Othello

Bond for your mom, art for your little sister. The defining characteristic of the Bond franchise is not a vodka martini, a shapely girl under a blanket, a fitted suit, or an Aston Martin on a Tuscan serpentine. It's his willingness to adapt to current trends. It's what has more or less successfully kept him at the helm for 50 years. When the blaxploitation wave rose, Bond was there (Live and Let Die), when Star Wars rocked the cinematic universe, Bond was there (Moonraker), when the Euro-crime era arrived, Bond was there too (For Your Eyes Only). That ability to lick the current cream of the crop has been brilliantly transferred by original Bond producer Albert Broccoli to his daughter and heiress Barbara, who has been behind the franchise successfully since GoldenEye. Skyfall is thus no self-reflexive take on the franchise (Bond films have been self-reflexive since the Connery era), but instead follows the trend of photographic reminiscence in action films, in which old stars of 80s and 90s flicks returned to the silver screen to recollect their heights through direct quotes or self-reflexive commentary. Along with this in Skyfall comes a move away from the one-man-bullet concept of Bond, from the previous two instalments, but following the trend (2012) of the times (The A-Team, The Expendables, M:I, etc), teamwork now plays a much bigger role. Craig's Bond himself has undergone a truly radical transformation here: from Quantum of Solace, in which he initiated virtually no dialogue and spoke in bare sentences, to an ironic, chatty Bond of almost Moore-esque style, a position from which by all accounts he seems unable to handle. Nor was Mendes able to handle the opening action sequence, which is poorly paced to the music and it's clear that almost every shot was made without composition to the whole scene so we have an unnecessary amount of randomly cut perspectives. The other problem I have is the insanely theatrical and poorly baked plot, which kicks the whole thing off with a terrorist mercenary stealing a disk containing lists of all the deployed NATO agents from a run-down hotel somewhere in Turkey (and what was that disk doing there?), only to then play with the acronym M in relation to her recruitment of orphaned children. Which is articulated by a villain who, perhaps unwittingly, evokes Tim Curry's prime years. Skyfall, then, is not a very good film, but in terms of what the Bond franchise has been known for, it once again delivers. And yet check out the reviews. Those who are happy with it have no right to moan once their favorite hero becomes black, gay, female, or a member of the Avengers in the future. PS: however, the scene from Shanghai should be framed and put in the gallery, it works on its own anyway.

Criticism of the system, non-criticism of the system, as soon as I see people in balaclavas with AKs in their hands standing around in dank factories and devastated plains, I get a terrible S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game vibe. Otherwise, actually, like Bykov's previous The Fool, this feels like a perfect debut in the many ways it wants to scream about some injustice in the world without forgiving itself for various genre shortcuts, artifacts, or even action scenes. The Factory feels less mature than The Fool, in some ways written by an enthusiastic child's hand, but it's also clear that its owner is someone who watches contemporary films and can thus spin some of the clichés on offer. From that perspective, it's such a synergistic joy to watch. However much the film tries to be bleak and oppressive.

James Bond in an era of cinematic chaos under the baton of a pure formalist. For me, this is the exploitation of Bond's potential almost to the marrow, with 230 million invested in a unconversational kinetic story where most of the money has been spent on hugely demanding real special effects and building a tangible set. I honestly knew I was going to give it the best score in one of the opening two-second shots, when from a shot of a destructive chase on Tuscan serpentines the camera still manages to execute an establishing shot. The fall from the Tower of Siena, the motorboat collisions, or the shootout in the opera house where the sound and spatial orientation are switched off, leaving only fragments of Bond-like attributes – all these are the results of an awful lot of money and the authorial vision of someone who thinks more in pictures than in words. Yes, films like this started swallowing huge budgets only a decade ago.

Jordan Peele's open arms for horror social satire might suggest that the genre is being given some relevance again after the era of stupid ghost flicks, but that would be to forget that combing social ills in extreme hyperbole was already in the job description of the Purge tetralogy. And that was a load of crap. Ready or Not isn't that bad, and there's definitely a bigger head behind it, as revealed by some witty dialogue (for me, the argument about how tradition is important, but when you're leaking in your shoes, you start to consider that after all, its author would also have used contemporary technology if it had been available to him at the time) or the hilariously bestial ending. But the problem is that the whole thing is terribly unbelievable – the characters of the rich are simple caricatures without a shred of respect, the violence doesn't hurt, the fire doesn't burn, the vulgarities ring false, you don't trust the actors to take a drag from a cigarette, and the violence is the kind of cool domestic hurt where blood spurts, brains stick to walls, and wounds open, but in that safe movie way where it's actually kind of funny. Luckily, Samara Weaving is a wild one who gets it all right, and her clucking at the end will probably be the only thing I'll remember from the film a year from now.

