J*A*S*M

A point for the eager make-up effects and gore, otherwise, it’s very bad in every aspect.

The originality of the vision is certainly worth praise, Anthony Scott Burns delivers a film that you won’t confuse with any other. Come True is about a girl who enrols into some sort of university sleep study. She suffers from night terrors, and those dreams – or nightmares, rather – become the centre of the story. The dream sequences have a great atmosphere, and not only them, the film as a whole has a very unique atmosphere, and I had to struggle a lot with the fact that even the events outside the dreams are weirdly detached from reality. But that’s not a reproach, because in spite of its initial viewer-unfriendliness, the film pulled me in and richly rewarded me. I expected it to be atmospheric, so I put it on in darkness with the headphones on, and I have to say that it made me jump more than once in the second half. I can imagine Come True without the last few minutes, which serve to set up the twist, but I think it can do without them.

If they sped up all the slow-mo and did away with all those pointless formal gimmicks, this film would be less than 90 minutes long and maybe a bit more bearable. Maybe. I’d really love to know what the Russo brothers thought they were doing. Perhaps, after years lost in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they wanted to prove they know everything and picked a premise that is part high-school romance at times, part war satire, part drug-addict drama, and part gangster flick with bank robberies, and they packed everything they could think of into it. There are many moments where that excessive formal indulgence feels unintentionally funny. And unfortunately, I didn’t even dig Tom Holland, whom I generally quite like.

To make something so boring and bland out of an action revenge thriller is almost a miracle.

A soulless safe bet. The film looks beautiful, yes, but that’s something expected from an expensive animation movie from the biggest studio in Hollywood, and not something worth praise. The story, on the other hand, it’s the run-of-the-mill journey through different locations to collect artefacts in order to save the world. The potential magic of the film’s world (inspired in South-East Asia) is killed by the modern language the characters use and the intonation of the dialogues. And if we take fairytales as a genre for kids that should give them valuable life lessons, this film has a very stupid message that will prepare them so badly that they will soon end up dead in a ditch, with a dagger in their back.

I can’t get tuned into the idea of the creators. They took a silly premise about murderous jeans and worked it out as a fairly serious parable about the rotten morality of large corporations. The conflict is so massive that I’m simply unable to enjoy it, even though in terms of the execution and the performances Slaxx is pretty decent.

A nice little island mystery and a very good debut by the McManus brothers. An interesting premise about the mysterious mass deaths of birds and fish, spiced up with a pinch of conspiracy theories and paranoid blather, and a mentally broken protagonist, all leading to a nicely escalated climax through a few creepy horror scenes with a dad. I like this mysterious stuff set in remote places, and I also like what came out of this one. The ending is a bit too literal perhaps, but nicely put together.

Judging this slasher purely in terms of the craftsmanship (and taking into account the kind of films that I give such low rating to), Dreamcatcher deserves at least that one point. Otherwise, though, I have to say that I didn’t like it at all. My interest was lost already at the opening party. The characters are unlikeable, the visuals were unattractive and on top of that the almost two hour runtime is unreasonable. Basically, I didn’t have anything to hold myself to.

An utterly funny and silly b-movie about monsters in an abandoned coal mine. I really must like monster flicks a lot to give this one at least those weak two stars. The scene that best describes it is when the two heroes, paralysed by monster’s venom, spend about five minutes crawling millimetre by millimetre towards a grenade, and the moment they throw that grenade, they get up and, without any signs of physical difficulties, run like hell. The design of the monster is also funny, as well as the stuff the characters sometimes say with very serious faces.

Warning! If you don’t like it when a film gives you something different than what you expected, don’t watch this one expecting a straightforward genre flick. The trailer touted, rather misleadingly, a home invasion horror thriller, spiced up with a time loop, but Lucky is actually an absurd parable of self-development packed with almost Kafkaesque moments. The core premise is about how it is to be a woman in the modern world, but you can find many other motifs. For instance, how to solve problems and adapt to difficulties – if you’re in trouble you will have to rely only on yourself. Or that when someone tells you that you’re lucky, they are usually mistaken. It was fun.