Lima

One of the few new-wave films that didn’t work with me. Towards the end it looks terribly fateful, the main character seems to be going through a moral crisis and sobering up from the gradual arrival of social changes, but it's all just in such hints that it touched me only in the slightest. The character played by Jan Kačer is very stiff, the only emotion is aroused only by the scene in the pub at the end, and that is not enough. It pisses off Potentate Novotny, which was nice, but otherwise, it's absolutely unlike Three Wishes, a similarly revealing piece, which is six years older. Evald Schorm is simply not my cup of tea, even his most famous The End of a Priest passed me by in a big way.

Some people say that a film is as good as its villain, and, Pearl is a perfect example. Mia Goth is amazing, on a small space she can play a naive girl, a broken woman, a demon-ridden bitch and a total psychopath, she has all of that in her acting register. Her almost ten-minute confession at the end, filmed in one take, blew my mind. Moreover, it's all supported by a script that flows naturally, has a logical development and almost reaches the level of Phoenix's Joker in terms of psychology. And the visual games with the camera, the opening with classical music in the style of good old Hollywood! I'm just shocked that after the botched X, Ti West was able to create something like this. This is a little horror treat, made with love and art, aimed at film connoisseurs.

In a short span he suffers a gash in the arm, a screwdriver stuck in the side, here and there some shrapnel under the skin or a knife stab, multiple falls from various heights, fatalities by heavy blows to the arms and legs, and he just shakes it off and moves on. Silly me, I’ve always though the human body is made of bones, flesh and tissues, like they taught us in biology, my mistake, probably. Even Rambo suffered and blew on his wounds back in the day. Nowadays it’s different, heroes have adamantium bones like Wolverine. And here I was thinking that nothing could top stopping bullets with a jacket like in Wick, but now there's some serious competition. All right. Otherwise, nothing against Hemsworth, he's a charismatic guy and he's found himself in what he does; I wish him well, but modern action flicks are just not for me anymore.

The more fat Vin Diesel has on his neck, the dumber and dumber things get, and all the time you're wondering which is worse, Momoa's buffoonery or the attempts at "Shakespearean" character acting by the chump in charge. You can't enjoy the action if you know that 90% of what you see is CGI, so there is no human factor, no risk. So, while for example Bullitt can be enjoyed even after fifty years and gives you a pleasant tingling sensation, here I was bored after 10 minutes of fooling around in Rome, and I would rather do something more useful, like getting drunk :). Moreover, I'm getting tired of the franchise from the human side, because characters who were previously arch enemies are now best mates, or the other way around in the next episode, depending on whether the actor has managed to sign a contract, and you really stop giving a fuck. At least the production didn't make Charlize wear those stupid wigs anymore, here she's looks fine here :)

I don't think I've ever seen Affleck so jaded and bored. It’s as if he was saying to himself “God, what kind of crap have I gotten myself into again?”

Niki Caro, as is her nature, found her feet in the middle passage portraying a family relationship of sorts, with Jennifer Lopez raising her daughter in the wilderness and teaching her the cruel laws of nature. That is the only thing I felt was interesting in her directing. The rest sticks to a dumb template we’ve seen a hundred times, and the action is mostly mediocre. But I have always liked Lopez in her own way, with her lifelong dedication and diligence, even though her musical output is completely out of my taste. But at least for Singh's The Cell and Soderbergh's Out of Sight I still appreciate this woman.

Paul Newman manages to sell every line, because he was, is, and will always be the greatest dude. Otherwise the film just kind of flows along languidly, with emotions gliding ever so lightly over the surface in a story could be told in two lines, and if you happened to step away for a few minutes while watching it, you would not miss anything crucial. Basically, a classic late Benton.

The premise is lifted from A Clockwork Orange, nothing wrong with that, but the script was probably written by a drunkard. I didn't believe a single one of the forced scenes, nor a single dialogue, and the social-critical dimension it seemed to want to have is laughable. In the 1970s the Italians were pumping out films like on a treadmill, hundreds every year, and there was plenty of room for crap like this. But I can understand why the publisher included their collector's box, it's pretty sick.

Fantasy with a heart. Here you can clearly see that this is not part of the mass production line of Disney executives, with bored filmmakers counting the days until the end of the shooting; you can see the love that was put into it. Where there's supposed to be a situational joke, it's there at the right time and it cheers you up, where there's supposed to be a bit of a song, it's there and it warms you up. It's chock full of ideas you've always wanted to see on the silver screen, but filmmakers never had the imagination to materialize them. Simply put, an awesome feel-good thing that hasn't been done here ... well, maybe since Matthew Vaughn's Stardust. And Chris Pine, the older and grayer he gets, the more charismatic he becomes, I wish he was in a really big movie. I can even imagine him as the new Bond.

A beautiful deconstruction of the clichés of the classic western, where the line between black and white, the classic notion of good and evil, is blurred. And it doesn't even need a barrage of gunfights, which I've always found boring in westerns. William Wyler seemed to provide an inspirational source for Clint Eastwood a few decades later, but he put it much more radically. The lead role could not have been played by anyone else – and no one could have played it better – than Hollywood's model no-nonsense guy Gregory Peck.