J*A*S*M

Basically, an ordinary exploitation flick that tries to elevate itself to harsh psychological horror with the use of trite motifs of child trauma. The exploitation aspect is not bad at all and if it wasn’t for those scenes that try to build the dubious psychology of the characters, it could get a higher rating. In any case, this film won’t be a crowd favourite.

No Country for Old Men is not for everyone, in fact, I’d say it’s only for a very narrow section of the public. I’m sure the Coens are very satisfied with it, you can’t deny the film has a distinctive style, but what good is that when I almost fell asleep? The plot moves forward very slowly, and in some places it feels that it doesn’t move at all. The shots of the desert landscape (room, car…) are beautiful, but they could have been shorter and less static. I must praise Javier Barden’s amazing performance, without it the experience would have been barely half as good.

Nomandland has come out of the festival circuit with the reputation of one of the best films of the year and a clear Oscar favourite, something that may generate expectations impossible to meet for some people. For me, it’s a very decent drama with a superb Frances McDormand, but I can’t say it stands out in any significant way from many other decent dramas. On the other hand, it’s clear that, in terms of social relevance, it will surely resonate more in the US than here. 7/10

Punk bikers scare you. Boo-hoo!

A great tragicomic drama about a time when in Yugoslavia everyone hated each other and nobody knew why. When two are fighting, the third… does nothing. 10/10

(50th KVIFF) At the beginning I was dismayed and thought of walking out as I’m not cut for such theatrically annoying and aesthetically awful things like this. But I resisted and the impression gradually improved. After about half an hour, the original plot, which up that point reminded of some vulgar sitcom from a commercial TV station of an Eastern European post-communist country, became something different, more self-confident and meta, that commented (perhaps quite accurately) on the Polish society of today. But the film still left a weird aftertaste, it simply failed to satisfy me. 50 %

It’s a pity they screwed up the third act. Up until Neeson’s speech to the nervous passengers, this is a solidly tense thriller and I would have forgiven it anything, but after that scene the decent fun falls apart in such way that it becomes annoying. By the end everything is bad.

No One Lives didn’t take much intellect, at least it was not boring. Putting the characters on a chessboard at the beginning was not a bad idea (the revenge of a psychopath on a gang of criminals) and some of the motifs are interesting (the relationship between the psychopath and his victims), but after some time, all the originality drowns in blood. I won’t cry over that, though, given the circumnstances, this was never going to be a masterpiece – the bad actors (the members of the gang) make the film a self-parody at times.

Pretty meh in the end. A rather skillful genre exercise with the most bland looking alien you can imagine. The interchangeable trauma subplot shouldn't have been there at all, or should have been in a more ambitious film. It just stalls the flow and then downright kills the finale. I also rated last year's Nope by Jordan Peele with only three stars, but the creativity of the execution of those traditional UFO/ALIEN themes was completely different there. 5/10 (almost at **)

For two thirds the film is a compelling, engrossing and carefully constructed horror-thriller mystery that kept me engaged as the characters struggled to get to the bottom of the mystery. This part of Nope, which I was very pleased with, culminated in a magnificent night scene with "blood rain" that made me glow with bliss and consider awarding five star to a horror flick for the first time in a long time. But, as you can see, I didn’t go further than three. Because the film then turns into an action charade, where you don't care about the characters and just try to catch the design of the weird contraption and figure out if you like it or not. And what shocked me above all is that it doesn't actually come to anything. After his previous two films, you'd expect Jordan Peele to be ... smarter than that? Us may have been logically leaky, but I found its social references were very stimulating (and that goes twofold  for Get Out). There's nothing like that in Nope, or I don't see it there at first. Many people, often dismissively, refer to Peele as the king of "elevated horror", but this is, in the end, more or less an ordinary genre film. In the space of half an hour, the film shoots two or three banal ideas (what people are willing to risk for fame and success / the fascination with tragedy / the stupid notion that man can tame everything), which it then repeats to the point of foolishness, but doesn't take them anywhere. I don't want to sound overly critical, Nope is definitely nice to look at, it has a number of impressive scenes and it's certainly a good film to see in the cinema, but after the excellent first two acts I can't help feeling disappointed at the end.