Marigold

Danish dramas are starting to have happy endings? The world is undoubtedly fucked. Bier walks a similar path as fellow dogmatist Vinterberg. Her drama about guilt, violence and forgiveness is visually enjoyable, completed tastefully and is a bit literary. I really liked a few things: the typical director's work with the landscape, which serves as a mirror of the mental states of the characters, the excellently modeled and acted characters, the non-forgettable use of the African storyline, which corresponds and deepens the Danish storyline. In a Better World contains a respectable portion of traditional Nordic themes: death, revenge, mourning, sociopathic behavior, all in a surprisingly coherent state that testifies to the excellent abilities of Bier and her court writer A.T. Jensen. Unfortunately, I'm not that enthusiastic about the ending. I have nothing against the ideal of unconditional love, but it cannot be overlooked that the author rather abuses the character in the end, the tension and plasticity disappear from the film, and the still dormant engagement comes into play. Despite the fact that catharsis is somewhat resentful and contrived, this is further evidence that the Danes can display Europe's current crisis state without awkwardness and ideological farces.

A nice surprise. Damon and Blunt are strong together, and Nolfi's attempt to diversify the romance of the (ex)congressman and dancer with the sci-fi element of "destiny controllers" worked, especially since his retro approach shows exaggeration, not an attempt to extract something extremely effective from Dick's story. Against each other stand a politician in love and a cute bunch of officials in hats, in whose scuffed notebooks a clear probabilistic map of the world is written. If we stop looking for philosophical consistency or logic in this, The Adjustment Bureau will reward us with a surprisingly fresh mix of thriller and romantic drama. Unlike 500 Days of Summer or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the film doesn’t quite have poetics, but debutant Nolfi is very skilled and knows what he wants to shoot. After my initial skepticism and sarcasm (four old men in bucket hats run the world? WTF?) I just had a great time (although with my eyebrows raised every now and then), which I don't usually do with film love stories. Points for Nolfi. P.S. I finally understand where Mr. Tau came from.

In crack fumes and in the smell of peroxide on boxing Olympus. The sympathetic, if inconsistent, synthesis of the Royck genre film with family-social drama, which has little idea which side to be on more, and thereby prefers to do the sure thing. Thanks to Bale and a very juicy finale, sympathy wins above all, although the question of why Aronofsky reached for a more effective grease from Tchaikovsky continues to bother me. The Fighter is simply a more modest and sympathetic substance. And not just because it's got balls.

An exploitative film... a selectively filmed and sounded demonstration of colonial fantasy with added value in the form of purifying catharsis. Slumdog Millionaire doesn't say anything about India, it's just borrowing it as padding in sympathetic shrapnel aimed at Western audiences. The essence of contemporary ideological escapism, however riveting technically. I don't believe anything about that movie. Boyle's obsession with the invisible hand of fate is typical from this point of view - just garish colors on an empty concrete block of a "guaranteed hit".

Fat old man... unfortunately, this is not only true of John Wayne's rich corpus, but also of the rich corpus of this nostalgic Western spectacle, which, when seen through contemporary eyes, pays the price for the damn heavy buttocks. Despite a few nice spots, it's just a poster-rich horse show for retirees that looks very much like a museum specimen, especially after the dark Old testament remake of the Coens’.

One great piece of Western poetry smelling of gunpowder, beans and tears. The film, which is perhaps most reminiscent of No Country for Old Men in Coens' pedigree, but with its humility towards genre conventions and absolutely brilliant work with the central triangle, creates a very pleasant and warm place of nostalgia and melancholy for the old dusty times of heroism.

Colorful fictional folklore, a bit of hippie poetics of apple growing and casual sex, a bit of dull detective story kicked off with the final twist. Yes, its atmosphere cannot be denied, it can be resonating like Christopher Lee's tone color - especially in an epic ending. But the filmmaking is really mediocre, full of naivety and, in the extended version, quite disturbing visual excesses. In short, the film didn't entice me nearly as well as like-minded crazy films (which I consider to be my heart's capital) would have. Feel free to burn me to death - great idea, slightly above-average movie.

I kept waiting for the sweet tremor between faith and disbelief, between dogma and heresy, to fade away into some stupid horror cliché, and I'm pleasantly shocked that it didn't. The script does the most sensible thing with all the key characters - it lets them stray into the mists of their delusions and obsessions (i.e., from a narrative point of view, common sense prevails). Smith already amazed me because he doesn't want to get the viewer drunk on the designs, but by modern means he pushes him right into the middle of the world crawling with sores - very reminiscent of HBO's historical production. The very solid acting performances are underlined by adequately dramatic music. It has to be said that I am still processing the whole thing, but if I take away a few of the wooden moments, the film is a well thought-out and well-realized variation on all other variations of Conrad's book “Heart of Darkness". Even the stuffing of the Middle Ages with very modern thought content didn't bother me very much. A strong ****.

In the competition for the most botched theme, Gans wins the prepared wolf plague. The sad thing is, because of how exciting and well-built this film can be at times, it's not properly funny in other places. The alternation of the torn action plane with a dark drama about the coming change of order is simply like drunk regulars in a cheap Hamburg tavern. There should be less kung-fu, less Vinnetou, and more spoiled sophistication, like the realia and the magnificent Cassel bring to the film. The idea seems brilliant to me, the processing burned like a cheap burger at a booth.

An expressively extraordinarily economical and modest film that depicts the Sámi legend with chilling matter-of-factness and subdued emotionality. Thanks to this, Gaup's version of the myth is understandable, full of natural life and interesting moments of an ethnographic rather than a cinematic character. A pure and inconspicuous Nordic epic about revenge and the ritual unity of man and the world.