Filmmaniak

No words, and yet so much emotion. The friendship between a dog and a robot in 1980s New York has only just begun when the two protagonists are separated from each other (due to consumer negligence and underestimation of the effects of corrosion) and the film tells their stories separately. However, each of them has the same dreams about the other, from which the film gets its title. After the initial joy, the plot takes a quite sad turn, so the prevailing feeling from the film is rather melancholy, which is reversed in the end, though that does not entirely involve a fairy-tale happy ending. Though the animation is simple, it contains a very large number of endearing and funny details and works very effectively with the characters’ facial expressions and body language. The film will also be appreciated by adults (perhaps even more than children) who have life experience and are aware that true friendship requires a joint effort and is a commitment to looking after one another. Robot Dreams is deeper and emotionally more complex than it may appear at first glance.

A modern witch hunt whose protagonist is an oriental healer who is actually a charlatan sponging off of the suffering people who trust her, only to become a victim of mob hysteria arising from prejudices and slander, which have devastating consequences for her. Set in a big city, Hood Witch is a realistic drama about the ruinous impacts of the actions resulting from religious conviction, in which the protagonist’s fight for survival becomes a fight to save her son. The film succeeds in eliciting compassion for the protagonist even though it depicts her in anything but a positive light at the beginning. It also offers well-written characters, powerful situations, a lot of exotic animals and one scene whose unpleasantness will make your toes curl.

Up until the final quarter, You’ll Never Find Me is a rather gripping and cleverly directed minimalistic psychological study of two characters whom fate has brought together in an isolated location and between whom nervous tension is skilfully built up over a long period of time. This is aided by solid work with darkness and editing, as well as the sounds of the storm raging outside. However, all of that is spoiled by the confusing denouement, which at the last moment attempts to weave together all of the motifs that have been broached and surprise or even shock viewers with new twists, but it comes off as too rushed and chaotic.

An extraordinary torrent of creativity in the best comedy of recent years and, at the same time, a surprising update of slapstick for the 21st century. It’s as if Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd joined hands with Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote, with the late, great Czech fantasy director Karel Zeman in the director’s chair, having just discovered the possibilities of computer graphics. This film is definitive confirmation of the proposition that a small budget is not an obstacle when you have enough ideas and creative ability. In the case of Hundreds of Beavers, the filmmakers have ideas in spades and they pack so many of them into the film that they easily fill the whole runtime, thus turning the limited resources for making the film into a strength, so the result, including the visual aspect, is outrageously funny, creative and endearing. The plot never slows down for even a minute, the individual gags progressively evolve and build up to unpredictable levels, and the film works superbly with the characters and recurring motifs while making full use of the snow-covered forest setting and the associated props. Hundreds of Beavers is a unique film and clearly a future cult classic.

A young man is about to get married, but he falls into an open manhole the night before the wedding. This simple premises ultimately gives rise to a rather entertaining and humorous mystery that is able to surprise the viewer with its unexpected development of events. However, the forcibly inserted twist in the second half is a double-edged sword, because even though it catches us off guard and changes the film’s theme to a certain extent, it also trips over its own feet with an overwrought narrative riddled with plot holes.

Godless addresses an actual tragic case from 1993, when a group of religious fanatics performed an exorcism on a mentally ill woman who was needlessly subjected to psychological torture and physical abuse. It is good that the film deals with the subject of potentially harmful deeds committed by people acting in blind accordance with their faith and good intentions, though they approach it from the wrong angle. The film contains the seeds of an emotionally rich psychological drama, but the filmmakers somewhat superfluously tried to pull an exorcism horror element out of the story (through rather poorly and cheaply rendered satanic visions and very dull jump scares). Until the very end, the viewer is battered with the thought of whether the victim was possessed by the devil after all, but this deliberate ambiguity causes confusion in the film’s tone, diminishes its power and makes it unintentionally ridiculous in places.

This well-known story of the air crash in the snow-covered Andes whose survivors had to resort to cannibalism had already been told in the 1993 American film Alive. In comparison with that film, Bayona offers a more modern take with top-quality filmmaking (including excellent camerawork and an intense scene involving the crash itself). In addition to that, he returns this story about the power of the human will and tenacity to the Spanish-speaking realm. But that’s basically all there is to it, because the film naturally doesn’t have much to surprise us with in terms of plot. With few exceptions, the individual characters are interchangeable and their agonisingly bad fortune serves mainly to make an emotional impact on viewers. However, the film is likable in that it is a truly honest and thoroughly realistic survival drama that is unburdened by the necessity of cramming the plot with personal conflicts between the characters, who can thus focus more on the practical side of their own survival. The low degree of pathos and the very subtle and humane approach to the issue of eating human flesh are also pleasing.

After suffering a head injury, a small girl lies in a coma and her subsequent story is intertwined with her journey through a fantasy world in which she repeatedly escapes death and encounters various other creatures. The result is a surrealistic variation on Alice in Wonderland that was made by the father of the five-year-old girl in the lead role as his own original project over the course of six years. It is necessary to appreciate the film for its well-thought-out creative side and the rendering of the puppet animation sequences, which must have required a tremendous amount of hard work. The child actress in the lead role is excellent. The style of the animation and the dark atmosphere of Moon Garden are reminiscent of Mad God (though it isn’t as bloody and disgusting, but I still wouldn’t let children watch it, as some of the scenes are truly terrifying and intense). Unfortunately, it also shares with Mad God the fact that the viewer gets fed up with this load of visual ideas after a while, because there isn’t much else to rely on in the simple plot. The film will thus most likely remain in the viewer’s memory only as a likably bizarre sequence of psychedelic scenes interspersed with a hospitalised little girl’s recollections of both happy and agonising family moments.

A powerfully effective and imaginative horror movie about various sleep disorders including extreme somnambulism, when a person become dangerous both to themselves and those around them. The nightmares of the married couple are conveyed from the perspective of the anxious woman, who is legitimately worried that her sleepwalking husband could kill their newborn. The suspensefully constructed story is then gradually given unexpected dimensions, offering both plot twists and small islands of effective situational humour.

Despite the subject matter and the title, Sharksploitation is a very serious documentary about the depiction of sharks in the history of cinema from the 1930s to the present day, as well as about sharks in general and how films have negatively shape the image of sharks in society. The film offers very nicely and entertainingly composed mix of talking heads (ranging from filmmakers to experts in marine zoology) and clips from every possible film with sharks, naturally including the biggest trash flicks (though rather towards the end). Plus a heap of little-known stories from the film industry and debunking of the biggest myths about sharks.