POMO

A tribute to selfless paramedics for their dedicated work in a job that takes an extraordinary psychological toll, especially in New York, where they are more hated than appreciated by the junkies and criminals they rescue. More stress and terror than in Scorsese’s Bringing out the Dead, made as intense as possible in every scene. Black Flies offers a constant melancholic mood of hopelessness, assiduous acting and an unrelenting dramatic drive, but there is also a slight superficiality and some borrowing from elsewhere. I most enjoyed the intimate scenes of naked bodies touching, healing all of the bad things around them. [Cannes FF]

Pulp Fiction’s motif involving the necessity of disposing of an inadvertent corpse, effectively elaborated into a feature-length film in the Moroccan suburban “wilderness”, where you can’t dig a hole in the ground with a shovel. The core of the drama comprises a father/son team of losers who have to deal with the situation. Aware of his responsibility for the son he has dragged into this situation, the father makes one bad decision after another. An authentic setting and symbolic scenes in the increasingly tense atmosphere of one long, stressful night. And a crew of interesting characters among whom the man and his boy seek help. This impressive drama received a long standing ovation. [Cannes FF]

The sex-charged glamour of the joy and sorrow of the show-business movers and shakers of the Hollywood music industry. Fulfilling intimacy and catchiness of the music-video scenes, a designer ultra-luxury villa and Depp’s diligent daughter Lily-Rose. In terms of its plot, The Idol didn't arouse in me a desire for more episodes, but as a way to boost the sexy atmosphere on a date with a well put-together home cinema, it's great. [Cannes FF]

Powerful motifs involving the troubled lives of two social outcasts in a bland bit of filmmaking. Scars on the soul deepen mutual tolerance and love, but the past and a higher power always catch up with you. And redemption lies in coming to terms with that. Along Came Love is a dramaturgically functional, well-acted drama with the nice coastal architecture of Normandy, but it’s enough to watch it on television. [Cannes FF]

The subject of acid rain caused by air pollution has already become a bit much for a serious-looking disaster drama. The screenplay doesn’t offer anything interesting, as it works only with adapted clichés and, furthermore, becomes increasingly, mind-numbingly stupid the closer it gets to the climax, which in turn almost becomes an unintentional parody. Only one scene, involving the unexpected death of an important character somewhere in the middle of the film, has any emotional value and hits the mark. Acid is a below-average, unnecessary French genre movie. [Cannes FF]

At the beginning, you think that this two-and-a-half-hour “meditative” film perhaps wants – with a hint of an attempt at tearing down the viewer’s expectations – to let the viewer feel the miserable existence of the poor Indians on their spiritually withering reservation. But it doesn’t do that. Rather, it is absolutely incapable of filling those long and, in the context of the whole, needless scenes with anything meaningful or interesting. And it wants to torture even the most patient viewer to death. Some existential thought eventually springs from it, but it comes only from the action that happens in scenes that would make up a half-hour short. And the presence of Viggo Mortensen and Chiara Mastroianni constitutes fraud! [Cannes FF]

Jonathan Glazer is again powerfully creative and artsy. In The Zone of Interest, we don’t see a single Auschwitz prisoner in the film or any of the atrocities perpetrated behind the walls of the camp. The minimalistically staged but effectively arranged action takes place inside the Hösses’ villa and in their garden, which is bordered by the wall, over which the tops of the concentration-camp barracks loom. Höss dutifully goes to “work” and spends his free time with his family. Höss’s wife enjoys the flowers in the garden. Their children play by the swimming pool. Höss occasionally receives a visitor on business, such as engineers with a design for a more efficient crematorium. Sometimes someone brings them a bag of nice clothes to pick through... The whole time, we hear the distant droning of the death factory in operation, sometimes people screaming, dogs barking, gunfire. Black clouds of ash fill the sky. The Höss children’s perception of the world outside the house is also evident in small nuances. The little girl’s nocturnal dreams in black-and-white inverted images are the most impressive of the artistic ornaments with which the film is packed to the maximum satisfaction of the festival viewer. The scene with Höss on the stairs with the dark empty corridors is brilliant and the highlight of the film in my opinion. The Zone of Interest is a different view of the Holocaust, with the most unpleasant music you have ever experienced accompanying the closing credits. This puts Jonathan Glazer in the company of masters like Michael Haneke and Yorgos Lanthimos. [Cannes FF]

Killers of the Flower Moon is another flawlessly staged Scorsese retro movie with anti-heroes rotten with corruption and deceitfulness that penetrates to the marrow. And the tragedy of the victims, filmed with Scorsese’s typical emotional distance. That is, with the exception of the main character, an Indian woman for whom annihilation isn’t a matter of a brief scene involving a bullet to the head. It is necessary here to have a liking for Marty’s uncompromising narrative style, with which I have always had a bit of a problem. Robert De Niro immensely enjoys playing another manipulative godfather, this time with the face of a kind uncle. DiCaprio entertainingly varies all of his acting trademarks in his portrayal of the ragged halfwit with a negatively curved mouth. And Brendan Fraser shines in his very small role. In her minimalist performance with a spellbinding gaze, Lily Gladstone is fragile, devoted and trusting. The brutally long runtime supports the absolute complexity of this epic film’s plot, but it also increases the number of characters and events happening around them, in which I got a bit lost in the end. The rhythmically monotonous but – thanks to the incessant pulsating music – vivid and ominously escalating narrative of a depressing injustice is invigorated by the appearance of the novice FBI agents with their professional methodicalness. Criminal gangs of deviants were not accustomed to being confronted with such tactics at that time. There is a nice surprise cameo in the solemnly edited epilogue. Oscar nominations are just a matter of time. [Cannes FF]

Testosterone meets character. Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant outshines Berg’s pure-blooded action genre flick Lone Survivor because it is not merely a pure-blooded action genre flick. Ritchie offers a more powerful story, or rather he is able to draw a dramatically deeper spectacle with intellectual reach out of the story that he has at hand. The shooting is of secondary importance. The Covenant is well cast and Jake Gyllenhaal turns in another fantastic performance. The buddy motif with Dar Salim is minimalist in gestures but all the more powerful at its core. Commitments and principles in a bulletproof man code.

Watching this guy work is simply fun! A slacker and entertainer – a singer, a legend of local pulp bars and hotel lounges for seniors on vacation – whose past sins will catch up with him. A superbly captured setting of an Italian beach resort in the ghost-town off-season, shrouded in fog and a dusting of snow. If you like German kitsch pop-folk as much as it deserves to be liked and, at the same time, you enjoy exploring the life stories of weird individuals in and unconventional settings, with Ulrich Seidl you’re again in the right place.