Bria Lou Reviews

I hadn't heard of this one before the bucket list and had no idea what it was about before pressing play, so I went in completely blind.  I have mixed feelings about this movie. There were some great things, but also some things that I didn't love.  The opening scene is great. Not only does it set the tone for the rest of the movie well, but it also puts you on edge and holds you there for a lot of the film. The main reason the film works is because the actors are so great. Even when you don't really know what's going on, you buy into everything that happens because the actors performances are so convincing and feel authentic. Despite being a ghost story, something about it felt really grounded and real. Even though you know there are fantastical elements, the characters feel human.  It does a good job of creating scares, particularly because a lot of what's scary is the story itself rather than using jumps. You can feel the fear within the characters, which makes y...

  When faced with a dangerous enemy, Supergirl (Milly Alcock) teams up with an unlikely ally for revenge. I had seen all of the bad reviews of this film before watching it, and while I didn't expect it to be as good as Superman, I was surprised by how much hate it was getting. I actually didn't hate the film, but it definitely had a lot of flaws. I really liked that they set it on another planet, rather than doing another story set on Earth. It would have been nice to see more of the planet and how the world was different to Earth. One of the first flaws of this movie is that it assumes Supergirl's appearance in the Superman movie was enough to make the audience care about Kara, and it really isn't. So because of that, no work was put into making us care about her. But in addition to that, Kara isn't as funny or likeable here as she was in her small Superman scene. And while she doesn't have to be, at times it doesn't feel like the same character. I kept wai...

  For a long time I thought I'd already seen this movie. It was only the night before watching it that I realised I've actually only seen the 2004 remake. While not a sequel, this is the second in a series of zombie movies by the director, the first of which being Night of the Living Dead. Despite liking both movies, I definitely preferred the former. It begins from a place of chaos, which is a great way to get the audience to understand the characters' states of mind. It took a while for the movie to grab me. The chaos of it all made it hard to follow, and hard to latch onto the characters.  The movie kind of takes Night of the Living Dead and expands it to a much larger scale. I actually preferred the smaller scale, as we got to intimately know the characters and we got time to understand their world. In comparison, this one definitely felt like being thrown in at the deep end.  As with all creature feature-type movies, I wanted to see more of the 'creatures'. Its...

  After witnessing an accident, a couple discover that they are being haunted by a demonic entity known as 'the passenger'. The trailer for this film was so fantastic that I couldn't wait to see the whole movie. It gave little away, previewed the potential scares and really left you wanting more. Unfortunately, the scenes in the trailer were the best part of the movie. The first half of the trailer makes up maybe 10 minutes of the movie, and it was a really great opening. We were immediately invested, scared, and really interested in where it would go. And then it just went downhill. The pacing isn't great - it speeds up, then slows to a glacial pace, then speeds up too quickly at random moments, making it hard to maintain interest. The scares are great, for the most part, but they begin to feel more important than the story itself. And part of that is because the story itself can be incoherent and messy, to the point where the only thing anchoring the story in a consis...

  This was one of the re-watches that I was most looking forward to, and from what I can remember, one of the only movies on this bucket list that I actually got to see in the cinema. I love this movie, along with most of the population. It's so much easier to write about something you've never seen before, than to write about something that you already love! The very start of the movie sets a tone that carries all the way through. We're scared, we're unsettled and there's so much nerves and anticipation that you're glued to the screen for the entire runtime. The pacing is so great, something is happening every minute and it moves so quickly that by the time it's over it feels like it just started, in the best possible way. It's so interesting to see how many careers were made or bolstered as a result of this film. It seems that all of the actors involved got huge boosts from this movie and most have gone on to do really interesting things, possibly as a...

  Sophie (Sunny Sandler) just got the lead in the school musical. But when life at home takes a dramatic turn, she is forced to balance competing priorities with the fear of a changing future. This movie wasn't really on my radar until I saw people talking about it on social media. I didn't know much of what it was about, which ended up being a good thing. I liked this film a lot more than I initially thought I might.  I really liked the way music was incorporated. One thing I had seen on social media was a clip of the main character singing, and I really liked that music was used throughout rather than just in one scene. The actors are all great, but in particular I really loved Melanie Lynskey and Max Greenfield in these roles. You connect with this family really quickly and only get more invested in their lives as the movie continues. That said, I would have liked for some of the relationships to be explored a bit more. This is a mother/daughter story, but there are other f...