Filmmaniak

This is a precisely-aimed documentary hit to the solar-plexus, a hundred times denser and more interesting than the entire methanol affair after the first twenty minutes. What begins as a total mess in a Romanian hospital ends in absolute disillusionment with the local healthcare system in general, which is riddled, through the state apparatus, with corruption, fraud and lies. The film presents an ingenious observation by investigative journalists who, despite anonymous threats, go behind the scenes of the fairy tale about how socialist health care should heal people, but instead kills them. The film’s mood is nowhere near positive, but it is therefore all the more important that it exists.

Mank attracts viewers primarily through its unraveling of the tangle of influences that led the title character, an alcoholic screenwriter, to write the celebrated Citizen Kane. However, the actual writing of that screenplay plays second or rather third fiddle in Mank, as there is no depiction of the classic’s shooting, the great Tom Burke as Orson Welles appears on screen for a total of maybe three minutes, and Mank isn’t very faithful to the historical facts; for example, it presents Welles’s involvement in the drafting of the screenplay in accordance with myths that have long since been debunked. In fact, Mank is rather generally focused on the workings of Hollywood in the 1930s and during the Great Depression, and to roughly the same extent it deals with the political mood of the time and the affair involving the 1934 California gubernatorial race, which is understandably not much of a draw for viewers. But that’s not the problem. Rather, the problem is that none of this is rendered in a very engaging way. Though I fully understand Fincher’s desire to make a film based on his father’s long-shelved screenplay, that screenplay is unfortunately about uninterestingly written and poorly defined characters who frequently deliver witty and precisely aimed lines, but what good is that when there is no one to build any kind of relationship with on the screen? Furthermore, the second half of the film fundamentally loses traction and, with the exception of a drunken scene at a fancy-dress dinner party, it doesn’t contain much that’s remarkable. Tim Burton's Ed Wood, for example, was made with a similar intention and turned out much better. Mank is also related to Citizen Kane in its attempt at an audio-visual retro-form, which, though impressive, is not in any way consistent (after all, it was shot in widescreen digital), with a complicated narrative structure full of flashbacks (which are rather oddly skipped between in places) and a lot of different allusions (visual quotes, references to sleds and rosebuds, for example). Therefore, it is definitely necessary to see Citizen Kane before watching Mank. And though it’s fortunately not entirely necessary, it helps to know something about the key figures of Hollywood society at the time.

This film is an action thriller that turns into an absurd comedy after fifteen minutes that attacks your brain neurons with utterly stupid twists behind a hair-drawn storyline and clichéd stereotypes - airplane passengers, who of course include a Muslim doctor with a beard, a little girl flying behind her father, lovers trying to have sex on the plane, a computer expert able to program a message with a virus in eight minutes, and a woman who earns the full trust of the protagonist just by sitting next to him. Liam Neeson is traditionally the ultimate badass, but his opponent, an "invisible terrorist", would have to be a thousand times bigger badass to come up with such a sophisticated plan based on a perfect estimate of the protagonist's reactions, a perfect overview of the situation and an endless number of hellish coincidences. Thanks to its unrelenting pace, at least something is always happening in the film, and given to the dynamic camera and successful action sequences, the film is nice to look at. In the end, however, it's just single-use, popcorn action nonsense, offering quality filmmaking and over a hundred minutes of demented entertainment, but also a story so dysfunctional and illogical that it is almost interesting.

This a very dismal experimental documentary both artistically and for the audience. The film is shot in inhospitable Antarctica and does not tell any specific story, which means you are probably supposed to find even more meanings and interpretations in it. It takes a lot of effort to sit through the seemingly modest 73 minutes, partly due to the intentionally cacophonic audio track consisting mainly of all sorts of humming, noises and someone breathing. Objectively, not much happens in the film - the introduction consists of a few minutes of home video with narrative commentary, an amateur vivisection of a deer and a bit of abstraction. The remaining 65 minutes are long, wordless shots of Antarctic nature taken from a flying drone filming in different directions. Animals appear here and there, and in the second half a lone scientist appears, and whilst some of the images are visually enchanting and hypnotic, most are just unnecessarily long. A herd of dinosaurs is digitally inserted into one shot, and at the end there is a black hole leading into space (maybe these are metaphorical reminders of the past and future, maybe not). According to the creators, the film reflects the crisis of human identity and the wave of posthumanist thinking caused by the development of technology and artificial intelligence, as well as climate change. I am grateful for this information, because I would never have read it myself.

