MrHlad

And the bubble has definitely burst, so if anyone thought that Gareth Edwards was a directorial genius who was forced out of Rogue One by the evil Disney, and Tony Gilroy only “finished his job for him”, they're in for a nasty clash with reality. The Creator is a beautiful looking film. Physical, full of cool gizmos, gadgets, robots, tanks, rockets, and generally beautiful to look at. It looks very decent in motion too, Edwards is quite adept at war action, and at some points his latest film is reminiscent of Terminator or Avatar; and also of the film we've been looking forward to since the trailers. But then there's a lot of things he can't do. Edwards is a brilliant designer, a decent executor and a lousy storyteller. The longer I watched The Creator, the more I actually felt sorry for him, because behind that veneer of great production design is a woefully banal story, told in an unimaginative and uninteresting way. All the clichés you can think of are there, even the ones that you'll think would be a bit embarrassing if someone used them. Besides, The Creator tries desperately to pretend to be something more and offer some philosophizing in addition to the simple story, but Edwards is woefully unable to work with it. And the more he tries to look clever and multi-layered, the more it becomes apparent how superficial and boring this film is as the running time progresses. Nice, but... shitty, I guess not, but just not very good, either.

A Haunting in Venice is very different from Kenneth Branagh's previous Poirot films. The less star-studded cast and smaller budget are not problem, the effort to use enclosed spaces for clever and spectacular camera games is nice, and it manages to be pleasantly creepy. An interesting and pleasant change. If Branagh plays with atmosphere and genre like this in future adaptations, I'll be happy to be there.

Banker Matt Turner finds out he has a bomb in his car and if he doesn't do what an unknown voice on the phone asks, he'll go up in smoke. And maybe he should do it to avoid making the audience suffer. Death Ride is a silly B-movie that is artificially stretched out and that shouldn't be longer than ninety minutes. It lacks suspense and ideas, and is predictable from beginning to end, and even annoying in how uninteresting it is. Liam Neeson has probably never made a worse action thriller.

A popular 15-year-old influencer had disappeared and young Nina found her photo on her father's mobile phone. To find out where she got it and what happened to the girl, she decides to track her down. But she may not be ready for the truth. #annaismissing is a well-written and directed whodunit with a great cast, and while the pacing gets a little shaky in the middle, it easily manages to compete with the rest of the world with its timeliness and craftsmanship. A confident film from confident filmmakers. And a damn good one.

Jaime Reyes didn't want to be a superhero, but an alien artifact chose him, so he has no choice. Now he must protect his family from an army of villains who would like to acquire his powers. Blue Beetle is an unexpectedly fine old-school comic book movie that has solid action, functional characters, and doesn't try to bludgeon the viewer with a bunch of overblown effects. It relies more on a likeable hero and shows that with superheroes, you really don't always have to make everything bigger and louder. Don't expect anything new or groundbreaking, but it's fine. And after flicks like The Flash and Ant-Man 3, that's actually enough.

Regie the dog has just been abandoned by his owner and he finds himself alone in the big city. Fortunately, he stumbles upon other stray dogs and sets out with them on a journey of revenge. Strays is a very simple comedy that stands and falls on harsh jokes, creative use of profanity and slapstick. Simple bollocks, but if you don't mind rougher humor, you'll have a good time for that hour and a half.

Jason Statham takes on the ruler of the primordial oceans for the second time. And although Meg 2 is more B-ish and less serious than the first, it's unfortunately not much better. The main problem lies in trying to cram in as many themes, ideas, digressions and horseshit that go nowhere, resulting in a film that is cluttered and at times almost tiresome. And the decent finale is spoiled by childish humour. Even in the context of summer crap, the second Meg is mediocre at best.

The makers and I didn’t meet eye-to-eye. It is very possible that the new Ninja Turtles just didn't fit me and will fit you a lot more. That's how it goes. In any case, I left the cinema feeling not only that I wasted time, but also disillusioned, because I grew with the Turtles in the 90s, loved them almost fanatically (for purely practical reasons I wanted to be Donatello, because you can find a stick anywhere as opposed to a sword) and if my parents had to suffer like I did in the cinema today because of it, I'm terribly sorry for them in retrospect. In any case, Seth Rogen's version, whose humour I have a soft spot for at other times, has missed me in by a long margin. For one thing, I find his Ninja Turtles almost repulsive to look at. I understand that it's all about stylization, personality, and so on, but still, I probably shouldn't feel like I'm watching an unfinished film or a Robot Chicken joke stretched out over an hour and a half. It's ugly. And it's not very funny either, because the humor here is usually represented by scenes in which the four turtles are shouting so much that they can't be understood and you're just waiting for April, Splinter or someone else to make them shut up. The action has its moments, especially the opening in the garage, but once the mutants get on the scene, it goes down the drain as well. The result is an unimaginative, boring and pretty ugly thing that I'll try to forget as soon as possible. But like I said, maybe you will like the visuals, and maybe you can hear what the characters are talking about in that loud mess. And maybe you'll find they're talking about something funny. I'm not going to find out a second time.

I went to the cinema thinking that Christopher Nolan wouldn't make just a biopic. Well, it's basically a biopic for at least the first hour and a half. A bit more playful in terms of working with time planes, but above all, it's audiovisually imaginative and engaging in a way that all those academy-praised films like The Theory of Everything have little chance of capturing my attention anymore. Moreover, Nolan switches gears a little bit in the middle and starts to play a lot more with individual plot lines as well as genres, so that after the more daringly conceived biopic (which looks great in IMAX), Oppenheimer turns into a horror film at times, a psychological drama at others, and isn't afraid to be a courtroom thriller that even Aaron Sorkin would applaud. It's a bit of a shame that Nolan doesn't have more faith in his audience and always ends regurgitating what might seem a bit complex for the unfocused into a few sentences. I'd certainly have liked it if he'd pushed the line about the responsibility of scientists more and generally gone more in depth with the main character himself, but those are just small things. I was entertained by Oppenheimer for the entire three hours, whether Nolan was playing with image, sound, pacing and genres, or sticking to more traditional storytelling techniques, and just spicing them heavily with his audiovisual mastery.

I don't really get the blockbusters this year, I admit that, but with Mission: Impossible I was sure it just had to work out. Well, it didn't. I had that fundamental problem from the very beginning. The story looks like out of movies that were made twenty years ago. The whole plot with the artificial intelligence that knows everything and can predict everything reminded me of Eagle Eyes in its better moments, and Next with Nicolas Cage in its worse ones. And as the main villain, he comes across as somewhat out of place and not the least bit scary, which unfortunately also applies to Esai Morales. The plot didn't grab me because it felt sort of old-fashioned. It's as if the script was written by someone who still has a push-button phone, has recently read something about artificial intelligence, and calls his grandchildren when Yahoo crashes, telling them that the internet is down... only there's more to it than that. Aside from crappy bad guys with zero charisma and questionable motivations, there are also the occasional oddly edited action sequences, which are often unnecessarily long on top of that. The chemistry between Tom Cruise and Hayley Atwell is virtually non-existent, and the film literally doesn't bother to work with emotion, stopping to let the characters and the audience enjoy and savour even the very major twists. After the bloated fifth and sixth episodes, Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie have simply served up some damn good Hollywood craftsmanship, but compared to the previous installments, it runs out of steam quite often and fails to offer any downright memorable scenes. But unfortunately, along with that comes a really stupid story, which leaves me a little afraid of what's to come in the grand finale.