Watched on Netflix
James Patterson has reached a huge audience with his novels: the US author, who specializes in thrillers, has sold more than 400 million books, earning more than anyone else for three years in a row. Strangely enough, however, he has only played a minor role in the film industry. While John Grisham and Dan Brown, for example, also enjoyed huge success in Hollywood, Patterson's various adaptations were more of a side event. Hardly anyone was interested in…
Watched on Blu-Ray
Brian de Palma has never been the artist who could lure large crowds into the cinemas with his name alone. Not infrequently, he was even an enervating thorn in the side of the film studios. However, if you take a retrospective look at Brian De Palma's career, you can see, on the one hand, that these animosities did not come out of the blue, as expressively as De Palma sometimes played with the boundaries of good taste…
Watched in the cinema (62nd visit in 2023)
Is it here after all, the much-heralded tedium of the superhero comic action film? After this segment dominated theaters for a long time and produced countless big hits, box-office results have recently been sobering. "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" still brought in a respectable 850 million U.S. dollars at the box office - but its predecessor had made 500 million more. While this could still be excused with the circumstances, it went on…
Watched on Disney +
One thing you have to hand it to the MCU: they really do manage to make gold out of (almost) everything. When "Guardians of the Galaxy" hit cinemas in the summer of 2014, only die-hard comic fans might have known who these people were supposed to be. There was no connection to "Marvel's The Avengers", none of the popular characters appeared there. It smelled a bit like recycling leftovers in order to profit from the superhero…
Watched on Disney+
The reaction of many movie fans when "Guardians of the Galaxy" was announced was the same as that of the dangerous Korath when Peter Quill introduces himself as the legendary Star-Lord in one of the first scenes of the film: "Who?" In the composition as they are seen on the screen, the Guardians in Marvel Comics have only existed since 2008, so you hardly knew the group, unlike a Hulk or Thor. Many studios then try to…
Watched on Amazon Video
Directly after "Scarface", Brian De Palma returned to his cinematic roots, his real passion: the declaration of love to the masters of suspense and genre cinema. As never before, "Body Double" (German title "Der Tod kommt zweimal"-Death comes twice) is a unique potpourri that makes direct, offensive and unmistakable use of previously shown ideas, lays them at its feet and excellently reassembles them in its own way. Even by De Palma standards, this is still a…