Archive for 2024

184 posts from 01 January to 30 November 2024.

  • Anora

    The first third really trick you into this being just some American Pie shit. But it’s really not, the gopnik is the real working-class hero. Fucking rich assholes.

  • The Bourne Ultimatum

    A little bit of Identity, a little bit of Supremacy, a bunch of Snowden stuff, and some very supercharged spooks, since this film’s budget is much bigger.

  • The Bourne Supremacy

    This is still very cool, even though Marie’s death is extremely shocking. Why, does Bourne need extra motivation? She was just another Collateral Murder.

  • The Social Network

    This is truly the Citizen Kane of our time, but it’s only accidentally brilliant. Know idiot and delusional Aaron Sorkin tries to suck Zuckerberg’s cock while maintaining eye contact all the time, but it backfires and both look like absolute idiots.

  • Ararat

    Why does this have to be so complicated and convoluted? There’s at least three interlocking stories here, stories withing stories.

  • Emanuelle

    A remake in name only. The main character is not even named. Plot with a bit of porn, nothing outside French standards.

  • The Island

    A childish The Matrix/I, Robot, directed by Michael Bay. Who the fuck wrote this, a 15 year old teenage boy? checks Oh, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, yikes! At least in the grimdark future, you can ride a public maglev from Arizona to LA, thanks Elon!

  • Tabu

    Such a great melodrama split in two parts, but I preferred the first one. The second is tinged with colonial disgust in every scene, always there in the background, you can never ignore it.

  • X

    More like XXX for Gen X.

  • The Thin Red Line

    A war film by Terrence Malick, sounds like a contradiction but the Malick-ness wins, it’s slow and soothing. Half of it it’s shots of weird jungle animals, Melanesian people enjoying life in a remote island away from the big brouhaha of modern cities, or soldiers on leave frolicking with said natives.

  • Saint Maud

    A slow burn over Christian superstition. Burns it out to the ground, not even the ashes remain. It seems God speaks Welsh, a gentleman of ill repute.

  • The Substance

    It’s all nice and metaphorical in the first two thirds, but then it goes nuts and loses the plot for the sale of referencing The Shining, The Thing, and eXistenZ. Maybe it’s too French and I didn’t get it.

  • Des Teufels Bad

    What the hell, I really only got the point with the last text crawl, good job everyone. It’s really The Witch meets Million Dollar Baby.

  • Smile 2

    It’s hard to believe the current mainstream horror cinema for teenagers is giallo body horror, but with extremely detailed CGI and perhaps some practical effects too.

  • The Man Who Knew Too Much

    It’s a joke, you see, Jimmy Stewart plays a complete buffoon. Too bad Doris Day is a woman in a 50’s film and can’t do anything but call her man, even though she’s a world renowned superstar, and her hubby is a bumpkin country doctor.

  • Death Wish

    Ah, is this the more centrist response to Dirty Harry? This is as fascist and anti-hippie as that, but the hero is a just a regular architect, not a credentialed murderer. The cosmopolitrometer is off the charts, lower than The Town, this is the new benchmark.

  • Cocaine Bear

    Good grief, are the people that think of this shit high? This is the worst kind of mainstream dross ever to come out Hollywood. An absolute trainwreck, in all possible senses.

  • O Melhor dos Mundos

    The first third of The Day After Tomorrow or even Don’t Look Up, but with no budget, and good actors speaking technobabble. What a weird animal.

  • Megalopolis

    I think I got the gist of this anti-fascist elitist screed. Power to the aristos speaking and acting on behalf of the people, I guess. It’s not very revolutionary, keeps the plot strictly in the marbled floors. If this is a roman à clef, I can’t parse it, after decades of rewrites. And it’s too damn long!

  • Ca$h

    Good god, this is a single page script, stretched to feature length. Add Sean Bean (playing twins!) and a pre-fame Hemsworth, and you get a “film”.

  • The Apprentice

    A nice descent into the making of the grifter to end all grifters. There are all the accoutrements that come with pathologic narcissism: massive Trump naming everywhere, gaudy gold plated shit for him and baubles for others, pure unbridled greed.

