Lima

The upside of a fast food movie like this for me, as a film collector, is that I save money. There really isn't the slightest reason to invest a single koruna in the Blu-ray of this; and its the same with most movie productions these days. I’ve never liked fast food, I prefer a hearty steak and this thing is like garlic bread. A tedious 120 minutes and the reassurance that the best film adaptation of a PC game is still the 27-year-old Mortal Kombat.

It says 1978 in the title, but in the 70s people knew how to make things spicier. It looks like a big gorefest at times, but at its core it's just another horror movie for kids, the kind Netflix is full of. Their derivative family friendly stuff to please everyone is like the plague.

At the beginning Branagh unnecessarily illuminates the reason for the moustache, he probably thinks we viewers are complete idiots, and then in artificial digital sets, coloured like gypsies' nails, he decides to desecrate an otherwise quite nice piece of literature. I wouldn't have expected this from him, someone with a theatre background.

Such a nice stylistic exercise, though P.T.A. won't put the script behind a frame. But I had fun and Anderson knows how to work with music as well as Tarantino. And Cooper Hoffman is an acting revelation, man.

With all due respect to Brian Johnson, he’s absolutely no match for AC/DC's original lead singer, the prematurely deceased Bon Scott. Johnson makes everything sound like a fistfight, whereas Scott's voice was incredibly colourful and variable, he had a bluesy feel and could glide smoothly across octaves with a husky voice that was a perfect match for the bombastic rock 'n' roll, and I fully agree with the opinion of renowned music critic Jiří Černý, who in his series in Rock and Pop magazine ranked Scott among the 7 greatest rock voices in history. The only really good album Brian Johnson recorded was “Back In Black”, because it has some great songs thanks to the writing input of Scott, who co-wrote it with Angus, but didn't get to do the vocals. And it was actually Bon Scott who was the leader of all previous major AC/DC albums, whether it was “Highway To Hell”, “Powerage”, “Dirty Deeds Done Don´t Cheap”, or “High Voltage”. I'm terribly sorry that Scott couldn't hold his liquor at a reasonable level and that inhaled vomit killed him in his sleep, and if I had the divine power to give life back to five prematurely deceased rock greats, it would be John Lennon, Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, the brilliant bassist and songwriter of early Metallica Cliff Burton, and Bon Scott. Let the heavens be easy for them.

An attempt at ambitious horror that doesn’t quite work. For the first hour or so, up until the first murder, it's a great directorial ride with an imaginative composition of shots, a witty timing of scenes (the crocodile from a bird's eye view!) and a top notch casting, all original characters and I loved it all; that long wait for the peak was a five-star job. But then, as the spiral of violence begins, the story winds clichédly along predictable paths, the murders are anything but interesting, though in one West recalls Fulci, and it all culminates in scenes you really don't want to see (gerontophilic sex). It's a film of two halves, and the first one, where it escalates, paradoxically outweighs the second one by a head; sometimes less is more.

Batman as a Fincher-style whodunit for depressed photophobics? I’m in! Finally an adult comic book experience – what a relief after all the one-note Marvel coloring books. And in the words of an advertising slogan for a refreshing drink: "100 percent atmosphere, zero percent cliché!".

This is so heavenly stupid that it's kind of beautiful. This movie is about 60 years late, and that's actually a good thing. I felt like I was watching vintage sci-fi from the 1950s again, only that Roland goes much, much further with the stupidity. In the 1950s, during the Golden Age of science fiction, these pieces were made like Bata's trainers, nothing makes sense to today's viewer, but you still have fun and smile because you can feel the sincere effort to make a good film. Probably like Edward D. Wood Jr. when he was hanging models of flying saucers on string, Roland has the technical side of the craft down pat, but the boys are on the same page in terms of message. Emmerich is a genre on his own. I don’t want to watch it again, but it was a guilty pleasure.

If all those amazing visual ideas, the surprisingly resolved situations and the sweetly over-the-top humour were wrapped in something called a meaningful plot and not a twisted alternate reality pulled out of someone’s ass like from the pen of a drunken Vondruška, I'd be happy. Give Vaughn the next Bond movie, really, the guy's got it.

The films from the Marvel stable are quite watchable if you turn a blind eye, but the expansion of its universe into series is one screw-up after another, with no exceptions. And I've never seen Jeremy Renner so bored, really. He must have breathed a deep sigh of relief when the shooting ended.