CinemaShafiq

  Stupid, contrived and messy. A film about the hardships faced by modern day women is a good premise for a film, but the executions that this film did was just plain and cringe-ly bad. Forced characterisations, and the expected simple generalisation of males in this universe. A film in which the central theme of its story is the hardship of the daily lives faced by it's main character(s) is akin alike Roma , Hidden Figures or even as back as Spielberg's 1985's  The Color Purple - and big budget or star power was not the strength of these films, but their good writing. And that is definitely what this film lack.  4/10

  A good female-lead assassin revenge thriller. Probably one of the few of decent Netflix films. Mary Elizabeth Winstead was amazing, and at least this film got a heartfelt story and beautiful cinematography unlike other numerous cliche modern female badass movies. This is how you make a good, badass female lead film; not with random preachy scenes or bland action scenes (Enola Holmes, The Old Guard), but with a strong front character with a good story and deep characterisation. I would be excited if there's a sequel. 6/10

  A fresh, intense and well-written series. It's been a while since I watched a series that got me real hooked and just makes me binge-watching it till the end.  There's some comments saying that this series was not original and it was ripping off The Hunger Games, Battle Royale or Alice in Borderland. In my opinion, it's common for a modern film/series to be inspired from other works, just as long as it didn't rip it off 100%.  Squid Game also had a very fresh & unique set and costume design as well as good scores. The characters were also well written, and you'll be hooked to 1 or 2 of them, and this depends on each viewer.  It seems like just as Netflix were doing great original Hollywood contents back in 2015 (Daredevil, Stranger Things), now they're doing the same thing with the Korean market (Squid Game, Kingdom). This is great and hopefully there'll be more coming from Netflix Korea. 8/10 

  Chris Hemsworth's new Netflix film Extraction turned out to be worth the watch.  It is a good action-packed popcorn film and this film showed that Hemsworth is the one amongst the OG Avengers who has the most diverse acting range and also a bright career post Endgame. 6/10

This whole movie is basically just Jared Leto enjoying his weird affection to the Japanese culture, this time; a white yakuza. Maybe he didn't had enough satisfaction playing with Japanese elements in Blade Runner 2049.  There was nothing much about this film, it was about Jared Leto being a former US military, stranded in Japan, and for some weird reason in the universe that this film was taking in - the Yakuza seems to be very welcoming in accepting a gaijin , a white one especially, being accepted into the family. Sure, to be honest, the promise of a white guy being a part of the Yakuza is actually interesting, and there were plenty of materials already made on this premise.  However, what we got is one long movie, which drags and didn't really deliver a good story about that and what was more annoying is that there seems to be illogical "white saviour" moments sprinkled in this movie. It felt like Tom Cruise's The Last Samurai . That fi