NinadeL

Another war story benefiting from the popularity of boxing at the time, which did not diminish even under the toughest conditions. This time we follow the fate of the Greek middleweight champion Salamo Arouch. Among a number of other similar films, I can also recommend the comic novel by Reinhard Kleist "The Boxer: The True Story of Holocaust Survivor Harry Haft."

A film adaptation of the play by Sharman Macdonald, mother of Keira Knightley... starring Keira. Honestly, it could have been much worse, for a fictional story set in the biography of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. However, it's much more about human destinies than life and institutions. The backdrop is the drama of World War II from the air raids on London to life in the Welsh countryside. Obviously the idea was to capture the nature of people in extreme situations (and love polygons), but the result is nothing special. All in all, it's just another melodrama with costumes... starring Keira.

In Mrs. Henderson Presents, we get successful period piece by Stephen Frears about the glory years of the Windmill Theater, the famous nude revue theater that had a fascinating era in the 1930s and remained open during the wartime bombing of London. I am not surprised that it eventually became a musical piece, because the style of London follies is simply attractive.

While cinema in the western half of the Czech Republic at this time was standing still, often making bland or timid projects and waiting for that famous little big change that was soon to come, the eastern half waited for nothing and almost unobtrusively produced work of extraordinary quality. The Boxer and Death, based on the short story of the same name by Polish author Józef Hen, presents a classic drama of the moral qualities of an individual in an exacerbated situation, with the backdrop of a concentration camp and the main protagonists, German commander Kraft and Slovak prisoner Komínek, united by their pre-war passion for amateur boxing. Individual situations and characters are portrayed as authentically as possible at the time, and Peter Solan is not afraid of trilingual dialogue in German, Slovak and Polish. The psychological miniature detailing is excellent. The character of Kraft's partner Helga is well written (Valentina Thiel is useless but in many ways smarter than her lover), but all the female characters are stylized into the latest trends of the early 1960s, and it's awkward how much this period failure brings down all the good this film can be proud of. What's the point of all the chilling detail, Nazi uniforms, prison garb, menacing incinerators and barbed wire when a bunch of women like a period weekly start parading through your carefully constructed drama? It would not have taken much to make it perfect, but the costume designers, make-up artists and hairdressers would have had to be stricter.

Pure nineties light. While Czech films of the 1990s are aggressive in their smallness and preoccupation with the trends of the time, this originally lyrical Eastern Slovak project of the mid-1990s also suffers from various similar ailments, yet in a rare way manages to remain idiosyncratic.

The reputation of Milka Zimková and Štefan Uher's film She Kept Asking for the Moon predates the dispute with Fero Fenič. Yet at the same time, it's also a "cult" movie.

Probably the most typical thing about all this 60s crap is the subsequent fate of Zachar in the hands of Carlo Ponti and the retrospective assessment of his work in the crisis years as a pornography director. While in Czechoslovakia he directed only a bunch of teenage girls in bloom, for distribution in the West he was able to produce more interesting things. After all, the theme of virginity knocking on the brain is in one way or another too much of a theme for Czech would-be art films of this unusually proud decade, to the point of embarrassment. While A Pact with the Devil is an interesting film in terms of the ratio of Czech and Slovak components, the group of "new discoveries" that emerged from the demanding casting process is mind-boggling. Turbová, Kocúriková, Rašlová and the unusually impossible Karbanová are simply too much.

Dušan Hanák's famous film Rose Tinted Dreams tells the story of a world between a village and a colony. Logically, given Hanák's previous focus, life in a colony is perceived here in a semi-documentary way. The differences between the village and the colony are transposed through the view of young love and the result is an attractive view of something else. The young Nvota and the even younger Bittová are authentic to the core.

A fascinating mature science fiction film that, while not a new turning point in the understanding of animation, manages to be appealing even after many changes in the way the medium of adult animated feature films as a whole is understood. In recent years, I've come to especially appreciate the references to classic science fiction from the dawn of the Golden Age (or even older ones), and I found plenty of them here. It's as if everything was influenced by Dejah Thoris and John Carter, Lord of Mars.

Mank is a decent piece in the classic puzzle game of pre-war Hollywood, W.R. Hearst, Marion Davies, and RKO 281. Those who only watch this as a bonus to Citizen Kane will be missing out. I can only recommend: study more, much more.