At the end of Besson's La Femme Nikita, Tchéky Kario smilingly announces to her boyfriend that they're going to miss the girl and he just takes an unhappy drag from his cigarette, nods his head and looks out the window in response. And I kind of think that despite all this, this is how we're going to talk about Luc Besson when it all falls apart, Europa Corp goes bankrupt, and he himself goes into images of the past. Because as much as we may freak out about the lack of logic, the lack of a coherent plot, the attempt to disguise the awful digital imagery, the completely incomprehensible anachronisms (for at least the second time with Besson, I feel like he decided on the period when the film would be set no earlier than in post-production), or the lack of dramaturgy, we still have to remember that this is the price we pay today for watching some of the last of the West’s auteur action films. Moreover, in this case, Besson takes a ways further his torch of the Cinéma du look movement, which worked with a distinctive advertising aesthetic, among other things. Indeed, everything here is completely secondary to the product Besson is interested in – the three-foot, thirty-pound and, in the action scenes, utterly breathtaking Sasha Luss. That's why the only things that work in the film are the things she touches, and only because she’s the one touching them. The resulting Gaussian curve, where we are moved from irritating civilian scenes to the best action sequences of the year, is probably best expressed in the words of Milan Vébro, director of Settlement of Crows 2: "It was great! It was terrible."

James Bond in "How do you do, fellow kids?" mode, which also serves as a reminder of the terrible formal procedures typical of MTV videos of the era, which are somewhat of a rarity, given that they were hip for only about two years.

So, as I was going through the user comments on this film, I came across several references to a "70s/80s vibe" for a film set in 1968. Which reveals an interesting fact about how it doesn't really matter when any film is set, because the only thing that matters about that era is that it's retro and the whole illusion of the era is just a kind of winking backdrop that, in various elements, harkens back to a time that might not have been. The retro here is really instantaneous, because despite the old cars, Nixon on TV, and recruitment centers in small towns, you don't feel like you've gone back in time at all, but you can feel exactly how half a meter behind the camera the rest of the crew are boredly scrolling through Twitter on their phones, looking for what to buy on Amazon. Several times I found myself wondering why the characters don't just use their phones, before realizing that it was actually the sixties. Because everyone here is behaving at the very least in a contemporary way. The redheaded freckle-faced nerd the film convinces us is somehow outsider-ugly is evocative of the forty-year-old porn actress who makes ponytails so her video can be labeled "barely legal", the Hispanic hunk has as much acting and visual equipment as anyone on the Disney Channel, and the last of the foursome – Merry and Pippin – are riding the acting school of teen comedy supporting roles in their second half. When I add in the utterly incompetent patchwork that someone dared call a script and whose character work is in crayon, then my rating doesn't make much sense. Well, that's of course the fault of the supervising del Toro, who is very likely behind the design of the three monsters the film brings us. And as much as we don't enjoy the first one, and the last one is such a digital piece of junk, the second monster, which I've dubbed 'Mommy', and its brief scene make for more horror than the rest of the film. That's when the real horror peeks out for a moment, the real and basic horror premise of something slowly akin to something seemingly ridiculous and therefore disturbingly hideous. That sequence actually generated a full three stars.

A terribly interesting thesis about the depopulation of the countryside due to the more tangible presence of its unresolved history represented by its dead. And everything is incredibly slow. In the best moments, the film even stops altogether. However, the omnipresent winter, mournfulness, incompleteness, and sense of loss would surely have worked better if the exposition had relied more on objects, location, and space than the characters themselves, but how can you fault a film that concludes the entire hundred minutes of quiet desolation with credits underscored by The Body's industrial noisemakers.

Awesome choreographed madness where every raised eyebrow has its place + of course a bunch of FTW ideas like hopping undead and sticky rice solving all the trouble caused because it binds undead toxins to itself, which makes sense.

FOD with simultaneous dubbing, ergo I have no idea what the film is, but A. Tesař delicately delivering the line "I like gay dicks" will stay with me forever. I was disappointed that the role of the school principal was not ultimately played by Donald Pleasance.