Luke Baldock (kiriyamakazou)

A complete and utter surprise. It's so easy to get lazy with animated films, even more so when those films are designed for 3D. It's with a great big smile as ridiculous as the film itself, that I can announce Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, to be one of the most hilarious films in recent memory. For laugh out loud moments it beats such brilliance as Up!, even if it does rely on it's ridiculous plot to see us through. The voice cast is fantastic, with Neil Patrick Harris excelling as a monkey that just shouts a few words. Luckily, each of those words has the comical impact of a meteorite. It was fun, entertaining and even left me having to catch up with the jokes at certain parts.

A tribute to the master Kurosawa. It uses his last screenplay as a template and builds a story of a masterless samurai. Unlike Kurosawa's films, this fails to have a dramatic emotional connection with the audience. It is also very slow and lacks entertainment. It is a sweet and quiet film with much to take in. It's nice to see the likes of Toshiro Mifune's son paying tribute. Overall you get a very slow Samurai tale, with long talking sections and enthralling, but short, fight scenes.

Quite simply the greatest film ever. It's perfect. Kurosawa uses all his skill to create an influential action masterpiece. Each of the characters gets their own amount of screen time and is developed upon. Kurosawa blurs the lines between good and evil, as we discover the farmers are not as pure and weak as they claim to be. The battle scenes have never really been matched, as most battles today lack real emotion. We feel there is something worth losing. Simply fantastic.

Simply and utterly gorgeous. A silent gem that shows how far cinema can go on simply visuals. Mainly told in close ups, the performances are just restrained enough to avoid the comical silent overacting. An artistic masterpiece.