Othello

I resent the general unwillingness to adapt and enjoy these purely physical genre films, especially when there's so much effort, skill, and a challenging but successful creative vision behind them. Underwater has ambitiously thrown a huge number of obstacles in its path – much of the film takes place in complete darkness, in a confined space, with disoriented characters wearing identical spacesuits. And yet it manages to maintain clarity in even the most challenging conditions without helping itself to any disruption of the original setup. It manages to do this in particular thanks to the shape of those diving suits, which since they have to withstand incredible pressure, look like something out of Warhammer, so that the characters who are otherwise piled on top of each other in these suits are actually farther apart and thus easily distinguishable. Navigating the positioning of the characters around the set, how they communicate, and what they are looking at, is also helped along by the sharp spot lights next to their helmets. And because of these kinds of different solutions to the challenges the film has set in its path, I enjoyed watching it immensely. Even if, from a technical point of view, I could have been grinning cynically the whole time (the highlight, of course, is when you can monitor your surroundings with 3D modelling in half a minute with one program and then, with a swipe of your finger, overload the nuclear core that the whole station runs on). Small bonuses, then, for the fact that the film is set in what is, for me, the most terrifying place on planet Earth and for the fact that Kristen Stewart’s character definitively tops the list of the most compelling movie characters since the invention of stone. I rank William Eubank alongside Christopher Smith, Christophe Gans, and Jaume Collet-Serra as one of my favorite genre directors.

While contemporary French comedies work with plots about how the old French find it difficult to assimilate into contemporary society, and they make films in the Czech Republic about the problems of being stuck in relationships, in Germany, judging from recent comedies, the biggest quagmire there seems to be the secure forty-something who is oblivious to life because of his constant work. But while the comedy of professional workaholics, the Japanese, usually involve at least one hilarious rape, seashells for nipples, and a gallon of blood on an octopus, in Germania they cope with the kanban by going for a summer ride on motorbikes and that's it. 25 km/h doesn't even try to make a joke, it's just a collection of heartwarming situations that, thanks to the background music, are always safely recognizable by how reminiscent they are of commercials for fruity summer beers. As entertainment, you can at least count the cameos of actors like Alexandra Maria Lara, Sandra Hüller, Jella Haase, Mateusz Kościukiewicz, and Franka Potente throughout the film, but I was probably most impressed by the unintentional portrayal of the German countryside as a kind of exuberant post-apocalyptic landscape, where you hardly meet anyone on the roads and where small towns are left behind by the wives and relatives of those who are making big bucks in multinational corporations somewhere far away in Asia. But the overall message of the film "try everything and continue to be nothing" is universally repugnant to me.

"Just look around. This guy literally lives on the Clue board." The dead guy is a wealthy author of successful mystery novels, one of the suspects is so old that no one knows how old she actually is, another one throws up whenever she lies. The rest are a bunch of poor, rich parasites, with no one seemingly having a motive for murder, so translated, everyone. And it's all investigated by a famous detective on the verge of incompetence, whose investigative methods lack perhaps only the method of strenuous squats. Once every five years, I'm regularly delighted to discover that the author of the perfect Looper and especially my beloved Brick is still alive and kickin', without being pigeonholed by Hollywood conventions, despite the fact that he probably had to be kept in chains by studio reps while filming the tired spinoff The Last Jedi. While it's a shame that his typical camera and editing gimmicks are lacking here, and the heroine is basically just the kind of innocent walking pair of eyes you wouldn't otherwise notice at a party of people like Craig, Curtis, Shannon, or Collette, let us be satisfied with the insanely unhinged script with Inspector Trachta at the helm. I'd rank Christopher Plummer's office here, alongside the shag-sub from The Spy Who Loved Me, as one of the coziest spaces I've seen in a film.

The old white French can, like few people, actually materialize their melancholy for the old days into a space that is typically a smoky café with a window in which to spend all day and observe your surroundings. From there they watched the revolutions, the transformations of society and the elites, from there they created their illusory safe space where they could sit in a corner for days and pretend to create or think about something big and groundbreaking. Then one day they suddenly had to get up and go outside for every cigarette, then they discovered that the café had actually become a wellness bistro with Wifi, and in the end it dawned on them that they were actually in their sixties and had no place to live out their days in all the social hubbub. La Belle Époque initially pretends to be about the extent to which we are able to accept illusion as reality just to have a chance to go back to the days of our youth, which is essentially a comment on why we love to hide so much in films from the 60s and 70s. In the end, however, following the trend of contemporary French comedy, the only way out is to adapt to the present, as depicted here by the protagonist who opens an Apple computer in the subway or plays ping-pong with one of the local corporate rats in the open space of his son's production company. Fortunately, the film doesn't devolve into one-sided condescending preaching, because there are multiple points of view in the film, and there has to be some sort of general compromise in order to reach a happy ending. Which is thankfully accomplished here without any character having to completely deny themselves.

