Othello

Finely boring rape&revenge about one and a half rooms with practically nothing in them, where 80% of the shots are medium close-ups. The Afterdark production is no excuse, it has been home to some often enjoyable horror rompers.

Already running out of funny ideas for how to describe these boogeyman in da house horror movies for a first date. At the very least, the darkness-addicted villain theme could have made for an interesting filmmaking challenge, where you could have played an action game with the protagonists with cones of light in the style of PC games like Alan Wake, which the lazy filmmakers probably didn't feel like doing, so they repeat the one trick of approaching evil in a flickering environment. It would have been cool to see how Buster Keaton would have handled a similar plot.

Seven hundred seventy-seventh attempt to find something in Osbourne that was never there. Yes, a failure again. Ozzy never had the brittle disjointedness of Amy Winehouse, the unwavering integrity of Lemmy Kilmister, or the pop-culture loneliness of Kurt Cobain. On the contrary, he was an incompetent buffoon without any superstructure, desperately in need of someone to infuse him with life instead of another line of coke, which he only managed to do after latching onto Sharon Osbourne, who managed to keep him within the confines of his nursery (Cleopatra's description of him as a "scared child in an adult body" is rather apt). The documentary makers, obviously fans, refuse to accept this and wrap the entire film up by following Osbourne's tour for two years, which not even a tenth of the running time relates to. Instead, for the umpteenth time, we follow the rocker's life from infancy, through the most famous etudes of his life, which even my grandmother knows about, and with increasingly panic throughout the documentary it starts dawning on everyone that there's simply nothing to squeeze out of this material. Ozzy Osbourne is a man with an undoubtedly extraordinary voice (as much as it is the equivalent of brushing your teeth with a circular saw for me), but really nothing beyond that. And thus, in short, there was nothing to make a film about.

Back in my day, The Addams Family used to be a comedy. Cynicism aside, though, because this is such a perverse midcult that a few of its pernicious aspects need to be listed. Primary among them is the appalling hypocrisy, in the name of which the film masquerades as an anti-mainstream alternative, but uses virtually every means to appeal to the widest audience, including the last dumbass in the back of the theater, for whom most Sundance films are otherwise a junkie bore about nothing. Indeed, the film carefully monitors the length of each scene lest it accidentally become boring, repeatedly demonstrates the glorified otherness of the Cash family through food, permanently rips the over-smart kids to shreds as evidence of superiority, and, most importantly, doesn't allow the protagonist to see his missteps from anyone but himself. This questionable aspect, however, is never capitalized upon critically, but only melodramatically. To see him as a dangerous, idealistic fool who, despite everything, deserves our appreciation through his diligence and conviction, is impossible; it thus arouses a provocative ambivalence, because for over half of the running time he fulfills the role of messiah, and the film gives him credit for being right by putting only obstacles in his way that he can use to demonstrate his truth. So much that, as a result of the isolation, the traumatic experience of his eighteen-year-old son's first love is rendered as a humorous cutesy scene, one of the many colors of their unbridled ride through America. The seemingly interesting concept of a post-hippie commune in response to consumer society is thus watered down into a mishmash of topics to be discussed by moms over a shelf of fair trade food with a baby strapped to their chest and three credit cards in an embroidered bag with Peruvian motifs.

The problem isn't that God knows the submissive autistic Ramanujan isn't a dramatically sustainable character for a movie biopic, because in my view everyone is, it's just that the approach has to be adapted accordingly. And this is not where attempts at making a "major motion picture" with twists, dramatic historical backdrops, and over-the-top panoramas fit in. This is because it makes the film fall into the classic post-colonial perception, defined by rich men with pipes and hats altruistically enabling the protagonist to do something and leaving him practically no opportunity to enter his story in any way, which gives him only one role, that of doing the same thing over and over again until Jeremy Irons somehow manages to try and wrangle the mathematician's approval. The film attempts to compensate for this shortcoming with the truly maddeningly hopeless storyline of Ramanujan's figurine wife waiting for him at home with a garland, which is the only meager link between the character and the viewer. Lastly, the film is absolutely horribly cut together, unnecessarily opening up thirty unnecessary little sub-plots that are pointless and that yield nothing but except that each of them brings the film a new scene.

