Filmmaniak

A Zen spiritual film with a magical atmosphere and emphasis on the motif of sleep and dreams. Watching it is akin to having a transcendental experience. After the first half, which takes place among monks in a Laotian monastery and the surrounding area, the film invites viewers to take part in accompanying the soul of a deceased elderly woman into the next life. The second half of the film comes with an endearing point and a fundamental change of location, though it also contains unnecessary additional literalness and less interesting action. Full of poetic melancholy, Samsara is a remarkable meditative film that offers deep thoughts and several original and understated creative concepts. Ideally, however, it would have ended shortly after its original, unconventional and long-resonating middle section.

This intimate desert road-movie is built on the performances of its two protagonists, with McGregor’s real-life daughter playing his on-screen daughter, which adds a notable extra layer to the film. At least in the first half, however, the film takes a very superficial approach to the relationship between the two characters, so its dominant elements are rather sentimental flashbacks, frequent pee breaks and occasional humorous encounters with supporting characters representing the usual clichés associated with the American South. Thanks to McGregor’s presence, the motif of drug withdrawals will be familiar to Trainspotting fans (and there’s also a train). You will thus have to wait for the proper screaming, remorse and mutual catharsis, but the whole extraordinary journey and emotional redemption at the end make it worthwhile.

A powerful drama about a moral dilemma, in which a wealthy Arab woman hits a black child with her car in a slum and then fearfully leaves the scene of the crime. The child escapes unharmed, but an unfortunate misunderstanding results in the death of his father, who was chasing the fleeing driver on his motorcycle. The remorseful woman then secretly seeks out his unsuspecting wife, hires her as a servant and houses her and the child in her home. The powerful subsequent development of the two women’s relationship and the suspenseful postponement of the inevitable revelation of the truth are complemented by the motif of the Muslim protagonist’s life together with her distant husband and the context of the political situation in Sudan, which is on the verge of a national referendum on the autonomy of its southern region. On multiple levels, the film honestly and comprehensively deals with a number of motifs and characters, incorporating into the story themes such as guilt and redemption, lies and mistrust, the shift from racial prejudice to warm friendship, and determining priorities when making major life decisions.

Sisu is an unhinged action flick with an abundance of exaggeration that will decidedly not bring joy to fans of realistic period depictions and historically factual information, but it might please fans of bloody B-movie guilty-pleasure entertainment grounded in westerns and one-against-all stories in the style of Rambo, John Wick and Taken, and which in a few places is reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds and Tommy Wirkola’s Dead Snow. Lovers of black humour, Nordic landscapes and expansive tundra – or amateur surgery – will be in their element. Conversely, it’s not for viewers who can’t stand the sight of people’s (and horses’) bodies getting blown to pieces while attempting to cross a minefield. The numerous variations on mowing down Nazi soldiers are often rather inventive (have you ever seen a protagonist kill his enemies under the surface of a lake and suck in the air escaping from their slit throats so that he doesn't have to resurface?) and the two protagonists standing on opposite sides of the barricade are almost perfect to the point of being fascinating, which makes it practically impossible to take your eyes off of them. The film starts off with a serious tone, but it loses all sense of seriousness at an accelerating rate as the absurdity of the individual scenes gradually increases. Jalmari Helander has not only proven himself to be a filmmaker with interesting ideas, but also – for the first time – a solid storyteller, screenwriter and director, in whose presentation the gritty tale of the gold prospector and fighter Aatami has its own memorable face, which is also due in part to the film’s distinctive stylisation and cast.

Chapter 4 is most sweeping John Wick yet and one of the current highlights of the action genre. It’s no longer just an adrenaline-fuelled action experience, but a carefully constructed narrative of a fatalistic story about a man who has to kill because he has no choice, finding himself in a deadly spiral of revenge and unfinished business. The action is powerfully effective, impactful, elegant, imaginative, clear and visually intoxicating. In terms of their length and overall execution, all of the action sequences are absolutely monumental and each of them could easily serve as the climax of many other action films. Moreover, thanks to the changes in setting, filming, stylisation and background music, they are completely different every time, which adds to the film’s multifariousness, effectively avoiding the routine and monotony despite the repetitive fighting techniques, blows and moves. Of course, Keanu Reeves is god-like, but Donnie Yen is absolutely excellent here and I would like to see a separate film featuring his character.

