Othello

So that's where that music comes from! The Last of the Mohicans doesn't deny its age-old premise, especially in the romantic storyline. Almost every scene sweats pathos until it flows off the screen, and if by chance someone doesn't feel that way, the soundtrack pushes it in your face every five minutes until it's just funny. But once again you can rely on Mann, his perfectionism making some scenes breathtaking spectacle, further aided by the knowledge that this is the kind of "honest filmmaking (TM)" that involves hundreds of extras in real sets and everyone knows what to do (unlike Braveheart, where if you look beyond the foreground in the battles, there are some gentlemen jokingly wielding their swords and looking like boys playing knights). The convoy ambush scene is incredible. The Hurons running out of the woods on either side of the road, the initial confusion among the soldiers, then the first gunshots enveloping the entire clearing in white smoke, all in one slow rising shot where it's obvious that even the biggest newbie of a stuntman has been individually briefed on what he's supposed to be doing in the scene. Rarrr!

Finding out that it's based on a book suddenly makes it a worse movie in my eyes, because the little details here that felt so civil, endearing, that shaped that look of a closed moment were probably just fragments of larger elements from the source material. The romance itself isn't silly, and at times manages to evoke memories of the agony of distant love and loneliness, but it still suffers from snobbery (the central couple meet and spend their days together in a luxurious European five-star hotel, so their days are framed by sumptuous lunches and the glare of the fireplace fire reflecting off their perfect bodies), and the contrasting cuts between the very different situations they both find themselves in after they part ways don't sit well either. You really have to go to great lengths to get any kind of experience here.

Iron Maiden fan, be prepared to get your hands on a proper stack of tissues; as for me, I was most fascinated by the descriptions of wartime hardship within the underground music community during a senseless and messed up time, openly illustrated by the horrific period footage of random snipers rampaging through the streets. My problem, however, is with Bruce Dickinson, who despite his vocal qualities just sounds like a terrible dork, and his visit to Sarajevo years later comes across like a seven-year-old hanging out in a museum because his parents promised him he'd go for ice cream afterwards.

Jason Blum reportedly gave this the green light only after being pitched the opening scene and told the title of the film. And boy does that make perfect sense. Because once again it's a completely inept, untalented, freakshow full of incredibly empty characters fitting of Blumhouse. Perhaps the only thing that struck me was how the film is really firmly grounded in the present day. The selfies, the social networking sites, the sleuthing that goes on through them, the film really doesn't shy away from the modern technology that normally gets in the way of filmmakers, and the work with it is incorporated into the film naturally. Truth or Dare is even so metamedia that the title of the main demon is derived from a tag on deviantart for pictures with a certain type of smile, which in turn is reminiscent of the deformation of photographs through various mobile and computer apps, so much so that perhaps it's not just laziness on the part of the filmmakers, but some kind of intention. Otherwise, this film is a terrible, really terrible piece of crap that is desperately incapable of making you scared, there’s no one to root for, you don't care at all about the illuminated lives of these pretty young people who aren't interesting in the slightest, and most importantly, it's further evidence of how in a pragmatic digital age where we hold ourselves back as much as possible from all the unknown, we simply lose the ability to tell scary stories or feel discomfited or scared by them.

There's no greater crime cinematically (or otherwise) than portraying a simple plot seen a thousand times over in a drawn-out, self-proclaimed artistic manner, and thereby creating an excruciatingly dull compilation of unoriginal motifs, situations, and clichés with all manner of macros, low depth of field, silent understanding, and long takes. Personally, I often defend movie schemes or seemingly illogical decisions and situations when the movie is driven either by attraction or catharsis (apart from the fact that life itself is a repetitive extravaganza of schemes and illogical decisions, where this sentence itself is a scheme that can’t be logically applied in this case). But Miami has nothing. The characters are unbearably flat, their relationship with each other is defined by simple obvious truths and silent glances, vindicated by a kind of sisterly telepathic bond. A third of the running time is spent crying. The situations driving the plot are completely pulled out of the blue. The thriller element is so blind and lax (a seemingly suspenseful situation where the heroine forgets the phone she used to film a mobster in his living room is resolved by saying in the next scene that she just has to go fetch something and she just gets her phone like normal) that it can only be outdone by a brief romantic interlude that is terribly comical, not least due to the inane smile of the object of her love interest ("what kind of music do you make anyway?" "folk music with electronic themes" "you look so cute like that"). And it's a motherfucking two hours long, for fuck's sake!