  • Amsterdam

    How ironic, no Dutch is spoken here, only English and French. And a Portuguese song in the background…

  • Nocebo

    Ahh, good old creepy-ass horror, disgusting and inhumane parasites, but there are also ticks and burnt flesh. It’s like an intense John Carpenter film.

  • Mrs. Doubtfire

    This seems like a lighthearted child film, but the more you think about it, the closer it is to the Dirty Harry universe. It’s also very 90s, large parts of the jokes wouldn’t fly nowadays. Chris Columbus is the best at working with kids, it’s uncanny.

  • The Invisible Man

    Why the hell does this have two endings? Is that a reshoot to make the woman as the gold digger and the violent gaslighting tech billionaire the real victim? What the shit?

  • The Flock

    Seven, Eleven, Sixty Nine, Fifty. A thriller by the numbers, since it even stars with a kind of PSA with all kinds of numbers. Includes a unbelievable scene where Richard Gere grills Avril Lavigne over sexual proclivities, I bet Claire Danes laughing her ass off was real.

  • Three To Tango

    A very progressive take on the whole homosexual closeted gay situation, wrapped in a very mainstream romantic comedy. Ironically, the woman are not very well treated here, for runtime reasons I think.

  • The Chronicles of Riddick

    If Pitch Black is Alien, this is some weird ass Aliens. There are some baffling hairstyles in here, just hideous mohawk-mullet hybrids.

  • Pitch Black

    That’s goddamn Riddick-al, an incredible thriller until the last scene.

  • Winter's Tale

    Narnia for adults, since it deals even more explicitly with death of young girls and children, plus sex, but then it’s PG-13 for no fucking reason whatsoever. Just because it’s magical realism, doesn’t mean it’s for children.

  • Speak no Evil

    European Straw Dogs, meets The Shining.

  • Salon Kitty

    Mamma mia, this is Caligula with less acting, and even more bad taste. The expression rompere i coglioni is uttered non ironically, but it might as well relate to actual testicles.

  • The Pledge

    This is almost a brilliant thriller, but the foreshadowing is disregarded, leading to absolutely no twists, just a tragic coincidence. Sean Penn is just weird, and obsessed with mentally ill people. You never go full retard.

  • The Menu

    As unabashedly leftist as Triangle of Sadness, but more hilarious. I see that all these stem from Parasite, that critique of high class using all the Voss water bottles and shit. This is more allegorical, there’s at least one kind of bad people burning in end.

  • Madame Web

    Cassandra Webb, crikey. She even goes blind in the end, can it be even more on the nose?

  • A Serious Man

    That’s some esoteric shit. If this is an autobiography of the Coen brothers, were they the perma-high kid who goes through the motions at the bar mitzvah?

  • Typist Artist Pirate King

    Geddit, Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy? “Sandra Panza” is also a Don Quixote reference, like most images on the screen.

  • Batman Begins

    I’m Batman! This is particularly lighthearted and funny, compared to the rest of the series, it retains just a little bit of the camp nature of previous adaptations.

  • Judas and the Black Messiah

    Fucking J Edgar, he’s always there in the background somewhere, scheming, always on the wrong side of history. Fred Hampton was a party leader at 21 years old, fucking hell.

  • Molly's Game

    The opening shot is a perfect trailer, a deluge of words, a wall of voice, a barrage of dribble. This is like a centrist Robert Redford film, but instead of focusing on a little guy, it’s some rich and privileged white chick fighting the IRS to keep some blood money.

  • M3GAN

    AI is absolute dogshit. Eat your heart out, Spielberg and Kubrick, fucking amateurs.

  • The Mask

    Truly a live action cartoon, not like the modern Disney lice action adaptations. And some of those old school cartoons, Richard Fleischer and the Tex Avery, adult animations.

  • American Ultra

    Such talented and vast cast filming a middle of the road script. It’s a higher brow version of Charlie Countryman, the cast prevents it from reaching such lows.

  • Promised Land

    Imagine that, a 9 billion dollar company pulling extremely dirty tricks to get the mineral rights off some poor farmer dudes. They send some useful idiot dude, just promoted to VP to make him feel self-important too.

