In the recent "lie detector test" video of the legendary Fanning sisters, it was revealed that Elle Fanning was indeed jealous of her sister Dakota Fanning, when Tom Cruise gifted her a fancy mobile phone back in 2005. Why would Tom Cruise gift anything to a ( then ) 10 year old girl? Well Tom and Dakota were the two leads of the 2005 science fiction horror film by Steven Spielberg called War of the Worlds.
Critics gave negative reviews to 2004 Tony Scott's film Man on Fire because of "grim story that gets harder to take the longer it goes on". Are you fucking serious? How then Lars Von Trier movies get good reviews? Something isn't quite right here. To be frank, the film is very ultra-cinematic. Which could rub some critics the wrong way. Scott doesn't just direct the shit out of it. He also edits the shit out of it. Making one of the coolest directed films in existence. Which if you think about it, isn't particularly what critics find as a serious picture. And yes, the film is grim. At times it feel like a horror film. Not just a thriller. But the film is a rather satisfactory experience.
A lot of horror films are therapeutic in nature. They let you see and examine some dark things about yourself or the world. And that is a good thing. For example, some people were "cured" from suicidal thoughts by watching the Saw franchise. A running theme in those films, is that Saw would choose some rather depressed, suicidal individuals for the "games". Where they need to do some utterly bad shit crazy things to themselves, to survive. That puts the whole suicide thing into perspective. Making you really understand how pointless it is, as a solution. The 2025 film Vicious written and directed by Bryan Bertino and starring Dakota Fanning is also a therapy horror film.
I'm furious! How the fuck nobody knows about the 2025 Nick Rowland film She Rides Shotgun starring Ana Sophia Heger and Taron Egerton? What the fuck is this? This movie is so good, yet because studio-heads apparently didn't get it, there was no advertising for it. And only a limited theatrical run. Which resulted in very little people seeing the damn film in the cinema. This fucking film! Are you fucking kidding me? They have fucking best picture Oscar material, and yet they try to hide it from everybody? What the fuck is wrong with you, Lionsgate? Fuck!
There are quite some differences between the Scott brothers ( Ridley and Tony ) and the Maximus himself Michael Bay. You can read Troler's observations and then my rant in the comments to see why they aren't quite the same. But specifically Tony Scott films sometimes feels almost like Michael Bay movies. Especially early Tony Scott and early Michael Bay, before both of them knew how similar they are and before they started trying to develop each other into opposite directions. Which happened roughly in time with the 21st century. And yet with all this the Ridley Scott epic Gladiator which was shot at 20st century and released at 21st, bluntly steals one of the shots Michael Bay is known for.
Tony Scott famously didn't care about the time travel plot of Déjà Vu which freaked out the writers of the film. As they said, he cared more about the action and surveillance aspects of the movie. He famously cared a lot about surveillance, as visible from his previous Jerry Bruckheimer collaboration Enemy of the State. And that means, that a sort of sci-fi surveillance movie, marks Déjà Vu as the closest thing Tony Scott did to Steven Spielberg's Minority Report.
Nicolas Winding Refn seems to be making only cult-classics. His 2011 Drive was a moderate box office success. But a banger of a cult-classic later on, as people understood that it is not a mere action film. Then he made Only God Forgives. A strange psycho-sexual movie where the plot lives in the crack-space between reality and dream-land. The film got misunderstood and barely made its money back. Yet those people who like it, like it very much. And then he made a straight box-office disaster The Neon Demon that made only half of its ( rather small $7.5 million ) budget back. Yet it is seems like it's the kind of movie that just begs for a deep analysis.
It is not often that a horror films appears to tickle the right nerves from the high-brow crowd of cinema critics. With 93% Rotten Tomatoes score though, it is safe to assume that Zach Cregger's Weapons from 2025 is one of those rare movies.
In the year 2022 Steven Spielberg directed a film about his own life, in a little known feature The Fabelmans. Although not a full documentary, it's semi-fictional nature was still education. The movie was teaching the audience how to make movies, how a single spark of The Greatest Show on Earth inspired Spielberg to become a director.
Bad Boys 2 is Michael Bay's most Bayhem! film. Man of fire is a huge leap in Tony Scott's directorial career. It is depressive, slow, simple, yet affective. It is both flashy and gruesomely slow. It is both overly edited and undercut.
Kristoffer Borgli's 2023 film Dream Scenario starring Nicolas Cage is a movie about a man, who is being dreamed about by a lot of people. At first his family have weird dreams about him. Then people related to them. Then the whole world. At first the dreams make him famous. But then they take a turn for the worst. At first he is just doing nothing in those dreams. Then he is being a creep. And then he literally murders people in those dreams. Which makes the public, in the real life, react to him with greater and greater rivalry. Apart from, for some reason, people in France.
People often complain about dumb movies with too much unnecessary spoon-feeding. We get so much explaining and over-explaining that the brain hurts sometimes. You already know what is going on. You are following the story. You don't need no god damned reminder of what you are watching. And yet the studio heads still think that you are too dumb to understand what's going on in front of you on the screen. Respecting the audience on the other hand is a leap of faith on a part of a film-maker and only the greatest do that well. Quentin Tarantino with his 2019 film Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood takes the hardest such leap of his career.