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Talking heads commenting in great detail on the subject and unique archival footage would be enough to make The Velvet Underground an information-packed two-hour documentary from which you will really learn a lot about the titular band and the American counterculture of the 1960s. Thanks to Haynes’s self-aware, avant-garde play with imagery, which has the vibe of both early Warhol and late Godard and is always subordinated to the divine music with rhythmic precision, The Velvet Underground is both an incredible audio-visual experience and one of the best films of the year.

With its essayistic style and thematic divergence, Exterminate All the Brutes is reminiscent of the work of Adam Curtis. Except for occasional flashes of dark humour, however, Peck is more serious, takes a more personal approach and uses performed sequences, often quite brutal and pulling us out of the concept by employing deliberate anachronisms, in which Josh Hartnett almost always portrays a racist swine. In various episodes from ancient and recent history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust and today’s neo-Nazi marches, Peck examines how a “deviation in pigmentation”, i.e. white skin colour, was “transformed into a source of power”. He is interested in the stories that form the basis of the belief that the white race is superior. In gathering together examples of how the happiness of some people was purchased at the cost of pain inflicted on many others, he puts himself in the position of a biased narrator, not a neutral historian. Therefore, he does not shy away from using words that you probably would not encounter in a serious sociological or anthropological study. He bluntly calls Andrew Jackson a murderer of Indians and talks about how the Belgians plundered the Congo and how the genocide of the native population is still ongoing in the United States today. To support his arguments, he uses scenes from Triumph of the Will and John Ford westerns, quotes from Thomas Hobbes, excellent animated maps, well-made animated sequences, classic paintings set in motion and Eva Braun’s home movies. In addition to his sombre voice, we hear a broad range of music ranging from funk to classical. The way in which Peck places individual images and texts behind himself (sometimes even on himself) and thus cleverly confronts us with facts that have been excluded from our culture for centuries (preventing us from cultivating the ability to perceive them) is in itself so suggestive that I momentarily became so absorbed in the visual component that I forgot to listen to the commentary. Exterminate All the Brutes is the most transgressive documentary of recent years.

Zootopia cleverly combines the narrative formula of a cop movie about a rookie learning the ropes, a (neo-)noir crime film and socio-political satire. The individual levels are integral to each other and it doesn’t happen that, for example, a case is closed after an hour and a new story begins. It remains necessary to find out why the animals reverted to a feral state, which is why Judy has to return to her hometown for inspiration. There, thanks to the reformed Gideon, she discovers that the treacherousness of some animals is not connected with their origin, but with their nature. The action scenes also have a deeper dramaturgical foundation, taking as an example the Little Rodentia chase scene, during which Judy pursues a thief, who later helps her track down who is behind everything, and also saves the life of the mob boss’s daughter, who later plays her own role. Shortly before the end, Judy can use her acting skills, a demonstration of which we first saw in the opening scene, which leads to an elegant conclusion. It is a joy to see how the filmmakers took care to ensure that the individual components of the narrative worked together and that no motifs seemed incidental. In addition to its textbook conciseness, the film is also delightful with its references to The Godfather and Mission: Impossible (chase on/in a train) and intelligent humour (the now almost cult scene with sloths), which requires a bit more attention and patience from the viewer than other animated studio films. An added bonus that elevates this solid animated multi-genre feature to the level of one of the best American films of recent years is the sensitively composed message (very topical yet universal) about the equality of all animals, the consequences of prejudice, the drawbacks of dishonest political gamesmanship and the risks associated with speaking recklessly. Though the film does not criticise the police – on the contrary, it uses the militarisation of the police for one of the final gags – it points out that those who have great power and great influence on public opinion should choose their words especially carefully. Zootopia may not offer as elaborate a world as some Pixar films or the abundance of straightforward entertainment provided by Madagascar 3, but emotionally, narratively and intellectually, it is the pinnacle of contemporary animation and (perhaps) a future Disney classic. 90%

