Some more fun hidden gems I saw recently:
The Brave One (2007) Starring Jodie Foster and Terrence Howard. It's effectively Joker but without the super-hero stuff.
Foster plays a Radio presenter who's future hubby-to-be gets brutally murdered while they are out being romantic, she herself surviving via a coma. When she awakens from the coma she's changed. Oh boy, has she changed. She's off to buy a gun. She's going on the offensive. But not standard action hero revenge/vigilante style, much more craftily done and more in the slow build style of Taxi Driver or Joker. Only 4/5 though as the ending's a bit crap.
Here's her version of "shooting the 'tards on the subway" scene:
Theeb (2014) is a spaghetti western film from Saudi Arabia, so a Kabsa western if you like, starring no-one I've ever heard of before and, surprisingly, lead by a child actor who isn't crap.
It's set during the first world war when the Saudis allied with the English against the Ottoman Turks, though neither the English nor the Turks play any real part in the movie, a bit like how the North and the South didn't play much of a part in The Good The Bad and The Ugly but just provided a cool atmospheric backdrop.
The meat of the film sees our good guys and the kid square off against the desert and the suitably menacing bandits. Lots of atmospheric camera work, tense stand-offs and shoot-outs, just lacking the oomph of some Morricone music to put the icing on the cake. 4/5.
Locke (2013) is an acting showcase for Tom Hardy. Literally, he's the only actor you see in the entire film. Set in real-time we watch Hardy as he drives from Wales to London, trying to sort out a myriad of life's problems via his hand's free telephone along the way.
Not much to say here, watching Hardy drive for 75 minutes is remarkably and surprisingly gripping and entertaining. Who'd have thunked just a good script and good acting and literally nothing else could work so well.
Again, a bit of a meh ending though so just the 4/5.
Some complete bullshit I also saw:
Any Man's Death (1990) would make for an entertaining watch if you ran a YouTube channel ripping apart shit movies or compiling a list of worst movies of all time. Crap in literally every department. 0/10
Blind Terror (2001) is at least good for reminding one that Natasha Kinski was once a leading lady for TV movies? Dunno, was she ever a thing? Anyway, it's an ok'ish plot-twisty creeper stalker kind of film but more thriller than horror. I guess it does just enough to make one not want to be too mean to it 5/10.
Death Sentence (2007) is a Kevin Bacon film. He's a man driven to seek mean vengeance on the gang of druggies who killed his kid. It follows pretty much every cliché of this routine that you'd expect and never in any kind of interesting or novel way and, worse, makes one facepalm at all the dumb things people do while going through the motions. Motions that were already cliché over 20 years before this film bothered to dribble into existence.
One advantage of it being so utterly retarded is that at least every single death scene, even those of the good guys, is very enjoyably cathartic 3/10.