Ready Player One (Steven Spielberg, 2018)

☼☼☼☼(☼) out of 10☼

Plunging the viewer into a vast and messy virtual world of a futuristic dystopia, Steven Spielberg reaches new levels of shallowness (no pun intended) and delivers a noisy, kitschy, mildly entertaining hodgepodge spectacle which bastardizes The Shining, relies heavily on the glossy, 'video-gamey' CGI (though for a good reason), wastes the talents of Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cook and the rest of the cast by fitting them into all-too-familiar cookie-cutter roles, and throws at you more pop-culture references than you can quarter-circle forward + any punch at (for the uninitiated, that's how you perform Hadouken in Street Fighter series).

The Nth Degree of Devotion

An impossible love story between the Goddess of Perpetual Electricty

and the penultimate chevalier from the Unknown Galaxy.

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Gemini (Aaron Katz, 2017)

☼☼☼☼ out of 10☼

The remarkable production design, beautiful cinematography rich with cool colors and jazzy score heavy on melancholic atmosphere are the only redeeming factors in this draggy, mumbling, uninventive, sleep-inducing, quasi-neo-noir, Hitchcockian wannabe thriller rife with trite plotlines and uninvolving characters, bloated with self-importance and further bogged down by the lackluster direction, heavy-handed social commentary and anticlimactic conclusion.

A Divine Anomaly Meanders

As his toxic glance penetrates her innate memory,

another night starts off, adorned with a golden sin.

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Evanescent Virtue Expands

As her everlasting smile petrifies his initial thought,

another day passes by, dressed in a fluttering dream.

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Passions (Kira Muratova, 1994)

☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼ out of 10☼

A spiritual prequel to a phantasmagorical drama, Rita's Last Fairy Tale (Poslednyaya skazka Rity), by Renata Litvinova (who brings her quirky, somewhat endearing mannerisms to the role of a daydreaming nurse, Lilya), Kira Muratova's Passions (Uvlecheniya) acts as a floaty, jovial, off-kilter, slightly surreal farce set against the backdrop of jockeys' life, bursting with vivid imagery, existing both below and above water just like its meandering heroine, and featuring a great number of naive, Fellini-esque, characters in almost non-stop motion whose seemingly endless jabber on love, death, beauty, circus and centaurs, inter alia, proves that horses really do make us philosophers.

If My Shadow Were a Ghost...

... it would roam the heavens like a translucent animal,

replacing I with Celestial and Me with Harmony.

(click to enlarge)