Othello

I've perhaps never experienced such anticipation for every new shot in a movie. Where they're going to put the camera this time, where the shot is going to come from, where it's going to take us. Every image, the layout of the characters in it, their body language, the setting of it in the real Paris and its suburbs, all create a strangely magical-realistic microcosm. This, unlike most French social dramas, is not altogether binary and yet has such a sympathetic childlike playfulness to it, reflected in the behavior and aimlessness of the actions of most of those involved. We don't know anyone’s backstory here, unless we project one onto them by virtue of their being an Arab, a Jew, a black man, or a cop. At the same time, the film constantly feels like a game where all the players know the rules, where Paris is a giant playing field where they all pretty much out of boredom just shove each other, double-cross each other, and chase each other between buildings, then they patch everything up again until someone breaks the code and a gun ends up in the hands of someone it shouldn't. Jusqu'ici tout va bien

The year 2041: an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on "The new nihilistic wave of late Hollywood": "Pinocchio is an ideal illustration of the creative nihilism that characterized the era. It was the remake of a classic cartoon, produced by a major film studio in the hands of a formerly renowned director and technical innovator. The film combined live actors with digital objects and environments, even when it would have been no problem to make the environment or objects real. The result ultimately demonstrates the creative chaos that was then unfolding in the freshly acquired and merged studios and the production companies attached to them, where the resulting work is a hectic clash between a seventy-year-old director's idea of a technologically advanced film and the inputs of dozens of focus groups and elusive external forces such as the COVID-19 pandemic or changes in distribution trends, all backed by many millions of dollars. We end up with a fairy tale that is muddled, unappealing, and (due to the poor quality special effects) creepy, obviously having completely slipped the hand of any creative contribution. The palpability of how much everyone who had anything to do with the film had already given up during production was another element that added to the collective depression on which the culture wars of the time were based."

Vallée's American directing career rested on the fact that he could handle themes in a distinctive, ambiguous, and relatively naturalistic way that would have ended up as slick motivational kitsch under most other filmmakers. But when his abilities were finally able to join forces with the abysmal suffocation of Gillian Flynn's subject matter, his potential was tapped to its fullest. Sharp Objects is eight hours of watching a staid, static Southern town with resigned, mentally ill characters, shot through the lens of a traumatized alcoholic. And so we watch everything through the not particularly comfortable formal method of static shots, which are nonetheless shot handheld, with occasional characters or impressions of characters who aren't even supposed to be in the scene, all interrupted here and there by a traumatic half-second flashback, as diegetic music plays almost exclusively from car radios or speakers somewhere in the background. Most of the characters speak in tired half-whispers and never say anything. They all have their pastimes and rituals to fill the dullness of everyday life. I wouldn't have expected a miniseries to mount such a thorough effort to keep the viewer in unfulfilled frustration in the constant company of unpleasant characters, where everything from the first to the last shot happens at the same snail pace without any gradation or payoff. The elusive omnipresence of evil makes this one of the most powerful horror experiences ever, where after each episode I was afraid to turn my head quickly.

The best installment in the trilogy. Still a completely incoherent mess full of unnecessary scenes, unspoken motivations, incomprehensible characters and, in the tradition of this creative duo, insanely mishandled dialogue. I have two theories about why the Garden Store trilogy looks the way it does. I'm drawn to the first by the many glaring formal errors, especially in the editing. Often the cut often later than it should, sometimes it comes earlier. They fail at portraying transitions in time. All of a sudden, between two interior scenes, there is a shot of the protagonists in Stromovka Park in Prague, such that you can’t tell what it’s supposed to be telling you. In a film this well-funded I would never have expected that a second camera would appear at the edge of the frame or that no one would notice a microphone dipping into the frame. It gives me the feeling that Hřebejk got real tired of it sometime early on and tried to spend as little time on it as possible, and the longer the production went on, the more his mind was elsewhere. He probably didn't show up for post-production at all. My second theory is prompted by how the entire trilogy is so inhuman, mechanical, and lifeless. It's quite possible that an artificial intelligence was behind it, into which all (ALL!) of Hřebejk's previous films were uploaded as a frame of reference for it to use to create its own film. There are those attempts at poetic moments, the absurdity of the mundane, there is the indictment of human small-mindedness, the minor courage, the strong gestures, the tragedy and reconciliation. But it all seems to have been coldly compiled on the basis of these buzzwords alone. A silly but appealingly intimate scene of a couple getting back together over the phone is immediately ruined by the girl bounding out of the post office and dancing in the streets. An equally goofy but potentially quite endearing scene in which the whole family discovers that their daughter is still innocent because she has guilelessly blown up a condom like a balloon, such that they all poke at it out of relief, is degraded by the fact that it all has to be said out loud. And now it occurs to me – why did she break up with him in the first place? Geez, I hope it wasn't because she was scared after hearing her aunt's story that her vagina might reject her boyfriend's penis, was it? Jeez, now that I think about it, it must have been. Noooo.

