Movie Reviews
CTRL movie audience review: Ananya Panday’s Netflix thriller is ‘terrific’; OTT film gets thumbs-up from viewers | Today News
CTRL movie audience review: CTRL started streaming on Netflix on October 4. The thriller, directed by ace Bollywood director Vikramaditya Motwane, stars Ananya Panday and Vihaan Samat.
The story is about Nella and Joe, who seem like the ideal influencer couple. However, when Joe cheats on Nella, she uses an AI app to erase him from her life — only for it to gain control over her.
The Netflix movie has received some highly-positive reviews from viewers, who posted their comments on social media. Let’s take a look at some of those.
CTRL public reviews
“CTRL is… terrific, absorbing and made with a lot of finesse… Do watch if you have time.”
“Found Vikramaditya Motwane’s new Netflix film #CTRL utterly fascinating. So much to admire. An ambitious, timely, deeply uncomfortable screenlife thriller that’ll make you want to change your passwords, cover your webcam and move to the hills.”
“This is quite good. Only 1 hour 40 minutes, and not gonna lie, I had underestimated Motwane a bit with this movie. Ananya did well because she nailed this genre. It starts off slow, happy, and lighthearted, but the tension builds as the story progresses. Give it a watch, it’s nice.”
“vikramdityamotwane Gives a nuanced and gripping narrative and @ananyapandayy has finally come into her own, and does a fine job.”
“As a big fan of Motwane’s films, I’ve always seen him set new standards in mainstream cinema. From Udaan to AK vs AK he has always proved his merit. However, #CTRL feels like just an okay film, despite good casting with Ananya Panday. It lacks a strong impact and becomes somewhat preachy about our relationship with technology, leaving you with little to think about afterward.”
“The movie is abt how social media, AI and corporates are controlling us and not vice versa. Ananya Panday is good. Vihaan Samat is brilliant. The movie cudve been much better. Esp the climax.Theres no closure!”
Movie Reviews
Trap movie review (2024) –
Trap is an unconventional effort from director/writer M. Night Shyamalan. He leans into the expectations in building a captivating suspense film with a mostly satisfying finale.
Shyamalan gets unfairly dinged by critics who impatiently wait for his film’s twists and then get upset when it doesn’t deliver. For Trap, Shyamalan relies far less on a movie-altering twist. Instead, the focus is on the relentless quest to track down a serial killer.
Cooper (a terrific Josh Hartnett) is vying for Father of the Year honors. He’s scored floor seats so his daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue) can fangirl out over the Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) concert.
While it’d be an easy layup to scream “nepotism!” to the heavens over Shyamalan casting his daughter as the pop starlet, it’s irrelevant. Saleka Shyamalan can sing and has a genuine pop star presence on the concert stage. And it’s not like he’s asking her to give some Oscar-winning dramatic performance. She just needs to play a pop superstar, which doesn’t feel like that big a stretch given her talent.
With its concert setting, the music is an integral part of Trap and Saleka Shyamalan is a major contributor as she wrote and performed 14 of the songs. The songs were catchy enough to warrant checking out the soundtrack (now available on Amazon).
Cooper quickly notices an unusually high concentration of police and armed security manning the entrances. He’s no fool and deduces they’re on to him. In a smart storytelling choice, Shyamalan doesn’t drag out the big reveal until the end — Cooper is indeed the serial killer the police are on hand to apprehend. The only catch is they’ve got no clue what he looks like just that he’s in attendance at the Lady Raven concert.
Hartnett’s performance is amazing. There are clearly different sides of Cooper at play from the trying too hard to be sweet and kind father making sure Riley has a great time and the calculating mastermind trying to escape this carefully constructed trap. Hartnett is in complete control of both aspects of Cooper’s personality in one of his strongest performances.
Donoghue is also enjoyable as the daughter who is actually appreciative of her father instead of hoping he’ll leave her alone. It makes the inevitable fallout that much more meaningful as the bond between father and daughter is well-earned.
Cooper keeps thinking ahead and avoiding the well-thought-out strategies of the profiler (Hayley Mills) on hand to aid the FBI and police making for some very suspenseful moments. It’s a little weird in the sense how Shyamalan wants the viewer engaged and marveling at Cooper’s strategy all while realizing there’s no good way to root for a serial killer.
