Reviews

65 (2023)

/ Jakub Flasz / Leave a comment

Imagine you wake up from your cryostasis, jolted into lucidity by the ship computer telling you a collision is imminent. You sober up rapidly and, propelled by a sense of duty mixed with well-trained reflexes, you make your way to the cockpit with a hope of successfully navigating through a swarm of asteroids. You fail. You were never meant to succeed anyway, but that’s beside the point. You must find a place to crash land and you therefore divert the ship towards the nearest planet.

Continue reading →
Advertisement

Scream VI (2023)

/ Jakub Flasz / Leave a comment

I think it goes without saying that most franchises, especially in the genre of horror, tend to get progressively more braindead as time goes on and by the time you see a number six or seven to the right of the title, chances are that originality had long been defenestrated in favour of keeping the series alive at all cost. However, an oft-interesting by-product of this process is that these further-down-the-spiral instalments in your favourite slasher franchises may occasionally develop their own personalities on the back of being wacky, which may germinate their eventual cult appeal. After all, even though Jason Takes Manhattan, A Nightmare on Elm Street 5, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation could never be accused of even trying to take themselves seriously, let alone of attempting to evolve the series in any meaningful direction, fans will always find ways to enjoy them. As long as they are fun to watch, that is. 

Continue reading →

Creed III (2023)

/ Jakub Flasz / Leave a comment

The Rocky series remains one of the arguably most interesting film franchises in Hollywood history. From its New Hollywood beginnings and earning acclaim for Sylvester Stallone on the back of his well-deserved Oscar for writing to evolving into pastiche in the 80s, descending into obscurity, experiencing a brief revival and eventually coming back under the refurbished guise of the Creed legacy subseries, it is a veritable goldmine for popculture historians and aficionados of earnest drama. Yet, as diverse thematically and tonally as it has been, the series had always been underpinned by one constant factor – the involvement of one Sylvester Stallone who wrote, directed and/or starred in most of them. And even – as was the case with Creed – in cases where Ryan Coogler did the writing and directing and the narrative focus was shifted away from Rocky, Stallone’s character was still instrumental to the development of the story and remained inseparable from the film’s overall success.  

Continue reading →

Cocaine Bear (2023)

/ Jakub Flasz / Leave a comment

It honestly feels as though I was about to repeat myself because on the occasion of writing up my thoughts on Plane I managed to weave it around the concept of February being a singular time in the year where you can get to see movies that normally would head straight either to your local bargain bin or to the far corner of the Netflix library. And here we go again because Cocaine Bear is available for you to see in cinemas and – to make it a little bit more bizarre and culturally intriguing – it seems to be bringing a reasonable box office revenue, despite the fact it is barely a functioning movie.  

Continue reading →

Plane (2023)

/ Jakub Flasz / 1 Comment

The first few months of any given year are commonly seen as a dumping ground for movies that studio executives don’t seem to hold too much hope for, such as stand-alone non-franchised action thrillers, horrors that just about missed the Halloween window, one or two rom-coms to mark Valentine’s Day, and prestige-adjacent dramas that weren’t nutritious enough to qualify as functional Oscar bait. In fact, there are more such periods peppered throughout the year, like the tail end of Summer when major blockbusters have already taken their crops and low-expectations affair come out from under the counter-programming umbrella, or the first weeks of autumn between the awards season fully winds up and when it is still a bit early for genre movies to make the most of these sweet Halloween dollars. But Q1 is where it’s at – the savannah of dad cinema, where Liam Neeson is the apex predator. The Liam King.  

Continue reading →

Knock at the Cabin (2023)

/ Jakub Flasz / Leave a comment

Looking back over two decades at the time when M. Night Shyamalan burst onto the screen with The Sixth Sense and took the world by storm, you’d be keen to remember how his early output precipitated multiple comparisons to Sir Alfred Hitchcock. Granted, it is impossible to separate his own self-mythologizing from the genuine third-party reception of his work – after all, the man has always had an ego, which is also perfectly acceptable. However, it is probably reasonable to assume that the truth lies somewhere between audiences responding so viscerally to Shyamalan’s inventive twist endings, critics pinpointing aesthetic inspirations Shyamalan drew from Hitchcock’s work, and the auteur’s own mythmaking.  

Continue reading →

The Whale (2022)

/ Jakub Flasz / Leave a comment

Ever since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival last year, the discourse surrounding the Darren Aronofsky-directed The Whale has been successfully constrained to become a conversation about Brendan Fraser’s performance as the film’s protagonist, Charlie… which is a bit of a blessing in disguise – or more appropriately, a blessing under a tonne of makeup and prosthetics. 

Continue reading →

The Fabelmans (2022)

/ Jakub Flasz / Leave a comment

By his own admission, A good chunk of Steven Spielberg’s directorial work has always been analogous to his real-life experiences. A keen observer will immediately find repeating patterns in stories he ends up attracted to, from E.T. to War of the Worlds and beyond. He’s been consistently coming back to revisit themes of broken families, absentee parents etc., especially visible in those rare movies he had a hand in writing, such us Close Encounters of the Third Kind or A.I.  

Continue reading →

Babylon (2022)

/ Jakub Flasz / Leave a comment

Damien Chazelle’s directorial output thus far has squarely put him in the realm of populist auteurs – filmmakers who challenge the audience without necessarily challenging the form, and always within the boundaries of widely accepted good taste. His work does not have the grit and prowess of what The Movie Brats did in the 70s or what the Indiewood crowd managed in the 90s.  

Continue reading →