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What Was The Last Movie You Watched?


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10 hours ago, coprolite said:

Jurassic World (2015)

CG dinosaurs, improbable action, shit attempts to introduce some emotion. Just enough action to hold attention. 

4/10

Jurassic World- Fallen Kingdom (2018)

More CGI dinosaurs. Much better baddies, even more improbable action (lava/physics). The velociraptor being a goodie strangely reminded me of terminator sequels. 

5/10 - insufficient encouragement to fork out for the third one. Will wait for freebie. 

The Killing (1956)

Heist caper. Auteured by Kubric, apparently before he had the budgetary clout to hire decent actors. Also appears to pre-date him finding his style. 

Still enjoyable enough.

A convoluted plan to rob a racetrack by a mismatched crew is told by a series of flashbacks out of sequence.  I wasn't a fan of the voice over but i got properly drawn in.  There were aspects of it that felt very modern, but the music kept reminding me it was from the 50s.

The acting was, apart from the main character and a femme fatale, pretty dire. The plot wasn't quite clever or suspenseful enough for a classic heist movie. 

6/10

The Killing is Kubrick's first masterpiece IMO.

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On 16/09/2023 at 22:42, Miguel Sanchez said:

 

The Godfather Part II (1974): Boring and completely incomprehensible. De Niro does a decent impression of Marlon Brando. I'd like to think if I was the head of a Family I could find a more attractive and less annoying wife than Diane Keaton.

I disagree. I think it is mesmerising and , crime does not pay !

when Michael is alone at the end of the film having had Fredo murdered ( Sonny already dead ) , Diane Keaton has left him and had an abortion and fallen out with Tom Hagen.

However , as someone has said , the attempted murder of Michael and Diane ( and Fredo"s exact role ) is rather murky.

Michael met Diane when he was in the armed forces !

 

 

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Barbie

 

After seeing the polemic on here I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed it. Thought it was quite funny and laughed quite often throughout. Mixed up the humour, from some puerile jokes (the hardly subtle wanking Kens off joke) to some more outright chuckles (the final scene/joke of the film) and some in-between. The voice over was quite humorous.

Had some surpringsly emotional bits too.

Was worried at first, as the opening stuff in Barbieworld has me going "Eh?!" and was thinking I'd made a mistake putting it on (didn't pay for it; PM me for details), but thankfully that was over fairly quick and then the film 'opened up' so to speak.

I thought it was often daft as f**k but knowingly so. 

Here's a teaser for you; is this a Will Ferrell 'companion piece' to Elf?* In Elf he travels to the 'real world' and here he does the opposite.

 

 

*

No, it isn't

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195 Outlaw Johnny Black -- A 90 minute movie if ever there was one, cram packed into a 130 minute runtime. Michael Jai White directed, co-wrote and stars in this comedic nod to blaxploitation movies and spaghetti westerns of the 70s, filmed on grainy stock, filled with ridiculous zooms, horse stunts, flashbacks, and a taste for revenge. We find the titular Outlaw Johnny Black on his way to take out the scoundrel who killed his father but he's thrown off course when he rescues a Native American couple, is wrongfully arrested, escapes on the lam, and winds up impersonating a preacher he assumes to be dead, in a town already full of corruption. Michael Jai White is a compelling enough presence but the movie really lacks focus and is too easily distracted by dull side stories and tonally it's all over the place. There's quite a bit of punching down in the direction of Native Americans that suspect Mel Brooks would've thought twice about. Contrary, though, to other things I watched this week, it all comes together pretty well in a third act. Tip of the hat in any event as it looks like White crowd-funded at least some of the budget he used here. A pickier editor could've saved him a bunch. 5/10

196 A Simple Favor -- It's impossible to ignore the Gone Girl vibes but it's not necessarily a bad thing and it's fun to watch Anna Kendrick's character develop from a mousy, Connecticut single-mom to Nancy Drew to a bit of a badass. Meanwhile, Blake Lively is wonderful as the mysterious PR executive who befriends Kendrick before going missing and Henry Golding is good as the husband who you know is about to get set up for something if he isn't behind it all in the first place. It's funny and kinda endearing it does such a good job in the set-up that maybe it was always going to disappoint by the end. 7/10

