Filmmaniak

The film is quite weak if you take into consideration Dupieux's filmography, especially after the excellent Reality. A simple comedic concept with an absurdly protracted police interrogation and an even more absurdly protracted witness testimony is done in an embarrassingly primitive and superficial way, without imaginative satire, breaking of expectations or any added value. The characters are intentionally idiots, but they produce little humor and the director also begins to steal from himself (blending the past with the present, physically deformed police officers) and his final point this time also has no power. It’s possible to sit through the running time of less than an hour and a quarter, but one would simply expect something more striking, subversive, sophisticated and complicated from Dupieux.

A slow but genuinely nice, empathetic and gentle thriller about an aging professional assassin who likes his daily solitary stereotype and work rituals and lives at his own pace. He is suddenly surprised by the chances of spending his twilight years living with a woman by his side. The film is basically like Ron Perlman himself. He is old school, a little tired and partly retired, but he still has it in him - black humor and style, the ability to impress with a correctly chosen grin, and being able to credibly portray the character of a rancher with an accurate line of sight. The film is directed a bit subtly by a director who is practically only capable of doing a gray routine, but it is surprisingly suitable for this material. The film is consistently above average, doesn’t rush and can impact in the right places.

Dan Stevens ventures, with a psycho frown, into a quirky sectarian community on a secret island where his sister has been abducted. The film maintains its atmosphere and pace from the very beginning and becomes more interesting with the arrival of the main protagonist on the island, where the rules of the local population and particularly the special mythology, according to which the community was built on the island, are slowly uncovered. But then the sectarian colony begins to collapse from the inside (unfortunately), the supporting characters begin to come to the forefront, and the story of the main protagonist falls by the wayside. Because of this the film loses steam slightly in the second half, which it tries to save with grateful scenes with a medieval lobotomy and a meat grinder. Except for the juicy gore scenes, there's nothing much reminiscent of Evans's previous films in this historical horror movie.

Only a torso standing on its head remains from the original horror story about a student who reveals a dark conspiracy inside a dance school, unnecessarily supplemented by a second narrative line in which an 80-year-old German psychoanalyst investigates the disappearance of one of the dancers on his own and searches for his long-lost wife. The duality of the plot is also symbolized by the environment of Berlin divided into two parts in 1977 (when the original Suspiria was in cinemas), where the story was moved due to references to RAF terrorism and post-Nazi ideology. The result is confused and poorly edited video art, which permutes the motifs of the original film in its own way and thus differs significantly from the original, including its overall tone. The burnt out colored background of the school from Argent's version has been replaced by a boring gray, the visually impressive parts are just the sequences in which Guadagnino tries to shock the audience, and this time you won't even remember the music. The new Suspiria is a film about the awakening of femininity and female power, used to humiliate men and the fight for supremacy in a matriarchal community, in which the lead male character is played by a woman, and where dance equals sexual experience. However, the film is drowned in an unnecessarily stretched and slushy storytelling, in which gradually escalating tension and anxiety alternate with flashy and unconstructed brutality and straightforwardness, manifested in the fact that the film definitely does not try to hide who the dance school teachers really are and lays its cards on the table right from the beginning.

An amateur short about how a banana kills two guys in the woods. Of course, it’s terrible nonsense. The creator is only justified by the fact that it was made as a competition film within a 48-hour limit according to a previously unknown and randomly drawn assignment. Definitely good work given the time limit, but unwatchable if out of context.

At first glance, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again has the same ingredients as the first part, but the result is much worse. It has an even weaker plot and dialogues, its story is told in a very ignorant way and it is directed boringly and unimaginatively. The first storyline is about the main protagonist from the first part sending out invitations to the grand opening of his hotel, after which the invited guests arrive and then a party follows. In the second storyline from the past, her mother acts like a girl who sleeps with every good-looking guy who sings a song to her. The first Mamma Mia! was in fact terribly stupid and superficial, but it had such an innocent joyful charge and energy that it was easy to accept it as a non-binding and undemanding summer break, excuse its naive plot, primitive candy dialogue and lazy dance choreography and instead enjoy the sea and Greek exteriors and listen to ABBA. Exactly this charge and energy, however, are missing in this sequel, and therefore there is nothing to excuse its shortcomings. The only things that are a bit worthwhile are some of the actors and the mentioned songs, which tighten up and revive a lot of things the second time around, even though some of them were heard ten years ago in the first film.

An honest, bizarre festival film, combining dark Scandinavian crime and bestial romance with fantasy mythology. Despite many WTF moments, the film is clearly rooted in our reality and based on multi-layered motifs reflecting current world events, especially regarding the issue of gender and sexual identity and approaches to minorities in society. This genre mix is directed with a firm hand, but in parts it deserves a brisker pace. Nevertheless, its originality, courage and uniqueness are definitely appreciated. And the great masks and acting performances of both title characters.

This is what Ocean’s Eleven might have been if Soderbergh forgot about commerce and decided to stay artful. The main protagonist, planning to rob the National Museum, is introduced over a long period of time, including his complex family and social situation, and the robbery is flatly thrown in there in the first half of the story over the course of 15 minutes, so that in the rest of the film the various existential issues and identity crises of the desperate main characters, hesitant until the last moment, can be dealt with. This is accompanied by a number of original and even magical motifs and scenes deliberately shot in spite of genre assumptions, but the whole thing has almost no pull at all and everything is only focused on the targeted breakdown of audience expectations.

A warm, bitter-sweet human drama with great Israeli music. The unobtrusive, almost conflict-free and slow-moving plot is enlivened by unusual local motifs, such as the question of orthodox religion and the theme of social conditions in Israel, and it also helps a lot that it's very well acted and filmed.

The first half hour with a lengthy wedding fails to introduce all of the roughly fifteen essential characters and the relationships between them (which you will slowly begin to understand later). The film then tells a story about a kidnapping that resembles an Agatha Christie detective story, but without a detective. The rest of the film deals with family ties and old wrongs rather than anything being investigated, but not knowing the abductors' identity at least brings an element of tension and uncertainty to the process. Thanks to the quality actors, it's not bad, but qualitatively it's on a completely different level than the director's previous Iranian films.