Marigold

Watching Past Lives is like staying in a meticulously tidy, clinically clean apartment in which one never begins to feel at home. It’s a film that lets you know exactly where it wants to take you emotionally, and its strategy – from the music to the shooting – is so clear and seamless that I couldn’t get into the game that it plays. Part of the problem is that Celine Song leaves the most dramatically satisfying content until the last third, so everything that comes before it is just a neat overture. The improbable love triangle in Past Lives is thus rather more sweetly illustrative instead of cutting to the marrow. Sure, a New York romance with a Korean twist is appealing. I understand the hype, but this film fades away too quickly in this lifetime, let alone the past ones. Return to Seoul, which has a similar concept, appealed to me more.

An excellent slow cinema debut that suffers from the fact that, unlike the works of real masters, it contemplates less with images and more with words…but Thien An is a talent who can add interesting postscripts to Tsai Ming-Liang’s legacy in the future. However, he still falls a bit short of the poetic mastery of his Chinese colleague Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues.

It’s a shame that of all the topics raised in We Have Never Been Modern (the Czech industrialist Baťa’s utopia/dystopia, tolerance, the political grudges of the First Republic, women’s standing in society), the film doesn’t really develop any of them and rather merely presents them. Similarly, it awkwardly shifts between the genre layers of an otherwise appealingly constructed story. The film seems as neglected as the female protagonist, whose suspicious “rightness” becomes problematic only in the end. The powerful dilemma is resolved very carefully in the comfort zone of Baťa-style modernism. We Have Never Been Modern proceeds with caution and is a bit clumsy in explaining things (the doctor’s animated lecture about hermaphroditism was the only WTF moment). In spite of that, however, it is one of the most interesting films that Czech cinema has generated in recent years. The attempt to be different and to make a masterfully crafted period piece is quite obvious, but I couldn’t shake off the impression that the film occasionally couldn’t get out of its own way in its effort to not go down the well-trodden paths.

Gone are the saturated colors and boisterous choreography of Lester’s classic version. Bourboulon has his protagonists rooting around in the dirt and mud, D'Artagnan literally in the first scene. The humor is also gone, but that doesn’t mean that the trio, which is actually a quartet, lacks distinctive wit and charm. The cast is good, the sets are properly shabby, the costumes are dirty and the plot is rife with intrigues. The deviations from Dumas are defensible and it’s apparent that this new adaptation wants to bring more behind-the-scenes scheming into play and somewhat sideline the love motifs, which is fine. It’s a shame that some of the plot shortcuts have slightly confused logic, but after a few doubts about whether all that Protestant fun below Paris is only a needless digression, the feeling that everything can be made into an excellent spectacle in the sequel ultimately wins out. In the end, I'm bothered only by minor issues with the film, mainly the fact that Richelieu is an expressionless character. But everything else works. The one-shot action replaced the playful choreography with physicality and the musketeers soon settle into it.  A very respectable contribution to the Dumas canon!

For kids, an infantile derivative of The Lego Movie; for adults, a few hits from their youth; and for Nintendo fans, a collection of Easter Eggs. It’s just enough to keep you from getting bored for 90 minutes, but tomorrow I won’t even remember that I went to see it.

A score performed with devastating precision and a feel for detail. A bit of early Östlund, a bit of Haneke’s mathematical precision, a bit of Malgorzata Szumowska’s lyricism. If the manifestos of the New Intimacy are fencing with each other here: this is how it should look. An uncompromising, devastating debut // a social probe into everyday xenophobia // a drama about what it’s like to return home and be a stranger (to yourself) there. A bit of street rap, a bit of Chopin. I have no idea where a talent like Kocur emerged from, but it’s clear to me that I will be watching his next films with bated breath.

No, this really isn’t just a collection of vlogs. In fact, Manskyj elevates Titarenko’s raw footage of hell and limbo into an artfully rhythmic and graduated account of the war’s impact on the ordinary lives of a few volunteers in a medical unit. At the same time, he manages to sneak in a full range of interesting secondary topics, dominated by his long-time obsession with “the traces of empire”, into the regular alternation of footage from the battlefield and documentary scenes from the rear. The infernal scenes from the front form a chilling counterpoint to the raw testimonies of Ukrainian and Russian identity from the idyllic environment of the rear. The quiet power of Eastern Front consists precisely in the fact that it does not try to stylize or incite, but instead lets authentic scenes and utterances resound. After the initial feeling that it was going to be nothing more than topical reporting, I left Eastern Front with an oppressive, hopeless feeling that endlessly scrolling through Twitter videos doesn’t really provide. This is the kind of documentary that was needed!

Extraordinary bullshit.

The film I had been waiting for since the Nošovice infestation. The Big Nothing is a focused, insightful observational documentary in which the directors don’t elbow their way in front of the camera, needlessly manipulate or artificially stage problems, but instead look for the strange logic of a time when the traditional chain of cause and effect ceased to apply. The film contains empathy and understanding, subtle irony and an attempt to identify the ways in which COVID-19 changed everything and, conversely, the ways in which it changed nothing. I have minor reservations with respect to the the dramaturgy, as the film could perhaps have been a few minutes shorter and could have relied less on the opera/masks at the end (which is a predictable step), but it kept me on my guard the whole time and strongly evoked a sense of the timelessness and disjointedness of existence. Furthermore, I appreciate the fact that Peterková is not another Daliborek. The Big Nothing is indisputably a candidate for Czech film of the year. All power to Vachek!

MH370 is a documentary that gives unnecessary space to people who don’t deserve it, because they are obvious attention whores and dubious manipulators. It’s nice that, after coming up with two utterly absurd hypotheses based on pure fabrications and technical inaccuracies, it allows the voices of sceptics to be heard, but there is a bit of twisted logic in letting the manipulators make stuff up and then have a few rational voices say that their speculations are contrary to the facts and aren’t even worth addressing. In fact, we learn nothing more than we would get from a single hour of the much more modest and better structured Air Crash Investigation. The voices of the actual investors, who were not involved in the documentary, are replaced by internet enthusiasts and experts who took part in this purely as a leisure activity. The documentary just repeats familiar revelations, complete with a series of annoying wild goose chases and muddled accusations about who is whose agent. Plus the emotional porn of devastated families who, in their desperate longing for answers, sometimes fall under the spell of people who know how to exploit the misfortune of others.