Lima

The main thing you will take away from this film is that Vittorio Storaro (Coppola's Apocalypse Now) was a grandmaster of the camera, a GRANDMASTER! Without knowing in advance who was holding that wonderful optics machine, I immediately noticed the amazing visual compositions, of which there are many, along with the congenial atmospheric music, and in fact the whole film stands on those two components alone. That's because the plot, while maintaining an interesting mystery for two-thirds of it, isn't the strongest element, which you realize especially at the end when the final sci-fi-tinged twist is revealed and it makes you want to bang your head against the wall. This can't spoil the mood, because until then you're floating along beautifully on the seductive mystery and enjoying the gorgeous imagery. And you also notice that Florinda Bolkan has a beautiful smile, it's just a pity about the androgynous hairstyle, she looked much better with a mane with Fulci

I'm going to say it, and I'm surprised myself. Even though I'm an old boomer who grew up on the first Planet of the Apes from the late 60s, and even though I'm not a fan of the CGI serendipity of today, the direction that Rupert Wyatt took 13 years ago, Matt Reeves continued, and now Wes Ball has followed up on, is very much to my liking. While the old Apes from the 70s was becoming a ridiculous parody of itself (and an ugly one at that) episode by episode (except for the legendary first one), and Tim Burton didn't take to it happily later on either, so the current tetralogy is beautifully paced, looks beautiful, makes logical sense in how the apes evolve and take over, and the current installment is such a natural evolution in the plot that the cards are already clearly dealt. It makes me happy that in this day and age we have a film franchise that has great references and works well, which is not the norm in contemporary Hollywood, where "rhyming" is done at the top of its lungs and it usually turns out badly.

A mediocre poliziotteschi from the year when the popularity of this once super popular subgenre in Italian cinemas of the 70's started to slowly fade away and so did the yappy career of the charismatic Luc Merenda, who looked good on camera, but in all his films acted exactly the same, with a limited acting register. And Dardano Sacchetti, to him be eternal glory for his scripts for Fulci's masterpieces, didn't do anything world-class here either. We've got stolen drugs from the mafia, a bank robbery (which itself, by the way, was often used in poliziotteschi, I've seen it myself in at least five films), some violence, one naked pretty Italian girl, two weak car chases, just... over and over again, nothing we haven't seen in previous films of the genre. I'm not surprised the Italians themselves started to get into it. There's some attempt at levity here, delivered by Merenda's hunchbacked sidekick (perhaps to make Merenda's tall figure stand out) who throws childish jabs, but it doesn't work either, I was bored. Umberto Lenzi's films with Maurizio Merli were a different brew, dumb as a bag of bricks, but high-octane from start to finish.