Othello

Probably not entirely kosher for a film that tries to swim in a pond already dredged by the 17-year-old Unbreakable and labels itself a thriller and a horror movie, when the best thing about it for me was the concept of the ending credits and the line about Hooters being as if Henry VI ran a fast food franchise (in the film they say Henry V, which is a mistake imho). It doesn't help that I've always found McAvoy to be an overacting hysteric, and this is like someone lending an insufferable child a camera for the holidays. Because of this, I couldn't shake the impression of an overwrought Saturday Night Live sketch meant to parody the Hitchcock canon in the spirit of modern teen horror movies from Blumhouse (who produced it). And I'm sorry, because with a little care it could have played on the right strings, with the tension built by the promise of the arrival of the abstract Beast and the final gradation, based on the original premise of an ubermench resulting from the cooperation of split identities, could have been properly and entertainingly deviant, whereas this handling of it kind of fades into the void, or rather into a spin-off between a $75 million intimate drama from 2000 and a $9 million horror movie from 2016. Oh how the fates twist and bend unpredictably. It makes you wonder about the pettiness of life and all our endeavors.

There must have been blood and sweat flowing in the writer's room again. Concept: James Franco acts like a psychopathic asshole while Bryan Cranston acts as if James Franco is acting like a psychopathic asshole. Neither of them are believable because they both overact like kids at their first casting call. Format: Franco bites off some stupid bullshit, makes a face you want to punch, followed by one to five silent cuts to the confused family of his betrothed. Throw in, of course, a ton of obligatory pop culture innuendo for even the slowest moron, all wrapped up in the immortal conflict between the old order and the expressive extremity of the new world. And, of course, the obligatory dramatic arc towards the end, whose timing you could practically count off right from the opening credits. Even so, my base, plebeian soul might throw a bone here and there for a touch of hilarity, except that they have no idea how to end most of the jokes even though they don't go anywhere, so they just repeat the basic premise over and over again, probably so that even the most retarded kid at the test screening can spare a laugh when Cranston uses the word bukkake in the wrong context. Nope.

The most boring boring boring boring thing in this boring boring world.

In the Czechoslovak New Wave, the cameras went out of the darkened studios and into the world, and began to revel in the human tragicomic pettiness that pervaded the post-Soviet society of the time. Seemingly about nothing, but a bravura zeitgeist that explains the character of the Czechs, even to this day, a bit too close for comfort.

A lavishly filmed romp that justifies its own existence in one of its opening scenes, when a character (who otherwise has no role in the story and never appears again) explains to Susan that in absurd times there is nothing to do but enjoy the absurdity, because that's all life has to offer. And by that time, Ford had explained himself to me and could do whatever he wanted. And he did. The dark intrusion of lost, sincere love into the nihilistic burnt-out decadence of the upper class (however it may be parodied here) is a tricky subject that reeks of moralizing didacticism. And yet Ford manages to avoid it brilliantly and instead handles the whole subject intimately and personally, without compromising his visual magnificence. The whole composition then skillfully coalesces in a devastating finale. In short, a beautiful example of how the magic of the film medium can dust off even a somewhat threadbare script, relying on coincidences and trusting that someone would be willing to publish such an unremarkable book. Oh, and I was also moved by the opening credits, and that counts for something.

