POMO

An intelligent movie treat in which everyone goes full throttle, but its extraordinary subject still seems to be not fully developed in the end. It stumbles somewhere along the way, but it’s hard to say where exactly.

What can save a low-budget action B-movie with the visuals of an Austrian television series? A capable and imaginative director. Is Neil Marshall a capable and imaginative director? No, he is not. He can’t even properly film a jeep driving through a forest.

Greg Kinnear and Willem Dafoe are unique, but this movie set in the porn business is somehow inappropriately negative and unlikable. Boogie Nights, for example, is in a completely different league, with a wonderful balance of humor, satire and tragedy.

Bad Company is an exceedingly drawn out and monotonous action movie about secret agents. It’s outshined by the first Mission: Impossible in terms of power, screenwriting sophistication, atmosphere and action scenes. It’s just a routine, unoriginal movie with no build-up, and it fails to utilise the mentoring potential of Anthony Hopkins. Anyone else could have been in his place and it wouldn’t have changed anything.

While the first Blade was a standard cliché with decent dynamics and a visual gorefest, the second one is a standard cliché with excellent dynamics and a visual super-gorefest. Wherever possible, Guillermo del Toro pushed the limits and the result is grittier, slicker and more exciting that the first one. It’s an upgrade similar to that seen in Terminator 2. If those great characters had been a bit more well developed, Blade II would have been worthy of five stars!

Blood Work is and old-school and somewhat predictable mystery with a more or less satisfying point. The film is kept afloat by Clint Eastwood’s charisma, but it would have been a better fit for Jack Nicholson guided by Sean Penn as a director.

This digital amateur movie suffers from a terrible lack of professionalism in places (particularly the use of original music). On the other hand, however, it scintillates with humor that could be the envy of more than one Hollywood blockbuster. A fresh, on-point and heartfelt and uncritical parody of Britney Spears and everything around her. It’s also an effective balm for the misery of her “real movie”, Crossroads.

A very respectable contribution to the genre that’s hindered only by the cheaply conceived visual form and by the overdone affectation (slow-motion shots). Otherwise, however, We Were Soldiers isn’t lacking in pacing or raw realism, or a firm foundation of thought, or a strong leading personality in the form of Mel Gibson, who is the best thing about the whole film.

Elegant musical entertainment that has style, flair and tons of energy. But it’s still just superficial and cold entertainment that won’t appeal to you nearly as much as the more powerful and more emotional masterpiece Moulin Rouge!.

Excellent actors and a lot of apt truths on the issue of man & woman that aren’t often spoken out loud. But as a whole... ugh! If Jean-Claude Brisseau seriously meant this, he needs to wake up and realise it’s 2003. And if he meant it ironically, he completely undermined the resonance and seriousness of an otherwise promising, very topical subject. The film is thus somewhat reminiscent of Eyes Wide Shut. But Stanley Kubrick didn’t leave me in doubt for even a second, left me breathless for the duration of his film and took me to the moon.