Othello

I've never been much for this cannibalistic parable, but I do have a giant soft spot for the new-wave obliteration of archetypes of a Czech character using non-actors. The strange unnatural feeling of watching it can be compared to the feeling of watching scary horror movies. After all, how many points of contact can the film The Party and the Guests have with the cannibalistic feast in Texas Chainsaw Massacre? The statuette for the most charming bimbo of the Czechoslovak New Wave goes to Helena Pejšková. She takes over from Hana Brejchová.

Perhaps too academic and detached a documentary for some, but I fear that in the case of Aalto – a privileged, increasingly withdrawn and egocentric architect – the tendentious method of "success against all odds" would hardly apply. However hard the author tries to weave women's roles into his work. With a wealth of excellent period material and snippets of old interviews to accompany it, the documentary comes across as surprisingly unfulfilled, melancholic, and fatalistic. This is helped by Sanna Salmenkallio's excellent (and very familiar, to connoisseurs of Michael Nyman, for example) score.

Argento. Hee hee hee. Cronenberg. Lol. A tribute to giallo. Ho ho ho. Dude, this is a total Vidocq in the sense of the work of a visual eccentric who is totally competent in the technical elements, but basically has no control over what's actually going on underneath the camera zooms, the staged action sequences, the simulated anamorphic lenses, and the CGI gothic madness. In the third act, it goes so far off the leash that it's resorts to pure camp. I didn't expect Wan could so comically screw this up.

A very romantic take on a Japanese internment camp, which made me regularly suspect several times during the film whether this was the protagonist's fever dream. With The Color Purple, for the first time, you could see the problem of a director's hysterical reverence when depicting major themes, which dilutes the viewing experience. Empire of the Sun presents another of his problems, namely the need to use his directorial skills to highlight traumatic moments in history, but without traumatizing the viewer. This aspect of his personality stems from the fact that as a filmmaker he takes on an exaggerated responsibility for his works, so while he wants us to be aware of the oppression and suffering depicted, he doesn't want to present it to us and instead tries to simulate the importance of the events through the enormity of the film. And he succeeds spectacularly indeed. The air raid on the airport is absolutely breathtaking.

A crazy wide-ranging story that reveals for the first time one of Spielberg's weaknesses – if he feels he's telling an important story, he's cautious to be sufficiently respectful towards it. In so doing, he often falls into the trap of over-sentimentality, unnecessarily long poignant scenes, and an inability to omit certain sequences in order to make the film a little more compact. It also doesn't help that every scene has a different tempo and that the composer of the music, Quincy Jones, shows no restraint whatsoever, so that at completely inappropriate moments there is a soaring orchestra of three hundred instruments, like a Russian constructivist film. If it had ended with a bravura (but very theatrical) gospel interlude through which several stories are linked within a single space, I'd be considerably happier; but alas, it's Spielberg, so it won't do without a final farewell in Grey Havens. I was quite surprised, though, at how tolerant and patient the story is with Danny Glover's character, who deserves to hang from his first scene.

Candyman is an admirably directed and scripted film in the current horror context, with two great talents – DaCosta and Peele – supporting each other, taking turns to carry the weight where the other falters. As a result, the film can never be completely condemned in any of its parameters (unless you're a complete cretin, see below). Thus, the new Candyman isn't offering a white-guilt pose – the protagonist is a gentrified African-American trying to exploit his socio-cultural background. The episodic nature of the white characters (where the snobbish art critic figures thus belong somewhere three decades earlier) can then be justified by the fact that it's simply not about them this time. Their exclusion then allows for a stronger coalescence around the former ghetto and the people tied to it, where the horror is not the sudden appearance of the Candyman but his omnipresence. The shot of the killer slowly leaning out from behind the door in the background is more terrifying than fifty thousand jump scares at once. Jordan Peele proves once again his excellence as a screenwriter, because he's a step further than the rest with stories about the legacy of oppression (as literal and tendentious as the ending already is), and he's able to explore, connect, and paraphrase in genre form African-American trauma, and I think that's just great. And DaCosta has a sense for working with space and narrative images. I'd quite like to see them stay together. And maybe get some better actors this time around.

In the context of Spielberg the perfectionist and micromanager, an interestingly incoherent and unguarded screwball comedy where you can smell the Zemeckis/Gale combo a lot more. Spielberg, with his multi-plane shots and knack for visual comedy (to the detriment of any other) is not a bad director for such material, but the problem is the somewhat muddled script with its endless cameos and overwrought episodes. The Director's Cut therefore wasn't really needed, as the longer running time doesn't really help; not to mention the inclusion of scenes that the rest of the film then doesn't carry forward (the chase through the dye house), making it even more nonsense. And watch out, Zemeckis dragged Eddie Deezen and Wendie Jo Sperber in there. Brrr.

Nowadays it's actually a beautiful fairy tale experience to see humanity cooperating and listening, how it’s humble, patient, and empathetic in the face of an encounter with something alien. It's actually a rare spectacle to watch professionals from all sorts of disciplines work together in the face of knowledge of the unknown, without being made into elitist upstarts above common sense. A film without a negative character, a film about fascination, indulgence, and knowledge. It must have been an amazing time, to be able to believe that.

Noir is a genre that has that magical quality where if such a film fails in style, it becomes terribly funny. And with Reminiscence, I was chuckling like a madman at times. By which the film proves once again, among other things, how that famous "best unrealized screenplays" label doesn't guarantee anything, because it's just a crappy rip-off of Strange Days (despite there being no comparison). With more capable direction and especially set design, this could have withstood a lot, because the subject matter isn't entirely bad; but just the way it all feels artificial and cheaply staged makes it stand out for how stupidly written, acted, and produced it is. Still, I'm glad someone took on this retrofuturistic neo-noir without trying to "instructively" look down on it, which is rare these days.

Obviously a major inspiration for American postmodernists like Lynch, Tarantino, Jarmusch, and Refn. And quite understandably so, as this surreal journey through an America full of lost lonely weirdos builds the most authentic sense of lostness and burnout, yet still gets us to hold our breath at the incredible police chase scenes. In fact, the father pointing out that he could have endangered innocent people with his driving is such a barometer of where you stand here. But this film is about resistance not only against the rules, but especially against sense and rationality. Of course, I'm not going to apologize to Honza Kočka for stealing flowers from his grave now and then.