Tag Archives: Lion

Beast – Movie Review

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TL;DR – It starts strong and has genuinely terrifying moments, but it does not have the legs to make it to the end.   

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Disclosure – I was invited to a press screening of this film.

A truck drives through the South African bush.

Beast Review –

A long tradition of films can be summed up as ‘an unknowable antagonist hunts down our plucky protagonists’. If we slip into horror, this can be a slasher hunted down kids at a summer camp, dinosaurs running amok in Jurassic Park, or you could flip it, and the unstoppable force is the protagonist as in John Wick. However, one of the more popular scenarios in this realm is animals, and while sharks may have been king for a while, today’s film looks to unseat them with the big cats that roam the savannah.

So to set the scene, it is late a night as a group of poachers stalk through the bush to a trap they have set up. Letting loose a barrage of gunfire, they kill all the lions there, bar one that gets away. The next day, Nate Samuels (Idris Elba) and his daughters Meredith (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Sava Jeffries) arrive at Mopani Game Reserve in South Africa to spend time with Martin Battles (Sharlto Copley), an old friend of Nate and his late wife. Nate is a ranger at Mopani, and in the morning, he gives the group a tour around the preserve, even in the areas the public doesn’t usually see. But when they see a man running out onto the road covered in blood and go to help, they soon realise that there is something out there in the grass coming for them.

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My Top 15 Films of 2017

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TL;DR – 2017 was a great year in film and here are our favourites
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Countdown –

So here we are at the end of the year, the sound of fireworks still ringing in our ears, the excess of Christmas just a faint memory, and the realisation just dawning that you probably won’t get your money’s worth out of that gym membership you bought for your New Year’s resolution. However, it is also a time of reflection, a look into the past and the hope for the future, and while 2017 has been not great internationally, there were some great moments in cinema, and this is what we are celebrating today.

So far in our end of year countdown we have had Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 of our Key Moments in Cinema in 2017 over the last couple of days, also we have looked at the Bottom 10 Films of 2017, but today it is all good all the time, so let us dive in.

Before we start we are going to take a few moments to clarify our criteria for the entries on this list so you understand why a film may or may not appear here. First, it has to be one of the 84 films we review in 2017 (To see all the films we reviewed this year Click Here). Now this means a couple of things, first you may see some films here that were released in 2016 where you live, but were not released until 2017 here, as well as this, a number of the films in contention for Oscars this year like Lady Bird and Call Me By Your Name have not been released yet here, or not released widely, as such they won’t appear on this list (we will hopefully be reviewing them later in January). Also shout out to Ali’s Wedding, Baby Driver, Detroit, Jasper Jones, Power Rangers, Star Wars: The Last Jedi & The Lego Batman Film who were close to making it onto this list.

Now just a warning we will be discussing these films, and some of them are still in cinemas, so be careful because [SPOILERS] are incoming. So without any further ado let us begin the Top 15 Films for 2017.

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Awards – Key Moments in Cinema in 2017 Part 4

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TL;DR – This is the end of the year, so let’s take a look back at the year that was by examining twenty categories across cinema, ranging from exquisite to the obscured and all between
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Awards –

It is the end of the year (well a bit later than that but life happened) and while I will have the traditional Best of 2017 and Worst of 2017 lists, I have found that both of those lists miss some of the important facets that make films work, or not work. To eligible for these awards, they simply had to be a film I reviewed in 2017, and there may be some notable absences simply because we have not got those films here yet. So in Part 4 of 4, we look at five different categories that deal with the cinema of 2017.

  • The characters that I loved
  • The biggest surprise
  • The best team up
  • The best villain
  • The most emotional film

So let’s dive into TL;DR Movie Review’s Awards of 2017 Part 4

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Movie Review – Lion

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TL;DR – A beautiful story of loss, exploitation, grief, and trying to find out what home means, in the absence of any real information of where it could be.

Score – 4.5 out of 5 stars

Lion. Image Credit: Transmission Films.

Review –

It might be one of those universal experiences, you’re walking through a shopping centre, theme park, city street, etc. with your parents and then you look up and realise you don’t know where they are. That feeling of being lost as a real and palpable fear and thankfully for most of us it short lived. However, this is not the case for Saroo, indeed for Saroo it was not a momentary fear, for him it was a life changing event. Lion tells the story of Saroo Brierley (Sunny Pawar & Dev Patel) who one day after working in rural India with his brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate), joins him on a train ride to a nearby settlement so Guddu can find some night work for them to help their mother Kamla (Priyanka Bose) who works as a labourer to make ends meet. Then Saroo ends up getting stuck on a train which is not going to the next station, but instead travelling 1500km to Calcutta, a place where no one speaks the same language, and as you are five years old as far as you know your mum’s name is ‘mum’. This is a heartbreaking tale of loss, exploitation, and the struggle to find what home means. Now due to the nature of the film, its structure and the very nature that it is based off a true story it becomes quite hard to talk about aspects of the film without discussing the second half of the film. So for this reason from here on into the end, a SPOILER warning is now in place.

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