197 50/50 -- Joseph Gordon-Levitt is quite excellent in this heartfelt comedy about 27-year-old Adam who discovers he has an aggressive form of spinal cancer and only a 50% chance of survival. Will Reiser's story is careful to tell Adam's story realistically but where it really excels is how this affects the people around him. Kyle, Seth Rogan, is his best friend who masks his fears with jokes and chasing tail. His mother, Anjelica Huston, is dealing with a husband with dementia and a son who refuses to talk to her. And then there's Anna Kendrick as Adam's therapist. It gets a little too neat and fancy and sugary towards the end, and perhaps Jonathan Levine could've resisted sticking his thumb down to make such a pretty bow, but the chemistry between Gordon-Levitt and Rogan, as well as the overarching message, makes this a surprisingly feelgood affair. 8/10

198 It Lives Inside -- A Hindi horror movie on paper at least sounds like it might bring something new to the genre and for a while it does.  We're introduced to Samidha, a young Indian girl living somewhere pointedly unnamed in North America with her parents. She prefers to be known as Sami, to speak English around the house much to the annoyance of her mother in particular, to shave her arms, and who associates with the white kids at school at the expense of her former best friend and fellow immigrant, Tamira. Tamira seems to be having some problems of her own, looks like she hasn't washed or slept in forever, and carries a dingy glass jar around with her wherever she goes. When Tamira approaches Sami for help, the jar is broken and it's all downhill for Tamira after that. Writer and director Bishal Dutta borrows heavily from Indian demonic mythology and his own immigration story and for the first hour or so, it was a compelling tale. The monster lingering in the shadows isn't winning any originality awards, but with the Indian spin, it felt renewed as these poor kids avoided the demon spirit determined to drive them crazy and consume them. There's a strong focus on meals, and sharing food, and offerings, and prayer all going hand in hand and I found all that fascinating, helped along by the performances of Megan Suri as Sami and Neeru Bajwa as her mother Poorna. For long periods, Poorna is in her own horror movie as she battles with a daughter who does everything she can to reject her heritage and culture. Sadly, though, it all falls to pieces in the third act where the old adage of the monster only being scary when you don't see it is proved to be true, and the whole thing becomes horribly rushed and the strength and power of the premise is diluted. It was never much of a scary movie in the first place, but it was spooky, and the last twenty minutes seemed to be in too much of a hurry to finish in five. 6/10

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38. Past Lives - Cinema

I've seen this a couple of times and thought it was good the first time but absolutely brilliant the second. 

The first 5/10 minutes sets up everything: the characteristics and motivations of the two leads, and the ideas of fate and diverging paths. It also sets up the tone of the film with a lot of weighted subtext and visual metaphors, the main one being the admittedly on-the-nose image of Nora going up the steep steps to a higher point with Hae Sung setting off on a rising path with an undetermined endpoint. Their respective journeys - both what we see in the film and what is alluded to - are really interesting and could well be the driving force behind the relationship.

It is such a visual film. The performances are obviously given a lot of the spotlight. It's a shame that the subtitles can distract from them, which is by no means anyone's fault, but I reckon an English speaker could have as clear an understanding of Nora and Hae Sung's motivations without the subtitles simply due to how much the two leads are able to convey in their interactions. However it was the visual storytelling that stood out to me, particularly how it boxes characters in the frame, often giving one, two or three of them a tiny amount of space within a third and telling its story through who or what is in that space. There are mirrors, screens, lighting and other environmental means of making this work which both looks great and provides information. One scene that stands out to me is when Nora is brushing her teeth with her husband elsewhere in the bathroom, but the way it's shot has two different stories going on within the one frame. I found it fascinating and it visually articulates a lot of things that I'm struggling to convey here. It's the kind of film that taps into emotions through indescribable ways, which I most found to be true through the Hae Sung character - how he interacts with Nora and his stilted conversations with Arthur touched me in ways I don't really understand. There's a sort of touching despondency to the whole film. 

