Goldbeater

Foodfight! is a disgustingly ugly computer-animated adventure comedy movie. I think only people who are into references to classic films, sexual innuendos, childish humor, and infantile characters will find this interesting. If this movie was made for an all-ages audience, it is an excellent example of how filmmakers can utterly fail in this regard on all counts. [The Shockproof Film Festival 2022]

Agent 69 in the Sign of Scorpio is a mildly fascinating movie that combines rather mundane pornography and a shell game, where the filmmakers try to involve the audience in the plot of the movie by following a series of suitcase swaps, one of which contains a MacGuffin. It is a good attempt, although this movie is an entertaining load of total horseshit at best. [The Shockproof Film Festival 2022]

The Revenge of the Crying Woman is the most entertaining El Santo movie so far. It is a triumph of childish naivety and bravado in its genre, and the acting is charmingly wooden. In other words, this is a trashy low-budget horror movie for the whole family. [The Shockproof Film Festival 2022]

The Hypnotic Eye is a simple and rather naive example of its genre with a police investigator whose speed of deduction is about fifteen times behind the viewer. However, it is such a nice old-fashioned nonsense movie that you have a stupid smile on your face while watching it. [The Shockproof Film Festival 2022]

Sean Baker takes us on an excursion among Texas' small-town shady low-lives, whose life stories are regrettable yet nonetheless engaging and, in any case, entirely believable and at times subversively likable. The main (anti-)hero, played by Simon Rex, is such an opportunistic asshole you feel almost heartfelt pity for him because he is such an innocent soul, that he does not realize it himself and probably never will, and the movie does not judge him for it. Red Rocket is a movie that has been virtually ignored at all the major movie awards this year, and yet it is one of the best things I have seen from last year's releases.

Marvel has gone the route of exploiting Eastern Asian culture and I would not mind if the final product was entertaining or at least interesting to the audience. This movie is neither. I got tired of live-action CGI comic book nonsense a long time ago, and Tony Leung and a few pretty choreographed scenes is not going to change that, unfortunately.

As with many French TV documentaries, this one suffers from its limited running time. You cannot really get a full picture of such an important historical event squeezed into under one hour. It requires at least a feature-length movie’s running time. In this respect, the French The Battle of Chernobyl from 2006 remains the best.

Shock Troops shows the genius of Costa-Gavras and a French casting extravaganza in a clumsily told story about French resistance fighters. The director traded making action-packed war movies for dark political suspense in his later productions which was the right move because his building of a coherent dramatic arc does not work so well in this movie. However, hats off to the filmmaking as some of the aerial shots, crowd scenes, and technically challenging scenes create the illusion of this being truly realistic, something today’s movies drowned in CGI sadly lack.

Sometimes a movie ticks all the right boxes for you to enjoy, but it somehow leaves you cold. That was my experience with X. Yes, the subject matter is great. It features good directing and visual effects and has some superb acting performances. It has also got some cool subplots even though it played out predictably and unexcitingly. It simply elicited no better response in me than an appreciation of solid filmmaking, which is a bit of a shame in this case because I expected a bit more from it.

Spike Lee is in great shape with this movie. Summer of Sam is an excellent period drama set in the 70s with a collection of believable and compelling human stories that run parallel to the rampage of a devious serial killer. There is actually little to fault with this movie.