Scandinavian mainstream films have a grateful Czech audience, because they speak their language, are not afraid of black humor, do not indulge in grand gestures, and lately, even with their squinting plots, give the impression that we are finally watching a domestically produced film. In other words, I have the impression that behind the success of Scandinavian cinema in our own backyards is the activation of the viewer's self-deception, where the usual altruism of "decent for a Czech film" is replaced with the personal pride of "I went to a good Nordic film", while still giving the person in question the stamp of a film explorer and connoisseur. Except that the target group is the same for both variants. Sure, compared to the slimy little dog-eat-dog opinion pond of the Czech mainstream, the cinematic North is more progressive in its opinions yet unafraid to dabble in "controversial" topics such as immigration, homosexuality, and in short the entire transformation of the world through the eyes of an old conservative pragmatist, but in any case it still accurately processes to death the mining of empathy for the character based purely on respect for the aged. Otherwise, there's no other reason to connect get on the same wavelength as the protagonist because he's a truly insufferable bastard who doesn't have a single character trait capable of engaging you. That's why the empathy is built up based on the incredibly parareal flashbacks about his love for his wife, who obviously must be suffering from something like hypertrophied altruism, because otherwise it really doesn't make sense how a likable, educated young woman can throw herself away on an autistic moron who permanently makes faces like Albert Fish. The emotion is then squeezed out of the viewer by the contrast of the old man's present-day loneliness compared to those flashbacks, which are so overwrought that, for example, the hero's wife is laughing in every situation, it’s a wonder she didn’t bite me through the screen. She reads and laughs, she goes on the bus and laughs, she eats soup and laughs. Ugh. The thrown-together handling of the entire story, which appeals to strong neighborhood cohesion in satellite suburban homes, also drives me to the brink of suicide and shows all too clearly who this adventure is intended for.

Compared to Rosi's previous horrible bore, Sacro GRA, this one has the advantage of topicality, and especially the passages with the rescue and subsequent trial of the stranded refugees provide a raw, uncomfortable look at a humanitarian disaster that the vast majority of us have only experienced from a few second-hand or multi-hand sources, operating on a telephone-game basis. The contrast of the picturesque lives of European natives with the refugees' struggle for basic existence is a pretty powerful concept, despite the somewhat irritating form (the slow, civil, and somewhat unbelievable framing of the islanders' daily activities lends too much credence to the fact that we're watching a cinematically uncolonized reality). The problem for me, though, is mostly with the terrible metaphors (my pet peeve, sorry). The boy sees well with the eye he aims the slingshot with while shooting cacti carved into the shape of human heads, but because of constantly covering the other eye, this becomes lazy and has to be forcibly restored to its original function. I mean, come on!

I, old and naive, always think nothing can surprise me and then suddenly a blow from the right. The death of an iconic X-Men legend in ever slower healing wounds on a pile of butchered corpses is almost violently stripped of all grandeur. The first of three (excellent and painful) action scenes comes after forty minutes of quiet apologetic whispers. The R rating is not so much an attraction this time as an inherent part of the plot, and here and there surprises with unseen intransigence (a spear piercing the body of a ten-year-old girl, however immortal, is a proper comeuppance to Marvel's hitherto impotence). An incredible prognosis of the fate of superhero movies in 2029, limited to whispered misfits who no longer interest anyone and, for all their former glory, are reduced to the fringes of society. The tiny hints of the shape of the future world, built on consumerism, retreating to cities and the hysterical decadence resulting from the defeat of a new potential evolutionary stage of man without that man having to do anything about it, are the strongest parts, and it's a bit of a shame that the film works with them so sparingly. It's not up to a full rating, since it chokes perhaps a little comically at times, the final passage is back to the more conventional, and as much as Beltrami is making bombshells, I see it as more of a professional understanding of the assignment than anything that comes straight from it. Otherwise, though, in the context of contemporary comic book blockbusters, total respect.

Yeah, I think it's kind of cool if, say, based on this film, Mister Tofei could go from Rădăuți, Romania, all over the world and do press conferences with statuettes in hand, but in terms of what the film stimulates in me, I'm unfortunately standing on a completely different stage.

Existential wandering among dehumanized concrete monuments with a dessert knife in your pants. It is this inaccessibility and coldness of the new Japan, revived by cold metabolic buildings, that creates the backdrop for the simple story of a man who is simply unable to find the satisfaction he needs in the new world, even in basic existence. Like the seminal architectural structures of the period, the protagonist here reflects the uncertainty of his purpose in the new society, his fear of transformation, and his sense of having grown old before discovering his place in space. He thus achieves fulfillment through the animalistic extremes of the ruins of the old world, whether it be a deadly accident in a junkyard, a murder in a demolished bowling arena, or gastro/intercourse on the graves of soldiers. A panicked response to the fear of the too-rapidly changing Japan of the 60s and 70s.