POMO

Diverse and complex in the relationships it depicts and with multiple motifs working in harmony, Mud is a drama about love, values, friendship, trust and the consequences of bad decisions that will always catch up with us sooner or later. Some viewers may struggle to understand McConaughey’s character, but he isn’t the film’s main protagonist. Rather, he is merely a character in a story that a 14-year-old boy witnesses and becomes a part of in order to have an adventurous and rewarding life experience at the end of his adolescence. The screenplay is outstanding and Tye Sheridan turns in an excellent performance, which eventually led to his role in Spielberg’s Ready Player One.

This gangster flick with a stellar cast tries for a high degree of originality, but its characters (except for Brad) are goofballs who neither inspire respect nor are humorously cool. And the dialogue is dull and unfocused (except for Brad’s last line). The most interesting thing about the film is the underscoring of the story about a gang of petty criminals with lines from televised speeches by George W. Bush and Barrack Obama about how great America is and will be. The visual gags and slow motion give the film the mark of exclusivity, but they’re nothing new and, frankly, they are better suited to The Avengers. A camera mounted on a car door, mirroring its opening and closing motion, had already been done by Tarantino (and God knows where he stole it from). The playful shifts in the narrative are pleasing, but in retrospect they seem gratuitous (Gandolfini’s character and his importance in the story), and in the climax they still lead to the resolution that we assume just from looking at the film’s poster.

China Moon is solid ’90s thriller with a high-quality screenplay. With no chance to reveal the point in advance, confusing interpolations and characters driven into a corner more than you would expect. And with an ending that is (unfortunately) no longer very much in fashion. What prevents it from getting a higher rating is “only” the lack of value added of more creative directing, which would have turned mere high-quality craftsmanship into a distinctive work with reach. That melancholic jazz soundtrack by George Fenton is literally asking for as much. For Polanski, for example.

Virgin Witch gets off to a promising start full of innocent teen eroticism, shot through a tantalizingly lecherous lens and with the promise of interesting things to come at the homestead, where two naive sisters fall into the clutches of an eccentric gang with nefarious intentions. The members of the witches’ coven are interesting characters, aristocratically understated at first glance, but burning inside with a desire to corrupt virginal innocence. The young, horny photographer of “modeling” nudes, the well-kempt lesbian, the trustworthy doctor who turns out to be... It’s a shame that the witchcraft rituals that everything builds up to are so closely tied to the understated old English cinema, and the film slips away cheaply and unsatisfyingly from the cards laid out between the characters. The prelude was a lot more fun here.

Kon-Tiki is a nice European co-production with spirit and beautiful visuals. A group of adventurers set out on a three-month cruise across the Pacific on a big raft. There are hints of social isolation and a storm, but you don’t have the feeling that you are seeing them for the 120th time. And there are encounters with a whale and sharks that look more believable than in a Hollywood spectacle and that disprove the cliché that a shark, however hungry, does not recognize the shape of the human body and will not attack. This film is not a studio commission, but a well-done team effort to tell a good true story. Faith in success and strong will make it possible to cross oceans.

Despite the names that it brings together, this FILM for single MILFs is quite dull. Charlize is (once again) damn nice to look at and it’s fun to get to know her character, which – along with her interactions with her chosen one, Patrick Wilson – is the film’s driving force. But with the characters in the small town to which they return from “the big world and success”, the second half could definitely have made for a more interesting, multi-layered relationship storyline that would have enhanced the main motif. Despite the celebration being the film’s best and, in fact, only memorable scene, it makes Young Adult narratively commonplace, which you wouldn’t expect from this film “because there must surely be more to it”.

Perhaps even the screenwriter himself didn’t know what was reality and what was only in the protagonist’s head. Or at least which of her imaginings would have an effect on reality and, if so, what kind of effect. It seems likely that he also didn’t know exactly what happened at the end. The Forest is supposed to scare with ghostly interpolations in the mold of the American version of The Grudge, and even the idea of angry ghosts of people who have committed suicide in the woods is borrowed from the Japanese original Ju-on: The Grudge. However, it lacks the clarity and balance between reality, childhood demons and frightening illusions in the forest, and the visual sophistication of the camerawork and editing that we’re used to from high-quality horror films are surprisingly missing here. This below-average film is a waste of the subject matter’s strong potential (that suicide forest in Japan really does exist).

In terms of craftsmanship, Train to Busan is excellent, with interesting plot twists in the ingenious opening scene and a pleasantly prolonged ending intended to give viewers as much of the train as possible. Only the middle third is rather laid-back (the zombies are suddenly slower and can be beaten with fists because we can’t resolve the situation otherwise in the screenplay). And those Asian emotions again go over my head. The characters are archetypally okay and all of the relationships and their tense moments work, except for the main one. When, in the most dramatic and would-be heart-rending scene, the father flashbacks to the kitschily over-lit birth of his daughter, with whom he has been on the train ride to Busan through the whole film, it was the only time the movie made me laugh out loud. Which was surely not the intended result.

A remote Scottish island with dramatic rock formations and windswept vegetation... The atmosphere of the location and the depiction of the cult mentality of its inhabitants make this a unique film, for a near B-movie debut of a director who then gave up on filmmaking. The equivocation of everyone present, the seductive sexual undertone, the helplessness of the main character of the police sergeant whom no one respects, and the almost spectacular sophistication of the people’s strange beliefs and their origins make The Wicker Man an absorbing, plot-driven flick.

Here we have an attempt at a touching story with a big heart, but it failed on all fronts. The two faces of the film, each in a different genre for a different audience, are poorly combined, giving rise to naïve absurdity that elicites laughter instead of suspense and the subsequent “awakening”. Though the first half starts off well and promises an attractive – though not original – plot in an appealing setting with interesting characters and fine actors, Steven Knight didn’t follow through with that.