paulosoaresperry

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the story of a man who creates a monster and gradually transforms imself into a monster worse than the one he created. And his creation, the monster, quickly becomes a human, more human than its creator ever was. But that's not what Guillermo del Toro does with his Frankenstein, although there are many points of contact between the film and the original 1818 book. What del Toro does is something absolutely extraordinary, a story that completes the original story. The cinematography is incredible, and the relationship of the characters with the complexity of the added story is irrepressible. The soundtrack, score and sound effects is also something to be taken into consideration. It's not a perfect film, due to some details in the creature's amazing evolutionary capacity, but it's certainly another of del Toro's monsters to go down in film history. It was two hours and twenty-nine minutes of cinema. Excuse me, of absolutely good cinema.

Paul Thomas Anderson has given to cinema some of its best moments in the past, but since 2021's "Licorice Pizza", something strange has been happening with his cinematic vision. Those intricate yet always compelling character-driven plots have given way to films sustained only by a few actors. 2025's "One Battle After Another" is the epitome of what I described earlier, where some characters (e.g., Benicio Del Toro's, who is a hick caricature of Mexicans) are merely figurative and don't live up to the actors who portray them. So, "One Battle After Another" is just Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn making us wonder which of the two deserves the Oscar for best actor. These two guys improve with time, like a fine wine. Also noteworthy is the big-screen debut of Chase Infiniti, a young actress who, in her very first role, eclipses actresses like Regina Hall, who should never have left the comedies and fatuous films she made in the past. But "One Battle After Another" isn't exactly a bad film. It's not exactly a good one either. It drags on (for a long time) and the result isn't what one would expect from PTA and his past glories, such as "Boogie Nights" from 1997, "Magnolia" from 1999, or "There Will Be Blood" from 2007. But perhaps the fault lies with me, because I had high expectations for this film, and as we know, high expectations can lead to great disappointments...