Goldbeater

It doesn't beat the originality and the villain of the first one, but it does beat the sterile and uninspired second one. The Equalizer thankfully didn't end up like, say, Taken, and with the third film, the duo Washington-Fuqua made a worthy finale, or let McCall age with honor and in the beautiful Amalfi setting. Last Chapter is surprisingly less action-packed than the previous installments and shapes the mix of the fragile family atmosphere of a small town that has its own specific spiritual charge vs. extreme violence and gore quite adequately, something Fuqua is unafraid of and knows how to handle pretty well. Nothing beats the opening scene, and no other passage even comes close, but as a whole the third Equalizer is watchable. Denzel is no longer an invincible killer, but a vulnerable older man, plagued by the demons of his past, and every now and then he kicks someone's ass and does what's right along the way through life. Exactly between 3-4.

Investigative journalistic dramas are usually very compelling in their procedure and revelations, especially when the viewer has no precise idea about the subject of the film and discovers the facts together with the characters. But this is not the case with When She Said, where a viewer normally interested in the film industry and current events will know very well what is at the heart of the scandal and how the whole affair ended. And 129 minutes is really an unreasonable runtime for a film that plays with exposed cards. With 40 minutes to go, I thought it was time to call it quits.

While Øvredal's Troll Hunter dealt with similar mythology in an inventive, imaginative and humorous way, here the filmmakers just followed the beaten path of typical clichés of films about giant monsters à la King Kong, half-heartedly and without the necessary "wow effect" that would at least somehow cover all the predictability and unoriginality.

A mere average among musical biopics. It’s classically sleek with a structure that has been tried hundreds of times and a very eager performance by Naomi Ackie at its centre, but she doesn't really sing what we hear in the film with her voice. The characters we follow over a span of years to decades don't age, nor do they seem drug-addled, though realistically they should, and the whole thing drags like glucose syrup. It may satisfy die-hard Whitney Houston fans, but otherwise it's more of a backdrop to do the ironing a Sunday afternoon.

I told myself that if there are flying piranhas, I'll be satisfied. There were flying pike, so I’m partially satisfied. Immediately after the screening I had sarcastic remarks like "the most expensive screensaver of all time", but I would be doing Cameron a disservice. The second Avatar is truly a visual spectacle and an incredibly beautiful and well-designed one at that must be seen in the cinema. The 3D works. In short, the technical aspect of the film lived up to the expectations built up over 13 years. What falls short of expectations is the script, which is the weakest aspect of the film, being predictable, simple and literally and figuratively built on water. It constantly relies on the characters to behave irresponsibly at any given moment in order for the plot to move anywhere. It gets absurd at times. Some characters are captured and freed so many times that the script forces one of them to gloss over it towards the end. And there is much worse nonsense. In other words, the second Avatar works well as an “experience”, but worse as a “film”. I'm willing to forgive Cameron for this one, but if he doesn't work on the script and prepare some surprises in the next installment, I won't forgive him so much again.

I have a bit of a soft spot for these Alien knockoffs, but it's rare that a film lives up to its expectations. Creature takes the cheap route of Inseminoid, which is to say that when there is no budget for a space monster to run rampant in the film, possessed crew members must run rampant instead (which is something that Ridley Scott, ironically, did in Prometheus, confirming that even he himself has no idea how to actually follow up, or at least successfully rip off, Alien). Making a solid Alien rip-off simply wasn't and isn't fun, so only DeepStar Six, Leviathan and Forbidden World remain on the imaginary podium.

I find it a bit sad and perhaps unfair that audiences in recent years have given more favorable to horror films that subvert, satirise and mock genre tropes, rather than to some of the attempted serious and atmospheric horror films of the traditional cut, which at best end up with a 58% rating, but at the same time it cannot be denied that Barbarian works well in its subversion and surprise.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is a nice parody of musical biopics about a man who spent his career making musical parodies, but I'd probably be reluctant to recommend it to anyone who isn't at least partially familiar with Al's work. And for those familiar, it may not be as funny as many would expect in advance, but despite a few deaf spots it offers a good portion of entertainment and some very good cameo roles.

Steven Spielberg is back to what he does best: a sensitively told, character-driven family drama about the magic of discovering something magical, here personified by cinema itself. This two-and-a-half-hour film manages to be almost perfectly engrossing and absorbing, yet it has two creative decisions that leave me wondering. For one thing, I don't understand why the lead actor had to wear dark contact lenses for the entire film, it made his eyes look as dead as those of the shark in Jaws and I think it sabotaged an otherwise very eager performance by the young Gabriel LaBelle. And then the idea (spoiler) that a pompous anti-Semitic bullying asshole would, by the magic of the movie medium, go to his victim and not only apologise, but have an emotional breakdown over his own emptiness – the most naive and nauseating thing I've seen at the cinema this year. These two things are all the more infuriating because they could have been easily avoided. However, despite those reservations, I was satisfied, and especially in the short scenes, when veterans Judd Hirsch and David Lynch are given space and well-written roles, I had a contented smile on my face.

I can see why this particular story was intended to be the conclusion of the entire miniseries. Although the horror element is very stale and wouldn't have been enough on its own, the eighth installment works very well in the portrayal of normal, one-dimensional characters played by well-chosen actors. It's more of a dark relationship drama than a horror movie (and some of the users here can't stomach that – a couple of the reviews on this episode made me downright nauseous), but as an ending to an entire anthology, it's very thought-provoking, functional and with a very human message.