Kaka

Intrigues, scheming and moves on an imaginary chessboard. It slightly starts to catch the mores of classic series, i.e. to put the key twist in the last shot, but surprisingly it doesn't lose its pull and you want to know more about the characters.

The opening is gripping, then the pace slows down a bit. After all, the viewer needs to be put into an epic backdrop of all the nations with the main characters and territories. The mystical and gritty medieval atmosphere is excellent, the opening credits are amazing, the musical score is also impressive. It looks like a 150-million dollar swords and sandals film, but it’s a TV show.

A slow, thoughtful, hypnotic piece of nothing. While the film deals with the right and wrong decisions in life, instead of analysing the main characters and their transformations "before and after", the screenwriter cements it with religious agitprop. There is some creative potential, but it will probably take a few more years to mature. Dan Stevens is much more suited to a charming madman with an assault rifle in his hand, and Malin Akerman, who looks deliberately like a young old lady here, is also better suited to Watchmen.

The quality of the Fast and Furious movies can be assessed, for example, according to which you remember. The first one is memorable because it was relatively cheap, down-to-earth and original. Everyone remembers the fifth one because it brought a proper boost and a leap up in quality, plus a lot of great directorial ideas and audience draws (The Rock, etc.). The rest blends together with only the really great highlights being memorable, whether good or not. The eighth episode is no different and thus falls into the category of nothing exceptional. None of the action scenes are really climactic (CGI mess doesn't automatically mean awesome), Charlize Theron, Jason Statham and co. are fine, but with that kind of acting potential to piss on cars in two or three scenes, get run over by a submarine and that’s it? Where are the full contact fights like The Rock vs Diesel, or Rodriguez vs Carano? Those were the highlights in the action, this one has nothing of the sort. All the flashy gimmicks don't cover up the lack of creative ideas, and the 250 million dollar visuals aren't going to make this a macho action ride. The family feeling continues, okay, the main characters are old enough for that, but the best scenes are not the action ones, and that’s not quite okey.

One of the few films where nothing actually happens in its two hours of running time and it's a slightly overwrought advertisement for Jamie Dornan's muscles, his penthouse and his swaggering businessman role. All this is much more entertaining than a kind of pseudo plot or bickering in bed, without any eroticism as everything is basically just for effect and fake. One of the emptiest and most pointless sequels in the history of A-list Hollywood production.

Baran bo Odar watched Miami Vice, Kingdom and a few episodes of CSI on TV, then made this boring, unimaginative and stupid as hell B-movie and presents it as an action ride through Las Vegas at night, where Jamie Foxx wears a similar shirt and badge as when he was Colin Farrell's partner, not forgetting to take a very similar photo of him on the posters to attract the fans. On top of that, the exposition of the bar scene in the style of the opening scene of Michael Mann's film is explicit but lacking in the poetics of the digital camera and a sense of hard and uncompromising realism. It's an insult to the fans. If it wasn’t for the interesting cast and the short running time, it would be unwatchable. I don't understand how such a schematically outdated and hackneyed film can be made in 2017 and released with A-list actors.

Tailor-made black Oscar-bait. An attempt at a great little film that tries to portray the plight of an exceptional individual on the edge of standard society and his integration into mainstream life despite his gay "handicap". Not that the narrative was impersonal and the camera twists unimpressive, but as a gay-themed film, Brokeback Mountain was a class act. As a story of childhood and growing up in a black community, it's good, but the really resonant scenes are few and far between, and there are quite a few clichés, especially when it comes to the outlining of the secondary characters (a bad mother, problems with classmates). Thumbs up especially for the solid performances and interestingly laid out story stages, where paradoxically the most important events happen outside the viewer. There are thematically similar films that are far fuller in feeling and more nuanced in their relationships.

Revenant 2 – for women, but with a more sophisticated, non-linear narrative, and at the same time often quite gratuitous violence in an attempt to shock the viewer at any cost. It might seem that this female anti-western is about the role of women in the Wild West, but it is presented too black and white, or only black, in this case. It is a classic revenge motif, only atypically presented and unreadable. Underneath the skin, it looks much more like the director either a) had a difficult childhood and used his frustration for such a cruelly uncompromising depiction of explicit and mental violence, or b) wanted to flash across the Atlantic to show how Europe can kick the US in the balls, because no one is going to let a big production do that. It’s shot in an impressively non-mainstream style, with great performances, but the value of the message is very questionable at best.

Who the fuck is Rupert Sanders and why does such an artless routine artist get 150 million, solid actors and a good composer to make a boring, hopelessly unimaginative, sterile shithole full of darkened shots, uninteresting plot and logical lapses? You could do such wonders with all the glitter and jingle of those fluffy big city visuals! The inspiration from Cloud Atlas and Blade Runner is quite obvious, but completely wasted. After this disappointment, at least we know for sure that we don't want this contrived void as a sequel to Blade Runner!

Zombie nonsense in a typically British style. In some of the action sequences, of which there are very few, you feel like you're watching a sequel to Zack Snyder's 2004 hit, but you soon sober up. The pace slows down, the running time drags and the plot doesn't know where to go. One stupidity follows another, but as that bold attempt at a novel contribution to the subgenre, for a few bucks, why not.