Malarkey

At home, we have basically devoured this show in one go. Stranger Things has the best of what I liked about old action/adventure/horror movies from the 1980s that I used to watch in the 1990s. A certain mysticism, fear, child heroes and an amazing contemporary synthwave music. If anyone holds classic movie adventures of times past close to their heart, don’t hesitate! This will definitely grab your attention. Stranger Things has an amazing style and I personally hope that it won’t end at the first season.

Harvey Keitel might have been easy on the eyes and might have had the charm of an alpha male of a monkey troop, but here, he’s played in a movie that’s more of a farce than a drama. Basically, this movie has no clue what it wants to do. At first, it tells a story of an insane Kate Winslet who has an equally insane family and then in some scenes, it all goes silent to create a wannabe funny comedy effect.

I am giving this five stars because I haven’t been fascinated by a historical atmosphere like this one for a long time. A proper gloomy Paris, amovie based on a novel by Émile Zola and exactly the right actors are a very good prerequisite for a very good movie. However, the fact that the story isn’t really any innovative (even though Zola might have been the first one to come up with a story this rough) doesn’t take away from the movie’s quality at all; on the contrary. At first, there was a rough sexual drama with a hint of suspense, eroticism and desire. Over time, it turned into a non-compromising drama that made me hold my breath from how much I hoped to see the plot unravel. The actors have added an incredible amount of quality; I was especially surprised by one of the Olsen twins. I remember her and her sister as little girls whose movies brought me fun and suddenly, she’s having these grand actor orgasms. I was also surprised by Jessica Lange, whom I feel like I see way too often since the American Horror Story, each time in the position of the best the movie’s got to offer. And of course, Oscar Isaac and Tom Felton are also great. Their characters are perfect in this historical story. What more can I say… I like movie surprises and this as one of them; fortunately, these kinds of movies haven’t gone extinct and I can only hope that random passers-by increase the ratings. The movie deserves it.

Who would have thought in 1991 that a kid like Macaulay Culkin would end up on drugs as an adult? The more I watch his childhood movies, the less I understand. I can’t imagine where you could find a more adorable child for a movie than he was in the 1990s. This movie was otherwise a standard heartbreaking story; nice to see once, but I wouldn’t want to stare the reality in the face the second time.

At moments, I felt excitement similar to the one when I watched Shaun of the Dead. But while Shaun of the Dead became my personal zombie cult, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse got stuck somewhere in the middle of a freshly roadkilled zombie. I didn’t mind that it wasn’t a brutal bloodbath, but the movie would sometimes come up with something so vile that it created an impression of a zero consistency and absolute fickleness. I don’t really even know if it was an innovative comedy or a light slasher. It had something from both worlds, but the result didn’t work out.

The Italians came up with a great idea and wanted to base it on dialogue humor, like the French do best. Unfortunately, they did not succeed, and so this comedy oscillates between occasional funny moments and mostly cringiness and boredom.

As far as the actors go, this comedy is really solid, I can’t deny that. And what’s strange is that while the standard American comedy has a decreasing tendency as far as the quality goes, this one has an increasing one. It’s awfully boring at the beginning, but as soon as good old Alan Alda appears on the screen halfway through, he brings high-level dialogue humor with him.

A proper Danish torture by the human factor. Nordvest is, in my opinion, another of endless series of Scandinavian dramas, ruled by depression, sadness, the rise and the fall of two identical brothers who were born to a mother living in the lower Danish class. I really didn’t want to believe that anyone in Denmark could be doing so badly, but after finding out where Nordvest is and what makes it famous, I’m no longer surprised that the Scandinavian countries are gradually losing their status of safe countries. And as chance would have it, the ones responsible for this human sadness are a bunch of immigrants. A coincidence?

A great, inconspicuous and original small-scale war movie. Not only does it take place in one location, but even – and this must be pointed out – on one landmine. Lo and behold, it can work, which creates afilm experience that you don’t get to see every day.

A cat gangster movie with class; that’s probably the most they could have squeezed out of that idea. But I feel like the movie could work only when the kitten appears on the screen. At that point, the cuteness is on the highest possible level and the viewer gets exactly what they wanted. But the kitten only appears a few times and so most of the time, there’s just these two clowns who have an awfully specific American humor and they sort of kill the movie; it’s funny, but only sometimes. Definitely not always. However, I still think that the subtitle of this movie should be: “anyone who doesn’t watch this movie will cause one kitten to die somewhere in the world.” So go get in a cat mood so that your entire living room reeks of cat cuteness on par with the Cats 24/7 TV station.