Friday, January 31, 2025

Lost dwellers swooping in

A man, on his way to the hospital where his wife's in labour, is kidnapped inside his own vehicle! With no proper explanation given he's threatened to drive to another city. At gunpoint no less. It's no joke, the kidnapper obviously is a psycho prepared to do anything. Nicolas Cage delivers hits from time to time, but Sympathy for the Devil is more his niche. A cliched and predictable little thriller.

Man is only truly alive when he confronts death

In the Orinoco river, Venezuela, a German submarine destroys a U.K. merchant ship killing its entire crew except for private Murphy. The lone survivor swears revenge against the Germans. He intends to blow the sub to kingdom come and its Nazis within! However the war, WWII, is almost over, so the retaliation must be executed before the peace is declared. Murphy's War is a 1971 movie, by Peter Yates, starring Peter O'Toole, Siân Phillips, Philippe Noiret and Horst Janson.

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Tits is good

Little bit of indie anarchy. Socially awkward and shy Patty (Emily Skeggs) is a huge fan of Psyops, a punk rock band. She's particularly attracted to the lead singer John Q (Kyle Gallner), sends him sexually tinged fan mail and everything. Patty meets a rebellious young man, hits it off with him, obvious to the fact that she's suddenly dating her punk rock crush! These two outcasts of society go on a journey together through America's Midwestern suburbs. A quirky, somewhat satisfying and heartwarming, film by Adam Rehmeier. Ben Stiller in the production department.

Monday, January 27, 2025

Riding into the moonlight

It would have been so much cooler if this French comedy would have been funny. Not that it ain't watchable. It's a gentle and harmless little thing with quite likeable characters and it's a film where John Malkovich speaks French. But that's all.

Evil begets evil

The Northman, by Robert Eggers, is rather wicked. It's great visually, crafted to perfection really. A classic revenge tale, simple and straight-forward, and therein lies the problem. The unique looking piece craves for more engaging storyline.

Tangled chains of agony

Maybe not every suspense movie can be The Usual Suspects or The Silence of the Lambs or Se7en, but this sort of thing is a travesty. Scottish, French and US detectives team up to catch a serial killer. It's embarrassing trash entertainment.  

Thursday, January 23, 2025

At the gates of moral and consequence

Season # 3 of Tunna blå linjen. The show humanizes the police in uniform, portrays the streets and people of Malmö, Sweden, shot similarly you see in documentaries thus it feels like a real, living and breathing thing. The narrative seems so authentic that you are emotionally involved yourself. Easily, one of the best television dramas.

Monday, January 20, 2025

Nothing is a secret for long

Jackal, a hitman for hire, intends to assassinate President Charles de Gaulle. Once the French police finds out of his heinous plan, they - with the help of Scotland Yard - do everything to catch the perceptive killer. It's a cat and mouse game with lots of thrills and deductive reasoning. The Day of the Jackal is a 1973 film, by Fred Zinnemann, starring Edward Fox, Michael Lonsdale and Olca Georges-Picot. A close to a masterpiece political thriller.

Thursday, January 16, 2025

Skeletons in the closet

Everything's a bit askew. What Remains is a film done by a Chinese production team (directed by Ran Huang), it's shot in Finland with a cast of mostly Swedish and Finnish actors (Stellan Skarsgård as the heavyweight) and they all speak English. It seems so unrealistic that it inevitably makes weird nordic noir. Based on the case of Thomas Quick, a Swedish man believed to have been a serial killer who confessed to more than 30 murders while detained in a mental institution. 

Sunrise hymns

A stone-cold rubbish B movie. Quite early you realize you are watching a shipwreck, so bad that you could easily think it's a parody of a thriller. And the end twist is just embarrassingly bad. 

Monday, January 13, 2025

The end of something or the start of something new

A bunch of young adults indulge in playing a Tarot card game. And their readings are coming true, but in ways no one could have imagined. They are getting killed one by one! This bad mojo must be stopped! Tarot by Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg, a few jump scares stretched out enough so you can call it a horror movie.

Lord of the idiots

Twelve episodes in season 2 only, yet the show is shaping beautifully into form. It introduces couple of significant characters, namely Jerry's uncle Leo (Len Lesser) and Jerry's neighbor Newman (Wayne Knight), although the latter makes his first physical appearance in season 3.

Thursday, January 09, 2025

Abandoned to a purposeless existence

Shit. Two vampires rise from their graves after being buried for 200 years! They want to live again and foremost begin a campaign to possess the body of a beautiful princess in Moldavia! Vintage gothic horror by Mario Bava. Released in 1960. Abounds in old-fashioned horror atmosphere with plenty of darkness and shadowy evil.

Death is as unfair as is life

Not much happening in Matt Brown's Freud's Last Session. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and professor C.S. Lewis, Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode respectively, are having a talk. Mainly they debate over the existence of God. Sadly, the film delivers so little.

Wednesday, January 08, 2025

Justice can be a messy business

The batmobile is fucking stolen from a car museum! The actors of the Batman shows and movies, Adam West and Burt Ward, want it back. It's a mystery and to crack it they've to find clues to it by reminiscing their filmography together. Good try, but the sarcasm was left half-finished.

Sharing the same sky

A father and daughter from Scotland are on a holiday in Turkey. Aftersun, by Charlotte Wells, is shot interestingly and it's open to a whole of interpretations, but quite a fucking bore to be honest.

Tuesday, January 07, 2025

No one loves more than one who dies for friends

After getting caught spreading propaganda flyers, Sophie Scholl wasn't scared to say he hated the fucking Adolf Hitler. She was a fearless activist, one of the members of the anti-Nazi resistance movement, The White Rose. Her interrogation, trial and sentence took place Munich in 1943. An unsettling movie, but a touching and inspiring story.

Friday, January 03, 2025

Lizards scared of entropy

Miki Liukkonen (1989-2023) was a Finnish writer and poet. A Finlandia Prize (the most prestigious literature award in Finland) nominee. The gifted and quite paradoxical young lad died by suicide at the age of 33. Heartbreaking. Documentary by Minna von Reiche.

Thursday, January 02, 2025

A blade in the dark

The other main character of the movie makes one stupid decision after another, so that kind of takes the edge away of this otherwise decent thriller. At least it has the premise of becoming a decent thriller. It's flawed and predictable, annoying as shit, but entertaining enough.

Cool under heat

Senegalese cousins Seydou and Moussa want to become African immigrants to pursue their careers as musicians in Europe. They've worked hard to pay for it. They're excited. Should be a fun trip. And once they make it big in the music industry, they become superstars and their entire family is all smiles. The journey through the dangers of the desert, the horrors of detention centers and the perils of the sea  is adventurous alright. An intense, illuminating and heartbreaking rollercoaster of a film.

Once in a lifetime alone

Film critics don't like these. Or they won't admit that they do. The general public doesn't necessarily like them either, but ...