Hřebejk and Jarchovsky's idea of how to make a "major motion picture" where characters are ruthlessly transformed against the backdrop of brutal history. It's just a shame that you giggle like a madman the whole time, because this artsy drunkenness is fantastically accelerated by the totally obscene (mis)direction and the inept script. Hřebejk clearly has no say at all in how the performers are supposed to conceptualise their characters, so they go to all sorts of lengths to build strong personalities. Machacek's "dramatic transformation", which forces him to alternate between several acting jobs, where he easily outstrips everyone by a wide margin, is perhaps somewhat reminiscent of Bruno Dumont. Jarchovsky hasn't had a clue how people talk to each other for a good ten years now; in my opinion, he doesn't read anything he didn’t write himself, but that doesn't stop him from writing epic historical pieces about how the sleazy Štěpán Kozub, who throws rocks at girls and doesn't want to work (because he's a communist!!), is stealing stuff from a nice, quirky gentleman with a moustache and a coffee machine. It's insane, really, it's almost impossible to watch, but for some reason this creative team manages to keep a close watch over the design and the camera the entire time, so I can't bury it too deep. Besides... well, thanks to the above, I actually had fun with it.

Once again Dolan uses a huge range of audiovisual masks in order to simulate the depth that the characters lack. He takes refuge in spatial orientation, shoots three-quarters of the frame in handheld closeups, slips into a music video several times, and tries feverishly to sell the subjective perception of destructive lovemaking. Except that he has nothing but poorly written, affected, inanimate vessels for love with no integrity. For me to be able to understand loss of self due to painful infatuation, there first has to be a self to lose. But the characters here don't exist outside of their scenes.

An utterly unremarkable European sociodrama whose only interesting aspect is that in several details it comes across as a poorly executed screenplay from 2008. It's set in the present day with selfies on smartphones, but at the same time people have alarm clocks by their beds, read magazines in their spare time, and make references to the crisis. Besides, these bourgeois ideas about how those from the lower economic levels of society somehow automatically stick together and hang out prevent the film from being taken as any kind of documentation of a bleak situation, but instead make it a heartwarming fairy tale that ultimately helps no one.

"I can't even do that." "So what can we do?" "We can't do anything." Chytilová has always been ahead of other New Wave representatives with her causticity, because her critique of society is first and foremost a critique of patriarchy. And from that perspective, Daisies is easily applicable to the present. Two women who have been declared incompetent, their offence that they continually subvert their assigned roles, and in doing so make poor men cry. After all, most of the film takes place not in the typical socreal setting, but in luxury restaurants and at feast tables with semi-cretinous bourgeoisie, obviously a reference to her long experience in various lower filmmaking positions she held for many years at Barrandov, which seems to have shaped her quite a bit as a person.

I remember when I saw a poster for the film somewhere and burst out laughing. So I'm not in marketing, but I'd love to watch from a distance to see how many moviegoers will be lured to the theater the by something called Garden Store: A Family Friend. A more settled and unexciting title next time please, said your great-grandma. Apart from that, A Family Friend is probably the strongest testament yet to the preserved and isolated creativity of Hřebejk and Jarchovský, where the dramaturg truly failed miserably. The result is a narrative avant-garde where time is distributed between plots, subplots, and illustrative moments in a completely bizarre way. So for the viewer, the film actually becomes a bit of an interactive adventure, where they try to guess from the film what it's about and what it’s actually trying to be. I would have thought I could better handle Sokol in a "serious" role since I've never actually heard him say anything funny so I don't consider him a comedian, except that his acting register occupies only a strangely infantile position in the range between a young Daniel Craig and an old Marilyn Manson. Then, at the end, I was fascinated by two shots, first when we see a panorama of a street in Terezin, which he cuts away from right after the camera crane starts to lift, and then the last one, where a character is obscured by a ceiling lamp, yet he still cuts after the actress reaches her mark, except that you haven’t been able to see her for five seconds. It clearly indicates that no one on the creative team watched it all the way to the end. I look forward with loathsome spite to the next installment, whose poster this time around suggests another solid slice of the wave of "new Czech weird cinema".

A Chiara fulfils to a tee that little cliché of the successful festival film – a coming of age film, strong female characters applied to an old patriarchal world, naturals in the lead roles, and intimate, subjective cinematography. I don't really have a problem with any of this, and on their own those individual elements mostly work. What's harder, though, is how it works as a whole. This is because Carpignano's film has quite an intense and specific formal method where the camera is permanently zoomed in on closeups of faces. He makes almost no use of establishing shots, nor does he give the viewer a chance to orient themselves in space in any way. At the same time, however, this distinctive approach, which remains unchanged throughout the film, doesn’t correspond to the fact that the plot develops quite substantially and the viewer is clearly required to make an emotional investment. And yet every scene here creates the same mood. After an hour, the static faces against a blurred background arouse doubts as to whether there is any process whatsoever driving them. But I admit that in this case, despite my policy of not finding anything out about films before I watch them, it might help to know that we are actually watching one real family for the entire film.