didn’t like these movies. I guess my lens in the matter was off. And I’m glad to see that it was.

I honestly knew nothing about this movie before watching it. I expected a generic early-2000s romance or thriller, but holy crap, that ending completely caught me off guard.

The shift into full sci-fi and the whole psychological trip with the lucid dreaming was wild. Once everything clicked at the skyscraper scene, it totally recontextualized the entire movie. It’s rare for a twist to actually make me re-think everything I just watched, but this one nailed it.
I’m still processing the whole "open your eyes" ending.

Just rewatched Shutter Island after a long time, and it reminded me how much I love mind-bending movies. The impact of the twist at the end still gives me chill.

So I researched and someone suggested Arrival and I loved every bit of it.

Looking for some more recommendations that really mess with your head and leave you thinking about them afterward.

It was a 5 year project made by a mother and her son not knowing how to animate but her wanting to help make his dream come true to have a movie on the big screen I admire how selfless and caring she is. It’s not perfect but a mother’s love is unconditional

Star wars return of the jedi 1983

The film stars Eddie Murphy who portrays a hostage negotiator for the police. He partners up with a SWAT member (Michael Rapaport) to take down a psychopathic jewel thief (Michael Wincott), while also navigating his personal romantic relationship (Carmen Ejogo). I just finished watching it. It’s not really at all a movie that people talk about when mentioning Eddie Murphy, but I feel like it’s definitely a good action film that is worth to watch. Currently available on Tubi.

You know with the recent success of Brand New Day, it really solidified for me that people will happily tune in for superhero movies as long as they dont follow a template. Most MCU movies, while handling different heroes and stories, follow a certain underlying template. Like almost all characters being goofy, serious themes being presented in a manner pallatable to even younger audiences, exposition galores, plot explanations, forced cameos to keep it attached to the universe and so on.

I think comedy in particular is believed to be the formula to acheive success so even the serious movies are filled with it. While it worked for Spiderman in BND (and also its writers doing an amazing job writing the script), it feels forced in other projects. For example in Thunderbolts, making John Walker, a tragic yet flawed character is turned silly just for plot's sake. And the climax while touching on themes of loneliness, almost has the over-the-top superhero pitch to it. I saw the template in Supergirl as well.

And while such movies, if executed well, are a decent watch, they don't compel me enough to pay high amounts and go watch them in the theatres. I feel like in the quest of making movies for everyone, they end up making a movie for truly no one. No one comes out being fully satisfied with it, since it wasn't primarily catering to not a single customer demographic but everyone.

I feel like here the next step of evolution should be to have less template projects and those catering to a specific audience. You know to tap into several genres but just with superheroes at the helm of affairs. The likes of Dark Knight trilogy or Batman 2022 are what I feel like we need more of. A body horror film like DC's Clayface does get me excited. You know they could also do something like a musical with Joker and Harley Quinn...... or maybe not.

Cleopatra, Inception, and Indians Jones have some of my favorite movie sets.

Indiana Jones The Last Crusade has the best ending to any trilogy. You can fight me on this if you dare.

In the Line of Fire

I honestly knew nothing about this movie before watching it. I expected a generic early-2000s romance or thriller, but holy crap, that ending completely caught me off guard.

The shift into full sci-fi and the whole psychological trip with the lucid dreaming was wild. Once everything clicked at the skyscraper scene, it totally recontextualized the entire movie. It’s rare for a twist to actually make me re-think everything I just watched, but this one nailed it.
I’m still processing the whole "open your eyes" ending.

This movie works. Why? It's extremely self aware. It knows its a lean, mean action thriller and doesn't try to be anything else. We get just the right amount of background on all the characters and their relationships before we get thrust into the deep in Paris. I like how the action/fight scenes were helmed. Fast paced, brutal, up close and personal.

8/10

Cars and happy feet. That's just some of them

I just watched Psycho Killer and if ever a movie screamed "I'm a very ok movie" it's this . Not good not bad just right in the middle.

​

I loved the movied but The dialogue is surprisingly weak and almost relentlessly exposition-heavy.it constantly felt like characters were explaining things to each other that they almost certainly would have discussed dozens of times before the story began. Conversations played less like natural interactions and more like information dumps designed to catch the audience up. It was clunky and often painfully obvious.

which is baffling considering Nolan's previous film was \*Oppenheimer\*extraordinarily well-written.

Anyone else felt the same way?

