POMO

Mortal Engines is a grand farce of colossal proportions with an exceedingly large multicultural cast. The tangle of characters and secondary motivations makes it impossible to focus on the main dramatic story line, let alone on the emotional experience, which is sketched out so well in the promising opening. That’s a shame, because the film’s fantastical world and its visual richness knows no bounds, and Junkie XL serves up an epic Ben Hur-esque soundtrack. It’s hard to say if it’s dragged down by the screenplay, the directing or both, but coming from Peter Jackson and the entire LOTR team, such a stumble is quite a surprise.

Most Beautiful Island is a take on the American dream in an intimate, low-budget thriller that does not fulfil the expectations of a perverted viewer, but reaches a level of suspense that even the most discerning genre enthusiast will find satisfying. Not bad for an actress’s debut as a director and screenwriter, while also being in front of the camera the whole time. [Sitges FF]

I watched an episode called Transylvania. A group of filmmakers and alleged ghost experts wanders through the dark corridors of a castle in the Romanian town of Râșnov. Everyone claims to hear scary noises and they communicate with the ghosts in the manner of “knock twice if you’re a woman, once if you’re a man”. Sometimes you get to see a graphic model of the castle showing where the group (supposedly) is at the given moment. Most Haunted is chatty, ridiculous theater without any filmmaking ideas.

A militaristic action movie without western stars, filmed (evidently) in the authentic setting of the ruins of a post-war Iraqi city. We spend the whole time with a unit of local soldiers who are the only ones to have abandoned the fight against ISIS. And we follow their mission with a classified and quite surprising objective. We get a superficial look into the film’s characters, but otherwise it is just starkly realistic, dusty infantry action, redeemed by a more spirited, emotional conclusion.

An admirable creative intention to express a powerful message, carried out in an overly abstract way. But why not? The focus on the main character’s feelings in the first half of the film is so formally precise and psychologically engaging that few living directors would be able to pull it off. Darren Aronofsky knows that and therefore has the courage to go so wild in the second half, like a painter who spontaneously moves his brush, forming a line that is disturbing at first glance but then becomes a unique, valuable feature of the work as a whole. I accept and acknowledge this, and I am delightfully intoxicated with the final impression of the film.

Mother’s Day is a nicely upgraded remake that is cruel and perverted in its violence. Despite how cheap the movie looks and sounds (the soundtrack is horrible!), the overall quality of the direction is good, if we ignore the retarded behavior of the characters. But if they used common sense, the film would have ended after the first third, which would’ve been a shame.

A line from the “by the way” dialogue at the beginning: “There are three most important things in business: distribution, distribution and distribution.” Yes, these are the ONLY values on which the Kaufman brothers built their Troma business. There is no need for quality; distribution is enough – there is a consumer for everything.

The final shot of Ama Dablam, the most beautiful mountain in the Himalayas, which is used several times in the movie, confirms that the filmmakers wanted above all to pay homage to mountains, the majestic works of our planet’s greatest artist – Mother Nature. It is therefore a pity that they borrow well-known footage from hit sports movies (The Art of Flight) and other documentary series and attempt to make the movie a retrospective “best of” (including pointing out every possible use of the mountains by civilization) rather than contenting themselves with piano music and the thoughts spoken by Dafoe. While some of those could have been written by any of us viewers, others lift the film to the philosophical heights that are its ambitious aim.

The Last Deadly Mission is a gloomy film-noir crime thriller in the vein of Fincher’s Se7en or Zodiac, with a powerful atmosphere of despondency, the great Daniel Auteuil, the beautiful and fragile Olivia Bonamy, dialogue scenes with dirty napkins in an ashtray with cold whiskey spilled on them. It is a brilliantly made film in technical terms, but the screenplay could have cut down a bit on Auteuil’s drinking. He drinks probably more than Nic Cage in Leaving Las Vegas and it makes the film seem 20 minutes longer than it actually is. But all that diligently constructed gloom still deserves a solid four stars.

Diverse and complex in the relationships it depicts and with multiple motifs working in harmony, Mud is a drama about love, values, friendship, trust and the consequences of bad decisions that will always catch up with us sooner or later. Some viewers may struggle to understand McConaughey’s character, but he isn’t the film’s main protagonist. Rather, he is merely a character in a story that a 14-year-old boy witnesses and becomes a part of in order to have an adventurous and rewarding life experience at the end of his adolescence. The screenplay is outstanding and Tye Sheridan turns in an excellent performance, which eventually led to his role in Spielberg’s Ready Player One.