3DD!3

The most powerful episode yet. Very imaginative. From a screenplay point of view brilliantly thought-through and fine-tuned details with small clues unraveling with every further tale. Hamm is excellent, with a couple of small winks at Mad Men. The pessimistic ending is just right for Christmas.

The unexpectedly brutal and malicious finale raises this IT awareness episode above the standard fare. Pleasantly down-to-earth actors and mainly and with many moments one experiences in real life, in this case taken to hysterical extremes.

Quite entertaining hogwash with a nicely OTT finale. The monsters look really great, the action is easy to follow and is a dream come true for little fans of fantasy who love dragons and dinosaurs. Anderson is a B-movie director to a T and he gets great joy out of making this sort of thing with Mila. It’s interesting to see how they steal things from the "Dark Tower" saga by Stephen King (the parallel worlds, and the Tower that unites them; come on, now - give it a rest!). It’s dumb as anything, Ron Perlman has awful hair, the relationship between the heroine and Tony Jaa is really shaky, but it’s bearable.  It isn’t so much about people anyhow.

A poor, unfaithful adaptation, turning some scenes the other way round to fit into these multi-cultural, irreligious times. The unclearly structured storytelling kills any chance of identifying with the separate characters and their interactions can make sense only to those who read the book. But if you have, you will be disgusted at how lamely done the introduction is. The least interesting part in Boulder is given the most space. And all that’s left of the Trashcan Man, probably the most intriguing character in the book, is a one-dimensional caricature. Some of the characters are absolutely superfluous, because the scenes where they do anything useful have been cut. The last episode is just a space filler; the things that happen in it aren’t in the book at all. A couple of things here are fine, but overall this is a big disappointment. P.S.: Notice that nobody in this movie is wearing either a facemask or a respirator.

Apart from a ten-minute, visually attractive space sequence, this is a regular, earthbound documentary about various ins and outs of Mother Nature. Sometimes what we find out is interesting, sometimes not. The best thing is planet Atlas and then the last Terra which may (or may not) show us what the future looks like on our lump of dirt. Brains in tanks!

With our government’s policies, I probably (luckily) won’t survive until my retirement. It’s just a matter of time until Marla inspires somebody to open a similar professional care service in this country. This cynical, female version of Scarface surfs on the waves of modern trends and, but still comes across subversively. It has a perfect screenplay which doesn’t falter, even at the end, and it manages to squeeze both comedy and a good portion of tension from the ridiculous premise about a "carer" who (completely legally) robs the mother of a white slave trade boss. Rosamund Pike’s acting recital is tastefully seconded by Peter Dinklage. Unexpectedly satisfying.

Season three was the point when I most often found myself dropping off to sleep and, even though the creators are making of generic plots, they are still generic. Some episodes are simply boring. There are still some excellent, humorous parts and the cliffhanger finale is unbelievably alluring, but I’m afraid this is going to be weaker and weaker.

I certainly didn’t expect a slow western about people from Paul Greengrass. The dynamic directing with the shaky camera, so typical for his work, is gone. Hanks’ Captain Kidd spends his time riding from city to city, reading his newspaper to the folks there, taking an orphan girl to her surviving family in Texas that he came across during his travels. There is precisely one action scene in this movie and it works excellently, even though there aren’t many bullets, if you disregard the horse bolting, nothing dramatic happens. But the power of this movie lies in the girl’s final dialog with a friend from school and in the little scenes when the girl sings to herself when grooming the horse. A very unusual western which, while not coming up with anything new, certainly doesn’t offend.

Awesome for a Czech movie. Sirový generally does a good job, but the movie lacks pace. Perhaps he is held back a little by the books it’s based on. The beauty of the Altai, simulating Alaska extremely well, does a lot to redeem the movie, as do the acting performances. Schmitzer is the powerhouse of this and Strach looked less strange when he was young, than in his adulthood.

The cynical, black-humorous lesson in black history, told by a black boy wearing a Sunday best dress. Ethan Hawk approached his performance of abolitionist John Brown with unbelievable verve. A crazy, Bible-bashing fanatic, fighting for the rights of blacks, one of the reasons for the US Civil War is the powerhouse of the entire series, and the only weak places in the series are when he doesn’t happen to be on screen. The Coen-like style is interrupted here and there by fantastically bloody sequences. His rather doubtful interpretations of the Bible make great sense in the light of these bloody slaughters. My name is Captain John Brown! And I am here in the name of the Great Redeemer, the King of Kings, the Man of the Holy Trinity, and I hereby order you to git! Git, in His holy name! Git! For He is on the side of justice and you are on the side of chains!