POMO

The director of Birthday Girl apparently wanted to make an original, postmodern romance that would combine the English sophistication of Bridget Jones’s Diary with the sexist controversy of the French film The Piano Teacher. But his plan either went off the rails or – in the worse case – he has very strange ideas about film directing. With the arrival of the thriller level, the initial interesting impression of the film turns into an unreliable patchwork that doesn’t know what it wants to say to the viewer. Birthday Girl will appeal to you only if you have bizarre tastes or if you have a major weakness for Nicole Kidman or Vincent Cassel, both of whom are excellent here, which can’t be said for the maximally bland Ben Chaplin.

Maximum Risk is a standard action flick that respectably fulfils its ambitions. Its biggest positive is that it won’t insult your intelligence like most of the other movies in Van Damme’s filmography.

Bad Company is an exceedingly drawn out and monotonous action movie about secret agents. It’s outshined by the first Mission: Impossible in terms of power, screenwriting sophistication, atmosphere and action scenes. It’s just a routine, unoriginal movie with no build-up, and it fails to utilise the mentoring potential of Anthony Hopkins. Anyone else could have been in his place and it wouldn’t have changed anything.

Trauma is Dario Argento’s first Hollywood opus and it’s not bad at all. It’s a respectable, made-to-order compromise for those who demand a plot that makes sense while also having a taste for a veil of mystery and psychedelic masochism.

It’s not easy to rate this film. Does good porn deserve some stars just for giving me an erection? Should I consider it a good thing that a film insidiously pressed the buttons of my innermost and most intimate visceral instincts, making me feel loathsome and guilty (guilty for voluntarily, voyeuristically watching the most disgusting thing under the sun)? The last shot of the film evokes the feeling that the director truly achieved his objective and won. If that’s the case, then Cannibal Holocaust deserves not three stars, but five. But that is VERY questionable and I would rather not rate this film at all. Because if that is not the case, they should burn every last copy of it.

Racism, prejudice and the difficult acceptance of one’s own identity, which can be a form of liberating salvation for a person. Looking at these aspects from the point of view of the injured party, the film seems to have too much, well, focus, perhaps reaching the level of its maker’s personality complex, without any sense of detachment. Not that there is a lack of clarity as to who is bad and who is good, but defending good always comes across better on the big screen than hatefully spreading evil (in whatever form). ___ Formalistically, the story is set in a colourful and, in places, even cartoonish world (see The Truman Show), which on the one hand helps the film to emphasize its message, but on the other hand it keeps its distance from reality and hinders the viewer in identifying with the characters. What can work perfectly in allegorical fiction (see, again, The Truman Show) doesn’t work so well in a story set in a real place and a specific period and dealing with very sensitive human issues. However, the film has such great acting and such a pleasant and surprising conclusion that I considered giving it four stars.

A blatant rip-off of Basic Instinct. And an incredibly bad one at that.

Blood Simple is the Coen brothers’ most complex and “purest” film. I didn’t breathe for the last ten minutes.

Though the comedy Blast from the Past didn’t get a lot of attention, I found it to be superbly cast and well acted, and mainly I think its subject matter puts it head and shoulders over its genre peers.

Like Contact, The Arrival is an intelligent sci-fi movie that doesn’t rely so much on visual effects as it does on a skilfully directed original idea. By comparison, however, it comes across as the little brother to Zemeckis’s opus (in terms of budget, stars, runtime, etc.).