Archive for Release Year: 2023

25 posts from 24 October 2024 to 01 April 2023.

  • John Wick: Chapter 4

    Three hours? Sacrè bleu, that’s too much, way too much. I like the fight scenes and think they are up to par in inventiveness and brutality, but the rest is just a slog. Way too many people play their characters straight, unlike Laurence Fishburne, who is just having the time of his life. Please don’t make a fifth one, I’m spent.

  • No Hard Feelings

    Gender swapping is fun. Can you imagine this the other way around, no way in hell it would be done. A rare American comedy with funny writing, but gets a bit po-faced in the third act.

  • Asteroid City

    Yet another prototypical Wes Anderson film. Not an inch of novelty, no twist on the formula, just whimsical stories within stories, within stories, with the regular cast, deadpan deliveries, and gorgeous visuals. It’s less on the nose than The French Dispatch, but a similar state of mind.

  • Oppenheimer

    My god, Nolan disappears up his own ass. Tenet was very watchable as an action film, but this just goes on and on. Could have been a tweet.

  • Pôr do Sol: O Mistério do Colar de São Cajó

    Like a 100 minutes long TV episode. Fairly packed with jokes, a lower budget Airplane! or Top Secret!.

  • Meg 2: The Trench

    MOAR sharks, one of them is a pet. There is also a giant octopus too (don’t call it a Kraken). The Chinese money is smellier this time, about half the film is spoken in Mandarin, the rest is shark grunts and Statham vocalisations.

  • The Nun II

    I was nun the wiser, but apparently The Conjuring dudes are trying to Marvel their way into a franchise? They seem about as successful, at least they are mostly standalone.

  • The Creator

    This is either one of the most subversive medium budget Hollywood films, or its yet another one “hero escorts kid that saves the world”. I’m no exactly sure, let’s go with the bland and safe option, because the alternative is unimaginable. I kept searching for the Chinese producers but they never came. This has no CCCP money, but includes Chinese Red Army imagery.

  • Pátria

    Was that a Werner Herzog picture as the ersatz Hitler figure?

  • The Killer

    Wreck it Ralph meets Street Fighter: for the big bad, it was Tuesday.

  • A Sibila

    Autobiographical story of the life of an aunt of the author, from what I can tell. Freaking ruthless female Scrooge, hiding her avarice with “charity”, piety, and religious adherence. This feels like a gender-swapped The Fountainhead, with less ideological ranting, but keeping the long stretches of voiceover reading the book.

  • Napoleon

    What a goddamn nice looking mess. The battle scenes are the best, if you like the Gladiator cold opening repeated several times. The rest can and should be ostracised to Saint Helena, with three officers and 12 servants.

  • The Old Oak

    Oh wow, this is what a not so good Ken Loach film is? It gets better than this?

  • Last Sentinel

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

  • 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.

  • Anatomie d'une chute

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Thanksgiving

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Há-de Haver Uma lei

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

  • 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.