Isherwood

This is quite a powerful episode from life. We can argue about the extent to which the protagonists' inertia is self-inflicted, but the way Danis Tanović portrays the hopelessness of their situation, through the seeming banalities of everyday life, to the desperate steps people are willing to take to save their loved ones, simply works. It’s not that I was fundamentally moved by it - the film isn't trying to do that - but it certainly did make me think.

This has all the clichés of escapist films crammed into 80 minutes. The only difference is that the prey and the ruthless pursuer are women. The guys are only there as extras to cause problems, occasionally have something twitch in their pants, or die. As far as the visuals go, the director says it's cooler to miss the mark using arrows, swords, and knives. I don't deny that I might have liked to know more about the characters, but on the other hand, it was really all about everyone running around in the Norwegian woods. Which the cast and crew certainly enjoyed. However, I do wish the director had more serious material and the same desire to go all out like this.

This is a more right-wing film than an instructional video for young Nazi Party recruits. It’s a cold, detached Nordic provocation that digs into the skin precisely by keeping an uncompromising distance from the viewer. The transformation of the young pretty boy into the arbiter of the human right to exist is too well crafted to not think about it long after it's over. The Machiavellian "the end justifies the means" stops at nothing in building up the protagonist's plan, and thus the emotional peak comes with the insertion of the sword of St. Vojtěch. However, it does not detract from the vigor and disputability of his actions - quite the contrary. I look at myself in the mirror with a smug expression and give myself a thumbs up.

This is a film whose value is undeniable from a historical rather than an audience point of view. Neither the newly restored copy nor composer Neil Brandt's lively piano accompaniment can simply cover up the fact that it’s nearly ninety years old. Hitchcock's scene composition is in many ways absolutely superb, moving with consummate confidence from humorous slapstick to sports drama in which two men clash fatefully to win the heart of one woman. Yet the main thing that springs to mind when it's over is that if it had lasted half the time, you'd probably have had a slightly better time.

When a demon crawls out of your rectum, against which even a morning detox after an evening of eating chilli is a walk in the park, something is wrong. The film’s ideas are good, and it’s got a bit of bizarreness, but otherwise, it's an extreme bit of boredom, in which the fecal humor isn’t the issue, as the creators promised, but rather the lack thereof. It’s funny at the elementary school level.

This was the first hit of the festival. It’s about the sexual problems of the current generation and is presented in such a perfectly bittersweet package that I was chilled by my own laughter at times. It has nudity and open sexuality, and yet no perversion. Just people like us, with whom we are of the same age, or soon will be. It’s a sex probe that goes deeper than into a retired porn star's throat. I was so taken by it that I'm willing to forgive the fact that only one of all the stories has a proper ending (and the least interesting one at that). 4 ½.

In terms of the dramaturgy, it’s a muddled mess, which for two hours concerns itself with something that deserves about twenty minutes and two or three plot twists. The motivations are merely thrown up in the air and the characters are undeveloped and unresolved in the end. If any of the things you expect to happen by traditional standards were to happen, you'd scold the filmmakers for cheap clichés, yet at the same time, you wouldn’t be biting the seat in front of you. This will hopefully be forgotten before the last celebrity leaves the festival.

Bursts of relieved laughter in places where the filmmakers didn't intend, a slowly emptying movie theater, and my personal incentive to watch one unconventional ordeal. This is a transformation into a zombie depicted as an antagonism of everything you've ever known. The main character's appearance, the excellent make-up work, and the director's skill as it washes over you in slow-motion shots, as the sores on his back burst and the grinning scars are quickly repaired with leucoplast. It's not a horror film in the traditional sense, but it also won't make you feel good. It’s too bad that it ends prematurely after the pathology brilliant scene. The masturbation performance and ambivalent sea voyage completely miss the mark.

A hard island punch in the gut, in which the director does not coddle either the characters or the audience. For me personally, Little Arbor embodies what I would never want to have sitting in my classroom as a teacher, and yet as time goes on you find yourself actually slowly but surely starting to root for this arrogant, rude brat. I have a bit of a problem with the fact that there is perhaps too much of the pretentious "shitting marble" in the course of ninety minutes (and yet the boys can be really funny at times) and that the fireworks are perhaps a bit too flashy. Yet given the way the filmmakers work with the mood of the weather and the minimal music, it ends up sounding exactly as raw as was originally intended. It's exactly the kind of film that makes domestic social dramas look like harmless "little errors" a little too strongly.

A detective storyline lost under a layer of ideological cleansing, and it’s not even saved by the fact that the extras are familiar faces and that Ondříček sells it visually as a sovereign European film. The cool façade is more likely to bear a jolly contemporary comedy than a period reckoning with a dark chapter of national history. A missed opportunity whose superficial glitz was only cemented by the movie award.