EvilPhoEniX

Winner of the Czech Lion for animation and a progressive revolutionary form by Daria Kashcheeva. It will leave you with your mouth open! Electra recalls her 10th birthday and awakens a series of family traumas. It's a deep probe into the female mind, with the “Electra complex”, the opposite of the “Oedipus complex”, comes into play. The stop motion animation is breathtaking (form wins over content for me, but never mind), you won't see 25 minutes this impressive in Czech cinema. 75%

A nice feel good genre film with good performances. It’s the story of an autistic boy with above average intelligence, but he is a laughing stock to his classmates, and his parents have a rather difficult time with him as well. The turning point comes when he wants to go visit all the football stadiums in Germany with his father to choose his favourite club. The first half is even quite funny and has some pretty chilling situations, I personally don't know if I could handle something like that mentally. Towards the end I thought it was pure drama, so I won't go up to 4 stars, but it's okay. 6/10.

Beautiful. The first proper action flick of the year from the inexperienced Dev Patel, who shines both in acting and directing, and to come up with such a great debut in this day and age, takes my appreciation and compliments. Even if the 5 stars aren't entirely pure, I'll happily give them to Monkey Man, this is after all my favourite genre and a film I'll happily watch with friends again, so why not! At its core, Monkey Man is a classic revenge actioner, but thanks to the Indian realities and culture, it has a very different vibe and actually feels very fresh. I loved the contrast where one scene is slums and utter poverty and squalor and the next is skyscrapers with rich scumbags doing coke instead of shots and banging Miss World. There are only three action scenes, but they are nice and long. The first lasts at least 20 minutes, it’s where Dev Patel doesn't know how to fight that much yet, so he gets a decent ass kicking too. Halfway through, the film switches a bit into spiritual Indian mode, where Patel gets a workout and they nicely show India from a different direction, so that we can then get a look at the Ring, this is where the film is most reminiscent of the Ong-bak, and it’s all wrapped up with an ultra brutal long finale that combines both John Wick and The Raid. The finale is again long, pleasingly brutal, with great cinematography (Patel nicely switches camera angles: bird's eye view, first person camera, close up and distance), and I like that the film has virtually no shooting but relies on melee weapons, and I liked the innovative element of rocket firecrackers!! The Indian assassins at the end were a delight, they were pretty damn cool, and the ultimate boss fight was a nice cherry on top. I had a great time, visually properly dirty and brutal, the action scenes are polished, Patel has charisma to spare and, as I mentioned, the Indian culture suits the film very well. It could have had a little more gore, there's less of it than I wanted in the end, but I'll rise above that. 85%

Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy this at all. An incredibly slow drama where nothing happens. There are two or three nice atmospheric horror visions that I thought were above standard, but the rest of it is nothing. Weird characters, a story about nothing, that dialogues that I didn't enjoy, no suspense or atmosphere, the whole thing is so weirdly Italian. Don't waste your time. 35%.

The beginning of a New French Wave of extremity of 2024 is here! After the awesome Meandre, the talented Mathieu Turi becomes the guarantee of France and his new release is definitely a rewarding creature feature film, actually the best we can see so far this year. A group of miners go into a cave with a professor to collect some samples, only to discover a crypt and awaken an ancient evil with a Lovecraftian twist! The story is pretty simple, but the attractive and novel setting doesn't make it a problem at all. The cave is properly dark and claustrophobic, the characters are cool and don't show any logical flubs. But the big plus is the monster itself, with practical effects and a nice mythology around it, it looks properly creepy and unpleasant, even if it's a bit of a shame that it doesn't appear until an hour into the film. There's some decent gore, of course, and as always, it there could have been more, but it's sufficient. The atmosphere also works well, the most atmospheric sequence for me was the one where they use a photo-camera, a proven sure thing! For me, a very fine monster survival flick with miners that shouldn't offend anyone. So far this year a clear horror number one, so show your gratitude and sprinkle those 4's! 75%

I was tempted by the perverse violence, shocking and sexually twisted, it sounded like the Chilean version of A Serbian Film featuring colonists and I couldn't miss it, but the result is a heavyweight borefest, where I was bored to the point of hallucination! The actors, the dialogue and the story were very uninteresting, really zero interest, it went absolutely off the rails and that one rape of a guy by a guy really didn't get me out of my seat. There was one more brutal scene, but that's really pathetically small. I was kind of hoping for some proper carnage in the finale to pull it up to at least average. I'd describe it as a True descent into the Madness of Boredom ! Historical cheaply made art from Chile. It made me boil with hatred. Audience ingratitude. Fuck those settlers! 3/10.

A Norwegian oddity about narcissism, or what a person is capable of doing to get attention. Again, an interesting psychological study of a girl who overdoses on certain drugs and acquires a strange disease that gets her media attention. A film with hints of body horror, but more of a morbid black drama. In the hands of David Cronenberg or Clive Barker this could have been far more interesting and intense. There were a few hallucinogenic scenes that weren't entirely bad, but I was kind of hoping it would have turned out a bit more interesting and rewarding. The inclusion of both comedy and horror is really only marginal. Stronger average. Definitely worth a watch, fans of dramas and Scandinavia can throw in a star. 65%

I caught up with this Scandinavian oddity and to my surprise it's decent and recommendable. The story focuses on Tina, who looks weird and is quite creepy, her life is not worth much and she works as a customs officer at an airport. But she has specially developed olfactory abilities and she can smell fear, guilt and other emotions from people, and thanks to that she catches some pedophiles. Her life changes, when she meets Vore, who has a similarly repulsive appearance, and they begin a sort of bizarre romance (the sex scene with them is very repulsive indeed). The film mixes multiple genres, it's interwoven with Norse mythology, it manages to shock (it gets quite intense at the end), and the whole thing is so strange, interesting and novel that I really enjoyed it. Scandinavian weirdness with all the trimmings. 7/10.

Suiqiang Huo is going really strong, but he hasn't topped Blind War for me yet. He had pretty big ambitions here, as he has two of the biggest Chinese martial arts stars in top form at the moment. Another collaboration with Andy On, who here plays a bad guy searching for drugs seized by the police, and Miu Tse, who recently excelled as a blind bounty hunter in Swordsman, here playing a police officer. It was tempting to have a clash of two big martial arts stars and it was supposed to be the event of the year. Unfortunately, I don't share the enthusiasm. It's not bad, there are some good moments (their fight is really good), but the plot is really too simple, the shootouts don't impress me much and the CGI didn't do much for me either, plus the roles are switched at the end and I didn't like what the director did with the characters in the final act. Too bad, he should have stayed more down to earth and focused only on the fights and it would have been a blast. PS: the switchblade was cool imho. 6/10.

I caught up out of boredom with this not-quite-famous psychological revenge thriller from Ireland, which has an unexpectedly decent cast: Mark Strong and Eva Green (who looks unexpectedly repulsive here). Green plays a fashion designer who suffers from a mysterious illness. A Filipino healer who uses her traditional healing methods comes to her house to help her, but everything goes wrong somehow. I liked the touch of Filipino culture, Eva Green gives a traditionally good performance, and there is a quite interesting twist at the end that escalates the situation nicely, and the hallucinations with the ticks and the mutilated dog are also interesting. Not a gem, but it's okay for one viewing. 6/10.