JFL

The walking, talking special effect known as Scott Adkins is not only keeping the sector of trashy, low-budget action flicks alive, but also repeatedly demonstrates that with the appropriate ambitions and physically fit actors, furious attractions can be created that the big-budget sector can’t match with its CGI colouring books. Furthermore, it is obvious from each of his collaborations with Jesse V. Johnson that Adkins, as co-producer, is building up a portfolio of unique acting parts and challenges with which he compensates for portrayal of generic parts in projects that he does mainly as a job. Avengement is the peak of this collaboration not only in terms of Adkins’s role, but also in terms of the screenplay and choreography, as well as the overall stylistic concept of the fight scenes. Instead of the spectacular acrobatics of Adkins’s previous top projects, here we have an unrefined, brawling style superbly combined with a coarse, loutish paraphrase of The Count Monte Cristo from the British underworld. Though it is merely the culmination of this whole brutally physical movie, the closing fight scene deservedly ranks among the best fight sequences of the decade.

Ritchie’s gangster flicks can be looked at as a genre screen on which the direct projects himself, or rather the current point in his life, career and position in the film industry. At the very beginning of his first film, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, we have a group of self-confidently cheeky youths who have not only talent and ambition, but mainly more luck than sense, when they heedlessly set out into the world of omnipotent old structures. Coincidence plays a much smaller role in Ritchie’s second film, but the director, together with the protagonists, gets into a much bigger game with foreign players in a different weight category, from which he cannot allow himself to escape only with a skinned knee. The already forgotten existentially pessimistic Revolver shows the former wunderkind in his element, which he had been away from for a while, consorting with overly powerful people and now doubting himself, so he tries to kick off a big game that will get him back to the top while simultaneously reassessing his own life. RocknRolla expressed a feeling of newly replenished assuredness and, at the same time, bidding farewell to his island roots while also peculiarly focusing on the position of England/Ritchie between Europe and America. Therefore, The Gentlemen isn’t so much a comeback as an attempt to show others and himself that “the king’s still got it”. He has come a long way and from an untested, clever lout, he has developed into a man of elegance over the years and the owner of a stylish pub and his own hipster brewery, which he does not hesitate to advertise. Though he still sympathises with streetwise hooligans with their online projects, he is far removed from them in his pursuits. He mulls over retirement now that he’s in the company of the cream of society and he’s raking it in with lucrative projects, but this seemingly final money spinner put new vitality into his veins in the end. Predation, courage and cheekiness have been replaced by sophistication (albeit in the snobbish superficial sense rather than true sophistication or ingenuity) and pretentious refinement. Gangster movies have always been founded on the motif of the changing of the guard between generations, or rather the conflict between the young and old schools, so in line with Ritchie's age and self-image, this story from the underworld takes an atypical direction that would not have occurred to him in the early days of his career. The question is how this glorified flaccid middle age will be perceived by today’s young people, who are licking their chops at their own opportunities in the genre world of gangsters – in recent years, francophone productions such as the excellent Les Misérables and the hyper-stylish Gangsta have reigned supreme. However, this in no way diminishes the fun and agility of The Gentlemen, which would have ranked among the most satisfying titles in broad distribution in another, stronger year (at least from the perspective of a boomer viewer).

I have a great weakness for small, low-key indie films based on a unique approach to a genre concept or a distinctive formal adaptation. This category often brings forth both enthusiasm and disappointment when the obvious creativity and ingenuity of the filmmakers is combined with obvious production limitations or, in the worst case, unfinished screenplays. But there is even greater euphoria when, every once in a while, a thoroughly polished work such as The Vast of Night emerges. This debut ode to fantastical stories such those as found in the Twilight Zone as well as to the golden era of futurism is not bogged down in retro, but uses its period setting to uniquely link the concept of radio plays with the expressive drama of modern film. Just as in the referential works of the aforementioned iconic series, here it is also necessary for the viewer to accept a certain degree of fantasy, naïveté and pathos, as well as patience. The reward then becomes a gradually intensification of the atmosphere and a splendidly escalating narrative and absorbing formal grasp of the individual sequences, which can be impressive both as evidence that it is still possible to breathe new life into genre stories that have already been told numerous times and as the filmmaker’s presentation of new talents. Fortunately, the ambition to work with various means of expression is completely subordinate in the context of the work as a whole. Instead of being a spectacular exhibition, the film thus shows thoughtful and decisive mastery of all means of expression in media. The predominant long camera approaches (including one lasting nine minutes), dramatic rides and the various ways of handling dialogue passages by editing, zoom and rapid montages work superbly with particular scenes and with the overall dramaturgy of the picture while, furthermore, preserving the dimension of specific scenes and the overall dramaturgy of the film and maintaining the dimension of a radio play.