Clever lad, that Maguire. He even makes you believe that taking care of him during tournaments must have been a harder road than being a tour manager for GG Allin. That and the fact that Zwick managed to make the chess matches really exciting sequences thanks to the editing and the many different camera angles are the main reasons to sing its praises. The resignation from a certain idealization of the protagonist is also pleasing, and we will not be deprived of his views on Jews, which would make the likes of Adam Bartoš pop the hook from his trousers. Believe me, it must have been quite an effort to promote such a character overseas. But what's mainly disappointing is the lack of courage to actually fill this biopic with four essential characters, so Fischer and I have to sit through several unnecessary cameos that only serve to switch between the side-plots for the thrilling finale everyone's watching on TV. It's as if the film is afraid that it's unable to showcase the importance and tension of the chess game of the century on its own merits.

Padilha why do you make this, this art? You know you don't understand it. As a shade of his former intransigence, the one-time heir to Greengrass stimulates the decline of his own powers with schoolboy-like wooden allegories, leaving one to appreciate the documentary-style cinematography, Rosamund Pike believable in the sack, and look forward to the final showdown. And yet it’s hard to imagine a bigger disaster. A terribly goofy and confusingly shot and edited shootout that doesn't even bother to dwell on the cinematically rewarding actions of the Mossad invasion force, such as the blowing up of Ugandan fighter jets, the death of hostages, or the revenge of the Ugandan president on one of them, and instead intercuts it with an episode of stage dancing. Dear god.

An exemplary and tasteless midcult film that exploits a real tragedy for mundane, first-rate melodrama, as evidenced only by the five-star reviews that grind their axes about the death penalty in the comments here, not to mention the fact that the film should have been made in 1990 but one of the victims disagreed, so it was only when she died in 2004 that preparations for filming immediately began with all sensitivity. This film is not only not shot very well, given that the purpose of most of the scenes that are supposed to show the transformations of the characters' motivations could be described in a brief sentence, but more importantly panders cheaply to the shocked small-towners who watch movies from the ironing board. The real-life situations, which need no significant formal input to achieve their horrors, are subjected to a jerky camera and are cut to keep us from being completely jolted out of our couch comfort, and even keep changing the players from whose perspectives we are supposed to watch the whole situation unfold. This is not helped by gnawing the character of the abused girl into an inflatable victim, because the character of Sylvia has no personality whatsoever, she just looks innocent, pretty, and keeps rolling her giant eyes around. The final betrayal, which is probably meant to stimulate the need to grant the heroine at least something like a good ending, is a disgusting underscoring of everything that preceded it. Oh, and the added bonus is the review by Shadwell, who tries to justify succumbing to kitsch by saying he's a good and brave man. Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

If I wanted to be mean, I'd say Den of Thieves is to Heat what the TV movie Gridlock is to Die Hard 2. But then again, it's not that bad. The problem is that DoT is once again a product of the pernicious "gym cinematography (c)", a trend of films (especially action films) getting made by producers, directors, and actors meeting in gyms and fitness centers, as opposed to the 80s/90s where they mostly met at cocaine parties. It's like all these muscular bald guys in tank tops slapping each other's shoulders, walking with their arms a meter away from their bodies and swinging. And they're always sweating. Unlike their predecessors, the two protagonists are not trying to outsmart each other, but instead are constantly comparing cock size. The plot digressions to the families of the two members of the opposing sides are utterly disastrous, as they spend two scenes awkwardly trying to explain how their way of life affects their families. With 50 Cent in particular, we see in the first scene him threatening his daughter's boyfriend and later in the next scene his daughter telling him she loves him and that's it! That’s all it takes. WTF? What kind of puts it over the top (besides my tolerance for movies where people shoot at each other) is Pablo Schreiber, whose minimalist, contained performance really sells the illusion that there's some grand plan going on in his head. What utterly fails, however, is the macho posturing of the spoiled Butler, here playing a completely unrealistic paper moron who is probably supposed to be cool and gritty but instead acts like an eight-year-old in a leather jacket. Scenes where he eats donuts out of a bloody box at a crime scene, forces his way with a crowbar into a bank, presumably occupied by hostage-taking robbers, or his luxurious unleashing of a firefight in a convoy of cars full of civilians are where the whole concept gets buried completely. On the other hand, given that they had to break Gerald's neck for the poster photo, it may have been worth it.

A bleak nightmare. Impotence, oblivion, the end before the end in the silence of a lonely forest where a malfunctioning phone can be heard ringing in the distance. A film that will haunt me in my potential old age.