JaydoDre

This is a movie that is very hard to rate with a specific number of stars.

On the one hand, this was the prettiest most colorful movie-length commercial I have ever seen. From the colorful neon-filled night scenes to fiery inferno's to gorgeous sunny scenes with the use of gold and white, it was as gorgeous as the trailer promised. I wished I saw this in a movie theater rather than at home. And by the end of the movie, there was the Fiji water, the new Audi and, of course the bullet train itself, so I wasn't even sure which awesome product I was supposed to concentrate on.

On the other hand, this was the dumbest high-budget film I have ever seen. The plot would forget what it promised a mere couples of minutes ago. It's like the screenplay was written by a 13 year old, who's off his ADHD medication. By the end of the film, I couldn't stop laughing at what I was seeing.

Of course, Brad Pit is Brad Pit, so it is hard not to recommend his scenes, but when it comes to all other scenes, my recommendation is to put on some rock music in the background, take an edible and just watch all the pretty colors.

One's ability to enjoy this film will be tied to one's expectations of it. The first film was a visual spectacle, with good performances and a simple, and at times silly, screenplay. The trailer for this movie promises more of that and that is exactly what the movie delivers - over 3 hours of excellent visual candy in a bed of Cameron's environmentalist misanthropist propaganda.

The story is fairly simple, but its primary function is to bring us into a new pretty environment. As the subtitle of the movie suggests, most of the story plays out in a water world, which brings with it a whole new bunch of things for visual artists to show off.

While the story is generally fine, I must mention one thing about the overall theme of the film. In our modern times, there is a tendency in the more politically active circles to berate and thereby alienate members of the public who don't follow the same beliefs. In that light, the anti-human message presented by Avatar to the audience is curious.

In the first film, the humans were squarely the bad guys, as they were destroying and killing because of some exotic material they were mining. In the new Avatar, the story makes it clear that humans are fighting for survival. Along with a few other events, this made me increasingly side with the humans, but the film very clearly wants to tell you that white man is evil and slaughters them in large numbers, even when the humans are just going about their business. You know, Mr. Cameron, it is a little strange to expect your audience to see your movie but then also tell them how much they suck. I don't care so much. After all, this is just a silly action-adventure cartoon, but I thought I'd point it out.

A few characters who died in the first movie are brought back from the dead through awkwardly shoed in sci-fi magic. I thought the acting in the first film was good, so it makes sense to bring those actors back. I wish there was a less awkward way of doing it.

Avatar: The Way of Water is meant to be seen in 3D on a large screen. Unfortunately, this fact greatly diminishes the movie's value once that thing arrives into your living room, unless you have a massive home cinema installation. If you see it properly and you go in expecting nothing more than cool visuals, you won't be disappointed.

If I hadn't recently watched so many videos on modern film criticism, I probably wouldn't even have noticed the issues in this show, as the main characters and the visual presentation are charming enough to keep your attention away from the flaws. However, once I had become aware of those flaws, I couldn't unsee them.

The main character is perfect at everything she does. She is supposed to be a teenager but she possesses a set of skills to cover several lifetimes.

There's an old issue with poorly written main characters of action movies. Main characters need to be vulnerable. If they are indestructible powerhouses then you can't associate with them or feel any sort of worry for them.

Wednesday is especially indestructible and undefeatable when it comes to men (with 1 or 2 exceptions), many of whom are given the role of either bumbling idiots, traitors or otherwise evil. I don't normally go looking for these social issues in films and shows, but I couldn't not notice it here. I guess this is just the social state of things in Hollywood these days.

However, this attitude actually does fit the show fairly well, since it's a show primarily about teenage girls, written for teenage girls. You know, girl power and all that...

Finally, the story is not that well written. A good story with twists and turns is one where you can look back in the end and see that all the pieces fit together, but with this show, the various episodes are fairly independent. The story serves the scenes rather than the other way around. The writers could've made anyone to turn out to be the main villain in the end. There are a few times where characters just spout exposition at you.

This show is primarily an exercise in style. Cute characters do cute things and everything looks cool and stylish. In my opinion that style hides the lack of quality in content.

