Searching (2018)

Powerful

People are voting emotionally.

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

It started slowly as the characters were revealed and like Nordic Noir the narrative drive was the meticulous investigation on the internet. For those on social media this was brilliant for those more technologically naive this was a bore. The silence and mouse clicks let to the suspense for me others thought it made the movie slow. The acting was brilliant and you felt his pain and frustration. A really great movie with an unexpected twist, I loved it.

If you want 90 minutes of a guy highlighting stuff for the audience like we're morons who can't spot the only thing on the screen, YOU'RE IN FOR A NON-STOP THRILL RIDE.Now, if you're not that impressionable, you'll soon notice how there's close to no content in this movie. Dead-ends that take up a third of the movie, twists that make no sense whatsoever if you listen carefully and of course, the whole point of the movie is that it's all on various computer or phone screens. The thing is, unlike Unfriended which is in real time, this movie is set over a couple of days... which end up showing the character sleeping in front of his open webcam? Or a police officer answering a FaceTime call from a civilian at 2 in the morning? This is just the tip of the iceberg on how very little sense this movie makes by trying to tell a convoluted story with limited fields of imagery.Cho's performance is nothing more (or less) than average, but I can't say the same for the rest of D-list actors in the cast. Everyone seems to be delivering their lowest effort possible, or maybe just don't have the talent to play even the simplest of all roles. You don't care about any of the characters already and that kind of performance doesn't help. I honestly couldn't care less if the daughter was alive or dead, because it really didn't change anything.And as I said in my very first paragraph, the director seems to take his audience for idiots by making sure the character highlights every important clue to try and make some sense of his "twists". I'm not exaggerating when I say the main character does that AT LEAST 30 times over the course of the movie. And if it isn't a highlight, it's the a straight-up ZOOM IN on the detail that needs to be seen, according to the director. An immersive experience would make the whole screen visible and let the viewer find his own clues. This feels like the director taking us by the hand to explain his stupid story.In the end, this movie fails on every single level and doesn't deserve all the praise it's getting (I guess for the fact that it's all on screens, but other movies have done WAY better). Save some money and skip this one, as for the twist isn't even worth the watch. It's barely a twist at all actually, as I said, since it makes no sense if you pay enough attention and don't get distracted by the constant highlighting.One of the worst movies of the year.

This film was utter dross. I saw this as a preview screening perk perk with my unlimited cinema package. I left the cinema after 40 minutes. If watching someone have text chats, with all the drama of pondering whether to use an exclamation mark or a full stop, (yes, that happens), and look things up on a laptop is your thing, then this is the movie for you. Garbage. Worst film I've (part) seen this year and the first one I've abandoned in ages. I couldn't care less what happened to his daughter, and I couldn't bear any more of the slow paced internet searching.

I got the opportunity to see an advanced screening of Searching through the Atlanta Film Society and I really enjoyed it! A quick summary, it's about a father, David Kim (John Cho) whose teenage daughter, Margot suddenly disappears and goes missing. David desperately tries to find his daughter by going through her social media and her text messages, and he discovers there was a lot about his daughter that he never knew. The entire movie is filmed in a unique way, by it being presented through computer screens and POV shots. At first, when I saw the trailer, I thought it was going to be another one of those shaky camera, first person type filming (think Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield) and I was pleasantly surprised that it was nothing like that at all. I thought that the film was great. I like who-done-its and this one was done very well. It was excellently written and acted. Aneesh Chaganty does a fantastic job building suspense. What was good about the movie is that there are a lot of surprise twists that keep appearing as the movie progresses. When you watch the film, pay attention to all the little details, because they all build to something and serve a purpose in the film. Overall, I enjoyed the movie tremendously. It was sad, it was funny, and it was suspenseful. I hope this movie does well at the box office.