Tag Archives: Noah Centineo

The Recruit – Season 1 – TV Review

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TL;DR – This is a delightfully fun romp through the world of espionage with a leading man finding himself in all the wrong places at all the right times.  

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Disclosure – I paid for the Netflix service that viewed this series.

Hiding behind your computer monitors.

The Recruit Review –

I have to say that when I first heard about The Recruit, I was kind of a bit tired of the overall spy genre. Add to that, it was led by Noah Centineo, who I had never seen as a leading man before, and the constraints of the end of the year. Well, I was happy to give this a pass. But something niggled in the back of my head, and part of me had to see what was going on here and look. I am the first to admit I was wrong.

So to set the scene, Owen Hendricks (Noah Centineo) is a brand new lawyer for the general counsel’s office of the CIA. Most jobs make you feel like you are in over your head when you start. The CIA takes that to a whole new level when all of your colleagues are also trying to sabotage you. To prove himself and because people wanted him to fail, he takes on the grey mail. These are letters from people threatening the CIA. 99% of them are not threats, but in his first week, Owen has to find the one credible letter. Max Meladze (Laura Haddock) is locked in a Phoenix prison for caving a guy’s head in with a tyre wrench. But she also knows code word clearance intelligence and might just be able to destroy all the CIA’s operations in Belarus and Russia. Owen is happy to find the threat but less comfortable when he is tasked by his boss Walter Nyland (Vondie Curtis-Hall), to take care of it, and then quite put off when that leads to him getting his fingernail ripped off in a ruin in Yemen. Now from here, we will be looking at the season as a whole, so there will be some [SPOILERS] ahead.   

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Black Adam – Movie Review

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TL;DR – This is a film where nearly anything of interest was sandblasted off to give us a bland expedition with some moments of interest.     

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.

Post-Credit Scene – There is a mid-credit scene

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

Black Adam floats in the ocean.

Black Adam Review –

I came into this film with a lot of trepidation. To say that Warner Bros has had a challenging year with its merger would be an understatement, losing nearly any goodwill they had with them. Add to this that the DCEU has struggled with very straightforward hero narratives. How would they go with an anti-hero? But if nothing else, the charisma of Dwayne Johnson is strong, and if anything can help a film, it is that.

So to set the scene, 5,000 years ago, in 2,600 BCW, in the land of Kahndaq, Black Adam (Dwayne Johnson) was chosen by the wizards to stand up to the local despot. SHAZAM, and the palace explodes. In the present, Kahndaq is still under the control of occupiers, and Adrianna Tomaz (Sarah Shahi) is trying to hide treasures from the Intergang mercenaries when she finds Black Adam’s tomb. He is finally let free, but all that time has not blunted his desire for revenge and rampage. Seeing a potential threat, Hawkman (Aldis Hodge) and the Justice Society Doctor Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), and Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo) try to show him a different path or at least get him to surrender peacefully. But then, the Black Adam is not peaceful.   

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Movie Review – The Perfect Date

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TL;DR – While it is a bit stodgy at times, it has a real heart to it and an interesting premise.   

Score – 3.5 out of 5 stars

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

The Perfect Date. Image Credit: Netflix.

Review –

In recent times, one strength that Netflix has really leaned into is producing quality rom-coms a genre that had been left wanting in the cinematic landscape recently. Indeed we have even been getting the highs of To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and given that our lead here with the impressive eyebrows is finding a niche in this genre I was interested to see how it would go. Well, it was fine, but the more it meant on the more it felt like while it had an interesting premise, it didn’t quite stick the landing in parts.  

So to set the scene, as high school is coming to the end, the world is finding out what to do next. For Brooks Rattigan (Noah Centineo), it trying to get into Yale, he wants to change the world, even though he has no idea what it is that he needs to change. He has the chance to go to a public college but he wants to go to Yale but how is he going to pay for it or even get in. Things change one day when one of the rich kids at his school Reece (Zak Steiner) was lamenting that he had to take his cousin Celia (Laura Marano) to a high school social and Brooks steps in because he needs money. During the ‘date’ Celia mentions that he would make a great stand-in boyfriend, well one app made by his friend Murph (Odiseas Georgiadis) later and a new business is made.

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Movie Review – To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before

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TL;DR – It looks at the complicated emotions of love and how we respond to it.

Score – 3.5 out of 5 stars

Post-Credit Scene – There is a mid-credit scene

To All the Boys I've Loved Before. Image Credit: Netflix

Review –

The teen romance is a genre that use to be very popular but you don’t see it as much anymore in recent times. Part of the reason is that quite often these were the mid-tier films falling between Indy and Blockbusters that got squeezed out of oblivion in the rush for everyone to make their tent pole crossover franchises. Also the genre has gone through some shifts in the wake of works like John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars. However, as people realise that the big multi-film franchise can’t happen all the time, we have started to see the resurgence of these mid-tier budget films and all of this brings us to today’s film To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before a Young Adult/Coming of Age film about love and loss and the need to hide your letters better from well-meaning but potentially destructive siblings.

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