Archive for 2017

122 posts from 20 January to 28 December 2017.

  • Gods of Egypt

    Gods of Egypt is stunning. Visually, it’s pretty much flawless.

  • Fast Five

    The film where the least ridiculous scene is when a Mustang flips a bus.

  • Men in Black

    The one with the Will Smith hip-hop song over the credits.

  • Castle in the Sky

    The anime with an unpronounceable name in most Romance languages. That joke is inherited from Gulliver’s Travels.

  • The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

    The one about the cardinal sins. Throw in a science strawman to be torn apart.

  • The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian

    Still four kids, but with extra large scale battles with hundreds of dead.

  • The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

    Four kids, for kids, forked ids.

  • Monsanto

    PTSD-ridden ex-soldier goes insane after a partner kills himself.

  • Corky Romano

    Yet another SNL reject who guns for Holywood and fails miserably.

  • Brokeback Mountain

    More than just gay cowboys.

  • A Very Long Engagement

    Engaging for a very long time. War never changes.

  • Mulholland Drive

    Third time I see it, still don’t know WTF was that about. Still cool though.

  • Helicopter Mom

    Insultingly terrible “comedy” staring Nia Vardalos.

  • Flash Gordon

    Barbarella filmed with the grandiosity of Star Wars.

  • Murder on the Orient Express

    Fancy-pants light Holmes that makes a competent film out of a great plot.

  • Peregrinação

    A road movie set in the Age of Discoveries. The main character travels through Asia in search of wealth and prestige and ends up shunned by the royalty.

  • Seed of Chucky

    Painfully unfunny. Yes, this is the middle of the series, but that doesn’t matter, there’s no canon anyway.

  • A Noiva

    Made for TV simplistic take on the colonial war.

  • Sleepy Hollow

    Alternates between horror and comedy. Should have made up their mind and cut in the horror bits.

  • Pinocchio

    That’s Pinocchio, all right.

  • Howl's Moving Castle

    Steampunk Wizard of Oz, set during the Great War.

  • Pacific Rim

    Go Go, Jägar Rangers.

  • Rocky Balboa

    The more things change, the more they stay the same.

  • The Hudsucker Proxy

    ◯. Ya’ know, fo’ kids!

  • The International

    I have seen this several times now over the years, and it never fails to impress, even when you know the twists. Bourne with much less action and more evilness.

  • Westworld

    Westward the bad cinema.

  • National Treasure: Book of Secrets

    Even more Brownian Saturday afternoon action-adventure. Alternate title: The Bourne Discovery.

  • National Treasure

    Run of the Stuart Mill Brownian action flick. Franklin, I liked it.

  • In Time

    Bonnie and Clyde meets Logan’s Run channelling Fight Club. It’s as derivative as this sentence implies.

  • Mr. Magoo

    Painfully unfunny.

  • Blade Runner 2049

    Not so special K. A worthwhile sequel to a classic.

  • Rocky V

    Took them 5 films to cosmetically change the formula.

  • mother!

    Aronofsky does Rosemary’s Baby. Requiem for a Dream of pregnancy.

  • Dark City

    A companion piece to The Matrix, but with a noir aesthetic. Sleeep!

  • Man of Steel

    Goddamn clusterfuck of pieces of plot strewn together randomly. They credited an editor, but it’s just a pseudonym for BlendTec.

  • O Pai Tirano

    One of the representatives of golden age of Portuguese cinema, it’s still hilarious. There’s an overarching plot of silliness and hilarious smaller bits which betrays its origin as vaudeville-esque popular theatre (known as revista).

  • Mission: Impossible III

    I fell asleep thrice while watching this.

  • Akira

    Damn radical. Part of the holy trinity of classical anime: this, Ghost in the Shell and Cowboy Bebop.

  • The Fifth Element

    A supreme being. Perfect.

  • Insurgent

    Hungrier Potter: Revolutions.

  • Wrongfully Accused

    Yet another Airplane!.

  • Cube

    High concept horror film without a budget. Focuses on the dynamics between characters. Blows Saw off the water.

  • Divergent

    Hunger Potter: A Twilight Fan Fiction.

  • Mission: Impossible 2

    John Woo decides Face/Off was too sane.

