Marigold

The best Bond played by Roger Moore, of that I have no doubt. In my opinion, Scaramanga's golden weapon ended the unattainable era of classic Bond films produced by the Saltzmann–Brocolli duo and directed by masters such as Terence Young and Guy Hamilton. The latter gave The Man with the Golden Gun the unmistakable style and charm that so characterizes Connery films, and the excellent Roger Moore does not lag behind. He has a huge personal magic and a rascal charm that turns into a stone killer mask at the right moment. And his opponent? Amazing! The classic Bond villain has many forms, and Lee Scaramanga is one of the most distinctive. After all, it's an anti-Bond thing – it has a murderously captivating style, it has inventions that even Q marvels at... But if Bond is a principled killer, Scaramanga is a masterless killer, and that will lead him into a battle with Agent 007 about life principles. The two sparkle like quartz, John Barry and his fabulous soundtrack stir up the fire. Hamilton's spectacle is simply kneaded... beautiful and attractive Asian scenery, divine catchphrases, beautiful feminine curves... and classic Sergeant Pepper on vacation (I know You! You are that secret English agent from England!!!)... It's simply the culmination of a golden era that other films regularly surpassed with the richness of plots and dazzling effects, but never even came close to Agent 007's style in his prime.

The 80-day trip around the world is a wonderful start, promising truly dazzling epic action, diluted with intelligent conversational humor (which really doesn't wear stars and stripes on its shorts), but ultimately unnecessarily slipping into shallowness and it breaks what adorns it in the beginning – integrity and style. I'm sorry, but it's Jackie Chan's fault, who, though he plays his part decently, brings something foreign and incompatible to the picturesque world of inventor Phileas Fogg. He smuggled the weird style of Asian action film into the world of dry English humor, and Frank Coraci couldn't combine them into a coherent whole. An English gentleman and a levitating Asian don’t work together. Therefore, all the potential gradually disappears, and at the end there remains only a fairly satisfying feeling of a craftsmanship of a decently executed action comedy, which needed much more than satisfying craft to achieve true brilliance. It needed a really great storyteller to handle the story. Coraci remains halfway there. It needed a great screenwriter to avoid schoolboy lapses and disproportions in the construction of the plot. Unfortunately, it's stuck halfway there, too. No, it's not a flop. It's a fun and enjoyable movie. Halfway to a really great movie. And that's what I'm most sorry about. At least I like Steve Coogan's excellent bore in the title role of Mr. Fogg.

The Grey Wolves is engaged in the reconstruction of interesting and typically “socialist" events from 1964, when a conspiracy by the leaders of the KSSS, the KGB, and other big shots dethroned Nikita “Corn" Khrushchev and replaced him with the bland and restrained Leonid “Hairy" Brezhnev, who soon proved the generally valid rule of communist history – the quieter it is before, the bigger the disaster later. Director and screenwriter Gostev did not try to make an action thriller, but rather an accurate reconstruction (interpretation) of events, supported by declassified KGB files. This is probably the main pitfall of the film for many viewers. There are many characters in The Grey Wolves, and even the "who is who" captions do not help in their orientation, often ignored in the Czech translation. The panopticon of acting anonymous comrades is so confusing that in the first half of the film I was even happy to have recognized Brezhnev by his bushy eyes. It's also pretty crappy with regard to the momentum. Gostev tries not to miss out on anything substantial, and the pace accelerates only in the second part, when it finally comes to the more “thriller" inserts and logical denouements, in which almost everyone appears to be a spineless pig and Brezhnev their king. The Grey Wolves is filmed with almost documentary boredom and precision (the actors even have the typically green touch we know from the television broadcasts of the party congress of the 1970s and 1980s), which makes it less attractive to the audience, but adds to its credibility. When it comes to the action, it's bad because Gostev doesn't know how to do it (the sight of the grotesquely accelerated Muscovites was truly pathetic), the music sucks (only the opening Hammond rocker is fine, but I'd expect it more in a film about Vietnam). The metaphor with wolf hunting, which permeates the entire film, is, as a result, very impressive, but not so much that the film becomes more than an interesting documentary of the events of 1964 and a slightly above-average film with a truly magnificent performance by Roland Bykov as the old and doubting leader Khrushchev.

