J*A*S*M

The cinematic cut turned out as it probably had to: as an obviously incomplete fragment of a larger work. It's hard to rate it, it's like reading a novel and skipping every ten pages. What is in the cinema cut is fine, but it doesn't coalesce into a comprehensive experience. Napoleon's personal life is there, the battles are there, but the "politics" between them are missing, so you don't really know why any given battle is happening. Quite absurdly, from the cinematic cut, the character of Napoleon doesn't actually strike me as an active instigator of all this wartime fury, nor as a figure that the rest of Europe feared.

How big a jerk do you have to be to bring poor 90 year old Ellen Burstyn into a Legacy sequel and do THIS to her character in the script? I swear to god that was an even crappier handling of the original character than the last Texas Massacre with Sally. David Gordon Green is probably the most hated filmmaker within the horror genre right now, and rightfully so. He doesn't just kill off famous franchises, he kills them off in a horribly annoying way. Two stars for craftsmanship, for all the righteous hate, Believer holds up to the basic standard of cinema, but otherwise it's woeful. A piss sterile bore, even that fifty year old film had bolder scenes than this one!

Some brilliantly overblown action sequences in a generally problematic film for me. MI may look deadly serious, fateful, whatever, but I'm afraid we're already on the level of the Fast and Furious franchise in terms of plot intelligence. The whole AI stampede is utterly ludicrously contrived, the plot still has to be explained verbatim by one of the characters to get the viewer to at least frame it, but it doesn't help much. If we forget about the craftsmanship and just think about the plot itself... I don't believe it makes sense to anyone. For example the dialogue exchange at the Venetian party, WTF? We spend over two and a half hours looking for a key, next thing we know we're diving towards a submarine for over two and a half hours, then Cruise shoves the key up the AI's ass and it goes nuts or something. 83 percent and 620th best movie, My God.

I don't know if I'm too demanding, but a mainstream horror movie shouldn't be so boring that I have to watch it twice because I fall asleep the first time. The Nun II is an eruption of creative horror ineptitude. It looks nice, the setting of the old French convent does its thing, but otherwise it failed to wring a single emotion out of me. Even the more action-packed sequences are shot in a boring way. It’s sad to see where The Conjuring universe has gotten to. It never stood out for originality, but when Wan had it in his claws, it was at least guaranteed to be workmanlike.

Absurdly intense. They obviously had one goal here, to make a film with extremely violent scenes, but they could have come up with at least a plausible reason for it. God, after all, even a random incestuous mutant would make more sense than this plot travesty, the nature of which I don't want to spoil (but it's only surprising in how moronic it is).

I was prepared to be insulted by this film as aggressively stupid QAnon propaganda, I was prepared to take it graciously as a solidly paced thriller, but I wasn't prepared for it to be such a cruel bore. Absolutely unexciting in every way, a "retiree thriller". The events around it were orders of magnitude more interesting.

The reparation for the Midnight Club was a success. For me, it’s weaker than both Hauntings and probably even than (the second half of) Midnight Mass, but the director and his court actors should still be applauded for this modern take of E.A. Poe's stories. Flanagan has become a conceptual creator who always has it all very nicely thought out, planned out, refined into a compelling, meaningful whole that's not always something to actively fear, but mostly something to think about. The first episode hooked me reliably, the six middle episodes were made a little less interesting by their identical structure (again, it could have been shortened and condensed), and the last episode concluded satisfyingly. Succession in a horror package and with the phenomenally charismatic Carla Gugino.

Brandon Christensen's films have maintained an incredible stability in terms of quality – all of them are net two stars for me. Sufficient in terms of craftsmanship, though not a great execution of a material that others have approached better. There are two or three scenes in The Puppetman worth talking about (a montage of a gym and a library, the death of a likeable character in a car, a police station), the rest is dull mediocrity crowned by a joyless finale. It actually snapped me out of my lethargy a bit in the end, I was really wondering why they brought it to such a strangely unsatisfying conclusion.

Khalfoun can boldly be counted among the horror filmmakers from whom fans expected big things early in his career thanks to one big hit, but that ultimately didn't materialize. Night of the Hunted is a generic thriller with a crazed sniper, nothing more, nothing less.

I didn't expect this festival flick to turn out to be something like a Filipino version o Evil Dead. In many ways, it is a likeable genre flick, but at the same time, when compared with this year’s Evil Dead Rise, and in it, the Filipino Evil Fairy is pulling the short end of the stick. It lacks energy, it lacks pace.