Marigold

Steampunk Star Wars? Dream on. It’s a wannabe soft version of Mad Max, a malnourished Hunger Games, and a crappy copycat of the Wachowski sisters with totally incompetent direction, overstuffed visuals, half-dead actors and a lot of horribly bad scripting. I haven't seen a film this dysfunctional in a long time.

I was a little afraid that Netflix was going to turn the cultured BBC Knighthood into a new Game of Thrones. Fortunately, the annoying buck-toothed sex bomb Skade doesn't get as much space, ensuring that Uthred gets a new edge again. This character has developed into one of the most interesting and fun characters over the course of three seasons. The creators care to make sure that the viewer can never have a completely anchored relationship with him. Uthred is an unpredictable, wandering character, so all the direct sympathy is captured by the ingenious sidekick Finnan. It may seem for a while that the third season wants to focus on pagan superstitions, but the second half is a pure masterpiece of a straightforward and emotional historical battles. King Alfred and his relationship with Uthred take care of the emotional pinnacle of the series, and the creators still have enough characters in reserve that they can break into and pull down in a scene (Beocca). This series is the essence of knightly epics and heroic fantasy. This is the story of a man who carries kings on his shoulders, but who is always deleted from the chronicles because he is too problematic and does not fit completely into any storytelling ... except for in The Last Kingdom. No matter how The Witcher turns out, I’ll stay calm. I have Uthred. Destiny is all!

Buster Scruggs had a good line of sight, but the Coen’s were sprinkling targets with very variable success. Most of the bullets ended up in the prairie. A disparate, unbalanced anthology that is meant to recall the romantic charm of westerns and the West, which has never been. Instead, it reminds us that the Coen’s are no longer masters of tonal equilibristics, eccentric dialogues and brilliant points. This film plays more on sentiment rather than skillfully creating it. Some short stories (trunk, gold digger) are downright awful and out of rhythm. Even though the moods change here, the overall impression is insanely monotonous, also because the Coen’s only vary safely. In the end, I remember with love the demented version of Lemonade Joe, the hangman blues of James Franco and the dog ballad... the rest is not even worth a spit into the dust.

A series that for a long time looks like an update of John le Carré's chess games, but in the end may only go down in history as a captivating audition tape by Richard Madden for the role of James Bond. On my god! The boy has it - a killer look, vulnerable charm and a special fragility. His body changes smoothly before the eyes from a powerful machine to a completely scattered trauma factory. Unfortunately, everything else in this world does not have a firm foundation. Until the fifth episode, these are slow promises, which are scattered by the sixth episode, which is overwhelmed by twists, meaningless explanations and the explicitly stupid motivations of the central conspiracy. As a political thriller, Bodyguard is, after all, not a carefully thought-out chess game, but rather stupid screenwriting work with holes in the logic. Unfortunately, the ridiculous structure devalues ambitious attempts at drama and makes it clear that the smiling clichés about the relationship between the bodyguard and his trustee were not just momentary flings. It's actually a cheap, albeit nicely filmed and modern-sounding B-movie. Too bad. but Madden is currently top on my 007 list.

Why Gary Oldman accepted the role of Dick Cheney in this C-movie is as much of a mystery as what Andrej junior did in Crimea. Sometimes he gives the impression that he was walking around and put on his uniform, then he just commented on something, shook a hand and fucked off. Gerard Butler has already made a living out of this boyish parody, so his macho, homoerotic etudes are actually doing me good. What they lack is a real scoundrel played by Michael Nyqvist, to whom Putin should give citizenship. He's the Russian. What now? TV Barrandov buys these types of films, but the effects are worse. The Russians speak broken Russian for a while, then broken English for a while. Toby Stephens wandered somewhere in Benghazi and found himself on the set in Poljarny. The screenplay was written by Tom Clancy's demented brother, and Donovan Marsh has a unique feel for ugly green screens, and Gareth Edward openly robs Godzilla in one scene. In any case, it is a film where submarines dive, emerge, pass rocks on a razor’s edge and endure a depth charge. I can't give the film less than three stars, because if I omit the lethargic middle, it's actually fun bullshit that gradually develops a 90's mentality.