First of all, I should say that it is not nearly as abysmal as the critics suggested, but it is still an incredible mess.

At some point the whole affair devolves into a series of colorful scenes that are only marginally connected to one another. The rhythm of the story is completely off.

The most amazing thing is that the ending of the movie assumes a sequel or even a trilogy. How could they have possibly looked at what they had in their hands and thought, "Yeah, there will definitely be a sequel to this"?

The primary thing this movie has going for it is that its visuals are very crisp and colorful. I could definitely see myself rewatching certain scenes from the movie, just for the fun of it. Though it is unclear why there are live-action human faces floating around this world, as this clearly should have been a 100% CGI movie. The film starts in the world of orcs, with everything being CGI, and everything makes sense, but then later you suddenly see real people, clad in plastic armor, and you're sort of pulled out of the movie because of it. Takes some time for your mind to adjust, though mine did adjust eventually.

There are actually a few interesting ideas floating in there somewhere, like for example the fact that the main evil force acts a bit like the plague, rather than the creatures themselves being good or evil, but these ideas aren't explored much and get jumbled up with the rest of the messy screenplay.

The whole thing could be represented by a CGI orc breaking things inside a live-action porcelain store. It's kind of entertaining to watch, I suppose.

Great movie, but there are two issues with it, as far as I can tell.

1. There does not seem to be sufficient introduction to its main plot device of Jumanji, which means that you have to have watched the first movie to understand what's going on. A lot of the themes explored in the sequel also require you to remember what happened in the first movie. I feel like there is an unwritten between movie makers and movie goers that this is not ok. Every movie should be a standalone thing.

2. The last 40 minutes of the film goes downhill. It's like a different team took over the movie and wasn't sure what the first team wanted and didn't have the vision that the first team had. It all just sort of ends, and the interesting themes that were introduced in the first half, don't get a satisfactory resolution in the 2nd half.

Having said that, this movie is still pretty great. I watched it back to back with Red Notice, another Dwayne Johnson vehicle, and the first 5 minutes of Jumanji had more acting talent and interesting material, than the entirety of Red Notice.

One of the main interesting things about the first film is that the 4 main actors were playing against type. In the 2nd film, the story makes them do that twice. They play one set of characters and then switch to a different set half way through the movie. This was so entertaining to watch.

There are a few interesting emotional themes at play. The main theme does unfortunately require the watching of the first movie for full appreciation, but oh well.

Also great to see Danny Glover and Danny DeVito. They are not phoning it in, like so many other old actors nowadays do.

I am surprised that I haven't heard of this sci fi gem before. Hidden in Netflix's depths, amongst other Love Death & Robots episodes, this 15 minute animation is beautiful and to the point. Seemingly inspired by Pitch Black, it took me to a different time and place, where not all media is related to superheroes or modern social issues. One big negative is that this feels like the beginning of a movie that never came. I want to see the rest of it but it's just a short animation. And even this part of the story feels rushed because they had to pack quite a bit of it in such a short amount of time.

I think that vulgar shock humour is divisive at its core and that is the problem we have here. I recall Sausage Party, a filthy comedy from a few years back, had some people laughing on the floor and (most) others utterly hating it. I came to IMDB expecting Good Boys to have a perfect score, and then remembered, "Oh right, this is an immature comedy and it's 2019".

However, unlike Sausage Party, which seemed to have the sole objective of shocking you with gross-out humour, Good Boys is considerably smarter, despite also having a lot of dumb humour. There is a quick line uttered by the kids in this movie: "I am not a feminist. I like women". It's brushed over very quickly and the movie moves on, but it's full of brilliant well-timed little nuggets like this one.

The movie does have a plot of sorts, but not a central plot. It goes from one situation to the other to the other, as the position in which the main characters find themselves gets progressively worse.

Although one can have objections to the type of comedy this is, I don't think you can say that the technical side of things is bad. The acting is just fine (remember, these are 3 kids. 1 kid in a movie is usually annoying enough) and the camera work is too, and, in fact, the latter is used rather creatively a few times.

