Lima

These old black and white classics have such enormous charm. The story of a woman who’s so consistently mentally tormented by her husband who wants to take away her sanity has a clever script (I'd love to see a remake by Fincher), the cinematography is fantastic with light and shadows, Chareles Boyer is a villain you'll honestly hate, but the biggest trump card that everyone here praises so much, Ingrid Bergman, was the only weakness for me. Her performance was sometimes too theatrical, sometimes I didn't believe her, sometimes her emotions gave me a pleasant chill; an inconsistent performance that I probably wouldn't reward with an Oscar, but the film itself is excellent.

Poster tagline: IT WAS THE DEADLIEST SECRET... THE MAN WITH THE RADIOACTIVE BRAIN!!! What can you say when a premise is so interesting but it’s completely unused. The sci-fi premise that the protagonist, with high levels of radioactivity in his body, lives with a sort of 7-second head start on everyone else, is drowned in a routine spy story where the low budget and apparent inability of the cinematographer to light scenes couldn’t be more evident. This film is terribly, terribly dark, 80 percent of the runtime is drowned in darkness, all it needed was for everyone to take a drag from a cigarette, like in period noir films (but very cheap ones). Actually, I wouldn't even call it sci-fi, it only lightly touches on that, it's more like a spy plot with shooting towards the end. It's a shame, the original idea with the time paradox could have been used much better in the hands of a more capable filmmaker. The English just didn't know how to make science fiction in the Golden Age (save a few honorable exceptions).

Blaxploitation to the bone, with a rudimentary plot that plays second fiddle, the most important thing is constant action, with one action sequence after another between one-minute pauses, with the three big stars of the time: Jim Brown as the most sensible, Fred Williamson, on the other hand, draws before he thinks, dropping one ironic line after another, and the short-lived Jim Kelly (who was riding the wave of popularity of Enter the Dragon with Bruce Lee at the time) doing something like martial arts moves (he's not very good at it, it looks rather comical). Of course, the white population is again portrayed as a backstabbing race (as commanded by blaxploitation genre rules), united in neo-Nazi battalions with red berets and the SS symbol, the main villain is so pathetic that even his maid would slap him. You can count the dead (especially the white corrupt cops and red berets) by the dozens, with IQ's generally below freezing. The abrupt ending is more like deliverance for the viewer.

Vincent Price was in incredibly likable guy who could sell even the dumbest line with his charisma and 26 year old ear Jack Nicholson was .... well still a rookie, although he does show his proverbial devilish sparkle in one scene. Corman vehemently rapes Poe's short story, treating it more like a grotesque (the duel of the wizards at the end is hugely entertaining and by far the best thing about the whole film) and fleshing it out into laughable drivel, all within the B-movie confines he was never able to leave.

The beginning of the gradual decline of a once great actor in a serious sci-fi flick that, thanks to shoddy direction, becomes a parody of itself. Heston is only here to run around with his hairy chest bared, while the evil infected inspire terror with their white wigs, white contact lenses and powdered faces. You'll laugh at the awfulness of the script and marvel at the clumsily shot action scenes with clearly visible stunt stand-ins. Even Bert I. Gordon would have made a better film. Send Sagal to the gulag, and Douglas to a mental institution!

A mop's thorny journey into American households. I confess that I found the synopsis so dull and uninteresting that I wasn't tempted to watch it. At first the film was "quite interesting but nothing special", sometimes quite bizarre with characters behaving strangely (a classic malady of Russell's films), but by the time Joy meets Bradley Cooper's character midway through I was firmly hooked to the final impression of "excellent". The actual scene of the mop being introduced by its creator in the TV commercial was five-star, as was Jennifer's immersion in the role, as she emotionally drove it in like a snowplow. And by the way, winter was a good move, the flying snowflakes gave the narrative an attractive atmosphere, along with the music, which Russell always knows how to use in a film.

It took a long 33 years, but we finally got it. After Episode 6, the best film in the Star Wars universe. It doesn't feel contrived, it doesn't tell the story through bridges for morons, and it treats the main and episodic characters in a brash and bleak way, like in a real war. The beginning is perhaps too slow (my only complaint), but otherwise it's pure fan joy. I'd love to have a beer with Gareth Edwards, not only is he one of the few to understand the poetry of the original Japanese Godzilla films, but his rendition of Star Wars doesn't look like a cheesy coloring book either. Give him Star Trek, too!

Poster tagline: THEY CREATED AN INHUMAN BEING WHO DESTROYED EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHED!! The synopsis is simple: a woman dying of tuberculosis and is saved by two doctors who inject her with a special healing serum that turns her into an evil being able to shapeshift (manifested by changing the colour of her hair and make-up) and kill anyone who stands in her way. The first thing that strikes you is that the film was shot in gorgeous cinemascope format, which was not yet common in cinemas. The second thing, the lead actress can't act, and the only time I believed her is when she goes into a rage and murders someone. The effects are quite good (the aforementioned sudden change of hair colour observed in the mirror, the disappearing scars on the hand after being scratched by a leopard), the men are exclusively in the position of passive drones with whom the dominant woman does whatever she wants, but above all, the story is so stupidly presented that even the audience of that time couldn't take it seriously (and they were faced with hundreds of even more naive films). Some scenes really fall into self-parody, fortunately for me Neumann fully made up for this one year later, with the fantastic The Fly.

It's a love triangle, that's all there is to it and the whole thing kind of fizzles out. Woody only makes films out of inertia these days, but Café Society in particular is so caressing, cute, and in its own way, endearingly old-fashioned, especially since it has the flawless atmosphere of 1930s Hollywood, an era that has always appealed to me, an old-timer. In addition to that, I realised that Stewart can be attractive when the role allows her to. And in fact the ending was exactly as melancholic as it should.

“Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks? Shaft!", says the film’s theme song. Shaft was the first one, he brought the blaxploitation genre to the world of cinema, he brought a black hero who has women falling into his lap like on a treadmill, who’s not afraid of blacks or whites, who, when needed, is appropriately aggressive yet smart. And it was a hit with black young boys from the suburbs who flocked to the film in droves. Yet the film's reputation is a bit ahead of its quality. I was expecting more wisecracks, more sex (2 girls in the whole film? - Shaft you’re disappointing), more action and more violence (three smaller action sequences don't pull it off). Even so, it's interesting, if only for the great atmosphere of early 1970s New York, the period clothing, the cars and the black junkies dealing. And the white population plays an irrelevant second fiddle, as it should be in a proper blaxploitation flick.