MrHlad

This potentially interesting horror comic-book film turned out to be such an eviscerated nothing. The New Mutants would like to lean on the characters, but the creators are virtually uninvolved with them. They'd like to differentiate themselves from other X-Men movies by setting them in the horror genre, but the scary scenes are more or less stripped down here. And while it looks pretty nice and the bunch of heroes are quite likeable despite their shallowness, it's not enough for a good movie. After years of waiting, a film that does practically nothing to impress has arrived in the cinemas.

This time Christopher Nolan got a little off the rails and became his own enemy. Tenet is of course a great piece, very fast paced and nice to watch, but unfortunately it disappoints in the very things that should elevate it above the classic summer blockbuster. Nolan may have announced that he's pretty much making his own Bond movie, and it looks like it for the first half, but it's more or less a classically conceived spy thriller clashing with his cool direction, where he keeps his distance from everything. And the audience has to go with him. Tenet then becomes a downright Nolan flick somewhere around the halfway point, but unlike Inception, which is the closest the film comes to it, here we don't discover the rules of the new world gradually, and no one explains them in breathtaking scenes. Nolan simply takes the characters and the audience and throws them into deep water, regardless of whether they can swim. What's going on? How does it work? What affects what? And who's to blame for it all? That's more or less dealt with on the fly here, and I reckon I missed half the stuff. I did end up enjoying a lot of the spectacular action, where things were a bit weird, but I didn't really care why. I reckon on a second viewing I would have been clear on it, kept track of everything and got everything in order. But for perhaps the first time ever with Nolan, I'm not sure I want to watch it a second time.

It must have been a really big movie in its day. Nowadays it's just a talky and tedious borefest, and I had a hard time getting through it.

Actually, this is exactly what I was expecting. Joost and Schulman have already shown in Nerve that they can make movies that look nice, which ideally overcomes the fact that they are pretty stupid. This is exactly the same case. Project Power is visually a lot of fun, Jamie Foxx is good at playing badasses in movies and clearly enjoys it, Gordon-Levitt didn't seem to get bored on set either, and I'm definitely curious to see what Dominique Fishback will do in the future. There's a lot of action, there are a few ideas too, and there's quite often something banging or someone shooting, so it goes by quickly. I had fun, and it wasn't actually until the end credits that I realized how silly this is and how unimaginatively it rips off the X-Men or, say, the semi-forgotten Push. Project Power is just as silly as the recent The Old Guard, but unlike the immortal Charlize Theron, Foxx and co. are pretty aware of that. Above all, Project Power is supposed to be a nice looking spectacle with a few cool scenes where you can turn your head off and enjoy the fact that it bangs along nicely and looks pretty. Of course I would appreciate if there was something more to it, but then again I have no problem with a B-movie that knows about its B-movie-ness, isn't ashamed of it and occasionally manages to pleasantly surprise with a cool catchphrase or an imaginative action scene. OK for me, and if Netflix wants to milk a series out of it, I'm fine with that, too.

Two tough guys collecting taxes for a powerful gangster in Los Angeles find themselves in the middle of a war over who gets to run the streets. And while it looks interesting enough at first, The Tax Collector quickly turns into an almost annoying film that lacks a single positive character, dully glorifies violence, and turns into a parody in its attempt to be as macho as possible. Ayer couldn't pull this off.

Assassin Jessica Chastain returns home after years to reconcile with her sister, sort things out with her mom, confront her own past, and occasionally kill someone Colin Farrell sends at her. Ava is more of a drama that tries to avoid action, which is good because the action isn't worth much. Unfortunately, however, the drama isn't worth much either, so aside from the charismatic and punishingly underused cast, there's really nothing in this schlock worth wasting your time for.

Four characters go to a rented house for the weekend, but none of them know that they will have to deal with some nasty secrets. And one crazy guy. Dave Franco is behind the camera for the first time, and it's quite interesting. Or it could be. There's an obvious attempt to play a bit with genres and audience expectations in The Rental, it's just that Franco may have had more ambition than ability and his debut never takes off the way it should. But there are a few interesting ideas. I'm not saying he'll be a good director, but I'll definitely give him another chance.

A really good, atmospheric and gritty whodunit until the halfway point. Then it turns into a ridiculous mess that's funny at times, but most of the time just more and more sad. With each "twist" the film becomes more and more stupid... and it started out so well!

Tom Hanks and his ship escort an Allied convoy across the Atlantic, but lurking beneath the surface are German U-boats. How many supply ships will eventually reach their destination? Hanks delivers honest man's film that has no room for talk, but no room for any substantial character psychology either. It's full on from more or less the beginning, with ships and submarines chasing each other for over an hour straight, shooting or torpedoing all the time, and even though the visual effects aren't particularly good and it might not have been a bad idea to slow down a bit sometimes and deal with things other than combat, it's a very fine watch. Also thanks to the short running time.

After Extraction, another big budget action movie with a big star. Unfortunately, this time behind the camera is not a former stuntman, but the director of the drama The Secret Life of Bees and the romance Love & Basketball. But enough, I'm not going to make fun of Gina Prince-Bythewood, she ironically deserves to be one of the few to be praised. At least a little. The action scenes aren't all bad, and while they lose out to today's cutting edge, they never turn into a confused mess. Otherwise, however, it's a dud. Although the plot revolves around a bunch of immortals who have been through the centuries, fought in various wars on every continent, and are depressed that all their loved ones have died, none of this is able to sell The Old Guard to the audience. And all the heartfelt outpourings about how they're alone in the world, immortality being a curse and all, get increasingly annoying as the runtime goes on, because there's not much else The Old Guard addresses. Sure, Charlize Theron is cool, and the rest of the team tries their best too, but it doesn't change the fact that more than any of the characters and their fate, I wondered when the curry on the stove would get finished. A minor league spectacle in every way.