Filmmaniak

This is an experimental, intellectually-ironic zombie film from a director who despises standard commercial zombie films, and that’s exactly the way it looks. Deliberately throwing away the rules of the zombie genre and overturning conventions and stereotypes sounds petulant rather than innovative, and the result is a purely anti-entertaining and random-acting film with a deliberately sloppy screenplay full of repetitions and unused characters that only accomplishes exhausted and shallow social satire and a few meta-jokes. What’s more, the film’s pace is slower than the shuffling gait of the wheezing undead, focusing on viewers who will never watch it in most cases because of its chosen theme.

The animators have done an excellent job in terms of authentic portrayals of living creatures and nature, ensuring that the animation is absolutely breath-taking, and many shots look as if they came from natural history documentaries. The problem is that The Lion King is not a documentary from the African savannah, but rather a musical from Disney, in which the animals talk and sing, and this truly does not work well together with photo-realistic animation. In order to achieve the greatest possible credibility, the animal heroes were deprived of all "human" facial expressions, and therefore the only emotions in their dialogues are the voices of their voice actors, which leave something to be desired. The story (basically Hamlet) is no different from the animated version (except that it’s half an hour longer) and it's still understandably great, but it just doesn't have much to surprise you with if you've seen the original The Lion King. The new The Lion King is a technologically perfect, but otherwise somewhat soulless copy of its much better predecessor.

Aladdin lags behind the animated version in many ways, but even so, watching the film is mostly a pleasant experience, particularly thanks to the expensive and colour-rich spectacular expedition with a slightly inconsistent concept, influenced by just about everything. The film’s Arabic elements are joined by Bollywood influences (including a dance number at the end) and the aesthetics of Brazilian carnivals. Unfortunately, the film also has breakdance and beatboxing. In terms of plot, it is not an exact copy, as several passages and two new songs have been added, and in some scenes their order has been reversed and their content changed (sometimes for the better, sometimes worse). Will Smith manages to be playful, funny and touching in the role of the Genie. Compared to Smith, Mena Massoud and Naomi Scott in the roles of Aladdin and Princess Jasmine have a more difficult time gaining audience sympathy, and with his leather expression and lack of charisma, Marwan Kenzari is downright tragic as the villain in the role of the Sultan's advisor, Jafar.

Sometimes the truth hurts. Unfortunately, that’s not the case here. The drama, which deals with the ambiguity and relativization of truth and an unreliable memory that can reshape the truth hidden in our memories over time, is based on the relationship between a mother, an arrogant and smug famous actress at the end of her career, and a daughter who preferred to flee away from her overseas, all her life blaming her for her constant disregard and contempt. However, relatively little has been extracted from this promising and potentially very significant conflict, as the film maintains a peaceful atmosphere from beginning to end and instead of confronting catharsis, it wraps itself with literal metaphors and the relationships between reality and the fictional film world. Although the characters gradually reveal more and more information from their past, they do not resolve their mutual disputes and instead double down on the need to use hypocrisy, lies and manipulation, because in their opinion, this is also a functional way to keep the family together (an illusory family and only seemingly cohesive, whose members pretend to be family in private and not family in public). The message of the film is that it is ok to defend such behaviour and that even the youngest generation should learn it, and this message can be described as at least distorted. Despite the film’s sensitive direction and great actors, the end of The Truth leaves a very bitter taste, not only from the processing of the theme, but also from the idea of how great a film it could have been if Hirokazu Kore-eda properly focused on the issue of mutual accusations between the dominant mother and her wronged daughter.

The film sticks to a relatively well-established storyline about a newcomer in a closed and torn community, who inadvertently brings it together through his actions, but who is still unable escape his past. Even the film’s form is quite common throughout most of its running time. What is not as common is the incredibly expressive and even demonic Bartosz Bielenia, who gives an extraordinary performance in the main role and carries the whole film on his shoulders, as well as the perspective of his character, looking at the world through God and thereby getting to know himself. The film also delivers through its comprehensively processed theme of religious faith and a static camera, which in the end surprises when it suddenly and justifiably starts moving at a key moment. This remarkable drama also excels in its elaborate script and serves as further proof that even an intimate film with a small budget and only a few locations can be shot in such a way as to provide the viewer with a strong and exceptionally impressive experience.

This is an excellent drama about (not) dying, with perfectly believable characters, and it is filmed quite realistically, civilly and without pathos and too much pressure. Thanks to a great script and excellent (sometimes breath-taking) actors, the film is strong both in emotionally tense moments and in quieter passages. Bleak running through hospitals and consulting with staff who are not always compassionate during the Christmas holidays and at the turn of the year, administered consistently into the story day after day, surprisingly amounts to more than just a fall into depression and gloominess, because in its second half, especially with the approaching conclusion, the film tries to make up for the sadness with an enormous dose of touching sugar candy which, paradoxically, makes it lose a bit of its emotion. Even so, it is masterfully directed and in all respects a precise relationship study, and what is also interesting about it is that the initially somewhat alienated main characters, who are partners, find their way back to each other and their withered love noticeably gets a second wind precisely because of the vision of the potential imminent death of one of them.