If you like content like the early Family Guy or Tosh.0 or South Park, then Good Boys should be up your alley. If you cringed at those, you will cringe at this movie too.

What the heck happened? I guess kids took over. That's what happened.

The obvious and brainless dialogue, nonsensical plot points, scenes that exist for no other reason than to exist, and thick exposition read out loud, covered by thick layer of CGI. It all makes me think that this film was constructed in a lab to appeal to kids who don't know any better. I couldn't help but laugh when I saw cartoony drawings of pirate Jack Sparrow as if they were leaflets at the Disney park.

The thing is, I am not sure it works for kids either, because there is metric ton of poorly weaved story beats that a kid would probably not care about. Some plot points appear to require you to have prior knowledge of previous movies, which makes things even more confusing. If you're going to make a movie that appeals only to kids, what's the point of adding complexity.

I don't know what I expected. I guess I expected that Javier Bardem and Johnny Depp are worth something, and they are at times, but the rest of the movie isn't and the two actors cannot save it. Even though Depp is doing his old tired act he's become known for, it's still entertaining at times. Whenever Bardem is on screen, that's when the movie captures your attention. The dialogue doesn't become any smarter, but somehow he is able to sell it well. But then the guy goes away for a while, and everything goes right back to suck kingdom.

This movie is an exceedingly dumb CGI fest and it's not for adults. May I suggest finding a youtube supercut of all the scenes with Bardem in it.

As much as there is a tendency in humans to want to denigrate sequels, this Ice Age sequel still has the Ice Age magic. Sure, it's nowhere near the level of the first movie, but after I watched one of the new Jurassic Park movies just before this one, the air sat heavy on my chest, as that air was filled with mindless artistically bankrupt Hollywood action, and along came Ice Age Collision Course and cleared everything right up. What a delight it was to watch.

The story is kind of dumb and a lot of the dialogue is dumb and the whole thing feels like an episode of a sitcom, but the scene progression still works, the animation is sharp and many of the slapstick jokes still hit their mark. It is also well-acted and just...cheerful, you know? Just...not trying to be Hamlet or a cynical blockbuster, but simply a lowbrow cheerful experience.

The main show here is Malek. This movie is his masterpiece. His energetic antics on stage, his accent, his prosthetic buck teeth and his tragic tension bring Freddie Mercury to life. He is the most interesting thing in this movie, as he should be. The second most interesting thing is everyone else's performance, especially Ben Hardy's, playing Roger Taylor.

The last thing that stands out is the historical polish. The 70's and 80's are faithfully recreated, along with all the Freddie's funky clothes. The flying camera shots of the giant crowd at the Live Aid concert are impressive. This is all somewhat expected, considering the film's high budget.

But that is where the interesting things end, unfortunately. All the other aspects of the film are good, but to me, nothing else stands out enough to justify the standing ovation that this movie seems to be receiving from the public.

The story, in particular, is one big missed opportunity. It would have been interesting to see Freddie's development as a singer in his younger days, perhaps his flight from his country of birth. There is none of that. Once Freddie meets the band, he is already the perfect singer. From then on, it's a steady rise upward and the film ends at the top of Queen's fame. There is drama towards the end, but that drama is touched upon lightly and treated like a nuisance in an otherwise awesome hall of awesomeness.

One of the more interesting historical moments with regard to Queen was the release of the fatalistic song The Show Must Go On right in the middle of the rumours about the singer's health. None of that either. That songs gets played during the credits.

The part of the story about the break-up of the band feels like it's been taken out of a cheesy kids' movie about a teenage band and the dialogue is appropriately cheesy.

In short, this film is about great performances and it is a nice audio-visual treat for those who are interested in the band. Malek's performance is well worth the price of admission. There is, however, little else of note.

In this movie there is a recurring subplot of a typical slasher film being shown at the local movie theater. After certain events of The Blob, a character says that this will cause him to never see another one of these scary movies. This all feels like some meta commentary by the makers on The Blob itself and is just one of the signs that they did not take this movie too seriously. The other sign: the effects in this movie. The practical gore effects are good, but at the same time they are increasingly comical, and at some points look more like slapstick. My partner and I were laughing out loud during every death, and at the way the titular Blob stalked and chased its victims. The creators could not have been unaware of how their effects looked. Even the name of the movie is kind of funny.

