Goldbeater

Ocean’s Eight is a worn-out and plagiaristic female-version of Ocean’s Eleven, in which every attempt at humour... and, in fact, every attempt at anything ends in cringing. Debbie and her partners-in-crime can shake hands with Paul Feig's Ghostbusters reboot and share the top spot of the laziest cashgrabs of recent years.

Rituals is very decent 1970s testosterone-fuelled survival-movie about a group of doctors whose fishing trip in the wilderness descends into bickering with one another and then they realize there’s an unwelcome saboteur around. A comparison with the more well-known Deliverance is not entirely groundless, Rituals is, however, more in the vein of a horror movie. The wilderness far from civilization provides the movie with a very credible atmosphere of total seclusion and the growing despair and exhaustion of the characters as every minute goes by is utterly believable (and draws you in). Although it is a bit clichéd for its genre, it is still a very respectable movie, which with its mood and suspense resonated with me.

The central storyline has been used through the copy paper many times, and some plot points, such as the actions and motivations of the main villain, seem completely random and written entirely to anger movie-goers. Still, when you watch the awkward out-of-place characters of Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams trying to fulfill their dreams, and Pierce Brosnan’s futile attempt at a Nordic accent, the whole outsider-pop thing has to soften your heart to some extent. This movie is an undemanding no-brainer and at the same time an alright easy-to-follow musical fluff, nothing more, nothing less.

If, during a snow-covered and frosty winter evening, you feel like you’d like to watch a thriller with a suitable atmosphere, go for anything except The Snowman. Watching completely unlikable heroes for two hours groping their way along the killer's trail in the midst of such a lacking plot would still be bearable if The Snowman did not have a scattered and incomprehensible storyline - the characters emerge and disappear again, confusing the audience, although despite the frankly erratic investigation it does not mean you could not have already figured out who the killer was from the start. Then there’s the ending, which is so chaotically edited you can’t possibly know what the hell is going on. It's hard to say where it all went so wrong. Tomas Alfredson, a once-promising director, probably got buried in the snow sometime during the past few years.

Netflix once again proves it has a good nose for a "true crime" story worthy of adaptation. The very topic of Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel is an extremely tense and most of the time very chilling series. However, this time the great problem of modern television serials is already clearly evident when the selected footage and content is barely enough to really fill half of the series, and it's stretched to four hour-long episodes. I myself felt coming up with perfectly logical questions worth immediate answering after an hour into watching it but the show took its sweet time and stretched out the answers over the following episodes. In other words, the whole mystery could have been solved quicker with a feature-length documentary, or maximum a two-part series, and the audience would not have missed anything. Unfortunately, Netflix needed to create more content, so here we have a documentary that was dragged out more than it should have been, and it's quite a shame.

I really liked the elaborate design, the well-chosen cast, and the whole leading of the original story from The Haunting in another direction. I can imagine Mike Flanagan coming to the Netflix people with "I have a great idea for a three-part miniseries for you," and they said "You're right, that's a really great idea, but you'll actually do ten episodes.", and that's the stumbling block here. The plot of The Haunting of Hill House is so stretched out, that it is filled with fluff and flashback clichés just to get to the tenth installment. I have to say that after the climax, which is the 5th episode (with the familiar face of Russ Tamblyn), I had quite a problem watching the remaining parts. For a series that takes place over a very short period of time and everything being very much predictable from the start, and really you're just waiting for it to fill in the details, the character’s motivation and watch some scary scenes here and there, the overall pacing is inexcusably stretched beyond credibility. After the hours you have put in and can never get back, the final part hits you with eye-watering sunshine that makes your head spin. It looked nice but was just way too long.

In a way, this movie was actually a phenomenon. After watching it for an hour and a half, a handful of absolutely, yes absolutely extraordinary characters are involved in such a banal and thin plot that it shouldn't really be called a plot at all, yet this is one of those movies that will stay with you for a long time, and you will remember how hard you laughed. Jon Heder in the title role is out of this world!

A perfectly shot silent movie. Timeless. Victor Sjöström manages to bring to life tangible intrusions of natural elements into an already rather inhospitable environment, and this creates a melancholic mood underlining the frustration of the main character. Lillian Gish is quite rightly regarded as a legend of silent movies, whose acting lifts the whole work to a more-than convincing performance for the audience.

Videoman handles the theme, various details and the credibility of the characters and their lines extremely well. It follows the story of a man who has been lost in the world of VHS for many years. His struggles with alienation, loneliness, and his own ego are a strong concept in its own right. However, unfortunately, they also try for a kind of "Giallo'' stylized plot, which I didn't buy, as I found it severely misleading. If it was just a chamber play about people who somehow got lost in their mid-life crisis looking for new ways to find like-minded souls, I would applaud it. Unfortunately, the creators had a different vision to me, so it is a fan-made mess that should entertain you, and maybe seem a little touching, but ultimately will be a disappointing watch with hidden ambitions remaining unrealized.

From the depressing and disturbingly suspenseful score to perhaps the most legendary and iconic head explosion effect scene in movie history, this classic horror movie covers a lot of ground. David Cronenberg, with a seemingly cold distance, lays out a twist-filled battle between two secret organizations, with a naive infiltrator in the middle of it all, who is sucked into a strange world and manipulated just like the audience itself. On first viewing, I had a bit of a problem with the slow pace of the movie, but on second viewing I was taken aback, I loved every single shot, the Cronenberg style of "body horror" plus all those practical effects managed to put a smile on my face.