Lima

Some like cupcakes, some like wild girls, but it's a fact that this one is too wild – headshots are not spared, nor are pierced eyeballs and larynxes. Again, it's probably just my problem, but somehow I don't give a shit about those skinny girls who have ten armed men for dinner, especially when they're in the last stages of being a Litvinenko in the ICU. Anyway, another template strong female checked off, Netflix at half throttle again. But I send Mary Elizabeth Winstead a kiss on the forehead, she's a cutie.

I would give I don't know what to be a part of a Ridley Scott shoot and get a glimpse of his art, his films look so real. One long camera shot captures the mood of the entire Middle Ages – a cathedral under construction, a stone bridge with a dirt road, huts by the river with boats floating on it, a peasant with an ox team, and behind him a cohort of soldiers on horseback, cattle behind a fence, dirty pigs wallowing in the mud, mangy dogs running around, and all that brown-tinted medieval gloom; beautiful. And then there's the story, which could be cheaply flushed down the drain as a politically correct me-too tale, but it's not. It is a powerful story about the strength of a woman who fights for her honour despite the threat of cruel death by burning. And at the end, it cuts to what is probably the best jousting I've seen in the cinema, even considering they so rarely appear in films. Jodie Comer is superb, and the guys are overshadowed by Adam Driver, he's a stud. And Ridley, once it's over, it's gonna hurt.

Look, let's say you don't need to see most films today in the cinema. Their visuals aren't interesting or sophisticated enough, they lack something that would give you that pleasant tingle in the back of your neck, they don’t motivate you to see them on the big screen, or it's just a dull colouring book for teenagers (oops, anyone heard of Marvel?), so you can get a big TV at home, or a monitor if you're a really undemanding viewer. But Villeneuve's Dune? My God! That's in a whole different league, that's the kind of film big halls and big screens are built for. There hasn't been a visual epic like this since ...... well, maybe since Nolan's Interstellar, and as for capturing the sheer genius loci of the desert, its magical dunes and scorching sand, there hasn't been anything like it for 60 years, when – as Steven Spielberg declared "the miracle of cinema" – Lean's Lawrence of Arabia premiered. And everything else in Dune is a triumph of cinematic design, a non-tactile architecture of spectacular proportions, an interior design that illustrates the fantastic visual compositions. Add to that the incredibly good cast – I was most excited about Chalamet, which is exactly how I imagined Paul Atreides. Other reasons why this is a film for the cinema: Zimmer's powerful, droning score (a quality audio set is a must) and then the simple fact that Villeneuve likes to shoot in the dark, at night, and much of the film is dark, with Villeneuve playing with light and shadows and ominous gloom. At home on the computer you’ll see fuck all. So I'll conclude with a nice little friendly jab at you – if you are judging a visual epic like this based on the aforementioned fuck all, you are an idiot (no smiley face).

A film as pointless as Mynář's press conference. It doesn't bring anything new to the genre, a soup reheated so many times that it’s inedible, and when it does come up with something unusual, which I consider to be the "popular uprising" of Haddonfield residents, it's as silly as Ovčáček's tweets. And Michael Myers here strikes me as an immortal cyber version of the T-1000 from Terminator and not a flesh-and-blood creature.

As a biopic, it follows predictably beaten paths, but the wonderful positive atmosphere trumps that. This film caresses you pleasantly all the time, without any negative feelings. The relationship with Helen, wonderfully played by June Allyson, is terribly funny (“Bought you a present for your birthday.” – “My birthday? That isn't until next November.” – “This is for your last birthday...”), some of the absurd situations made me laugh, and June is a real sweetheart, the ultimate woman in discomfort. And the real Louis Armstrong is playing – cool, jazz, what more could you ask for? And “Moonlight Serenade” is a song that will last for ages.

A shameless copy of Karloff's The Mummy, with the added value of swapping Egypt for ancient Greek Pompeii and a lava-covered walking zombie with its own name and history. He is the Etruscan slave gladiator Quintilus, who also lusts for a woman and whose unfulfilled relationship with her has been his curse for centuries. The boys blew it here, I wouldn't have been so strict. It's a Ctrl+C - Ctrl+V rip-off, but it's got likeable actors who don't overact exceptionally, nice seaside locations, and Quintilus hilariously smashes doors with his fist and gives knockouts like Mike Tyson. Let's be forgiving, Edward L. Cahn rode the vogue in the 1950s for "the better, quite workmanlike mass production."

I didn't fully appreciate this film when I was younger, but now, more than 30 years after first seeing it, even I, a person with a reserved relationship with cars, find it interesting. It's actually a kind of art-house racing film, part cool procedural, where we see almost live the preparation and the start directly from the cockpits, and part slightly melancholic experience with an unfulfilled relationship with a fellow racer's wife (but really only very lightly sketched). There's also the gentle jazz, the weaving loops, the rain, and Steve McQueen, whose every glance throws out the charisma of a power-packed racing car. And then there’s the reassurance that the races used to have a really human dimension, with the guys behind the wheel with one foot in the grave, a dimension mortal risk that today, in the face of state-of-the-art technology, is disappearing. That’s a win for Hamilton :)

In the first episode, the inexperienced Jason Bateman directs like he came from David Fincher's sperm. In other words, the pilot is the most intense I've seen on the series production front in years, and Bateman pulls off the paranoid, oppressive stew in two timelines with absolute ease. The rest, however, is just good, occasionally suspenseful, but it's mostly drawn out and doesn't justify the ten-part runtime (I would cut, among other things, everything about the psychologist, or Holly's partner). The core premise is great, though, King is a master.

If I had to compare, Cronenberg's remake is more nutritious in terms of horror properties, full of irresistible filth, but this prequel has a more elaborate story structure. During the first half an hour the director plays a paranoid game with the viewer (is this woman really crazy, or what the hell is going on?) and then, thanks to flashbacks, a horrible twist is revealed, where the brutal murder in the press is not the end of the story; on the contrary, the filmmakers prepare one more surprise, thanks to which the story turns 180 degrees. Some of the scenes are real top-notch horror, I would never have guessed how thrilling catching an ordinary fly could be, knowing that a human life is actually at stake, and it also has a unique science-fantasy dimension. The Fly became an important milestone in the development of cinematic science fiction as a whole. As many smart books state, this is the very first film to use the idea of nuclear fission and fusion, the idea that matter can be converted into energy and energy back into matter, exactly the same principle that was adopted 20 years later by Star Trek and its famous teleportation device. And if nothing else, this wonderful film gives us the revelation that flies like milk mixed with rum :o)

If you take away the over-the-top digital effects, this film doesn’t have much to offer. Yes, Sommers knows how to give the impression that his films are epic. His work is filled with beautiful views of sandstorms, Egyptian cities in their heyday, or in a kind of eye-catching splendour of their ruins (the set of the crumbling Egyptian mansion must have been terribly expensive), and the dungeons full of treasures are also eye-catching. But the film has otherwise aged terribly, unlike its predecessors, because much of its charm is based on digital attractions, and those no longer impress anyone in the face of today's technology. The Mummy in its early stages is downright digitally awful (but not in the good creepy sense of the word), and Arnold Vosloo overacts like a pig until he becomes a caricature of himself. The only thing that survives unscathed to this day is Jerry Goldsmith's music; it's beautiful, even after repeated listens. It's also quite nice that the film doesn't take itself too seriously and is surprisingly funny in places, like when the offending skeleton heads are blown off like in a baseball game, or when Rachel Weisz demolishes an entire library in a domino effect – that’s the first scene I always remember when I think of Sommer’s The Mummy.