3DD!3

A raw and pretty original insight into the life of a cunning thief. Pattinson enjoys his role of perverse scab with strange moral boundaries. His attempts at getting his disabled brother out of prison/hospital and the winding road leading to this goal serves only as a way of investigating the logic both of the main protagonist and of the lower classes of dirty New York. Great music, unbelievable pace.

I preferred Del Toro’s vision much more. Although this Hellboy tries to draw more on the comic books, it’s bloodier and ruder, but I miss the fantastic poetry here. Here they simply squander the mass monsters and characters appearing here, only to flit by on the screen, leaving you none the wiser. Harbour’s Hellboy is much more hideous, like a heavy-metal street bum, crossed with the devil. The action is hard and dirty, but full of playfulness and invention. The monsters are really demonic. The witch is so horrible that the sight of her made me feel physically ill. But my two-year-old daughter liked it...

This seems rather underestimated by others. OK, it has a rather average story and a weird beginning, but then Clint takes things into hand and contemplates about getting old and passing on wisdom to the younger generation. Not such a wow as Grand Torino, but still way above the competition. This old man, oozing with charisma, teaches a kid to ride a horse, pulls a cute housewife and knows how to fight too. In fact, I like this more than I expected. Loser cops... Stupid bastards. If they had a brain, they’d be dangerous.

A pretty well-made adventure movie, but the guys at Disney should have made some alterations to the screenplay which is pretty break-neck and because of that I can’t give it a fourth star. The Rock and Blunt have a big job in front of them to save this. Similarly to the Pirates of the Caribbean, this adaptation is a spectacular showcase of special effects generated mainly for profit = job well done. But instead of Verbinski, here Collet-Serra is at the helm, so here they make the killing more entertaining, but the voyage isn’t as smooth. But the twists worked with me and the Mayan city looked fantastic.

Kodi Smit-Mcphee is going to have a hard time from the LGBT community. The Power of the Dog is a really weird family drama set in Montana in 1925, where it seems a key scene is missing, but wait! That’s on purpose. The characters suddenly change their demeanor thanks to something that happens off-camera. Campion simply hints at it and leaves the viewer to do the thinking. So the picture plays through without any sort of catharsis. It all stands on the shoulders of an excellent Cumberbatch who makes the very most of playing the rancher, really enjoying it.

A cynical comedy, subversive and bloody, thanks to Wirkola. After years of marriage, a married couple can’t stand being together after all these years and so each of them invites the other to their country cottage with the aim of killing them. Rapace is splendidly two-faced and Hennie’s transformation over the course of the second half is worthy of praise. The occasional explanatory asides that this movie is peppered with don’t seem to be cheap helpers, but carry a large portion of typical Norwegian humor inside them. The ending is a perfect reflection of today’s society.

The audiovisual experience of the year. A regular movie theater is too small. Any imperfection on the screen and the weak sound are painfully obvious. Putting this book onto the movie screen at this moment in time makes perfect sense and creates the necessary counterbalance to most of today’s movie production. Civilization as a relic that needs to be cleansed of the lives of unbelievers in a holy war made to thrill the fighters of ISIS and their supporters. And the indication that men aren’t so absolutely useless as we first thought is also very audacious. Underneath the traditional western-geared topics, we sense Herbert’s fascination with the Middle East. Villeneuve does his very best at depicting the world and its mechanisms. The movie is bristling with ideas, e.g. technical details, Harkonnen songs or the Scottish bagpipes. Comparison to Star Wars is relevant only in terms of scale, and in this respect ⊃∪∩⪽ is much more realistic. The acting is top-notch from all of them. Emotions bubble under the surface and aren’t needlessly displayed. The only trouble is that it’s terribly short, even though what takes place in the first part covers material that fills more than half of the original book. Zimmer is darkly thundering.

A special conversation thriller with an almost absurd multiple ending. The grandson of a Nazi against all sorts of swines... It’s as if Carnahan is paying a twisted homage to Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13. Buttler is excellent, Grillo slightly outside his comfort zone and the awesome Toby Huss as a twisted psychopath balloon vendor, Antony Lamb. It has its moments, but overall it’s only got enough to score a high average.

Excellently written... How to quit gambling easily and fast with the help of kids’ games. In addition to having a great screenplay which grabs you and doesn’t let go, despite the slow opening and superfluous epilog, Squid Game can rely on precise directing and perfectly chosen actors. Hae-soo Park clearly rules the screen. Each game points at a different aspect of what it is to be human, and lots of people won’t like what they see. I sincerely don’t know if we need another season. As it is, it’s great, if you forget about that epilog. So leave it be.

I was always more of a fan of Häkkinen, but Schumacher was also a great driver, no doubt about that. The documentary nicely presents his arrogant excesses, his stubbornness and the way he would risk his life. It shows him as a good dad, a miserable singer and presents him as a pretty great guy, instead of a cold, stone statue. No inspiration, no recruitment drive for future Formula 1 drivers. In some cases (e.g. Jean Todt) it seems to me that it holds back a little in describing Schumacher’s reactions, and that’s a shame. The lesson of this movie is, maybe... don’t ski... it can be lethal.