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There are some moments that feel like Shyamalan got a little too cute in ignoring basic logic in favor of a more dramatic moment. Some of the concert crowd shots feel too intimate in a way that suggests most of the crowd were filled in via CGI.
The actual concert shots are well staged as Shyamalan places more emphasis on the singing and dancing via the large monitors rather than the stage. This provides more of a feeling of watching a concert onsite as opposed to watching a movie with a concert playing out.
Given the 1 hour and 45-minute run time, it would have been nice for Shyamalan to offer more insight into Cooper’s motives. Yes, Shyamalan provides a cursory rationale of Cooper feeling a monster is inside him and some basic mommy issues, but Trap would have played out stronger with an actual explanation beyond “he’s crazy.”
At the midway point, Shyamalan seems to have that elusive motive lined up in his sights when Cooper mentions that Riley battled leukemia. Cooper’s murder spree being the result of him getting some measure of revenge on the doctors, hospital staff and insurance agents that let Riley suffer could have provided Trap with a more complicated narrative.
As seemingly is his norm, the third act starts to get away from Shyamalan a bit. Fortunately, he can lean heavily on Hartnett to get it back on track. Trap has some problems, but it’s a fun suspense thriller that kept me engaged right through to the credits.
Rating: 8 out of 10
Photo Credit: Warner Bros.
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Movie Reviews
'We Live In Time' movie review with Casey T. Allen
Anyone who’s watched a romance film knows the most vital ingredient in such a film is chemistry between the two characters in love. This chemistry is bountiful in the new release, We Live in Time starring Andrew Garfield (tick, tick… BOOM! 2021) and Florence Pugh (Dune: Part Two, 2024) as two young people living in England whose paths intersect violently and then turn into romance. Over multiple years, their relationship endures through self-doubt, fertility challenges, secrets of the past, and a frightening health diagnosis.
We Live in Time is not a romantic comedy, because it has a slightly melancholic tone throughout with lots of quiet dialogue and heartfelt montages of lovers doing fun activities together. Both Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh give believably vulnerable performances. He is shy and socially clumsy while she is ambitious and open-hearted. They find comfort in each other during life’s hardships, portraying a love that is resolute and demurely steadfast.
Nick Payne is the screenwriter for this film, and he wrote another romance tinged with tragedy from 2021 called The Last Letter from Your Lover. He also wrote on a few episodes for the popular Netflix series, The Crown, and that’s where you can spot the similarities in his writing style. Nobody in We Live in Time talks too much, so none of the dialogue feels forced or superfluous. Everything feels tender and natural, because this film clearly wants everyone to like it. So why did I walk out of the theater with only a shrug as my emotional response?
Irish Director John Crowley keeps this film consistent with genuine bittersweet milestones in the lives of these ordinary people, much like he did with his Oscar-nominated film, Brooklyn (2015). But I couldn’t ignore my feelings that I had seen films like this already. I’m talking about Love Story (1970), Dying Young (1991), One Day (2011), The Vow (2012), and there’s plenty more to include here. Telling the story of We Live in Time in a non-linear way is a nice surprise and adds some interest jumping around to different periods in the lovers’ lives without any hints or foreshadowing. But I still left the theater with dry cheeks wondering why I wasn’t more touched.
Is my heart made of stone, dipped in garbage, and soaked in manure? Am I emotionally handicapped against the romantic lives of straight white people? If that’s the truth, then I’ll just say We Live in Time is sweetly adequate. It’s true not every film needs to be a brilliant bolt of lightning showing something new and pushing boundaries. We Live in Time is an example of this. So it will tug some heartstrings, but it isn’t exactly an exciting choice for movie lovers out there. (But maybe for romance movie lovers, it WILL be an exciting choice.)
Movie Reviews
Blitz movie review: the unraveling of propaganda – FlickFilosopher.com
Blitz opens amidst a terrifying conflagration on a nighttime city street. This is the blitzkrieg, the German bombing of London in 1940 in the early days of World War II. But as writer-director Steve McQueen casts it, it’s not about an entire street or even a single building on fire. It’s about a loose fire hose whipping about wildly and the heavy industrial nozzle whacking an anonymous fireman in the head as he struggles to bring it under control.