This mundane copy of the recent remake of Child’s Play is unimaginative, lacks suspense and isn’t scary. I was startled once when a dog barked at an unexpected moment. The actors are fine and there are some OK emotional moments here and there, but M3GAN is otherwise a rather silly horror B-movie on the now classic theme of spreading irrational fear of modern technologies among people who have no idea how artificial intelligence actually works. I don’t understand the enthusiastic response abroad.

An unsentimentally emotional and beautifully shot film about the love of film and old cinemas. Serving as a tribute to cinema and the world’s directors, Last Film Show tells the story of a journey to find one’s heart in spite of family traditions and predestination, and it succeeds completely as a social drama with a dash of culinary cinema, while also refreshingly thematizing film from the material perspective and capturing the death of the film medium in an extraordinary way.

Real handmade wooden crafts can hardly be replaced with “more modern” versions made of cheap plastic. The only positive aspects of Pinocchio are Tom Hanks and his clock, the splendidly dubbed Honest John (in English), the scenes with the whale (which the filmmakers turned into a sea monster with tentacles) and occasionally the tricks, which are very convincing in some scenes, but alarmingly bad in others. Almost everything in this film is digital and it looks ugly and artificial (the animals, the water and the unrealistic drinking of soda...omg). In comparison with the original 80-year-old animated classic, this version’s extra half-hour adds nothing interesting, instead horribly diminishing the conciseness of the opening exposition and changing the impression given by many of the scenes and themes (including Geppetto’s motivation for creating Pinocchio). From the moment of Pinocchio’s awakening, the plot is so excessively rushed and the individual acts so narratively sloppy (or changed for the worse) that the original moralizing message, which should have comprised the core of the film, is lost in the climax. Important characters (including the blue fairy) are introduced in one scene and then disappear from the plot, never to be seen again. Whenever there is a sung passage, you immediately find yourself hoping that it ends as soon as possible. The attempt at contemporary gags is annoying, misses the mark and makes no sense. The new Pinocchio has none of its forebear’s amusing playfulness or inventiveness, nor does it enchant with sudden wonder or disturb with dark undertones. It’s just sad and unnecessary.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has more action, more locations and more characters, all of which is definitely a change for the better in comparison with the first one, which was relatively lacking in these aspects. This is nice family entertainment, if you don’t find Sonic and Jim Carrey pulling faces annoying (which can easily happen). The movie goes by quickly and a certain literalness and predictability can easily be forgiven, considering the target audience. Otherwise, it’s still true that Sonic’s speed is used mainly to set up gags and only rarely for the practical resolution of a difficult situation. The formulaic work with the plot is a shame (I’m the only one who knows the location of a hidden powerful artifact that definitely must not fall into the wrong hands, but rather than keeping it to myself, I will of course go there and thus unwittingly reveal the location to the villains) and there are several face-palm moments. Sonic and his friends are incompetent bumblers in a dance competition, but a few seconds later they are suddenly freestyle world champions? Robotnik’s servant has no idea how to operate the giant robot, but within moments he has read the whole manual and is instructing Robotnik himself on how to do it? The human characters get their hands on alien technology, which they regularly discard after using it once, when it proved to actually be useful? Sure, these are minor details, but there are a lot of them, and if each one diminishes the believability of another scene, it’s going have a significant impact on the overall impression made by the film.

Sonic the Hedgehog is better directed, more imaginative and has slightly more action than, for example, the live-action Garfield, Yogi Bear and Stuart Little, but otherwise I don’t see any significant difference. It’s definitely okay for fans of the video game and kids under the age of ten, but otherwise Sonic the Hedgehog is just a very mediocre family spectacle that in places goes a little too far in underestimating the viewer’s intelligence. The hyper-stylized Jim Carrey is fine just as long as he doesn’t slip over the edge into awkwardness. It’s remarkable how often the filmmakers use Sonic’s ability to run fast when it suits them for setting up a gag, but almost never when it would be appropriate in terms of practical solutions to the problematic situations in which the protagonists find themselves. It’s even more fortunate that the outcry from fans on the internet resulted in a new design of Sonic, because if they had stuck with the original one, we would have wound up with a new Howard the Duck. So maybe those fans at least went to see it at the cinema.