POMO

Michael Fassbender moves, walks and uses his voice in an interesting way. And that's all. His soliloquys are as empty as his character’s craft, and we’ve already seen the naturalistic depiction of brutal physical conflict between two cold-blooded professionals elsewhere long ago in more intense performances. The simplicity of the story wouldn’t bother me at all if it were dressed up with imaginative moments, an original psychological profile of the main character and some playing around with the formalistic aspect. However, The Killer offers none of that. The form is pure and precise, but not bold. The encounter with the perfectly cast Tilda Swinton at the table arouses the viewer’s curiosity and interest almost like the face-to-face encounter between Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat, but it remains the only scene that I remember from the movie. And that’s just not enough for a David Fincher flick. I unequivocally prefer The American with George Clooney, a similarly minimalistic and creatively distinctive, yet more emotionally engaging profile of an unknown killer.

A teenage Funny Games, with a portion of unpredictability in the well-crafted screenplay, but the directing doesn’t do a good enough job of depicting the growing seriousness of the situation. When the main victim is supposed to be in the greatest shock in the climax, she looks like she did in the first third of the film, when she still had no idea that this wasn’t just child’s play. The villainous brat is both well cast and well acted, and the filmmakers’ goal of spicing up the Christmas family atmosphere with a bit of morbidity is praiseworthy.

David Harbour is half of the film. He was made to play the role of a kind-hearted Santa Claus with the roots of a bad-ass Viking. The mixing of motifs from Die Hard and Home Alone, which are Christmas cult classics in America, is the right way to join their ranks in different genre garb. Wirkola almost succeeded – he combines Christmas clichés with new ideas, the endangered family members are not cliches and the narrative flows nicely. It’s just a shame that Harbour doesn’t face any correspondingly interesting bad guys for whom we would have more respect.

Based on the promo photos, A Whole Life appears to be just another bit of romantic alpine kitsch. In reality, however, it is the nicest film about life in the mountains, as well as life in general, to come out in recent years. It also offers the nicest alpine panoramas to be seen in a feature film in recent years. The choice of locations and the filmed details (the bus ride) bear witness to the director’s relationship to the mountains and will elicit a feeling of déjà vu in some viewers – we will repeatedly go back to it for the magical fragments in the subconscious perception of the high mountain landscape, where we will find peace of mind. The characters are perfectly formed and stage actor Stefan Gorski does a flawless job of portraying the protagonist. The heart of the film is the scene in which he leads his fiancée to a mountain cabin and shows and explains to her why he has settled there. Another attractive theme of the film consists in the building of the first cable cars and the electrification of the mountain villages – and the fatal injuries that occurred during the particularly hard physical work – associated with it. Great, constantly “floating” camerawork and music that is always perfectly appropriate. And that epilogue...

Nyad is a standard movie in terms of its filmmaking qualities, but it has a strong story and two masterful actors in Jodie Foster and Annette Bening, who go all out for a film they believe in. Friendship and support beyond the grave, a will and unyielding conviction that moves the world. In terms of its story, Nyad has the parameters of an Oscar winner, but it will most likely escape the attention of the masses, like Howard’s excellent Thirteen Lives from last year. I’m glad that Jimmy Chin is breaking into the field of feature films.

It’s a shame that the evil is so divorced from reality due to its physical abilities and movements, while the film itself otherwise tries to remain firmly rooted in reality. And it’s also a shame about all of the strange and ill-conceived moments in the characters’ behavior and generally how they are set in the course of the scenes. Because otherwise, this “girl under the stairs from Holdenfield” very interestingly plays with genre clichés and is capable of surprising and delighting the viewer with delicious cinematography, editing and soundtrack treats.

The influence of The Wolf of Wall Street persists. Pain Hustlers is another story about business success based on an actual event that was not entirely legal. Emily Blunt is nice to look at in her lovely costumes and Andy Garcia is likable as the billionaire boss. However, the film deals in formulas and the directing lacks a creative signature. And though it’s not boring, its value lies only in the explanation of how the pharmaceutical business works, from production to bribing doctors, who otherwise wouldn’t prescribe the medications. It’s a matter of greed and selfishness that destroy patients’ lives. Emily Blunt’s character is the only one that shows any remorse or regret. And that’s all there is.

The World is Yours is an entertaining French gangster flick mostly set in the Spanish resort town of Benidorm, which with its trashy urban character and beach vibe lends itself to confrontations among a diverse group of criminals. The film features the well-cast Karim Leklou as a battered small-time crook and the striking Isabelle Adjani as his manipulative mother with the rank of alpha criminal. Vincent Cassel’s character is surprisingly underdeveloped, but the British mobster played by Sam Spruell is delicious in his few appearances. The film gets its sense of drive from the characters and their interesting stylization. The plot can be summed up in a single sentence and it isn’t nearly as sophisticated or briskly conveyed as we are used to from Guy Ritchie.

The Conference is a quite entertaining Swedish comedy with characters who are not particularly likable, but they work sufficiently well in the plot. And with killings that – due to the fact that the film doesn’t have even a hint of a horror atmosphere – are exceedingly brutal. I praise the approach by which the film doesn’t show the initial massacres of supporting characters and dynamically edits them into the cheerful moments of the main characters, whose elimination is then shown in more detail, which creates at least some sort of “slasher escalation” concept. And the very last killing is literally a treat, for which I’m giving The Conference a solid third star.

The first segment in the apartment / on the street / in the store is congenially filmed paranoia. With goosebumps and my mouth hanging open, I witnessed the beginning of the film of the year, a film that I had been waiting decades for, a film that would put me in a cinephilic trance with every shot, every cut, every expression and every move that Joaquin Phoenix made. The second, laid-back and more comical segment still held the bar high and aroused my curiosity as to what would happen next. But with the segment in the forest, the film began to lose everything from the plot that had won me over and became an incoherent muddle of motifs and metaphors that don’t make sense in the psychological study of the main character. And if they’re supposed to makes sense, the viewer has long since lost interest in figuring them out.