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It’s no surprise this film has been included in The Shockproof Festival program. The Czech Monty Python? Bollocks! A post-normalisation farce, with humour on the level of TV variety shows of the time. It wants to be so wild, so crazy and dada that it's just ridiculous and exhausting. And you will love Felix Slováček. PS: I felt sorry for the talented Laďka Kozderková and that chubby little pig.

Totally unworthy of Tom Cruise's star power. Well, yeah, there's a shortage of good original writers in A-list Hollywood productions, or there's no interest in them, so they recycle and reboot to the point of madness to create new film universes. Marvel has theirs, DC Comics has theirs, and starting with this film, Universal has theirs, with the starkly original Dark Universe title that seeks to revive the iconic monsters of the 1930s and 40s horror franchises. But the first runner they sent was a lazy bum who would have lost a 100-meter race to a turtle. This is a fairly routine, formulaic, almost B-movie 100 minutes. Well, let's say that the first 40 minutes or so follow in the footsteps of a mediocre adventure flick with a protagonist and a cute female scientist by his side, with some nice location changes and Cruise talking for his life, culminating in an excellent airplane scene in weightlessness. But with the arrival of Dr. Jekyll (and Mr. Hyde – for the less astute), the film becomes regular crap, throwing in one B-movie cliché after another, with the set never leaving the doctor's office and the dull backdrop of the London catacombs, all drowned in darkness to make it easier to render the CGI. At the end, there is no door, but a gate open for the next sequel and I will definitely not be there anymore. I've always considered Cruise to be a 100% pro who chooses his roles carefully, but he stepped in some serious shit here. Yet he is the only good thing about the whole film, he plays with such commitment that it makes me wish I had as much verve as him at 55. But the positives end there and the overseas reviews really didn't lie this time. This is truly one of the worst films Cruise has left his signature on.

This is for me by far the most interesting origin story that DC Comics, and in fact all of the Marvel comics combined, have done to date. You can see that it was made by a woman, so the emphasis is not on CGI, but on the story and it works perfectly. The juxtaposition of wide-eyed Diana vs a new, uncharted world works great and brings a lot of funny situations (the whole cinema was laughing), the setting of the story in World War I is original and unorthodox in comics, and the CGI orgy at the end is easy to digest. Plus it has a strong anti-war appeal, so another thumbs up. And Gal Gadot? As of today, she’s my new heroine. Irresistible in her righteous anger, honest with her astonished surroundings, and not only charming but – how to say – emancipated in the right way, girls must love this.

An artistic statement that is not as thought-provoking as The Last Temptation of Christ, yet it is a beautiful piece of filmmaking, thoughtful, with first-class visual compositions. My relationship with this film is ambivalent. The main characters – the Christian priests – didn’t have my sympathy because they were spreading the gospel in a culturally different country where no one asked them to (and where Buddhism was strongly rooted) and at the cost of immeasurable suffering for the common folk, bleeding and dying, but at the same time, this account of Scorsese as a deeply religious man is so honest that you have to admire it, even if you might be ideologically inclined in a different direction. Scorsese wanted more, to show that the people of the distant past deeply believed in symbols and that strongly rooted beliefs cannot be broken, no matter how hard the hostile environment tries. Everyone believes in something. Some believe in the power of nature, some in the power of family, others in the power of money, and Scorsese and other Christians in the power of the Christian God. And I, an ordinary person and a mere atheist, have no right to deny and question this belief. Although I will still side with Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson) and prefer the aforementioned The Last Temptation of Christ, which was deeper. PS: Garfield was brilliant. I was already intrigued by him already in The Social Network and I knew we would hear a lot about this guy.

It’s worse than Prometheus and the least interesting film in the entire saga. While the much-criticized Prometheus somehow matures into a better experience with repeated viewings, Covenant is an overripe and completely squeezed lemon. The mythology built around the most famous space killer is not interesting and the result is like a mediocre movie by a mediocre director, which takes place half of the time at night, in darkness, in dim light (Prometheus was much, much more visually engaging and colourful in this respect) and you won’t find any sign of Scott’s visual bravado. The crown is put on by the WTF mutual welcoming of the android and the newly hatched alien, which is like a cut from a Zucker brothers parody. What was that, dear producers? Please let Alien be a milestone in film history where it belongs and don't milk it like a cash cow, the poor thing is already barely hanging on.

