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Gene Hackman is an uncouth macho farmer with minimal education and experience with women, who also lives in the middle of nowhere from the perspective of society at that time, where foxes say goodnight, and Liv Ullmann is a poor maid with no dowry, who is at the age when it is high time to start a family. Neither of them can be too choosy when it comes to a partner, and they are simply left over for each other. The story takes place in the farthest American West, actually near the Pacific coast, but you would be searching in vain for any typical western elements. It is occasionally a truly bitter study of a conflicted relationship between two completely different people, devoid of any romance. The two of them have to figure out how to get along because the other options are still a bit worse. I like the sobriety of the script, which allows for no somersaults and melodramatic twists. The participation of the great actors elevates this historical drama to a four-star affair. Overall impression: 75%.

Inside Llewyn Davis is a film that has provoked remarkably contradictory reactions. Film critics nodded approvingly and spoke of the most fundamental music film of the decade, and perhaps the most fundamental film ever devoted to folk music. The music scene shook its head disapprovingly and claimed that it was not like that, or rather that it perceived that time, events, and places that were described completely differently. The reality is this: the Greenwich Village neighborhood has an exceptional place in American cultural tradition. It was the neighborhood of famous writers, freethinkers, and bohemians, where non-conforming individuals of all possible categories and social classes gathered. In the 1930s, they broke social taboos and opened the front door of the music club to African Americans. The local society consumed drugs and practiced free love long before the hippie movement emerged. In the early 1960s, the folk revolution started there. Numerous amateur enthusiasts emerged, clubs sprouted up like mushrooms after rain, and musical performances became common in bars and cafés. Folk blossomed and merged with rock and other genres. Today's musicians largely associate the birth of modern music, as we know it today, with Greenwich Village and the time period in which the film is set. In their eyes, it is an amazingly positive, innovative, energetic, and romantic matter. However, the Coens approached it from the other side. Every revolution has its victims and losers. Overnight, new stars overwhelmed familiar faces of the past, enthusiasts had no problem performing for free, and professionals found themselves without engagements. The directing duo loosely drew from the memoirs of folk singer Dave Van Ronk, who did not stand a chance in the fierce competition. In their interpretation, the story of the main character has a gloomy atmosphere; it is the story of a man who sinks to the bottom and doesn't know how to defend himself. It is a depressing matter where bleak prospects intertwine with the self-destructive character of the protagonist. Personally, I argue that it is one of the best Coen pieces, an intimate experience that I fell in love with. However, you will have to be okay with the fact that the film has a melancholic tone and a slow pace. Overall impression: 90%.

The Debt had its sights set high with its theme and cast but the ambitious script tries to do too many things at once. The genre fusion of a love story with a psychological drama would be fine, but grafting an action thriller onto it was a mistake. I understand the producers' concern that the film should not be too intimate in its nature because adventurous elements simply sell, but at the same time they detract from its credibility and power. The most impressive aspect of The Debt is where, through dialogues, it comes to a confrontation between the characters, a clash of value hierarchies, and strength of will. Scandinavian Jesper Christensen portrays his war criminal as a terrifying monster, a cold-blooded psychopath who never loses his nerve for even a second and does not give up even in seemingly hopeless situations. He is demonic and brilliantly acted, just like Jessica Chastain in the role of the Mossad agent, who represents his antithesis. She is determined but also full of emotions and emotional confusion. Their chilling spark, whether in the office or in an illegal apartment after the doctor's capture, is the premature climax of the film. The film is not harmed by the shifting time frames, but rather by the aforementioned attempt to move the drama into a more appealing genre. The final quarter hour, when there is a final settling of accounts in Ukraine, kills the film's high potential because it pushes it to the brink of absurdity. It could have been a five-star affair, but after the final showdown between the old men, I can only give it three strong stars. Overall impression: 65%.

