POMO

The Tomorrow War is pure guyish pleasure, an enthusiastic B-movie packed with everything that we love about the action sci-fi genre. Human characters with sincere, emotionally charged relationships, unpredictable and richly escalating plot development, set in an attractive fantasy world, with delicately brisk action and well-made repulsive aliens. Cleverly written and directed with heart, cunningly hiding its art behind a false mask of cheap trashiness, this is the best Emmerich movie without Emmerich.

Red Notice is an insanely unoriginal and generic, annoyingly unobjectionable flick with a screenplay like a feature-length Tom and Jerry... playing with twists like The Usual Suspects. In the words of Reynolds, “What the fuck?!” His lines are the only bright moments in the film. Even Jungle Cruise was more imaginative and enchanting.

Lamb is unexciting in terms of plot and transparent wanna-be art in its creative vision, pieced together from familiar motifs and moments from other festival films. The film offers minimal innovation, but rather relies a lot on the atmosphere of its northern Icelandic setting and Noomi Rapace’s acting.

A nice Hanks, a nice robot and a good dog take a van ride across post-apocalyptic America and get to know each other. The robot learns how to drive and to throw a ball to the dog. Finch is this year’s most clichéd banality in the field of films from which you expect more than just technical perfection. The only interesting, though half-baked, moment of the film is when the robot sees itself in a mirror. It lasts about 20 seconds.

The most interesting setting of the franchise. The story of a girl searching for her roots in a segregated Amish community is a good foundation for a scary romp with the potential presence of an uber-devil. The Midsommar-like subject matter invites us to intensively scrutinize the inner workings of a well-crafted ominous church in the middle of a cold forest. On the other hand, it also uses the hackneyed Paranormal Activity POV scares inside the building, which have become rather boring and are also sloppily done. And there’s so much chaos and lack of continuity in the editing of the POV shots in the climax that it inspires WTF embarrassment instead of suspense. But the conclusion of the story is cool.

Old offers Shyamalan’s classic, interesting camera tricks in the opening and the nice idea of “growing old together” around two characters. But everything else is just wrong. The more the film tries to be serious and scary, the more it puts a smile on your face. And it absolutely fails to draw viewers in, to make them believe and experience the events with the characters. We could say that the point of the film is OK, but it doesn’t make up for the embarrassment of childish naïveté in the handling of the preceding events.

Tommy Wirkola handles marital crises differently than Woody Allen. He’s just as entertaining and creative, but a whole lot different. Which reminded me of why I so much enjoy well-made movies by skilled filmmakers who enjoy doing their work and mean well by us viewers. The Trip is a Norwegian version of American genre flicks where everything gets unexpectedly complicated and the blood flows. This film is very darkly humorous and serious, grotesquely brutal with heart. The subject matter is not entirely original, but the characters and their sweaters are. Despite its initial simplicity, the film turns out to be beautifully edited and increasingly suspenseful precisely as the satisfied viewer demands. The cast is outstanding!

Spaceships galore, but bringing a little water from Norway to the planet in gratitude for spices…just no! As a non-reader of the book, I enjoyed the second viewing more, at least the first half of the half-film. The second, “desert” half, however, was more drawn out in its dreaminess taken to the point of would-be profundity. A key question: If there were no books and only this screenplay existed, would there have been any reason at all to film it, especially in such an expensive production? Besides cool giant worms, what would it bring to today’s world of cinematic sci-fi? Furthermore, if visual splendour without emotion and with phrases having no connection to the philosophical questions of real human life is considered to be art today, I want to go back to 2001-2003, when spectacular cinematic journeys into fantasy worlds based on books could make me cry and fall in love with their characters. I’m giving this a purely IMAX fourth star for the excellent cast, for which this project had been waiting perhaps as much as for the creative visionary Villeneuve, for the display of costumes and make-up par excellence (Skarsgård!) and for the film’s breathtaking audio-visual immensity, boosted by the “heavier” Zimmer. After I listened to it in the car for the first time, I was sure it wouldn’t be the last. It wasn't, and I'm looking forward to hearing the track “Leaving Caladan” on Zimmer’s upcoming concert tour!

There’s something to the vision of a flooded Miami in a noirish coat of night-time lighting, with a bumbling love-struck Jackman infatuated with the beautiful femme fatale Rebecca. It brings to mind Blade Runner and Sin City, and Rebecca singing on stage in a red dress even brings back memories of the animated Jessica Rabbit from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But the potential for a nice, touching love story is cut off at the knees by the film’s clumsy and uninteresting detective storyline, which also diminishes the significance of the interesting formalistic stylization.

Into the Inferno is a bizarre combination of fascinating shots of lava and volcanic eruptions with great sound and religious and political-ideological dialogue scenes with people from the communities and cultures living near them, which though occasionally interesting, are mostly boring and have nothing to do with volcanoes. And the latter type of scenes take up 80% of the runtime.