POMO

The best Oscars in a long time, capping off an extraordinarily strong year in film. Funny surprises like a nude John Cena, Guillermo with a mega-bottle of Tequilla and the twins Arnie and Danny DeVito. Again hosted perfectly with humour by Jimmy Kimmel, statuettes handed out to those who deserved them. I was pleased with all of the results, especially the awards for Best International Feature film and sound for Zone of Interest. And a powerful speech by the director of 20 Days in Mariupol! And the singing Ryan Gosling stole the show.

It’s a shame about the level of stupidity in many of the scenes, because the natural settings are atmospheric and the monsters are impressive. The idea of setting the story on Earth before our civilization, in the age of dinosaurs, is also fine. Sci-fi B-movies require at least a bit of common sense, which is all the more true with smaller budgets. Here, with solid production under the baton of Sam Raimi and an A-list actor in the lead role, the absence of intelligence is an even greater drawback.

The subject of acid rain caused by air pollution has already become a bit much for a serious-looking disaster drama. The screenplay doesn’t offer anything interesting, as it works only with adapted clichés and, furthermore, becomes increasingly, mind-numbingly stupid the closer it gets to the climax, which in turn almost becomes an unintentional parody. Only one scene, involving the unexpected death of an important character somewhere in the middle of the film, has any emotional value and hits the mark. Acid is a below-average, unnecessary French genre movie. [Cannes FF]

Set in a time in America that now seems the most appealing of all, Air is a fresh entrepreneurial adventure with a maximally feel-good happy ending. It's not as funny or seductively amoral as The Wolf of Wall Street, nor does it reveal such an interesting curiosity as Moneyball did, but it’s still a skilfully directed and well acted true story of the American Dream. “Booorn in the USA!”

Powerful motifs involving the troubled lives of two social outcasts in a bland bit of filmmaking. Scars on the soul deepen mutual tolerance and love, but the past and a higher power always catch up with you. And redemption lies in coming to terms with that. Along Came Love is a dramaturgically functional, well-acted drama with the nice coastal architecture of Normandy, but it’s enough to watch it on television. [Cannes FF]

Sandra Hüller turns in another superb performance in Anatomy of a Fall, one of two films featuring the actress in the competition section at Cannes this year (the other being The Zone of Interest). Though she plays the main character, we remain unaware of whether she is guilty or not throughout the film. Her expression and speech are mostly cold and we sense the murderer in her, but she plays innocent absolutely naturally. Casting her in this role was an excellent move. This long, very dialogue-oriented film also includes a trial with an interesting, procedural investigation of a tragic event. Well directed with ambiguity in the difficult search for the truth. [Cannes FF]

Based on the promo photos, A Whole Life appears to be just another bit of romantic alpine kitsch. In reality, however, it is the nicest film about life in the mountains, as well as life in general, to come out in recent years. It also offers the nicest alpine panoramas to be seen in a feature film in recent years. The choice of locations and the filmed details (the bus ride) bear witness to the director’s relationship to the mountains and will elicit a feeling of déjà vu in some viewers – we will repeatedly go back to it for the magical fragments in the subconscious perception of the high mountain landscape, where we will find peace of mind. The characters are perfectly formed and stage actor Stefan Gorski does a flawless job of portraying the protagonist. The heart of the film is the scene in which he leads his fiancée to a mountain cabin and shows and explains to her why he has settled there. Another attractive theme of the film consists in the building of the first cable cars and the electrification of the mountain villages – and the fatal injuries that occurred during the particularly hard physical work – associated with it. Great, constantly “floating” camerawork and music that is always perfectly appropriate. And that epilogue...

The exploration of the real world by people coming from Barbie Land is stimulating and original and hints at the promise of a clever, fresh and original satire reflecting the pseudo-problems of contemporary (western) society. But the potential inherent in that is cut dead by the subsequent “gender conflict” and its childish resolution to which the film resorts. And that’s a shame. Even the balance of entertainment for children and adults doesn’t work here, since the movie is not for kids at all. But let’s be glad that audiences are returning in large numbers to cinemas now that the pandemic is over. Barbie deserves thanks for that. And special praise goes to the originator of the brilliant “Barbenheimer” marketing concept, though the hardworking crew around Tom Cruise didn’t deserve to have M:I-7 overshadowed.

The first segment in the apartment / on the street / in the store is congenially filmed paranoia. With goosebumps and my mouth hanging open, I witnessed the beginning of the film of the year, a film that I had been waiting decades for, a film that would put me in a cinephilic trance with every shot, every cut, every expression and every move that Joaquin Phoenix made. The second, laid-back and more comical segment still held the bar high and aroused my curiosity as to what would happen next. But with the segment in the forest, the film began to lose everything from the plot that had won me over and became an incoherent muddle of motifs and metaphors that don’t make sense in the psychological study of the main character. And if they’re supposed to makes sense, the viewer has long since lost interest in figuring them out.

This dark pathological thriller descends into horror not through scares or a sense of dread, but through a chillingly realistic rendering of a disturbing subject. With its atmospherically appropriate setting in gloomy New York, the film features a creepy lead character superbly stylised by Marin Ireland. The film is psychologically balanced, as the motivations of the two doctor characters are understandable despite the definite crossing of ethical boundaries. Only the directorial guidance of the child actress is weak, and the film’s conclusion lazily avoids the escalation of tension that the viewer expected.