Goldbeater

I appreciate the craziness of the whole idea and some rather striking details that probably just happened by accident, because otherwise this movie is a completely undisciplined, and technically peculiar grindhouse horror completely lacking in any atmosphere, which unfortunately most of the time is not even entertaining. The fact that the characters' behavior will lack any, really any, logic is clear to you after 5 minutes, so you have plenty of time to come to terms with it by the end. The adults behaving like far more irresponsible troublemakers than the insufferably murderous brats, however, is quite something. Maybe that was the intention.

Small film, yet great. Within the first few minutes, The Father grabbed my attention perfectly due to its dynamic script, fast pace, and strong acting performances. Plus, I have to say that it was like an emotional rollercoaster ride that will leave you with goosebumps in the end. The spiral narrative ingeniously plays with the supporting characters and the perception of time and space. In addition, we experience its growing confusion and frustration with the main protagonist. Anthony Hopkins is at his best here. Everything he does and he feels is endlessly believable, and you forget that you are watching an actor. It was a force to be reckoned with, and it touched me like nothing else.

Kong II, king of the monsters. I could practically copy my comments from the other Godzilla reviews, with perhaps one positive amendment, that this time there was at least something to see during the fight scenes. However, you still have to spend an incredibly long time watching the inconsequential, clichéd, and absolutely intolerable characters, some of whom are on screen just to stare up at the sky and mindlessly repeating the catchy monster names. Also, I have to say that even though I was in such distress, I was still somehow waiting for the screenwriters to add another act to the storyline we have seen a million times before, which would provide at least one element of surprise. However, it was not to be, so the movie ends, and you go, "Oh, was that it?" I had to shake my head at the obvious references to 2001: A Space Odyssey, the first Star Wars movie, and I am guessing Tron, unless I did not imagine that due to the excess of neon lights. Also, throwing knowing references at the audience does not necessarily make a good movie. The only thing that lifted my spirits is that it all seems like the swan song of the series, and I sincerely hope it is.

Zack Snyder is a master of the placebo effect. He did not resolve the issues with the original Justice League movie at all, he only watered them down, and disguised them with a movie that is twice the length. Some of the characters have more depth and come out of it "more alive", however, we still have to watch the practically indestructible (and therefore uninteresting) superheroes in the movie for a long time, whose superpowers lack any consistency and are governed only by whatever the screenwriters feel like at the time. Plus, there is a generic villain from a generic galaxy of generic villains who came to take over / destroy the planet, because they can! In addition, with all the scenes full of stuff that slows it down, whining musical interludes, and endless teasers for sequels and spin-offs that will never happen, I was just wondering if I could not have done something better with my time and watched 2 to 3 shorter, more fulfilling movies instead.

After second screening, The Brood is one of the more sluggish and lesser satisfactory works of David Cronenberg. Once you know where it's all headed, it doesn’t have the same impact (compared to that, for example, Scanners impressed me strongly on the second viewing). Nevertheless, with its ideas, naturalistic imagery, and chilly Canadian atmosphere, it is still an admirable work, the ending of which will surely be remembered by everyone.

Ocean’s Eight is a worn-out and plagiaristic female-version of Ocean’s Eleven, in which every attempt at humour... and, in fact, every attempt at anything ends in cringing. Debbie and her partners-in-crime can shake hands with Paul Feig's Ghostbusters reboot and share the top spot of the laziest cashgrabs of recent years.

Rituals is very decent 1970s testosterone-fuelled survival-movie about a group of doctors whose fishing trip in the wilderness descends into bickering with one another and then they realize there’s an unwelcome saboteur around. A comparison with the more well-known Deliverance is not entirely groundless, Rituals is, however, more in the vein of a horror movie. The wilderness far from civilization provides the movie with a very credible atmosphere of total seclusion and the growing despair and exhaustion of the characters as every minute goes by is utterly believable (and draws you in). Although it is a bit clichéd for its genre, it is still a very respectable movie, which with its mood and suspense resonated with me.

The central storyline has been used through the copy paper many times, and some plot points, such as the actions and motivations of the main villain, seem completely random and written entirely to anger movie-goers. Still, when you watch the awkward out-of-place characters of Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams trying to fulfill their dreams, and Pierce Brosnan’s futile attempt at a Nordic accent, the whole outsider-pop thing has to soften your heart to some extent. This movie is an undemanding no-brainer and at the same time an alright easy-to-follow musical fluff, nothing more, nothing less.

If, during a snow-covered and frosty winter evening, you feel like you’d like to watch a thriller with a suitable atmosphere, go for anything except The Snowman. Watching completely unlikable heroes for two hours groping their way along the killer's trail in the midst of such a lacking plot would still be bearable if The Snowman did not have a scattered and incomprehensible storyline - the characters emerge and disappear again, confusing the audience, although despite the frankly erratic investigation it does not mean you could not have already figured out who the killer was from the start. Then there’s the ending, which is so chaotically edited you can’t possibly know what the hell is going on. It's hard to say where it all went so wrong. Tomas Alfredson, a once-promising director, probably got buried in the snow sometime during the past few years.

Netflix once again proves it has a good nose for a "true crime" story worthy of adaptation. The very topic of Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel is an extremely tense and most of the time very chilling series. However, this time the great problem of modern television serials is already clearly evident when the selected footage and content is barely enough to really fill half of the series, and it's stretched to four hour-long episodes. I myself felt coming up with perfectly logical questions worth immediate answering after an hour into watching it but the show took its sweet time and stretched out the answers over the following episodes. In other words, the whole mystery could have been solved quicker with a feature-length documentary, or maximum a two-part series, and the audience would not have missed anything. Unfortunately, Netflix needed to create more content, so here we have a documentary that was dragged out more than it should have been, and it's quite a shame.