Hall of Fame stand-up. Despite references to the political situation at the time (“Tony Blair and W. were like the United Nations production of Rainman”), Williams’s observations are timeless and, thanks to his God-given acting/improvisational talent, are incredibly funny, regardless of whether they accurately describe what’s wrong in society (“We didn't have Twitter. We had shitter. That was my chat room. We had useless conversations. We just didn’t fucking share them with the world…”) or address more mundane concerns of everyday life (the unforgettable bit on the topic of “where babies come from”). For a 58-year-old comedian who’d had a heart valve replaced (also the subject of humour) shortly before his performance, Williams has more energy than a ferret on meth. He constantly runs around the stage, furiously jumping from topic to topic (which is a pity, because when he talks about something at greater length, the punchline is more epic), he reacts quickly to the stimuli from the audience and rattles off one joke after another without missing a beat, while it seems that he hadn’t prepared much in advance for what he was going to talk about. With a similar cadence, the varying level of jokes doesn’t matter (parodying of gays, national stereotypes and occasional flashes of misogyny crop up), most of which will stick in your memory thanks to their masterful delivery, during which Williams fully engages his physical talent and various alterations of his voice (women’s gymnastics). Like few other stand-up comedians, he was able to tell jokes with his whole body. It’s a shame about what happened to him.

When, after roughly two hours, The Irishman stops switching between the two narrative lines and three different time planes that together set the film’s rhythm, it becomes clear that the wedding was not actually the primary destination of Frank’s journey. At the same time, one important character from Frank’s past comes into the road-movie framework. Contrary to the custom of accelerating the pace as the end approaches, the film slows down and becomes more focused, no longer engaging in a series of diversions and jumping between numerous people and events. We realise that the memory of a given event is of fundamental importance for Frank and he wants to recount it in as much detail as possible, step by step, minute by minute. Thanks to the context provided by the previous two hours, we concurrently comprehend what this is leading to and what the individual characters are experiencing. We start to understand that Frank had merely been carrying out another one of his missions, which usually ends with a house getting painted. ___ In the first narrative line, Frank is in the final phase of his life, just before his death. In the other, he is heading toward death. It seems that all of the events in his life involve death and dying in some way. The detached approach to killing well demonstrates Scorsese’s departure from the more dynamic style of his earlier mafia films. In The Irishman, violence is not “cool”; sometimes we don’t even see it, we only hear it from a distance. If an upbeat song is playing in the car during one of the murders, that is only because the driver turned on the radio to drown out the death rattle of the strangled victim. ___ Frank's blackened conscience, a reminder of his sins and the incompatibility of violent behaviour with the feeling of having a safe home, is represented by his daughter Peggy, thanks to whom we realise that Frank fills his emotional emptiness with words and diverts attention from his inner self to the outside. Though Frank’s relationship with his daughter may seem to be of secondary importance in the context of a story in which people die, cars explode and mobsters bribe top politicians, it is that relationship which best describes how Frank feels and what he longs for above all else: to go out into the world reconciled with himself and with his loved ones. Despite first appearances, the core of the film thus does not represent Frank’s involvement in the structures of the Italian-American mafia and trade unions, but what he lost due to his career advancement. Civil dialogue and time spent in the family circle appear to be more important than a detailed description of the underworld and a factual depiction of Frank’s work processes. Rather than an epic mafia saga, The Irishman is primarily an intimate drama about dysfunctional relationships and the constant presence of death, the basis of which we always carry within ourselves (as we realise thanks also to digitally rejuvenated acting veterans). 95%

