Goldbeater

A combination of a thought-provoking war crime documentary and a not-so-interesting amateur avant-garde in a 1 to 2 ratio. I respect the creative decisions, but it missed me by a mile.

A typical staple popular among indie film festival programmers. This warm story about the bonding of a child and his estranged parent must, perhaps out of obligation, be present at least once at every edition of such a festival, and the formula is the same every time. And I’m tired of it already. Hardly anyone will remember this British attempt a day later. And on top of that, it features a very smart child - so annoying.

A mediocre horror drama where the relationship between a mother and her young daughter is severely tested when the ghosts of her past start to resurface. Seen many times, unexciting, slow, those 100 minutes felt incredibly long. The setting of the Australian outback adds a bit of appeal to the film in the second half, otherwise I can't think of much reason to see it.

Talk to Me is an enjoyable little ghost story from the antipodes that doesn't try to get an audience response with cheap scares, but instead spends a good amount of time on the relationships between the main characters. The concept of ghost séances as risky fun for careless zoomers is an interesting premise that could sound utterly ridiculous in the wrong hands, but here it works very solidly, thanks mainly to the believable and not annoying characters of Australian teenagers.

A camera exercise on the theme of bizarreness produced by Steven Soderbergh. It has some clever visual ideas and a bit of stop-motion animation, but the plot itself is incredibly lame. As a half-hour short it would be fine, in feature length it's slightly tedious.

I watched the hard NC-17 version. Infinity Pool is Cronenberg Jr.'s best yet – less depressing this time, but more entertaining and morbidly humorous. If possible, don't give away too much of the plot, although the trailer has already covered a lot of it. The charm is in the surprise. Alexander Skarsgård gives it his all many times over, Mia Goth is once again a force of nature, and some of the audiovisual scenes are pretty memorable (I don't know how trimmed down the R version is). I fully recommend it to fans of sci-fi horror. We may only be in January, but it's already one of the top genre films of the year for me.

White Noise means nearly 140 minutes spent with incredibly annoying characters in a pastel-coloured allegorical world. What I enjoyed about it was the 5 minutes where it becomes almost a Crazy Griswold Family Vacation. After Amsterdam, another overwrought film by an overconfident filmmaker, who should have had a producer, a playwright and an editor at his back, who would have thrown out 50 minutes of dysfunctional wadding.

A movie colossus. Babylon recalls old Hollywood not only in its motif, but also in its lavish style and giant sets, which seem to combine the megalomania of David Lean with the vulgarity of Martin Scorsese. It's exactly the kind of spectacle that many people say nobody makes anymore today, and yet, sometimes it happens. In short, a truly epic film. It's also a very refreshing counterpoint to other recent works celebrating the medium, because it shows that cinema is not just about glamour and sentiment, but also about sweat, blood, grime and, last but not least, a lot of shit. Watch it in the cinema, I’m sure going for seconds.

The story feels like told by Grampa Simpson. In David O. Russell's overwrought and self-indulgent script, the very simple plot that the director and screenwriter in one person are unsuccessfully trying to tell disappears under layers of constant digressions and unnecessary exposition. At just over 130 minutes, it feels like a bland four hours. The colour palette of fifty shades of brown and the annoying antics of the acting elite don't add much to it either. It's been a long time since I've been so annoyed by the blind pomposity of a film and its maker, so it's good that the cinema attendance has fallen hard on its face.

Guy Ritchie kind of goes on autopilot and Operation Fortune follows in the footsteps of flashy superficial crap like The Man from U.N.C.L.E. rather than his last cool and functional notches Gentlemen and Angry Man, but it's cool nonetheless. We get a mix of Bond and M:I in typical Ritchie style, but without an interesting main villain, a surprising script and no wow action scenes. The humour and catchphrases are only as fertile as ever, the main characters are practically impossible to care about, and at times it seems as if Ritchie is getting too drunk on his own shots, but the pace is as it should be, and at least it doesn't have an overlong running time, as has been the case with everything lately.