In less than eighty minutes, the talented and very capable Bartosz Kruhlik managed to pack a lot into his directorial debut – emotive performances, the dense atmosphere of a peaceful rural summer Sunday disturbed by a sudden tragedy, a chain of escalating events with fatal consequences for the characters acting under stress and pressure, the motif of society’s demand for justice in a world of incompetent police authorities and wealthy bastards hiding behind political immunity and influential connections, and a polemic on the fleetingness of life and the approach to a lamentable event from various perspectives. However, the initially realistic real-time drama about securing a crime scene, cleverly rendered in long procedural shots, yields over time to a highly exaggerated and contrived melodrama in which unforeseen family and amorous ties are gradually revealed, and which ends up being a pile of literal metaphors, simplifying shortcuts and awkward flirting with metaphysics instead of an emotional supernova. Which in turn somewhat spoils the good impression and enjoyment of the film, which otherwise puts on a rather grand show with very little.

I definitely appreciate about half a dozen of the film’s truly funny and imaginative gags and scenes, but otherwise it's quite weak, especially compared to the excellent, first Borat. Confrontations with "unsuspecting" Americans (who are surprisingly resigned this time around and put up with everything) are unfortunately dull, sometimes giving the impression of artificial staging and especially the desperate need to involve them in a poorly directed, convulsive and unfortunately broken plot about the relationship between a father and his daughter. As long as Cohen is provoking people while wearing bizarre costumes, the film works, but as soon as the scripted actions take place, or if anyone else is on the screen, the film immediately falls off the rails. The film only has sporadic quality satire and is otherwise mostly a relatively standard comedy with borderline humor and plenty of dead spots.

A dilapidated Al Capone, afflicted with worsening dementia and struggling with the effects of heart attacks and venereal disease, is living the last year of his life, dependent on the care of relatives, while in numerous hallucinations he is confronted with his ancient sins and brutal past. Despite the unattractive sounding theme, it could have been at least an interesting and remarkably conceived contemplative biographical drama, but its implementation is very unfortunate. Repetitive motifs and Capone's delusional visions have virtually no point, and the whole film is somehow about nothing and it disintegrates just like the main character's mind. Thanks to the actors, at least the film is not embarrassing and unintentionally ridiculous. The film could be summed up as an unsatisfactory wait for Capone to finally remember where he hid his stashed millions, but a far greater mystery is how he managed to persuade Tom Hardy to accept a role in which, as the most famous gangster in history, he just shits in diapers, mumbles Italian swears, sucks a carrot and looks repulsive.

Whilst the narrative structure of the book Cloud Atlas is more like the unfolding and folding of a matryoshka doll, in the film the individual storylines are intertwined and told in parallel, meaning that they do not culminate gradually, but rather all at once. Thanks to the fantastic editing, jumping over awkward transitions, dialogues and various details and similarities, and thanks to very well-established direction and dramaturgy, all of the stories approach their climax in similar places and act as an intertwined whole, without the result falling into confusion and chaos. This ambitious and daring work recalls the adaptation of six books at once, combining historical adventures at sea, period drama, spy thriller, exuberant comedy, dystopian sci-fi and a mythical post-apocalyptic world. The film underlines the central motif of the reincarnation and interconnection of the characters by using ingenious masks and casting each actor and actress in half a dozen roles, regardless of gender, nationality or skin color. The Wachowskis’s collaboration with Tom Tykwer was apparently a key aspect in terms of the film being able to function in all stylistic positions and at the same time form a compact whole. Great design, excellent music, revolutionary and unprecedented film structure, multilevel thought overlap and intertwined work with motifs and themes make this one of the best book adaptations ever.

This film is a somewhat unbalanced, but nevertheless interesting horror movie about old age and neurodegenerative diseases, but it also pretends to be something that it’s not. To its detriment, from the beginning it comes off as a standard ghost story about a haunted house, meaning the use of the usual genre motifs to build atmosphere (mysterious shadows in the corridors, something hidden under the bed...). These have no point in terms of the story and are extra aspects of the film,which is also true for all of the supporting characters. The theme of the film is anchored in a harsh reality (and giving it the form of a horror about a family curse makes perfect sense), but its resolution is based on a single visual metaphor that sweeps everything else off the table in the finale. The joy from the characters, who are not non-trivially conceived, and successful work with the interiors is muddled by the fact that the film unnecessarily clings to a few insufficiently intertwined and, above all, misleading hints of the presence of ghosts that have nothing to do with the film's central theme.

This is an average sequel that took advantage of its predecessor's strengths and simply repeated them. The video game environment is initially replaced by the world inside the Internet (the phrase "It's new, it's different, and that's why we have to be afraid of it"). Although the official logos of a number of famous companies were contracted into it, the story was not allowed to take place in them, meaning that instead of YouTube and Google, the heroes visit fictional companies BuzzzTube and KnowsMore. With the exception of one excellent passage with Disney princesses (give them their own series, please) and a few references, there is surprisingly very little additional humor left to stand on its own, and the story also is very simple and sometimes unnecessarily overstretched. The inner workings of the Internet are portrayed relatively ingeniously, but otherwise the film doesn't have much imagination, which is also reflected in the sequence in which the heroes decide to make money by making a funny video, but instead lack creativity and copy the most popular trends instead of using their own original idea. On the other hand, there’s nothing bad to be said about the animation.