The humour of the action, whether international or unintentional, is only underlined by the fact that the rest of this movie is played straight and the quality is alright. Elements established early in the story pay off later on; the acting is alright; the conversations are not the best but not bad for a horror flick; characters are properly established and the central characters have a bit of an arch to them.

Sadly, the movie doesn't go far enough into one or the other direction. It is not purposefully funny enough to be a dark comedy and too funny to be a horror movie, which plants it much closer to the so-bad-that-it's-good territory than to any other.

In short, this movie is kind of awesome. It's a question whether or not the people behind it realize the reasons why it's awesome, but in any case, it's worth watching. The Blob is a good example of horror slapstick.

There are guidelines against stating the score in the body of your review, but given the Imdb's inflexibility, I have to say that Guardians 2 is possibly the most 6.5-star movie I've ever watched.

I remember how I complained about the ending to first Guardians movie having unrealistic physics. Guardians of the Galaxy 2 lets you know right away that it throws the physics out of the window, which frees you from having to worry about pesky things like realism and this creative choice appears to have been right one.

In combination with an overwhelming amount of colourful CG, the flexible physics at times made me feel like I was watching another Shrek animation, and it was not annoying like it should have been.

Compared to the first movie, the sequel turns up the goofiness knob quite a bit, and with it, also the funny knob. This movie is a comedy above anything else and that's where it shines. All you need is fun characters played by interesting actors, just doing their shtick.

Perhaps the most notable thing about the movie is that it doesn't have a strong central storyline. There is a main villain, but he and his plan do not really enter the movie until about half way. Instead, this movie has 4 or 5 stories and themes running through it almost side by side, which is completely fine and does not feel disjointed.

Unfortunately, the film went downhill for me in the second half, as prolonged action sequences were making increasingly less sense and the humour was replaced by conflict and forced drama. Also, if you think about this movie's value in the future, it's hard to ignore the amount of CGI used to make it and how bad it may look to the human eye 10 years from now. The costumes and character design are nice, but they are drowned out by fake explosions and monsters.

In short, this movie is at its strongest in its middle section, when it is having fun and doesn't think too hard about anything. The last third of the movie starts losing momentum and entertainment value.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle has a strong middle part, which is the part where the characters really start interacting with one another and start working off of the good chemistry between them. The writing is mostly good and the actors are good, though this movie is really a Jack Black show. The guy completely steals the show, playing a superficial girl stuck inside a guy's body, which may be a little too silly to some.

The action sequences and the physics throughout the movie do not make a whole lot of sense, but the movie of course always has the excuse that the whole thing is a game and is not supposed to make too much sense.

The weak parts of the film are the beginning and the end, but especially the beginning, where the movie rushes through the introductions without any impact, in order to get to the main part as fast as possible. If you are watching the movie with other people, it may be easy to get distracted and talk during the very beginning and thus miss a few things.

This movie is unlikely to occupy your mind long after you have seen it, but it is still a lot of fun.

Westworld has a lot going for it: the first season features a number of good high-profile actors doing a good job; it features pretty cinematography; and it has a number of story threads that were woven with care, with enough tension built to make you want to keep watching the show in order to reach the resolution of all the introduced mysteries. Was the writing a little bit up its own bum sometimes? Yes, sure, many scenes looked drawn out, with the writers pretending to be artsy and classy without there being much value under the surface. But the show was still cool and interesting.

With our interest peaked, the first season did not answer the main questions, leaving the answers for the second season. The second season then promptly proceeded to completely disappear up its own rear, as the story stopped making sense, both in its broader strokes and also in the individual scenes. Seemingly important moments in the story are handled quickly and awkwardly. The dialogue got increasingly pretentious. The actors are still doing a good job, but you can only do so much with a poor script. It also doesn't help that Anthony Hopkins left the show.

