Kaka

Ecstasy for the fans, a borefest for the everyone else. They completely abandoned trying to appeal to a wider audience base, and so, after a very brief prologue (because they had to), they go straight to the point and things basically don’t stop until the end. Therefore, when they start fighting with this one and that one does this other thing, the viewer not familiar with the game is lost. It's an impressive array of images, a well-chosen cast (Patton, Foster, Fimmel), and it's decently paced, but it doesn't allow anyone other than an absolute lover of the game to have emotions and form a more personal attachment to the film, or to like it.

Too bad about the first two episodes, because even together they are not as entertaining as this one, which is smart, mature, with effortless humour. Sharon Maguire serves up a film showing a main character that has matured over time, leaving behind infantile gags and lame jokes, as well as the bitterness about how she's old and fat, single, etc.; she’s know dealing with important life milestones. The male acting duo is a hit and forms an equal counterpart to the traditionally excellent Renée Zellweger, their bickering and interestingly set-up characters are exactly the spice this series needed. And the gap in years has done wonders. It doesn’t warrant a sequel, there’s nowhere to go, but as a worthy ending to a comedy film trilogy, it's great.

A decent and restrained remake of an immortal classic for today's times, bigger, noisier and more ethnically colourful, i.e. politically correct in the way that is befitting and appropriate in every other great film today. Washington pulls it off by walking, looking, and occasionally tossing in a morsel of wisdom, Pratt pulls it off by making wisecracks, and D'Onofrio plays the bear. The rest are essentially extras, which is a shame in the case of Hawke. It should be noted that the execution is also interesting. It’s top-notch, of course, with a fairly weird mix of classic, almost absurd shootout scenes where the good guys shoot in all directions and the bad guys fall like flies, plus well-shot fights mostly with bows, knives, etc. If it was R-rated with more catchphrases, it would have been exactly what everyone wants these days. But Fuqua had too much respect for the original and in his delivery it is both good and bad.

I couldn’t believe Tom Ford is American, because he nailed the dry, precise, aristocratically detached British style of this film almost to perfection. That, together with the breathtaking formal style (beautiful production design, filters) and the excellent Colin Firth form the backbone of this lonely, bitter drama about a man who could have had it all, but instead only confusedly searched for himself. Outwardly aware and detached, inwardly torn to shreds, a role tailor-made for Firth. It's hard to criticize and look for flaws, maybe only a lot of long passages and not all of them are entertaining, the vague gay parallel that didn't even need to be there so vehemently, the reproachful Julianne Moore. But anything where the lead is alone is great. Amazing music.

Days of Future Past was already a harbinger of future total shit and incomprehensible creative decline, and, unfortunately, Age of Apocalypse is full of that. All the things we loved about the X-Men – the characters, the relationships, the connection to reality – are missing here and have been replaced by the classic comic-book elements of Marvel: a CGI mess and a constant change of locations that is supposed to evoke a sort of build-up of the plot. There are only a few really good scenes that will resonate though – primarily almost everything with Fassbender and a minute of Wolverine, unless you count Jennifer Lawrence in a sexy purple costume, or a few nice visual effects that just copy what we've seen better/more sparingly used in previous episodes. The gamble on youth didn't pay off and neither did the super villain, who, surprisingly, wants to destroy the world – something we haven’t seen yet.

Clint Eastwood as we like him the most: simple, economical, straightforward and this time almost without pathos. His reconstruction of a famous event is neither as overwhelmingly authentic as United 93 nor as classically cinematic as The Flight, it treads on the edge, somewhere in between, and it does a great job. Basically without a dead spot, every shot is a forward thrust. The accident scene is amazing, both in terms of atmosphere and visual effects. Another film where the great form isn't a crutch for a lack of screenwriting substance, but serves exactly where it's expected, something that very rarely happens in a film of this kind. If it weren't for Tom Hanks being a good guy in the 126th way (getting a little tired of it) and the final 30-60 seconds, it would be almost perfect.

Compared to The Prestige, it looks like an opening act created by art school students, and I don’t consider Nolan’s highly-praised opus to be great. Unfortunately, Now You See Me plods along from the very first moment, and while there are a bunch of good actors and they're well cast, it's a typical consumer Hollywood commercial from start to finish without a shred of invention. And when, in the course of the film, you discover that there's going to be some devilish subterfuge and the magic tricks are not solved by wit and ingenuity, but by visual effects, something is wrong. So average for the entertaining ensemble of stars and its brisk pace.

The good thing is that in this day and age of comic books and action blockbusters, someone is still going back to the Balkans in the 1990s, which is a goldmine in terms of filmmaking. Not everyone is able to work with it, but the range of possibilities and stories is endless. This time an unknown director from Spain chose a half-cynical road movie, half-black comedy and unfortunately, even with a great cast giving very good performances, we are more concerned with a well with a dead body and the nudging of individual characters than with the absurdity of the confrontation and its seriousness. The fabulous cinematography Alex Catalan is not enough on its own.

It could have been great, because these rainy, raw small-town thrillers (like Out of the Furnace) where a bunch of villagers, a box of money and a dead body get mixed up have great atmosphere and are usually very fun to watch. Here everything works quite fine except for the plodding pace, which some will enjoy and others will get bored with now and then. It's missing its biggest acting aces, but Rockwell saves the day with dignity.

Finally, a film about very serious matters, presented in an accurate, balanced optic oscillating exactly between serious drama and black-humored dirty comedy, beautifully showing that even a serious illness can be treated in a different way than with tears and a feeling of helplessness. There are no clichéd platitudes or pathetic emotions, this film is dominated by common sense and a lot of brilliantly staged passages of everyday life. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has great talent and a knack for choosing roles, and Seth Rogen does what he knows best, portraying a clumsy, good-hearted, vulgar schmuck.