  • Abandon

    The Rules of Attraction as a reluctant thriller.

  • Dark Water

    Psycho thriller, Qu’est-ce que c’est? Na na na na na na na na not bad at all.

  • Pushing Tin

    Aren’t air traffic controllers wacky?

  • Kingsman: The Secret Service

    This is a Bond film as directed by Tarantino, which leads to a black hole of bad taste. At least the villain is interessting.

  • A Perfect Getaway

    A thriller that cheats.

  • Mission: Impossible

    This film has two sides clawing for attention. On one side you have the goofy, Get Smart-like spy parody, on the other the serious spy drama, with double and triple agents, deception and remote-controlled car bombs.

  • Bangkok Dangerous

    Light drama meets tourism postcard with murders.

  • Warm Bodies

    Ravenous consumers of human flesh are people too. At least when they literally turn to people.

  • Saw III

    Yet another formulaic sadistic gorefest. I almost sawed some logs while watching this.

  • Breaking and Entering

    Hipster cheats his wife thrice, while ignoring her autistic kid, gets away with it with passionate kisses.

  • Freejack

    The one where Mick Jagger is the good badguy with a silly helmet.

  • Species II

    Fucking Predator, literally, with even more fucking.

  • Magic Mike XXL

    More beefcakes, but softer and funnier. Strips the film down to the basics, namely dry-humping all sorts of women while wearing thongs.

  • Elektra

    Another superhero film with a script that fits in a single page.

  • Guys and Dolls

    A filmed Broadway play that makes for a good musical but a not-so-good film.

  • Mississippi Burning

    Morons massacre minorities in Mississippi, Mulders mount manhunt, mortified locals maim more, motherfuckers must rot in jail.

  • Four Rooms

    Regular Tarantino crap, even though he only directed a fourth of this. His lousiness infects other directors.

  • Magic Mike

    Beefcakes are sensitive people too, beneath those massive layers of muscle.

  • Being John Malkovich

    What can you say about a Charlie Kaufman script?

  • The Company Men

    Follows the stories of three salaryman, unsurprisingly.

  • Coming Home

    Yimou Zhang goes minimal and makes a film with only three characters, a nuclear family.

  • Dunkirk

    A truly cinematic experience that eschews dialogue and characterisation for Stuka sirens and Hans Zimmer horns.

  • Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

    This is a worthy spiritual sequel to The Fifth Element, just lacks a phenomenal main duo. These are merely good.

  • Minority Report

    It seems ironic that Spielberg adapts sci-fi stories, when he flatly doesn’t care about the story. Feels like a bet he won, making a blockbuster about something he couldn’t give a shit about.

  • Mimic

    Yet another horror film about man-sized bugs with humanoid faces eating people.

  • Lake Placid

    Ensemble cast trade snarky remarks amongst themselves, and there’s a giant crocodile in the lake somewhere.

  • War for the Planet of the Apes

    State of the art visual effects. Testicle-shrivelling details.

  • Jerry Maguire

    Just another romcom about a jerk discovering he has emotions.

  • I, Frankenstein

    This is a nominal sequel to Frankenstein, the book. Except there are daemons and gargoyles too.

  • Battlefield Earth

    This is completely laughable film. Ridiculous from start to the end. Written by Hubbard pre-Dianetics, this is free from the pernicious influence of that mind killer.

  • Starsky & Hutch

    Aren’t the 70’s whacky?

  • 127 Hours

    Tragedy strikes a perpetual optimist, then unsurprisingly he comes out on top.

  • Edge of Tomorrow

    This is the weirdest thing. A big budget Hollywood flick that adapted an obscure Japanese novel featuring mecha and thinly-veiled metaphors for WW2? How this that happen?

  • Species

    Fucking Predator, literally.

  • The Golden Compass

    This is an interesting high fantasy story, completely butchered by the studio.

  • Cellular

    The one where the woman jury rigs a rotary phone and calls random numbers.

  • Fantastic Four

    Complete and utter dross, unworthy of this very review. I want to sue Marvel for my time.

  • Footloose

    For a musical about organising a dance off, there’s less dancing than you would expect. It’s more ugly brawls, sermons and grieving over dead loved ones.

