Othello

The hapless and clueless Brejchová has so much of that cutely goofy esprit of rural naivety and pure femininity here that she steals every scene, even when she’s just sitting there looking confused. The rest (especially the party scene with the soldiers), as is usual with the duo of Papoušek-Forman, I finished watching practically from under the table, I felt so embarrassed. A painful study in the inability to communicate, which I would have shot into space to prevent a possible alien civilization from making its first attempt to meet humanity from anywhere outside of Žďár.

"I fell asleep in the cinema and when I woke up, there was no one there and it was dark everywhere." Gan Bi is a rare case of young, unpolished talent that can still faithfully portray youthful resentment, melancholy, fatality and need for escape of the almost obsolete cynicism typical of the most self-important battered art filmmakers (especially European ones). As such, his characters are a combination of adult weariness and childlike naivety, and thus find fulfilment only through dream logic as opposed to what is for them far more surreal and incomprehensible, namely reality. The film is in fact an act of resistance to awareness, understandable for a sensitive young filmmaker living under technocratic despotism. While that may make the whole thing seem like an overly obvious cinephilic soak (direct quotes from Tarkovsky and the same plot concept as Lynch's Mulholland Drive), all is forgiven in the second half, which is the realization of a dream so familiar that it is impossible to gird yourself against it. And because of that alone, this film should be required viewing from three in the morning. Incidentally, if you have that one film on the tip of your tongue while watching that you’re reminded of but can't put your finger on, it's Trier's first feature, Element of Crime, which also used neo-noir to portray a heavy-handed love of Tarkovsky and was made by a twenty-eight year old hottie fascinated with exploring the limits of camera movement.

Oh, my God, what have they done to us at Blumhouse? The trailer practically lures you into a teen slasher, and what actually arrives is this kind of slow-burning Hitchcockianism, underpinned by well-written characters, and on both sides. Whether it's an innocent first high school crush or a tale of finding the lost youth of an older woman who has always had to stand on the sidelines, almost every scene works by making you perhaps far more forgiving of her than you normally would be. The patience and discipline with which the film slowly builds to its bloody finale is admirable, as is the unassuming direction, but by simply framing it in exteriors (even in the city, the individual shots only let you see at most one or two buildings at any given time, even in large units), it manages to effectively portray an American nowhere land where the greater promise of the Friday night bash simply isn't there. Jason Blum would have surprised me enough with this film if I didn't know that he's above all a savvy businessman, and with a film featuring a central black character whose motivations stem from past misadventures, he's trying to pump up the trend of successful Jordan Peele-style horror films.

Warner Bros crammed 200m into a reminder of how much we should have appreciated the previous Edwards auteur blockbuster. We didn't appreciate it, after the harvest we're going to have to suck Chinese dicks. Good for us. A film about a room with six people in it flying around the world watching a digital cartoon.

As happy as I am that Olivia Wilde has resuscitated the true 1998-2009 teen comedy (and not the al-too-common adult take on a changing teen masquerading as a teen movie), I can't rate this film except by comparing it to Mottola's Superbad. Here, too, the quiet Asterix and the vulgar and expressive Obelix go to their high school's last party, which may be the last chance for them to experience anything together, given that the Sword of Damocles of impending adulthood is looming over them both. And they, too, must earn their presence there, but the reward hanging in the air is once again the ultimate inter… vention in their hitherto untouched love lives. Although they don't achieve the greatness of their forebear (which nowadays I don't think is even possible), they deserve a huge thanks for waking this hibernating genre, not to mention that at most points it works the way it should. It's funny, you root for the characters even though they actually piss you off, and when it comes to the first hints, the subtle touches, the hiding under the surface of the pool, and the karaoke, you'll be seventeen again (unless you're already completely sealed in the fat of adulthood). The timing for the mos part isn't perfect, the script occasionally goes out of its way just to have an arc, and the effort to find my Emma Stone in the cast of supporting characters was rewarded with no more than her distant soulmate Gigi, but I'm glad the girls finally got a good teen comedy, a genre that didn't include them at all during its heyday, and instead dumped the weighty and fatalistic responsibilities of Young Adult films onto their shoulders, while boys could jump straight from the teen genre onto the superhero train headed to outer space and beyond, which they can follow to their deaths.