Though not entirely in balance dramaturgically, this feature-length film derived from the series We Bare Bears is elevated by its final quarter, when the special breaks away from the mandatory piling up of cameo roles for significant supporting characters from the series and rises above the straightforward road-movie farce and finally relies on its intended theme. At its core, the original series deals with migration and, through the characters of three bear brothers, conveys the everyday feelings of people who are part of a minority and just want to live their lives and be themselves while also fitting in with the society around them. It is thus no wonder that the filmic culmination of the series could not avoid the topical issue of American internment camps and the separation of children from their families. On the one hand, it elicits hysterical shouts from dim-witted supposed adults that such topics do not belong in children’s shows or that it supposedly constitutes some sort of propaganda and brainwashing of children. On the other hand, as the unsurpassed icon of creating children’s content Fred Rogers said, children actually perceive these issues and need to orient themselves in them because they are bothered by them internally. As a member of an ethnic minority, Daniel Chong conceived the series We Bare Bears from the beginning as a metaphor for his own distressful, clumsy and tragicomic attempts to integrate into society and, at the same time, to find his own place in it. It is thus no wonder that he felt the need not only to express his opinions on this disgusting issue, but also to offer viewers of the series hope that even in a world where something so terrible is happening, there could be a prospect of an optimistic future if we help create it together. There could be no better conclusion of We Bare Bears.

Three bears are eagerly trying to fit into modern human society and thus have to deal with a number of phenomena found in today’s world, including social networks and other media, the hipster lifestyle and environmental issues, while people look at them warily and even with hostility. The characters are not only enchanting exotics, but also ideal projection screens for child viewers, who also stubbornly and often clumsily try to stake out their own place in the world while also wanting to fit in as much as possible and not stand out too much. The bears’ different personalities, the gradually built-up world with other supporting characters and every possible twist and turn add up to an entertaining series with a lot of heart. At the same time, We Bare Bears is not only a rollicking celebration of individuality, but also a clever metaphor for the everyday life experience of minorities.

The king returns, but it’s a bit less spectacular than one would have hoped, given how high the preceding two instalments of the series set the bar. Unfortunately, it is obvious that Isaac Florentine no longer occupies the director’s chair, even though the production made a decent effort to replace him. The Bulgarian journeyman Todor Chapkanov undoubtedly directed only the dialogue scenes, whereas the action scenes were shot by choreographer Tim Man together with cinematographer Ivan Vatsov, who as the camera operator observed the shooting of the previous movie under the wing of someone more experienced. Despite efforts to copy the crane approaches and the dynamic camerawork of the third Undisputed, this time the camerawork is not refined enough to capture the fight scenes as effectively as possible in individual long shots; in other words, this time the movie cannot benefit from such flawless interplay of direction, camerawork and choreography. In this respect, the third film in the series remains the undisputed champion and also outshines part IV with its wonderfully straightforward screenplay. The effort to come to terms with the fact that Boyka is not behind bars results in testosterone-fuelled asceticism and messianism, the relaying of which in the screenplay draws attention and space away from the fight scenes. Thanks to Adkins' dedication to his craft and to the audience, the fight scenes fortunately still elicit the desired astonishment at the athletic skill of everyone involved, which has been the main advantage of the series since the second part and can overshadow any shortcomings.