The events depicted in the film were by no means unknown to historians, but it took many decades for the social taboo associated with the trauma of mass rape and abuse by the advancing Red Army to be broken. The USSR and its successor Russia naturally had no interest in opening up this inglorious chapter of their troops' actions during World War II. When the Red Army reached the German borders in 1944, they had already experienced the brutal reality of heavy and bloody battles, as well as the awareness of the brutal violence inflicted by the Germans on civilians. The Red Army had retribution to exact, and the population of the first occupied German villages certainly did not fare well. However, this increased resistance from German units and soviet leadership quickly put an end to the most extreme excesses. Rape and looting, however, were inevitable; the exhausted troops simply had to be offered something. While sexual crimes also occurred within Western units, they were much less frequent and in a different atmosphere (as evidenced, for example, by the scene of the mass rape of an Italian schoolgirl in the film Two Women). On the Eastern Front, rape was of a mass nature and represented a systemic failure - and, effectively, a war crime. The victims of these crimes were unable to seek help and did not want to remind others of their pain and shame. Only after the wartime generation died or reached old age was it possible to revisit this issue. The content of the film is controversial for some even today, but in my opinion, it does not attempt to relativize the horrors of Nazism from the German side or even to falsify history. The film does not seek a black-and-white perspective; the Red Army soldiers are not one-dimensional monsters, but people shaped by war and personal experience. Their attitudes and feelings are simply contradictory - the same can be said for German civilians. In the first half, considering the subject matter, I would not hesitate to give it 5 stars, but in the second half, the script starts to become tangled in circles, and many scenes could have been edited out. So, in the end, it gets 4 stars and an 85% overall impression.

Farhadi's first Oscar win helped him understand the recipe for global success with festival audiences. In his subsequent project, he tries to follow the same path but has no luck. A Separation set the bar very high. The Salesman is like a tea bag that you just pulled out of a cup and you don't want to throw it away. So you put it in another cup convinced that it will do its job again, color the water, and give it a tea-like taste. Only this time, the tea will be a little weaker. I won't denigrate The Salesman, it certainly has its merits, but while A Separation worked almost flawlessly from a dramatic standpoint and I wouldn't cut even a minute out of it, with The Salesman I would not hesitate to grab scissors and remove 20 minutes. The storyline could do without intertwining with the theatrical scene, although for me personally, the Iranian adaptation of a typically American play was quite interesting. Equally interesting is to observe that even an internationally acclaimed Oscar-winning director does not dare to break free from the constraints imposed by the official ideology. According to him, Iranian women don't take off their headscarves even at home, and they might even wear them in the shower... In the end, I give the film 4 stars, with the fourth one being frail, just a hair's breadth away from being absent, whereas in the case of Toni Erdmann, it stands out. Toni Erdmann, by the way, deserved much more recognition from the American academics, but that's just how things go in the film world. Overall impression: 70%.

Blue Velvet feels like a relatively normal film in David Lynch's filmography. At this point, the director had not yet escaped into hallucinogenic alternative worlds, and he had not yet fully expressed that the plot is actually not important at all - what matters are the exciting moments, the entertaining details, and the fascination with the shocking and strange. However, Lynch was already refining his impressive style based on the contrast of good and evil, normality and perversion. Beneath the facade of an exemplary disciplined and polished small-town society, symbolized by the idealistic friend Sandy, the main character Jeffrey discovers an underworld controlled by psychopathic Frank. In this dark world, rules based on violence and vulgarity apply, social relationships are based on manipulation, and sexuality has a pathological dimension. Among the film's merits, I include the presence of the extraordinary Isabella Rossellini and, above all, the young Laura Dern, whom Lynch actually discovered and helped establish. I also appreciate that the director still holds back and does not get tangled up in eccentric experiments. The visual symbolism he uses here is still simple and easily decipherable. Overall impression: 90%.