  • La Maison

    The frenchiest of French films, it’s almost a cliché. Putain, soft cocks, you name it.

  • Há-de Haver Uma lei

    Os Maias meets Rashomon, with an heavy dose of Lolita. The ingénue was the mastermind all along!

  • Call of the Wild

    I can’t believe a CGI dog is really the main character in a 90 minute feature film. The killer dog that murders a greedy rich prospector in the big climax, just chucks him into a burning log cabin. That’s wild all right.

  • Sphere

    Christ, common Crichton crap. It’s like Andromeda Strain meets Prometheus, mixed with Solaris. The finale is utterly pointless, there is literally a reset and all arcs are undone.

  • Chaplin

    I mean, it’s a Charlie Chaplin biopic, with a lot of the actual films. That’s cheating, if you can use the final speech from The Great Dictator. I really preferred Eddie Izzard in The Cat’s Meow.

  • Texas Chainsaw 3D

    This is so bad. They basically remake the first film until middle of the runtime, then run out of plot, and have to make up something to reach the bare minimum 90 minute mark. So the final girl teams up with Leatherface, because FAMILY.

  • Kangaroo Jack

    My god, it’s worse than it seems. The girl is the least idiotic character, and she gets the short end of the stick: harassment, gaslighting, the main character literally feels her tits and jumps in her bath to kiss her. You know, for laughs!

  • Anatomy of a Murder

    I’m just a poor, country lawyer, defending a murderer. Yeah, said murderer is a wife-beater, hyper-jealous, overall 50’s husband, but he was only defending her after she was brutally raped by some dude. Oof, his own incognito daughter came on the stand to charge the dead man.

  • While we're Young

    My god, the first part has some hilarious shit. It gets really serious in the last 30 minutes, for the conventional reconstruction, but it could have just been the funny parts, structured as a fall from grace into an abyss. It’s self-referential, but broad enough to make sense to most people.

  • Victor Frankenstein

    A more modern retelling of the modern Prometheus tale (the Hollywood version, not the book, you think Max Landis reads?), where the doctor is kinda the hero.

  • The Hunted

    This is Rambo in the Kosovo War, then The Fugitive/Predator, then a proto-Bourne, all in a single package. Mostly Rambo if Richard Crenna was a real character, but the rest of the plot is pretty thin.

  • Holmes & Watson

    American comedies, how cute. This is their middle-brow offerings, not just pure slapstick, puke, and fart jokes, but nothing subversive and actually funny either. A big talented cast in service of crap.

  • Panic Room

    A great thriller with so much class subtext, where the focus is all on the technical trickery and old-school CGI. Working Class people are fucked over badly, while aristos can withstand ugly home invasions and come out of it relaxed and looking for more places to gentrify.

  • The Seventh Seal

    That was not what I expected. Meta-Jokes, in my existential philosophy? An atheist snarky lower class worker, while the aristo wasted 10 years of his life in a pointless crusade, instigated by an idiot?

  • The Departed

    Those damn Buoston accents, I luove it. “Anointed Pederast” when referring to men of the cloth, they should have used that tagline on Spotlight (or at least a punk band name). I really want to rewatch Infernal Affairs now.

  • Free Guy

    Ahh, what seems like The Truman Show turns into Wreck It Ralph for teenagers (with a Cyrano love story). Shame, it reached for the stars, but faltered towards the end.

  • Jurassic World: Dominion

    The stupid quotes remain. “He slid into my DMs” used unironically, how the mighty have fallen.

  • Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

    My god, this is too realistic. A billionaire CEO transitioning to lobbyist organisation green washing, another billionaire bankrolling stuff while congress gridlocks.

  • Hot Shots

    What can I say, this is another ZAZ flick, with only some of those letters. Mostly parodying Top Gun, but also very obscure deep cuts I didn’t catch. It’s fine.

  • Hot Shots Part Deux

    Ha, a Rambo parody with Richard Crenna. With the classic episode of George Bush Sr puking all over the Japanese Prime Minister.

  • Shutter Island

    I guess Scorsese is the real monster. What’s he doing, dipping his toes into stuff he knows nothing about? Or does he direct every script that comes up to him with violence against woman?