Neil Marshall is a master of trash who delights in original variations on subgenres and categories to such an extent that it’s astonishing that someone would give him money for it. From today’s perspective, however, that is no longer true. To a significant extent, Marshall made his living off the existence of the hungry global DVD market, which secured him fame in certain circles. Following the collapse of the DVD market, Marshall, like many other genre barbarians, found refuge in television, where he accepted the role of a mere wage-earning craftsman. Doomsday remains his most unhinged and most entertaining film. Despite the obviously limited budget, he amazingly unleashed his combination of genres and local sentiment, thus creating the ultimate trash flick in ultra-British attire. The odyssey to find a vaccine against a deadly virus takes viewers through a full range of genres, which are proudly combined with British elements, motifs and actors. In individual parts of the film, we identify the attributes of zombie movies, spy flicks and cyberpunk. The post-apocalyptic world gradually transitions from allusions to Carpenter’s Escape from New York to Cameron’s Aliens before resting for a moment in a Mad Max style enhanced by elements of punk concerts, so that it can travel by train a la Harry Potter to the magically Arthurian landscape of the highlanders. In addition to the casting of British faces with domestic genre icons Malcolm McDowell and Bob Hoskins at the fore, the film maintains throughout its runtime a certain British punk exaggeration reflected in, among other things, the regular incorporation of elements that relate to the contemporary world of film, whether the collection plates of the Mad Maxian cannibals or the direction signs of the medieval castle tour. However, Marshall did not have a bottomless budget, so he tried to use frantic camerawork and editing to conceal compromises in the set design and deficiencies in the choreography and other phases of scene preparation. Even though that is extremely annoying, in the end it works in the overall meta-trash concept, for which nothing is sacred except for unbridled entertainment and the ethos of Junktown.

This grimly counter-revolutionary exploitation flick was created by white filmmakers with the ambition to benefit from the trend of blaxploitation films while also reproachfully warning against the danger of the Black Panthers movement. Propped up by trashy appropriation of grand themes and insipid adaptation, which the same team had previously demonstrated with the Nazisploitation Love Camp 7 (1969) and the shocking A Climax of Blue Power (1974), they teeter on the edge of bad taste and uncontrolled ignoble entertainment. It could be said that they were only innocently trying to revive the classic categories of exploitation and trash films in the context of the blaxploitation trend, as they demonstrated three years earlier in an absurd variation on B-movies about mad scientists and their creations in The Thing with Two Heads. This time, however, with that combination of Nazisploitation and African-American motifs, they got closer to how the Black Panthers saw Richard Nixon and his minions than how the African-American community saw them. Apart from that problematic level, The Black Gestapo nevertheless remains a gloriously cheap bit of trash that holds the viewer’s attention with a steady supply of ketchup scenes and bare breasts (even including those of Uschi Digard) until the grand climax, which gives the impression of being a sweded Commando.

Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey are animation illuminators in every sense of those words. Not only does their film breathe life into the medieval art of manuscript illumination, which it also elementally connects with the world of Celtic myths, but it also enlightens viewers with its truly breathtaking creative side and enchanting story. Though Brendan and the Secret of Kells does not deny taking inspiration from Miyazaki elements, it ranks among a surprisingly small group of feature-length animated films that are based on the ethos of old legends and revitalise old artistic styles, such as Marcell Jankovics’s Son of the White Mare (1981), Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) and Richard Williams’s unfinished project The Thief and the Cobbler. Moore’s beautiful project is captivating due to not only its unprecedented ornamentality and harmonisation of traditional drawing with 2D computer animation, but also its carefully constructed screenplay, which, following the example of Miyazaki's films, always gives priority to emotions and does not underestimate child viewers.

What is interesting about Déjà Vu is primarily how its screenplay provides the ideal framework for director Tony Scott’s stylistic development. After the extravagant Domino, in which the unreliable narrator gave space to spectacular formal flamboyance, Scott’s upcoming project gives the impression of being a sort of calming. However, by combining various cameras, materials, shooting speeds and post-production processes, the director found an ideal application for playing with the impression of the moment in Déjà Vu’s narrative, which in the essential middle part works with the possibility of looking into time running in the past while changing points of view. In its peak scenes, the film brings a wildly fragmented view of two different time planes running concurrently, but thanks to the visual stylisation, the viewer never gets lost even for a moment. Domino and Déjà Vu together represent the two highlights of Scott’s late-period filmography, where in the respective screenplays he had the ideal framework for his formal experiments – in one case, unbridled wildness in the interest of increasing the expressiveness and delirium of the narrative and, in the other case, the paradoxical use of those elements for maximum clarity and a credible display of the fantastical aspects of intersecting time planes.