Marigold

An excellent slow cinema debut that suffers from the fact that, unlike the works of real masters, it contemplates less with images and more with words…but Thien An is a talent who can add interesting postscripts to Tsai Ming-Liang’s legacy in the future. However, he still falls a bit short of the poetic mastery of his Chinese colleague Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues.

Toledano and Nakache are experienced hitmakers, so they know how to shoot a film with ease, how to help themselves with music and how to get actors to turn in performances that are easy to consume. Despite that, their new film comes across as dramaturgically clumsy, as it has problems with the characters’ basic motivations and the logic of their actions. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the film is a satire about the confusing present and its climatic and social anxieties. Unfortunately, however, it isn’t entirely clear where and at whom A Difficult Year is aimed. It’s a sort of standard comedy-sedative. Problems are used as backdrops and humour as an opportunity to avoid thinking about serious issues. Furthermore, that humour is largely superficial, completely lacking the polished, relaxed and apt humanism of The Specials and The Intouchables. Compared to those two films, A Difficult Year seems perfectly detached from reality. This is (being fully aware of the stereotypical nature of the statement) a lazy piece of work by French guys in their fifties who don’t want to think too much about what they are actually making. So they build a sort of safe space full of clichés and situations that don’t make sense in the end and lead only to a bland, midcult climax. The hypocrisy of consumerism is dumbly and arrogantly parodied by a work that is itself a perfect product of consumerism. And round and round we go.

A likable film with a likably unlikable protagonist driven by wounded ambition. The Promised Land blends a serious historical epic with some penny-dreadful twists that ultimately prevent the film from forcefully crowning Kahlen’s fate as an entirely tragic and self-destructive character. The Promised Land comes across as a film in search of itself on the heath. Fortunately, Arcel elevated his directing above that in the slightly TV-like A Royal Affair, Rasmus Videbæk beautifully captures the chiaroscuro and Mads Mikkelsen plays his unapproachable father character with his usual precision. The film wants to throw a powerful jab with its ending, but it winds up choosing a safer route that doesn’t offend, but it doesn’t satisfy either.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s greatest hits (coloured and expressively remixed). At its core, Poor Things is Dogtooth part II with the layout of an emancipation drama. Here we have a similar constellation – father-creator, who tries to protect a woman-child from the dangers of the world and foster in her a pure being, which makes him a god and a tyrant. Here we have a heroine who moves strangely, which reflects the twisted nature of the world and the attempt to free herself from conventions that others have imposed on her. Where Dogtooth ended, however, Poor Things begins. Bella and her journey of initiation through the world are reminiscent of a sexual and social bildungsroman with several stops along the way to discovering that her body belongs to her and her alone. This is a realisation that the heroes and heroines of Lanthimos’s previous films came to only painfully and with difficulty, usually ending in an embarrassing misunderstanding. The clumsy rebellion against convention, the arbitrariness of social rituals, the ego of men who try to remake women in their own image – in Poor Things, these Lanthimos trademarks are made more digestible because the film externalises them and caricatures them to an even greater extent. Nevertheless, it doesn’t sacrifice a certain amount of unpleasantness and the ability to put the viewer on the edge of their seat. I would place Bella and her escapades in schools instead of sex-education classes. Everything essential is there. Unfortunately, I only half believe Yorgos’s inner Zeman/Jeunet. I have always seen him as a brutalist and cinematographer Robbie Ryan as a realist. I find their pastel colouring books to be borderline kitschy – “attract with originality” recklessly overlaps with “make faces in every close-up”. Lanthimos’s originality has always consisted not in any spectacularly eccentric outward presentation, but in creating a picturesque initial situation, twisted realism and working with actors as if they were living marionettes. Of course, the actors are magnificent; I would point out the wonderful cameo by Hanna Schygulla in the role of an old woman who doesn’t shy away from talking about her sexuality. We can interpret Poor Things in various ways and probably every interpretation will have its own vague truth. Personally, I interpret the film as a metaphor for Lanthimos’s work, which began with warped and manipulative experiments on human material in an ugly laboratory and grew into comprehensible and mainstream catharsis in colourful settings. In my heart and soul, I will always have a greater affinity for his older, scarred dystopian freakshows about people dragged along by conventions than for his pathological fairy tales about poor wretches who have become masters of their own bodies and fate.

A random collection of futuristic wallpapers surrounded by robotic characters, wooden dialogue and an utterly stupid plot devoid of psychology and a basic characterization of the world. In terms of narrative, Restore Point is on the level of a made-for-TV detective movie. The emphasis on design elevates it slightly, but this post-autopsy Blade Runner and post-trepanation Minority Report can’t be taken too seriously.

The Iron Claw tries terribly hard to give the impression that the holds it employs and the punches that it throws are real. Thanks to the motif of wrestling as painful theatre that is only a spectacle but still manages to fully absorb and scar both viewers and the participants alike, it even inventively plays with the meta-illusion of wounds, which the film inflicts on the viewer. In order for this illusion to be perfect, however, Durkin would have to as skilled a screenwriter as he is a director. But he’s not. Family relationships dissolve in his hands, the individual storylines are half-baked, characters somewhat randomly disappear and the grand words and literal symbolic scenes do not create the illusion of completeness. Efron put on a lot of muscle, but his acting is squishy and flat. He can’t hold the film together with his turnip head of a cursed good guy who is stronger than he thinks. The concentration of tragedy due to unsatisfying ellipses may ultimately arouse more cynicism than participation, and this whole sweaty routine about fragile masculinity finally pins itself to the mat with its silly ending.

A cautious and selective Wikipedia entry that replaces psychologising with affected external “pictures from history”. Brothers is the most effective when it abandons its simple moral universe and focuses only on survival and determination, which perhaps best defines both Mašín the director and Mašín brothers in the film. It’s not as foggy as other Czech attempts to reflect on the bad old days of the 1950s, but it suffers from similar shortcomings in its characterisation of the period and the servants of the regime. Brothers too reverentially zigzags and hides behind what might be defined as “historical necessity” for it to really say something about the problematic issue of violent resistance and moral choices. Nevertheless, no one can deny that it offers solid directing, cinematography, editing and acting.

Literary cinematic boredom on the Baltic with with a suspiciously small thought displacement.

Beau Travail, primarily from the trio of Louvart, Vitalic and Rogowski. One can sense that Abbruzzese wants to infuse his film with tension and symbolism, to measure the EKG of the heart of darkness and to create a magical parallel between people of two worlds/faces, who are all fording the river of migration, which unfortunately is rather shallow in this rendering, though that doesn’t matter much. The visual aspect, sound design and, as usual, the superhuman intensity of the pit bull Franz carry it through to the expected climax. Though Disco Boy merely takes notes from Claire Denis, it’s still undeniably a joy to watch.

Borgli has great ideas, but he’s not able to bring them to fruition. Compared to Sick of Myself, which was irritatingly aggressive and stupid, his new film is slightly more refined. In the first half, which concentratedly works with simplicity, awkwardness and an acting masterclass on the part of Cage, it’s even one of the best black comedies that I’ve seen recently. Unfortunately, when Borgli spreads his wings and starts satirising cancel culture and the influencer vacuum through dreams, the film suddenly comes across as completely clueless and toothless. Fortunately, Cage’s professor is such a fascinating and ambiguous character, whose guilt consists primarily in thinly disguised egoism, that the film never completely falls apart. But where it was supposed to punch you in the mouth, it rather just dissipates and leaves behind the odour of the nervous fart in the film’s unquestionably best scene.