At first it felt like a slow mover that hits you in retrospect once the credits roll, but on rewatch, with a clearer understanding of what was going on, there is so much packed into the dialogue, performances and cinematography about these two characters and the attraction between them - the uncertain futures, the unspoken present and the unreliable pasts. It's actually really similar to Everything Everywhere All at Once, only if that film didn't have the multiverse. Both have similar ideas about a life unlived, however due to Past Lives being grounded in reality, that idea becomes much bleaker for the characters as the only way they can explore their alternative lives is through their own imagination based on the only life they've got. Characters being defined by their choices is a pretty common idea, but this explicitly draws attention to every choice made and how one different decision could result in an entirely different life for Nora and Hae Sung - and, subsequently, an entirely different film for us. 

There are also pretty bleak thoughts about relationships for people who value control of their own lives (again relating to fate) and whether control and loneliness go hand-in-hand. When I first watched Arthur and Nora's introduction as a married couple, I initially thought it was setting him up as a controlling dickhead due to the fact he's doing the talking for her to the border force dude, but the rewatch made me reconsider it from the point of view that what could've been a happy ending in a different is here just another blow to Nora's struggles with identity. It's really just a natural compromise of marriage, but everything we'd learned about her up to that point suggested that she wouldn't be happy with that. 

South Korean filmmakers just keep producing must-see cinema these past few years. Burning was my favourite of 2019 and one of my favourites of the decade, Parasite was an insta-classic, Decision to Leave was excellent in pretty much every way even if it didn't completely click with me, and now Past Lives is loved by all. There will be others that I've other forgotten about or didn't see too. 

My second showing was made even better by, for the second time this year, being treated to an empty screening. It was fucking freezing due to being the first showing of the day, and it wasn't even open when I turned up, but it was very much worth it for a great experience. 

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On 23/09/2023 at 19:34, DA Baracus said:

Barbie

 

After seeing the polemic on here I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed it. Thought it was quite funny and laughed quite often throughout. Mixed up the humour, from some puerile jokes (the hardly subtle wanking Kens off joke) to some more outright chuckles (the final scene/joke of the film) and some in-between. The voice over was quite humorous.

Had some surpringsly emotional bits too.

Was worried at first, as the opening stuff in Barbieworld has me going "Eh?!" and was thinking I'd made a mistake putting it on (didn't pay for it; PM me for details), but thankfully that was over fairly quick and then the film 'opened up' so to speak.

I thought it was often daft as f**k but knowingly so. 

Here's a teaser for you; is this a Will Ferrell 'companion piece' to Elf?* In Elf he travels to the 'real world' and here he does the opposite.

 

 

*

  Reveal hidden contents

No, it isn't

 

Elf is shite. Absolute fucking bobbins. 

Overrated pish. 

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9 hours ago, scottsdad said:

Elf is shite. Absolute fucking bobbins. 

Overrated pish. 

This is the post of a man with children. Children who loved this movie and watched it repeatedly and relentlessly each Christmas, driving our favourite Academic grass demented.

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Just watched the 4k digitally restored Blu Ray of ‘Gregory’s Girl’. Just wonderful, absolutely bloody wonderful film. I am the same age as the cast, went to school at the same time as the cast, can identify with many of the teenage themes of the film, and also now live in Cumbernauld, so am familiar with many of the locations. Even allowing for that, it’s just a wonderful film. Will always be in my Top 5 movies of all time, only trumped for No 1 spot by the original ‘12 Angry Men’.

Edited by pozbaird
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Morituri.

Marlon and Yul , Yul and Marlon.

Marlon and his accent(s)

Ex German forces Marlon blackmailed by Trevor Howard !

into working for British intelligence. He impersonates a SS officer and joins a boat which is smuggling rubber from Japan to Germany . M. starts to sabotage the scuttling charges so the valuable cargo can be grabbed by the Allies . He finds that some of the crew are anti Nazi and may be prepared to help him.