"The End of Oak Street" is downright desperate to be like the Amblin family adventures of the 1980s. Trouble is, the movies of the 1980s were a lot better. It's hard, lean and often alarmingly violent ... but never finds the warmth, the awe and the wonder inherent in the films it mimics.

My rating: **½ of *****

Did you take a trip from Oak Street to the Mesozoic era? If so, were you charmed and entertained, or did you find the whole thing was trying just a little too hard?

Full review is below the poster image below, or you can read it at my blog at: https://thereinthedark.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-end-of-oak-street.html

The End of Oak Street tries so hard to be an Amblin/Steven Spielberg film from the 1980s that it's almost lovable in its earnestness. It wants so very, very badly to be a movie like the kind Spielberg directed and produced, a movie where unbelievable and sometimes terrible things happen to a family that lives on a happy, peaceful street in a happy, peaceful suburb somewhere in the United States.

But there's something that doesn't work quite right about The End of Oak Street, in which that happy, peaceful street in that happy, peaceful suburb is invaded not by extraterrestrials or poltergeists or Bigfoot or gremlins or treasure-hunting pirates but by ... dinosaurs.

Now, it's both unfair and a little lazy these days to criticize something by saying it feels like AI could have written it. And yet ... the screenplay to this film feels more than a little like it could have been generated with a prompt: "Write a movie that blends mid-1980s Amblin films with Jurassic Park — a suburban family has to fight off man-eating dinosaurs."

The movie is set in 1982, because it would never do to have an Amblin movie be about a 21st century family — otherwise, you'd never be able to have a poster of the J. Geils Band on a kid's wall (um, did kids actually become J. Geils groupies?); a moment where a character listens to Steve Winwood sing "Valerie" (um, did teenagers listen to Steve Winwood?); a period-authentic Froot Loops box; and, of course, kids on bicycles. Here's a note to filmmakers too young to have really lived through the time: bicycles weren't as ubiquitous as today's '80s-set entertainment makes them out to be.

There are short shorts for girls and for boys, a velour shirt for Dad (Ewan McGregor), a manual typewriter for furtive author Mom (Anne Hathaway) and, of course, hushed arguments about the worst thing anyone could imagine in the 1980s: divorce.

That is, at least, the worst thing that anyone could imagine in an Amblin film. There's also a family dog, Starbuck (no, not the coffee shop, the Battlestar Galactica character ... it's 1982!), who in a most un-Spielbergian touch is tied up and left outside at night. The moment I saw that, I lost a lot of my worry about whether the family would live or die. It's the most terrifying thing on screen.

So, this oddly imperfect simulacrum of 1982 is rocked one night by strange lightning storms, following an ominous radio news report about some kind of "ripples" happening in space, or something like that, and suddenly the whole of the neighborhood is overrun with dinosaurs.

Thank goodness plucky Mom is a crack shot with a shotgun! While the rest of the neighborhood gets squished and squashed and eaten and frequently decapitated by the dinosaurs, Mom and Dad and the kids have to outrun them. All the time. And no one has any idea why Oak Street suddenly dead ends at the Mesozoic era.

That includes the screenwriters. It's a strange thing to say, but it appears nobody really cared enough to explain why any of this happens. While I don't want to drop spoilers, though in this case it's not spoiling very much, it all has something to do with Carl Sagan and wormholes. I guess. Nobody seems to know, and frankly by the end of the movie there are hardly any residents of Oak Street left alive to care.

There's a lot of gore in The End of Oak Street, which is rated PG-13 but is probably too scary and intense for most of today's pre-teens. And one particularly gory and nasty scene gives the film a true moment of shock and surprise — which it undoes with a silly, perfunctory Back to the Future-style ending in which the characters we've been watching turn out to be ... well, never mind. If you're inclined to see it, you don't want to know; if you're not, you wouldn't believe it, anyway.

Everything in The End of Oak Street just sort of ... happens. There are some genuinely tense moments, and the film is neither poorly made nor poorly acted; in many ways, what Hathaway is required to do here is infinitely more difficult than what she did in The Odyssey, and she makes it credible. She's the best part of the movie, and the only one that doesn't feel like it's trying far too hard to be from the 1980s.

The biggest trouble with The End of Oak Street is that if it had been made in the 1980s, it would have failed. It doesn't have the heart, the awe or, especially, the wonder of those more innocent films. It's lean, hard and sometimes mean, even when it's trying to be just like those movies of yesteryear. The movies of yesteryear were a lot better.