Isherwood

This is a missed opportunity that doesn't pay homage to rock 'n' roll at all, not only because the musical numbers lack proper choreography, but also because the real rock, apart from the music, is provided only by the supporting characters (Baldwin, Cruise, Cranston), while the main duo only serves up lemonade pop.

As an uncritical admirer of QoS, I am quite amazed at how many people there are who are able to bitch about Bond ceasing to be Bond and fading out of the franchise. Yet Sam Mendes has made the most classic entry in the saga, one that fits perfectly into the Sean Connery era in particular, while still being able to work within the confines of the new century. In the opening action, the excavator seems to symbolically break the trend of the previous two films, so that the protagonist then sets out on a new adventure through the path of presumed death. It serves up all the old-school proprieties, starting with a creepy villain that Bardem relishes to no end (the dental exposition will keep me waking from sleep for a long time) while still managing to make fun of them (the conversation with Q) and still managing to get deeper into Bond's head than last time. Everything then culminates in a purely personal final battle, which styles itself as a personal apocalypse (not only because of the helicopter raid). If anything deserves extreme praise, it's Deakins' cinematography and the lighting work (the Shanghai episode rules!), which is crowned by Newman's music, taking a novel route in the style of John Powell. Craig, as usual, is on point. If I have anything to criticize the film for, it is perhaps the persistent effort to remind us that it is "old-school." However, a second screening will certainly fix that. [And it did. A film perfect in every detail. Watching it is pure ecstasy.]

The noisy action and bloody fountains of mutant blood, combined with the revolutionary efforts of the post-Soviet republics, work as standalone components. Yet in the context of a single film, it becomes quite a mess due to the absence of stronger unifying elements, in this case a protagonist who's not cool enough, and it also suffers from annoying soliloquy; fans of the game will obviously get more out of this world. 3 ½.

A slice of family history that only works in its two hours of runtime when it scores points with good actors and brutal violence, but also forgets the characters. Hardy just grunts and LaBeouf builds an empire out of nothing; it’s got the same feelings as Proposition, copying from everywhere, but with a beautiful signature.

A cinematic illustration of Machiavelli's "The Prince" with eight hour-long acts that switched sociological research into core politics into 'hardcore' mode. I thus forgave it at the end for the fact that Kane's journalistic nemesis is an unsympathetic moron and that the pretexts for sex tend to be cheaper than in 1980s GDR porn. However, Kelsey Grammer's charisma is something I could watch for days.

Objectively, with a runtime of under two hours, you just can't give all the characters the space they undoubtedly deserve. Beyond that, it’s a pure action spectacle that works exactly as I wanted it to because it doesn’t underestimate fan intelligence - this is the only way to get the action going, which is secondary because the primary thing is to ride the wave of catchphrases that beat into the mummified icons of most of the people involved.

Will's unflagging comedic talent and Brolin's perfect copy of Jones' gesticulation, diction, and facial expressions, are all beaten down by a flimsy script and routine direction that doesn't take the best from the characters, the 1960s, or anything else. With the exception of the "Mommy, the President is drinking my chocolate milk!" joke, it’s terribly boring.

Journalistic idealism and the struggle for its purer morality is borderline ridiculous, which fortunately returns to the waters of reality the personal positions of those involved, who simply act and speak like ordinary people. If I wanted to write stories, I'd want to be able to do it like Aaron Sorkin. The educational lessons in American politics are a bonus. This is the series event of the year (which almost passed me by due to its relatively quiet campaign).

Vic Mackey is a bit like the Chuck Norris of the crime genre because he doesn't recognize any rules except his own. These are the rules which he makes, twists, bends and modifies a million ways in his own image as he goes along. He does it all to put as much dirt behind bars as possible, to satisfy his superiors, for whom quarterly statistics are what matters, and to keep his family as far away from it all as possible. That isn't always entirely possible, so the creators are squeezing out adrenaline by the gallon to make you realize that this series improved in quality right up until the very end. In terms of cathartic effect, the ending is one of the most gut-wrenching moments I've experienced in these TV series, thus giving the series the status of one of the best genre works ever.

A vengeful Czech businessman goes after the school principal who killed his son. The only way that sentence can look worse is if someone films it. Magnusek's magnum opus, in which everything is wrong, from his inability to narrate to the technical failures (was a sound engineer even brought in for post-production?), to audiences shaking their heads at how such a cast could be assembled into one film. I can understand this fact with Troška or Poledňáková, who over the years have built up a certain status in the film business that provides them with many friends who are willing to act for them from time to time for the sake of goodwill, but with the young Magnusek, it just makes no sense to me. Unless his belly is full of gold. What does it matter that the quality of the performances matches the fact that some of them must be decidedly fake? I really don't know if I don't like Czech films because they are mostly boring, or rather because every attempt at genre ends in a terrible fail.