Othello

Space fighters swoop in and then an aerial dogfight over the city rooftops. The destruction of entire planets. The murder of an entire airliner by one man using only two knives. An underground prison on a planet that's about to be hit by a wave of fire. Assholes versus bastards. Killing with a soup mug. Hellhounds. A shootout in a post-industrial setting. The hero's escape from the crash of a giant transport ship. An all-conquering race. A contest for the best killer. Blades on boots. Vin Diesel...

Ronin isn't perfect, especially compared to its genre kinsman Heat. The dialogue is a little clunky and perhaps a little illogical in places. And yet the characters, and two scenes in particular, are ones I won't forget from this film. The first is the car raid on a cafe full of people. The second is the tackling over the railing at the Coliseum in Arles.

Total imbecility. The film is drowning in neon opacity, assisted by blatant pap, which makes the already stupidly shot, edited, and acted action absolutely boring and confusing. Val Kilmer is an incredibly unappealing gut of an actor, the plot is clichéd, and the film doesn't even drip a milliliter of blood. The whole thing feels like a morning Hallmark production, and I can't understand how a schmuck like Schumacher could have made 8mm or Falling Down. Maybe the problem is his poor perception of comics, maybe I have a completely different take on film treatments of the subject. The unfortunate truth is that if it weren't for Tommy Lee Jones, who one still has to imagine isn't trying to emulate Nicholson's Joker, and a few good jokes (the shot of Batman's latex ass), it's a clear waste.

In my amateur research into late American film history, I've come to believe that since the 1960s, film themes and approaches have more or less changed by the decade, reflecting the current state of overseas society and pop culture. Each such renewal can be traced in a contextual set of films, whether we look at films from the New Hollywood era influenced by the awakening of society after the Vietnam War, the period of 1980s hedonism overshadowed by the Reagan economic boom, or conversely, the exhaustion and increasing paranoia of the ‘end of history’ of the 1990s. But then, in the late 90s, there wasn't another multitude of films, there was one film – The Matrix. And it set the themes and form of the audiovisual for the next twenty years thus far. All those contemporary films with underground resistance movements, multicultural teams fighting against oppression, the allegories to breaking free from slavery (I've only now run out of all the scenes with Morpheus, culminating in him breaking the chains he's chained with while in the real world machines pick human fruit like cotton fields) and queer manifestos within genre films – it all started here. Most importantly, though, The Matrix activated a hitherto completely uncool subculture of nerds right away by allowing it to be virtually the only group in '99 that could appreciate The Matrix beyond a collection of badass scenes. It wasn't until after The Matrix that it became generally 'in' to watch anime, read manga, play video games, or even just dress up in leather trench coats and roam the streets that way. So it's not true that The Matrix started a new subculture, as is often mistakenly said; The Matrix simply elevated some subcultures. And with that it didn't just stay in a cinematic framework. Since the first Matrix, one can also note as rise in the popularity of gothic and industrial metal, or established rock bands have often begun incorporating electronic influences into their music. Then my other favorite consequence of the success of the first Matrix is the mark it left on the fashion world (and by that I don't mean that anything has changed on the catwalks, but on the streets). While Rob Halford of Judas Priest ensured that hitherto metalheads dressed like a Laakson picture, the Wachowskis ensured that hitherto fetishistic queer fashion was universally accepted as eveningwear. However, the implications of their influence were of course beyond the comprehension of The Matrix, and the film's message, where those who don't fit into the system become a natural part of the struggle against the establishment, where the fight is fought with gloves off because anyone connected to the system is the enemy, became the first stone in the inclusivity of subcultures under the mainstream, a trend that continues unhappily to this day.

A nicely and cleverly written whodunit whose biggest fault is the bland TV production design and some clunkers, such as the main characters' incomprehensibly presentable appearance in relation to their surroundings, etc.

Fincher proved his talent for atmospheric depressing renditions of anything and set the third installment in an utterly industrial setting full of filth and wasted lives. He added the absence of guns, a good dose of explicit violence, an excellent idea with the similarity of the alien to the hostiles, and brought the whole concept back to the first installment, making the third installment the best of the series.