  • Tropic Thunder

    Crosses the line into bad taste, but then it keeps running and running, until it rolls over into awesomeness again. The anti-Lebowski.

  • The Dark Knight

    The only film where David Dastmalchian does not play the most tortured soul.

  • R.I.P.D. 2: Rise of the Damned

    One of those direct to streaming faux-sequels. The original was nothing to write home about, and this doesn’t have Rooster Cogburn. That dude from Sicario is not cut out for outright comedic roles.

  • Troy

    Only a German would bother about a big budget Illiad adaptation. He’s no Schliemann, this is a proper adaptation with nice touches, even though it’s a 3000 years old story.

  • Alien: Romulus

    A nice mishmash of all Alien films, a little bit of horror, a little bit of action, a little bit of body horror and baby human-Alien hybrids. Utterly ruined by the stupid decision of putting a fucking deepfake Ash in it, Ian Holm must be rolling on his grave (even though is estate is credited).

  • Jumanji

    It’s Home Alone if directed by Spielberg: all about the daddy issues for boys, girls are just a sideshow. Speaking of sideshows, black people are that too, even if they come up with some Air Jordan.

  • Fool's Paradise

    The big boy version of Little Miss Sunshine: pretentious, hypocritical as fuck, vacuous and lightweight. Charlie Day is not Charlie Chaplin, I’m sorry, they just share a first name.

  • Suburban Commando

    Hulk Hogan is not Batista, much less The Rock. He’s just a washed out wrestler trying and failing to make the leap into acting, but he just don’t have what it takes.

  • Public Enemies

    A less focused, 1930’s Heat. There’s not just one cop and one robber, it’s a lot of robbers with distinct allegiances and a boatload of cops (and even some bureaucrats like Hoover). It’s still better than The Untouchables, but doesn’t hold a candle to any of the Scarface films.

  • Vanity Fair

    Good grief, those upper class twits are complete maniacs. Alas, this is no Dangerous Liaisons, truly evil is vanquished but there’s an happy ending anyway.

  • The Bay of Silence

    One of those cheating thrillers, where there’s no way to guess what will happen based on foreshadowing. But it’s absolutely predictable anyway, because all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.

  • The Last Voyage of the Demeter

    Count Dracula ships himself from Transylvania with a farm girl as travel snack, but gets the munchies and feeds on the rest of the crew.

  • Mata Hari

    From Cyborg’s producers, Sylvie “Emanuelle” Kristel is Mata Hari, an accidental “spy” who is being manipulated by both sides of WW1. It’s even more based on a great big lie, there’s a disclaimer that “no similarities with living or deceased persons are intended”.

  • Us

    Esoteric AF. I didn’t get it, needs a second view.

  • Cyborg

    Christ, that’s intense. Like a not so good version of Solomon Kane, same vibes but less production values.

  • The Swimmers

    The story of Yasra Mardini and her sister, told in the most soap opera style possible. It’s no Capharnaüm.

  • Inside Out 2

    First world problems elevated to life-threatening conditions, as any teenager believes.

  • 300

    This story doesn’t need to be directly interpreted as the last stand of Europe against the Asiatic hordes, since Attila and Genghis Khan are well into the future. It can be bloody Asterix, some monarchist anarchists fight an invasion by an evil empire.

  • Babylon A.D.

    Mary Mother of (twin) Christs. It’s an “adaptation” of the escape from Egypt, where Mary is played by Michelle Yeoh and Joseph by Vin Diesel. But Baby Jesus is actually Mary, it’s confusing.

  • Thanksgiving

    Eli Roth mixes the worse parts of random high school slashers and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It’s very mainstream, not hideous like Hostel.

  • Crank

    Borderline experimental action film. A bunch of vignettes on teenage radical stuff, very juvenile, 90’s nu-metal, very fast cameras with fisheye lenses.

  • The Black Phone

    Just another Stranger Things ripoff: kids in violent situations (including swearing), nostalgia for the 70’s, there’s no third element. Ethan Hawke might have lost a bet with Jason Blum and was forced into this.

  • Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

    Tim Burton’s Back to the Future version, with his trademark horror themes. A solid children’s film, where the hero hooks up with his own grandfather’s ex.

  • The Voyeurs

    Sexually frustrated Sydney Sweeney stars in horny Rear Window, with two twists in the last minutes.

  • In the Heart of the Sea

    Well, an actual Ron Howard film that is not utter crap? Imagine that. Wiped clean of deviant sexuality and dick jokes, just Apollo 13 in the Pacific Ocean.

  • Moneyball

    Good grief, the Michael Lewis rot was there from the start. This was even co-written by Aaron Sorkin, for the radical centrist bingo. It was just hidden under the mass of talented actors squeezing blood from a stone.

  • 65

    Planet of the Apes meets After Earth. This follows all modern trends to a T, but it works. The kid is actually great, and Adam Driver is a good at being befuddled the whole film.

  • OSS 117: Alerte Rouge en Afrique Noire

    James Bond meets Starship Troopers. It’s a more political Austin Powers, ultra-reactionary.

  • 8mm

    What a great gem. Thematically extreme, but touches so many facets of human nature, it’s almost blissful. He who fights monsters…

  • The Birds

    What a bizarre horror film. It has elements of zombie films but so much is left unsaid, feel like a truncated release. The main plot is an hardcore family psychodrama, which gets abandoned half way on account of the freaking birds. And that ending, what the fuck was that?

  • The Magnificent Seven

    A mediocre remake of a mediocre remake of Seven Samurai. With such a large budget and a good cast, not a great film comes out of it. Nothing magnificent about this.

  • Triangle of Sadness

    What a rollercoaster ride of emotions. It starts of a bit too on the nose, and goes completely farcical on the Captain’s Dinner, but the island section is great. The ending freaking sucks, they can shove those damned open ended finales. High-Rise is better at this.

  • Barry Lyndon

    An opera in two acts, ain’t nobody got time for more, what are we, 18th century aristocrats? Pure Kubrickian technical flex, a visual marvel, but the plot itself is pretty alien for modern audiences: not only the Irish are not reviled as philandering devils, pretty much all situations are preposterous by modern standards.

  • Getaway

    Gone in 60 Seconds (the old one, the stunt showreel) meets self-insert fic about some Bulgarian billionaire. It’s the only way to explain this.

  • Burn After Reading

    Play it, Tuli!

  • Journey 2: The Mysterious Island

    A stillborn franchise attempt, how sad. Even more for kids than the last one, mashing up book concepts like there’s no tomorrow.

  • Emanuelle

    Some porn with flimsy plot, not very French. This has aged horribly, there are cancellable offences left and right. It’s tamer than daytime reality shows.

  • Emanuelle: L'antivierge

    More softcore banging with yet another excuse plot, but with better cameras, more girls, and less rape. There’s even less plot, “let’s fuck” is uttered unironically.

  • Allied

    What the hell is this, why is Robert Zemeckis directing a soap opera for the Chinese? Sure, they laundered their money through Paramount, but there’s the Huahua company logo at the start, probably some Chinese billionaire front.

  • The Road

    It’s not that bleak, actually. They find “plenty” of food (and eventually lose it), there are several bands of marauding cannibals, but also regular people too. Just like the real world, with much less people.

  • The Last of the Mohicans

    They mean Mohawk, some kind of sub-tribe? I do not fully understand the Native American ways.

  • Serpico

    Regular middle-class second generation immigrant cannot make it on the police force, no matter how many trappings of upper class signifiers he picks up. He takes the harder way and gets shot for his troubles.

  • Blazing Saddles

    Whaddya know, it’s a Mel Brooks film. A kind of high brow Airplane!. It’s a bit intense, a lot of “niggers” and “chinks” thrown around, and enormous amounts of gay jokes.

  • Star Wars: Return of the Jedi

    The emotional arc of Vader’s story, intercut with childish teddy bears and a bunch of action scenes of no consequence.

  • Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

    More of this sort of childish space opera. Jar Jar Binks is like a C-3PO on steroids, it’s grating on the ears. Even on more serious scenes, that tinny voice is there, hammering away at your ears.