If the story in this film remotely reminds you of something, then your memory is not deceiving you. The screenwriters borrowed the idea from the famous film The Apartment by Billy Wilder and modified it to suit a significant star of the 90s, Michael J. Fox. Some comments suggest that the film is underappreciated. However, the comparison with Wilder's film proves exactly where this film falls behind. I am intentionally not saying that it fails because director Sonnenfeld clearly did not have Wilder's ambitions. He wanted to create an entertaining and undemanding morsel, and he succeeded in essence, while Wilder made an intelligent and satirical comedy that mocks the American way of life. The social-critical dimension of the film is quite significant. It is essentially a morality tale on the topic of human moral integrity that is corrupted by the system. Regaining self-respect in The Apartment comes at the high cost of losing one's career. All of this is missing in For Love or Money; it is a bustling spectacle devoid of any depth and heading toward a Hollywood happy ending. Where Wilder offers two top-notch actors in the lead roles, Sonnenfeld can only offer Michael Fox and a group of average supporters around him. Gabrielle Anwar is just an ornament with a charming face. Thanks to Fox's talent, it deserves three stars, but seriously considering revisiting For Love or Money doesn't make sense. Overall impression: 55%.

1864 is a project that I approached with confidence. Danish television production rightly has a good reputation, churning out one international success after another, and in addition, considering the size of the country, it is capable of carrying out ambitious large-scale productions. The subject offered a journey into understanding historical events, the significance of which had so far escaped me. I like similar topics, as history has been my hobby since high school. The series is well-cast and full of familiar faces and it has an appropriate set design - so why only two stars? It is because I feel that something is wrong with the scriptwriting. At the end of the first two episodes, I found myself staring at the screen with a blank look and unable to remember what had just happened. Yet, the series offers many powerful themes. It is the story of a confident country that fell victim to self-delusion of exceptionalism and nationalist fervor, and in the end, it cost them dearly. However, if you can't connect with the characters in the series, if you can't appreciate the effort of the script to connect events from the second half of the 19th century with the present, and if you prefer fantasy elements, then you will simply not get into the series. In the end, I only appreciated the well-directed war scenes. There were quite a few of them, including truly massive ones, but the journey to get there was long and exhausting. Overall impression: 45%.

Many people expected that Oliver Stone and George Bush would settle things without scruples and that a political pamphlet would emerge rather than a biographical drama. For the American left, Bush's victory was a slap in the face. After all, let's admit seriously that it was on the edge of legitimacy and tested American institutions and society to the utmost. Strangely enough, Stone approached the material with the utmost seriousness and wanted to make a dignified drama. But, alas, screenwriter Stanley Weiser unfortunately didn't excel and the result was also marked by the fact that Bush Jr. simply wasn't a charismatic personality. Instead, he was in the right place at the right time, with his advisors from public relations doing the work for him. The only thing that stands out in the film is Josh Brolin's great performance in the lead role. That is clearly a five-star affair. Everything else is forgettable and, within Stone's filmography, this piece belongs to the least remarkable films. Overall impression: 45%.

After the famous film Platoon, Stone returned to Vietnam to capitalize on his personal experiences with the Vietnam War. This time, he attempted to capture the war conflict through the eyes of civilians - a young girl from the countryside whose family is threatened by pressure from both sides. Loyalty is demanded by both the government and the Viet Cong and in the interest of victory, they can act absolutely ruthlessly. Despite his left-wing beliefs, Stone looks at the Viet Cong without illusions and shows the raw reality of war from the perspective of those who have nowhere to retreat and how to defend themselves. The Vietnamese part is great and the director is on familiar ground here, using the exotic beauty of Vietnamese nature and the unique charm of the main protagonist played by Hiep Thi Le. The love romance she experiences with the American officer is also great, surely thanks to Tommy Lee Jones' charisma. The melodramatic elements, which I am usually sensitive to, did not bother me at all this time. The problem is that the film does not end with the failure of the American intervention, and Stone lets his heroes travel to America. However, the two parts of the film do not understand each other at all. The American part occupies a significantly smaller portion, and it is rushed, terse, and emotionally unconvincing. While the same protagonist is at the center of Stone's attention, it suddenly turns into a feminist manifesto, conflicting with the previous war drama in some ways. Nevertheless, I'll give it 4 stars and a 75% overall impression because 2/3 of the film is a five-star affair.