At its core Westworld is supposed to be about cool cowboy robots rising up against the humans. The moment of the uprising should be the pinnacle of excitement. Instead that moment is a drawn out pretentious mess.

Is the quality of the first season sufficient to give this show a recommendation and a respectful sendoff. No, not really. Because the first season left all the tension to be resolved in the second season, it cannot stand on its own. I hope this show will recover.

The story of the Seven Samurai is not a cliché but it is treading an existing type of movie, namely a type of movie in which the story builds to an important event. This event will test several characters, showing how they deal with the said event and with one another. Normally, the formula to such a movie requires the first 80% of the movie to be devoted to showing the backstory of each character who will be present for the final event. This is necessary because you have multiple characters and you need to understand the backstory of each of them as well as the relationships between them in order to understand and fully appreciate their behaviour during the final event. Seven Samurai gives a little bit of an introduction for each character, but not much. Not long after seeing this movie, I have completely forgotten 3 out of the 7 samurai. And I would only be able to describe the characters of 2 out of the 7 people, and only briefly.

It is not a spoiler to say that some of the samurai are not going to make it out alive, but it's hard to care when the characters are so undeveloped.

As for the acting in this movie, it is a matter of taste. The Japanese sometimes have a really expressive line delivery, which is most evident in anime production. This delivery is aided by the fact that the Japanese language, even when spoken at a conversational speed, can easily be made to sound more pressurised than Western languages, with a lot of harsh "zh" and "sh" mushed together for effect. And in addition to that, older movies in general seem to suffer from overenthusiastic acting - a leftover from the theatrical era when it was actually necessary due to the distance between the performers and the viewers.

Perhaps as a result of all 3 of these factors, there is a lot of overacting in this film. Specifically, Toshiro Mifune's character was given artistic license to physical improvisation by the director and Toshiro ran with it all the way to cartoon-land. I felt a physical need to look away during some of the scenes because it just got too weird for me to handle. That is not to say that the acting is bad. It's great but very stylised.

I read that the reason why Toshiro was given the liberty to go nuts is because the director was worried that the movie would otherwise be too quiet and boring. He was sort of right, because when you remove Toshiro's character and his contribution to the themes concerning the position and identity of the peasant class, the film is just a story about a few people coming together and then fighting off an attack. It moves slowly, at almost 3 hours long, and not all of the scenes feel necessary.

The good part is that, despite of it all the shortcomings, the film remains entertaining. The scenes are shot with competence. I am just somewhat surprised to see all the overwhelmingly positive reactions to this film.

I was worried when I noticed that the bird on the shoulder of the animal leader is a Northern Cardinal, visually and internally styled to resemble the Cardinal from the game Angry Birds. My worries were confirmed when I heard the hit song Gangnam Style play almost out of nowhere, as the movie's main characters suddenly started to dance to the said tune. Technically, the story did give characters a reason to do the said short dance when they did it, though in a palpably heavy-handed way. Also technically, all rats animated using modern computer graphics are going to show similarities, but the rat character by the name of Buddy sure does look a lot like the main character of the animated movie Ratatouille. For that matter, all the animal characters resemble the various animals of Dreamworks and Disney films from recent times. This, ladies and gentlemen, sure does feel like a cash-in. Nut Job is a joint venture between South Korean, US and Canadian production companies that shows symptoms of trying hard to capitalise on the western animation market and the pop culture.

This is all particularly unfortunate when you consider that actual work was put into this production. Although the movie certainly has other problems, to be discussed shortly, the film does have a plot, it has a number of highly acclaimed actors that do a relatively good job at portraying their characters (however poorly those characters may have been written), and the animation is not terrible, even if rather bland. There are a few funny moments to experience, even though some jokes fall flat. There are certainly worse things to watch out there, but ultimately this Nut Job is botched (Pa-dum tss?).

In addition to its irritating exploitative nature, Nut Job suffers from poor writing. The general outlines of the story are simple and clear, but the individual scenes become less and less coherent as time goes by, less and less natural. There are many lines of dialogue that seem like were meant to be funny, or at least there is no other discernible purpose for them, like comments on smelly farts, but they aren't in fact funny.

