Othello

Jordan Peele's open arms for horror social satire might suggest that the genre is being given some relevance again after the era of stupid ghost flicks, but that would be to forget that combing social ills in extreme hyperbole was already in the job description of the Purge tetralogy. And that was a load of crap. Ready or Not isn't that bad, and there's definitely a bigger head behind it, as revealed by some witty dialogue (for me, the argument about how tradition is important, but when you're leaking in your shoes, you start to consider that after all, its author would also have used contemporary technology if it had been available to him at the time) or the hilariously bestial ending. But the problem is that the whole thing is terribly unbelievable – the characters of the rich are simple caricatures without a shred of respect, the violence doesn't hurt, the fire doesn't burn, the vulgarities ring false, you don't trust the actors to take a drag from a cigarette, and the violence is the kind of cool domestic hurt where blood spurts, brains stick to walls, and wounds open, but in that safe movie way where it's actually kind of funny. Luckily, Samara Weaving is a wild one who gets it all right, and her clucking at the end will probably be the only thing I'll remember from the film a year from now.

At the end of Besson's La Femme Nikita, Tchéky Kario smilingly announces to her boyfriend that they're going to miss the girl and he just takes an unhappy drag from his cigarette, nods his head and looks out the window in response. And I kind of think that despite all this, this is how we're going to talk about Luc Besson when it all falls apart, Europa Corp goes bankrupt, and he himself goes into images of the past. Because as much as we may freak out about the lack of logic, the lack of a coherent plot, the attempt to disguise the awful digital imagery, the completely incomprehensible anachronisms (for at least the second time with Besson, I feel like he decided on the period when the film would be set no earlier than in post-production), or the lack of dramaturgy, we still have to remember that this is the price we pay today for watching some of the last of the West’s auteur action films. Moreover, in this case, Besson takes a ways further his torch of the Cinéma du look movement, which worked with a distinctive advertising aesthetic, among other things. Indeed, everything here is completely secondary to the product Besson is interested in – the three-foot, thirty-pound and, in the action scenes, utterly breathtaking Sasha Luss. That's why the only things that work in the film are the things she touches, and only because she’s the one touching them. The resulting Gaussian curve, where we are moved from irritating civilian scenes to the best action sequences of the year, is probably best expressed in the words of Milan Vébro, director of Settlement of Crows 2: "It was great! It was terrible."

James Bond in "How do you do, fellow kids?" mode, which also serves as a reminder of the terrible formal procedures typical of MTV videos of the era, which are somewhat of a rarity, given that they were hip for only about two years.

So, as I was going through the user comments on this film, I came across several references to a "70s/80s vibe" for a film set in 1968. Which reveals an interesting fact about how it doesn't really matter when any film is set, because the only thing that matters about that era is that it's retro and the whole illusion of the era is just a kind of winking backdrop that, in various elements, harkens back to a time that might not have been. The retro here is really instantaneous, because despite the old cars, Nixon on TV, and recruitment centers in small towns, you don't feel like you've gone back in time at all, but you can feel exactly how half a meter behind the camera the rest of the crew are boredly scrolling through Twitter on their phones, looking for what to buy on Amazon. Several times I found myself wondering why the characters don't just use their phones, before realizing that it was actually the sixties. Because everyone here is behaving at the very least in a contemporary way. The redheaded freckle-faced nerd the film convinces us is somehow outsider-ugly is evocative of the forty-year-old porn actress who makes ponytails so her video can be labeled "barely legal", the Hispanic hunk has as much acting and visual equipment as anyone on the Disney Channel, and the last of the foursome – Merry and Pippin – are riding the acting school of teen comedy supporting roles in their second half. When I add in the utterly incompetent patchwork that someone dared call a script and whose character work is in crayon, then my rating doesn't make much sense. Well, that's of course the fault of the supervising del Toro, who is very likely behind the design of the three monsters the film brings us. And as much as we don't enjoy the first one, and the last one is such a digital piece of junk, the second monster, which I've dubbed 'Mommy', and its brief scene make for more horror than the rest of the film. That's when the real horror peeks out for a moment, the real and basic horror premise of something slowly akin to something seemingly ridiculous and therefore disturbingly hideous. That sequence actually generated a full three stars.

