J*A*S*M

A disaster movie from the 1950s about an attack of giant ants that mutated after an atomic bomb test. The story and the characters are laughably naive (which isn’t bad for this type of movie, quite the opposite), but the execution is surprisingly good – A level. You don’t get to enjoy the ants too much, they show up only for a couple of minutes and, to my great surprise, when they do, the don’t look as funny as I expected. Thumbs up, but there’s no doubt that there’s nobody today who would enjoy this move as sci-fi horror (as they did back in 50s).

It’s not horror, it’s not suspense or even a thriller, it’s a drama; a very slow and lengthy drama. Technically, there’s hardly anything to complain about, this is something that will either suit your mood or it won’t. It didn’t suit mine.

Monster’s Ball is incredibly well made, Marc Foster did a great job here. The script is also worth mentioning – it received an Oscar nomination – it surprises several times with interesting twists. On the other hand, Halle Berry, who got an Oscar for her performance, pissed me off basically every minute she was on screen. It seems to me that she didn't breathe much life into her character, and left me with a very artificial impression – the only flaw in the beauty of an otherwise excellent film.

A very nice court thriller. Harrison Ford’s colleague and lover is murdered and, according to the evidence, it seems he killed her. Is he crazy? Or did one of his colleagues framed him? Or is there something else? The film works very smartly with this mystery and until the very last scene, I didn’t know how things would unravel. And they unravel in a very interesting way, with a surprising twist. Strong four stars.

A naive black and white little horror movie with a nice atmosphere, but the silliness and naivete of the protagonists are more than I’m willing to accept.

The Sleeper is a rip-off of the cheap slasher movies of the turn of the 70s and 80s (like Black Christmas) and it looks like a rip-off of the cheap slasher movies of the turn of the 70s and 80s. In other words, this means that despite all efforts, it doesn’t fully feel like a cheap slasher movie of the turn of the 70s and 80s (which, for instance, Ti West managed to do in the sub-genre of occult horror with The House of the Devil). I hope that the difference is clear :-) Otherwise the actors aren’t good, there’s little gore and few murders (and the killer only hits them with a hammer and that’s it), and the killer looks fairly unsettling. About two thirds of the film pissed me off, but I have to say that the last fifteen minutes are really good – if the whole film had that atmosphere, I would have been very satisfied.

Sinfully unexciting. Formally, A Dangerous Method is a film with very little to reproach, and it will probably delight film theorists, but I’d be lying to myself if I gave it a higher rating. I just didn’t like it, I didn’t find it interesting in the least and the idea of having to watch it again is pretty terrifying. Cronenberg’s old perversion and subversiveness have disappeared under a ton of academically precise make-up, and now just bubble peacefully deep beneath the surface. And looking for it is not fun.

I didn’t know anything about this film beforehand (other than an outline of the premise and the good reviews), and I would recommend you the same, so stop reading, now :). Very unique take of the sub-genre of “the protagonist is (maybe) crazy”. Michael Shannon is married to Jessica Chastain (by the way, great performances by both) and has a deaf-mute daughter, he also has apocalyptic visions about a super storm that doesn’t bring anything good. Jeff Nichols (director and screenwriter) chose an interesting approach, leaving the main character to doubt himself. But crazy people usually don’t think they are crazy, which raises a fairly legitimate fear in the viewer that something is really going happen in the end. But don’t expect a catastrophe movie, Take Shelter is mostly an oppressive conversational drama spiced up with an almost horror scene here and there. In the final fifteen minutes I felt a (un)pleasant chill several times, largely due to the excellent soundtrack. The very last scene can debated at length (how much to take it literally or what it symbolises), which also deserves praise. Very satisfied, but this is not something for everyone. 9/10

A purgatory for me, but the fans of Troma will probably be satisfied, even though, when compared to the older Troma stuff (that I’ve watched), Father’s Day comedy is significantly less scatological and vulgar.

Very unsettling, really (the moment bugs start crawling into somebody’s body orifices, the gloves are off!), and atmospheric and disgusting at times, but as a whole, it looks terribly choppy, incoherent and unfocused. Disappointment.