Yes, I agree that Forest Whittaker was good in The Last King... and deserved his Oscar. Also, I never felt such huge relief on behalf of a character as I did with McAvoy's at the end of that film. It was very powerful.
Fans of that film might be interested in checking out Yaphet Kotto's earlier efforts, playing the same naughty but endlessly convivial dictator in
Raid on Entebbe which was a not very good TV movie from 1976. I doubt if Whittaker could laugh at a child as well as Kotto does here. Skip to about 2:50:
Uncommon Valor 5/10 is a war film in which Gene Hackman and a band of ex-military men go back to Vietnam after the war's end to try to find his son and other POW/MIAs. It's from the 80s and John Milius had a hand in it, so it's not subtle. The plot's as perfunctory as that of a videogame from the early 1990s. It's like Rambo crossed with the A Team but less good than either.
Videodrome 6/10 is a queasy and uneasy body-horror film from one of that subgenre's most prolific practitioners, David Cronenberg, and starring James Woods. The effects shots are impressive for their age but the story that is their pretext is pretty much bullshit which makes little sense and becomes more absurd the more you think about it. Both Cronenberg (Scanners, The Fly) and Woods (Once Upon a Time in America, Salvador) were doing better stuff around the time they made Videodrome.
Shutter Island 8/10 is very good. Some minor plotting issues and contrivances towards the end stop it short of being great but the opening is one of the best I can think of thanks to a bravura helicopter shot and the placing of music which I had assumed was original but is in fact a part of Symphony No. 3 by Krzysztof Penderecki. Acting is excellent across the board but hats off inparticular to Leonardo DiCaprio (of course: he's never turned in a performance that wasn't excellent), Max Von Sydow and Ted Levine, who only has a bit-part but it's a part you'll remember.
Beautiful Creatures 2/10 is a genuinely dreadful British crime/drama/pseudo comedy film from 2000 that feels at least ten years older. Like a lot of British movies in the wake of Trainspotting and Lock Stock it desperately wants to be hip and sexy and off-beat. Almost the entire cast of this film does bad acting and Rachel Weisz - my only reason for watching it - is no exception but she stands out because she was well on her way to becoming a star at the time.
The Fountain 10/10 also stars Rachel Weisz, and Hugh Jackman, both of whom give career-best performances, and my words can't do it justice.
Donnie Darko 7/10 is an odd one. You tend only to remember the good stuff, of which there's plenty in this film, and not the boring bits in between - of which there's even more. But the good bits are very good - Donnie's "you're goddamn right I will" to his little sister; arguing with Kitty; Seth Rogen's school bully; Elizabeth Darko managing to be super-hot without even trying or even being in the film very much.
Birdy 5/10 is some sort of a drama about a guy (Matthew Modine) that got drafted and, shellshocked after getting blown up (or shot, I don't remember), has decided to act like a bird. His childhood friend (Nicholas Cage) visits him in hospital and the story of their lives up to that point is told in flashback. Cage is great - his oldfashioned style of delivery fits the period perfectly - but the film is really fucking boring and I completely fail to identify with either a boy who's obsessed with birds, or a man who thinks he is a bird.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room 9/10. I had been wondering recently what the deal was with Enron, having been too young to properly understand or care when the story broke, and this film informed me perfectly.
The Spirit 4/10: I can't be bothered to write anything about this.
The Lost Weekend 7/10 is a film about alcoholism from 1945. I had heard about this film. I thought it was going to be a comedy in which a guy gets monumentally drunk over a weekend, whilst trying to write a novel. It's from Billy Wilder after all, who's known mainly for comedy. This isn't a comedy and it doesn't make you feel good about drinking too much, which is exactly what I was doing whilst watching it. It isn't like Withnail and I or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. In this film alcohol is treated like any other addictive drug and could perhaps more accurately be compared to Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm.
JCVD 7/10 stars Jean-Claude Van Damme as a fictional version of himself who becomes involved with a bank robbery in his home-land of Belgium. It's a neat idea and he comes across well but the super-broad exaggeratedly-Gallic (so it seemed to me) acting of the rest of the cast grates after only a short while.
Lolita 8/10 is a 1962 adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's staggering and brilliant novel of the same name. It's a comedy about a sympathetic paedophile. I imagine it's the only such comedy; though it isn't the only adaptation of the book - there was one starring Jeremy Irons in 1997. It isn't particularly funny and of course it pales compared to the source but it's always a pleasure to hear James Mason's diction and Peter Sellers is sufficiently amusing as Clare Quilty. It's on the long side at two and a half hours but it gets better as it goes along and events reach their tragic, galling but totally inevitable conclusion.