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What I Watched This Week #176 (May 12-18) The Good Dinosaur dir. Peter Sohn/2015/1h33m This is one of Pixar's lowest rated films according to review aggregator sites so I wasn't particularly looking forward to watching this, but what I found was a pleasant surprise. Set in a world where the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs passed Earth harmlessly dinosaurs remain the dominant species thousands of years later. When Apatosaurus Arlo (Raymond Ochoa), the runt of his family, is separated from his family he discovers a feral early human he later calls spot. The two must work together to get back to Arlo's family and prove that Arlo is as strong and capable as his siblings. The first thing that struck me about this film were the incredibly gorgeous, almost photorealistic, background animations. There are points here where this looks like a big budget nature documentary. This makes the actual character design, especially that of Arlo and his family, really incongruous, like they wandered in from a different movie. The voice cast, which includes Frances McDormand and Jeffrey Wright as Arlo's parents and Pixar mainstay John Ratzenberger, are solid but wholly unnecessary. This film is at it's best when there is no dialogue, with my favourite scene being one between Arlo and Spot where they tell each other about their families without a single word and it was genuinely really touching. A minor effort from one of the best animation studios in the world, but when you're among the best even your lesser films are worth watching. 7/10 Fast X dir. Louis Leterrier/2023/2h22m The latest film in the Fast saga sees the family bought to their knees by the son of the bad guy they killed in Rio during the events of Fast Five. Dante Reyes, played by Jason Momoa, is the best villain in the series. He's a camp, dangerous, genius madman and he easily stole every scene he was in. This feels like his audition to be the bad guy in the next Bond film, whenever that franchise returns. The actual plot is somehow both threadbare and overly convoluted, but it's really just a line on which to hang several explosive set pieces that defy the laws of physics. My favourite is the extended chase through the streets of Rome where they are trying to catch a rolling nuclear mine. At this point in time I don't think there's a difference between Vin Diesel and Dominic Toretto, they have become one and his stoic masculinity in this role I find both funny and charmingly sincere. This is part one of a two part franchise finale, so you are left on a cliffhanger with no resolution. Even worse, right at the end, Gal Gadot returns (she is an awful actor). I can't believe that I'm as much of a fan of this series as I am after going through them all so far. Not that they're the best films in the world, but I was expecting to be giving them all scores of 2 or 3. I'm genuinely looking forward to the final entry in the series and will even go to the cinema to watch it, something I never thought I'd say. As for this particular film, it's decent but not as good as F9 because in that one they went to f*cking space. 6.5/10 Nine to Five dir. Colin Higgins/1980/1h50m Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda play three office workers who have had enough of their ignorant, sexist, racist, idea-stealing boss Frank Hart (Dabney Coleman). After first thinking they have poisoned him and stealing a random body from the morgue they then kidnap him and start making some changes at work. This is a really fun, dark comedy with three great lead performances as three very different characters. My favourite is Tomlin as Violet, Frank's right hand woman and the person who actually runs the place. Fonda is funny as a bumbling klutz of a woman getting back in the workplace after a divorce, and Parton is as delightful as she always is as Frank's secretary who everyone thinks is sleeping with him, but is actually a loving, faithful wife. I did go in to this thinking it was a musical due to the iconic theme song and the fact that Parton later went on to make the brilliant The Best Little wh*rehouse in Texas with the same director, but it isn't. That may be a positive for some, but not for me. I did still have a blast watching this and had the theme stuck in my head for days. 8.5/10 Lime's Film of the Week! A Minecraft Movie dir. Jared Hess/2025/1h41m A Minecraft Movie starring Jack Black as Minecraft Steve is an actual thing that really exists and is actually pretty good. As a child Steve yearned for the mines, where he found a portal to a strange, blocky reality, the Overworld, a place where you can unleash the full power of your imagination, and he becomes a master crafter. Years later four others, a sister and brother, Natalie and Henry (Emma Myers, Sebastian Eugene Hansen), a realtor Dawn (Danielle Brooks), and washed up 80's video game champion Garrett (Jason Momoa), also find their way to the Overworld. When they learn that the evil witch Malgosha (Rachel House), who lives in the hell-like underworld of The Nether, wants to destroy the Overworld, they band together to stop her. This is from the director of Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre, and that same style of surreal, awkward humour is present here. Jack Black is the most Jack Black here than he's been in years, so if his style isn't your thing then you'll get tired of this pretty quickly. Personally I think he's great here, especially in the scenes he shares with Momoa, the two make a hilarious double-act. Momoa, like he did in Fast X, steals the show here. The plot with Natalie and Henry is fine, but it's there just to give some emotional weight to the film and I don't know if it needed any. I don't know why Dawn is in this as a character. Brooks is fine in the role, but the character is pointless. The visual style of the film emulates the game really well and I think looks quite beautiful, apart from some of the faces. I also like how the mechanics of the game are used in the film. If you've never played Minecraft then some of the things that happen will seem pretty weird to you. I was expecting this to be a mess, but I had fun pretty much throughout the entire thing. 