Editor's Reviews
In-depth reviews by our experts 🔮
The Running Man
"The walk and now the run, both in the same year. A stylized cyberpunk dystopian version of Death Race meets Gamer meets The Purge Anarchy (..and of course The Hunger Games) with Edgar Wright's trademark playlist curated specially for OTT divers and a hit and miss allegory for the topical- bread and circus, one percenters, technofeudalism, paid corporate media and the attitude of winner takes it all with an endless diet of popular reality tv entertainment slop presented by charismatic…"
Wake Up Dead Man
"A Haunting In Chimney RockRian Johnson settles on the who in this whodunit and works his way backwards creating a maze out of a mystery box and places his suspects, their motives, backstories, skeletons in the closets and above all, interplay between spooky atmosphere, gothic surroundings with a trickery that involves flare and theatrical drama and meta-humor (if at all that's even a word). The flip side is unlike the original installment, this third one heavily borrows from already…"
Bone Lake
"If those couples retreat reality TV had snapshot unsettling but clever editing with jarring cuts and suspenseful music and eerie spooky lightings, they would be this movie. A perplexing spin on the commentary about intimacy, loyalty, insecurities, honesty, power dynamics and relationship imbalances along with all that fun stuff about weird kinks, gaslighting, cabin fear erotica and characters symbolic of tailor-made recruitment ads in the urgency of why more younger generations need to become red-pilled. Although Bone Lake stars a Florence Pugh lookalike Maddie Hasson in a horror drama with relationship theme, it's not even remotely close to Midsommar."
One Battle After Another
"PTA headbutts Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Todd Lyons and Tom Homan singlehandedly with his audacious, undaunted yet hysterical film about a breeding underground counterculture revolutionary gang with a modern spin but radical take. Somebody send a memo to Ari Aster how to make a no-holds-barred film on the current political climate and ideological rift in a divided USA as wide as it was maybe during the Civil War, and to think of the fact that the novel it has been…"
Baramulla
"Beware of the blossoming petals of the white tulips, they are poisonous. What starts as a hook which really is a prop in this film becomes a magician's assistant and a transparent metaphor and neither the baleful foreboding score by Shor Police and Clinton Cerejo nor the enthralling performances by Manav Kaul straight from his eponymous hometown along with Bhasha Sumbli could save the final act from the foreseeable standardized plot and its inevitable conclusion. It's not Mission Kashmir, neither…"
A House of Dynamite
"Wait!! Didn't Tony Scott already make a more dramatic version of this with flair? A House of Dynamite doesn't have the patented blend of Bigelow's preparation and precision equivalent to Zero Dark Thirty nor does it have enough tension, stress or the devil-may-care attitude of The Hurt Locker because this time she attempts to give us a peek behind the curtains similar to that of the second act of Zero Dark but the score by Volker Bertelmann keeps one on…"
Dead of Winter
"A good superhero movie in a while."
The Long Walk
"Way before The Reaping, President Snow, Katniss and Suzanne Collins, there was The Long Walk, The Major, Pete & Ray and The King... And for all of 'em, one Francis Lawrence. How weirdly sick and twisted is it that the supposed "Leader of The Free World" has stooped to this allegory and how "The Great Experiment" has come undone!"
The Woman in Cabin 10
"It's our new normal now, isn't it? Every TikTok frenzied novel adaptation era. At least Knightley retains her wit and charm."
Play Dirty
"It's officially that time of the year for Mark to update his Imdb profile and feed the streaming giants. At first, I thought this couldn't be a Shane Black movie and then I saw some of the familiar faces from his Predator movie."
The Fantastic 4: First Steps
"It's as inconceivably preposterous and unwieldy as it is unrelentingly life-affirming and Lovecraftian. However, First Steps is also an instruction manual for upcoming movies in the superhero genre as how to build a solid 1979's Alien like intrigue and ambiance fused with an imaginative blueprint of a premise for a spiritual sequel of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the chosen one trope only to course-correct (or rather incorrect) itself towards the animated movie Justice League War and becomes a generic superheroes-save-the-day feature with an antihero not given enough screen time to have her character developed up to an optimal point."
Wedding Crashers
"Two wrenches try to infiltrate a toolbox full of, well, tools. If you readjust the script and play spooky eerie score in the background, this could be reimagined as a horror movie with Vince Vaughn as the damsel."
Hallow Road
"Grief's psychoanalysis on a couple. Genuinely creeped me out in one or two scenes. Rosamond Pike continues to surprise with her choices. An addition to the gallery of a rare genre along with Locke and The Guilty."
Vesper
"A laudable display of what could be achieved with a meagre €5 million. Whatever Vesper tries to create initially through imaginative ideas of high-concept spectacles comprising biohacking, membrane science, systems design based on bio-engineering and Wetware in addition with world-building and pensive score, it soon loses due to the formula-driven same old commentary about human-centric values, emotions, free will, purpose, freedom versus base desires, animal instincts, servitude and the hardened vicissitudes of humanity's leftovers witnessed through the pure, irreproachable eyes of an inquisitive but precocious teenager."
Weapons
"A wasted opportunity. Massively overhyped and inflated. Too many moving pieces to juggle. Whatever stars are here is mostly a reflection of the technical traits of the movies, and not because of the plot or concept per se. The principal concept itself is highly derivative of John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos which had already been adapted into two movies in the 60s and one 1995 movie named Village of The Damned starring Christopher Reeve along with a Television miniseries in…"
Days of Heaven
"An homage to wandering hearts and hard times. Terence Malick created new pages for John Steinbeck after his demise."
Highest 2 Lowest
"No offence Mr. King. Kurosawa was and still is the one true King.High and Low made in the early 60s is legendary because of its play on light and shadow, white and dark, no score saturation and all about mise-en-scène to evoke the thrill. It was a masterpiece of an investigative thriller. The problem with the modern retelling is the add ons, Spike Lee adds shiny bright colors, lights, hustle and bustle of the city, glamor, pizzaz and the…"
Eephus
"A fading sport in a fading community through all different generations. "I've been watching this for an hour and I still don't understand baseball." Still it got me all mushy and nostalgic about my days of peewee cricket matches with my friends. It's one of those movies that isn't trying real hard to say anything specific, doesn't happen much and yet it shows everything. If you yearn for those days of hitting a ball with your childhood friends while running around on a patch of grass until one day it's all over and you get hurled into the vortex of life, you'll dig this film."