Reviews

Getting the support of the SAS is a nice asset, now if there is nothing else than a law enforcement storyline that's just a waste of ressources from a team very low on creativity.

Who Dares Wins is about the SAS as the title honestly announces so it is long and repetitive in the introductory part and not really sure where it stands in the middle. Well they had to come up with something to fill up a movie with more than training, more training and real action.

I looked at my watch at the 1h25 mark. The final act was only barely underway and there was still 40min to go... There's definitely no rhythm. I understand that director Ian Sharpe was doing good on TV and he actually shoots a bundle of episodes here. Absolutely no inner respiration.

And since it's a movie about law enforcement with the support of law enforcement it is boringly not subtle. The police are clean efficient nice people, the activists are bad self-righteous wannabe terrorists. In between Lewis Collins is thrown a brick of a role which he handles as it comes, and Judy Davis does a great job with the most (half) interesting part.

In the end, what most here in their reviews hail as one of the best pieces of action ever filmed looks pretty boring. First because we've seen the SAS train at least half a dozen times in the first half, and above all because it's badly filmed. Long shots, slow editing that just makes us passive witnesses. Sure enough there was no rhythm before so it is just drawing to a close.

For special forces nuts only. Very dispensable.

Some will say it was important to bring this story to the widest audience possible, so here comes a fine adaptation of stellar investigative journalism. For me it is just fine because I would object that the movie doesn't stand out if you snip out all the specifics of the Harvey Weinstein case.

The acting is good, but maybe direction is overdoing it quite a few times (make yourself at home, toss this out as mansplaining). And anyway those clean gentle dedicated NY journalists are not very interesting characters, not ones that carry a movie till the end.

Yes, paradoxically this movie doesn't serve the larger purpose of denouncing and warning about sexual predators in the workplace, and narcissistic perverts at large. Actually a documentary would have been great, but impossible to achieve without having most of the victims mentioned in She Said giving another painful testimony about what they endured. So a re-enactment was the next best thing, absolutely, but if you are going to re-create why not leverage the powerful background of this specific case and build a real movie, a real thriller? Sticking to the facts, confirming sources is critical for journalism, but needs work to make an engaging cinematic storyline.

As it stands She Said only caters to a small audience, most of whom already know the main points about the Weinstein case. So it is preaching to the choir. To me it is only a vanity project, adapting a Pulitzer prize and feeling proud about the subject matter, without adding anything constructive to the debate.

It sounds cliché but Black Christmas was probably too ahead of its time, too creepy frightening for 1974. Before it there was Gothic horror then Giallo who allowed distanciation. Here we are at the next step, with a realistic and contemporary setting that would cater to a wider audience.

I don't remember Halloween was so frightening and hell is it obvious how much John Carpenter was inspired by Bob Clark work here. Wes Craven took the time to find the right balance in the decade before Elm Street and eventually with his tongue in cheek he brought the slasher at its ultimate level of popularity. Todaybatvotjer end of the spectrum there is exploitation creep/gruesome ala Saw, Hostel... but frightening, realistically gut-wrenching no more.

Black Christmas could have been perfect, unfortunately the ending looks like they didn't think hard enough to make it sensational.

The job of a director is to somehow direct actors. If you take good actors and a script that is mostly about action, they won't need much direction. But before the shoot the director has to think his story through, think about the pacing and how the plot comes together. That is this hard work that differentiates the clueless director - just happy to toy with a moving camera and shooting angles - from the good one.

Mannen på taket starts unnecessarily slow. The introduction takes only 6min but nothing happens until the last couple of seconds. It builds up nothing, we get almost no information about what it is all about. Then we get the exposition that will take us in a full circle along with some four police officers (their private lives, their connection to the case) for the next 60min. Ok we get an idea of who the victim was (I would not go so far as to say it is a clear picture) and at the 66min mark they start exploring their sole lead, which happens to solve the case.

Except now they must stop the guy. And you are already guessing what will happen since you've been waiting so long for A Man on the Roof. So last act is about a very clumsy police operation. Who wrote this? It is based on a book so they had the time to envision how it could be suspenseful? 40min of hapless cops improvising the most harebrained schemes to get the perpetrator. And some reviewers here dare rank this as the pinnacle of action sequences? Yippee ki-yay.

Apart from the cast the only other high mark is that there is no epilogue, fortunately having nothing to tack there at the resolution of uninteresting random action. So little for a 110min long movie.

