Marigold

The master made an error. A mushy and calculated screenplay, which tries to play at intellectual construction, completely soulless characters (only faint reflections of Forman’s former brilliance in a small character drawing), and a protruding to almost stale directing concept (especially the crowd scenes evoke cheap television productions). Goya is something like product placement – his name stands out nicely, but we can only dream that this is any sort of speculative psychology of genius, albeit simple but lively (Amadeus!). Milking emotions with Natalie Portman's grandma mask and Javier Bardem's satanic frown is not worthy of one of the greatest directors of recent decades. It truly isn’t. This is Forman’s first great mistake.

Incredibly stupid emotional terrorism, which uses exactly the same range of emotions and persuasive means as the religious fanaticism it fights against. Camino is a monstrous triumph of utterance, emotional blackmail and the stupidest agitation. The fact that it agitates "ideology" may improve it, but it doesn't change the fact that Camino is a stupid and insidious advertisement for childhood innocence and Converse shoes. Everything in it is adapted to have an effect, but the seeming heights in this film are only repulsive lows. Personally, in the face of such none-sense, I find myself in a state of boundless fury. One of the stupidest films I have ever seen.

In long shots, we watch a very ordinary Spanish retiree wading through the dew, and later sleeping in a car. We then watch a captivating person for a while who called his very own existence an absurdity of modern history and a perverse interest in listening to and succumbing to impressive stories (even if they are lies). Even though the creators have something great in front of the camera, they behave a bit like grade schoolers to whom someone lent a camera. They notice everything possible, just not the essential thing... this is a terrible pity, because this could have been a GREAT endeavor.

This is a terribly unbalanced but interesting film that has its distinctly bright sides, but also aspects that one would rather turn over quickly. The positive aspects certainly include the performance of the main female protagonist and the motif of a "forgotten" cosmonaut, who connects the story nicely. The negative aspects include frequent bookishness, the unnatural studiedness of dialogues and completely unnecessary overflow of motifs. Less could have been more. In any case, Fandos' Cosmos is a very friendly place, a place that, compared to chaos and alienation, builds quite promising moments of connection and order. It's too bad that the creator is far too flippant and likes to aestheticize everything he says. In this way, his work lacks room for gradation and a finer palette of emotions. He pushes too much and longs too much for spirituality and peculiarity. I quite miss the talent to connect the metaphorical level with the realism of the film image, the disturbing closeness of things and symbols that, for example, Pedro Almodóvar easily achieves. For Fandos, there is a large gap between heaven and earth, and the film does not completely cross this gap.

A pleasant and poetic siesta in the middle of Cáceres, where Spaniards and Moroccan immigrants meet. The film shines through the smile of Sanâa Alaoui and the playful direction of Irene Cardoza. It’s a little more serious, and at its core very Spanish Amélie – with a somewhat indistinct reverberation, but which results from a charmingly carefree approach to the world.

The key questions are: does Shutter Island offer anything more than a well-built but remarkably unbalanced genre story? Isn't the feeling of confusion that comes after watching it actually just a reflection of the inner emptiness of the story that was told? Does the shocking point not only explain, but also justify all the wonders (logical, spatiotemporal and ideological) of the previous events? I can’t say that I’m closer to the answer YES... Which is quite a sad outcome for M. Scorsese's film. Despite the absorbing atmosphere, despite DiCaprio, despite some really great moments, I'm far from appreciating the creative game, however much I am able to accept it. I shake my head helplessly over a work that is a much more effective trick than a thoughtful manipulation. Perhaps if the film stayed away from stray attempts to overlap and admitted without torture that it was ONLY a pure, and at its core a blunt genre film, I would have left the movie theatre more satisfied.

I know the co-author of the screenplay, Martin Němec, among other things as a skilled writer, whose short stories are exciting and are very diverse in terms of genre. It is therefore all the less clear to me why 90% of the dialogues sound like they were written by Arnošt Vašíček, and even attempts at conversational styling end in an epileptic spasm. Herz does a solid genre work, an imaginative shot flashes on the screen from time to time, and here and there a jump scare or the gloomy stylization of the environment work. The story is a classic cheap tale from an amateur fanzine, which need not have been so useless, if... It happened to include, above all, credibility, an overview of one's own derivation and more moderately guided actors. The way it is, Darkness is decent enough as a Czech television film despite its shortcomings.

Unlike the original documentary Trapped, in which solidarity and hope were the predominant emotions, I am left with a certain resignation and disgust after watching the full length version. The pity for the fighting mind got lost somewhere, leaving only a devastating look at a decaying body (I thought about Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream many times). The decline and resignation of the main protagonist are also suppressed by the detachment by Helena Třeštíková, when, at the end of the documentary, she tries to retouch the "story written by life" at least a little through her own initiative. A small misstep against the hitherto excellent "time-lapse". However, this is only proof of the overwhelming nature of this "drug romance," probably one of the strongest and rawest forms of addiction and self-destruction. After the screening, I felt like I had rolled in rotting garbage for an hour and a half. Regret is most likely the last memento left from Katka's story... Paradoxically, perhaps that's what bothered me a little – that it's no longer the expectation of catharsis, but just one big crisis.

Theatrically twisted, unfettered melodramatic and precipitously colorful... Almodóvar talking about life being like playing a role, a mother, a woman, a man – an intelligent and consistent unit with characteristically supple personal stamp (how much the music of Albert Iglesias means to a Spaniard!). A queer film, but one that does not close itself off to the majority whatsoever. Personally, I don’t know what to think about the comedic stylization in certain parts. It seems to me that out of the hypersensitivity of maternal vicissitudes, Almodóvar dipped into Broken Embraces. His self-reflexive mask of an intellectual is probably a tiny bit closer to me than the pastel softness All About My Mother.

Full Metal Jacket for the new millennium – militant, cynical and predatory. A ballbusting documentary drama about a war-addicted people, about overgrown boys for whom normal life is far too normal. Bigelow loaded a cart full of naturalism, the hot Iraqi atmosphere and brilliant acting. This type of dynamically filmed war drama has been lacking since the days when Scott filmed Black Hawk Down. Like him, Bigelow leaves aside the moral assessment of the conflict and instead goes deep into the characters' psyche and adds a solid portion of irony (something that was missing in Black Hawk Down). There is great portion of raw fight scenes and sweaty dialogues of the average soldier for two solid hours. The Hurt Locker is not trying to get to the heart of the Iraq war, but rather simply capture the strange soul of a warrior. And in this respect, Kathryn Bigelow did a better and more responsive job than her male colleagues. In addition to balls, the film also has empathy... For me, The Hurt Locker is one of the American film highlights of 2009. Perhaps even the best.