POMO

I would have expected a sophisticated social satire from the South Korean envoy to the Oscars, especially now, just a few years after the brilliant Parasite. But Concrete Utopia is merely a technically polished post-apocalyptic genre movie with ordinary conflicts between the characters and a kitschy ending that tries for straightforward feeling without first building relationship emotions. It surely works as a blockbuster for the masses, as actor Byung-hun Lee is already a major-league crowd-puller, but the film is rather only for Asian audiences. [Sitges Film Festival]

In the history cinema dating back more than a century, we can count the number of high-quality arachnocentric horror movies on the fingers of one hand, or maybe both hands if we squint our eyes. And I am pleased that their ranks newly include this French spider spectacular.  However, the experience that it provides depends heavily on the extent of your arachnophobia, because it’s not about likable characters or nice landscapes. It rather takes place in an apartment block on a French social housing estate and its protagonists are rebellious odd-jobbers and adolescents whose survival will be of no concern to you until the final quarter of the film. But the apartment building has a brilliant circular design patterned on a spider web, the spiders multiply rapidly and actually look like real, live spiders (in a French genre film by young enthusiasts!), and more than one scene is so intensely scary that you’ll get goosebumps and hold your breath. The fourth star is for the cinema experience with good sound. [Sitges Film Festival]

Well-depicted psychological insecurity when a girl, seeking shelter from a storm, enters a stranger’s caravan and doesn’t know if its owner is or is not dangerous. An hour of dialogue during which the two check each other out and anticipate each other’s reactions, interspersed with the creaking of the caravan and the powerful sound of thunder, wind and rain. The guy is weird, unreadable and, mainly, paranoid, which after certain events leads to a hallucinogenic wilderness with a mix of factual cards on the table that the viewer will find confusing. And that’s a shame. [Sitges Film Festival]

A likable genre movie about a Malaysian schoolgirl who starts to turn into a tiger. And sometimes her eyes glow like those of an extra-terrestrial. The first half-hour, when she spends an ordinary day with her schoolmates staring at mobile phones and chattering about nothing, tries the viewer’s patience. However, the film starts to be entertaining with the onset of bullying at school and the initial metamorphoses into a predator. Not as horror, but as a child’s fantasy with sensitively depicted states of complicated female puberty. We sympathies with the protagonist and we can see her nervously tense transformations with endearingly naïve masks as a metaphor for her defense against the “bad people” around her. The film is set in the Malaysian jungle, which, in combination with the mythical aura of the tiger, gives the film a pleasantly exotic feel. [Sitges Film Festival]

An homage to French horror movies of the 1960s and ’70s (e.g. the films of Jean Rollin). Nice retro visuals and an appropriate soundtrack including dreamy vocals. But the film is bland in terms of plot. Two teenagers run away from a Catholic girls’ school to attend a party for adults at a chateau, where they experience their first contact with boys, one of whom happens to be a vampire. And that’s it. Exalted boredom with pseudo-dramatization and criminally underused potential. [Sitges Film Festival]

In the broad palette of festival films in which a lot of filmmakers push themselves or strive for something, The Last Stop in Yuma County is absolutely, wonderfully refreshing. It is coolly and confidently directed from the opening credits, with a game of one-upmanship superbly set in motion by the characters. It’s like a Tarantino flick set in a desert café, though without the brisk dialogue, but it’s just as well thought out, surprising, darkly humorously homicidal and beautifully played by the flawlessly cast “familiar supporting actors”. The connection between the film’s subject and the lyrics of the song in the closing credits is great. After Reptile, this is the next extraordinary American debut of the year! [Sitges Film Festival]

We don’t ever see many Luxembourgian films, especially not historical films from the dark periods of the country’s history. This gritty German-language contribution to the historical genre is thus all the more rare. The Last Ashes is surprising with its cold-blooded rawness starting with the black-and-white prologue. The squalor and tyranny can still be felt in the color continuation of the story about a determined (and pretty) avenger, though not as intensely. Despite the viewer-pleasing revenge motif, the film is heavy with dialogue and in the depiction of the characters; it could even be said that it’s ponderous, hobbling the viewer’s catharsis like one of the supporting characters with severed Achilles tendons. However, that heavy-handedness in some ways suits the cruel historical period and the dark tone of the narrative.

A well-directed socio-thriller about a tragic clash of social classes that occurs in rural Brazil, where local workers from a plantation rise up against its owners, a married couple from the city. The police and the law cannot be counted on; they have only blind faith that they will be saved from being lynched by the “savages”. Well-portrayed mob psychology of individuals with limited thinking and no knowledge of the reality of a world with legal underpinnings. This is easily applicable to possible situations even in countries more advanced than Brazil, including some in Europe. Chilling! [Sitges Film Festival]

This is how the Pakistanis see the horror genre? Quietly let the grieving characters talk about their feelings and occasionally have one of them hint at something spiritual, which doesn’t tell anyone anything and isn’t scary in any way? Tediously boring, In Flames is the worst possible choice for a mid-morning festival film, unless you go to the cinema to take a nap. [Sitges Film Festival]

A Chilean island, indigenous people with witchcraft at their command and an arrogant German colonizer... Sorcery has atmosphere, high-quality actors and a setting in an attractive historical period with impressive production design, but the screenplay fails to offer anything more interesting. The most powerful scene gets the story going at the beginning, but it’s followed by waiting for a catharsis that is never fully brought to fruition. Nevertheless, the subject matter invited many interesting solutions to the situation as longed for by the viewers. [Sitges Film Festival]