  • Star Wars: A New Hope

    Yeah, it’s all right. Just another campy space opera, with action driven plot (lifted straight from The Hidden Fortress), young whippersnappers, and older British actors collecting their paycheck.

  • Fury

    This really tricked me into being another fascist interpretation of Saving Private Ryan, bit it’s a much more humane and hopeful film. Doesn’t reach the technical heights of the D-Day landings, but the again, what does?

  • Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

    A completely unnecessary retreat over well worn desert roads of Fury Road, but still provides crazy visuals that make pretty much all Marvel crap looks like toddler-level drawings, when compared to this J.M.W. Turner painting.

  • They/Them

    An important subject matter butchered beyond belief. An abject failure as a film, a lot of money wasted by Blumhouse.

  • Rollerball

    Look at us, look at what they make you give.

  • American Made

    I knew it, Kill the Messenger needed some kind of softer human alternative. One with literal cartoon Eagles and Bears battling over the American lebensraum.

  • Anaconda

    King Kong meets Apocalypse Now. A group of city dwellers go on a trip to the Amazonian Jungle to film uncontacted tribes.

  • Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith

    No, Lucas, noooo! The retcons, oh the humanity.

  • Star Wars: The Phantom Menace

    Now that’s pod racing!

  • Star Wars: Attack of the Clones

    It that Rose Byrne? It’s like Harry Potter over here, a massive amount of English people!

  • Cândido - O Espião que Veio do Futebol

    That’s a joke with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Fitting, for a middle-of-the-road spy flick.

  • Fall Guy

    The film equivalent of the diss track, mocking Tom Cruise mercilessly. There are so many Tom Cruise direct mentions, it’s clearly not an accident. The funniest thing is he can’t complain, is he gonna admit he doesn’t do his own stunts?

  • Snatch

    Less a film, more like a series of music videos. The writing grates on the ears, nothing smooth about the quipping, the pattern is quip-reply-repetition-quip-pop song. Cinematic celery, lacks proteins.

  • Shut In

    Some kind of crappy horror film. It’s not just technically bad, the rest is so bad, you start noticing the technical fails.

  • The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

    The Fincher version. This is a great thriller, but feels like cultural appropriation to pretend everything is Sweden but speak English with accents. If you want to adapt a story, do it, don’t do this half way.

  • Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City

    So this is another reboot, for the money. They got that right, there’s a Jill Sandwich joke in the first minutes.

  • The Tomorrow War

    Low rent pastiche of other, better sci-fi films, with a way bigger budget it deserved. So much combat, it never ends, relentless bottomless magazines.

  • Lost Girls & Love Hotels

    Prude 50 Shades of Tokyo, with Alexandra Daddario. Suck it, Dakota Johnson, instead of nepo babies there are pillow boobies.

  • Civil War

    Yeah, a muddled mess, you can’t see the point clearly (maybe there isn’t any). Clearly written during the Trump years, it’s stale before it even plays in theatres. Amazing military visuals and sound, the sonic punch, the tactics, so engrossing.

  • Wind River

    Now, that’s another Sicario. What happened Taylor Sheridan, why go from this to dross like Those Who Wish Me Dead? Is it the higher budget? The ego inflation from Sicario itself? I don’t get it.

  • Monkey Man

    A political John Wick, that’s new. Of course it’s not filmed in India, Dev Patel would be murdered by RSS goons.

  • Nope

    Nope, there’s so much product placement, it feels like a very long commercial. It’s just too much, this is not Transformers. Self-Awareness notwithstanding, there’s no subversion that cannot be integrated into the system, all Hollywood people will eventually degenerate into telling stories about themselves.

  • The Castle of Cagliostro

    James Bond meets Scooby Doo. Is this a Heidi prequel? Are all Miyazaki films on the same universe? That scene inside the clock is like Modern Times on steroids.

  • Revolt

    Some kind of direct-to-DVD sci-fi romp, very light on plot, with silly effects. Lee Pace and a Bond girl hit it up, until she drops out of the film (probably dead by the end, it’s ambiguous). Not bad enough to hate.

  • The Predator

    An R-rated Predator film written by Shane Black? With this cast? Sign me up, this is amazing.

