Matty

Without its A-list cast, Nolan’s cautious entry into Hollywood would have been just another unnecessary American remake of a high-quality European genre film, also slowly told but much rawer and more atmospheric. In the context of Nolan’s filmography, Insomnia is surprising especially because of its relatively conventional structure (the boldest aspects are the confusing flashbacks, which, with respect to what we know, we attribute to someone other than the one to whom they actually belong) and its brightness, which of course has a thematic rationale (furthermore, the lighting changes as Dormer becomes increasingly disoriented due to sleep deprivation). Otherwise, this is, after Following and Memento, the third story of a man traumatised by what happened to him in the past and who is prevented by time from getting a firmer grasp of the situation. Time is Will Dormer’s enemy in the sense that it does not allow him to sleep during the given season in Alaska. Besides investigating a murder and trying to cover up the fact that he himself has committed a crime, he begins to lose his nerve and to make mistakes due to his deepening fatigue. Of course, due to the fact that Al Pacino looks rather worn out from the opening minutes, his transformation consists mainly of chewing more and more intensely and the circles under his eyes getting bigger. Not even Robin Williams gets much room to show off his acting talent, as he maintains a poker face most of the time (which obviously had the purpose of making him seem more sinister, but it doesn’t really work). Nolan simply doesn’t care as much about the characters and their plausibility as he does about the comprehensibility of the narrative for the viewer, which is more jarring in a film largely based on actors than in films whose main draw is unique composition. For example, the behaviour of the hotel receptionist, who forms an attachment to Will, who thus has someone to whom he can confide about one of his past sins (thus fulfilling the receptionist’s sole narrative purpose), makes very little sense. More disturbing are the other “traditional” deficiencies of Nolan’s films – dividing scenes into an unnecessarily large number of shots (as if the filmmaker was afraid that we would lose interest if a shot lasts a little longer), excess dialogue explaining in detail what could have been simply hinted at, faulty spatial relationships between individual shots (an actor is suddenly somewhere other than where he should be based on the previous shot, which is partly due to the overuse of editing). Compared to his more spectacular later films, Nolan doesn’t make much use of locations to shape the mood, which is really a shame given the genre and the setting. However, Insomnia cannot be denied its consistent work with props (the murder weapon, the bullet, the alarm clock) and precisely timed turning points (at first, the twists come every twenty minutes and then every ten by the end), thanks to which the film is relatively briskly paced despite its somnolence. In any case, this is the only Nolan film that I’m not tempted to watch again (for the third time). 70%

When your life becomes a point-and-click adventure and you find yourself again and again in unfamiliar places, where you try to figure out what to do with the aid of the objects that you have with you and around you... Leonard’s only “data repository” is his own body (not his mind), on which he has important information tattooed (an extension of his body is a Polaroid camera, which he uses to take pictures of the people entering his life and which therefore replaces his visual memory). His identity is based only on what he has written down and what can be interpreted in conflict with the original meaning, which is perhaps an even more relevant theme today, in an age when we let our lives be controlled by smartphones, than it was at the turn of the millennium. The expression of uncertainty in the relationship of the “self” to itself and to the outside world comprises only one of the levels of inspiration in Nolan’s ambitious updating of noir conventions for the (post)modern era (the formalistically unique films of European modernist cinema served him well in this regard). The director’s aim was to put us in the position of a man with no short-term memory. The narrative perspective is fixed on Leonard throughout the film. We see and hear only what he sees and hears. The protagonist does not remember what happened a few minutes ago and because of the non-chronological narrative, we don’t know either. Because we know the future, however, we can piece together the overall picture more easily than Leonard can. We gradually assign causes to the consequences of events and try to arrange events in chronological order in our minds, which is a slightly more demanding thought process requiring a different schematic than in the case of a standard narrative running from point A to point B. On the other hand, the linearity of the film (which makes Memento different from Following with its scenes in a jumbled sequence) makes our work easier. The individual scenes in the colour and black-and-white storylines build on each other. The former runs backwards and the latter forward in the standard way (and though it pretends to be a more objective record of reality, it contains flashbacks that are not entirely reliable), so that they intersect in the climax, which is strikingly reminiscent of the beginning and thus draws attention to the hopeless cyclicity of Leonard’s situation. At the same time, the two storylines are complementary in many ways and help us to understand the protagonist’s situation and his objective relatively early in the film. If Memento ran chronologically, it would lose a substantial part of its mysterious nature, unravelling the mystery would be a much smaller challenge and the themes of remembering, forgetting and the flow of time would not have been incorporated directly into the structure of the film. In other words, the complexity of the narrative is not an end in itself, but a determinative feature. 90%