There certainly was a shock factor back in 1979, the shock of seeing the seedy underworld of sex workers and imagine teenagers getting lost in it.

Paul Schrader looks like he is not working hard when he just contrasts deep clean puritan America with Sodom and Gonorrhoea. Actually he realizes at the same time as his main character that he is going nowhere and for a moment it seems like we could ride on light humour about the vacuity of the porn industry and then the laborious search continues, till the end, not without strapping our heads real deep into darkness.

In the end there is nothing much you feel you've learnt, neither do the various characters. Nikki should have been the main character, directly challenging and unsettling the 'pilgrim' father. Unfortunately not much care has been taken into writing this part. A lost opportunity, especially given the fact that Marilyn Chambers auditioned for the role!

Mario Bava succeeded in giving us a visual masterpiece. I cannot think of a better visual experience with horror movies from the oldish Universal heavy-fighters of the 30s to the Hammer sharp stories and till the whimsically gore Gialli that later took over. La Maschera del Demonio is a must-see just for its fantastic atmospheric visual experience.

So it should have been a masterpiece, but unfortunately Mario Bava was never as talented in the directing department as he was in the photography/art department. The plodding rhythm, the generic characterization, the over-exposition of every detail of the plot, causes a lack of mystery, of suspense. It does break the pure magic of the visuals from time to time and it's a sore pity.

In short, a movie you'd better discover when you're very young (maybe 12 is ok) so you can totally be impressed by the visuals while not knowing what is a flawed movie.

I understand that pure documentaries do not cater to everyone's tastes. Hence the need for a dramatized angle. On these merits I acknowledge that Dopesick is nicely packaged, with very fine acting. Yet I was quickly bored by the regular ebb and flow of the narration along the story line: flashback to 1998, flashforward to 2004, flashback again... AND not every subplot was consistently interesting.

Dopesick focuses on the evil root of the opioid crisis: the Sackler's family inner struggles to make more money with Purdue Pharma. That is the main interest although this dramatization is quite contrived (you know, rich people, fat rich egos, cynicism and zero empathy beyond the bottom line). The Western District of Virginia's DA office investigation is very engaging on the other hand, with real people you want to root for. But it is frustrating to cut away from this storyline to stuff that looks much more like fodder rendering of another aspect of the case.

The little mining town in the Appalachians provides a nice backdrop to get a view of what was going on in American people's everyday life. Very fine acting indeed but it gets so cliché. They wanted to cram too many things in this, not least of all melodrama PLUS über preachy Diversity Inclusion Equalizing (in a mining community, remember...), so it shows and really detracts you getting hooked to the criminal case.

Already at the beginning of episode 2 I was looking for the Alex Gibney documentary (HBO), The Crime of the Century, which goes beyond Purdue Pharma in its second part, and leaves you with a better understanding of the real issues. And in the end the documentary is even darker while staying with the naked facts all along.

I confess biopics are definitely not my genre. I'd definitely rather watch a movie that is focused on a specific set of actions than one which aims at being an all-encompassing retelling/homage/capsule of someone's life.

Sure enough there was already plenty to tell about the Manhattan project alone, or Oppenheimer loss of his security clearance later on. Christopher Nolan basically aims to focus on the latter and build an array of flashbacks to give us context. Extensive context, overflowing context. I really enjoyed these parts with Robert Downey Jr. They were focused, intense, self-explanatory. That is the only part where I felt that the main character was interesting, indirectly interesting, through the eyes and actions of others and it was excellent, period.

But the rest just dilutes this. J. R. Oppenheimer before 1933 is not interesting, spending time with this biopic fodder is just about summoning an IMAX experience of what might be the mind of a brilliant scientist. Nolan enjoys toying with this like he is on a mission to save movie theatres. The sensorial experience does not really feel unique, it just dresses up parts of the movie that are less interesting, using and abusing of sound effects, hammering home the point that Oppenheimer is some kind of autistic genius well past the viewer's compassion.

To me, somewhere in the middle of this 3h sensorial rollercoaster is a great movie. The Imitation Game was not excellent, but it was focused, it was not preposterously forcing an exhaustive audiovisual exposé onto us. So I may well watch again the Imitation Game at some point but I would never want to sit through Oppenheimer ever again. From the word of mouth I believed this Christopher Nolan opus would reconcile me with the director, alas he still has this effect on me of not wanting to watch any of his movies again. There are brilliant movies with a complex structure, a complex storyline, and there is Christopher Nolan showing off complexity as a raw material without ever being able to transcend it.