  • Love Lies Bleeding

    A very intense thriller, keeps delivering the goods until the end. Kristen rules, as always!

  • Mon Crime

    A very funny romp through the interwar period, my personal minette. Seems a bit conventional for Ozon, but it’s so hilarious, it gets a pass. This was apparently adapted to Hollywood comedies twice in the 30’s.

  • Poor Things

    This seems like Lost in Translation from the male perspective? That’s what I took from that middle section. The epilogue seems tacked on, something that does not belong.

  • King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

    King Amleth Moses Pendragon, more like it. It’s IP now, a meaningless label to slap on unsellable dross to make it pop.

  • Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

    I thought I detected the Soderbergh touch, not only on the very extensive cast, most the cut away gags, the stylish editing-based jokes. The underlying seediness, the depression, the mental instability, that’s something else, something Being John Malkovich-shaped.

  • Ladyhawke

    A medieval story to the bone, in the form of the standard silly fantasy film of the 80’s. Sort of a Dune in tights.

  • Resident Evil: The Final Chapter

    This is not the final chapter, feels like yet another chapter told badly for devilish reasons. It retroactively makes the last film worse, the whole President Wesker subplot is abandoned offscreen.

  • Resident Evil: Retribution

    This is a bombastic improvement over the rest of the series, the explosions and overall action sequences are better. Paper-thin characters, just as the doctor ordered for brain shutdown entertainment.

  • Resident Evil: Afterlife

    More derivative Resident Evil films. Yes Paul, I have seen The Matrix, Children of Men, and The Island. It’s called afterlife because the cast comes back even though they died.

  • The Dead Pool

    Even though it’s not a great Dirty Harry film, it’s still an hyper competent cop film, with memorable scenes, like the RC car chase. Beats Deadpool by a mile.

  • Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

    This kind of thing works better as sketch show, like Who is America. Just like most Borat stuff, not all of it lands, but the Giuliani stuff is incredible, it’s beyond manipulative editing. America’s Mayor.

  • The Enforcer

    Dirty Harry fights the forces of feminism, that’s about the only civil right he hasn’t violated. But not even him can resist jiggling boobs.

  • Magnum Force

    Ahh, the fun starts at the credits. Since there was a backlash with fascist undertones of the last film, this one is written by John “Red Dawn” Milius, actual fascist, Saving Private Ryan script doctor, and Walter Sobchak inspiration.

  • Venom

    This is another origin story, but different from Spider-Man 3. Who can keep track anyway.

  • Venom: Let There Be Carnage

    Another red Venom, yay. Haven’t seen the dozen of necessary Marvel shit to properly appreciate the references. Boring as fuck normal Marvel crap..

  • The Wrong Daughter

    This is one of those Z-list direct to streaming releases, probably unearthed because Sydney freaking Sweeney stars in it. It’s not bad enough to become blackmail material, it’s just beige and anodyne. It’s not even the good kind of Z-list, just Hallmark shit.

  • The Banishing

    Ahh, a proper horror film about truly horrible things: sexual frustration, church crimes, British collaboration with the Nazi regime. I just can’t understand the title.

  • All The Money in the World

    A story where the ‘Ndrangheta are not the worse villains, at least its an ethos. Worshipping Mammon is the root of all evil.

  • Evolution

    More Ivan Reitman bullshit, another low rent Ghostbusters. Effects driven, the “hero” is introduced flirting with an underage student (again!), explicit anti-state spiel. It was bad the first time already.

  • Marlowe

    A bona fide old school noir in Hollywood, with all the necessary twists. Turns out to be filmed in Spain and Ireland, Tinseltown is no what it used to be.

  • I, Robot

    Ahh, vintage Will Smith slaps … I mean, kicks ass. A bona fide Arnie-alike. The plot is great too.

  • Wild Things

    This is a shitty thriller, it cheats so much there is a mid-credits montage of how things actually happened. What’s the point, then?

  • Dune: Part 2

    The action-packed sequel that Dune: Part 1 required. The diptych really covers all bases. The changes from the book are mostly for the best (except the (understandable) Jihad references).