A terribly basic film about the insurmountability of trauma and the voluntary exchange of life for existence against the backdrop of a frozen seaside town where the winter is so unkind that you don't meet anyone on the street and everyone lives their lives in the bedrooms, living rooms, and basements of their houses as best they can. The civility, the perfectly written and acted characters, the excellent and cohesive script where everything fits together so beautifully, all make the film a masterpiece. However, the editing is at times paced differently than I would have liked, and the crucial flashback scene intercut with Affleck squirming in the lawyer's chair strikes me as a terrible formalist misstep.

The degeneration of contemporary pop culture, which shows us stories of how a humble peasant came upon a great truth and then cleverly defeated it on his own terms, we can feel that They Live is actually a typical victim of 80s primitivism, where the truth is ideally reached with a fist, an elbow, or straight up with a shotgun. At least Carpenter does not mask in any way that the solution to the problem was basically reached by a muscular teenager who doesn't read Nietzsche in the evening, but rather Hustler and Guns & Ammo. The means by which he then seeks satisfaction simply correspond to this. And besides, Carpenter was very good at macho shoot-’em-ups and beat-’em-ups in the eighties, so it's a joy to watch.

If you can tune in to images like a naked man with elephantiasis gingerly padding across a damp, overgrown meadow under an overcast sky, you're in for some breathtaking visual manna at times. Despite the fact that underneath the skin of brooding heavy art there is actually a story about a little mermaid, where the change of the black-clad protagonist is represented by her association with white mist or snow. I notice that the official text of the distributor doesn't mess around this time.

The early 1920s. The workers are revolting, Russia has been taken over by the proletarian revolution, and you can only find an honest girl with a compass – in short, times are changing. But what is the centuries-old Count Dracula to make of it, benefiting from the emeritus traditions of noble ethics that have so far allowed him to draw energy from a veritable supply of virgin blood? On the advice of his adjutant, they go to Italy thinking that this God-fearing country logically has an ever-running fountain of virginal whores (LOL), but bad luck, bad luck, everywhere a whore in sheep's clothing. And how else, with a Marxist gardener laying it all out there with a spread collar so wide he can barely move his arms. This mustang, who gives the impression that humiliating the noblewomen is actually as necessary to him as virgin blood is to Dracula then actually acts as their last hope, as he's the only one around with the instant potency to deprive Dracula of his only hope of regaining his desperately lacking energy. His catchphrases like "Where is your sister? I want to rape the hell out of her." referring to a 14-year-old girl, or scenes where he rapes his way from "No, no, no!" to "I love you" in a single take is sure to leave not a single lap dry. Opposite him stands a shriveled and infirm Dracula, who is now almost immobile and must stoop to sucking virgin blood through bread or licking it directly from the ground after involuntary deflowering, depicting the final stages of a panting bourgeoisie in the face of a new world. Blood For Dracula is a dud that's better talked about than watched, but it's certainly a crucial contribution to the whole vampire issue, presenting us with the Count again in a different position. Daylight and crucifixes don't kill him, they just sort of piss him off, and non-virginal blood safely sticks his head in the john. It's strange that the devil's damned Dracula actually belongs so much to the age of innocence and has no chance of surviving outside of it.

The B-movie thriller Fincher originally had planned just didn't work out. He deliberately wanted to take a break from the demanding production of Fight Club with something completely genre-pure that takes place in one location. Instead, it turned out to be a 150-day long shoot and one with mainstream feminist milestones, which happened sort of unexpectedly out of the blue (the originally cast Nicole Kidman was supposed to be a classic Grace Kelly-style damsel in distress, and her teenage daughter actually took on the mothering role during the film; the script had to be rewritten after Jodie Foster was cast, because Foster is typecast as a completely different type of actress). In hindsight, it's the formal purity that is the most enjoyable part. While today's home invasion films try to convey the awkwardness of the protagonists' situation through handheld camerawork and quick editing, Fincher almost never uses handheld shots, doesn't pan and therefore doesn't move his gaze, and instead builds the entire film on the gimmick that the camera can be omnipresent, no one person controls it, and therefore we can expect practically anything from it. It's a bit of a shame that the direction then has to rely on a rather unimaginative script which really pulls the subplot out of its ass at the last minute, violently, and in short when another way for the main characters to save themselves comes after ninety minutes, but somehow goes wrong again, you start to wonder more and more if it even makes sense anymore, and with that parameter you find yourself nowhere you want to be nor where the film wants you to be.

Like its predecessor, Darlin' tries to pretend that it's smarter and more radical than smartness and radicalness, but this time around, the mess cannot be saved either by the directorial concept, nor – God forbid – any filmmaking precision. If women-empowerment films are going to look like this in the future, I think women are pretty much in danger of losing the vote again.