I am not rating this movie since I could only sit through 30min of it. It starts nowhere and wishes to go anywhere just for the sake of trying absurdist meta verse complications.

Ok so if you are much of a gamer your brain might be rewired to explore all this kind of BS stratified world and thus embrace what the title says. Otherwise, if you are desperately rational in your thinking (and think you should cultivate it for fear of becoming a dumbed down version of yourself, gradually entrusting machines and AI with managing the complexity of life) then the only thing you can see is a big mess originating from some student pet project.

In this rational realm people enjoy just being carried away by some brilliantly creative story. But a story is not just whatever mess you can summon to metastasize into anything mixing action and meta-BS. Otherwise the meta pretence is just a self-delusional way to present one's laziness to package paraphrases, for example here in the dystopian-Matrix SF sub-genre.

Sure this movie gathers a lot of talent across all departments... except where it matters in the first place: screenwriting and directing.

This Alexandre Dumas adaptation just aims to pack a lot of all-out action that looks more like a costumed digest of last decades' super hero fights. Instead of building up the mousquetaire characters and team spirit we have 4 loose swords competing for screen time and waiting for their cue to mouth one-liners.

The other creative choices are defensible and a chunk of passable acting can certainly be traced down to bad direction. I am convinced nobody in the industry will overvalue the achievement of daddies boys (producer and director) so wildly missing the mark, but it is always puzzling to see a part of the audience just gobbling up fine images as a fine movie.

Sure Alan Ritchson looks like the impressive, intense, low-key drifter from the books. But the scripts here only partially grasp his overwhelming intellectual sharpness. It is easier in the book to describe at length what goes on in his mind, and it was the actual challenge.

"Reacher said nothing" needs a lot of script power-lifting to translate to the screen better than what we have seen umpteen times with lone action men bordering on super-heroes.

And yes, Ritchson is good again but he looks too much like a clean waxed body-builder. There is no much grit apparent in his stature. Surprising that Lee Child somewhat let it slip and did not request to make the "Real Reacher" more of the brawler he is at heart.

Season 1 was good although here, 10y after I read Killing Floor, I was not overly impressed by the scenes that got me hooked to Reacher from the very first book.

Season 2 puts back Reacher with the Special Investigators so he sadly looks smaller in the cast. More of a social outcast, a meek beast rather than the inspiring leader; narrow-minded passive rather than extremely thoughtful. Also I had formed luminous images from the action in California (Bad Luck and Trouble) yet they decided NY/NJ was good enough for their production values.

Bottom line: the series does not stand out, it feels content with the opportunity to cash in on a franchise. It's a pass for me now.

Sometimes the work of one of the creative department is so excellent that it overshadows the rest of the work. Which I find is a good thing here because the rest of the creative work, beyond make-up/animatronics SFX, is not very good.

Let's not put the blame on the cast: they are all very good. So fine actors from a nice casting with nice direction. Unfortunately the script errs on the tongue-in-cheek side, a common fault after the demand for slasher movies developed in the seventies and the common misconception that so-called horror movies are meant to entertain teens who are fast to laugh for fear they would get sucked too deep into the movie.

So teens' forced laughs are not an indication that horror should be mixed with comedy! Polanski tried this back in 1967 (because he thought he was too smart to take horror seriously) in the Fearless Vampire Killers and his spoof just felt too long and protracted. All the nice horrendous settings just fell flat, exactly like it does here.

When the horror starts building up a fascinating atmosphere John Landis's script waters it down by merging it into a story arc about the undead (seriously? We should empathize with the past victims rather than be scared about who's next?) and a little romance to round it off.

From a marketing point of view this is a killer-thriller deal. A technical tour de force as a publicity workhorse plus a blend of everything studio executives might want to comply with customer surveys (comedy, romance, exotic punk London...) and you get the perfect date movie of 1981. He dares her to come watch it and she gets more than just haemoglobin and jump scares in return.

Makes me want to check back on the Howling which I remembered more as a horror movie (but I was a teen then). Anyway the assistant make-up/SFX designer there went on to do stellar work in a movie that is on the horror level: The Thing (1982).