In dealing with popular genres, Parasite is more perfidious than the crime film Memories of Murder, the monster movie The Host and the postapocalyptic sci-fi flick Snowpiercer. Its narrative is not pieced together by conventions of a single genre that Bong would modify or refuse to comply with. Rather, it changes solely based on how the characters see and react to certain situations. Unlike in ordinary genre films, evil is not concentrated in a particular monster or villain, but manifests itself in the actions to which the protagonists resort in an effort to gain and maintain a certain social status. Predatory capitalism is the real antagonist. In the film, it is an invisible force that strengthens people’s desire to live someone else’s life. ___ The entire plot is derived from a particular social reality and the relationships between members of various classes of society, who are trying to game the system or defend the positions that they have achieved. Due to the rules that have been put in place, however, it is not possible to do either fairly. Reaching the top requires self-denial and crossing numerous boundaries. Disrespecting and breaching those boundaries comprise the dominant formal strategy and the film’s central metaphor. The rich live thanks to the hard work, blood and sweat of the poor, while the poor parasitise those who live in even deeper poverty in order to scratch out a living. They simultaneously need and hate each other. The space of clearly defined boundaries, the crossing of which will have unfortunate consequences, is an expansive modern house which from the outside represents a dream space for the protagonists. Its location on a hill contrasts with the central quartet’s modest home crouching below street level. Although the claustrophobically cramped interiors contribute to the fact that the destitute family sticks together more, they offer incomparably less comfort than the spacious rooms of the villa, whose inhabitants are spatially and emotionally more distant. ___ Though Parasite verges on farse through most of its runtime, in the end we perceive most of the characters rather as tragic victims of social stratification and economic injustice. The protagonists’ successes no longer bring comic catharsis, but vacillation as to whether the denial of one’s own individuality can be legitimised by the effort to maintain one’s position in the system. Amusement alternates with worries, compassion and a sense of injustice. Bong achieves this by altering the rhythm of the narrative and through skilful changes of perspective that redirect our sympathies. In the end, the tones of the individual characters’ stories are so incompatible that a reversal occurs and instead of a mere game of conquering the Wild West, there is a real and bloody breaking down of the boundaries between fiction and reality, civilisation and wilderness. The film involves not only a clash of different classes and ways of relating to the world, but also a blending of horror, black comedy and melodrama. The mastery with which Bong combines these seemingly incongruent elements into a consistently entertaining whole, in which every cut and movement of the camera is calculated with Hitchcockian precision, offers the most convincing argument against doubts as to whether a similarly “viewer-friendly” film deserved the Palme d’Or at Cannes. 90%

Gray further develops the theme of dysfunctional communication between immediate family members. They are unable to establish a dialogue because they escape into their own individual worlds and stay in their usual models of existence. Though Gray remains thematically and stylistically consistent, his view is more ambitious from film to film, while the protagonists’ ambitions grow accordingly. The distance that they had to overcome in an effort to find common ground was previously insurmountable only in a figurative sense. In Ad Astra, the distances between the protagonists are literally astronomical. This brought about a reinforcement of the main idea of Gray’s filmography – regardless of how far we roam, a place that gives meaning to our existence will always be in reach. ___ Recurring reservations about Gray’s latest work have a paradoxical nature. Critics admonish the film for not eliciting a stronger emotional response because of its monotonousness and ponderousness, while also saying that it is too literal, too obviously predictable and banal in its message. It’s as if they couldn’t see that the tension between the emotional distance on the one hand and the effort to share as much as possible on the other hand is the driving force of the film as well as its crucial distinguishing element. This duality is reflected as early as in the introductory action scene. The impression of vertigo evoked by the sight of a falling body and the POV shots contrasts with the icy calm of McBride, who matter-of-factly informs his commanders how he intends to handle the situation. The fact that he reacts to a lethally hazardous situation as if he has nothing to lose offers a relatively precise image of the main protagonist. ___ The uncertainty under whose influence the protagonist deviates from the mission’s objective is initially reflected in the words, actions and facial expressions of the supporting characters and later in Roy’s voiceover. The spectacular expedition to obtain knowledge gradually transforms into intimate family therapy. The film increasingly shifts from action to introspection, from broad strokes to details. This stylistic development corresponds to the growing scepticism with which Ad Astra frames heroic deeds. Acts of heroism performed only to satisfy one’s own ego or as a means of avoiding seemingly banal relationship commitments are, from the film’s viewpoint, a path to loneliness and social isolation. During the protagonist’s odyssey, people and animals die for no reason and, in the end, the main benefit of Roy’s mission is not finding the lost patriarch. He must go through this in order to reveal the reality concealed behind the myth that has been created around his father. ___ Roy uses an idealised image of himself based on his father’s upbringing as a shield against reality. Therefore, it is important that we have access to his concept of himself and can see or, as the case may be, hear how he gradually becomes disturbed by facts that do not correspond to the mythologised image of his father. Due to the pathological introversion of the protagonist, Gray decided to use a voiceover, which reflects Roy’s feelings in the present tense, not retrospectively, and thus continuously takes his character development into account. However, Roy’s detached tone of voice and the lack of passion in the sentences he utters do not primarily indicate strict work discipline, but rather his emotionally anesthetised state. He is incapable of openly communicating with others and talks to himself as if to the computer terminal in front of which he has to undergo regular psychological evaluations. He is inspected both internally and externally. ___ A certain warmth is present only in brief flashes of memories of his mother and former partner, for whom Roy was never fully present because he clung too tightly to his father’s legacy. Also, when questioned about his father’s disappearance during a work briefing, he symptomatically recalls not how he reacted to the event, but how his mother reacted. The fleeting presence of women in the narrative is legitimised by the filtering of all events through the perspective of a man who is unable to connect with his own emotions, let alone those of his loved ones. Roy mistakenly seeks understanding from his father, whom he admires for his career successes. In Roy’s voice-over, the two men merge from the beginning, when he derives his own worth from doing his own job well. However, the person who anchors him in the present, who defines the beginning and end of his story, is a woman, who represents his future, as she brings him back to life. ___ The way the film is constructed does not in fact needlessly double the message that it conveys. We do not hear offscreen what we see, but we see what Roy sees and perceives. Together with flashbacks, the parallel narration of various stories layers the seemingly straightforward monomyth about the protagonist’s journey, thus making it diverse and stimulating. The structure sets the text and the subtext against each other by maintaining distance from the hero and letting him comment on his changing position in the heroic narrative. Gray did not make a film that was spiritual or poetic, but one that is especially intellectual, particularly by revitalising the basic building blocks of adventure stories. Layer by layer, the film unmasks the heroic myth in order to show, based on the example of one flawed hero, how unstable the myth’s foundations are and thus it has to work on a different principle than that of traditional Hollywood genre movies, which merely recycle the myth. Ad Astra offers an emotionally powerful experience not in spite of its subdued nature, but precisely because of it. 90%