This is a movie that is mildly entertaining and would probably go over well with young kids alive in the year in which the movie was produced, the year in which the musician PSY was still relevant, but it is unfortunate that a movie with so many good actors and such a budget is so average. The cash-in was successful, however. The movie more than made back its investment. I will not however be watching Nut Job 2. I'd have to be nutty to do that....Eh? Eh? Shut this down.

Maybe sometimes you do need to throw subtlety out of the window and just make an honest and unpretentiously dumb movie. You, creators of Absolutely Anything, make an excellent point with your movie there. As I watched it, I often found myself thinking "This is so silly," but then wondering "is that a problem?"

As far as stories for romantic comedies go, this one must have been fished out of the very bottom of the barrel. It exists only as a base for the movie's situational comedy. Half the humour comes from jokes centred around the magic wishes of Simon Pegg's character getting taken too literally. How original... The rest of the humour comes from the level of ridiculousness of the effects of each wish. The humour is therefore not high brow, but the movie is nonetheless funny, with a lot of good timing.

Absolutely Anything feels less like a movie and more like a comedy sketch that has been stretched to movie length and given a budget. That budget is not giant, judging from the level of CGI effects, but big enough to get top billing actors. Simon Pegg does his Simon Pegg shtick with relative ease. Kate Beckinsale is ok, though she doesn't do much beyond providing a pretty female co-lead, who somehow looks 28 at the age of 44...must have been one of the wishes. Both leads are a bit bland. The most interesting additions to the film are Rob Riggle and Sanjeev Bhaskar. They are not funny, but their performances add colour to the movie. Robin Williams plays only a minor role, but considering that this was his last movie, there is extra value there. He isn't given anything particularly funny to say though and does not appear to have been given room to do improvisation.

This movie is harmless. It is a little bland and forgettable, but it is stupid fun.

There was a time when the movies were purer. Today's action films follow the same basic concept as in the past but they cover their genericness with high value effects and good acting. Van Damme movies had no such pretension and Double Impact is a staple of such 90's action movies. It is an exercise in that style, where the heroes jump away from big orange explosions and problems are solved with high kicks, right alongside Beretta pistols.

Double Impact's specific selling features? Two Van Dammes for the price of one, Bolo Yeung (a fierce martial arts master and an awesome looking villain) and the exotic Hong Kong setting. Additionally, the technical side of the film is actually not as bad as the low review scores may makes you believe. The camera work makes sense, the plot more or less makes sense and the acting is acceptable even if not great.

It's a nice "good-bad" film for those who want to breath some culture from that era and eat some popcorn on a rainy night.

In this movie there is a recurring subplot of a typical slasher film being shown at the local movie theater. After certain events of The Blob, a character says that this will cause him to never see another one of these scary movies. This all feels like some meta commentary by the makers on The Blob itself and is just one of the signs that they did not take this movie too seriously. The other sign: the effects in this movie. The practical gore effects are good, but at the same time they are increasingly comical, and at some points look more like slapstick. My partner and I were laughing out loud during every death, and at the way the titular Blob stalked and chased its victims. The creators could not have been unaware of how their effects looked. Even the name of the movie is kind of funny.

The humour of the action, whether international or unintentional, is only underlined by the fact that the rest of this movie is played straight and the quality is alright. Elements established early in the story pay off later on; the acting is alright; the conversations are not the best but not bad for a horror flick; characters are properly established and the central characters have a bit of an arch to them.

Sadly, the movie doesn't go far enough into one or the other direction. It is not purposefully funny enough to be a dark comedy and too funny to be a horror movie, which plants it much closer to the so-bad-that-it's-good territory than to any other.

In short, this movie is kind of awesome. It's a question whether or not the people behind it realize the reasons why it's awesome, but in any case, it's worth watching. The Blob is a good example of horror slapstick.

This film is held up by pillars of style. It is a bag of cool camera shots and ideas for cool scenes (something its sequel would expand upon). On their own, these shots are great, containing a wonderful integration of color themes, shot composition, make up and interesting props. Even the outdated CGI doesn't look too bad, mostly because the digital effects are properly mixed in with practical effects. But the bindings that tie these cool shots together into an actual story are of poor quality and I found myself constantly trying to ignore the annoying nonsense in between the good stuff...in vain.