I had been wanting to watch Blue Velvet for a long time but I had stopped watching Lynch's movies after Lost Highway which, for me, is his masterpiece. And with this kind of inspired-tormented artist it is a fine line between masterfully fascinatingly bizarre and just eerily self-conscious almost grotesque.

I would not want to watch Eraserhead or The Elephant Man a second time although I reckon the experience was worth it. You may be curious about roller-coasters and then not feeling the need to be taken for a high ride another time. Still I would watch Lost Highway again because I remember it as very cohesive within Lynch's bizarre explorations.

Blue Velvet feels very close to Twin Peaks, and for me suffers from the same major flaw: a kind of tongue-in-cheek approach to characterization. Everybody is written as kind of a pun on a cliché. But for me satire and bizarre do not blend well at all. So the satire part is interesting and then you switch to the bizarre that is interesting, captivating in its own right, then you switch back again... So it does not add up.

Blue Velvet just reinforced my take on Lynch: I do not care about the mess in his brain until he gets his act together and composes an entrancing piece of art.

Most of José Giovanni's movies are about "Honour among losers". At best they are beautiful or colourful losers but most of the time they are just losers. Before Giovanni "realized" he could cut the middleman to bring his stories to the big screen he first wrote Le Trou (a jail movie, so the characters are only temporary losers) which happened to be helmed by Jacques Becker (his swan song). Then he did two scripts for Robert Enrico (Les Grandes Gueules et Les Aventuriers) who IMO mostly benefited from a solid cast including both times Lino Ventura and his career as a "solid" film-maker was definitely launched (also for the mediocre Enrico who owed to Giovanni's "straightforward sentimental actioneers" his successful transition to feature length). Both movies do not warrant a second viewing but they are somewhat pleasant and original the first time around.

Le Ruffian is mostly a rehash of the Aventuriers baseline. Two adventurous losers trying to lose big time but in style... and most importantly staying best buddies, laughing it all away. No wonder I remembered little from my first viewing as a kid. And I would be even harsher than other reviewers who enjoyed the first act: it is badly scripted and badly shot from the very first frame. There was potential, sure, but then again shooting in the wilderness with a more than competent cast does not count as a bonus point on a mediocre work. It means you are overselling your ability to shoot something that does not look ridiculous in the middle of grandiose scenery with actors who were better utilized elsewhere.

I was definitely not swept away by Cria Cuervos. I had this movie on my viewing list for something like 30 years, I heard about it before taking up Spanish, so I did expect the gloomy introspective atmosphere but I would argue there is nothing special more to it.

I won't elaborate on the socio-political subtext. Others have dug into it at length. My point of view is that it is nicely interwoven with the intimate story here. You do not need to know much about Spain's history from the Civil War to feel how much it puts a lid on this particular story, as it put a lid on Spanish society as a whole.

Whereas the cast is excellent, perfectly directed, I found that the movie lacked in terms of technical skills. Probably something due to the weakness of the Spanish movie industry at the time. Camera angles, framing are mostly very boring. My opinion is that you need to be very dedicated to suggest a maximum of inner tension with the camera if you are shooting mostly oppressively static scenes. Some cinematographers are excellent with lighting, but less so with framing, especially if left unchallenged, which I think is the issue here.

In short I think people over evaluate Cria Cuervos because it is a great movie IF you take into account that it was made under certain restrictions.

More crucially I was amazed that people would summarize the movie by stating that the aunt is very tough on the kids, or just plain cold-hearted. Not quite. Ana is tough, for a reason: she is a little girl who has been deprived of her innocence by witnessing the profound unhappiness of her mother's marriage. Her sisters are less profoundly affected: Irene is older and Maite is too young. But the aunt is only coping with her life now burdened by this sudden responsibility (which Carlos Saura makes clear in a late scene). She tries her best and she is certainly not to blame whereas the maid, while indulging the kids with more affection, is so psychologically challenged as to prove unable to refrain from elaborating on the late parents' issues.

There is undoubtedly not enough gore and murders are barely sadistic, not really gruesome. Obviously this is softcore giallo... I mean for Argento's fans who revel in staring at this kind of cheap thrill. I was sort of agreeably surprised that Argento avoided this ludicrous haemoglobin galore, the ridiculously, redundantly sick scenes with gross close-ups and splattering blood.