Shot on black-and-white 16mm film, this homage to noir B-movies (I was particularly reminded of Killer’s Kiss and Pickup on South Street) contains, in embryonic form, most of the elements that we associate with Nolan’s work today. A non-chronological narrative that, in its (seeming) disorder, numerous ellipses and progression from effect to cause, is reminiscent of an unstructured recollection of an event (when we can also start the story from the most important point rather than from the beginning). The postmodern instability of human identity. It is possible to read the story as a variation on European modernist literary and cinematic experiments (e.g. Alain Robbe-Grillet), i.e. as a narrative about the narrative process (Cobb imagines the “backstory” of the people whose apartments he enters based on their personal belongings and, by making minor interventions in the domestic order, he lays the groundwork for future conflict, thus becoming the author of the plot). Following is basically a no-budget prototype of Inception (the film’s budget was roughly £3,000) – a psychological heist movie in which it is necessary to “break into” the victim’s subconscious and uncover their hidden desires in order to successfully commit a crime. When broken down into its individual parts, it would probably be a relatively easily understood story, but due to the fact that it is divided between four plot segments (plus an overarching fifth segment with the interrogation), each of which takes place in a different “time zone”, it presents a relatively difficult test of one’s attention (it is rather helpful that everything converges on one character, whose changing appearance indicates where we are on the time scale) that you will most likely want to take more than once...but even then, you probably won’t be able to say for sure what really happened (the entire film is framed by the retrospective narration of a man who has no reason to tell the truth). 80%

Master of None is a series in which racial, ethnic and gender prejudices do not make up the central theme, but are a natural part of the lives of characters representing different minorities. It is primarily a series about the lives of indecisive big-city millennials who have too many possibilities to make their lives more pleasant and the pitfalls of modern dating, and only secondarily a statement on the lives of people who otherwise remain ignored or misunderstood. It keeps a greater distance from its protagonist than shows like Girls and Louie do and more extensively takes the social and cultural context into account. At the same time, it is a series characterised by greater formalistic playfulness and visual elegance, especially in the second season. In the more divergent second set of ten episodes, on the other hand, the very generous approach to the characters takes a toll in the form of the slapdash characterisation of Francesca, which matches the archetype of the manic pixie dream girl. Because of that, the episodes based exclusively on the coming together of the central couple are not very convincing; take, for example, the penultimate hour-long episode, which is obviously supposed to recall Antonioni’s study of estrangement, but it comes across as empty, false and forced in comparison with the rest of the series. However, the advantage of Master of None is that each episode approaches a particular topic from different points of view and works as a stand-alone short film. The individual episodes are thus very diverse and always surprising in some way, though not always in a positive sense. 80%

Good Time is a much grittier and sweatier bit of neo(n)-noir than Drive, in terms of both style and digressive narrative. Instead of a straightforward journey from point A to point B, it offers unnecessary detours and dead ends. Good Time comes close to being a pure genre movie only during the opening bank heist, after which everything goes downhill in a way that other heist movies don't prepare you for. Connie doesn’t have a plan. He improvises based on who/what gets in his way. One half-baked (and sometimes very funny due to its idiocy) decision is followed by another. The film also gives the impression that it was made “on the fly”, but it holds together thanks to good rhythmic structure (alternating between quiet scenes without music and dynamic passages) and recurring motifs (Connie is convinced that he was a dog in a previous life, which explains why he and a four-legged friend get along so well later). Furthermore, the protagonist’s efforts to save his brother from going to prison are used systematically to portray the life of the New York underclass, and this portrait of people with no money, no ambition and no hope for a better future, whose drinking and drug use are occasionally supplemented with police brutality, is thus as important as the melodramatic story of self-destructive brotherly love (which makes the film reminiscent of early-period Scorsese). Together with an edgy, highly visceral thriller (shot almost exclusively in close-ups without establishing shots), we get a social drama in neon colours and with electronic music (which, apart from arcade video games, reminded me of the first Terminator) in one surprisingly compact package. What is certain is that you will not experience a similarly unpredictable and comparably intense film in the cinema any time soon. 85%

