Othello

This year has actually been pretty good so far. The only thing I had to suffer through from Marvel was the awful Captain America, and with Endgame I just pretended I didn't know it existed. When that huge color spectrum of objects and characters in monumental resolution came flying out at me again after so long, which mercilessly testifies to the fact that even a normal street had to be created mostly from a green screen, I was quite startled. This despite the fact that I surprisingly liked the previous Homecoming for its return to its roots. I mean, Spider-Man, as he himself hints at several times in this installment, is one of those "street-level heroes" whose main agenda is to right everyday wrongs against everyday but upstanding citizens, and ascribing the role of savior of the world to him doesn't sit well. While the first action scene in the last installment took place essentially in the confines of a laundromat against a bunch of common thugs, now it's already taking place in Venice against 20-foot elementals. The one delight there is in all sorts of details, realistic object physics, and the need to improvise with limited surroundings. It's boring to see buildings getting torn down and cars exploding again. The only thing that remains at least preserved is the identity of the villain, who, as in the first installment, is created as a result of the indestructible arrogant Stark hegemony. Besides, in an age of necessary war on tourism and its ensuing tastelessness and disposability, it's hard to rise above the issues of the plot, which constantly serves us images of whiny, spoiled American tourists with cell phones for heads raiding European capitals for instant gratification. No matter how much it makes me enjoy the idea of a conversation between a director and a Czech location scout: "With Prague, I'd like to shore up the quirkiness and history of the place by having the heroes arrive in that city just as some of their traditional celebrations are going on or something. What do they have there?" "Uh, well, there's always drunk guys chasing women with sticks and beating them up in the spring. They have to give them something in return, usually eggs or more booze. If they don’t, they're a write-off." "Hahahaha you're funny, but seriously, what are their specific traditions?" "Well then, like in February, kids dressed up as the three kings walk the streets and sign their names in chalk on the door to get some kind of a handout..." "Well, see, that's a nice custom..." "...and one of them in is blackface." "Oh, good gracious! Please, say no more. Do they at least know what paper lanterns are?" "Well, I guess so?" "Then let’s go with the Festival of Lights idea."

Both the production team at Eon and McClory (owner of the rights to certain elements of the Bond universe that spawned this alternate shop) have tried to bring the plots more down to earth in their respective Bonds, as a reaction against the wackiness of the last Moore films (The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker) full of space battles, submarine swallowers, lasers, and steel-toothed giants. And yet as befits the slimy old men in suits that the film's producers are, it didn't occur to anyone that the most unpleasant element was always above all the situation where a wrinkly old geezer sucks on a barely twenty-year-old beauty and she leaks through the bed because apparently nothing better has ever happened in her love life. Fifty-two year old Connery, who you'd give up your seat to on a streetcar, really does look more like a dirty old man with his lisp and combover, but the cheesy eighties ethos plays into his hands a bit here, where this unofficial episode has actually become more topical than the concurrently released true Bond film Octopussy. Apart from the high collars, there are video game fights, aerobics, a bunch of perms, high lady swimsuits, and crazy quasi-feminists. Combined with the setting in a tropical or subtropical region that raises constant beads of sweat on the foreheads of all involved, the entire cast, apart from the excellent villain, gives the impression of being over it, out of breath, and exhausted. Yet (like Octopussy with Grandpa Moore) these Bond films still retain heaps of ideas for action scenes, which despite the fact that they are all made up of stuntmen, still look far better and more thrilling than what we currently look at with the faces of real actors grafted onto digital bodies that can do who knows what kind of wickedness, but we know that the only ones doing the work are the graphics cards.

Amusing pensioners talking about their favorite era. It's not so much a documentary as a declaration of love, which then has to withstand the full range of ratings, because I can understand that watching a plane whirring in the sky is as fulfilling for some as, say, seeing Will Smith shoot dreadlocked Haitians point-blank in the face while talking dirty is for me. A good idea for a Christmas present for grandpa, awesome. As a surprise first-date movie, inspiring.

The 1990s have finally become nostalgic retro, and given that one of their hallmarks was the rapid branching out of cultural scenes, we're sure to see more than a few more cinematic flashbacks in the near future. After Lords of Chaos, dedicated to the Norwegian black metal scene, Hill's Mid90s, which in turn reminisced about the American skate subculture, or the mainstream-oriented Straight Outta Compton, the BBC has farted out a reminder of the British techno/dub/rave scene, which was besieged by a law that made it virtually impossible to exist and thus plunged it into an actual illegal underground. Given the brief, then, I was expecting an inaccessible and austere anti-system ride where the protagonists would demand no sympathy and the overdriven beats and contrasting cuts would make my head explode. In short, something like Climax, Nachtmahr, or Mektoub. Instead, Beats serves up a Scottish version of Steindler's Coal Tower that constantly reminds us how it is unable to wordlessly convey the feeling of being part of the wild years of the resistance under the loudspeaker by needing someone to constantly talk about it out loud. And of course that's why there has to be a terribly negative character to explain the whole idea of these events through. In short, some very badly made techno education system with the ambition to explain this scene to your parents, maybe grandparents. I still feel embarrassed at the dramatic arc with Spanner's violent brother and Cristian Ortega is clearly doing the worst acting of the year.