So here we get this uncontrovertible evidence that without these childish bursts of morbid creativity an Argento giallo is a very dull movie. And I am glad that his most devoted fans concur with this fact! Here, all we have is the bare Argento treatment: a naked serial killer giallo procedural. And it shows! The script is basically an Agatha Christie whodunnit, stretched over 90 to 120min. And interspersed with a half dozen murders (or attempted murders) to try and make it somewhat lively. But there is simply no rhythm because the script is all about accumulation of events, almost never about causal narrative construction (which is precisely the trap of whodunnits and exploitation movies where you mechanically unwind the required number of scenes without further consideration for your audience).

With better art direction, a more consistent cinematography, a great score, Argento gets away with it (for his undemanding cheap-thrills-wired crowd), the atmosphere is properly summoned. Actually, I would say that L'Uccello dalle Piume di Cristallo was promising. What was unsettling in it could still then pass for raw originality. If you watch it again you will see that this is already the same lacklustre director obviously fumbling his way around a great creative team.

'Il Gatto a Nove Code' does not even have a consistent art direction, cinematography is rather erratic... as is the score, a lazy jazzy Schifrin-inspired non-descript music. Maybe Morricone was accepting too many jobs and he sort of burned out then? But maybe he really was not inspired by his collaboration with Argento, which got confirmed as it got worse the following year with 'Quattre Mosche di Velluto Grigio', causing them to part ways. And Morricone never failed to be inspired by Sergio Leone as a director or a producer. This is pretty easy to understand: Leone was a moviemaking genius while Argento never graduated from the exclusive Giallo kindergarten his producer-father set him in.

I have now seen 6 Argento gialli. In my teens I was somewhat agreeably puzzled by l'Uccello dalle piume di Cristallo, then it went downhill from there. As if Dario Argento was just interested in putting together bizarre scenes only to find himself totally at a loss with narration. Eventually I concluded he is just a spoilt producer's son who played with his toy-camera and never made one single good movie. He is bad at directing actors, in all his movies actors are just walking through waiting for some action to jump at them. And he had quite a few fine actors at his disposal (somehow he got the best results while directing his daughter: not the greatest actress in perhaps his least interesting movies, if that ever means something with this gonzo director).

I was only curious to check '4 Mosche di Velluto Grigio' because of the falling out with Ennio Morricone, and also to see how the great Jean-Pierre Marielle would fit in such a carnival of self-aggrandizement.

Answer #1, as acknowledged by Ennio Morricone himself, he was at fault here and in quite a dead-end when he would 'compose' these improvisational scores. It would take them 25 years to work again together, and the titles and opening of 'La Sindrome di Stendhal' are worth watching because Morricone's score elevates the moving pictures and accounts for more than 50% of your desire to jump into the story and get totally absorbed by it.

I do appreciate the Goblin scores that Argento got during the Morricone intermission but quite frankly their raw energy is totally at odds with the slow rhythm and overflowing attention to visual imagery.

Answer #2, Jean-Pierre Marielle suggested to make his character gay and here we have a blindingly magnificent evidence of bad directing because his over-the-top characterization is totally out of place (which was incidentally the same issue a couple of years before in 'Sans Motif Apparent', where Marielle would ham a supporting character for a bad director in one bright example of a movie that is outlived by its wonderful Morricone score). If he ever understood anything about directing Argento should never have accepted in bulk the creative idea of Marielle. In his memoir Marielle recalls he was just happy to travel and spend a week in Italy all expenses paid (actually more than a week as I remember because the Italian job of production planning was not done by real pros).

Bottom line: can I find a couple of interesting things in the big slow protracted mess of this Argento playground of a movie? I liked the titles, although Michael Brandon already looked bored and passive while just playing the drums (you only get on screen the energy you give to the cast as a director). I liked the idea of the murderer's mask, very unsettling and now very cliché since it has been referenced and copied in many horror movies since (I would argue that the idea originally came from the puppet in 1945's Dead of Night). The park setup with the maid waiting was interesting but, seriously, as usual with such a limited director, the interesting idea then feels full of itself and we get some pedestrian build-up. The optometry scene was just plain ridiculous and it really felt tacked around here to close a loop in the plot (as if such a thing mattered with Argento's randomly intriguing hallucinations of a plot) so why not put it there earlier and have the characters wonder about it for most of the movie? No wonder Argento never came close to Hitchcock in mastering suspenseful storytelling.

It is quite amusing that this movie is nowadays reviewed with fondness, with a near-cult status because it "introduced audiences to forensics". Ok, but forensics is only the realization of modern detective stories that one Sherlock Holmes cannot solve a mystery alone, he might now need a couple of scientifical experts in his team.

