In a room with no windows on the eastern coast of Africa, a Scotsman, James More, is held captive by jihadist fighters. Thousands of miles away in the Greenland Sea, Danielle Flinders ...
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On this IMDbrief, we break down the worst gifts ever given in our favorite holiday movies. For some great gift ideas, check out IMDb's Holiday Gift Guide, curated with the entertainment lover in mind!
One day, driving aimlessly around the outskirts of town after a trivial domestic quarrel, a writer named Tomas accidentally hits and kills a child. Will he be able to move on?
Director:
Wim Wenders
Stars:
James Franco,
Peter Miller,
Gilbert Wahiakeron
Mike Max is a Hollywood producer who became powerful and rich thanks to brutal and bloody action films. His ignored wife Paige is close to leaving him. Suddenly Mike is kidnapped by two ... See full summary »
A historical drama that illustrates Russian author Leo Tolstoy's (Christopher Plummer's) struggle to balance fame and wealth with his commitment to a life devoid of material things.
Director:
Michael Hoffman
Stars:
Helen Mirren,
James McAvoy,
Christopher Plummer
Katarina is 20 years old. With a troubled past in a dreary suburb, her life seems to be already set in stone - until she discovers music. Everything changes when she hears a performance of ... See full summary »
Director:
Lisa Langseth
Stars:
Alicia Vikander,
Samuel Fröler,
Josephine Bauer
A beautiful summer day. A garden. A terrace. A woman and a man sit at a table beneath the trees, with a soft summer wind. In the distance, in the vast plain, the silhouette of Paris. A ... See full summary »
Told from Igor's perspective, we see the troubled young assistant's dark origins, his redemptive friendship with the young medical student Viktor Von Frankenstein, and become eyewitnesses to the emergence of how Frankenstein became the man - and the legend - we know today.
Director:
Paul McGuigan
Stars:
Daniel Radcliffe,
James McAvoy,
Jessica Brown Findlay
In a room with no windows on the eastern coast of Africa, a Scotsman, James More, is held captive by jihadist fighters. Thousands of miles away in the Greenland Sea, Danielle Flinders prepares to dive in a submersible to the ocean floor. In their confines they are drawn back to the Christmas of the previous year, where a chance encounter on a beach in France led to an intense and enduring romance.
In the novel, Danielle Flinders is described as a mixed-raced woman. Her father is Australian and her mother is from Martinique, a country where 90% of the population is black. An excerpt from the novel says this about Danielle; "In her complexion and variety of dress and habits and manners there was something of her mother's Creole background". Swedish actress Alicia Vikander was cast for the role. See more »
In spite of its very low 19% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I watched it because of the lead cast, namely James McAvoy and Alicia Vikander. It's indeed not a great movie, but I didn't feel it deserved such animosity. It's just a plain, "meh", movie. A man and a woman meet during holidays in some sort of vacation village at the French Atlantic coast. He's an agent from the MI6 and she's a oceanographer (he presents himself under the cover of another job). They each take a few days off before an important mission; for him to go obtain intelligence about an IS leader in Africa and her to dive in a deep-sea submarine to find about life at the bottom of the ocean. They fall in love and promise that they'll see each other again. As she engages into the sea, he is taken prisoner, and somehow... (insert some sort of mystical, spiritual stuff). Well, the movie doesn't quite deliver on the spiritual part; the two story-lines just have really nothing in common.
I didn't really mind this lack of overall consistency. There is the first part which is the long, full-fledged love arc in the vacation village. There are some cheesy dialogues and mood music that are reminiscent of weekdays afternoon TV movies but the important cast and the thematic around their characters' jobs (MI6 agent an oceanographer) gave me enough goodwill to care and find some sort of chemistry in their relationship. The second part alternates between him being a prisoner of IS and her going to her day-to-day oceanographic research (before the final dive). Again, it's quite superficial and nothing really stands out, but it's followable. There are nice shots of the sea and of the submarine.
On the technical side the sound mixing was bad and it was hard to understand the dialogues over the background sounds. Some of the framing was awkward, again evocative of TV movies. I watched it without minding, and went on with my life. I've seen way worse and endured way more boredom in films that are considered way better.
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In spite of its very low 19% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I watched it because of the lead cast, namely James McAvoy and Alicia Vikander. It's indeed not a great movie, but I didn't feel it deserved such animosity. It's just a plain, "meh", movie. A man and a woman meet during holidays in some sort of vacation village at the French Atlantic coast. He's an agent from the MI6 and she's a oceanographer (he presents himself under the cover of another job). They each take a few days off before an important mission; for him to go obtain intelligence about an IS leader in Africa and her to dive in a deep-sea submarine to find about life at the bottom of the ocean. They fall in love and promise that they'll see each other again. As she engages into the sea, he is taken prisoner, and somehow... (insert some sort of mystical, spiritual stuff). Well, the movie doesn't quite deliver on the spiritual part; the two story-lines just have really nothing in common.
I didn't really mind this lack of overall consistency. There is the first part which is the long, full-fledged love arc in the vacation village. There are some cheesy dialogues and mood music that are reminiscent of weekdays afternoon TV movies but the important cast and the thematic around their characters' jobs (MI6 agent an oceanographer) gave me enough goodwill to care and find some sort of chemistry in their relationship. The second part alternates between him being a prisoner of IS and her going to her day-to-day oceanographic research (before the final dive). Again, it's quite superficial and nothing really stands out, but it's followable. There are nice shots of the sea and of the submarine.
On the technical side the sound mixing was bad and it was hard to understand the dialogues over the background sounds. Some of the framing was awkward, again evocative of TV movies. I watched it without minding, and went on with my life. I've seen way worse and endured way more boredom in films that are considered way better.