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.

PVT CHAT is like the dissertation work of a New York Film Academy student who is not afraid to go a bit over the edge. There are plenty of penises and semen in this film about the manipulation of a young submissive by an internet dominatrix. The theme itself strives to create controversy through the open approach to it. However, the immaturity, naïve attempt at a thriller-style plot and mainly the empty dialogue are rather more evidence of the filmmaker’s frustration with the absence of a meaningful topic that he would have shot with real interest and enthusiasm. The scene of a long and spasmodic (as if friendly) fight at an art exhibition only confirms this.

Red Dot offers up the familiar theme of tourists hunted like wild animals in the wilderness, but spiced up with new twists. The unique Swedish locations and the film’s climax significantly improve an otherwise absolutely standard experience with at least one instance of illogic. The directing is sufficiently good and everything fits well psychologically, but in more experienced hands this could only have been a real hit, like the British film Calibre, for example.

Goosebumps. Every time.

This is my Promising Adult Woman! Original subject matter with modern definition of the characters, a clever battle of rock-solid egos, where no one is an angel and everyone deserves a punch in the mouth. A thriller and a gangster film, led by a female character as masterfully as Clint Eastwood did in Leone’s westerns and, at the same time, an accurate mirror held up to American society. Rosamund Pike hands in the best performance by an actress in an English-language film in recent memory – not with award-winning depth, but by bejewelling every scene with surgically precise facial expressions. She is the backbone of this boldly conceived mix of genre elements. The casting of Peter Dinklage seems bizarre at first, but gradually fits perfectly into the caricaturish concept of the film. I Care a Lot could have come off as a cheap novelty, but thanks to great directing and Pike, it turned out to be a little post-modern gem.

This crime flick is fantastically stylish in every possible way, with its gloomy atmosphere of Manhattan at night, alarming police mega-dragnet with a lockdown of “the city that never sleeps”, the noirish character of an honest, straight-shooting cop, music in the spirit of old “gritty” crime movies. And standing against that, the most transparent and predictable screenplay that I can remember. Everything that is merely suspicious to the protagonist is immediately so clear to the viewers that they think that just maybe, for such stylish filmmaking, it must have been done intentionally to serve a higher purpose. But that’s not the case and, because of that, the film turns out in the end to be just a naïvely short-sighted banality.

Wrong Turn is a laughable attempt to push the well-known B-movie slasher franchise in the direction of thematically more substantial horror flicks like Midsommar. And what’s more, it does so with would-be clever genre clichés in mold of The Cabin in the Woods. Unfortunately, this attempt is just as dumb as the preceding films, and not as entertaining as a guilty pleasure without the admitted stupidity. It’s watchable only out of curiosity as to what other unexpected twists will pop up to make the film seem innovative, even though it just mechanically borrows everything imaginable from everywhere (the final stylisation of the female protagonist into the archer from The Hunger Games confirms who the film’s target audience is supposed to be). But the ending left me a bit puzzled. It was brilliant, like Jordan Peele’s work at the time of Get Out. And for the first time in the entire film, Bill Sage didn’t come across as a cheap B-movie version of Ray Winstone.

Ron Perlman’s hairstyle and make-up in the opening scene give us a hint of what’s to come. And then everything in the film only gets better. Monster Hunter is a videogame-based ultra-farce with an utterly primitive plot, but it’s even more of an admittedly guilty pleasure that’s just straight-up entertaining. The explicitly dry humour made me laugh more than I do with most forced comedies. And with visual effects that only a few top-tier Hollywood productions can boast (Godzilla vs. Kong). Otherwise, Paul W.S. obviously steals from everywhere, from Aliens to Dune (or Transformers or Star Wars) to The Lord of the Rings, sometimes so blatantly (a group of soldiers walking across a stone bridge to a hellish mountain covered in burning lava) that it’s rather more a declaration of love for those films than a case of creative helplessness. Conversely, the monsters themselves are magnificent and the visual dynamics of the action are highly polished. And there is an abundance of that here. One slaughter after another. Plus nice locations. Despite that, take my third star with a grain of salt, because I’m giving it for the gut-punching sound. My downstairs neighbour is on vacation, so I’m running Atmos in the living room with an unmuffled subwoofer. And with this movie, it was almost an orgasmic experience.

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.

The Crew is a standard French crime flick in which the protagonists are “honorable thieves”, but the plan goes off the rails and they have to become killers in order to survive. Of course, the most charismatic of them draws the rest of the crew, including his younger brother, into a life of crime, and his own mother condemns him for it. And even he would prefer to give it up and get back together with his pretty ex-wife, but... Cliché stacked on top of cliché, but it’s entertaining as an action flick with a flowing plot.