Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) - Top marks for aesthetics (it’s perhaps the best-looking 3D animation focused on human characters ever made) and humour. But on the other hand, it’s very long and starts to feel it and isn’t a complete story (even when considered in the context of other serialised films such as Infinity War). I hope there’s a Best Animated Film Oscar in this studio’s future but I can see why this one lost out to The Boy and the Heron.

Overall, very good, look forward to seeing what this studio does with the last Spider-Verse in the trilogy and beyond. ★★★★☆

So ranking the Best Animation Oscar noms:

1: The Boy and the Heron (★★★★☆)
2: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (★★★★☆)
3: Robot Dreams (★★★☆☆)
4: Nimona (★★★☆☆)
5: Elemental (★★★☆☆)

It’s nice to see there’s some upcoming animation teams making interesting stuff along with the old hands, even if it wasn’t all wall-to-wall bangers this year.

Damn just noticed MySpleen has a slew of new 35mm original cinema reel scans on there from this year. Blade Runner, Terminator, Aliens, Alien, The Thing. Glorious.

There's many, many, many more.

EWS looks class. Apparently most are sourced from Italy then synced with Blu Ray audio. All the little scratchmarks, burns etc.

I've seen The Shining and 2001 projected. Both pretty special. I'm always on the lookout.

Have seen Soylent Green and Eraserhead too. Marvellous stuff.


Apparantly the older Bond films look superb projected - earliest one I saw projected was The Spy Who Loved Me but I was 10 and can't remember it all that well.

I reckon Sicario would be a treat.

I loved One Hour Photo back in the day. I thought the alternate ending was already on the DVD or something though?

EvilRedEye wrote:

I loved One Hour Photo back in the day. I thought the alternate ending was already on the DVD or something though?

No idea its a workprint with multiple alternative scenes

Just watched a clip there on YT. Easy to forget just how bloody good Williams was.

With the new Planet of the Apes film coming out, it’s time to revisit the reboot series (been yonks since I watched the first two and I’ve never seen the third.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) - I feel a bit cooler towards this than the first time I watched it. You have to give them credit for deciding to create a lavish chronological remake of the original film series - even as a fan of the later original films it feels like quite an unhinged project to splurge hundreds of millions of dollars on. But it does leave this film scrabbling to create a new origin story for the Apes in addition to recreating plot beats from Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. It’s difficult to criticise the overall arc of the story, because it is what it needs to be, but the script isn’t great and is packed with cheesy lines and uninteresting characters. Tom Felton went straight from the last Harry Potter film to being some random college student who torments the apes at an ape sanctuary, which seems like a tremendous step down.

This is my first time watching in 4K and I don’t love the HDR implementation - it was shot on film and has a distinct celluloid look but looks like SDR with some bright HDR reserved for stuff like lights and the sun. The HDR brightness looks kinda contrived - I’ve now watched some good HDR masters of old films and they looked great so I wonder if this suffers from being an early HDR master or from trying to make it look like SDR with a few bright lights. The 5.1 surround mix is nice though and has some good rear speaker usage.

It’s not bad and I actually admire it for having a good go at making a really weird and inadvisable premise work but if you’re going to make a Planet of the Apes film without a planet of apes, you need a good script and this doesn’t have one. ★★★☆☆

ShabbyMcCrabby wrote:

There's many, many, many more.

How does one get access to this?

Private torrent site, ratio based and all of em are 15-120gb so...yeah. I can grab them but 2 or 3 will just nuke my account.

Cor, that Monkey Man is a bit good innit.
Patel has an incredible eye for motion and pacing - camera always on the go but never excessive, always fits the scene and keeps the geography tight during the action. Beautiful in many places - DP from Whiplash and, of all things, Silent Night, so has some chops but lots of his other work I don’t recognise, so I gotta figure a huge amount of the look, style and feel is from Patel himself. I’m now a huge fan of the guy and will be lining up Green Knight and Copperfield.

Kow wrote:

Will they appear on Stremio via Torrentio?

Only if someone releases em publically

Hey it's me five years ago seeing the latest superheromans trailer

Challengers (2024) - It’s yer tennis threesome. Very well made tennis drama. I think Zendaya might have a shot at Best Actress for this depending on what comes out as she has some very good facial expressions.

I kinda see why no-one in the UK bothered with IMAX as the big sweaty hyper-detailed tennis close-ups are the main thing that would benefit and they are very infrequent. If you miss it at the cinema and have an OLED, console yourself that a few scenes will look better with perfect black levels.

Very good but didn’t hit the big emotions for me. I thought the ending tried to have its cake and eat it, a bit. ★★★★☆