Othello

"My mother ate half of the village, including a few of her friends. She was so ashamed she sewed her lips together." The original subject matter and the work with the witch phenomenon mean that dialogue like "I ate a worm." "Are your friends all right?" can come naturally in the film and I think that's awesome. While the cinematography often has its limits (especially in interiors) and the male characters are probably created by someone who just read about men in some high school feminist magazine, again, it's auteur-driven, erratic, and idiosyncratic, so let's be tolerant.

I don't really know what the movie was about, because the simultaneous dub was dialed way to the right in everything this time. If the role of this film was to at least motivate the dub, it deserves five stars. The prosecutor's strident monologue gradually segueing into a defense of the cuteness of the Malaysian fruit but would normally earn it some sort of Best Screenplay nomination.

A maddeningly tiresome dud that struggles to reach feature length with worn-out scenes repeating the same information. The magic then is clearly the most incompetent protagonist ever, who in a Chandler-esque manner carries himself through scenes where literally everyone explains the solution to his face, to which he is utterly lax, obliviously wipes everyone out ("Women!"), and instead asks three pointless questions to the point of blindness and robs the blind.

A sometimes almost comical play on art. The idiotically soulful expression of Dyk walking down the corridors of the hospital in the style of 90s adventure movie animation. Characters who speak like they're from a Czech language audio book. Repetitive static boring half-measures and a new age aura revealing a simple lack of inspiration. When Kadrnka focuses on the hospital corridors, their detached mummery and the assorted patients scattered throughout, you can see what motivated the film. But it's so overwrought and spasmodic that it instead makes me wonder if Kadrnka's irritating slowness and heavy themes confused a lot of people, like it’s supposed to be substantial filmmaking, yet the episode where the protagonist meets his child self in a dream sequence, for example, passes him the ball, and it ends up in his father’s hands, who finally opens his eyes, looks like a straight-up intentional parody of an art film.

A classic tale of an unlikely couple with its greatest added value being the bleak portrayal of an empty and exhausted rural central United States during the Great Depression. For example, the brief passage where the investor waits on the corner of a building for Mozes, who lies battered nearby, recalls in its desolation (despite being set on Main Street) and silence (Mozes lures Addie there with a barely audible hiss) a nightmare scene from Bergman's Wild Strawberries or an episode from Jurek's New Wave films. Yet these are only illustrations of the time.

A horror film about a haunted forest and the ghosts hidden in it. Basically a kind of The Witch from the Eastern Front. The irrational element here is represented by the war itself. A perfect emotional film made just for me and probably not for you.

It's at once so insanely overwrought and yet so cheap and fragmented that it's reminiscent of a sulkfest in which the creative team lost funding for a project, but still decided to finish it with the help of two hundred and fifty Spanish investors folding themselves into a straw man. This also gives me some uncontrollable sympathy for the film, because (probably wrongly) it feels somehow "resilient". If it weren't for the swift Last Duel, one might even offer to mention that directors in their 80s simply lose a certain visual sense out of complacency (see Wajda, Polanski, Bellochio, or Konchalovsky), such that a film that's called freaking House of Gucci lacks above all else style and elegance. And yet it's helmed by a director who, when he devoted a two-second shot to the seated emeritus mobsters during one court scene in American Gangster, just from their body position, clothing, and layout in the shot screamed that these gentlemen mean business. Here, it's like every once in a while no one really knows what to do, so they deal with it in their own way. Jared Leto, whom no one told he wasn't in a Bruno Dumont film, Lady Gaga aiming for the Proudfoot from Bag End Award (presented at Bilbo's 111th birthday), and the writers ticking off the necessary scenes in a high society life story (crying a single tear, a drunk wife terrorizing her husband, the husband slamming her against the wall). As a result, the film feels oddly artificial (thanks in part to the ugly digital camera) and almost everything in it feels like it's happening for applause. However, you can really see some effort, commitment and directorial ideas, but it all feels oddly disjointed and staged.

Ugly tech demo. In a couple of decades people will think that in the early 21st century they gave tax breaks for movies with digital giants.

Apparently all the quality of the show was in that podcast that Netflix bought and handed over to a bunch of talentless fachidiots to execute. There are, in fact, a lot of tasty horror ingredients hiding here, which is such a sympathetic chronicle of 20th century American horror themes, and we find influences ranging from Lovecraft to The Twilight Zone to a fascination with the occult in the upper echelons of show business. The first episodes, which work with a lot of hints, still not connecting anything, instead trying to keep as many things under wraps as possible for as long as possible, are excellent and at times almost remind me of Lost Highway. But Archive 81 degenerates from the fourth episode onwards into a weary stodginess that lacks resources, courage, or any creative vision. What the fuck is the point of having a different screenwriter write a script for nearly every episode of a mere eight-part horror series anyway? Did I get caught watching some workshop? Fundamental errors in bullet points: 1) The series could have beautifully hidden its production limitations by working with film material, which the plot literally screams for. After all, we're watching a movie where the protagonist discovers mysterious events through the restoration of damaged camcorder tapes. Why can't it be a mystery horror mixed with found footage and even a silent black and white insert from the 1920s, where Episode 7 takes place? Well, because no one there has the guts to do that and they're afraid that switching between multiple formats and viewing angles would put unnecessary demands on the viewer's viewing experience. 2) I have eight hours to profile the characters, but I can't justify motivations for any of their actions other than family satisfaction. Again, this is probably so it can convene a television target audience who would have trouble relating to characters who embark on dangerous quests perhaps for the purpose of exploration, research, inner tension, or simple curiosity. 3) It would be great if Netflix could for once afford to cast, I don't know, actors in acting roles, because watching Dina Shibabi overact for hours makes me rethink my usual view that acting is an overrated cinematic discipline. Although I admit that anyone would probably struggle with a character this stupidly written. 4) Why do those witches look like they're from... ah, Rebecca Sonnenshine, shutting up now. 5) I'm sympathetic to stupid scripts, but when several stupid scripts by several people come crashing down on me within the same plot, the scenes where the analog film expert starts destroying hundreds of VHS tapes by randomly hitting them with a wrench, I'm like dude hit the brakes already.

I think there's little appreciation of how easily this could have been an excruciatingly schoolboyish ode to how America's greatest man confronted America's greatest problem, but instead it's an intimate yet systematic drama about the processes and behind-the-scenes of American politics that can easily be applied to the present day. About the processes that make it virtually impossible to always play fair within the framework of purpose, force reliance on weak and sporadic characters, and eradicate the last vestiges of idealism in people. All of this can be felt in the character of the permanently exhausted, sickly, and despite his nature, reluctantly scheming Lincoln, who floats through the film with his three-meter arms like a vampire, planting unrelated stories around him in a sleepy voice and the unbearable political dilemma of the possibility of ending the war early at the expense of the 13th Amendment visibly eating him up from the inside. As the film's surprising climax, it is not the passage of said amendment, but the utterly silent scene where he announces to the Confederate state representatives in a low, calm voice as they negotiate the terms of surrender, "Slavery, sir... It's done". The first decisive, firm, and unqualifiedly intelligible sentence he can finally utter. In the end, I’m raising it to 5 stars because, despite the tame opening and a percentile more sentiment than is necessary, Lincoln is actually both a political maze and a physical drama, with the protagonist's wasting away is contagious and robs the film of the shield of mere historical reconstruction.