A wonderful lyrical poem about a boy who had been alone during the holidays, but in the end everything was different. Masaa's pilgrimage to find the mother he longs to see is an unusually conceived road movie, to which Takeshi Kitano gave his personal style through artistic acting and directorial conception that is somewhere between a child's diary and the poetic warmth of a European narrative film. The epic vein is de facto secondary, and the story culminates in the truest sense of the word when the film has gone through about half of the runtime. But it's not really about that. It's about enjoyment and feeling. Kitano's art of turning the journey of a boy and his guide – "uncle" a brute, a show-off and a buffoon – is extraordinary and, with gourmet slowness, a recited poems about love, naivety and childhood, achieves absolute perfection. The camera often distances itself from direct action and revels in lyrical panoramicization, the editing seemingly breaks the flow of time and often gives shards of events, artistic accessories and Masaa's dreams add a magical character to everything. Kikujiro's Summer is at its core kind of like a Japanese Kolya, but where Svěrák brought out tears, Kitano is an impressive poet who understood well that magic is not in the explicitness of the edict. His film has extraordinary humor, which the director himself ensures with his role as a rough clown (in a way very similar to the character Shinkichi from the later Kitano film Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman). The humor of the "uncle" is full of blunders, overconfidence and very boorish behavior, but under which lies a good soul. The "uncle" attracts various other weirdoes, with the affection of created and staged characters, which provide Masaa with the strangest and most beautiful holiday. Hackneyed? Not in this package. Moreover, the music of the court bandmaster Hisaishi is simply brilliant, and with its fragile beauty and non-styling accurately captures the bitter-sweet note of Kikujiro's Summer. Because Kikujiro's Summer is not only a film about finding and joy, but above all about what we lose that makes us find it. It's a film that folds like a mosaic, and late at night I could hardly hold back fits of laughter as I watched the whole shape from a distance. Caressing my soul, that's all I can think of.

From the very beginning, German's work gives the impression of a chaotic cocoon of sounds, disparate dialogues, hard-to-recognize characters... The effort to give the impression of unstylized events, in which the camera (and with it the viewer) is only visiting, results in feelings of confusion and frantic rambling, which is only directed by the character of the boy-narrator with occasional barks. The plot skeleton only looms slowly under the mass of false sounds and shards of events. Russia in 1953 looks like an absolute madhouse, its inhabitants (in this film the "narrowing" of the inhabitants of one house) give the impression of overly affected and illogically-reacting inmates. German's view is typically Russian, and it includes irony, sharp twists into tragedy, bizarreness, frantic gradient of narration that can seem like a mess to an "untrained" viewer, but on closer inspection there is great narrative skill and order. Khrustalyov, My Car! resurrects the atmosphere of the 1950s in the USSR not only from the point of view of the ordinary citizen (constantly sliding and humiliated heater), but also from the point of view of the elite (the central character of General Glinsky)... But they are united by the cruel and manipulative domination of power from which one cannot escape (black cars...). The fundamental questions of the time come into play with admirable ease - there will be no answers, but after all, this piece is based on "documentary" value. In my opinion, the Russian-French film works with the same kind of "realistic" metaphor as Kusturica’s Underground, although it handles ad absurdum and is not nearly as grateful from an audience point of view. Alexei German has talent, but still his message has only a few strong emotional moments (especially the rape of the general by drunk men); otherwise, his black-and-white coldness, director's distance and confusing structure keep it more of a film for the invited. Which, on the other hand, is not a mistake.

A captivating autopsy of the fatality of power, a film that balances on the edge of speculation, but with its image of a feast of the powerful (so popular since ancient times), it reveals one of the possible interpretations of Stalin's personality. A personality who may have found himself in the schizophrenic captivity of contradictory halves – Dzhugashvili, the farmer, and Stalin, a world ruler. And when Koba chose the second, he found himself in the pliers of absolute power, which he himself held in his hands, but which he could not let go of for even a moment. Director Yuri Kara described Stalin as a strange mixture of fragility, quiet madness and brutality (which he himself sees as a necessity of existence), as a manipulator who, in a single word, turns men into ruins and ruins into men. And a feast in his honor, a feast in the middle of the leader's vacation in Abkhazia, provides the perfect space to play a special satirical-tragic game in which nothing seems to happen, but in which everyone's lives are at stake every second (except Stalin's, of course). The Feasts of Valtasar, or The Night with Stalin is a typical example of subsurface drama, where all the tension takes place under the masks of the individual characters, which have a rather caricature nature. Its emotional highlights are magnificent, and the scene of the egg-shooting from the chef's head is one of the best images of power and humiliation I've ever seen in a movie. It is amazing how little means it takes for Kara to express his view of the cursed and adored leader, to spread his vision of the communist apparatus in front of the viewer, the most resentful point of which is not the surprisingly charismatic Stalin, but the sly and spineless pig Berija. I was somewhat taken aback by the narrative aspect of the film, which acts as a "memory" of one of the performers of the feast, but in the process shatters into a typical Russian polyphony of views. And I consider the incredibly convincing performance of Alexej Petrenko in the title role to be the strongest motivation for the fifth star...

