Hummens

Really quite fantastic, excellent performances, genuinely shocking and astonishing at many points and follows on the previous film effortlessly.

Occasionally funny, largely tedious and extremely self-confident in how smart and amusing it is. There is very little momentum aside from riffing on well known zombie tropes with 4th-wall breaking gags delivered with purposefully low effort. There is none of the wild enthusiasm for the genre, or affection towards it's characters, that Shaun of the Dead did so well. None of the outrageous slapstick violence or genuine scares of Braindead (aka Dead Alive) or Evil Dead. It plays out more like a script penned by an annoying man with a waxed moustache and a bright orange beanie who only likes zombies ironically. Not very good at all.

Such a strong first half, beautifully shot with great performances, has such a violent tonal shift into a From Dusk Til Dawn scenario that I was just left wishing the vampires maybe never turned up at all. What the film was shaping up as had me expecting maybe something more like Near Dark, more brooding and sinister and character driven, but instead Coogler reverts back to comic-book territory and silliness that knocks the wind out of the whole film. Dancing around all of this though are some amazing musical sequences that too made me think things would be going in a more adventurous direction than they end up doing. Still, I was very pleased to see Saul Williams turn up, which I didn't know about.

Just a compilation of moronic situations featuring characters so repugnant you couldn't pay me to spend time in their company. Unlike many of the negative reviews I have seen so far, my issue isn't with the debauched events but how utterly meaningless it all is. The whole endeavour just winds up being a parade of alienating shenanigans from a gang of proto-rapists. I had more fun watching Salo.

An outstanding cinematic achievement that will echo through the ages, I fully anticipate Star Trek: Section 31 to sweep the awards season.

Moody but derivative in the extreme, with decent (Monroe) to very good (Witt) performances, with the notable exception of star-appeal Nicholas Cage whose makeup is as inexplicable and distracting as it is absurd rather than terrifying, underpinned with a performance best described as having fallen out the bottom of a bag of characters from "The League of Gentlemen" BBC TV show. Longlegs is more Papa Lazarou than Jame Gumb. The film's relentless marketing campaign has given it some undue focus in the discussion of 'greatest horror movies of the year' although if you don't go in expecting the next best thing since The Silence of the Lambs (it is categorically not that) and just want some schlocky nonsense, you won't be disappointed. The film has done well and so I wouldn't be surprised if it led to a sequel, but the premise is so paper-thin already I really think that would be a bad idea.

Absolutely abysmal, borderline unwatchable, dreary **** you thought Aliens Versus Predator couldn't get worse, you're not even in for a treat, you're just in for grim resignation.

A decent franchise outing that doesn't look to reinvent the wheel but does exactly what it aims to. The majority of effects are excellent practical work, with one glaring exception in CGI that shows that the same tech behind Peter Cushing appearing in Rogue One still hasn't crossed the uncanny valley yet. The cast is solid with good performances, with particular praise for David Johnson who pulls off two very different sides of the same coin, one side being effectively sinister. A few too many nods to fans of the series' one liners but nothing so egregious really.I've seen some reviewers complaining but you'll never please these people.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

I don't think a film has tried my patience as much as this since Beyond the Black Rainbow, and for some of the same reasons. Both films are dreary exercises in style over substance. Wes Anderson has confused visual composition for narrative and compelling characters for props. Everyone in the film is less of a human being than a half-sketched caricature of a stereotype. Watching this film was agony.