Here is an example. A monster jumps through the front of a moving subway train and out of the other end, as it tries to run away from Hellboy. Hellboy, however, gets dragged under the said train for a while and then gets left on the ground. However, in the next shot, the monster is standing directly above Hellboy, looking around. This kind of nonsense is non-stop, permeating the movie from beginning to end, and it is very distracting.

Hellboy is one of Ron Pearlman's better roles, despite the fact that his face is under a layer of make-up and his lines mostly consist of monotone gruffs. Jeffrey Tambor's and Doug Jones' characters provide a good colorful counterbalance to the said gruffness of the main character. However, everybody's lackluster dialogue complements the aforementioned flawed storytelling and together they keep this movie below its potential.

I am glad the makers fixed a lot of the problems in the sequel. This first film is still worth watching though, even if only for the charm.

Some time has passed since my viewing of this movie and the first thing that comes to mind, when I think about it, is the scene in which Moana goes to the shoreline of the island where she lives and the first song plays. Watching this scene on a big TV in HD makes your jaw drop, as you are mesmerized by all the pretty colours.

As with many recent Pixar animations, the creators go out of their way to make everything as colourful as possible, to the point that certain neon-lit magical creatures and scenes feel like they were created solely for the purpose of allowing creators the freedom of using extreme colours that you would not otherwise encounter in a realistic setting. This is not a complaint, at least not on its own. The net result is that the movie does look gorgeous.

However, this observation takes the shape of a minor complaint when you take into account just how standard the other aspects of the movie are. At that point, the excessive visuals and style start looking more like a set of jingling keys, distracting the viewer from the fact that the rest of the movie is just ok.

Moana has interesting characters, with Moana herself not being one of them. The demigod Maui's dominating arrogance is a refreshing trait for a main character, his animating tattoos are funny (although this again is more of a visual aspect rather than a character trait), his backstory is interesting and his arch is subtle. The giant crab is fun, even though he is not on screen for long. The acting and dialogue are good, though not groundbreaking.

However, the plot is just a rehash of the same old story: a young character feels the drive to cross a boundary, set by his or her guardians. The young character then disobeys and gets in trouble, but ultimately overcomes, learning about self in the process and usually learning to be more responsible. There is an interesting little twist at the end, which puts Maui's character in an even more interesting light but that's about it.

Moana has no major flaws and it's a pleasant watch from beginning to end, but I do contest the apparent tendency of some people to treat this movie as a God that needs to be worshiped.

Horror movies aren't known for their artistic quality, or common sense...or subtlety. However, this movie has just enough quality to rise above the muddy pool of bad horror movies. It still fails to stay sensible all the way though, but I suppose you can't have it all.

A mysterious body is found and a father-and-son team of medical examiners start uncovering weird things about it. That's the basic story, but the story is really not this movie's strong suit. In fact, as the movie progresses, the events make increasingly less sense. The ending helps explain some of it but not all. The movie tries not to draw attention to the imperfections in the story by simply not addressing certain questions and keeping things a mystery, which is a smart thing that more sci- fi movies should do.

What this movie does quite well is establish and follow through. A number of items and characters are established and all of those scenes are not for nothing because they pay off at some point later on.

The movie scored Brian Cox as one of the lead actors, and he does a very good job at bringing life to this film. The movie invests time into establishing the relationships between him and his son and between his son and the son's girlfriend. It also takes its time to show the characters of the two main leads and the difference between them. This helps the viewer care.

Taking the time to establish its characters and story beats and then following up on the promises made, helps this movie feel alive.

Although this movie can't help itself and starts giving you cheap jump scares, there aren't too many of them, and the movie isn't that gory either (well, autopsies aren't gory to me). The movie relies on suspense and mystery to keep your attention. Because of this, and the medical aspect of it, this movie feels like an episode of X-Files, and just like many of the X-Files episodes, it asks you to not think that hard about everything you see and hear, as you start wondering if the story couldn't have been organised more effectively and with less running time.