Roger Moore's truly stylish entry into the series. Unlike the insecure Lazenby, who blew himself up in a single film with his awkward performance, Moore showed us a fresh and youthful-looking creation that has almost nothing to do with Sean Connery's performance. Where the wild Scotsman was rugged, Moore is elegant, where Connery was teeming with masculine energy, Moore remains a slightly sarcastic glossator with a license to kill (which he uses). Guy Hamilton is one of the best directors the 007 series has ever had, and even with a poor plot, he was able to make a two-hour film that has no downright weak and boring spots (which, unfortunately, cannot be said about most Moore films). Although the villain Kananga is downright bland and Bond isn't interested in saving the world, but rather just fighting the drug lord, the creators manage to create the right Bond tension, spice up the action scenes with unprecedented comedy inserts (especially the mixture of American redneck aspects and the militancy in sheriff Pepper are worth it), create unforgettable characters (Baron Samedi, Tee Hee) and, thanks to a song from the pen of the Cartneys, a completely unrepeatable atmosphere on the edge of adrenaline and laughter. Connery was right to call Moore the ideal Bond...___ A few tidbits: Q is missing from the film, in the only other Bond film except Dr. No, but his inventions are worth it once again. The film also lacks a traditional scene with M's office and a ritual throw of a hat on a hanger. Instead, the Bond, M and Moneypenny meeting takes place unconventionally in apartment 007. The filmmakers originally wondered if Honey Ryder from Dr. No (perhaps the most famous Bond girl Ursula Andress) should return to the Bond movies, but due to the change in the title role, they eventually rejected the idea. Finally, the representative of Bond's CIA ally Felix Leiter, David Hedison, was the only one to play the role more than once out of nine occasions (he also appeared in Licence to Kill). ___ Bond song: "Live and Let Die" (Paul McCartney and WINGS)

Although the film version with Ustinov has a great set behind it and bigger acting stars, there is no doubt that the portrayal of the main character makes the English remake convincing and faithful. I can't help but think that Ustinov is too rude and chaotic for Poirot. David Suchet's charisma is overshadowed by some of the weaker performances in the supporting roles, the obviously lower budget and the fact that I knew how to decipher the plot. Although I found some TV films with Poirot to be more successful, I still appreciate the courage of the filmmakers to challenge the film classics. Especially since, from my point of view, the 2004 version of Death on the Nile is better.

An excellent demonstration of the old English detective school. The typical model with a country house and an aristocratic family who gets involved in the murder of the husband of one of her members. We have seen the pattern a few times where suspicion points to everyone and the killer can only be the one who's the only one standing outside, but as before, it works wonderfully. Even more than usual, Poirot is driven by a desire to prove that his brain has no competition. Langton's film explores to some extent the conflict between detective logic and creative thinking. And as usual, David Suchet gives a pedantically full performance, which is enhanced by the excellent atmosphere of the case and the emotional ending.

A pleasant spectacle that certainly does not aspire to a revolutionary shift in the genre of "thief" films, but fills all the typical clichés and the traditional narrative framework with ease and a certain elegance, which greatly helps the ironic subtext of the whole film. If there's one thing that bothered me, it was the lengthy introduction in which the traditional "recruiting" humor doesn't work very well (how much funnier The Ladykillers is in this regard!) and the vast difference between the distinctive performances of the stars and the bland characters of the lesser-known members of the eleven. Soderbergh managed to film 116 minutes of brisk, pleasant and relaxing entertainment, which, while not breathtaking, is guaranteed not to spoil the evening.