The ship meets up with an Axis submarine which lands two , soon to be suspicious of Marlon , German officers and ( conveniently ) some American prisoners and also a German Jewess.

The American prisoners are " persuaded " to join the uprising ( mutiny ? ) unfortunately it is unsuccessful

Yul sets off the remaining scuttling charges. Everyone abandons ship except himself and M  who are saved by the rubber congealing in the hole in the stern !

Yul radios the Allied ships , Marlon ...

regrets the murder of the Jewess by one of the Nazi officers.

 

N.B. per Wikipedia the above summary has some mistakes

 

 

 

 

Edited by Ewanandmoreagain
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On 25/09/2023 at 22:37, velo army said:

This is the post of a man with children. Children who loved this movie and watched it repeatedly and relentlessly each Christmas, driving our favourite Academic grass demented.

If only it was that simple.

The Professor has declared it his favourite film and insists every year on the last day before Christmas every member of staff has to come to work dressed as an elf.

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12 Monkeys (1995) Bruce Willis lives in 2036 where some horrible thing happened, killed five billion people and left the earth uninhabitable. Only the humans live underground, animals rule the ruined earth and humans... have the technology to send Bruce back in time to 1996 but not do anything about their current situation. Classic time travel paradox caper, only extremely surreal because Terry Gilliam directed it and the whole thing feels like a dream. The only problem is I'd seen it before I remembered halfway through how it ended.

The King of Comedy (1982) Robert De Niro really, really wants to be on TV. I found this really engrossing in a way I wasn't expecting and I think it's because there was an ironic timelessness to it. The idea of someone stalking a TV host to try and get on TV seems almost quaint now, given the things people do for attention and the ease with which the internet facilitates this. The level of notoriety can feel absolute nowadays, yet at the same time can be utterly fleeting. Anyway, good performances all round and a Scorsese picture which should be more renowned than it is because it remains so relevant. 

American Psycho (2000) Yuppie Batman starts absentmindedly doodling in his diary while listening to some fantastic music. Along the way he lives the dream of many by killing Jared Leto with an axe. I tuned out a bit towards the end because it hadn't been that long since I'd seen it and I knew how it ended, but I instead focused on just how detached Bale is from all of it. It's a masterful performance in its complete emptiness. One day I'll read the book.

Detective Pikachu (2019) About five minutes into this I went online and read the original Nuzlocke webcomic. In 40-odd pages I saw a Pokemon story which was more creative, engaging, human, entertaining and funny than this CGI ridden horrorshow. I could go into great length about things I didn't like about this but it would genuinely just be a list of bulletpoints. By far the worst thing was the design of the Pokemon themselves. This is a film from 2019 and Jurassic Park was more realistic looking than this. Absolutely hideous in every way. I hate Ryan Reynolds and he was by far the least irritating thing in the film.

Manhunter (1986) In part due to how quickly mass media moves nowadays I don't think you can broadly describe decades in the way you could in the past. If I say "the 80s" or "the 60s" relating to pretty much any aspect of western life, you'd have a general understanding of the sort of mindset and existence I was referring to. Can you do that for the 2020s? The 2010s? Is it just me unable to do this, because I'm old and don't understand the young? I'm not sure. Either way, this is the most 80s film you've ever seen and it slightly spoils things for me. The visuals and the music all seem to be well thought of now compared to when it was released, but for me there was too much going on at times. Brian Cox as Hannibal Lecktor is fantastic. 

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199 The Bourne Identity -- Guess I'm watching Bourne movies this week. I can't believe I haven't watched it before, because now, twenty-odd years later, it's easy to forget whether this is trendsetting or jumping on the bandwagon. Because we've all seen this movie plenty of times now, where a spy who doesn't know he's a spy has to figure out his past, and we've all seen movies where the average shot length is less than 5 seconds and fights and chases, which can appear confusing actually do a great job when done correctly, like here, to throw the audience into the scene. Doug Liman really reinvents the action genre and discovers that Matt Damon is an awesome action hero along the way. There's maybe a bit too much on the exposition at the end, but this is a thrilling watch and I'm looking forward to going through the others. 7/10

