Babylon.

 

These days director's stature can be gauged by the ability to cast Margot Robbie. If Margot's vehicle "Amsterdam" was undercooked, Babylon is overcooked with too many plotlines to untangle them all by the end. To manage these plotlines they applied a device already employed (unsuccessfully) by the end of the "Boardwalk Empire", that is adding another plotline as a scaffolding to support the previous one. The scenes of fighting with the snake as well as the suicide of the Brad Pitt's hero, and, gigantic distraction in the form of underground palace of De Sadean pleasures would be completely unnecessary if the auteurs followed logic of the characters and made already existing plotlines deeper -- the personalities of the wives of Brad Pitt, his business manager, etc. 

Avatar. The Way of Water.

          

        Why Cameron desperately clings to this Rousseauist fantasy that tribal societies live in peace and harmony with nature? Violence is endemic feature of the tribal way of life. Human hunter-gatherers are blamed for destroying big Neogene fauna. Concerning the coexistence with the other sentient species: modern humans invasion of Europe is linked to the disappearance of Neanderthals.   

Strange World

 Reeking of political correctness... the boy is gay raised in multiracial family, the ruler is Native American lesbian and even the dog is a three-legged mutt, the flick is saved by an inventive subject matter--the travel through the anus of a giant turtle into her organism to save the world. 

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    Stylish thriller with aesthetism consciously carried to absurd. Anya Taylor-Joy is now tucked in every movie, as Scarlett Johansson was in 00s and Nataly Portman on the eve of the new century--but, here, in the role of a call girl replacing an English tof's girlfriend on the guest list she is wonderful. She even stands up---on screen and as a performer--to a formidable Ralph Fiennes. Michael Hoult in a role of a British cuisine-obsessed upper classman is also very good. 

Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile.

 

H. L. Borges commented that humanity only invented four stories and doomed to repeat then to infinity. Obviously, even the stories of stories have dried up. The movie is the hybrid between "Airbud" (a basketball-playing dog) and Michigan J. Frog from the Looney Tunes. And no effort by actors can exculpate this fact. 

Amsterdam.

    

       All-star cast of the movie (Christian Bale, Zoe Saldana, Margot Robbie, Rami Malek, Michael Shannon, De Niro, etc., etc.) did not assure victory. Beginning as a pastiche with imitation of Wes Anderson, it quickly devolves into a formulaic, moralistic thriller. Bale is wonderful, Robbie's smile is worth only slightly less than Gioconda's but this does not make a movie fly. It is not bad at all; just undercooked. Probably, evolved from a theatrical play with dialogue suitable for the stage but not for a fast-pacing movie. 

See how they run.

     

Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. Wes Anderson's oeuvre now has its imitators and not bad at that. The movie even employs Saoirse Ronen and Adrien Brody -- the constant presence in Anderson's movies. Totally unmemorable but well worth the price of admission.