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The more I watched of this movie the more I became convinced that the crew were just making everything up as they went along. And with such an atrocious screenplay, full of colossally unlikely coincidences, unexplained or nonsensical motivations and a boat load of cliches, I realized that it had no chance to be anything but laughable by the end, which it was. Nikolaj Coster-Walda tries his best to keep a straight face through it all but it's a lost cause. The 10 points here are for the earthy daytime cinematography, which was pretty decent.

All things considered I'd say pass on this and watch Synecdoche New York instead, because that deals with similar themes, is grander in scope and has a firmer grip on what it's trying to accomplish. This isn't bad by any means, but at about the halway mark everything starts to fall apart and become more incomprehensible, more overblown and less interesting. Luckily we have Jessie Buckley as an anchor to keep us from drowning - she holds everything together enough to make this watchable.

Starts off as a modern road movie, setting the scene of a couple of young rebels in love and doing their own thing - a drummer and singer in their own band living the dream. The scenes of the drummer starting to lose his hearing - the panic that sets in and his lover's reaction to it and what it means for both of their futures are handled in a very realistic and effective manner. The film becomes less interesting and more cliched in the second half, when the filmmakers follow through on these themes, and although not as impactful as the first half the film taken as a whole is involving enough to be worth yourt time.

'Mank' is more often than not stagey and awkward when it's trying to be snappy and smart, and I lost patience with it well before the half way mark, as it didn't seem to be doing anything interesting, and wading through some of the self-conscious performances and stilted dialogue became a real chore. In trying to be too many things at once; an interesting bio-pic, an imitation of vintage movies, and a critique of the social and political ideas of the time it doesn't do justice to any of them and ultimately becomes tedious and annoying.

All of Christopher Nolan's movies have a puzzle aspect to them - where the viewer is given a set of rules then left to figure out what's going on and how things are to be resolved. 'Tenet' takes this to an extreme, and is so willfully confusing at times that it will ultimately leave a lot of people cold. And it doesn't help that if they do manage to sort through everything some of it just doesn't make a lot of sense. Still, it's expertly directed and competently acted, and it's shooting for something more than just a standard actioner - and that counts for a lot these days. In short it's a bit of a garbled mess but still very watchable.