200 The Bourne Supremacy -- The octane from the first movie maybe dips a little bit here but Paul Greengrass's style more than makes up for it. Jason Bourne is in India with Marie, still struggling with his memory but putting his life back together, when figures from his past drag him back into the shadows. Matt Damon is superb again and the story is gloriously twisty-turny, but it's Greengrass's direction and camera use that really makes this one stand out. It's dizzying and disorientating, but there's method to his approach here which has often been imitated but seldom with the care shown here. 8/10

201 Dumb Money -- The GameStop Share Squeeze story is based on The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich, who also wrote the Facebook story in The Accidental Billionaires which was one of the worst books I've ever read and was eventually polished up by Aaron Sorkin into The Social Network. Here, I can only assume his work is unrecognizably buffed up by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo because this is actually a very interesting and complicated story told in a very captivating way. Paul Dano stars as Keith Gill, the YouTuber whose videos on why GameStop was undervalued and a great investment opportunity sparked a reddit revolution that threatened to take down billionaires and hedge funds and sparked a Congressional hearing. The movie doesn't go into the minutia of how this all worked but rather tells us the individual stories behind it. America Ferrera is a nurse looking to repay her mortgage. Anthony Ramos is a disillusioned GameStop employee. Myha’la Herrold and Talia Ryder are college students drowning in $100,000 of debt. Along with Seth Rogan and Nick Offerman as hedge fund CEOs, the movie focuses on how the investment rollercoaster affects each of them, and how the game is stacked against the little guy and it wears its heart on its sleeve on how it feels about that. It draws inspiration from The Big Short and looks and sounds very much like The Social Network, and it punches competitively in comparison to both. It serves as a reminder of how angry we should be at stuff like this, how that anger is ultimately futile and temporary, and it's absolutely astonishing to think that this happened just a couple of years ago when we were all working from home wondering where the next roll of toilet paper was coming from. 8/10

202 The Bourne Ultimatum -- It's unusual to have a series where the first three movies build so well on the previous one, but this one seems to take it all up a notch and is my pick of the bunch so far. I loved how confused I was for spells that, given I've watched the three movies in a week, it took me a while to realize how much of this overlapped with the previous film and to figure out where the joins were. If I'd waited three years, I may well have assumed this was deja vu, which would've been a neat touch given the premise. It's just a great action movie that finds a perfect blend between running away from something, running toward something, fighting and shooting things, and the internal workings of CIA department politics. If there was any doubt beforehand, Matt Damon is an awesome action hero. 9/10

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39. Dumb Money - Cinema

Perhaps the most 'Good' film released this year. I'm not sure if it has found or will find an audience, but I reckon that most who do give it a shot will, at the very least, quite like it.

I won't go over the plot as that's already been done above, but I will say that it was strange seeing a trailer for an event that seemed so recent, and that's exactly why I wanted to watch it. There were a couple of films last year that had COVID as a central crux of the story (Kimi and Glass Onion are the two that stick out in my mind), but I think that this is the best encapsulation I've seen of that period - not just in relation to lockdown life, but also of the internet age. 

I expected the class warfare stuff, which is there and it's fine, however what I liked most about this was the exploration of internet forums/communities/cults, and the pandemic is the perfect setting to explore them. Despite some disregard for social distancing etc., there is a feeling of isolation for all the characters. A lot of that isolation is borne out of lockdowns, obviously, but also due to status and politics such as the debt-ridden student, the overworked single mum nurse or the subjugated GameStop employee who sticks out in my mind more than the rest due to encapsulating a lot of the themes at play. There are a bunch of different stories to be balanced, all connected by just one thing: their glorious leader, Paul Dano's character. The loneliness of both the pandemic and an increasingly online world can manifest itself in positive and negative change. This film is, imo, an example of the positive and an example of the negative was taking place at the same time, albeit not reference here (the January 6th shenanigans). They both demonstrate the power of the internet for individuals who feel oppressed, as it allows them to come together with like-minded, disillusioned people and plot to rally against their 'oppressors' led by the words of their saviour. This focuses on the positive effects of the concept of the internet democratising discussions - although it does show how traditional powers are able to influence even that - but I always have the counter-argument lingering in the back of my mind when I see this kind of story, just like it was with Belle last year. That's obviously not a mark against Dumb Money by any stretch of the imagination and it's actually a good discussion prompt to come from such a crowd-pleaser. The film is a great success when it comes to providing an insight into its characters' erratic behaviours; it's not necessarily about money, it's about escaping a certain status. 

