Othello

It's exactly what it looks like, and if the clichéd contrast between the rational burnt-out journalist and the plain good-natured elderly lady appeals to you from the audience perspective, you'll get your rocks off just the way you like it, maybe even burn some of that laundry with the iron, forget to feed the cat, overcook dinner. The principle of reconciliation and forgiveness that is constantly pushed is the film's only emotional asset as such, but it will only work on those who like to wallow in reconciliation and forgiveness. While it has the potential of confronting a lady whose values are rather old-fashioned with many situations that affect her personally but whose tolerance is mostly a contemporary person's asset (homosexuality, AIDS, immigrants), unfortunately it's the good-natured conciliatory nature of the central character that once again makes it all a funny fable that unfortunately pulls its biggest ace out of its sleeve when the nearly 80-year-old Judi Dench says "clitoris" out loud. I'm adding a star for bringing the beautiful Irish epithet "fecking eejit" to my ears again after about 10 years.

Unlike many, it would appear, it was clear to me beforehand that Hollywood would not allow Padilha to fumble through the film the way he has done with his slum opuses, so I am thrilled with the result. Especially given that he still retained his directorial handwriting and immense talent for sustaining the momentum of sequences that could easily have been built on cutting between three static shots. As a result, the average shot length is longer than most genre trailers, and the camera often dances around action sequences to keep an overview of seemingly unanchored action that is only pinned down by set pieces (a shootout in an alley, a mock battle in a factory hall, the destruction of an ED-209 in a lobby). The reshoots from the long shots, which Padilha is very fond of using to capture action, however challenging it is to seeing the protagonist's point of view, are so smooth and non-evasive that any Branagh could envy them, and I generally enjoyed the whole thing. Compared to its predecessor, it does lack the punkish revelry in the destruction of both body and property, but while it retains the obligatory quotes, it doesn't routinely copy individual elements and finds its own alternatives to them. Namely, for example, Robocop defeating the ED-209 mecha-guards, whose firepower superiority is once again countered by their lack of agility, but this time it is their sheer numbers and thus their tactical inadequacy that is used to defeat them.

A whiny, drawn out, and incredibly uninspiring spectacle like something from the Sparks, where I had to spend the whole time thinking about my vacation starting the next day so I wouldn't eat my arm out of boredom. It embodies virtually every aspect of cinematic evil – guilt, fatalism, mistrust breaking into love, becoming a man, soft lights – and it's got practically zero budget. Better to read the book instead. A different one, that is.

Actually, the only interesting thing about Jack Ryan is the creepy armchair rightism without a shred of self-reflection. Not only is there not really much to justify the hero's reasons for superiority – he's smart, he's pretty muscular, but so are his opponents in the film, and he only wins because he's more strongly committed to service of his country – but more importantly, all the US security forces here look adorably harmless, especially thanks to the presence of a bored and fatherly Costner. While the focus of the virtually identical Spy Game also didn't address the controversies surrounding the agents and their actions, it nevertheless pointed them out and constructed a point of view. Here, Chris Pine is a constantly whining young man in the snares of the big game, who has little choice throughout the film yet seems untroubled by it, a bit reminiscent of a noodle in a lunch pail. All the while, he manages to constantly grope his girl and cast doe-eyed glances throughout the entirety of the film like it's not fair, but someone has to do it. The most fun, though, is the final shot, which is identical to the first Godfather. It's where Al Pacino closes the door on his wife and she finally realizes how her life has been pushed to the margins. Here, it’s the viewer the door closes on and the ones standing behind it are the president (with a subtle Southern accent) and CIA agents.

