Sound of Metal – Movie Review

TL;DR – A profoundly moving and confronting film that explores a man’s life after it has been ripped asunder    

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

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

Awards

Nominated: Fascinating Worldbuilding.
Winner: Fascinating Worldbuilding.

Sound of Metal. Image Credit: Amazon Studios.

Sound of Metal Review

There are times when you have seen an actor nail every role that you have seen them in, but they have only been in supporting roles. So you can’t wait to see someone take a chance and cast them in the lead. One of those actors is Riz Ahmed, and I am glad that I get to see that happen today with Sound of Metal.

So to set the scene, Ruben Stone (Riz Ahmed) is a musician, specifically a drummer, who is on tour with his partner Lou (Olivia Cooke). One night when he is performing a ringing starts in his ears, but it goes away. However, it continues to relapse till he has only 20% hearing in both his ears. Ruben is told that he has to stop drumming or he could lose all his hearing. He ignores the doctor and goes back to drumming until it is all gone. In a moment of despair, he starts to backslide after being clean for four years. Lou calls his sponsor, and they are able to find a place that can help him with both his addiction and help him work through his loss of hearing. The head of the facility, Joe (Paul Raci) needs Ruben to cut himself off from the world for this to work, which is a difficult transition.

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Movie Review – Venom

TL;DR – There are moments when Venom comes together and is a really entertaining film. However, those moments are spread in-between a dull story with some bland action, and an anti-climactic ending.

Score – 2.5 out of 5 stars

Post-Credit Scene – There is a mid-credit scene, and a post-credit trailer thingy (that you should totally stick around for)

Venom. Image Credit: Sony.

Review

I don’t think I have seen a film that gave such a bad first impression in quite a while. As a rule, I try to avoid trailers where possible, because of both the spoilers and also because they could taint my view of the film before I have even walked into the cinema. But even with that policy, it was hard to escape the “like a turd in the wind” quote, one of the worse lines of dialogue uttered in a blockbuster film in recent memory. Add to this the filmmakers are trying to build a universe around just Venom, after failing to do the same thing with Spider-Man. All of this was a recipe for disaster. However, walking out of the cinema I have to admit I might have been a bit too harsh on Venom … well, only just a little bit.

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Movie Review – Jason Bourne

TL;DR – This movie is everything you have come to expect from a Jason Bourne film, but that means all the good and the bad is here.

Score – 2.5 out of 5 stars

Jason Bourne. Image Credit: Universal Pictures.

Review

I have to say before we start that the original Bourne Trilogy (Identity, Supremacy & Ultimatum) is probably one of my favourite trilogies of all time, for me I put it up there with the original Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. The follow-up Legacy had some interesting ideas but it lacked the style and understanding of the previous films, and it felt like they had just inserted the Bourne universe into an original IP. So given how high my impression of the first films was, and how low the follow up was, I was preparing myself for this iteration to be a train wreck, but thankfully it’s not. For me, it is everything the old Bourne’s were, however, the last of those films were made almost 10 years ago, and that is a bit of the problem if you are just doing the same thing over again.

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