Ironically the Harvard legal doctor in Mystery Street helps solve 90% of the case while the gentle cop is running about with very little flair. This imbalance alone turns this into a very weak story. But the script also splits on two diverging subplots, basically about one prime suspect and about the murder weapon, and this denies the procedural the momentum it needed.

Actually the root of the plot problem is with the prologue where the murder unfolds with exhaustive - even exhausting - details about the chain of events. No wonder the 1950 audience did not like to empathize with a young girl just before we are given a scientific analysis of her skeletal remains. The Colombo creators learned their lesson about putting together a clear-cut procedural more like Hitchcock (The Rope, Dial M for Murder) rather than like John Sturges here.

The sad thing is Ricardo Montalban is really good in a weak role and it was a missed chance for a memorable part before an accident greatly narrowed his ability to shine on screen. The supporting cast is good (you may find Elsa Lanchester bordering on ham at times but I'd argue that is the way the script singles her out) but once again typical from most B-movies of the era, every character plays his part alone before this tediously gets us to a run-of-the-mill conclusion.

I hadn't watched this movie in decades and I did not remember it being so bad. Ironically it is closer in tone to the Daniel Craig movies and actually Timothy Dalton mentions they wanted to come closer to the grittier novels of Ian Fleming (...as if such "orthodoxy" had mattered in the creation of the 007 screen persona and the subsequent phenomenon in the sixties).

Visually however, it is a different story: it all looks like a random Miami Vice episode. Maurice Binder's titles might have been innovative in 1962 but in 1989 they looked like your average softcore fodder. Bond girls are more useless than usual, real flower-plants. Action scenes are boringly weak, they look old and sluggishly edited. Incidentally we have a passive Bond, no longer smart and cunning but only in tow of his emotions. And the constrained budget probably explains the couple of supporting actors who are downright bad in a screenplay that drones, desperately uninventive and grossly violent - as opposed to depicting the mischievous plans of clever protagonists. One script too far before retirement alas for one of the original franchise builders Richard Maibaum.

The only thing to keep you interested is to spot a very young Benicio del Toro in a cliché lead henchman role. And you could as well check online pictures of him and save two hours.

Sure hyperconnected millennials must find this very compelling since it just mimics their lives glued to screens. But as a cinema endeavour it was certainly a false good idea, akin to the 100% subjective camera 1947 Lady in the Lake. I mean this is an interesting narrative device to compress the time and establish suspense but as always thou shalt not overuse fancy techniques. Technique is not the movie, technique is barely at your disposal to make good use of it.

Had it been a cheap student project limited to a 1-hour runtime, it could have been brilliant. As such it is pretty frustrating to have to sit through a montage of people clicking away (mostly the father interacting with his computers, phone and his daughter's computer). IMHO it totally detracted from the objective of building up empathy for John Cho's character. Basically it put us in the head of an IT forensics officer rather than in the head of a father fighting fate.

Yet it is well-assembled, John Cho does a fine job and there is a clever (if rushed) ending. So, not totally annoying but quite frustrating.

I never thought I would ever rate a Fellini movie so low. Now I understand what it's all about with people who dislike Fellini, and I have to admit that Giulietta degli Spiriti is the pinnacle of overloaded visual psycho-poetry. And pathologically, perversely narcissistic once you understand it is a big blown up marriage therapy that Fellini forces on his wife...

So it is difficult to try to assess this movie on its own merits because it keeps drifting big time into psychoanalytical, even psychotic, territory. Still I will do my best, stick to the facts, the movie experience, not Fellini's personal life.

I am all for innovative film-making but to me, here, Fellini just indulges the graphic-side of his creativity and forgets about getting his story straight. The story is flimsy because it is supposedly all about Giulietta's spirit, that is her live psychoanalysis. So it feels like you are sitting through someone else's therapy, or someone on LSD describing you everything they experience. You pretty soon feel bored and even ill-at-ease with the accumulation of weird details.

And it is long, verrrrrry long for a story about what happens in a bourgeois housewife's mind. I could not watch it in one sitting (lucky I did not go watch it in some art-house) and still it was very difficult to stay concentrated in the second part...

