Kaka

After fifteen years, I would have expected a far more marked evolutionary change than what I got. Nowadays, most of the big studios producing mainstream action heroes know that it's easier to do things in a team and the audience enjoys it. The new XXX came up with this idea and it has to be said that half of the squad is more interesting than the alpha man himself, who makes a few comments here and there, fights once or twice and that's about it. Tony Jaa and Donnie Yen don't have much room to stand out thanks to the hasty editing and confusion of the action scenes, and the girls are damn good at it, but the shooting doesn't quite work for them. We are willing to bend genre standards and boundaries, you know before you watch it that it's going to be dumb, but not many people expect it to be this stupid and badly made.

A brave effort by the French, keeping their typical traditions of hard, raw and direct crime dramas, and are not afraid to experiment a bit (exotic South Africa). It’s a very rough and explicit blood fest in places, but unfortunately it is entertaining mainly because of its form and style, and the performances. The script is too simple and generic. The surprisingly well matched Forest Whitaker-Orlando Bloom duo is a delight. The latter in particular portrays a character of a perpetually drunk and stoned cop, the exact opposite of his acting career so far, and I have a feeling that he enjoyed it quite a bit.

Organ transplants in a different way, with elements of the crazy Trainspotting. A film full of strange creatures, underground London and an atypical love story. Not that it's not original, but there's not much to admire about it.

Everything I feared became a reality. You want a gritty gangster revenge flick, but instead you wait with fear in your eyes for a dressed-up Gatsby to pop around the corner in some lavish camera swoop. That's how "beautiful" Live By Night is, unfortunately, in this case. It does have a flair for pictorial composition, it’s well-acted with few exceptions, with some great roles given damn little space (Gleeson, Cooper). Unfortunately, thematically, it's a film that's not supposed to be so fancy, especially when right at the beginning you get a lively action set-piece like in Public Enemies. It is, after all, a gritty story from a harsh and unforgiving time, and not a poster-boy reminiscence of the golden 1930s. And that's exactly the point where Affleck screwed up, hand in hand with the script. He shows the twenties with poetics, in a haze of nostalgia that doesn’t fit. It called for shady businesses, down-to-earth characters, period hits and dirty streets, exactly how we like it in other films. Still, Affleck has a talent for directing and he can act, but hopefully, he will no longer write scripts.

A well-directed old-school paranoia that more than its engaging plot and unprecedented drive, uses minimalist sets, a gloomy atmosphere and other Polanski filmmaking devices and proprieties to tell a thematically well-supported story, which might make one smile at how the master has it all figured out and in control, but could have been much more entertaining and brisk.

Another dense filmmaking experience from the master. A film built on three exceptional performances and a thematically strong and rewarding story. Gradually escalating and revealing a shocking truth that is clear from the beginning, but we want to hear it at the end. The ending is not cathartic, is just natural, and the rest is a solid psychological game of who with whom. Too bad that the hints of legal issues and the question of guilt/innocence and the right to punish/not to punish are much less entertaining than the similarly atmospheric, depressing but much more personal and intimate Bitter Moon, which the viewer can relate to much better.

An exceptional thing, no doubt. Spontaneous, explicit, naturalistic, with brilliant performances and superbly executed. It presents things not only through the script and dialogues but also through the camera and music, which is something that cannot be understated. I understand what the film shows, and it does it brilliantly, but it doesn’t add much more to that, and that's hard to stand for 163 minutes. After two hours, the handheld camera and the endless car ride become too much. It needed a thicker plot, not just a documentary depiction of the issue of teen outsiders with troubled values and lives.

An interesting, artistically ambitious attempt. Visually, it’s similarly "black and white" and artfully polished as anything from Nolan or Spectre. But the script is gibberish and buries the personality and confident direction the creators were pursuing. The parkour is fine, and so is 15th century Spain, but everything in the present is rubbish. And in this case, I'm afraid that, unlike Warcraft, the players of this famous game won't be excited about the film adaptation.

There's loads of these brisk, funny, situationally attuned, brilliantly shot comedies with polished casts in precisely fitting jackets, and no less precisely fitting roles. And if there is also an interesting dramatic subtext and some wisdom from life, much better. It should be noted, however, that Crazy Stupid Love entertains just a little bit more than its contemporaries. It's hard to say what it is, maybe the directorial dynamics, maybe the immediacy of the main characters, in any case, it’s great.

Argo 2 – made in Germany (so a bit worse). Too bad about the clumsy script, which throws up one formulaic thing after another, because otherwise this is a pretty decent German scenic drive. Great actors without exception, an electrifying finale, and an interesting, period-accurate, portrayal of 1970s Chile and the camp practices. Emma Watson confirms that she can break out of the role of Harry Potter's uptight friend and is starting to emerge as a top-notch actress with all the prerequisites for success.