7.5/10 The Witch dir. Georges Méliès/1906/13m The Witch is one of Méliès's more elaborate films in which a man pays a witch to foretell his future, and it show's a beautiful princess. But it turns out he paid her with a bag of sand. She pursues him, tormenting him with ghosts and giant frogs before she is defeated. This is a beautiful film and a perfect example of the technique by which films were given colour at that time, with each frame being meticulously painted by hand. This gives the colours in the film a shimmering quality, adding to the magical feeling of the piece. This also brings out the details in the beautiful stage like sets, with the overall tone being that of a storybook come to life. I'm not much a fan of the story, just pay the woman and you wouldn't get any of this trouble, but it was still magical to watch. 6.5/10 Mr. Arkadin dir. Orson Welles/1955/1h47m Mr. Arkadin is a noir thriller from Orson Welles in which he stars in the title role of an imposing oligarch with a mysterious past. When small-time crook Guy Van Stratten (Robert Arden) hears two names from a dying man - "Arkadin, Sophie" - he and his partner Mily (Patricia Medina) attempt to blackmail him, but surprising he hires Stratten to investigate his past, as he has no memory of his life before 1927. This leads him on a worldwide chase that becomes darker and more dangerous the more he uncovers. It's a bit pointless saying this about one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, but this film looks amazing, with every shot being a masterful use of shadows and unconventional (certainly for the time) framing and shot composition. Welles also dominates the film with his performance, looming threateningly over everyone else. The plot, like most noir films, is very convoluted with several twists and revelations, but by the time we get to the emotionally climactic airport set finale it's tied up quite nicely. Not on the level of his masterpieces like Citizen Kane and Chimes at Midnight, this is still a great film. 8/10 The King of Dollars dir. Segundo de Chomon/1905/2m This is an early film from Segundo de Chomon, a sort of Spanish Georges Méliès who used the same editing trickery. It's a very simple one shot setup where a magician performs close up magic with a coin, made even more magical with that same editing trickery. He then makes a man continuously vomit up coins, a surprisingly grotesque visual. There's a surrealist quality to this film that's not really present in the works of Méliès so that makes it feel quite different, but I didn't find much else here. It's not one of the director's highest rated works, so when I watch some of those they hopefully feel even better by comparison. 5/10

Ferrari (2023) dir Michael Mann This wasn't exactly what I expected, but I enjoyed it. Adam Driver stars as Enzo Ferrari, who with his wife Laura (Penolope Cruz in very good performance), founded the Ferrari sports car & racing company. It's not got that much racing in it, and it's not really a biopic either, rather it focusses on events from one specific year, 1957. Those events relate just as much to the Ferrari's personal life and their business as much as it does to motor racing. So if you think you might like a film all about the Ferrari motor racing team, then this might not be for you. But also if you don't like those sort of films then this may be something you would like. I don't know for sure how much of the plot was true, some I definitely know was, but obviously most of what I describe here is just what is portrayed in the film. Enzo was a former racing driver who had limited success and retired in the early 1930s. He then went into the sports car business as a way to finance the racing team he managed. That was, he says in the film, the opposite way round to what most of the other famous names; Maserati, Porsche, Jaguar etc, did. Their racing teams promoted their sports car sales. By 1957 Ferrari was in financial trouble and some of the plot is about Enzo setting things in motion that would eventually lead to Fiat buying the company. They go into the engineering side of things a bit too, Enzo describing how he comes up with ways to improve engine performance by imaging himself inside the engine. There's a personal side to the plot. Laura and Enzo are really just business partners at this stage and she knows he is seeing another woman, and is not really bothered. But then she finds out a bit more about her husband's mistress, Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), and doesn't like what she finds. There's a couple of racing scenes early on at a test track where Maserati and Ferrari are competing to set a new lap record and then the last part of the film is about the 1957 Mille Miglia (Italian for Thousand Mile) race. This was an endurance race for sports cars on public roads in northern Italy. The roads were obviously closed to the public for the race, but it's obviously far from a race on a purpose built circuit. Ferrari entered 5 cars, 4 with established Ferrari drivers and one with their latest signing, Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone). You see these drivers preparing for the race in the morning, rather like in a WWII film about pilots preparing for a mission they know they might not return from, leaving letters for their wives and girlfriends to be opened in the event of their deaths. The Mille Miglia had an average of about 2 fatalities per year, from drivers and spectators, and due to what happened in this edition, it was the last time it was raced. The film shows a couple of accidents in quite graphic detail, leaving no doubt about consequences for those involved. The racing sequences are very good, featuring some classic cars which you see and, just as importantly, hear. There's also some other famous racing drivers from the time named and / or seen. One was very recognisable as Stirling Moss and Graham Hill is also mentioned. They show the camaraderie between the drivers, with one Maserati driver surviving a minor crash that writes off his car, and then continuing the rest of the race as a passenger in a Ferrari. Some great scenic shots of the Italian country side in this section as well – see trailer. 8 / 10