Watch it if you like Lily James and Armie Hammer for how pretty they look. Otherwise, it's not *bad*, but it misses the mark.
Stephen King's magnum opus, The Dark Tower, a long book series with a sprawling mythology and epic battle of good against evil, has finally been made into a movie. I've heard it being talked about for years as this practically unfilmable book series -- kind of like The Lord of the Rings -- that Hollywood has been trying so hard to adapt for at least the last decade, but hasn't been able to succeed until now.
I recently finished And Then There Were None, a thriller by Agatha Christie. I haven't read an Agatha Christie book in ages, but I picked it up on the recommendation of Anne Bogel from Modern Mrs Darcy in one of her "What Should I Read Next" podcast episodes. Her son also read the book and said it was the best book he ever read, which intrigued me to see what about this book could cause a teenager to love it. I ended up agreeing it is great too. What a baffling mystery and chilling thriller!
I just finished this book called Dark Matter by Blake Crouch, and it is mind-blowing. I'll avoid spoilers, so you can enjoy it yourself, but basically, it's a story of a college physics professor who gets abducted one night, taken to an abandoned location and drugged. When he wakes up, he finds himself in a different world where he's a genius atomic physicist living a successful but career-oriented life, his wife never married him and his son was never born.
'Mockingjay - Part 2' follows the book pretty much faithfully -- except for all the subtext that they could not (dare not?) translate to screen, which Darren Franich from Entertainment Weekly explains in a brilliant analysis.
There are movies that I like, movies I love, and movies I *love*. The first are movies I think are good and will watch again, maybe once, at the most twice, such as Kingsman: The Secret Service, Birdman, The Divergent Series: Insurgent. (Anything else is overkill.) The second are movies I’ll gladly watch a few more times, like The Lego Movie and Whiplash, though I need some distance between each viewing. The last category belongs to the films that have won my heart and mind entirely, the ones which after I finished watching them for the first time in the cinema, I immediately wanted to go back in and rewatch them a second, third, fourth time. Cinderella belongs squarely in the last.
'Mockingjay - Part 1' is as true to the book as it can possibly be, even with the addition of Effie in District 13, but it feels a little bland without Katniss' internal monologues and all the other details that brought flavour to the story.
I went into the movie with little idea of what to expect, except a generically good time -- and came out extremely impressed.
Noah is a visualisation of what Noah's ark and the Flood would be like -- if the storyteller was on acid.
Going into Divergent, I had very little idea what to expect. While nothing beats Twilight for terrible story (that still inexplicably earned hundreds of millions of dollars and literally devil-spawned four equally successful movie sequels), Divergent had a convoluted-sounding plot that made me never want to read the books, so I was skeptical of how good the movie could be.
