JFL

Months of boredom with nudists on the Moon, or how to come to grips with a plan to shoot a nudist sci-fi movie when you don't have money and you need to make a feature-length film. Like Herschell Gordon Lewis or Russ Meyer, director Doris Wishman is regarded as a pioneer in her category but, as in the case of Lewis and Meyer (and a number of other nameless filmmakers), that does not make her a good filmmaker or her films anything other than bumpy sections on a long road of demolishing taboos before other, more capable filmmakers could build on the milestones that they achieved.

Ad Astra is a film that is easy to shoot down or mock with a withering catch-phrase, but which nevertheless hypnotically draws in the viewer and long afterwards smoulders in one’s mind. It is impossible to avoid the impression that something is simultaneously missing and excessive, whether monologues, action scenes or pulpy elements thatturn contemplative absorption into amused mockery. Like a cosmic Heart of Darkness, Ad Astra gives the impression of being abridged, as if a full range of other stops on the road to the destination have been bypassed. Glimmers of the film’s world give the sense of a well-thought-out future and colonisation of the solar system. Director James Gray's film comes across asa several-hour miniseries that has been edited down and promises the possibility of not only seeing more of everything but, primarily, getting everything in a more sophisticated, dramaturgically refined and, above all, more slowly flowing form. I very much would have liked Ad Astra’s runtime to be twice or even three times as long, with proportionately more stops in space and some motifs more thoroughly developed. In its actual form, it is a sort of Reader’s Digest, the fragments of which do not conceal the masterful filmmaking and give a sense of an epic vision.

When two people do the same thing, the results of their efforts will differ depending on their respective levels of talent and life experience. Thus, while Ready or Not would like to be another Get Out, as the promotional materials emphatically make clear, it can never have that film’s sting. The grievances of one ethnic group and the phantasmagorical delusions of the privileged social class are not revealed here. Rather, only a group of well-to-do people make fun of rich people within the limits of the genre. Thanks to that, Ready or Not works great as arelief valve for the frustrated workers of our capitalist reality, but it characteristically does not open up its subject in any way or contain any overlap into everyday reality. Above all, however, it does not open anyone’s eyes. It’s just an amusing episodic film in which, instead of the monstrosity in the human heart or the gears of the predatory system, we can only see our own need to simply find festive relief in a properly explicit lynching.

Stéphane Drouot's short brings civilian ordinariness into space and is appealing primarily as a formal exercise in staging and camera work. While the idea that even in the era of humanity’s expansion into space there will still be social chasms and enclaves, when ordinary people will futilely dream of the luxury seen in lifestyle consumer magazines, remains topical, it is the image of the world in Star Suburb that is captivating. Stylistically, the film is reminiscent of contemporary French creative works giving rise to cinema du look, such as the early shorts by the duo Caro-Jeunet and Besson’s initial projects.

Pokémon: Detective Pikachu is a recombinant and, at its core, generic human story that plays out in world of Pokémon. Please more scenes with Pikachu and Psyduck next time.

Starfish is by no means flawless, but with its originality and debutant overflow of ideas, it is a likable work conceived as an audiovisual parallel to the mixtape format. With its roots among the ranks of genre films creating surreal metaphors of the minds of their characters – such as Donnie Darko and Pi – it is, like the aforementioned classics, both deranged and intimate, thanks to which it is emotionally absorbing and fascinating for viewers.

From gun-fu through car-fu to animal-fu, or pure pleasure from creative action choreography and the most physical and highest-adrenaline viewing experience of the year.

At its core, Feedback is pulpy, but thanks to the clever screenplay and superb production, it is a marvelously exciting, chilling and devastating thriller on the #metoo theme.

Greener Grass is anenchanting film about the position of women in American society and the search for roots. It is a likable journey about one not-entirely-perfect woman from a suburb that is so perfect that no one there expresses surprise at its madness; for example, when someone raises a football like an infant or gives children a snack that has been pre-chewed by real mothers because machines are inhuman. Despite a series of escalating humorous mega-bizarre situations, the heroine tenaciously resists in order not to deviate, which leads to a number of even crazier and more absurd scenes. With its style of humour, Greener Grass approaches Quentin Dupieux’s films cut with the aesthetic of Saturday Night Live, where the white-bread world of the 1950s suburbs meets Lynch smothered in cotton candy discreetly pissed upon by John  Waters.

Riot Girls is arough-hewn would-be postapocalyptic film for teenage punk-rock girlsand the guys who want to befriend them, which could be fine for its target group, but it would have to have a slightly better budget or, ideally, a far more capable filmmaker. The result is a film that has tremendously great promotion and posters, but it does not come anywhere close to fulfilling the expectations raised by them. But perhaps that is only an expression of my old man’s envy that no cool punk chick or bike would lean on me anymore.