MrHlad

Baltasar Kormákur knows how to make manly films and Hollywood obviously likes him. After the heist thriller Contraband and the action comedy 2 Guns, he's here with Everest, his most ambitious project yet. And he has succeeded. The director more or less ignores the pathetic scenes and tries to approach the story realistically. During the climb up the highest mountain in the world and the fight for life on the descent, we don't see scenes of a half-dressed hero holding his friend over a precipice with one hand and beating a chamois with the other. When there's dying, it's no bullshit. When there's a fight for life, it's over the top. And the fact that it's got really good actors makes it great to watch.

It’s no miracle, but it fortunately is an interesting film. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a properly wild ride, where for a long time you have no idea what the they actually want to say, but the gradual unravelling and discovery is damn interesting. Partly, thanks to the awesome action scenes, the clever script, the strong emotional moments and the lots of ideas, but mostly because of the approach of both directors, who push it all into the audience almost to the point of violence. Everything Everywhere All at Once is a film where you have no idea what you're going to see in fifteen minutes, alternating extremely fast paced scenes with slower ones, unafraid to go for the jugular, turning from a wild action sci-fi into an intimate drama about the most ordinary things, and then into a rip-roaring comedy. It's just too much. Two hours and twenty minutes is a subjectively untenable runtime for a film that, while it works on a dramatic level, still runs in a pretty rut despite the original visuals. And on the other hand, the moments where Kwan and Scheinert pour one wild idea after another from their sleeves start to get tiresome after a few minutes. Everything Everywhere All at Once is really interesting, but it needs someone to tell the directors where to add and subtract. Sometimes it's a bit of a drag, despite the imagination, creativity, great actors, action and emotion.

Sam Raimi produced and Lee Cronin directed Evil Dead Rise to make fans of the original as happy as possible. An audiovisually aggressive gore flick with great sound design and a lot of imaginative violence, it's a wild ride that goes by pretty damn fast even with its short running time. It also has fine heroes and even the derelict building setting works well enough to not mind that it doesn't bring much new to the table. I'm just not sure if a similarly off-the-rails horror film can capture audiences.

He's young, charming, educated, handsome, and he also kills women sometimes. Ted Bundy was one of America's most terrifying serial killers, but what he was doing was long refused to be believed by those closest to him and much of the American public. And Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile shows that this is actually quite understandable... Zac Efron gives a very good performance and Joe Berlinger is quite clever at playing with the audience. Unfortunately, the film runs out of ideas somewhere in the middle and starts to become unnecessarily transparent and frankly a bit untrustworthy. Which is quite a pity.

The best movie of John Woo in Hollywood. Great action, great Travolta and Cage and great atmosphere. One of the best American action films of the 90s, but it's a long way from what Woo did in Hong Kong.

I've waited more than twenty years for a movie or TV series adaptation of “Fallout”. It pretty much sucks.

The first film proved that audiences are still quite curious about this cinematic world and will gladly pay to return to it. So what do we do in the second one? What makes sense. We're gonna add in everything that we think people might like, to keep it wringing it out for a few years. This approach is fine, it's just what Hollywood does with big movies, but unfortunately the second Fantastic Beasts shows that it's not always for the best. For example, getting a film directed by the biggest routine artist Hollywood has at its disposal, or wanting to milk the studio so badly that it sets up a lot of plots, subplots, characters, heroes and creatures that there's no time at all for a plot that makes even rudimentary sense. The result is a bunch of mediocre, albeit good-looking action, a lot of twists and turns that would put the creators of Wild Angel to shame, and a cauldron of book and movie references that fans are likely to enjoy. That last thing makes The Crimes of Grindelwald rather good, and if you head to the cinema expecting someone to simply shove things you probably like and probably want to see under your nose, you'll enjoy it. As an attempt to kickstart a grand fantasy franchise, however, it brutally fails in practically every way. Boring movie, and perhaps even a little embarrassing at times.

The most useless film franchise proves that it can be even more useless. David Yates kick-started his career with Harry Potter, but even he and J.K. Rowling must know that this juggernaut they're working on won't win them much applause. Whereas the previous films were merely dull and uninteresting, this one is just a mess most of the time. Things happen that don't make sense, characters appear as it suits the director, and most of them are about as interesting as those faceless bad guys in Commando. Woefully empty. Dumbledore just has a plan, he doesn't tell anyone, and you as the audience must enjoy it, that’s it. The final quarter in Bhutan does offer a few ideas and an attempt at some closure to all this nonsense but I'm really not going to praise the film for climbing from drivel to mediocrity. If the water closes behind this bloodless void after the third film, I won't miss it. On the other hand, I'm glad Yates is dedicating his measly filmmaking skills to this franchise and not hurting anywhere else...

Not a very entertaining film. There is not much action, and it’s not dazzling, the acting is weak (only Chris Evans has some charm) and the senseless seriousness of the characters, doesn't work in the film at all, because the you can’t relate to them. It's not completely bad, but it falls well short of Bryan Singer's rival team-up.

An incredibly stupid thing about an island that grants wishes but makes them into nightmares. Obviously, the people behind this film weren't even clear on how the whole thing was supposed to work, and given that director Jeff Wadlow can't come up with a single workable scare and is even worse at working with atmosphere, the result is utterly trivial and almost laughable. Avoid it.