Without the participation of personalities such as Spielberg, del Toro and Streep (who reads the commentary), this look at the Second World War through the eyes of five famous Hollywood directors would easily fit in with the dozens of other war documentaries for military enthusiasts that some television channels put on their broadcast schedules with iron regularity. Bouzereau chose the most ordinary form of exposition – talking heads, archival footage, excerpts from scripted films, more talking heads, animated maps, and so on. Therefore, the content rather than the form is worthy of attention. Paradoxically, the series would have benefited if the filmmakers had adhered to a more factually dense book with greater regard for context as the source material and not tried to give the project greater prestige by attaching famous names to it (the directors involved in the documentary are connected with the directors being discussed only because they feel respect for them, not because, for example, they knew them personally – therefore, I would rather understand, for example, the presence of Peter Bogdanovich, who interviewed Ford). Though the gentlemen speak nicely about their filmmaking role models, they don’t say much of value in the end and their words of almost uncritical admiration only needlessly take up space that could have been given to something more revealing. Unsurprisingly, their colleagues who experienced the war at first hand get much more to the point in the earlier interviews. A fascinating aspect is, for example, the account of the formulation of the Why We Fight concept by Frank Capra himself, whose frustration stemming from the pinnacle of German propaganda (Triumph of the Will) led him to the idea of using that same sort of propaganda, but with a different intention. Unfortunately, Five Came Back wants to tell not only the story of how documentaries with artistic ambitions were made during the war (and subsequently used by the government for propaganda purposes), but also about the war itself, so it offers a very simple retelling of the history learned in school. The same “kitchen sink” approach characterises the whole series, which tries to cover a large number of topics, thus leaving no time to discuss at least some of them in greater depth. The view of film propaganda presented here is driven mainly by the effort to interest viewers and spur their admiration for the heroism of Capra, Ford, Huston, Stevens and Wyler, rather than to prompt them to ask more complicated questions (basically, we are led to the idea that German propaganda was bad and American propaganda, often working with similar racial and national stereotypes, was good). Though, thanks mainly to the unique footage from battlefields, Five Came Back is not a failure, it is certainly a missed opportunity. 75%

The Beguiled is a gentler, more sensual and more sophisticated take on Thomas Cullin’s novel than the film made by Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood in 1971. In the original film, the ruin of men was represented by jealous and vengeful women who were incapable of suppressing their lust. Therefore, I understand Sofia Coppola’s decision to rework the same subject matter so that the result would not be a film expressing male paranoia about female hysteria and in which Southern belles are defined solely by their sexuality (or lack thereof). Coppola dispensed with the broader historical context and replaced it with a timeless narrative about the battle of the sexes and girls coming of age. Similarly as in The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette, she confines her female protagonists to a golden cage, which provides them with certain privileges but also prevents them from freely expressing their individual interests. This confinement is manifested also in The Beguiled in the disregard for the outside world, corresponding to the point of view of privileged white girls who are only interested in their own needs. Despite its seeming one-dimensionality and superficiality, The Beguiled is a layered, subversive and humorous film with an ambiguous message. 85%

Taylor Sheridan isn't as good a director as Denis Villeneuve, but he learned a lot from him, both good (his work with landscapes, drawing out the suspense to the limits of tolerability, shocking explosions of violence) and bad (“deliberateness” and unnecessary literalness). The investigation of the crime serves mainly as a means to create an atmosphere of ruination and total disillusion (as in film noir, in which the revealing of the perpetrator often occurs rather by chance than as the result of piecing together individual clues) and as an excuse to uncover something rotten in the midst of the community, similarly as in Top of the Lake and Wilderness, though on a much smaller area, which takes its toll in the form of overwrought scenes that try to say too much at once (a woman sits in her bedroom, crying and cutting her arm; another woman sees her, closes the door without a word and leaves). Furthermore, the realistic tone is disturbed by balladic dialogue about the frozen hellscape and undefeatable evil (which would have come across much better in the pages of a book) and the use of western archetypes, shifting the drama of people anchored in a particular social reality to a timeless parable about hunters and predators and the clash of two declining cultures. The combining of these two narrative levels could have been smoother and the treatment of the female protagonist lost among men who much better understand what’s happening around them didn’t have to be so reminiscent of Sicario, and sometimes it might have been enough for the characters to simply sit and be quiet, but the catharsis that Wind River delivers in the climax is so powerful that it absolutely outweighs the unconvincingness of the film’s individual parts. 75%

