Othello

Excuse me, entrusting the music to one-trick pony Toppinen was whose idea now? Worse, it only appears about three times in the film, so it successfully disrupted my meditation to the roar of water walls, the crack of bushes, and the crashing of waves, which is unforgivable. But the Russian opening, with the cars being pulled from the bottom of Lake Baikal by short-tempered drivers, is again and again Life Imitates Art Scenic Depictions of Slavic Life. You can't make up a frozen wet Mongol with a Titanic T-shirt who just drowned his car in a lake.

Rambo could actually choose between two genres. Either following in the footsteps of the first installment, it could have been a drama about war trauma or the godless action carnage of an unbreakable machine along the lines of all the other installments. Except it doesn't have a second option because of the protagonist's limitations, and it's too stupid for the first one. Because of the protagonist's limitations. Sylvester Stallone is one of Hollywood's most annoying stars. His incessant need for self-presentation, dabbling in scripting and production, grandiose declarations and the gloriola of his own supposed wise old man's modesty twisted the entirety of Rambo: Last Blood into a very agonizingly twisted corpse that is incapable of meeting even the simplest expectations of an action movie. The first twenty minutes are a celebration of honest work, in which we watch a sweaty Stallone exercise a horse, a sweaty Stallone hammer a nail, a sweaty Stallone spin some wheels, or a sweaty Stallone forge an iron bar. There are no action scenes in the film, just a bunch of shots of the protagonist hitting someone with a hammer or a knife. The final confusion, where we watch fifty people casually walking down identical corridors and randomly falling into some traps, is the most disturbing film finale of the year. Most importantly, please make this 'old-school and honest' spectacle all animated next time. Who's supposed to watch those digital flames and funny pools of blood?

"Live. Love. Submit." I called Interstellar a manifesto of humility; Ad Astra is a manifesto of its own insignificance. Those who say the film is about nothing are right.

A forgotten remake of a forgotten (but much-appreciated) French masterpiece that successfully stormed American club theaters in the 1980s. A seemingly traditional romantic soft drink that puts an unlikely couple against a backdrop of funny wedding traditions and family reunions, it benefits in particular from Schumacher's sensitivity to the characters, good dialogue, an emphasis on 80s hedonism, transience, its permissiveness, and therefore the possibility of constant new beginnings, demonstrated by the senior weddings where half the film takes place. The devil is in the details, and Schumacher knew it from the start. The film is at its strongest in its various digressions, brief snatched moments, and off-the-cuff conversations. This makes it possible to enjoy the romance of even such unlikable people as Ted Danson and Isabella Rossellini.

Despite a perfect start, as the film introduces us to the wild world of Southern California beaches inherited by the offspring of hippies, it eventually switches gears to a Goonies-esque coming-of-age story about grown-up kids, in which producer Richard Donner tries to squeeze every last dime out of his success. A storyline about a teenage boy's vampire initiation in an overwhelming new setting and a storyline where funny boy maniacs trying to beat vampire dad with comic books beat each other to a bloody pulp, and you're sorry, because if these were two normal standalone movies, maybe they could be friends.

[comment written in between writing love poetry about Ally Sheedy] Schumacher here captures the brief specific period between graduation and the moment when adulthood suddenly hits with all its force. All in all, he manages to coordinate 7 characters and thus 7 plots, which are mostly not about taking stock of lost youth, but about catching up with its last rests, and therefore logically doomed to failure. On the basis of this, the protagonists then voluntarily close the freest chapter of their lives and plunge into the whirlwind of adulthood. While the ending tries to sound like a happy ending, it is in fact a sad farewell to what the protagonists were. They are not particularly looking forward to what lies ahead, but they are resigned to it. Which is the first important step towards becoming an adult. A necessary comment about the fantastic actors and well-written dialogue. The film oozes incredible chemistry between the director and the crew.

Just like Warriors or Police Academy, D.C. Cab also speaks in particular to the amazing multi(sub)cultural nature of the low-rise boiler rooms in big American cities in the 70s and 80s, making for a beautiful picture of the brokenness and mutual respect of the street people in contrast to the stodgy small-towners and white people who are constantly being made an example of.

A cleverly hidden emancipatory queer film. Unfortunately it's as howling as a gypsy funeral and buried under tons of small-town props from the late 70s and early 80s. I know it's all deliberately part of the concept, but when something stirs up heavy animosity in you, even the sacred hairspray won't help.

Hey wait a minute, I was the one who came up with the Bad Lieutenant comparison. Oh, well. Anyway, it's surprising that despite how disgusting and disillusioning the portrayal of conditions in Croatia is here, for me this is the first film from the former Yugoslavia where the characters don't call each other ethnic epithets. PS: well, actually, no – everyone there is picking on the Arab. But we were really close this time, believe me.

The short horror episodes and the sensible monsters are cute in places, though Muschetti has been proving since his debut that he can't even brush his teeth without CGI. But it utterly fails on that hometown flashback level, where unresolved childhood traumas and a sense of undivided camaraderie return. And the film is panicky about this, so we go through one flashback after another, constantly naming what it's supposed to feel like, with the central five actors ripping their shirts off and one feeling like he's sitting in the front row at the National Theater. The few themes that go nowhere (Beverly's husband, the murdering Bowers), the overwhelming amount of footage, the inability to link the five protagonists into a coherent whole so that they each carry one unchanging type of character, and half the scenes have new information placed before them and we all immediately know what each of them is obliged to say to it – all evidence that there was some painstaking back and forth between the writers and the big-shot director who managed to get it to this point. And I believe (and the presence of cameos by Peter Bogdanovich or Xavier Dolan) that Muschetti was confident here in making a giant piece of filmmaking. I won't lie, somewhere past the halfway point I had a panic attack that it might never end.