POMO

Watching Plan 9 from Outer Space requires a great deal of patience. I enjoyed it, but not as much I had expected. I was more bored than entertained. Either Tim Burton is too much of an idealist or I was expecting too much after see his wonderful Ed Wood. In any case, for fans of thoroughly bad films, I recommend the C-movie gem Robot Monster, which is even more naïve, sillier and mainly more entertaining.

A psychological ultra-hell made stylish through brilliant camerawork and editing. The plot of Sexy Beast is merely a pretext; the important thing is the original combination of three different moods – bohemian romance, cynical comedy and sultry crime flick – and the rising tension in the interactions between the characters, which exceeds everything seen so far. It’s a sensational audio-visual treat elevated by Ben Kingsley’s brilliant performance (Scorsese’s and Tarantino’s gangsters would cower in the corner). The other actors are also excellent. For me, Sexy Beast is a cult gangster flick with iconic dialogue and an iconic soundtrack. And it just gets better and better with each viewing.

This action flick was supposed to make two men famous. It was intended to be Chinese idol Chow Yun-fat’s big Hollywood debut and music-video director Antoine Fuqua’s first major feature film. But these big ambitions foundered on a below-average screenplay worthy of a straight-to-video B-movie starring Dolph Lundgren. The well-armed Chow is cool in his black coat and his unwilling partner, the blonde document forger Mira Sorvino, is sexy. But regardless of how spectacularly filmed The Replacement Killers is, it comes across as a bad joke because of its shallowness and the pointlessness of its content. Antoine Fuqua proved his mettle three years later with the excellent crime thriller Training Day and Chow achieved global fame not as an action hero, but as an unhappily in-love spiritual guru and kung-fu teacher in Ang Lee’s poetic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Pulp Fiction is the most distinctive signature of the most original contemporary filmmaker and it most faithfully defines his screenwriting and directorial excellence. One of the films without which there would be no FilmBooster.

An overly sentimental and manipulative Hollywood tearjerker for the masses that’s diminished by its own lack of credibility. But as an emotional viewer, I was still moved by it.

A climb up to base camp, breathtaking bivouacking under an overhang, the beauty of the Karakoram Mountains and the bombastic music of Hans Zimmer. Despite its clichéd story and shaky physical credibility, K2 remains the best of the 1990s mountain adventures alongside Cliffhanger.

Inferno is one of Dario Argento’s traditionally dreamy, visually elegant horror movies, but it’s so “storyless” that you sometimes forget what it’s about.

If you see The Haunting not as a horror movie, but as a ghost story for the whole family, you’ll be okay with it. As a horror blockbuster with a stellar cast, which is what it was supposed to be, it’s a fiasco.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is a routine movie that is in no way exceptional, but it is skilfully and spectacularly filmed Hollywood entertainment for the whole family.

Though Hard Target’s screenplay is that of a standard Van Damme B-movie with dumb clichés in places, John Woo works wonders with it. Van Damme’s long hair flies through the air as coolly as he does after crashing his motorcycle into a jeep, Lance Henriksen in a black coat and wielding a stylish shotgun is the most ruthless and arrogant bad guy who loves playing piano, and Yancy Butler is a goddess of wild ONS sex. Van Damme’s best film!