A terribly interesting thesis about the depopulation of the countryside due to the more tangible presence of its unresolved history represented by its dead. And everything is incredibly slow. In the best moments, the film even stops altogether. However, the omnipresent winter, mournfulness, incompleteness, and sense of loss would surely have worked better if the exposition had relied more on objects, location, and space than the characters themselves, but how can you fault a film that concludes the entire hundred minutes of quiet desolation with credits underscored by The Body's industrial noisemakers.

Awesome choreographed madness where every raised eyebrow has its place + of course a bunch of FTW ideas like hopping undead and sticky rice solving all the trouble caused because it binds undead toxins to itself, which makes sense.

FOD with simultaneous dubbing, ergo I have no idea what the film is, but A. Tesař delicately delivering the line "I like gay dicks" will stay with me forever. I was disappointed that the role of the school principal was not ultimately played by Donald Pleasance.

The dense Lovecraftian atmosphere of a backwater coastal village with crazed murderous inhabitants grabs you right from the start. The rest is then kept on the move by Stan Winston's terrific work, properly horrific set design (the ending with the projectors), and decent cinematography. It's just a shame that the dialogue fell victim to the film's radical change in genre (it was originally intended to be a horror comedy) following a change of sponsor.

I was looking forward to watching BoxOfficeMojo halfway through the film, whether this forlorn, static bore cost two hundred million bucks. And it did! Because if there's anything that downright screamed at me from this movie, it's the filmmakers' panic. And so it was probably from the fact that somewhere in the process they're horribly out of money and they're unable to figure out and patch up where. I don't see any other reason for why the movie looks like it cost a million and fifty. Like the similarly overpriced last entry in the F&F franchise, it alternates three types of shots: static mid-shots and medium close-ups with aggressive drone flyovers. Which reveals an unfortunate attempt to successfully divide the scene and the three elements that are supposed to sell it, namely famous actors and expensive locations. However, the filmmakers lack any sensibilities for this. On the one hand, there's a harrowing five-minute-or-so scene with Kevin Hart painfully searching for a joke the entire time and unhappily cutting between three static shots so pointlessly that I got the impression the actors involved weren't actually in the same room at the time. On the other hand, a telephoto drone circles furiously during a scene of Johnson and Kirby drinking beer on the shore. I was absolutely furious at the work of the production designer, who must have had it all famously up their ass, because if a location headline in a movie announces "secret tech headquarters of terrorist group in former factory" I expect anything but the interior of a movie studio, with four tents set up on the sides and white lamps running down the middle. The logical guess that it only took half a day to build the set again goes pretty much against the solid fact of a two-hundred-million-dollar budget. I'll skip over the pastel image, the completely CGI action scenes, the fact that Vanessa Kirby twists her face like a pike most of the time, dozens of other failures, and stop at the last one – namely the characters. Because if there was anything I was eminently uncomfortable with, it was watching two elite assassins who don't go far for a shot or a bullet cursing each other in accessibility for the whole family, feigning any mutual animosity by quirking their eyebrows and constantly varying the fact that someone has a small penis, someone has a big penis, and it usually comes with the fact that the one with the big penis has big testicles and the one with the small testicles has a small penis. Combined with dialogue like "You know, when we get there, you can't kill anybody, Hobbs." "Yes, Shaw, because we have to use their retinas to pick the lock." "That's right, Hobbs." we might as well admit that any affinity for this masterpiece is essentially an act of resignation to the action movie genre. "Oh no, it's self-aware and clever when it quotes Nietzsche!" Shut up.

Mandragora: Freelancer Edition (it’s not even short a rich music-loving sadist or drugging a client to clean out his apartment). I appreciate raw naturalism until the moment it turns into exploitation, and the vehemence to show the utter bottom by giving the tubercular protagonist nothing to do but drink from a puddle and sleep with his head on the curb in the middle of the street is getting dangerously close. If I can appreciate the film for not taking note of the salon straight liberals of Pride with its scenes, and admit that one scene emotionally wrecked me with its sudden tenderness (the doctor), then I can't overlook when the film, despite its point of inexorability, tries to have some development and is thus forced to drive the protagonist to the brink of mild mental retardation.