Felix Gallardo may feel like a poor relative and schoolboy of real narco- sunroofs by a pool with hippos in Colombia, but this parallel history lesson (or a bridge between the 3rd and 4th series?) can look straight into the eyes of the past three seasons. It does not lose out qualitatively. Yes, contemporary Mexico and Felix as a drug addict are somewhat more run-of-the-mill than Pablo and the gentlemen from Cali, but that is the strength of the series. It flows slowly, unobtrusively, sometimes just by varying familiar situations, but giving them an interesting measuring scale, a disturbing undertone that stands out all the more when you know the current testimonies about the state of affairs. For example, Heli Amata Escalante, who directed the great fifth episode and underlined Netflix's courage to hire art directors with a very radical CV. The second example - the excellent retro beauty rides of the seventh and eighth episodes, which the outlaid Mexican formalist Alfonso Ruizpalacios directed. The sense for detail and atmosphere of these episodes is as exceptional as the creators' feeling for type casting. The transformations of the main characters and the constant influx of interesting supporting characters elevate Narcos amongst the elite. Mexicans can feel at home here, even though the peak of the series, combined with another excellently chosen protagonist, Kim, comes between episodes nine and ten. I can't help but be excited about drug addiction again. The one where benevolent killer Don Neto rises especially breaks the heart.

The worst and best moments in the history of the series in the third season, in which the height of its best moments is unfortunately offset by declines in amateur twists and the cowardly storylines of the supporting characters. The driving force behind the series is the inconspicuous, but all the more catchy "good guy who took a wrong turn" Ray Nadeem. The only character that is brought to an impressive point. For me, the entire season is ruined by a terribly sloppy last episode and the feeling that Matt is just a free rider in his series. My favorite series disappointed me as a result for the first time. If the creators wanted to make a dark, civil and heavy colossus, they needed to learn more from The Punisher. Because The Punisher never slipped into B-movie twists and Cimrman revelations.

100 minutes of alternating epic, bloody and generously designed scenes and dialogues, which are simply a bit of cheesy historical TV series. Mackenzie aspires to the dark medieval carnation, which he thrives on in luxury crowd scenes and some quadratures of Scots, but other times he uses superficial adornments and Gaelic kitsch. Nevertheless, I like Pine a lot. He's not an exaggerated macho caricature, but rather a guy who has been going after what he wants in a calm and steadfastness manner for some time. It may seem strange to some people that this is the leader people follow - I understand them. I would follow him, too. Btw, Aaron Taylor-Johnson seems to have a taste for raw beef for the first time in his career.

No one in the world can accuse me of not being a fan, because there probably isn’t another band in my life that I was into as much as Queen. I didn't listen to anything else for a few years. I absorbed the songs, lyrics, concerts, and I read the biographies. That's probably why Bohemian Rhapsody seems like very lazy history research to me, and it was also very much castrated by the living members of the band. All that remains is the flimsy story of a naughty child and a trio of his dads who try to protect him from evil in the form of a disgusting version of Tom of Finland and his party of gay friends in leather. It was supposed to be a portrait of deep solitude, but it is just a superficial and poorly-motivated collection of weakly told stories. All in all, I can deal with the fact that the film dismisses everything dark (sexuality, drugs) in almost a puritanical vein, if it at least offered more than sitcom figures and a lot of awkwardly arranged scenes (will anyone really be satisfied with a theatrically lit and Highlander song tinted scene from the AIDS center in 2018? Obviously they will...). The film is kept above water by excellent editing and also the fact that it has a rhythm typical for this type of genre. At Live Aid, you can feel that Singer quite enjoyed it. In some scenes, I had the feeling that the director was either sleeping or didn't arrive. The paradox is that a perfect product was created because of all those blind spots. He gives people a genius without everything that was outrageous about him and preserves Queen’s pathetic halo of stadium entertainers. Only Roger was a bit of a naughty womanizer. But you know how it is with those guys...

A monthly Elegy. A film that is much more about fatherhood than space exploration. After all, it is just a place where our thin and frail shells throw away their sadness and anxiety. Nothing took me apart this year like First Man. A virtuoso mosaic of sharp, detailed, claustrophobic fragments in super 16 and IMAX width, which perfectly flushed out my sensory receptors. Gosling can channel melancholy with his eyes, and Claire Foy's performance is stronger than gravity. This is what Interstellar was supposed to be. For me, this the greatest film experience of 2018 and the perfect reparation for La La Land.