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Despite the slight infantilism of the premise and the unattractiveness of the trailers, they managed to create a very pleasant and entertaining film that will definitely find its fans among children and adults with the wave of film references and the undisguised parody of Hollywood storytelling techniques.

Boyka tries to be more likeable this time and the film wants to speak to the wrestlers' souls, but it's still only an entertaining, shallow spectacle with a bunch of clichés and catchy choreography that doesn't stand out or fit in with the series.

A nice fairy tale about unpleasant things. Parts of it work almost perfectly, and during the animated sequences I was literally gushing with bliss at the endless visual and emotional creativity, but as a whole the narrative is rather heavy-handed, calibrated towards a not very distinct and insufficiently overarching twist. While The Big Friendly Giant was for children and had no significant communicative ambitions, A Monster Calls has no clear target audience and delivers its profound message impressively, but not in such a way that children will fully absorb it and will keep adults thinking about it longer than a few minutes after the end. Strong 3*.

Finally! A couple of years after I declared war on Shyamalan, the formerly miraculous revelation of mystery cinema, and condemned his more recent works with a series of expletives, the stubborn Indian managed to hold his own and in less than two hours didn’t make me sleepy, angry or bored. Split may not match the claustrophobic atmosphere of Signs or the subtlety of Unbreakable, but the overall concept of a narrative based on the gradual unveiling of the two main characters, the hunter and the victim, is outrageously appealing and, hand in hand with the impeccable performance of McAvoy, and Taylor-Joy and the director's renewed sense of intense and believable tension, creates an impulsive whirlwind of interesting filmmaking ideas and games. I was a little disappointed by the lack of any truly surprising twists, but if Shyamalan has longer term plans for this fictional world (as the final scene suggests), as an interlude, Split is more than satisfying and successful. The climax with the shotgun in the gloomy corridors is the best in years.

An ultra-brutally overblown action flick (at times to the point where I was expecting the Death Star to be the target of the villains and The Rock to pull a Mustang with a built-in R2-D2 out of the garage), but one that manages the near-impossible feat of finding a workable balance between over-the-top superhero antics, where absolutely anything goes, and a more serious psychological conflict leading to seriously motivated nonsensical antics. And the middle ground is both in the addictive humour and the tremendous insight, thanks to which the film immediately gets the audience exactly where it wants to go, and every sci-fi element is simply funny and somehow natural. But there’s also the very well constructed script, which, for a change, deftly handles the limited communicativeness and resorts much less to visibly improvised and wannabe cool dialogues (and when it does, it's quite good, e.g. the delicate verbal shootouts between Johnson and Statham, which are the steroid of the first half). In addition to being deliberately over-the-top and spectacular, the action is also royally entertaining and intense, culminating in a double finale that is one of the most gripping in history (Statham now aspires to be the nanny of the century, his scene with the baby being the best sequence of the entire series). Charlize is a great villain, Gybson still isn't annoying, I still love Rodriguez, and I sincerely hope Gray stays fast and furious, because after the miserable Seven, my interest in this testosterone-laden franchise shot to considerable heights. 80%

Admittedly, it scares me a bit that I fully identify with the character of a middle-aged, declining pussy-whipped guy who falls for his daughter's hot friend and gets a new drive in life with visions of a redemptive fuck, but on the other hand, Kevin Spacey's Lester is the only character that the script portrays believably and properly tragicomic, unlike the other peculiar individuals who represent various psychological, hormonal or opinion extremes, whose merging into a single plot weave is admittedly cinematically impressive, but intellectually overwrought and simply unbelievable. The actors are, of course, excellent (besides the amazing Spacey, for example, there’s Chris Cooper and his militant asshole) and, with the help of one of the most beautiful melancholic soundtracks, Mendes leads the story in such a brilliant way that the final minutes are indelibly etched in your memory. That said, a film festooned with accolades and regarded as inspiring, concise and artistically distinctive should look different, certainly more explicit and unconventional – this is an exemplary, suitably forward-looking Hollywood jigsaw puzzle that just manages to look extremely clever and functional, and I quite adore it.

