MrHlad

Of all the Marvel superheroes, Doctor Strange has the most potential for visually wild and appealing films. Filmmakers can get awfully crazy, and especially now that Strange is supposed to travel to other worlds and universes and where everything was once again based on magic, so the boundaries of normalcy were pushed a lot further than, say, in Black Widow. In that respect, there's nothing to fault in the Multiverse of Madness. Sam Raimi enjoyed his return to blockbusters and, unexpectedly, Kevin Feige allowed him to be his typical self. There are a few horror and scary moments, references to the visual style of the first Spider-Man and even Evil Dead, and it's nice to watch. The trouble is that there's not much interesting stuff going on. The story this time around is fairly banal, the characters uninteresting, and the whole time I felt like there was a missing minute here or there where it could slow down and go a bit more in-depth. I didn't get the sense that the universe was at stake or that Strange himself had to undergo some major transformation. It's simply a nice attraction, but it wraps up a not very interesting plot. It should have been better.

Wolf, Snake, Piranha, Shark and Tarantula are the best thieves in town, but now their luck has run out. Instead of prison, however, they're going to re-education to become good guys. And they're gonna love it! The Bad Guys is an unexpectedly fresh and entertaining animated film with absolutely delicious action and exceedingly well executed heists, whose writers have a background in heist movies. Too bad the story itself and its heroes are somewhat bland.

The Crawleys have a problem. Two, actually. Hollywood filmmakers want to shoot a movie in their home and move in for a month. At the same time, they discover that they've inherited a villa in the south of France, and that’s due to their grandmother and her half-century-old secret. The second Downton Abbey: A New Era brings back the old charcters and the old attitude. A non-conflicting series full of great costumes, good actors, but also plots and stories that are not too complicated and do not distract from admiring the atmosphere of interwar England. Fans of the series will be pleased, casual cinema goers will get through it painlessly. But one wonders why anyone who doesn't know the series and its characters should go to see it.

A forgotten computer game from the 1980s is killing people because it's cursed. What will players be willing to pay to win? Choose or Die is exactly as stupid a movie as its plot sounds. An underfunded horror film without a shred of wit, but most importantly without a single truly thrilling scene. It attempts to rip off genre classics, but does so with utter clumsiness and zero input from its own inventiveness. There is no reason to watch it.

I was a little wary of The Northman. I found Robert Eggers's previous films interesting rather than really good, and I was worried that in the case of his new film, the trailers might lie and that the result would be torn between an attempt at epic Viking carnage and a not entirely accessible auteur style. But my worries were unwarranted. Eggers has kept himself very much in check as an artist and auteur in an unexpected way, and The Northman is a very audience-friendly film. There's not much room for any interpretations of images, dialogue or anything else; it's much more about the Viking carnage, which is quite simple at its core, and its creator is aware of that. If you accept the fact that Eggers simply wanted to revive a legend of betrayal and revenge, and more than anything else he was interested in showing the cruel world of the Vikings on screen and having a good time audiovisually, you'll be satisfied. Or maybe you'll be thrilled like me. Musically, it's a treat, the one-shot scenes of the attack of the town, with dozens of people dying and blood spurting, made my jaw drop to the floor, because it must have been a mad dash to think this up and organise it to work. But the result is worth it. There's nothing to fault the actors either, and the fantasy elements are inserted into the plot in a non-violent way and fit in perfectly naturally in a wild world full of strange rituals. I really enjoyed the two and a quarter hours. However, I can imagine that fans of The Lighthouse will be a little upset by this actually unexpectedly audience-friendly film. Personally, though, I haven't seen anything better than The Northman so far this year.

After retiring from the army, former soldier Jim Harper travels to Germany with a group of mercenaries to stop a dangerous scientist and his research. Only too late does he discover that it's a lot more complicated than that, and that there's no way he's going back home. While The Contractor tries to pass itself off as an action film, the action is minimal. Instead, the film takes its time with boring heroes and philosophizing about how difficult it is to leave the military for civilian life. Unfortunately, as a drama it works even worse than an action movie. A boring and miserable film with nothing to offer.

The most useless film franchise proves that it can be even more useless. David Yates kick-started his career with Harry Potter, but even he and J.K. Rowling must know that this juggernaut they're working on won't win them much applause. Whereas the previous films were merely dull and uninteresting, this one is just a mess most of the time. Things happen that don't make sense, characters appear as it suits the director, and most of them are about as interesting as those faceless bad guys in Commando. Woefully empty. Dumbledore just has a plan, he doesn't tell anyone, and you as the audience must enjoy it, that’s it. The final quarter in Bhutan does offer a few ideas and an attempt at some closure to all this nonsense but I'm really not going to praise the film for climbing from drivel to mediocrity. If the water closes behind this bloodless void after the third film, I won't miss it. On the other hand, I'm glad Yates is dedicating his measly filmmaking skills to this franchise and not hurting anywhere else...

Pretty much the same thing we got from Sonic last time. Still good for me, though. The blue hedgehog is likeable, he's good at action and humour, Jim Carrey is still having fun on screen and the new villain Knuckles is good too. It's a shame the film is a bit too long, which is especially evident in the third quarter, which deals with things that have little to do with Sonic and his adventures. But otherwise it passes pleasantly and neither children nor adults will be bored.

Honestly, did anyone expect Morbius to be a good movie? The trailers didn't suggest anything of the sort, and after how Venom turned out, it's not a bad thing to be wary when it comes to Sony comic book movies. So talking about disappointment wouldn't make much sense, the film exactly as crappy as most of us probably expected. Like Venom, Morbius feels like a comic book movie from the days when Ben Affleck as Daredevil and Nicolas Cage as Ghost Rider were goofing around in theaters. Simple entertainment with a simple story, realistically about six characters, no surprises, no ideas and nothing worth paying attention to. Moreover, Jared Leto is no Tom Hardy and while he doesn't spoil anything here, his Morbius simply isn't an interesting character, but that's more the fault of the writers who occasionally try to bite on some attractive themes, anti-heroics and a potentially interesting relationship between the main character and the villain. In the end, however, they ignore all that and serve up a boring film that has nothing to offer in real terms. And when they start to try for some kind of bigger story at the end, it still doesn't work. Oh, and the vampire faces are pretty ugly.

A race between Czech and German skiers starts on the ridges of the Krkonoše Mountains. It's an honour, but it soon becomes a race for life and not everyone will make it to the finish line. The Last Race suffers slightly from the fact that it bites into a lot of interesting themes that it fails to develop properly, but at its core, it remains mainly a gritty and unexpectedly proper and intense survival thriller, with technical aspect that far surpass the Czech competition and stand out among the world's top in the genre.