Ironically, the opening 30 minutes of the film, when nothing happened, were the most bearable, with much promise of interesting developments. Especially Misha Barton's voice, even if she were just reading the next stop announcements on the subway I’d easily travel a few stations further than planned, but any time it reaches a situation where the plot is about to go someplace, the director ultimately finds an opportunity to show that directing films with actors in them is not really his thing, and given that the film is based on only two things – the main couple's relationship and, in the second half, the fear of the unknown – and given that neither works, the 107 minutes are more or less a punishment. The protagonists' chemistry doesn't work simply because the film tries to embroider the unlikelihood of their romance with off-topic shots of Instagram relationship clichés that the viewer is supposed to identify with, so the element of fear is lost in the second half because you pretty much loathe the characters, and on top of that they behave in a way that makes it hard to believe they've lived to such an old age. The whole shebang is crowned by a disgustingly selfish and resigned ending that just confirms that no one in this film rightfully deserved my sympathy. On the plus side, the lighting work is quite successful and there are some technically impressive scenes. By "a couple" I mean two.

Another monstrous contribution to the scary "Holocaust for the Whole Family" sub-genre, which includes, for example, the much-adored The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Compared to that, The Book Thief isn't as aggressively retarded and sci-fi-istic, but even here the view of that whole Nazi Germany problem is summed up as Hitler and a few of his cronies deciding to wage war and cleanse the Reich, and the rest of the Germans just trying to survive before it rolls over. That demonization of the individual is actually quite an appealing progression from classic wartime films where German equated to an obligatory barrel in the back of the head; on the other hand, here the element of danger is constantly represented by the sound of car engines, whose arrival on the street where 80% of the film takes place rarely means anything pleasant. However, the problem with The Book Thief is its narrow focus on school screenings, where they check off the elements of the fact that the Nazi thing probably wasn't entirely kosher in the individual scenes, but without a hint of healthy naturalism, and for the love over a monstrous 130 minutes. The moldy cherry on the stale cake (where they made up for the missing flour with detergent), is the character of the narrator – Death, voiced by Geoffrey Rush, i.e. one of the protagonists of the story, but these characters otherwise have nothing to do with each other, so I was all mixed up when it actually comes out that Liesel's adoptive father is actually Death and they're all long stiff or something. Anyway, whenever the movie pulls off a potentially interesting and atypical scene, unfortunately someone decided that the narrator had to inform the audience that the scene was interesting and atypical.

That was such a fantasy for you. A bunch of mad women that simply no amount of imagination could ever have put together and their ride through the Balkans is something that can only be compared to Gilliam at his best. I wouldn't mind if the documentary was 7 hours long... really. In the cinema, this had to be the best collective Monty Python experience of the year.

You see the posters, you've seen the movie. The beautifully framed shots with amazing mise-en-scene are considerably more than the whole more-or-less story with characters so impenetrable that no one even wants to penetrate them. The sad kind of movie that if it wasn't dutifully artsy, lyrical, and independent, it would have been 45 minutes shorter and at least respectable. That said, it's funny how what the film really lacks most is what's often picked on in Czech films, the lack of a dramaturg who has the balls to say to a famous, renowned director, "Hey don't you feel like this is a little past the point of mind-numbingly boring?"

I wouldn't really chase the whole Gravity thing. Not only am I not particularly keen on comparing the cute ripples of the Indian Ocean to tens of thousands of chunks of space debris peppering orbital stations, but the protagonist, whose range of motion is about 6 x 6 x 6 meters on one and a half ships for the entire movie doesn't resemble Sandra Bullock in her und... I mean, orbiting the Earth. All is Lost is pretty much the same scenario as Buried. It's definitely a good movie, and I'm even convinced that the story in question couldn't have been done better, but I still feel that 106 minutes of an exhausted, aging actor in life peril in the middle of nowhere minus Somali pirates, Navy Seals, and words is more of a instructional manual on hope than a functional narrative. //// The Golden Globe for music at least reassured me that there was some music.

Always a pleasure to get an infusion of first-rate nihilism, plus combined with the formal adoration of the protagonist (slow-mo shots, hero voice over). Of course, there's a moment with every such film when it's discovered that it's all really a response to trauma, inner tension, sad childhood blah blah blah, and with that the whole Bukowski circus goes to shit. In Filth, thankfully, that happens relatively late.