The narrative is without major mistakes and hesitations, but for the one hundred and ninety-fourth time the stale concept of a racist hunt for terrorists, starring an iconic, flamboyant and morally immaculate hero (we're talking about Wahlberg, Goodman needs to lose some weight and J.K. Simmons needs to gain some) just can't satisfy me anymore, even as a fan of old Hollywood conventions. Moreover, it's as long as a list of government debts, and the pacing fluctuates between many characters who, though played by top-notch actors, aren't very convincingly portrayed. Berg is definitely up for something bigger, at least in terms of physical rush, which you can see here, for example, in the very intense and realistic street shootout. 60%

If Mr.Bean and Frank Drebin could, by some sick coincidence, produce their own offspring, he or she would probably behave just like Mr. Hulot. I'm only talking about the heartfelt spontaneity and unintentional pathos of the title character, whom we come to love even though, unlike the two aforementioned figures, he’s far from being the main and only source of entertainment in the story; there’s also the overall openness and disjointedness of the narrative development, where characters and subplots pile on top of each other, scenes are repeated from different perspectives, characters are characterised by doing nothing and reacting to Hulot's eccentricity, and the main catalyst for individual situations or stylistic choices is not their subordination to the narrative, but the subordination to a system that might be described as one of controlled chance – everything looks like a series of random sketches where Hulot accidentally disrupts the stereotype of resort life, but the course of the disruption is in fact minutely and systematically orchestrated, gradually unravelling the pattern of routine inherent in the idle accomplices of a seven-day holiday. Tati is not only brilliant in his grotesque sketches, the number of which is perhaps a waste for a single film, but also perfectly depicts the conflict of human nature, culminating in an smart, often openly ironic humorous whirlwind. I would really love to have a beer with Tatin, Hulot is my kind of dude. 100%

The first one was (and still is) a formidable claustrophobic machine for mining nerve-wracking atmosphere and suspense; the second one is a militant feast in honour of the most terrifying monsters in modern cinematic history that doesn't let us get away from aliens in the right sense of the word. The third one wants to take something from each by using a single bloodthirsty monster and involving a group of seemingly twisted characters, setting the action in the vast, depressing labyrinth of a prison where life as a symbol no longer has any intrinsic value. The cast is once again perfect and the characters are quite diverse, and it’s not possible to guess who will end up as a bloody spot on the wall and with whom the script has longer-term plans. And as for Fincher's debut, it's a well-known fact that the studio tried to repeatedly rape and control his work, which is unfortunately noticeable: the depressive barrage is at times on a similar level to its predecessors, but partly due to the very choice and nature of the setting, where even a brain-dead would get depressed; and on the other hand, it has a rather fading tendency: the performance of the intruder, like in the first one, is based on suggestiveness, but fails to generate intense flamboyance during its advances (also due to his strange digital form), and mostly doesn't even act as a highlight of the film – that would be the skilful subjective camera work, the effective soundtrack and the already mentioned actors, led by the excellent Weaver, who is more dominant from part to part. It's worth watching, it doesn't offend or fail, but it still makes me sad to think that there could have been a pure Fincher version that would have shown his narrative genius and fulfilled the potential of a great subject into something grander and more distinctive.

It's certainly a remarkable rebellion against the conventions of traditional storytelling that promises big extravagant things, especially in the first fifteen minutes, set to a thrilling rhythm of cyberpunk music and disjointed space-time. But since it’s nothing but a formally entertaining piece of crap from the get go, as Tsukamoto's bizarre surrealism abandons its attempts at interesting attention-grabbing and the film gradually becomes an ultra-cheesy piece of shit suitable only for individuals with deviant sexual appetites or a very strange sense of humour. Had we been served a more intimate horror drama in a similar style, about a man who must come to terms with his fate on his own, this could have been a gem of an indie film; this way, Tetsuo is incredibly dull and only artificially refined, downright fucked up in its formal and narrative potential.