Isherwood

It takes a lot of creative courage to put a spin-off episode in the middle of a series that doesn't really move the plot anywhere, stretches a short section from the video game to 80 minutes, and manages to piss off fans of the original and newcomers alike. It's every liberal's dream come true and yet it doesn't have a drop of woke ideology in it. It's just an endlessly sad story of two elderly guys who have created their own world of reason, sanity, and love in contrast to what was going on behind the fence. When Ellie reads Bill's letter, it becomes clearer than ever that in this mycological marasmus, every single person is in fact "the last of us."

This is well-made. Joel and Ellie may have walked barely a few feet in their journey, uttering a minimum of words, but the protagonist of the second episode is the vast, semi-abandoned world that stuns us with its breadth and mesmerizes us with its detail. It's the endless hours of special effects studio people behind this that have taken the benchmark of audience intoxication to a new level. Given the enormity of the material, the TV format is a necessity, but 50" screens are not good enough for this visual masterpiece. By the way, the passage in the museum is one big helping of genre excellence.

I keep hesitating about how justified I find the need to adapt a game that is more of an interactive film, and even though the opening episode doesn't offer anything that really blows me away, I also can't fault it for anything. Those little spores of big things fly in the air for 80 minutes. That the scale of the collapsed world will be as important in its breadth as the intimacy of relationships, where morality has fallen away and the animalistic desire to survive remains. Pedro dictates, and Bella's brattiness will surely reach the viewer too. If it lives up to the spirit of the game in the next eight episodes, I find myself feeling a bit sorry in advance that I won't be able to enjoy it as an ignorant viewer. Let's call it the Mazin-Druckmann paradox for now.

A superficial ride on the cheap tinsel of fashion mafiosi, which wallows in its own pompous chauvinism, but never once gets under your skin. Scott is a great man. For one hundred and fifty minutes he blows out the candles on a birthday cake sovereignly like Aldo, and you'll even forgive the shortness of breath. But when it's all over, you'll feel a little disappointed that a showrunner who wasn't afraid to push the characters through something deeper for eight up to ten hours didn’t take up the mantle.

This is the recycling of the dinosaur movies where all the good has gone down the drain, leaving an unpleasant concentration of what is wrong with the Hollywood factory. The lazy script follows the same pattern for the sixth time, completely ignoring all the possibilities offered by the prehistoric monsters that are spread all over the planet. The joining of the new party with the old one features no surprises or a single spark. The parental theme is boring, and the only really full-blooded character is Kayla Watts (who maybe should have filled the quota, but she's a well-written and well-acted pilot)… Other than that it all goes on forever for two and a half hours. At the end, Ian Malcolm starts to spout a few catchphrases and unbuttons his shirt, and that’s about it. If it wasn't for the dessert in the form of the eaten guy on the electric scooter, which honestly made me laugh for about 5 minutes, I would award it the maximum misery.

I considered the first season a likable game that didn't really have much desire to go anywhere. However, the deliberately overwrought spy storyline, the superficially pleasing camera and editing games, the fantastic Kaley ("I can make 2 expressions, but I'll use them to the max!"), and especially the alcohol demons in withdrawal delirium, which like an acid corrode the personality and relationships around them, all actually amused me more than the first time.

Is this a brilliant satire that affects a sensitive point? Nope. Rather, it’s a very dry affair that fails in all disciplines. It strikes out in all directions indiscriminately and sometimes hits something rather unintentionally. That humanity is, at its core, a bunch of greedy assholes driven by the lust for riches and the desire to be better off than our neighbor is nothing new. Yet the film shouts it out to the world with the smiling naivety of young teenagers who want to save the world with a banner in one hand and a cobblestone in the other. Maybe these old-fashioned thought "overlaps" are enough for some people, but if I’ve got the laziest dramaturgy, I'm damn well taking the opportunity to be really clever and, above all, funny. This collection of caricatures without a single full-blooded character just travels around America, decrying concentrates of media outpourings, billionaire complexes, and political clownery, where it's fine to look for all the real-life foreshadowing, but absolutely no one is standing on their own two feet. It's like the jokes my fourth graders sometimes tell me at school: it has a confusing beginning, everything gets repeated about four times, and by the punchline, you have to help it or it's never going to end. This simply lacks effort and cuteness. The condescending smile is nowhere to be found. Middle finger up.

This is the most complex Czech film of the last decade. I mean it! All the foreign samples are put together into a purely Czech whole that works in all conceivable positions. The satire toward the local YouTube scene could perhaps be a bit sharper (and maybe that's why I'm not giving it full stars), but I enjoyed everything else perfectly. There's no point in naming specifics, but the scene with the shit is exactly the kind of thing everyone else wished they'd made, but it never came out exactly in the balanced level of dementia and wit that it does here. I'm going to pretend this wasn't all a coincidence and I’m cautiously hoping for a sequel.

This was an EXPERIENCE. Once every few years you sit down in a movie theater, and thanks to the subject matter you somehow know what to expect. Yet after a few minutes, all your ideas start to fall apart because everything that happens on the screen inevitably keeps you enthralled for 155 minutes. Not a single part of the film is wasted, the synthesis of image and sound is at its peak, and the gigantic spaceships amaze as much as the intimate story of the young messiah makes you shiver. The people who believed in it at Warner Brothers, and slapped that insane budget on it, are my personal heroes of the capitalist gamble of the movie business. Any objective criticism is beyond me. Along with Interstellar, I place Dune on the pedestal of the best science fiction of the 21st century.

Nolan spins the threads of time, reverses entropy, and becomes definitively his own genre benchmark, no longer needing to prove anything to anyone. He plays a stimulating game with the viewer that is, at its core, justifiably simple because its magic lies in its precise narrative composition, which inevitably demands full attention and multiple viewings. I gave up the first time and the composition of the timelines together with the thunderous music threw me into lethargy. It was only on the second viewing that I enjoyed the elaborately complex structure that makes you think and gives nothing away for free. It’s a fascinating and immersive experience in every way, with such unique production values that it is almost impossible to compare it to anything else. I read the Q&A breakdowns for this film and consider them proof that the viewer is really just a small cog in the great game of one principle.