Marigold

A long time ago, anyone who hadn't seen The Towering Inferno was completely out of it. My mother wouldn't let me watch the film, so I had to wait a few years, but in the end, I really liked this great disaster film. A superbly constructed story according to the rules of genres, excellent acting performances and tension until the last minute. This is how you make a disaster film! Better than the book and all the disaster films I know. Even the effects don't seem ridiculous these day...

A great romantic film of my heart. Impressive cut-outs from Russian (Soviet) history, the riveting Omar Sharif, the beautiful Julie Christie and an ending that put me out of commission for two days. It's really long, but every minute just intensifies the tide of emotion... Plus, for an American film, the "Soviet" atmosphere is very convincing. These types of films are no longer made. For me, it’s one of Hollywood's highlights, compared to which The English Patient is just a heap of hideously cheesy snapshots.

I may be insensitive, but after a while, the story got on my nerves. The director is strumming on the emotional string with such pomp that mine burst after about half an hour, and I just shook my head for the rest of the story. At the end, I felt like eating two kilos of overly salty Kremroles... Doctor Zhivago, now that was a different spectacle!

I avoided Titanic like a demon a cross, but eventually it caught up with me... And oddly enough, it wasn't a head-on collision, but rather a light miss. The story is sweet and protracted, but as soon as the overgrown steamer began to sink, there was plenty to watch - I finally recognized it as Cameron's work. Surprisingly, I quite liked the unruly Leonardo DiCaprio, but I didn't know much about the bourgeois maiden Kate Winslet. It's just shabby love story that Cameron painted gold. In places the paint is sparse, so rust shines through. Definitely a classic seasonal hit... Edit 2012: beautiful proof of how often a person is wrong. To see this film as a kitsch love story actually hides the essence of what Titanic really is: the product of Cameron's massive fetishism and a metaphorical path to the coveted object that comes to life with the power of the film and allows the filmmaker to lead the viewer through its lost nooks. The director simply captures the feeling that still seizes me today when I look at a dead wreck in the depths - a burning longing to "give faded matter meaning and shape with a story". The result is a film full of contradictions, but above all a film extremely precisely constructed and economically told. All the pleasure from it comes from pure rationality. If Rose says: "It doesn't make sense, that's why I believe it," I say "Everything makes sense here, that's why I believe it (but I do not succumb :-))".

Ummm… I was forced by circumstance to see it. Yes, it's visually perfect, but for God's sake, I don't understand what that the guy with glasses was doing. It was too serious for a fairy tale, too infantile for fantasy, not funny enough for a comedy, and not adventurous enough for an adventure film. Columbus reminds me of a craftsman who didn't want (couldn't) smuggle any of his own ideas into the story. A perfectly done commercial product, nothing more. The fault is probably in me, Harry Potter made me very bored even after I read a few pages. We were not meant for each other, and Rowling is never going to be poor... And neither am I, so why worry?

Cut Reloaded and glue it together with the best of Revolutions and behold: that would be a film! Yet, after an unbalanced and melted intermediate link, Revolutions is a brisk spectacle that benefits from the chatter of Reloaded (there's no need to think about anything deeply anymore) and the visual mastery that The Matrix is famous for. It’s nice to look at, and the ending is really riveting, as is the message of the whole story. Plus it has a great soundtrack. I love this trilogy because it is not only "one", "two", etc., but is really a conceptual work that, as a whole, creates a huge potential universe that can be further populated. In addition, it allows you to engage your brain and create your own intertextual "matrix" with classics of world philosophy and literature. It may lead to exaggerated constructs, but thank God the "mass" story places such high demands on the viewer at all...

In my day, I grossly underestimated the film, or rather overestimated it. I searched within it for more than a perfect post-cultural encyclopedia, richly overwhelmed with meanings and inspirations, narcissistic in its visual beauty. That was a mistake. The Matrix Reloaded can only be enjoyed if you accept it in this lightly coated yet childishly honest position. Years later, I saw a film that seemed to contain within it all the beauty (narrative, thought, visual) of all the magnificent epic works of fantasy. It's a real imaginative charge, unbridled by any self-criticism, guided only by a love of pop culture as a whole, and also by an excellent idea that turns the first film into a fairy-tale coloring book. Reloaded is a more mature but no less stimulating experience. What was encoded in Star Wars for generations before that, the Wachowskis offer in the cinematic language of the new millennium. I sincerely feel sorry for those who do not appreciate it – the most conspiratorial feeling of a person who feels at home in a green world.

An ancient drama brought to the backdrop of the early Middle Ages. Cold castles instead of air shrines, rags and armor instead of togas... Yet Lars von Trier has proven that this story of a desperate and betrayed woman is utterly universal, and if the director can capture it visually interestingly (which Trier can), it does not lose any of its impressiveness. On the contrary, it fits perfectly into the ruthless Nordic landscape. The child sacrifice scene is filmed as harshly and openly as Lars von Trier can. A film drama in full force...

The opening part of the film is excellent, shot with great perspective and decorated with surprisingly good performances by Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes,. Over time, the perspective fades and the film slides into action routine in which only Sandra Bullock can impress with her cool face and the appearance of a naïve virgin before the prom. It’s too bad - all they had to do was to keep the humor and not take the story (pretty pointless, of course) so seriously. Demolition Man, however, is one of the better items in Sylvester Stallone's filmography...

When I hear talk of European film, I think of Amarcord. If I hear the word puberty, I think of the powerful breasts of the tobacconist, a horny Fox and masturbating in the car. And when I hear Amarcord, I think of a warm and loving film that sketches a portrait of an Italian small town with all its sweetness and tribulations with relaxed strokes with a slight exaggeration. I think of a motorcyclist called Fart, a bunch of teenagers, a stunted nun, an angry father and a farting grandfather. Just a film that's close to me and that's fascinated me for years. So many beautiful mini-stories, so much humor, so much love for the characters. Amarcord is a magnificent celebration of storytelling and directorial skills, open cinematic souls... Just everything that European cinema means to me at its best.