Lima

The worst of the loose trilogy and three levels lower than the previous and excellent Pearl. It's as if Ti West ran out of ideas and Mia Goth in the producer's chair didn't help. It has no pizzazz, not a single memorable scene, no visual ideas. The insane 80s atmosphere is minimally exploited, and if it was at least as dull as the typical slashers of the era, I'd say to myself "good, West pays homage skillfully". Except the gore and murders are almost absent, the whole thing is devoid of wit and suspense, and the director does try to make a point, but it's pulled out of his ass with the whole "cult" thing, and I just shook my head during the shootout by the pool. Kevin Bacon makes a couple of unnecessary appearances, and his role is fades out in a few minutes, and Goth, whose performance in Pearl had me in a trance, bored me here. If only West had at least included the Night Stalker, who is mentioned throughout the film, but no way. It almost feels like West and the crew just wanted to fool around with the camera and conceived the whole thing in a lazily, half-assed and half-throttled manner.

An atmospheric delight. The pacing is murderously slow, but it’s perfect for the bleak story; the vast majority of the film takes place at night, or in the darkness of houses, or - as in, say, The Silence of the Lambs - in the brisk autumn weather with overcast skies. Osgood Perkins works with the picture format in interesting ways and varies it, and it's all complemented wonderfully by the ominous music and shiver-inducing sound design. Admittedly, for the less knowledgeable, it would be a mistake to go into this as a "Nicolas Cage movie", he's only here for about five minutes in total, but his creation is still memorable and wrung to the marrow. Towards the end it was a little too contrived for me, but you can forgive such nits in a film when you're having such a great time. The fact that the main character is a woman then adds an extra layer of tension because you do worry about her. Perkins is a talent, his dad starred in one of the greatest thrillers of all time, and he makes great thrillers, so the cycle has come full circle. I'll continue to watch him, he’s one smart kid.

A pop horror flick that appeals to Generation Z and won't offend the oldies. On the positive side, I'll take the superb and highly talented Cailee Spaeny and the fantastic last half hour, and on the negative side, the simple fact that the other teens are all interchangeable, I didn't find my way to them at all and didn't care if the monster made a sandwich out of them. Yes, it's nice to look at, it has the hallmark of the 70s technique Ridley Scott established in his masterpiece, the atmosphere is nicely depressing and claustrophobic, but for the first two-thirds the film painfully lacks in any kind of tension, because apart from Cailee I - as I've already written - hadn't built up any rapport with the characters and consequently didn't experience the threat of the facehuggers as such at all. Fortunately, there are enough references and allusions to previous episodes, and as a connoisseur I appreciate how "disjointed" it is in that respect: the first third is slowburn old Alien, the second the warlike Aliens, and the last one is a return to the first one, with Fede Álvarez literally quoting it. So yeah, I actually had a decent time, and since Álvarez unloaded a few scenes I hadn’t seen in this genre before, I give the film four spits of acid.

An embarrassing demonstration that this franchise is exhausted and has nowhere to go. If it was the same genre-bending in atmosphere and overall approach as, say, 10 Cloverfield Lane, I would be very satisfied and it would make sense to me. This, however, is a variation of things already seen many times, and moreover, from the first film onwards, with the feeling that the whole thing doesn’t make sense, because sometimes the aliens react to, for example, the imperceptible sound of a shirt being torn, and other times the main characters produce much more significant sound stimuli. The whole premise just stands on feet of clay. I appreciate that the film isn't trying to be some sort of War of the Worlds where space creatures are mowing people down by the hundreds, and rather there's a focus on two people who are just trying to survive and can't somehow actively defend themselves, but that can be told in one film, there’s no need to use the same teabag three times. And the cat here is just sci-fi within sci-fi, this territorial animal that always looks down on humans acts like a dog, walks beside you without a leash and returns to its owner like a hunting dog. Nonsense.

A pretty average giallo, of which there were dozens a year in Italy in the 70s, until it resembled a treadmill. It's almost cringe-worthy in places, with the opening scene alone killing the whole thing, with the witnesses looking impassively on the elevator at the brutally slashed girl and commenting in an unexcited voice, as if they're just discussing what's on discount at the supermarket. It doesn’t bother much with logic either, but that's what I'm used to with giallo films, even the king of the genre Dario Argento could tell a story in that regard. But at least he could conjure up nice visual compositions and his murders were stylish, whereas here there is nothing visually sexy and the murders are lackluster. Only Edwige Fenech, one of the biggest stars of Italian cinema in the first half of the 1970s, adds a punch of some class, and it's a pleasure to see George Hilton reunited with her after a year. That's what I call an ideal couple. Especially for Fenech, her nipples, which she is not afraid to display here, and the witty pair of investigators, I give a weak 3 stabs with a scalpel.

