Filmmaniak

Baby Driver it is sympathetic and entertaining summer fun, but it is not directed, or (mainly) written, quite perfectly. Compared to Wright's older British work, it is also more trimmed and lacks perspective. However, the entire film is based on the creative intention to edit it all into songs that always play in the protagonist headphones. One can only praise the director for being able to so excellently edit to the rhythm of the music not only the action scenes, shootouts and car chases, but also how a character walks down the street or plans a bank robbery. Content-wise, there is nothing particularly demanding, but as a silly action comedy, it's a fair bit more imaginative and entertaining than the last episodes of The Fast and the Furious.

The original film from 1971 is no miracle, but it is still done much better overall. The original is significantly richer in plot in terms of character portrayal, and it contains much more tension, conflicts between characters and more daring sexual tension. The conclusion also had a better- elaborated point. In the new version, the director mainly failed to make the film more from the point of view of his female characters, which was probably the intention, and then transfer to the present its atmosphere of a spinster’s prudish girl's dormitory, in which a forbidden temptation suddenly appeared in the form of a handsome man, which is why viewers seem to mistakenly confuse the film with a black comedy and react to it with laughter. Compared to the original film version, the story is shallow and sparse, the motivations of the characters are not clear enough, and even the stellar cast is average at best.

I didn't believe it would be possible to make a feature-length documentary revolving around a single scene from another film, even though it was one of the most fundamental scenes in world cinema. And lo and behold, it works! It’s also very brisk, amusing and real. The film is an excellent, detailed analysis, practically overwhelming the viewer with information, and for cinephiles, it also fulfils the role of content-bloated material suitable for studying Hitchcock's genius and sophistication, which one cannot help but marvel at. If director Philippe really wanted to shoot more documentaries of a similar type, I would love it. Bring ‘em on!

Practically a standard portrait, in which by far the most interesting are the parts dedicated to Heath Ledger as a talented experimental filmmaker and video clip director, a profession with which people usually do not associate him. Most of the documentary, however, consists mainly of excerpts from various films, footage from the shooting, and interviews with other creators, Heath's friends, and family members who, with tears in their eyes, remember how great he was. It is obvious how much of an acting talent the world has lost, but this film certainly does not really provide anything new and only works as a nostalgic memory and prefers to skip the unhappy themes.

Japanese gore movies are all terribly stupid, overly brutal, crazy, and hectoliters of blood are sprayed in them daily. But even in this special distinctive genre, there is a thin line between annoyance and entertainment. Entertainment grows with the ingenuity and ability of the creators not to take the film seriously and make it ironic, but Meatball Machine Kodoku not only recycles what has often been seen elsewhere, but the first half also consists of an overly civil drama about a debt collector drowning in financial trouble, and his cautious romance with a younger book saleswoman, which doesn't fit well with the idea of aliens turning humans into bloodthirsty mutants (and then juice). All that remains is the original craziness, but this is spoiled by purely amateur editing, an inappropriately chosen musical accompaniment, horrible digital tricks and a generally lousy filmmaking, despite the fact that the story doesn't even really make any basic sense. Did the same person really film Tokyo Gore Police?

In terms of being an attempt to make a meditative artistic film fresco, whose story is more of a parable about parental responsibility, Little Crusader is unprecedented in Czech film terms. As a film, however, it is only able grip the audience with its visuals, perhaps through the camera and Roden’s performance. He plays a character of a father looking for his son who loses his mind during the film, and that's about it. His simple, intellectually and desperately empty (content-wise) plot, inspired by an epic poem by Jaroslav Vrchlický, is so terribly stretched out and his scenes are so exaggeratedly long that it is simply impossible not to get bored. Extending a half-hour’s worth of material to three times the length is not a good idea, because film craft does not automatically consist of the ability of filmmakers to film the raising and lowering of a drawbridge so that it takes up three minutes in the film. Two thirds of the film consist of shots of a gloomy Roden riding a horse and the rest of children with palm branches. All that remains is the viewer's need to interpret what they see on the screen and look for different meanings. The dialogues are, of course, sparse, because this intimate crusader road-movie was supposed to mainly tell its story through pictures, but there is not much to tell.

Double Lover tells the story of the psychological roots of the sexual fantasies of a mentally complicated young woman, and it is also a sophisticated tribute to Brian De Palma's Sisters, Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, and Roman Polansky’s Rosemary's Baby, full of references and double meanings. In connection with the motif of twins, Ozon probably also liked to divide images, axially symmetrical shots and especially mirrors, which he inserts into every third shot, in order to draw sufficient attention to the illusory game with the viewer, which he does from the very beginning. He plays on the edge of reality and fantasy, digs into the inner marches in the mind of the main character and pulls props and hasty plot twists from his sleeve, which in some cases can be easily interpreted. However, many require plenty attention and thinking in order to analyze them, whilst others are probably just confusing. As a result, however, Ozone fails in telling the last third of the story, which seems convoluted and chaotic. There is tension in the relationship between the characters and the final point just complicates the psychological level even more. The director managed to improve the B movie theme of the original book thriller with erotic elements to an artistic European psychological drama that looks like Fifty Shades of Grey in a version for demanding and thinking audiences, but even they will still remember one single shot the most – one that is right at the beginning of the film.

A showcase of bizarreness set in a fictional pagan world based on Estonian myths. The film is beautifully shot in black and white, incredibly imaginative and definitely original, but all of these amazing ideas (creatures looking like something out of Švankmajer’s work, composed of old tools, the main protagonist – a werewolf, a sleepwalking countess, spitting out of wafers, the absurd battle between villagers and the plague, love potions mixed with feces, poetic conversations with a snowman, marches of the dead and everything else) are unfortunately present only in the form of isolated strangeness, which at most creates an atmosphere of a magically realistic environment, but they have no significance for the plot. The story about a girl in love, whose lover falls in love with someone else, is then just a torso to which none of the above-mentioned fantasy addons are properly related, and the whole thing falls apart somewhat. However, if the organizers of the Weird Europe festival were looking for suitable candidates to be included in the program, then November is a clear choice.

From the audience's point of view, this is an extremely demanding spectacle, mainly because Haneke apparently decided to indulge in leaving things out. So many scenes deliberately lack context, which is instead given to them tens of minutes later. A typical example is that you might see someone writing an email to someone, but you don't know who it is and you don't know to whom it is being written. Or that someone gets punched at a housing estate, but you don't see by whom and you don't know why, and the answer is revealed later throughout the film. You can always find out from someone else indirectly, long after the incident, that a character has attempted suicide, has gotten engaged, or is dead. There is a connection with the film Love, but it's basically not important and you don't even have to see that film. In any case, this narratively complicated jigsaw puzzle, requiring extraordinary audience attention, brings nothing other than a glimpse into the personal motives and tragedies of a rich bourgeois family, which is a pity.

This is a completely precise work in terms of directing and acting, this time condemning racial hatred through the motif of right-wing terrorism. The story is slightly manipulative and in the end a bit hurried and therefore not completely satisfying, but everything until then is thought out and written well. The strong theme is used in a thrilling, emotional and brilliantly escalating storyline, and Diane Kruger really does an amazing job. There are many other films about this topic, but that doesn't matter. Quality is what’s important.