Goldbeater

This year, David Fincher gave me an early Christmas present in the form of a 100% movie-lover experience, thanks to which I was lost for two hours in the Hollywood machinery and political jungle of the end of the 1930s and start of the 1940s. Jack Fincher's screenplay flows harmoniously like a poem and there are strong intense speeches from the characters that I haven't heard in a movie for a long time. Cult movie making maybe, but absolutely breathtaking and shot right from the heart!

In WW84, there are scenes that are at best average for this genre or stupidly cut short and/or just plain stupid layering clichés upon clichés. All the eccentricities you'd expect and forgive from the Superman: The Movie because it was a pioneer of modern comic book movies and also because it was made in the year 1978, and here the creators try to sell this as a cool retro throwback thing, but it is very much lacking in terms of the screenplay and rests on its laurels. The action scenes are probably the weakest points of the movie as a whole. Patty Jenkins does not really succeed at shooting action using unnatural-looking CGI, like in the first movie, and putting a total of only 4 short and indistinct action scenes into a 151-minute giant blockbuster is almost a crime. Maybe that's why it didn't even bother me as much as in the first movie. Otherwise, this movie is in all ways a forgettable watch, which actually received more media attention than it is actually really worth.

Boss Level is a sufficiently fun and humorous action movie about a time loop, but after this year's refreshing Palm Springs, I found it a bit low for this subgenre. Mel Gibson needed more room to act, he practically enters to reel off a typically antagonistic monologue, but then he just turns up sporadically here and there during the rest of the movie. No epic "boss fight" takes place in the final. When the closing credits start to roll, you expect them to stop and the actual final scene to appear. But it never comes. In the end, the highlight of the movie is actually the bonding of the main character with his son, but for most of the rest, including the comically diverse minibosses, this movie is quite forgettable. However, it is quite a decent watch for what it is, but just not as good as it could and should be.

Horror anthology with captivating art direction! Clancy Brown delivers a very charismatic old-school performance falling straight from the Angus Scrimm in Phantasm series. I liked the self-awareness of the characters continuously commenting on the stories being told and pointing out shortcomings and doubts that the movie-goer may have. At the same time, the stories are pleasingly intertwined with various fascinating details, and mainly they are consistent and equally interesting. The only thing is that the general story pulled me by the hair at the end and the final twist comes on way too strong, but it is nothing that undermines my overall positive impression of the whole movie, which is a very solid collection of horror tales.

When the first news about Fatman came out, I thought it might be a pretty good trip, but the creators should have made it clear at the start if they wanted to go in the direction of a fiendish family comedy or an unorthodox bloody thriller. Nothing in between. After watching it, my fears were confirmed and it ended up right there somewhere in between. At times, this "Christmas western" is quite bleak and wistful and does not shy away from cold acts and bloody murder. In other moments, the movie is too infantile and filled with naive comic book characters (the main bad guy is actually a spoiled little rich brat). The script really does look like it was written by Robert Rodriguez's children. The movie is quite amusing and doesn't drag. Mel Gibson cracks the whip and delivers in an unconventional role and his badass Father Christmas is cool, but the movie is weakened by its unclear mood and the relatively clear and simple story lacking surprises or twists.

Bogdanovich recorded and captured the essence of the environment and time, the joys and pains of individuals, and you watch their story tensely and with bated breath as if it were happening right in front of your eyes. There's a strange, sad gust of nostalgia. Like a moment of life recorded on a black-and-white polaroid image, which has long been blown away by the wind and today lies beneath the dust of faded memories. An incredibly lively spectacle that definitely grows stronger with each new viewing.

A distant cousin and precursor of the modern slasher horror, in which a masked psychopath disposes of unsuspecting victims in abandoned houses in the middle of a ghost town. The locations and atmosphere should have hit the jackpot, but in the end, it feels like a confusing tangle of random scenes. The mise-en-scene is really solid and the killer has some eccentricities which are way ahead of their time, but it falls short of being a solid average.

Nothing against a low budget and a purely fan-based approach to the material (That's what the whole web series is about), but I have one big problem with this movie - where the hell did the classic Angry Video Game Nerd go? Most of the time you only get a glimpse of James Rolfe, his characteristic swearing and sarcastic remarks hardly occur. Instead, most of the time you just get a series of uninteresting supporting characters with screen/speaking time you couldn’t give a crap about. This stew of a movie has something of everything in it, except the most important ingredient, the all-commenting angry AVGN character from the web series.

The Untouchables is a neatly filmed story of a few individuals who fight the rotten system. At the end, the film is not afraid to show that for a greater cause, you sometimes need to creep over the line of what the law allows for. Director Brian De Palma is on top of his game and Sean Connery in his best. A captivating flick which contains all the magic ingredients of a film I want to watch over and over. And that music by Ennio Morricone always gives me goosebumps!

Blood of Dracula’s Castle is a low-budget crap which tries to surf on the exhausted wave of the classic Dracula horror films, except the titular ‘castle’ is more akin to a regular Californian hovel. And the absence of any atmosphere and lack of visually interesting scenes are not helping at all. At the end of the ’60s, this concept couldn’t have scared even the most naive viewers.