Those horror smiles were very scary. Brrr. Good stuff this was. The premise is original, the jump-scares are good (one is absolutely sumptuous), I trusted the little-known Sosie Bacon with every stressed-out twitch of her face, and what I'd particularly highlight was the soundtrack, both the perfectly pitched nervous music and the sound design, which flawlessly supports the anxious atmosphere. And I liked the cinematography, which was interestingly rolling around, or shooting the image upside down. Simply, to conclude, this might not be the horror event of the year, but it is a fine one-off with pizzazz.

For me, the best episode of the franchise. It's not as unbearably loud as the first one, nor as visually aggressive as second one, or as shallow in plot as in the third one, which bordered almost on a Mexican soap opera. It has proper with, unexpectedly funny scenes, good visual ideas, and during action scenes the camera circles the space in an interesting way and chooses unconventional angles. And the biggest surprise is the one I least expected it from. Martin Lawrence may still be a pain in the ass, but holy wonder, he's funny here too. Starting with the unwanted "visit to the beyond" the goofiness and his sort of messiah complex make sense and I just enjoy the dude as an actor, unlike, say, the king of awkwardness Kevin Hart. The only one who spoils it a bit is the character of Will Smith's son, the youngster just can't act and in all the scenes he looks equally impassive, as if he's not even enjoying it.

Mad Max is an Australian cultural treasure that should have only stayed at three or four episodes. For the first hour, it felt like a sequence of mini-stories, with the disgustingly overacting Chris Hemsworth twitching like a pigeon eating grain and his performance actually making it into a kind of interlocking semi-comedy sketches that I really don't want to see in the Mad Max saga. He was the weakest link in the film. The other one was the overuse of obvious green-screen and over-stylized colors. Back then, years ago, with the first two episodes, I admired the punk spirit that came out of them. A punkness that was related to the low budget, when everything was handmade, so to speak, when the wastelanders were played by real bikers, the cops by real cops, the props were invented in the breaks during filming, and it exuded a wildness and realness that George Miller partially revived in the equally wild Fury Road. This is rather closer Thunderdome, which was also over-stylized and implausible in its depiction of the post-apocalyptic world. I didn't believe it. Mad Max doesn't benefit from a swollen budget because then Miller can't keep it up and in trying to cram in as much as possible, it's like that dog and cat fairy tale where they cooked a cake with so many ingredients that it made them puke (the quarry scene is too over the top). As time goes on, you find that you don't really care much about Furiosa's fate because, unlike Mel Gibson, she's not a pivotal defining character for you, you don't experience it with her, and you pray all the while that there's as little Hemsworth as possible. In fact, the only thing worth singling out is the ten-minute attack on the tanker, because you can feel the punk genuineness of it, where the stuntmen have honestly worked their magic along with those who came up with the choreography. And that's not enough for me, George. Too little.

In the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, Hollywood made about 270 low- and high-budget sci-fi films, and this piece is one of the last representatives of the 'Golden Age of vintage sci-fi', when the demand for this type of films gradually began to wane. Very nicely produced, with nice visual effects and a cinemascope format that was not standard in sci-fi films. It's basically the granddaddy of Ridley Scott's The Martian, 50 years older. Here too, a stranded lone astronaut struggles to survive on inhospitable Mars, and in fact the entire first half is a bit of a solo for him, his ape companion and one inhabitable cave. It's all commensurate with the scientific knowledge of the time, of course, so our hero parches around Mars without an oxygen mask, indulges in a refreshing bath, in short, things Matt Damon could only dream of. Towards the end, it turns into total nonsense, with a native "Friday", aliens whipping deadly rays from a flying saucer in orbit, and changing ecosystems that include fresh snow. The whole thing looks pretty nice, but I can't shake the impression that the long running time is rather untenable given the sparse filler.

More than a decade before falling ignominiously into the clutches of normalization's "cleaning up", Zbyněk Brynych was making good films. Really. Here, too, as if his inspiration came from the best bits of Italian neorealism, he tackles a serious social problem of the time. Having a child out of wedlock in the 1950s was a major trauma for young girls of the time, along with the misunderstanding of those around them; today, of course, nobody gives a shit. And not only did the then debutant, not-so-beautiful Renata Olárová capture it superbly as an actress (today they would give out Czech Lions for similar roles) but also the brisk direction helps it tremendously, the authenticity. The cinematography is always in motion, with some great visual ideas, and the lead actress is more than a worthy partner to the "Brad Pitt of our grandmothers" Jiří Vala, who perfectly combines fluttery immediacy with doubt. What's more, it's nice to see that the word "comrade" is only heard in one single scene and the Socialist ethos is completely absent. The biggest star of the 50s, Jana Brejchová, has only a small role of an excited twit and Eduard Cupák is completely ignored. The ending is atypical, but all the more interesting.