Definitely the epitome of artsy-fartsy. Unfortunately Fellini got praised for it, hence he never parted ways with this egotistical complacency. It works ok with Casanova though, but I'd rather watch again I Vitelloni, La Strada, La Dolce Vita (one of my all-time favorites) and even Otto e Mezzo which I now understand as an unconscious cry for help "okay, look at that, tell me I am a bad self-conscious brilliant film-maker in need of a sobering bomb to get his creative juices flowing again."

Ok, let's start by what is well-made. Cinematography is very good, location shooting is great, some in the cast are much better than others, especially women characters. And that's all.

El Cuerpo was a waste of time for me, I just sit through to see where it was going. The male lead was already very weak, the central element of the plot was already a car accident, but it was straightforward. In Contratiempo the story is annoyingly told in flashbacks and I wonder how people can be interested in the ordeal of a dumb couple who takes dumb decisions.

I had somewhat hoped that Oriol Paul would do a better job, but in hindsight there were already too many basic things about movies he could not understand when making el Cuerpo so I should have known I had better forget about him.

The feeling that Almodovar dried up his creativity, drained his energy to shoot emotional characters, is getting confirmed. Now you can barely hope for an ok movie from the child of la movida.

Most of the movie is pretty stale. We've already seen these characters before, only stronger and more intense, not diluted in some soapish summer novel that middle-aged women read in the shade. It is funny to read hypocritical reviewers here acknowledging the flatness of the storyline but filmed with style. Sorry pedantic nostalgics of Almodovar but if you are honest - or know some arithmetics - flat plus style gives a big blown up flat movie.

The male character was very weak. Maybe it was a choice to push him even more in the background of this story about women struggling to live their own lives, but I found it really distracting. It is not clear if she is interested in him indirectly, because he may help her with her family history, if she used him to get pregnant or if she fell for him at some point.

Penelope Cruz happens to be charming, touching but because of the weak characterization she ends up lost, passive most of the time.

And seriously these boring bourgeois characters really do not help making this story interesting: they all live in spacious cozy apartments with maids to help, they are doing their exclusive, high-brow dream job (photographer, anthropologist, thespian), including the young mother is never on the verge of selling her body to turn her back on such substantial material advantages.

Quite frankly, Almodovar has just lost it. His touch of magical movie-making, and his touch with real people.

The problem with procedurals is that they are tricky to be made to shine. But I think there is a basic rule: there should be an elusive target for the investigation. Robert Hanssen is creepy and not elusive at all so that is very uncomfortable to just sit and wait for him to take a misstep. Chris Cooper plays this extremely well, unfortunately this is a waste of talent in all the wrong places.

Ryan Philip is much too weak an actor in front of such heavyweights as Chris Cooper and Laura Linney. The script is certainly not helping (I guess the book is more interesting about what went on in O'Neill's mind) but Ryan Philip is just transparent the whole time, not making him at credible force in this psychological tug-of-war.

A fan of Idriss Elba and a sucker for movies about airplanes, I was very enthusiastic about this mini-series. I feared they would have to artificially dilute the suspense for 7 episodes but ultimately this was a very minor flaw (basically that's the contract you agree upon when signing up for Hijack).

So there is no real issue with the rhythm, although I think this could be cut down to a great 2-hour thriller. But the problem is the writers spoiled the soup with stupid characters.

Ok the premise is that the hero, Sam Nelson (Idriss Elba) is a very clever man. How is that supposed to be sufficient in case of a hijack led by focused, determined terrorists? The writers had their classic easy answer for this: let's make the hijackers not so good at their job. So someone has to tell them that commercial flights are on autopilot while they stay at their cruise altitude. Well there used to be amateur hijackers back in the day, but that's simply not possible today with the level of preparation needed for a hijacking between 2 major airports in the post-9/11 real world.

So the hijackers are very well-organised but somewhat sloppy. It could be understandable for details given the stress of a real operation, but preparation? No way.

Now the police are also pretty dumb. They are tracking criminals with GPS and a drone, but they cannot stay away from their rear-view mirrors... They are sloppy also in gently allowing a witness to escape.

All around laziness in the script about how dedicated professionals/criminals would not walk around humming the breeze. Later on one character has the time to see armed men entering his home and his first (and second) thought is not to try and escape out of range but hide (and the hitmen fail to find him, sloppy ep. 87) and seek to do complicated things around the house.

In the end Hijack was fine, except for those major - somewhat ridiculous - let-downs. Seriously, when major characters act stupid, it just deflates the whole tension build-up.