Lima

I hadn't given Boo! rating in 3 and a half years (!!), and now I’m doing it with gusto. Nunsploitation, the naughty stuff the Italians used to regale us with in the 1970s, a genre that, together with Nazisploitation, is one of my only two hated ones (otherwise, at the age of 52, I can swallow anything), a monstrosity that was resurrected by Michael Mohan – I saw an interview with him on YouTube, where he wondered why nobody goes to see his film, since he made it so wonderfully (his own words). Yes, indeed, the 2nd half is proper Nunsploitation splatter as if from the pen of an Italian production, but I'm more annoyed by the ideological framework of the whole thing. No, I have nothing to do with the Church machinery, I'm agnostic, I'm bothered by the opulent property of the Catholic Church, including those lavish cathedrals that were deliberately intended to appeal to the emotions of the commoners, but I resent when nuns are made out to be some kind of Satanic evil. I know a few of these women personally, specifically the nuns in Štěken, and they are honest hard-working ladies who do not in any way parasitize society, women pure in spirit who have chosen their path in life because they are convinced of it deep down. It's utterly stupid to mock that, to make stupid jokes about them, and it's utterly perverse to demean their approach to life, or even to put them in the role of absolute evil, as this film does. I'm a tolerant person, I would even say that nothing is sacred to me and I can make fun of everything, but I have my limits too and this is one of those uncrossable ones (along with other crap like animal violence or holocaust denial for example). Those ladies have my respect.

Some good revenge flick has spawned a child with Slumdog Millionaire and emerged with a confident directorial debut that is anything but a simple action flick for housewives to iron their laundry. Dev Patel also approaches even the usual scenes in his own original way, so that even an ordinary training montage is brimming with ideas that won't soon get stale, and the action sequences themselves, which the film spares, demonstrate imaginative choreography. The cinematography is brimming with over-stylised colours and I liked how the mental processes in the protagonist's face are originally portrayed through cartoonish images. But where the story of the monkey man breaks out of the usual genre pigeonholes is its socially critical feel. India, though beautiful, is actually a harsh country with huge social divides where even within the same neighbourhood you can find luxury and abject poverty side by side, and Patel beautifully highlights and critiques this. There is the luxury of modern skyscrapers and right next to it a neighbourhood of dingy slums with crowded, cramped alleys. But the poor here are not in the position of those who bemoan their status, but as someone who has a rich inner life with faith in their Indian deities. Unexpectedly, you learn more about Indian society from this film than the shallow fairy tale of the aforementioned Millionaire, which also wanted to be a social probe, but stuck with the fairy tale. Sure, not everything Patel does is up to scratch – for instance, the elevator fight to the completely unsuitable accompaniment of Boney M is one of the most bizarre things I've seen in the action genre, and I don't mean that in a good way. But those are minor things, Dev otherwise handled it with flying colours.

I'm not really into Saleka Shyamalan's shallow pop for teenage girls, but who I absolutely enjoyed was the fan-tas-tic Josh Hartnett. Every look he gave, every twitch of his face, was completely telling of the momentary situation he was in. Great performance. And M. Night Shyamalan proves once again what he's been strongest at his entire career. Namely, coming up with a completely original, unorthodox concept that he has always alternately managed to follow through with. And that's true here too. The first half, about the search for an exit from the encirclement, is a great piece of screenwriting, but unfortunately, after the twist in the middle and Lady Raven's involvement in the plot, it stopped being interesting. Firstly because of the haphazard logic and also because Shymalan's daughter simply doesn't have the acting skills to pull this off. But all things considered, after the terrible Glass, when I had already broken my stick over Shyamalan, I actually liked his last two films quite a bit beyond my expectations. It's not a return to the limelight, more like a light echo of his great beginnings.

A detective story of the absolutely classic old-fashioned style, like from Agatha Christie wrote, the kind our grandmothers loved and read before going to bed. At the end, when Maigret gathers the suspects around a table to uncover the villain, I smiled with satisfaction, this is exactly what my old-fashioned soul needed. Commissaire Maigret, or my favourite charismatic Jean Gabin, has swapped the darkened streets of Paris for the countryside, and he is just as good as he was in the previous film. That former was much more dynamic, with more "cinematic" camerawork, whereas the latter goes for explicit dialogue with more sedate shots, which the current younger generation may find unappealing, but I had a great time. It's completely pointless to compare this to Bruno Cremer (I like him too), as many others here do. Each took the role in a completely different way, and in the cinematic Maigret universe, the two complement each other perfectly.

Nowadays, good visual effects are more of a standard, not extraordinary as they were in the 90s, so the initial fascination is no longer there. Twister didn’t have many iconic shots (the flying cow), and when you remember it today, it feels “overdone”, so this film won't impress or surprise you with anything. And neither is the clichéd plot that brings nothing new and where you guess every scene ahead of time. The only saving grace is the central cast, who have a nice chemistry, although I have to say that I'm starting to get tired of Glen Powell's "wannabe sex appeal", and I've only seen him in three films so far. Maybe in his case it wouldn't hurt to try something different.