It’s a moment of feral intensity, and of ferocious intimacy. It reminded me of nothing so much as snippets from early in the TV series Chernobyl, about the 1986 nuclear-plant disaster. Just an ordinary schmoe firefighter not even thinking twice about doing a dangerous job, because it has to be done.
Blitz is not about that firefighter. But the brutal randomness of that opening sequence sets the stage for what is to come. This is not a sentimental story about British stiff upper lips and keeping calm and carrying on. There were scenes in this movie when I gasped out loud and actually clapped a hand to my mouth in shock — I can’t recall if I’d ever done that before. McQueen (Widows, Shame) seems to be deliberately pushing back against how the British and especially the London experience of the war has been ex post facto propagandized into cheery, chipper camaraderie and complacency. Indeed, the whole “keep calm and carry on” thing was a propaganda slogan developed during the war but barely used then, and was almost entirely forgotten until it was rediscovered in 2000 and subsequently weaponized for whitewashed and commercialized nostalgia.
McQueen plays with those expectations but smashes them at every opportunity with this tale of nine-year-old George, who’s furious that his single mom, Rita, has relented and agreed to evacuate her son to the countryside, finally, after so many other London children had already left. Blitz is the picaresque misadventures of George as he decides to take himself home, Nazi bombs be damned, and to the inadvertent horror of his mother, once she is informed that the authorities who were supposed to be in charge of George’s safety have lost him.
(George is played by wonderful newcomer Elliott Heffernan, a real find on McQueen’s part. Rita is portrayed by Saoirse Ronan [Foe, Little Women], as ever a standout, and the best thing even in an all-around terrific movie, as this is.)
McQueen is pushing back against another sort of whitewashing, too, of the more literal kind: the bizarre notion that, somehow, “diversity” is a 21st-century invention and that people of color haven’t always been a part of, in particular, majority-white colonial nations like Great Britain. (This is hugely applicable to the US as well.) The filmmaker had said he was inspired in this story by an old photograph of a mixed-race Blitz evacuee, a small boy standing on a WWII-era railway platform, and wondered what his life was like. And so McQueen — who is Black British — builds a sketch of vibrant, multicultural life in century-ago London. Partly through flashbacks, of the lively jazz-club scene where Rita partied, pre-war, with George’s father, Marcus (CJ Beckford), an immigrant from Grenada who is no longer in the picture. But McQueen’s portrait of a London that some would like to pretend never existed blossoms, enormously affectingly, via the air-raid warden George encounters on his journeys: Ife (Benjamin Clémentine: Dune), a Nigerian immigrant to London. Sharply but gently — so gently: Ife is one of the loveliest characters I’ve met onscreen in a long while — McQueen’s exuberant, diverse London subtly suggests that this, very much this, is what was worth fighting the Nazis to protect.
(Relevance to today? Sky-high, no pun intended. It was WWII horrors like the Blitz, as well as the Allied firebombing of Dresden, in Germany, and the American atomic attacks on Japan that have helped shaped our ideas about what constitutes warcrimes today. Bonus points to anyone who can pinpoint multiple indiscriminate military attacks on civilians happening right now around the planet.)
Yet nothing here is romanticized, either. Racism is a real and pervasive presence — the sequence in which George has his eyes opened to just how ingrained the denigration of Black people has been by the British Empire is heartbreaking — as is the opportunism of those who would take advantage of the chaos of the Blitz: Stephen Graham (Boiling Point, Greyhound) and Kathy Burke (Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie, Pan) as scavenger-thieves who descend after the bombs fall, and who rope George into their schemes, are terrifying, akin to the Thenardiers of Les Misérables but devoid of their bleak comedy.
Blitz is McQueen’s most accessible, most mainstream film yet; his previous works include 2010’s IRA hunger-strike movie Hunger, 2013’s 12 Years a Slave, and last year’s Occupied City, a four-and-a-half-hour documentary about Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t absolutely brutal. This is a movie about childhood adventure that is a lark, until it isn’t. It’s about community care and small moments of kindness from strangers in passing, and also about stomping on your neighbors in moments of panic and terror. It’s wildly human, artistically masterful, and completely magnificent.
more films like this:
• Empire of the Sun [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]
• 12 Years a Slave [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Netflix UK (till Nov 15) | BFI Player UK]
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