Head over heels

Any publicity is good publicity, but to confess to a murder you didn't commit to gain fame, reckon that's a bit excessive. A poor struggling actress Madeleine Verdier and her manager/lawyer Pauline Mauléon think it's a great idea to boost your career and showcase your talent in a courtroom. Soon others will follow suit. And it's a farce all written.

Repetition is hell

A college history professor Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal) has a doppelgänger. Namely Anthony Claire (Jake Gyllenhaal), an actor. It makes a pretty weird yet curiously entertaining thriller. And there's a complicated ending. Enemy is a 2013 film directed by Denis Villeneuve.

Hard times for wicked dead hearts

Troma Entertainment movies are a different sort of boogie. Return to Return to Nuke 'Em High AKA Volume 2 (2017) is the fifth one in the Nuke 'Em High film series. It's disgusting and atrocious with lots of nudity, inappropriate human fluids and nuclear sludge. Classic exploitation filmmaking by Lloyd Kaufman.

Died a hundred times

Pretty groovy ghost story by Edgar Wright. Eloise is a fashion designer student with a too comfortable and close connection to 1960s London. Her life is drawn into murders in the past. Last Night in Soho is a visually arresting piece, truly bloody interesting, the fun died a little along the way, but an entertaining and unique movie. Brilliant soundtrack to boot.

A cold knife in the middle of the back

An ex-con is framed for an armored car robbery and he sets out to discover who set him up. Close to excellent film noir. A good story, great first thirty minutes, but anticlimactic narrative towards the end. Kansas City Confidential is a 1952 crime film directed by Phil Karlson starring John Payne, Coleen Gray, Neville Brand, Preston Foster, Jack Elam and Lee Van Cleef.

Love is the price

What a poor lad. Got mightily famous, got lost in the fucking success really. Pushed in all directions, projects and side projects and sessions, songs to write, shit to deliver, pretenders and hangers-on everywhere. Had probably a million things buzzin' in his head. Burned himself out. Big time. And couldn't take it anymore. Avicii, an enormously gifted young DJ and musician Tim Bergling from Stockholm, Sweden, chose to end his life in 2018, aged 28.

Beneath burning bridges

Bunch of young activists break into a furniture store to vandalize it to shit. Little do they know that it's guarded by a psychopath security officer who gets all fired up by these intruders. He stalks them, sets deadly traps and, most ridiculously, forces the activists to assemble a shelf even! Something else. This kind of slasher thing can be tasteless and delicious at the same time.

Pale paranoid opioids

Alongside a few other performing artists, Brian Epstein (1934-1967) was the manager of The Beatles. He had no experience of artist management before, but after witnessing them, he became a music entrepreneur in a twinkling of an eye. His story in Midas Man had a good thing going, but the film lost its focus just when something magical should be happening. Pretty outstanding performance by Jacob Fortune-Lloyd though.  

The undead shadows

A secret South Korean science organization created killer dogs as a military experiment to hunt down terrorists. But the project had to be shut down. During transportation to be executed, a pack of these mutant dogs break out and all hell breaks loose! It's kind of cool popcorn horror.

You can't lock up a man's whiskey

Marshall Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne) loses his badge because his kill count is incredibly and worryingly high. He drinks too much as well. And let himself go a little. When some real job - catching nitroglyserine and gun thieves - needs to be done, they recruit him back. Teaming up with Christian missionary Eula Goodnight (Katharine Hepburn) and a Native American Wolf (Richard Romancito), he eats bandits for breakfast.

See the enemy first

A little too far-fetched a story and meandering plot twists. Regardless David Mamet is a masterful storyteller and Spartan (2004) moves forward strong and well. The daughter of a US government official goes missing and special-ops agent Scott (Val Kilmer) is determined to find her. Whatever the cost.

Then one day you will go down

Often said that Frank Oz's The Score has the best three actors of their generations. Namely Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro and Edward Norton. Be as it may, it's a fun bunch to watch, their characters here orchestrate a heist of the Montreal Customs House and a scepter of immeasurable value. The film was released in 2001.

Years of being brushed aside

Packs a different punch. It's not a superhero series, nothing cartoonish about it, it's all about Mafia and gangsters in a gritty and grimy Gotham City. Colin Farrell as the mobster Oswald "Oz" Cobb, nicknamed The Penguin, is absolutely terrific and the noirish tone and violent madness of the episodes is incredibly arresting.  

The gates of hell are open night and day

This doesn't have the feeling of this first one even if it tries to recycle a lot. Gladiator II's computer-generated humbug kills the pleasure and entertainment and, quite frankly, Paul Mescal in the leading role nowhere near replaces Russell Crowe's charisma. The film is an overstuffed blockbuster, but lacks depth.

Decaying vestige

Horrendous piece of garbage. It's sad really that in this day and age this sort of thing is even being released at all. The movie is basically filmed in the back of a truck. It's cheap and talentless insult to all the other so called confined space movies.

Tomorrow is promised to no one

The cast in Clint Eastwood's Absolute Power - Gene Hackman, Clint Eastwood, Ed Harris, Laura Linney, E.G. Marshall, Dennis Haysbert, Richard Jenkins, Scott Glenn - is tough class. Their presence is impressive, downright dazzling. And the story of the President of the United States involved in a ghastly killing, and a burglar witnessing it, is brilliant. If they had paid more attention to the small details and cleaned up the mistakes, the film would be one of the greatest thrillers.

The moment the laughter died

Torture. There's not much to like in Todd Phillips's Joker: Folie à Deux. It's an awfully boring affair. Riding on the coat tails of Joker (2019), they probably thought they could pull off anything, stupid musical bits included, and people would suck it up.

Just another man hunting for a trophy

Essentially Kraven the Hunter is a ridiculous action hero movie. The character Kraven is a fighter of animal justice whose superpowers are courtesy of a some mysterious elixir. He's a gung-ho kind of guy and mercilessly wipes out the people in the poaching business. The movie is a different kind of absurdity with inconsistencies and plotholes, but kind of liked it all the same. Wacky shit.