  • Soares é Fixe

    Technically impressive biopic with incredible makeup and acting, in service of a crappy hagiography and bland story. The political equivalent of the effects driven extravaganza.

  • Das Lehrerzimmer

    This feels like Die Welle, with more meaning lost in translation. But the coup de grâce is avoided, the ending is weak, there is barely resolutions to the plot points.

  • Dirty Harry

    Celebrating fascist pigs have never been so stylish. A cinematic marvel wrapped around repulsive ideology, more explicit that Triumph of the Will.

  • Anatomie d'une chute

    Probably the best film with a calypso cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” on the soundtrack.

  • The Zone of Interest

    It’s really too subtle, a very small peak into banal lives spent murdering people at an industrial scale. This is better than Oppenheimer in almost every way.

  • Sin City

    An anthology of smaller stories. Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax logo means immediate shudders at the amount of nudity. God, it retroactively ruins so many films.

  • Fumer fait tousser

    Mon dieu, c’est magnifique. A higher budget silly B-movie, a much more comedic anthology of Troma-like schlock.

  • Shadow in the Cloud

    The Twilight Zone (Nightmare at 20 Thousand Feet) meets Ice Age meets Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot.

  • High-Rise

    More JG Ballard weirdness, but this is much more “political” than Crash. It’s almost too on the nose. I’m sure the book doesn’t end like that, or maybe it does…

  • Occhiali Neri

    A Dario Argento film, but not stylised and giallo like Suspiria, more raw and undercooked.

  • Wonder Woman

    Yet another bloated two and half hours snorefest, with a truly preposterous 30 min long silly fight scene in a parking lot. God, it’s so long and painful.

  • Resident Evil: Extinction

    Biohazard: The Road Warrior. A particularly crummy Mad Max ripoff, with final boss fight setting up the next film.

  • Schindler's List

    You got to hand it to Spielberg, he can tug at heartstrings. Under absolutely no circumstances you have got to “hand it” to the nazis.

  • Resident Evil: Apocalypse

    The second one, a direct sequel. Mostly a retread with smaller and smaller mean scene length. There are just too damn many cuts, it’s all chopped up like confetti.

  • A Semente do Mal

    Fuck yeah, a proper horror film made in Portugal. Just a bit on the nose, as our boy is called Edward Ipus. Ed Ipus, geddit?

  • Resident Evil

    It’s no Event Horizon, but it’s a competent mainstream horror film. Derivative, but a good effort.

  • No Time to Die

    That’s no time to die, all right. Several decades too late. The complete anachronism of the whole thing is getting more and more preposterous. NANOMACHINES, SON!

  • Blade Trinity

    Who the fuck wrote this? Why? Blade is not an exasperated oldie, Whistler is a curmudgeon elder who dies (again), so Blade needs to run with Whistler’s Daughter (not the famous painting from Bean).

  • Blade II

    A higher budget cannot hide the outdated CGI, but is great despite that. The characters are just awesome!

  • North Country

    Erin Brokovich with more English actors. I’m afraid of reading more about the case and discover they were all mistreated even more, or that the lawyers hoovered up all the money. I’ll be pissed if they made up the whole thing.

  • Road Trip

    Mother of god, just how many Porky’s-a-like can Hollywood film? Todd “Joker” Phillips directs and licks Amy Smart’s feet on camera, like an even grosser Tarantino.

  • Last Sentinel

    A nice little close circle thriller. Simple, slow burner, twisty. Overdeveloped in terms of world building, the characters take a back seat.

  • Blade

    Now that’s a Marvel film I can get behind. Beats Black Panther in every single metric. It’s not even an origin story!

  • War of the Worlds

    Of all the suspension of disbelief, nothing beats Tom Cruise as the blue collar worker that kill the prepper. He would be the first Trump supporter.

  • Thor

    This is almost a real film. An actual plot with good actors, drama, cool visuals. It nearly outgrows its dark origins as childish dross, but there’s some specks of horse manure attached to a somewhat polished gemstone.

  • The Suicide Squad

    Wait, another bloated superhero film with Harley Quinn and other people? Am I having Deja Vu? I’m just here for Ratcatcher, the weaksauce hero that saves the day.