In Garrone’s interpretation, the attempt to return to the roots of the famous literary source material took on the form of a mix of a modern fantasy fairy tale and artistic realism, based primarily on the poetic depiction of the poor Italian countryside and somber scenes rendered in the director’s traditional and distinctive visual stylization, with which he also imbued Tale of Tales and his raw dramas. However, the allegorical incidents of the disobedient, absent-minded and overly trusting protagonist, which cause him temporary trauma and subsequently teach him moral lessons, seem contradictory and disjointed, and some of those lessons even contradict each other, not to mention the presence of several utterly infantile and unbearably tiresome supporting characters. The magical fairy and the cricket appear only sporadically in the film and thus do not have much influence on shaping the moral compass of the titular Pinocchio, whose portrayal is a fundamental flaw of the film, as he is not sufficiently interesting and it is practically impossible to sympathize with him, as if Garrone put too much emphasis on the perfection of his physical appearance and did not even try to charm the audience with his personality, behavior and feelings. Thus, in addition to several plot stumbles, the film also struggles with a lack of emotion and, due to the slow pace of the narrative, often with sluggishness. The film is pushed forward by the actors and excellent technical execution, but thanks to a number of unique moments, the result is successful more for its remarkable bizarreness than for its qualities.

Sweethearts is a melodrama dealing with, among other things, prostitution, drugs, infidelity, brain cancer, suicidal tendencies, escapes from home and many pregnancies, whilst being surprisingly presented as something relaxing, lively and spiced with comedic quotes. This is another Czech film that tries to act as a bittersweet life story, but at the same time is completely detached from reality (the depiction of the relationship between a prostitute and her pimp or employment in multinational corporations is seemingly from another universe) and whose characters are just primitive figures defined by one to two stereotypes (all of the adult males are selfish and ruthless bastards, while the female heroines are their troubled and naive victims). Despite the banality and dullness of the content, however, Sweethearts is excellently directed and has a feel for storytelling and a solidly mastered formal concept (editing, camera, music, hard-working actors). Sweethearts also has a decent tempo, a perfectly staged climax filmed in one shot, and even the gradual unravelling of the connections between the individual characters is quite entertaining. Overall, this is a film whose masterful cinematographic processing is several levels better than its pathetically written plot and flat characters deserve.

In terms of story and narrative structure, Tenet is the most complex of all of Nolan’s films. It requires attention and concentration, but it leaves viewers with questions and uncertainty after the first viewing, despite all of their effort.  Though it often tends to balance on the edge of overall comprehensibility due to the overabundance of stimuli, information and experiments with the flow of time, it never slips into a being an opaque, chaotic mess, which is clearly a sign of Nolan’s directorial and storytelling qualities. He inventively makes use of the central motif of time in many spectacular scenes and constantly enriches it with new and unexpected possibilities of using it, thanks to which the plot continuously escalates to highly unpredictable dimensions and thus unceasingly becomes more complex, while at the same time becoming less and less concerned with explaining what is actually happening on the screen, how it should be understood and what would be good to take note of. It is not necessary to analyze the structure of the film and its plot sequence in detail, as it can easily be read only intuitively and on the basis of physical experience, supported primarily by the intense sound and music component and the realistically filmed action. In comparison with some of Nolan’s previous films, Tenet is far from perfect (particularly in terms of the cold rendering of the main characters and a few somewhat banal and awkward motifs), but it is still admirable and absolutely magnificent, with a consistently brisk pace and unrelenting rhythm. Not a second is wasted and the film holds together splendidly without letting viewers catch their breath in many passages. Tenet is fascinating, visionary, narratively revolutionary and not too similar to anything else. It is one of those films that you would think impossible to make if someone just told you about it. But Christopher Nolan indeed made it, with absolute precision and filmmaking brilliance.

Although its supposed to be a summer comedy, the only funny thing about the film is that 70-year-old Jaromír Hanzlík is supposed to play the character of a mysterious charming seducer who picks up significantly younger women through his romantic poems and rides on the Vltava. Instead, for the duration of the film, Hanzlík acts more like a lewd psychopath who tours villages in an attempt to lure local married ladies to bed, and his character can be considered a relatively solid part of the film only because all the other male characters in the film are disgusting drunks. The casting of the main female character, played by a woman in her forties, is also extremely bizarre, because she evidently should be about age sixty. The rather miserable story is further interspersed with nonsense, unrelated digressions that lead nowhere and have nothing to do with the main storyline (debates between the villagers about the disposal of a cesspool, an attempt to get a funeral procession through the town square with carousels). The film openly states to women that suffering as a victim in a clearly toxic marriage is part of their job in life, because "anything is better than divorce." The drooling sexism goes hand in hand with low-brow humour, and the whole film is captured best through the last shot accompanying the closing captions, where a sewage truck spills poop across a field.