How to stay true to the idea and structure of Henlein's premise while epically wiping your ass with it and its entire author. The inability of critics of the time to recognize the satire in a film steeped in Reiefenstal-esque angles and the sectarian milieu of a utopian Earth, not to mention the cast, demonstrates time and again the importance of building a sensitivity to the form of film, the Achilles heel of most film theorists. ___ Update 2021: I am convinced that there is no such thing as immunity to visual propaganda, and whoever thinks they have it is saying so in the name of propagandizing others. After years of rising above the propagandistic nature of Starship Troopers, it only just dawned on me that the proper reading is to succumb to it for a lovely 129 minutes and, through cheering on those beautiful young people, to enjoy that sense of power and purpose. It's an important cathartic experience that ultimately helps you be more sensitive to the natural need to fall for that propaganda and marketing in real life.

A bold piece of filmmaking aimed at pissing off everyone who went to see a movie about Ted Bundy. A film made from his fabricated point of view as an intelligent, young, charismatic, and most importantly, innocent handsome man who, thanks to the aforementioned parameters, uses his persuasiveness to gather fans from the ranks of violence freaks, who in turn are pinned to him by the idea of a public trial filled with lurid descriptions of the details of Bundy's actions. Acts that we, on the other hand, see virtually nothing of and for the most part aren't even mentioned throughout the film. And implies that if we have a problem with that, we might as well get in line behind the wacky fans of this murderous celebrity. In fact, the film ultimately turns its full attention at the end to the tragic figure of Bundy's girlfriend, actually his biggest victim, who has lived for fifteen years wondering who she was really hanging out with because even Ted is unable to redeem her to the last moment with the truth. Whatever that is. Berlinger's film isn't very well made, it contains some downright idiotic scenes (the dogs successfully identifying the killer), and the casting agency party that led to this cast will take at least a week to recover from, but it's a respectable treatment of a certain uncomfortable thesis that boldly identifies the very specific hypocrisy that applies to almost every one of us who saw the film. And that concept is worthy of respect in our infantile pop culture zeitgeist.

A unique compilation of screenwriting and directing flaws that carefully whitewash the fact that everything we see is just a narrow slice of the grand concept of "superhero horror". As such, nothing in the film exists offscreen and nothing there has any character. The filmmakers at least acknowledge this by saying that in order to be able to awaken any resonance in the audience at all, they crank up the sound at the right moments and the characters die in pretty decent Aja-esque gore circuses.

The three-year hiatus swiftly aided this and even though the script, suffering from about a dozen rewrites this time around, is truly lame, The Spy Who Loved Me has become for me a top 3 representative of the current trio of Bonds. Sharing second to third place with On Her Majesty's Secret Service and trailing behind Goldfinger. This is mainly due to the production team's respect for the work of production designer Ken Adam, after whose painstaking and unceasing work on all the previous installments was given a blank check to create the exteriors and interiors and was thus able to go all out, both in creativity and in all his grandeur. So whether its the Eisenstein-inspired office of the KGB general, the secret British Secret Service base under Abu Simbel, the monstrous tanker-submarine, or the famed construction of the submarine Atlantis, they all retain exactly the creative period esprit of technological advancement combined with innovative design for which Bond films are famous. Plus, the closing submarine love nest is one of the coziest spots on the movie screen, where I could easily hump for days. This time, you really can cheerfully ignore the lame old man in the jacket and his rubber plaything trying to convince you of something she can't even pronounce. Because here above all you can enjoy to the fullest the environment where it takes place and the wild action scenes, where no expense was spared. The Leicester cinema where the film was screened on opening night with the assistance of Prince Charles knows a thing or two about that, where the entire cast stood in silent awe during the opening jump off the mountain.

Interesting man, that Honnold. Too bad he's climbing some stupid rock most of the time. However, the overseas fascination with this elusive climber is understandable. A great story of indomitable human spirit, the will to fight and overcome one's limits is, of course, sheer manna for all the motivation freaks who need great human stories to get them to do something. But then it's brilliantly contrasted with Honnold's utter incapacity for self-presentation, his closed-off and disarming pragmatic honesty, which in a country running on a mantra of expressive self-expression must come across as something of a mysterious element, despite the fact that this country has busloads of such people. The tedious attempts to communicate with his mediocre, uninteresting, and somewhat dense girlfriend will at least identify which side you are on. Because I kind of suspect that she's there as an audience surrogate.