I sometimes felt that this exploration into a larger group of characters resulted in less of a spotlight on Paul Dano as the lead which ultimately negated some of the grander emotional moments. A lot of the smaller scenes are great when it's just him and his family, or even just him on his own, and I'd argue that they're all the heart you need, but I did occasionally yearn for greater time spent on the cliched scenes of a normal, everyday guy going about his daily business before the plot kicks into gear. The opening that we did get is reminiscent of The Social Network as it lays out the protagonist's character through a conversation in a bar before jumping into the main bulk of the story, although I think The Social Network had a more gradual and understandable buildup of its plot device (Facebook in that, GameStop stocks in Dumb Money). Despite what I liked about the depiction of the internet in relation to character, the story elements linking to that did become a wee bit repetitive. It's not a story-centric film, though, and it actually does a really good job of raising the tension as the stock rises which is testament to how it makes you care about the cast of characters. 

40. R.M.N. - Cinema

Strange one. There's some absolutely excellent stuff in here but I'm not gonna be shouting from the rooftops telling folk to see it. 

It starts with one of its alternating leads, Matthias, leaving his job in a slaughterhouse after being racially abused by his co-worker, travelling back to his home village in Transylvania (no vampires, sadly; all very much grounded in reality). That opening is played out similarly to something like Blue Ruin as it's very light on dialogue and very paranoid, which sets the tone for the rest of the film as a lot of things are implied rather than explicit - this works well early on but I sometimes struggled to keep up towards the end. 

Meanwhile, the other lead, Csilla, is working at a large-scale bakery struggling to recruit, so they decide to get three Sri Lankans in to work for them. This seemed like a pretty incidental interaction, and I thought it was trying to establish the bakery rather than the story, however that incidental interaction was the catalyst for the plot which descends into sheer misery. 

Essentially, the locals don't take too kindly to the Sri Lankans "infiltrating" their village and it all goes to shit, but I felt like this inverted what Dumb Money did and the told story of a wider village through the eyes of just one person (Matthias) and the counter-argument was conveyed through Csilla. What was quite interesting about that was that neither of them were at the very heart of the story; they weren't one of the immigrants and they weren't the most vocal opponents, however their values made them gravitate towards either end of the spectrum and away from one another, fuelling more hatred. 

Despite the film not leaving any doubt that 'yes, racism is bad,' it does try and delve deeper into the motivations of the dissenters. Matthias is a man full of anger who tries to project his hypermasculinity onto his son and Csilla (his one-time shagging partner), and when there's pushback against his behaviour, he pushes back against the immigrants. And when he pushes back against the immigrants, Csilla separates herself from him which results in more anger. He encapsulates a lot of the emotional response to their arrival, and also the hypocrisy which is one of the ideas that the film is most interested in. There are multiple languages spoken throughout which are depicted by using different colours for each of the subtitles, a simple technique but one that allows you to see the different backgrounds and cultures which have arrived into the village across generations - yet they're still vehemently racist. I was more interested in how it conveyed those ideas as I wasn't massively engaged in what it was saying, although its depiction of the effects of progressiveness as a commodity was fresh to me. For a film that can be quite bombastic, such as the 15/20-minute static one-shot, it still retains a lot of ambiguity and grey areas which is why I'm a bit unsure about the whole thing. 

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...so the chart now goes:

1. The Exorcist
2. The Exorcist III

<massive cavernous gulf>

3. The Exorcist: The Beginning

<another smaller gulf>

4. Dominion: a prequel to The Exorcist
5. The Exorcist II
6. The Exorcist: Believer

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