D.Moore

An excellent horror film, certainly by the standards of what's being made these days. If it weren't for two things (the unraveling of the mysterious shadow and the period film) that were really over the top and distracting, I would have given it a full rating. The atmosphere of Shelter is excellent, dense and ugly, Jonathan Rhys Meyers is really good in his role, Julianne Moore is good too, and the film is not flawed in terms of direction and is full of very interesting shots. Three and a half stars.

Not particularly scary, but definitely atmospheric in a few scenes and for me an unforgettably likeable film. I mean the part where Camille deals with the trio of thieves, then the architect's escape from the wolves and hiding in the house, and of course the ending with the chainsaw, which was absolutely sensational. In fact, every time a tree that seemed to have fallen out of Evil Dead "came on the scene", The Guardian was perfect. It’s just too bad that the rest of the film is too stretched and topsy-turvy, and that the actors are quite bland.

I was expecting a funnier film and definitely something more original, not a film just based on two or three ideas. I was downright disappointed with the ending. But Brendan Gleeson is of course excellent, as are the trio of drug dealers. But films In Bruges or Hot Fuzz, which The Guard would probably most like to resemble, are much, much better. Three and a half.

The opening and closing twenty minutes are perfect, the section in between drags a bit, but certainly not to the point that it makes you yawn with boredom. I was missing some of the typical De Palma stuff (even the long shots here weren't really long), but not in a major way. I liked the hazy and dreamlike cinematography very much, as well as Herrmann's music, which the maestro composer didn't put much effort into (he simply stole from himself), but that didn't detract from its impact.

The film begins with a Bible quote and ends with a JFK quote, and is pretty much decent to watch until... Until the trio of "heroes" arrive in an Italian town where all hell breaks loose. Not war, but movie hell. It only takes a moment and Klaus Kinski, who until then had constantly amused me with his (semi-)crazy expression, suddenly makes a terrible fool of himself. The script doesn't deal his black colleague such a blow, but that doesn't mean he fares any better. At least the finale with the attack of the (thankfully German-speaking) Germans irons out the mess quite effortlessly and Kinski's last scenes are really worth it. What disappointed me even more in The Liberators, unfortunately, was Ortolani's overly weird music and the ostentatiously cheap production design in general. Two and a half.

I expected a much more contradictory spectacle, but in the end the positive impressions prevail, and quite strongly at that. I'll definitely watch Passion Play again soon - then (when I know what happens) I'll either discover a lot of new things, double meanings, and notice a lot of things I didn't notice the first time, or I'll see the light and think that it's all just overly simple gibberish. Anyway - I really liked Mickey Rourke in an atypical role for him, as well as Bill Murray, but a huge plus was Megan Fox, who also seemed really beautiful to me for the first time. The magical atmosphere is complemented by the delicately sensitive music, the whole film had an extremely calming and warm impression on me, which is something I don't often see lately.

Wow. Bourvil's civil acting amazed me, as did the breathtaking robbery scene filmed almost without a single word. Le Cercle Rouge is one of those films where it is clear from the start that it can't turn out well, but you still hope it will. Delon is very good, but he doesn't stand out from the strong cast of other roles (Yves Montand especially enjoyed his ex-policeman), which of course is not a bad thing.

Certainly the best I have seen from Dušan Klein (who otherwise leaves me safely cold). I can't even believe he made something so dark and psychological. He was able to rely on great actors, an excellent composer in Havelka and a script that wasn't afraid (slightly) of an open ending. The dialogues by Jiří Adamíra and Bohuš Záhorský were perfect. What was bad was the ugly TV cut. The film, which was obviously (not only according to the opening credits) shot in widescreen, was left with a screen that simply couldn't and didn't fit everything into it.

A truly excellent and engrossing affair, and one where the book's origin is very, very evident (and very, very good). It’s sort of a precursor to the even more successful Black Sunday, which John Frankenheimer released a year later. Larry Peerce, a mostly TV director who is not very well-known, was as good as his more famous colleagues. The tension is omnipresent, and if you see the film for the first time, you can't be at all sure what will happen in the next minute; the sniper remains virtually faceless and anonymous from beginning to end, but we get to know a lot of other people in the stadium, whose mini-stories come together in a perfectly terrifying (or terrifyingly perfect) finale. Great, great, great! The only complaint I have is how late (without any explanation for the delay) the helicopter appeared on the scene... But that's really a minor flaw. __P.S.

Except for the final half hour or so (or better yet, everything from the moment the sergeant's son takes the controls of the tank), which is both too moralistic and too over-the-top and primitive (people trying to pull the tank out of the field), Tank is a pleasant and benign spectacle for boys. James Garner actually won my sympathy during the opening credits, while the sheriff's representative is such a disgusting slime-ball that I wished on him something much worse than what eventually befell him. Schifrin's virtually unknown music (except for the melody from the credits and the tank launch scene) doesn't sound revolutionary or memorable this time, but it also didn't really fit into the film either. Three and a bit.