The hapless and clueless Brejchová has so much of that cutely goofy esprit of rural naivety and pure femininity here that she steals every scene, even when she’s just sitting there looking confused. The rest (especially the party scene with the soldiers), as is usual with the duo of Papoušek-Forman, I finished watching practically from under the table, I felt so embarrassed. A painful study in the inability to communicate, which I would have shot into space to prevent a possible alien civilization from making its first attempt to meet humanity from anywhere outside of Žďár.

"I fell asleep in the cinema and when I woke up, there was no one there and it was dark everywhere." Gan Bi is a rare case of young, unpolished talent that can still faithfully portray youthful resentment, melancholy, fatality and need for escape of the almost obsolete cynicism typical of the most self-important battered art filmmakers (especially European ones). As such, his characters are a combination of adult weariness and childlike naivety, and thus find fulfilment only through dream logic as opposed to what is for them far more surreal and incomprehensible, namely reality. The film is in fact an act of resistance to awareness, understandable for a sensitive young filmmaker living under technocratic despotism. While that may make the whole thing seem like an overly obvious cinephilic soak (direct quotes from Tarkovsky and the same plot concept as Lynch's Mulholland Drive), all is forgiven in the second half, which is the realization of a dream so familiar that it is impossible to gird yourself against it. And because of that alone, this film should be required viewing from three in the morning. Incidentally, if you have that one film on the tip of your tongue while watching that you’re reminded of but can't put your finger on, it's Trier's first feature, Element of Crime, which also used neo-noir to portray a heavy-handed love of Tarkovsky and was made by a twenty-eight year old hottie fascinated with exploring the limits of camera movement.

Oh, my God, what have they done to us at Blumhouse? The trailer practically lures you into a teen slasher, and what actually arrives is this kind of slow-burning Hitchcockianism, underpinned by well-written characters, and on both sides. Whether it's an innocent first high school crush or a tale of finding the lost youth of an older woman who has always had to stand on the sidelines, almost every scene works by making you perhaps far more forgiving of her than you normally would be. The patience and discipline with which the film slowly builds to its bloody finale is admirable, as is the unassuming direction, but by simply framing it in exteriors (even in the city, the individual shots only let you see at most one or two buildings at any given time, even in large units), it manages to effectively portray an American nowhere land where the greater promise of the Friday night bash simply isn't there. Jason Blum would have surprised me enough with this film if I didn't know that he's above all a savvy businessman, and with a film featuring a central black character whose motivations stem from past misadventures, he's trying to pump up the trend of successful Jordan Peele-style horror films.

Warner Bros crammed 200m into a reminder of how much we should have appreciated the previous Edwards auteur blockbuster. We didn't appreciate it, after the harvest we're going to have to suck Chinese dicks. Good for us. A film about a room with six people in it flying around the world watching a digital cartoon.

As happy as I am that Olivia Wilde has resuscitated the true 1998-2009 teen comedy (and not the al-too-common adult take on a changing teen masquerading as a teen movie), I can't rate this film except by comparing it to Mottola's Superbad. Here, too, the quiet Asterix and the vulgar and expressive Obelix go to their high school's last party, which may be the last chance for them to experience anything together, given that the Sword of Damocles of impending adulthood is looming over them both. And they, too, must earn their presence there, but the reward hanging in the air is once again the ultimate inter… vention in their hitherto untouched love lives. Although they don't achieve the greatness of their forebear (which nowadays I don't think is even possible), they deserve a huge thanks for waking this hibernating genre, not to mention that at most points it works the way it should. It's funny, you root for the characters even though they actually piss you off, and when it comes to the first hints, the subtle touches, the hiding under the surface of the pool, and the karaoke, you'll be seventeen again (unless you're already completely sealed in the fat of adulthood). The timing for the mos part isn't perfect, the script occasionally goes out of its way just to have an arc, and the effort to find my Emma Stone in the cast of supporting characters was rewarded with no more than her distant soulmate Gigi, but I'm glad the girls finally got a good teen comedy, a genre that didn't include them at all during its heyday, and instead dumped the weighty and fatalistic responsibilities of Young Adult films onto their shoulders, while boys could jump straight from the teen genre onto the superhero train headed to outer space and beyond, which they can follow to their deaths.

How to stay true to the idea and structure of Henlein's premise while epically wiping your ass with it and its entire author. The inability of critics of the time to recognize the satire in a film steeped in Reiefenstal-esque angles and the sectarian milieu of a utopian Earth, not to mention the cast, demonstrates time and again the importance of building a sensitivity to the form of film, the Achilles heel of most film theorists. ___ Update 2021: I am convinced that there is no such thing as immunity to visual propaganda, and whoever thinks they have it is saying so in the name of propagandizing others. After years of rising above the propagandistic nature of Starship Troopers, it only just dawned on me that the proper reading is to succumb to it for a lovely 129 minutes and, through cheering on those beautiful young people, to enjoy that sense of power and purpose. It's an important cathartic experience that ultimately helps you be more sensitive to the natural need to fall for that propaganda and marketing in real life.