POMO

It’s a shame that the evil is so divorced from reality due to its physical abilities and movements, while the film itself otherwise tries to remain firmly rooted in reality. And it’s also a shame about all of the strange and ill-conceived moments in the characters’ behavior and generally how they are set in the course of the scenes. Because otherwise, this “girl under the stairs from Holdenfield” very interestingly plays with genre clichés and is capable of surprising and delighting the viewer with delicious cinematography, editing and soundtrack treats.

The influence of The Wolf of Wall Street persists. Pain Hustlers is another story about business success based on an actual event that was not entirely legal. Emily Blunt is nice to look at in her lovely costumes and Andy Garcia is likable as the billionaire boss. However, the film deals in formulas and the directing lacks a creative signature. And though it’s not boring, its value lies only in the explanation of how the pharmaceutical business works, from production to bribing doctors, who otherwise wouldn’t prescribe the medications. It’s a matter of greed and selfishness that destroy patients’ lives. Emily Blunt’s character is the only one that shows any remorse or regret. And that’s all there is.

The World is Yours is an entertaining French gangster flick mostly set in the Spanish resort town of Benidorm, which with its trashy urban character and beach vibe lends itself to confrontations among a diverse group of criminals. The film features the well-cast Karim Leklou as a battered small-time crook and the striking Isabelle Adjani as his manipulative mother with the rank of alpha criminal. Vincent Cassel’s character is surprisingly underdeveloped, but the British mobster played by Sam Spruell is delicious in his few appearances. The film gets its sense of drive from the characters and their interesting stylization. The plot can be summed up in a single sentence and it isn’t nearly as sophisticated or briskly conveyed as we are used to from Guy Ritchie.

The Conference is a quite entertaining Swedish comedy with characters who are not particularly likable, but they work sufficiently well in the plot. And with killings that – due to the fact that the film doesn’t have even a hint of a horror atmosphere – are exceedingly brutal. I praise the approach by which the film doesn’t show the initial massacres of supporting characters and dynamically edits them into the cheerful moments of the main characters, whose elimination is then shown in more detail, which creates at least some sort of “slasher escalation” concept. And the very last killing is literally a treat, for which I’m giving The Conference a solid third star.

The first segment in the apartment / on the street / in the store is congenially filmed paranoia. With goosebumps and my mouth hanging open, I witnessed the beginning of the film of the year, a film that I had been waiting decades for, a film that would put me in a cinephilic trance with every shot, every cut, every expression and every move that Joaquin Phoenix made. The second, laid-back and more comical segment still held the bar high and aroused my curiosity as to what would happen next. But with the segment in the forest, the film began to lose everything from the plot that had won me over and became an incoherent muddle of motifs and metaphors that don’t make sense in the psychological study of the main character. And if they’re supposed to makes sense, the viewer has long since lost interest in figuring them out.

…and Edward Scissorhands found the love of his life in Bella… The intellectual Yorgos Lanthimos in the fantastical world of Tim Burton with a considerable portion of sex, the socially hot topic of emancipation and framing in an artistic form for the highest film awards. Distinctive humor spiked with a bizarre parable about growing up and awareness of the feminine self. A delightful black-and-white paraphrase of Frankenstein with a brilliant depiction of the instinctive behavior of a curious childlike mind in an adult body with its physical needs. The aptly depicted process of the downfall of male rationality and ego after falling in love with a sexually animalistic and mentally unstable woman. Poor Things has the sole of a European arthouse delicacy that all Hollywood actors long four. I may or may not give it a fifth star in due time. A lot of scenes struck me as overly strained and not as funny as most of the guffawing audience found them to be. [Sitges Film Festival]

An interesting subject with unconventional depiction of the characters (particularly the ambiguous protagonist Akira) and unexpected connections with their past. A crime thriller with Miike’s edgy, entertaining creative signature and the continuous uncovering of new facts that give meaning to previous strange events. Unfortunately, however, without sufficient emotional engagement that would have made the film a more powerful experience. [Sitges Film Festival]

An excellent metaphor for the successful restart of a languishing relationship! We simply have to kill something inside of us and carry on with new versions of ourselves. Karoline Lyngbye's technical handling of the film could be made into a phenomenal invention. When, before the screening, the director acknowledged her admiration for the films of David Lynch and Villeneuve‘s Enemy (his best film, in my opinion), dealing with a split personality, no one in the room could have anticipated just how close she would take us to their level. Her Superposition is a psychologically refined schizophrenic work in which everyone who has live through the disintegration of a relationship will see themselves. [Sitges Film Festival]

A vampire Addams Family? An endearing comedy about a kind young vampiress who doesn’t want to kill anyone and an emo boy who doesn’t want to live. And they fall in love with each other. A slow film with the dark colors of night, but also with gentle perception of the central characters’ feelings and refreshing humorous interludes. Humanist Vampire is by no means groundbreaking, but it is an enjoyable film that is definitely more meaningful than the pseudo-artsy A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night about a similar young vampiress.  [Sitges Film Festival]

Red Rooms explores the bleak world of snuff-video distribution on the dark web and the trial of the murderer of three girls who filmed his macabre “work”. However, it doesn’t properly develop either of these storylines and spends most of the time on the short-term friendship between two strange girls who attend the trial as spectators because they are fascinated with the killer. I don’t understand the enthusiastic response that the film received. It’s true that it is shot with precision and is well acted, but in terms of content, it absolutely squanders the potential of its powerful subject matter. [Sitges Film Festival]