POMO

The first half of Unfaithful is excellent. Adrian Lyne is a brilliant psychologist and he fantastically captures the development of a married woman who is torn by unbridled sexual passion and a guilty conscience because of her infidelity and “hurting the people she loves”. The scene on a train with the sex flashbacks is absolutely fantastic in this respect. And in the bathtub scene, the director superbly captures the alienation that the protagonist feels in relation to her husband. I devoured this excellent first half, shot in Lyne’s typically hypnotic style, with bated breath. In the second half of the film, however, the screenplay devolves into cheap, half-baked, self-parodying thriller clichés.

The arid, dusty plains of Iran without a drop of water. Minimal camera movement. No music. A world without emotion, without colour. A well-off middle-aged man intent on suicide, looking for someone in this environment who would be willing to bury him the following night for a hefty financial reward. It doesn't matter why he wants to die – and we won’t even find out. Abbas Kiarostami doesn’t like to manipulate viewers’ feelings, preferring instead to just let them observe and compose their thoughts. What makes this film so interesting that I couldn’t take my eyes off it? If I managed to find that out, the magic it possesses would fall away. In any case, this is the first film to make me feel thirsty when it was over.

A nice, deep, sad story. But as coldly and uninterestingly filmed as any Austrian or German TV series. A waste of the big screen!

We spend the whole time watching  a group of people (veteran actor, neophyte actress, successful producer, a chauffeur who wants to be a successful producer, etc.) as they search for happiness in life during the titular festival. The unsuccessful ones seek success, while the successful ones take it for granted and long for a happy partnered life and love. And there are a few gratuitous shots of billboards for Stigmata, Fight Club and Entrapment. But there is no humor and no satire à la Robert Altman. Only boring dialogue, which makes sense only in the last third of the film, when the characters start to take off their masks. Very weak.

The world of underground passages and grass in Microcosmos has been transformed into beautiful nature around the world. It’s just a shame that all of the shots in the film are so short and we can’t enjoy the best of them as we can in the slower, more fluid and more hypnotic Baraka. In any case, it is necessary to see Winged Migration on the big screen and, because of the collapsing iceberg, at least in Dolby Digital!

A psychedelic trip about a group of actors who are trying to make a historical film in Venice. Mike Figgis overshot the mark this time. Conceived in the style of a documentary, Hotel is nothing more than a patchwork of incongruous theatrical acting, dreamy visions and slightly titillating sexual obsessions. Most of the film is shot with a digital camera or through various filters, and in places the image is split into four parts, in each of which we see something different. It’s the same concept as Figgis’s previous Timecode). But what does it all mean? Paying tribute to the process of filmmaking? Or to the art of acting? At the festival screening, a third of the audience walked about before the film was over, another third applauded enthusiastically at the end, and the remaining third (myself included), who stayed until the end only because of a large dose of tolerance, left with a bemused smile.

A psychological study of two characters dealing with the relativity of guilt and evil. The whole film takes place in a handful of interiors or obviously studio exteriors and stands entirely on the dialogue and the acting of Harvey Keitela and Stellan Skarsgård. Keitel, as a strict American investigator, tries to prove the direct involvement of Skarsgård’s musician character in Nazi crimes. Both actors give brilliant performances, but the film is extremely chatty and completely ignores the story’s potential. But even that could be forgiven if it weren’t so cold and didactic. Polanski’s drama Death and the Maiden, which deals with a similar subject in a similar way, is much better, as it is more suspenseful, more gripping and more emotional.

Two teen boys and two teen girls find themselves in a sealed underground atomic shelter in the middle of a forest and, after a few days, they start hurting each other. In a bloody way. A standard, unremarkable cross between The Blair Witch Project and Cube, underscored with a dynamic soundtrack. The Hole merely mechanically varies clichés that we’ve already seen a hundred times.

I liked Salo when I was 17 and felt like a “clever liberal intellectual”. And though even today I cannot deny the directorial inventiveness in the film’s last five minutes (the voyeuristic binoculars and the ominous droning of planes in the background), I find that the rest of the film is just gratuitous homosexual (s)exhibition with minimal narrative value.

A police interrogation of a criminal outcast pieces together a flashback mosaic of past events leading to the tragic explosion of a boat in the harbor. Sophisticated dark film-noir in which, in the end, everything is completely different than it seems even at the penultimate glance. A perfect screenplay built on flashback sequences and detailed characterisation, made for an unbelievable $6 million. One actor who was still unknown at the time got very lucky here in that he got a role that made him a demigod for quite some time. I want a sequel in which I can enjoy his character for more than ten seconds so that he doesn’t remain just a mythical revelation to me!