A much over-used and tired fight movie that impresses only in the way it manages to combine several thematic relics from different times into a single whole. Namely, the illusion of the omnipotence of television, the Occupy syndrome, the cunning bankers who cannot be brought down except by popular grassroots justice, or the common folk connected by a television screen in the upper corner of a room in a cozy bar. Although it manages at times to update the entire framework by punishing the main capitalist with an internet meme or deliberately knocking itself down a level in a joyous video conference scene with the knocked-up moll of a young terrorist, the final climax with its endlessly incompetent police, chanting people, and epilogue fist in the air in the face of a criminal bourgeois quickly reminds us what kind of film museum we are actually in.

Exactly what The Art of Negative Thinking wasn't about. And yet it's shot like an earl grey commercial (slow horizontal tracking, soft sepia lights) with a terrifying acting concept from Emilia Clarke, right along the lines of "Are you laughing, Bart ol’ chum? Oh, aha, you're crying."

The fact that it's completely, utterly, truly, truly moronic (I was actually on the verge of blowing my own head off at the end) wouldn't have mattered in principle if the film had exploited the potential of its subjects, which is enormous. The characters do perform a variety of spectacular tricks, but we wouldn't even hazard a guess as to whether the actors could pull off even a single one of them, given how terribly digital it all is. Sequences of ingenious team tricks, whose timing and spatial distribution could be accentuated with an elaborate one-take shot, are destroyed by countless cuts and slow-motion sequences along the lines of "The second one from the left, or the third one from the right. Basically, the one in the trench coat. Here, I'd better show you." Moreover, in terms of dispensing information, the film doesn't really know how to approach the viewer, and shyly gropes its way to where it wants to let the audience go, even though they’ve long since lost interest in digging through the overcomplicated death-in-a-family-evil-corporation-our-privacy-revenge-mafia-blablabla plot. All my love, however, goes to Lizzy Caplan, who steals any scene she appears in and I...I...I just love her.

It's easy to forget, but the world of the source material (just like the Warhammer Universe, for example) is an exploitation of Anglo-Saxon fantasy that takes its classic attributes to the extreme, from the warmly decorated armor of the forces of good, to the length and shape of the elven ears, to the grotesque disproportions of the forces of evil. In a similar reading, it's possible to see the film adaptation as something so bizarre (I nearly peed myself laughing – several times – during the opening sequence with the pregnant orc) that even a decade ago no one would have thought that, in principle, anyone could actually get away with making a feature-length live-action adaptation of the games' legendary blizzard cinematic sequences despite any comic relief. Warcraft, after all, can be seen rather easily as an exploitation of the colorful blockbusters filmed entirely in front of a green screen. Indeed, the process of throwing live actors into a completely surreal environment where they are forced to interact with a bunch of pingpongers and dancers with pockmarked faces is taken to the point of absurdity here, and it's terrible fun. Ironically, then, the chivalrous charge with flintlocks is what movie fantasy is sorely lacking – balls, ideas, and the joy of being entertained. I stomped my feet contentedly and was happy. This despite the fact that I'd tried the games and didn't care for them. Bonus subjective point for Travis Fimmel's acting, which reminded me terribly of waking up after a wild bash in a completely unfamiliar place among unfamiliar people and trying vehemently to pretend I fit in so as not to arouse suspicion before I can find the door.

Camera looks left – nothing. Camera looks right – nothing either. Camera looks left again – still nothing, so it looks right again – nothing. Something falls from above. INNOVATION!!! Wan really tries his hardest, and his smooth sailing of the camera through the house at atypical angles keeps the boredom-bar still somehow hovering around average, but you can't win if your story is as worn out as the socks of a child with cerebral palsy. I like him better when he's filming footage of Paul Walker's funeral than when he's chasing a pissed-off nun around the house. Farmiga and Wilson aspire to be the whitest, straightest couple ever to grace the movie screen.