Filmmaniak

This is an anime about a teenage musician who reunites with her much older sister’s ex-boyfriend after thirteen years. However, the burned-out and prematurely aged man appears to her the way she remembers him from her childhood, as a ghost, the way he looked thirteen years ago. The dramatic story with magical, musical and romantic elements excels through great drawing and motifs of how people change over time. The main themes of the film are adolescent anger, the dilemma of love, family ties and the clash of ambition with reality that robs a person of old dreams and ideas. However, the narrative should have been built more tightly and not diluted by side characters and unnecessary side trips (for example, on the topic of urban funding). Several emotionally impressive scenes from the film thus resonate much more than its simple finale, in which even the musical level of the story resounds into emptiness.

From its very beginning, this film presents a dense drama about the reunion of a father and son after approximately thirty years, based on the premise that the father has become a hateful drunken bastard over the years, and there is nowhere to run from his cabin in the wilderness. After a major twist, about halfway through the story the film switches to another genre, which is practically unrelated to the previous events and is somewhat bizarrely straddled between a thriller and an off-the-wall black comedy. On paper, the film might look interesting and entertaining, but the result is unsatisfactory, as a number of directorial and screenwriting blunders and a desperately non-charismatic protagonist take the wind from its sails.

A romantic story about a 16-year-old boy who, after running away from home, falls in love an orphaned girl in Tokyo of about the same age who is able to stop the rain and call the sun on request, but she always pays dearly for it. Honestly, it's an incredibly beautiful film about the power of love, the desire for freedom and the strenuous struggle with life in a big city that gradually disappears under the water build-up. The film can also be perceived as a metaphorical commentary on extreme weather fluctuations, which have been increasing in recent times. The film’s only disadvantage is that it very much resembles the director's previous films, especially the film Your Name, which was more story-rich, mysterious and emotional. At times, it almost seems as if Makoto Shinkai wants to repeat his success after his previous hit, and so he uses the same formula again (a young couple in love who are connected by a magical fantasy ability) and again decorated the film with his favourite motifs (a busy metropolis, rain, trains, a soundtrack, an impending catastrophe, the risk of the fatal loss of a loved one), with the assumption that it will again. It obviously does work, but this time the result is a little more transparent and straightforward and the drama must be replaced artificially, most often through various police chases. The ending could have been much longer and more surprising. Even so, Shinkai reaffirms his position as a master in working with details and poetic images, with dialogues, in faithfully capturing the environment and with a narrative that can grab the heart in the right places.

This is a sci-fi thriller about two rescuers who have recently gotten caught up in several cases related to a new drug causing people to sink into other worlds after using it. Another classic motif of the sci-fi genre is packed onto the attractive mysterious theme, which the film remarkably combines with an emotional drama about the friendship of two of the main characters and their difficult problems, and with action/horror passages that amount to “good value for the money". The film could have turned out to be a stupid Hollywood b-movie, but skillful directing, a clever script (except for one crutch), the great Anthony Mackie (he gets significantly more screen time than Dornan, and it's a pity that the film doesn't connect their characters more in the story) and the absence of pathos make the film an impressive authorial work, which, despite the presence of several clichés, is original and fresh.

The film is a social drama about a poor boy who naively falls in love with a classmate who is a gold digger, and he then joins up with a group of gasoline thieves to make money. This honestly-directed film get points for its natural actors, the authentic environment of the Mexican backcountry and a documentary-style camera. The film’s raw narrative and striking conclusion are helped out by a certain uncombedness and gradualness, while the side story with the police officer improves its dramatic level and amplifies the socio-economic message of the film. However, the film makes it seem like stealing gasoline and potentially risking your life isn't as bad and problematic as trying to date a girl who only agrees to a date in exchange for a new iPhone, which probably wasn’t supposed to be what the movie intended.

This is a sequel that no one asked for, and there was no reason to make it or anything to make it from, but the previous film had made a lot of money. So it simply had to be made. The story is one large generic template, acting like a combination puffed up ideas and a product, pulled out of someone’s ass and created by a random plot generator. The film tries to cover up the simplicity, commonness and predictability of the story with digital tricks, design and a colourful visual aspect, but even so it only fulfils the usual pleasing standard, without trying for anything original or more imaginative. The film is driven by the professionally implemented surface aspects of the film and in some places by the actors. Unfortunately, all of the effort was wasted on a careless and uninteresting endeavour that exists practically only out of obligation.

Despite the suggestive title and exciting story of teenage cinema employees who accidentally discover a cursed pornographic film strip in the early 1990s and evoke a female sexual demon during its screening, the film is a rather chaste and moralizing comedy horror whose message is that porn it is evil and that fornicators are in danger of having their genitals brutally devastated (which you get to enjoy up close in one scene). The poorly written and annoying main characters are members of Christian youth who manage not to cross themselves when looking at a shameful poster, and the film is more based on their dialogues than on exploitation scenes, but they are dull, humourless, toothless and unable to stimulatingly take advantage of contemporary motifs, such as access to pornography before the internet and homosexuality as something unnatural. This film amounts to unenjoyable trash that is really not worth the few seconds of naked breasts the audience gets to see.

This is a blatantly funny social satire set in a pastel-coloured world, where all of the adults wear braces (unlike the children, who are treated as property), ride in golf carts, act quite out of the ordinary and conspicuously envy each other’s houses, gardens, swimming pools and offspring. The film does include the story line of one of the heroines who, after a series of bad decisions, tries in vain to break free from all-encompassing conformity, but otherwise it has no plot and consists more of thematically-connected sketches in which various everyday situations and petty bourgeois stereotypes are enriched by unsuspected, absurd and nonsensical points. The result is a surreal show of imaginative episodes, not all of which hit fertile ground, but they are amazingly playful and most of them are hilarious. However, humour is subjective, so it’s entirely possible that you won't like it.

This is a classic horror film with a haunted house, ghosts and a demon, in which the protagonist, a young man who suffers from past trauma and lack of money, is grateful for a one-time deal to be the guardian of a dead member of the Jewish community (which is part of tradition), without knowing what evil will try to get inside him from the dead body. After solid exposition, the film slides quite quickly into a horror routine and a series of standard jump scares, which uses Jewish elements only sporadically and superficially, and instead, it clings to cheap clichés. The tension is built quite densely (although only in individual scenes), many passages are appropriately chilling and the kosher camera works nicely with the darkness, but this is barely enough to create a slightly above average film, and when compared to the promising subject matter, this film has a surprisingly generic and overly hasty ending.

A horror film with comedic elements about a filmmaking team producing a popular exorcism show on the Internet, and the latest live broadcast (with hired actors and pre-arranged tricks, of course) is suddenly disrupted by a real demon that nicely disrupts the viewership. The story, built on an attractive theme, disturbs the horror atmosphere with comic elements, the effectiveness of which, however, is slightly variable, as well as some acting performances, alienating elements and the fluctuating tempo of the narrative. The film, mainly focusing on the perniciousness of lies, the healing power of forgiveness and the fascination with horror and violence, nevertheless still contains a sufficient number of ideas and juicy scenes, is able to consistently entertain from beginning to end and has several surprising points and a purely adorable conclusion that is able to aptly take jabs in all of the right places.