Following the dissolution of his relationship, Frank Beauvais fell into depression and set out for the Alsatian countryside. There, isolated from civilisation, he began to fill his emptiness by obsessively watching movies. Over the course of several weeks, he watched four hundred of them. He then turned his experience into an informationally dense audio-visual diary comprising cleverly selected fragments of the films he had seen and original commentary. In the uncensored stream of thoughts, a retelling of his personal life is interwoven with more general reflections on politics, work and art. The bigger the cinephile you are and the more experience you have had with depression, passivity, anxiety and procrastination, the more you will identify with the language of Beauvais’s film composed of other films. 90%

The concept of this two-and-a-quarter-hour compiled documentary is simple – using official government footage and without offscreen commentary or music, it reconstructs events in the Soviet Union in the four days following Stalin’s death. However, Loznica uses properly restored archival materials, which originally served as communist propaganda, to emphasise the absurdity of the cult of personality while also uncovering its hollowness. The layered sound design and the repetition of shots that are similar in content show the extent to which veneration of the leader was based on the mechanical reproduction of the meaningless symbols and emblems of Stalinist iconography. 90%

Five members of the upper crust meet in a large residence. For over three hours, they will discuss war, progress and the end of history (as the title refers to Solovyov’s philosophical treatise that inspired Puiu). They cannot be stopped by a serious illness, a coup attempt or the coming of the Antichrist. Regardless of how long their disputations last and how many steps they take, they can’t go far. They move in circles (Dante’s Inferno). Like the characters from Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, they are prisoners of their own intellectual worlds and ideas of an ideal society, but with little reflection of the external reality that is not only thought, but also lived. However, Puiu is more restrained than his Spanish counterpart in satirising snobs who indulge in their autotelic intellectual games while the old order collapses outside the windows. His slightly disdainful detachment from the self-centred aristocrats is shown less in the dialogue and more in how the actors react to certain lines and how, during long shots, the director inventively stages and frames the characters’ movements in the broken space, especially their interaction with the servants, who, in contrast to the main characters, are constantly busy and manage to achieve something through their actions. Malmkrog is a long, serious, intellectually rich film that is also in some way delightfully sadistic toward viewers. At the same time, however, it humorously reflects and disparages its own length, seriousness and intellectual richness so that, unlike its characters, it does not suffer from academic torpor. In fact, the opposite is true. It’s been a long time since I was drawn in by something so plotless (but also tremendously dynamic thanks to the conflict of various opinions and subworlds, as well as the direction of the actors and space). 90%