The Nice Guys is a pilot episode to a good 90's TV show that never happened. It's also the Thursday evening 90's action movie, which you watch in parts as you flip between the channels on your TV because you can't decide if you want to watch this movie, the show on National Geographic or The Peacekeeper that's just starting.

It is a polished buddy cop action movie with excellent performances from most actors. The little girl who plays the daughter of one of the detectives is adorable. The costumes look good. The camera work is clean, without shaky cam, and the action is appropriately dumb, as it tries to imitate the bad action movies of the 80s and 90s.

However, beyond the basic quality, there is not much to this movie. There is no major depth to any of the characters; there is no central respectable bad guy; the script is not that smart (appropriately of course, as far as 90's action movies go); and there is no big twist. The story is a murder investigation.

I liked the film and I want to see more of these guys. It's time for a good buddy-cop show. But as a one-off, this is somewhat unremarkable.

Suspense and subtlety. These are this movie's main strengths. It's carrying this tray full of glasses slowly and carefully. Everything is carefully constructed as the movie keeps the viewer on top of the story with little hints. There are no loud screams or startling sounds. The movie continues to carry this tray until the end and then...it just drops and smashes everything onto the ground with its comically ridiculous ending. What the heck, movie?!

Although this movie is in many ways a prototype for the modern horror movies, it is in many ways the opposite of those movies, as it is not a horror movie. It is not even a thriller. Instead, it is a mystical psychological drama and it is a very slow- cooking one at that. This can mean that for many who are expecting to get excited, this movie will be quite boring. My girlfriend quit it half way out of boredom, and I understand where she was coming from.

At least we had a few laughs about how bad some of the acting was. The writing for the dialogue was rather poor as well.

This is not a great movie. It is nice to see something that attempts to approach the occult material with subtlety, but it is still poorly acted and not particularly interesting. And as I mentioned, that ending is f- ing horrible.

There are arguably 2 major issues this movie has: the CG and the script.

When the movie started, it opened with a gorgeous African view and I thought to myself, "Well, even if it is not going to be good, it will at least be pretty". Movies set in Africa automatically get extra points just because they are set in a country that is naturally beautiful and atmospheric. However, as the movie continued, almost everything except the actors was computer-generated, including things that did not need to be computer-generated, like trees, or a train. There is a scene where a man is walking his pet crocodile. They do not show the man's face so it would have been easy to hire a trainer with a real crocodile but even this croc was fake.

CG is always going to be an issue when you chose to make a film with animals as active characters, but another such film, The Jungle Book, at least made sure that everything looked impeccable. The same cannot be said for Tarzan, with its fake blurry steam train looking like it came out of an Xbox game. So much CG pulls you right out of the movie.

Poor CG however does not break this movie. The terrible script does. This problem can be roughly divided in 3 parts: the slow first half, the bad exposition and the poor dialogue. The first half of this film has a pacing problem, as it takes its sweet time with setting up the return of Tarzan to the jungle, suffering under the weight of the need to connect the current events to the original story of Tarzan through countless flashbacks, which brings us to the bad exposition. There is so much of it and it is so blunt. Every character's motivation is spelled out, and everything that is not talked about, gets shown in flashbacks. Can't find a clever way to explain what is happening? Just let the character describe it out loud. Film-making! And none of the dialogue is particularly good, nor does it fit well with the action, so all that extra talking really doesn't do this movie any favors. On top of that, there is a scene towards the end in which a character does something that makes no sense within the scope of this story, a final nail in the coffin for this flick.

Perhaps this film could have been saved with good acting. I only watched this movie because it promised Christoph Waltz, and his performance is fine, but there is a scene in which a Belgian officer played by Simon Russell Beale talks to the character of Christoph Waltz, and the performance given by Mr. Beale is considerably more captivating than that of Waltz, and Christoph Waltz is supposed to be the main villain, for crying out loud!

While this movie is not a complete wreck, it is painfully average, and in a world with so much other entertainment available, "average" might as well mean "useless".