I divide my admiration for The Beatles into two stages: before and after “Revolver”. I always condescendingly ignored the first stage, I took it as a time of catchy songs like the carefree "she loves you, yeeee, yeeee, yeeee... ", which I would listen to on the radio but never go back. But starting with “Revolver”, when the Beatles were almost determined to quit touring (which they literally called "the circus that has nothing to do with music"), because they couldn't hear their own words in the roar of the 60,000-strong crowds, let alone the instruments, I consider this phase of their career to be the best and most progressive rock music has ever produced. The Beatles soaked up musical influences like a sponge, starting with basic rock 'n' roll (especially in the beginning), through symphonic music to Indian elements with sitar sounds. They were the first to bring the sound of guitar distortion to the music world, so some of their songs are considered the first hard rock songs ever. On the aforementioned “Revolver”, they brought a bold fusion with Indian music in the song “Tomorrow Never Knows” with a drum rhythm never heard before in rock music. Then their musical genius, when they quit touring for good and devoted themselves purely to studio work, was like a treadmill. It's no wonder that the albums “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band”, “Abbey Road” and especially my most beloved “The White Album” (the elements, genres and bold musical experiments this two-album set contains is something incredible) are all in the top twenty best rock albums of all time in regular music critics' polls. “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band”, for example, is a triumph of music production (George Martin was a genius!), with all its sound gimmicks, tapes played backwards, loops, use of symphonic music, etc. etc. Howard's film doesn't deal with this creative phase, it only presents them before the breakthrough “Revolver”, showing that the worldwide Beatlesmania in the first half of the 60s was something unprecedented, which no other musical band has ever managed to repeat. As one famous music journalist said, The Beatles rid us of boredom forever. They were something completely new. Until then, only individual singers like Elvis Presley and Sinatra accompanied by an anonymous orchestra ruled, but the cheeky lads from Liverpool came along and demolished all the established pop culture orders to the ground. They were also fed by the times – the beginning of social changes in the 60s, the baby boom, when teenagers looked for someone they could identify with (who else but boys with rebel hairstyles, right), and in this enormous social brew (the end of the 50s innocence and naivety) The Beatles were one of the most prominent flag bearers. You can love Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Metallica and others, but no one can deny that these four guys from Liverpool are the biggest influence on modern rock.

China playing Hollywood, but the stupid Hollywood. The production values are like from Asylum, the only difference is that you can see the huge budget. Thanks to the People's Republic of China for an enriching experience, I watched it on a Huawei monitor, thinking about the Silk Road and mentally summarizing the text of the letter to Ovčáček, in which I packed the Blu-ray for Miloš to enjoy as well.

There are fewer boring fights, the female element has been strengthened (the protagonist is, of course, a sensible scientist, without whom the whole of Japan would be in ruins) and, above all, the effects improved to such an extent that it’s almost unbelievable, given the one-year gap. Some of the effects and fiery attractions during the Gamera plasma whipping were admirably beautiful, just pull them up and put them as a background on your monitor :o)

The film brings nothing new, revelatory, different than what Godzilla, or Rodan, or Varan have done 22 times before in their spin-offs. But complaining about it’s as useless as complaining that 90% of all Shaw-Brothers fights are also one-note. You have to take it as it is, as its own unique subgenre that has its own rules and deviating from them is not desirable in conservative Japan. In a cursory comparison I have to say that it has much worse effects than its contemporary Godzilla, the budget was probably lower, you can see that Gamera doesn't have such a big name as an overgrown lizard after all. Writing about the plot is pointless, it's like discussing a soap opera. In the end, the door is clearly open for two more sequels, with the same filmmaking team.

Beauty. An absolute beauty, packed with content in all 3 parts. Full of period footage, examples of propaganda films, whether they were feature films or from Walt Disney, full of examples of posters of the time (for films, or pin-ups with girls for soldiers), examples of soldiers' backgrounds on the battlefields, or TV sketches promoting "true values" and inviting young men into the army and women across generations into the service of the factories where weapons were made. The whole thing is brilliantly structured, from mentions of the military service of Hollywood stars (e.g. Clark Gable as a combat instructor, or James Stewart as a bomber pilot), to examples of the monster projects of the studios that roused the nation with their films. And most importantly – it's all free of pathos, even if the material would suggest it. I recommend it to everyone, currently available on the archive of Czech Television.