Of course, there is nothing wrong with films that cater to the tastes of the masses. The fact they want to be liked (even though they may deal with rather painful issues) and do not arouse any antipathy in viewers only puts critics in a non-conformal position, as they are being manipulated. Therefore, I had a similar problem with The Big Sick as I did with last year’s Sundance hit Captain Fantastic. In a film that boldly combines observational comedy about the clash of different genders and cultures (with humour based on commenting on everyday situations in the manner of stand-up comedy) and melodrama, there is less banality and more truth. The first welcome disruption of the romantic-comedy formula is the unexpectedly early break-up, which is not the worst thing to happen in the central couple’s relationship. After the sudden genre shift, a relationship remains the focal point of the film, but it’s not the relationship between the guy and the girl, but between one of the partners and the other partner’s parents. Considerations as to whether the solution is original or cowardly and rather insensitive toward one of the characters are not very relevant, given the knowledge that this is how it actually happened. Though the film does not completely lose its humour after a change of tone, which may be reminiscent of some of James L. Brooks’s comedy-dramas, it is more serious, more moving and less egocentric than other romantic comedies by young filmmakers. The parents are given almost as much attention as the children, whose self-centredness and unreadiness for life are that much more apparent. The unexpected change of perspective, which Aziz Ansari also works with brilliantly in Master of None, leads us, just like the protagonists, to reassess what is really important in life. Emily and Kumail’s inability or unwillingness to perceive the situation that has arisen from the other’s perspective is more thoroughly elaborated in the slightly repetitive final act of this somewhat drawn-out film (which is, however, a shortcoming of most of the films made or produced by Judd Apatow). The filmmakers like to spend time with their characters and let them carry on dialogue often lasting a few minutes longer than is necessary. Most of the time, however, they adhere to the central theme of "love in spite of” and never deviate from the main storyline for so long that the narrative loses traction and starts to be boring. Besides that, they succeed in utilising most of the plot detours in an emotionally powerful climax, where the alternating perspectives make you care not only about the fortunes of the central couple, but also about the many characters around them. 75%

Homecoming is a movie version of Iron Man's remote-controlled suit (which also shows up here). On the outside, it works flawlessly and gives you everything that you expect from it (even though it is mostly just a goof; the film goes by rather quickly), but on the inside it is empty and lacks distinctiveness. Except for the scenes with Michael Keaton, whose cartoonish Walter White entertained me far more than Spider-Man’s dilemma of how to ensure world peace while hooking up with a sexy schoolmate. Vulture deserves a solo turn in which his skilfully constructed story will not be hindered by the (mandatory) references to 1980s pop culture or a teenager struggling with his hormones. I was surprised by how conservative the film seems despite its targeting of younger viewers (roughly the same age as the YouTubers whom Peter’s opening video diary addresses) who might have a rebellious streak in them. Homecoming is a veritable anti-Deadpool. The characterisation of Aunt May begins and ends with the acronym “MILF” and the other more prominent female character is here only so that Spider-Man has someone to save. Of the two people’s heroes, only the actions of the one who acts with the blessing of a huge corporation (and with the help of its super-modern drone-like technologies) are correct, though he strenuously tries to convince himself and those around him that he doesn’t need Stark to have his back, which is underscored by two impassioned scenes of last-minute epiphanies. The only touch of anarchy, which the film unfortunately does not take into account at all, is Spider-Man's reckless destruction of other people’s property (and the likely killing of dozens of civilians in the climax), which repeatedly results from his efforts to do heroic deeds. It is also for this reason that the pathos-free civilian level works much better, the dialogue scenes reminding us that Peter is, at heart, just an ordinary kid off the street who knows where to get the best sandwiches in Queens, but he cannot help you resolve serious moral dilemmas. If the filmmakers had not forced him to be responsible and had not attempted to make his action fit within the template of superhero epics, the new Spider-Man could have been much more compelling. Pro tip: take a sheet of paper containing the names of your favourite characters from the series to the cinema and mark down every time Atlanta’s Earnest Marks, Broad City’s Lincoln Rice, Silicon Valley’s Bertram Gilfoyle or Better Call Saul’s Nacho Varga pops up on the screen. 70%