  • Hercules

    A Trojan horse. A tragedy. They lost their marbles. All-the-gory caved in. The best part: none. Ironically, one of the worst classics.

  • Princess Mononoke

    A gripping tale of a feral ecoterrorist raised by wolves that discover what you hu-mans call “emotions”.

  • La vie d'Adèle

    Came for the lesbian sex, stayed for the Bildungsroman.

  • The Devil Wears Prada

    Whoring out is the only way to be someone in life

  • Journey to the Center of the Earth

    Not-adaptation cash grab for 3D

  • The Avengers

    It was too hot to think today, so I watch these Avengers, and not the other, more interesting, film with Sean Connery in a Teddy Bear costume.

  • Veronica Guerin

    I give it 7/used needles

  • Cursed

    Even though the premise is interesting and features womanwolves, which I think it’s a first, not worth it to take everything around it. Even if the werewolf flips the bird at the protagonist.

  • Army of Darkness

    Braindead without the mommy issues.

  • Rocky IV

    The best Rocky is the first one, but Rocky III (the one with Mr. T) was pretty crap already. This takes the cake, though.

  • Mad Max 2

    War. War never changes.

  • Un moment d'égarement

    Puts the ‘fun’ in ‘paedophilia’

  • Body of Lies

    US frames innocent muslim for terrorist attack, is all for nought

  • And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself

    Neither a fluff piece nor a hatchet job

  • Recount

    The Thick of It meets Kevin Spacey headdesking repeatedly.

  • The Assignment

    Here’s a 40 years old script that feels ripped from the virtual headlines.

  • One Million Years B.C.

    Transformers with extra scantily-clad women.

  • The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box

    This might as well be the quintessential Young Adult novel turned prospective franchise.

  • Salvation Boulevard

    Aren’t those new evangelical churches wacky?

  • The Headsman

    Here’s an obscure film that shouldn’t embarrass whoever participated on it.

  • Lo impossible

    Yet another feel-horrible tale of lucky people in a tragedy.

  • Hollywood Ending

    Woody Allen is not perfect, and this is an example of it. Just like Scoop, this still has chucklegoofs, but the drudge you need to wade through before getting to the good jokes is too much.

  • Body Count

    Ultra obscure baby’s first noir with a star-studded cast. The producers must be crazy to throw away this, it’s not so unworthy to deserve the Direct to Video mark of shame.

  • Perdidos

    This is a remake of Open Water 2: Adrift. It’s better than it sounds, but I haven’t seen the original.

  • Alien: Covenant

    If Prometheus is like the The Phantom Menace, this is like Revenge of the Sith,

  • Tarde Demais

    This is a story about a group of fisherman from the outskirts of Lisbon that sink their boat in the mud in viewing distance from the shore, but since some are weak, old and/or injured, can’t get to safety before tragedy happens.

  • Jonah Hex

    Bog-standard comic book adaptation. Not even worth to hate.

  • Red Rock West

    The director of The Last Seduction did not spring into existence with his magnum opus. First he did this low key, light noir, set on a small town, in which our lead drops into. And it’s not a remake of Yojimbo.

  • Nick of Time

    90 minutes of runtime with a one-line script

  • The Lovely Bones

    Peter Jackson does Life Is Strange

  • King Kong

    I re-watched King Kong today and it’s still as impressive as the first time.

  • Beauty and the Beast

    Following all Disney properties, this is a completely safe film, all the rough edges sanded out, which turns a supposedly magical story into an anodyne cultural artefact. A mere husk, dead on the inside.

  • Ghost in the Shell

    I though this was supposed to be an adaptation. Turns out to be a bog standard modern sci-fi blockbuster.

  • Life

    The first part of this made me think this featured a truly alien alien! I started thinking about Solyaris and everything.

  • The Twilight Zone: The Movie

    An highlight reel for the Twilight Zone spirit.

  • Sucker Punch

    This is a fantastic film, in all senses of the word. Scott Glenn is clearly making bank on his David Carradine impression.

  • Exodus: Gods and Kings

    The grimdark realistic remake of Prince of Egypt that everyone was pinning for.

  • São Jorge

    Boxing is life, and so is debt collection.

  • Saw II

    The gorefest the series is known about.

  • Saw

    Not the gorefest the series is known about.