Lima

It has an attractive execution, interesting visuals, the camera is constantly moving in nice locations and coming up with unusual shots, it looks very cinematic and it's brilliantly shot for a debut. It's just that when you think about the premise and the twist even a little bit, it stands on very shaky clay legs. The exposition before the major twist is too long and after an hour or so many viewers will get tired of watching a bunch of constantly celebrating and exuberant extroverts. That said, Zoe Kravitz has an interesting directorial style and may be on the verge of great things in years to come. And I'd like to see Channing Tatum in this unconventional role more in the future.

I really like Paul Schrader's scripts in his strong 70s and 80s. But it's also a well-known fact that the more interesting his themes and ideas were and are, the worse he is as a director; it was always better to have someone more skilled take on his screenwriting brainchild (yes, Mr. Scorsese, I'm pointing at you). Here again, the premise is quite interesting, but delivered by Schrader in such a tired way that you just don't enjoy it. In fact, the story doesn't really work towards the end either, and thanks to cheap plot crutches and a point that lacks any punch, you don't recognise the Taxi Driver screenwriter here at all. And if that's not enough misery for you, the old man tries to convince you that video games are mainly played by rapists and junkies. Boo.

It's clear to me why this film was pulled from cinemas for several years because it didn't conform to the ideological norms of the time. Karel Höger is here as a bankrupt creature who drinks a lot, smokes like a factory, and as an ideologically defective person is not in the party, which is why he is subjected to bullying. The personal-party tug-of-wars didn't engage me at first, much less the frequent comradeship, as did the hanging around a certain miner, spiced with a little hint of his wife's infidelity. Fortunately, at around the 50-minute mark there is a turning point, a major flashback that illuminates why things have been happening as they have been, and the acting of Höger, a master of his field, and his beautiful sonorous voice give it all a certain emotional charge. He could play the alcoholic convincingly, and when you add to that a nice cinematography and an emotionally tense, touching ending, just as Václav Krška was able to do, satisfaction prevails in the end. But more in the "seen it and probably once is enough" category, the Socialist odour in the first half was too strong for me.

With the first notes of Iron Maiden, which I don't hear in movies, I knew this would be the movie for me. The path set by John Wick all those years ago started tire me with the fourth movie, with dozens of dead bodies dropping like bowling pins, and the whole thing feels unrealistic. Here, in contrast, they don't play with the dead, they skimp on the action, and when it does happen it looks believable, like guys who have no superpowers, just like a normal fight between regular family guys vs one slightly more trained guy. Actually, it's not even an action movie, more of a focused drama about police corruption, so the oft-mentioned comparison to the first Rambo is no that warranted. Aaron Pierre is a revelation, that stoic calm, stern look, charismatic voice, he can convey everything in the slight twitches of his face. And when he gets his moves going, it’s amazing. So it's clear. The great, and again underrated here, Hold the Dark was no accident, Jeremy Saulnier is worth continuing to watch.

I wasn't drawn in. I almost cared more about whether the main character, a private eye, would find his way back to his cheating wife, a minor subplot here, than whether he would bring back to his stepmother her wandering stepdaughter from Florida, where things really drag on lethargically and where I was only entertained by the fine sexual tension between the detective and the blonde femme fatale. That's the first hour, then from a certain point onwards it picks up some momentum and the corpses pile up, including the final climactic ten minutes, which in its overwroughtness feels more like a bit of B-movie drama than a very slowly told story up to that point. Gene Hackman is great here, as always, with a young Melanie Griffith almost unrecognisable. And it has a fine jazzy musical score at times, but .... I was expecting something better from the seasoned Arthur Penn.

I can't say that I experienced the story of a mentally unstable hooker who helps a private eye in one of the cases in a particularly emotional way, Alan Pakula directs it in a distant way, with strange music that in tense scenes most of all reminds me of the production of street performers. There is, however, one big BUT. This is Jane Fonda's hugely great performance, which belonged in the 70s. The role of a lifetime, really. Those scenes, the great monologue and dialogue deliveries, they're a joy to watch. And when it eclipses even the legendary Donald Sutherland in that regard, who rather just slips in his somewhat boring role as the stoically calm, soft-spoken detective, there's something to be said for that. A very well-deserved Oscar for Jane. It's just that the clumsily told story fails to draw you in, and it escalates to a kind of weird, long static scene at the end, with the villain spilling all the beans in the face of his intended victim, which I find cheesy.

Alan Pakula's All the President's Men is one of my favourite political investigative dramas, and this film, two years younger, takes a slightly different approach. The investigative journalism is still there, but the investigation is more straightforward, more of a life-and-death levitation, the solo of one embattled journalist who gets himself in mortal danger a few times. The paranoia of a conspiracy by a major corporation and its connected government circles is palpable, two years after the Watergate affair, and it culminates in an ending so provocative that I wouldn't hesitate to call it as bold an auteurist vision as, say, Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation. For me, the unexpected highlight is the psychological acceptance test at the Parallax headquarters halfway through the film, a five-minute (!!) sequence of images, categorised as 'dad-mom-god-home' etc., designed to evoke certain associations in the protagonist. I have to say, I haven't seen anything stranger in a movie in a long time.

At times it reminded me of the last two seasons of Lost with its cluelessness, including the hatches that also lead somewhere. There are mysteries, unpredictable situations, but it doesn't lead to anything meaningful. For about half an hour or so, I was amused to see how dumb the whole thing was, like watching some exotic animal in a zoo that nature had "done" to in a way that would make Richard Attenborough weep. The characters behave irrationally, they have unnatural dialogues, and at the end, it builds up so stupidly and with such a futile point that it gives you a headache. The only thing that made me happy was the yellow Aratinga, because I love parrots. And in the case of Ishana Shyamalan, I can only think that the apple rolled far away from the tree and was never found. Meh.

It could almost be called "Two Musketeers and Eva", because everything revolves around D'Artagnan and his efforts to save his beloved and then Athos (a magnificent Vincent Cassel) and his "skeleton in the closet"; the other two are neither interesting nor essential to the plot at all, apart from their awkward jokes at the end. The enchantment of the flawless production design, as in the 1st episode, stayed with me here though, the guys are properly dirty again, it has a fine unpolished patina of the 17th century, beautiful cinematography, beautiful castles, but I, having been bitten by Richard Lester's version and a pretty decent overview of the content of Dumas' novel, was surprised by the sidelining of Richelieu and unpleasantly shocked by how the political correctness pushed on me left an unpleasant aftertaste. I am referring to the character of the black prince Hannibal, who always appears at the right moment and helps the Musketeers out of their predicament with his selfless intervention. Dumas, who never once mentioned this character in his novels, must have been spinning like a propeller in a blender, but mostly it was given to the current quota, and now that I mention it, a person who has never addressed the woke agenda in films, that's really saying something. Sometimes you really don't need to push so hard, filmmakers. PS: The ending in the burning building is spectacular, but too "Hollywood" for me.

A middle-aged American writer corresponds across the Atlantic with an antique shop assistant in London, the whole film based on a rather original concept where we hear both actors reading the letters and at the same time their content is visualised by the scenes. In fact, the whole film is a constant reading of letters across three decades, and there is a minimum of dialogue where the two actors talk to each other. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it's a concept that only lasts about half an hour before it becomes repetitive and monotonous. The film does have a lively feel to it, thanks mainly to Anne Bancroft's enthusiastic acting, but otherwise I don't think the story is interesting enough to not be tiresome by the end. I've seen Anthony Hopkins act better in many other films, too. But I can say from my own experience that this movie is very much liked by women, my 60 year old sister loves it, my friend does too. So I guess it's my fault :o)