Logan

What they promised us, that's what we got. Logan is more than a dignified farewell for Hugh Jackman and his most famous role, and finally a film that fans have been calling for for years. The rough action scenes, without much emphasis on nice choreography, and where extreme physicality and animal fierceness prevail, are very cool, but it is more of a drama than an action film. And a damn good one at that. The people behind this film understood that the announced "maturity" is not achieved through headshots and severed legs, but through characters and their behavior. Logan has never been this broken and interesting, and what happens to Professor Xavier is something you won't find it amusing at all, and the young Dafne Keen is an acting discovery on par with Haley Joel Osment. Add to that the excellent music, the western atmosphere, and the extremely intense finale, and you get one of the most interesting comic book movies ever made, which deserves to stand alongside The Dark Knight. A few years ago, we wouldn't even dare to hope for a film like this. (15/05/2017)

Everything has a price - Singer knew it at first. And Mangold is now paying her interest on all the excesses, cardboard, digital cotton wool and unfinished work. Brutal, explicit, socially dystopian, yet very nostalgic and sensitive to the characters that the film undresses from leotards and impales them with deadly diseases, coughs and doubts. No, Mangold is not an elite director. Sometimes the dark tone is on the brink of exaggeration, sometimes you can really see inside of it, but in the last shot it hit me as deeply as any other X-Men movie. It is in a way an e-Revolution. Logan uses it not only for vulgarisms and unusual anatomical clarity, but also for opening up a very unhappy vision of the future, in which heroism is just a dull memory from scuffed comic books. America in 2029 built from hints, but very current hints. Children of Men in a superhero version. Logan hurts. And that is good. A film for pessimists who can't stop believing. (01/03/2017)

I can't resist any part of the mutant universe, including Wolverine's solo movies or the much-derided X-Men: Apocalypse, and even where I'm on the fence about a given film (X-Men: The Last Stand), I can still enjoy it over and over. And yet now, half a day after seeing this film, I cannot imagine that stories from this world will continue to be told. Logan, in a hundred and one ways, serves as the final chapter, the most human and believable one. It is a bloody, uncompromising, and depressing chapter, but precisely because of that, the clear message of the entire X-Men saga resonates much louder than I dared expect. Remembering almost any scene tightens my heart and I nostalgically immerse myself in the times when seventeen years ago, as a teenager unfamiliar with comics, I went to the local cinema for something called X-Men and in an empty cinema first discovered what adamantium is. Hugh Jackman made it happen, and has done so now more responsibly than ever. Except that back then, it was for the first time; this time it's definitely the last. (04/03/2017)

The more raw, the more mature. The comic equivalent of the Unforgiven / Gran Torina, in other words thank God it's not an adaptation of Old Man Logan, but an uncompromising advanced neo-western road movie from the department of "no change that things will go better, we just need to last till our death". It's just another Eastwood movie about the autumn of the life of an icon tortured by inner demons, only the footage is unreasonably long. (02/03/2017)

An action flick for adults that works with characters and emotions as though it was an epic drama, Logan is set in realistic locations overflowing with atmosphere, with action scenes worthy of James Cameron and the most effective, ultra-dark music Marco Beltrami has ever made (though not suitable to be listened to on its own) plus one soundtrack hit from Tarantino’s Django Unchained. It’s only once in a few years that I give five stars to a movie based on a comic book. (01/03/2017)