The worst of the loose trilogy and three levels lower than the previous and excellent Pearl. It's as if Ti West ran out of ideas and Mia Goth in the producer's chair didn't help. It has no pizzazz, not a single memorable scene, no visual ideas. The insane 80s atmosphere is minimally exploited, and if it was at least as dull as the typical slashers of the era, I'd say to myself "good, West pays homage skillfully". Except the gore and murders are almost absent, the whole thing is devoid of wit and suspense, and the director does try to make a point, but it's pulled out of his ass with the whole "cult" thing, and I just shook my head during the shootout by the pool. Kevin Bacon makes a couple of unnecessary appearances, and his role is fades out in a few minutes, and Goth, whose performance in Pearl had me in a trance, bored me here. If only West had at least included the Night Stalker, who is mentioned throughout the film, but no way. It almost feels like West and the crew just wanted to fool around with the camera and conceived the whole thing in a lazily, half-assed and half-throttled manner.

An atmospheric delight. The pacing is murderously slow, but it’s perfect for the bleak story; the vast majority of the film takes place at night, or in the darkness of houses, or - as in, say, The Silence of the Lambs - in the brisk autumn weather with overcast skies. Osgood Perkins works with the picture format in interesting ways and varies it, and it's all complemented wonderfully by the ominous music and shiver-inducing sound design. Admittedly, for the less knowledgeable, it would be a mistake to go into this as a "Nicolas Cage movie", he's only here for about five minutes in total, but his creation is still memorable and wrung to the marrow. Towards the end it was a little too contrived for me, but you can forgive such nits in a film when you're having such a great time. The fact that the main character is a woman then adds an extra layer of tension because you do worry about her. Perkins is a talent, his dad starred in one of the greatest thrillers of all time, and he makes great thrillers, so the cycle has come full circle. I'll continue to watch him, he’s one smart kid.

A pop horror flick that appeals to Generation Z and won't offend the oldies. On the positive side, I'll take the superb and highly talented Cailee Spaeny and the fantastic last half hour, and on the negative side, the simple fact that the other teens are all interchangeable, I didn't find my way to them at all and didn't care if the monster made a sandwich out of them. Yes, it's nice to look at, it has the hallmark of the 70s technique Ridley Scott established in his masterpiece, the atmosphere is nicely depressing and claustrophobic, but for the first two-thirds the film painfully lacks in any kind of tension, because apart from Cailee I - as I've already written - hadn't built up any rapport with the characters and consequently didn't experience the threat of the facehuggers as such at all. Fortunately, there are enough references and allusions to previous episodes, and as a connoisseur I appreciate how "disjointed" it is in that respect: the first third is slowburn old Alien, the second the warlike Aliens, and the last one is a return to the first one, with Fede Álvarez literally quoting it. So yeah, I actually had a decent time, and since Álvarez unloaded a few scenes I hadn’t seen in this genre before, I give the film four spits of acid.

An embarrassing demonstration that this franchise is exhausted and has nowhere to go. If it was the same genre-bending in atmosphere and overall approach as, say, 10 Cloverfield Lane, I would be very satisfied and it would make sense to me. This, however, is a variation of things already seen many times, and moreover, from the first film onwards, with the feeling that the whole thing doesn’t make sense, because sometimes the aliens react to, for example, the imperceptible sound of a shirt being torn, and other times the main characters produce much more significant sound stimuli. The whole premise just stands on feet of clay. I appreciate that the film isn't trying to be some sort of War of the Worlds where space creatures are mowing people down by the hundreds, and rather there's a focus on two people who are just trying to survive and can't somehow actively defend themselves, but that can be told in one film, there’s no need to use the same teabag three times. And the cat here is just sci-fi within sci-fi, this territorial animal that always looks down on humans acts like a dog, walks beside you without a leash and returns to its owner like a hunting dog. Nonsense.

A pretty average giallo, of which there were dozens a year in Italy in the 70s, until it resembled a treadmill. It's almost cringe-worthy in places, with the opening scene alone killing the whole thing, with the witnesses looking impassively on the elevator at the brutally slashed girl and commenting in an unexcited voice, as if they're just discussing what's on discount at the supermarket. It doesn’t bother much with logic either, but that's what I'm used to with giallo films, even the king of the genre Dario Argento could tell a story in that regard. But at least he could conjure up nice visual compositions and his murders were stylish, whereas here there is nothing visually sexy and the murders are lackluster. Only Edwige Fenech, one of the biggest stars of Italian cinema in the first half of the 1970s, adds a punch of some class, and it's a pleasure to see George Hilton reunited with her after a year. That's what I call an ideal couple. Especially for Fenech, her nipples, which she is not afraid to display here, and the witty pair of investigators, I give a weak 3 stabs with a scalpel.