POMO

Watching this when you’re at home fighting the flu is a treat par excellence. Antiviral is an unlikable movie in every way, with an apt satirical theme and sterile form. There is a lot of white, which adds emphasis to the coughed-up blood, injections with herpes viruses and eating of meat created from human cells in a laboratory. Actually, from the cells of admired celebrities. “Celebrities are not people. They’re group hallucinations.” Antiviral could entertain me if it had a sensible 80-minute runtime, but not like this. I otherwise like bizarre debuts by original filmmakers.

Eli is one of those horror movies that starts promisingly and ends as a bad joke. Or rather, its not that it doesn’t make a cool point, but a lot of the connections between the characters and details in their behavior are shaky, as if twenty important minutes had been left out of the film. Not to mention basic mistakes in continuity like the intact hairstyle of the boy who’d had part of his hair shaved off the day before so that they could drill into his skull. The long ghost-story part of the film is properly chilling, but we have seen it all a hundred times before when at least the characters weren’t talking through the insulating glass between the interior and exterior of a thoroughly sealed building. This film is even more lobotomised than its protagonist after the second surgery.

A punk junkie comedy with a cadence of humorous profanity and one-liners and a dramatic climax that gives it an element of seriousness. The film’s creative editing and the authentic form of its hectic handheld (iPhone) camerawork not only give it a solid sense of drive, but also make its otherwise sparse story entertaining, even though the shaky close-ups of faces are too much for the big screen. The depth of Mišík’s expressive acting in the final scene reveals the greatest trauma of his life, when as a child he wanted ice cream and didn’t get it. You will enjoy this film more if you aren’t familiar with the formalistically similar but, in terms of screenwriting, more sophisticated work of the Safdie brothers (especially Uncut Gems).

Banality with banal characters in a banal setting, but it’s very well cast and acted, and even touching in its gentle and precise depiction of the dramatic nuances in the conflict between two newly in-love people. This film has heart and, mainly, the fantastic actress Pavla Gajdošíková in the lead role. She elevates Mistakes to four stars.

Take the girl from It Follows, impressive forests and an average screenplay with hackneyed ideas, put it all together and you have genre pap for Paramount+ subscribers. It’s interesting for a moment but otherwise ridiculous, thoroughly bland and unnecessary.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is spectacular and colourful – the characters, the production design, the costumes and the excellent arrangements by soundtrack composer Göransson. But it’s also inordinately long, with repetitive dialogue rehashing the same things, a mighty villain with a weak personality, an underwater world that’s not nearly as sophisticated as the one in Aquaman, and the borrowing of ideas from other Marvel movies that don’t fit here (e.g. Iron-Man costumes and flying in them). The first Black Panther was surprising with its distinctive soul and the compelling African mystique of the ethnic roots of a new, superbly functioning superhero movement. This is still a respectable Marvel formula, but altered only for effect.

Babylon is a subjectively irrelevant and aesthetically disjointed depiction of early Hollywood with hackneyed (Brad Pitt), uninteresting (Diego Calva) and annoying (Margot Robbie) lead characters. Chazelle overshot the mark. If it weren’t for the accompanying jazz interludes, you wouldn’t even recognize him in this. The wild parties and scenes of hectic filmmaking are entertaining, but you can sense the strong theatricality in them. The scene of filming on the first soundstage is the best of the whole film, both in its execution and cinephilic dimension. But as soon as the overly long runtime veers into into a fatalistic lament over the inability to go along with progress, it gradually goes downhill, all the way into the “LA shit hole”, i.e. the most WTF scene in the whole film.

As a superstitious believer in traditional values, Shyamalan has run out of ideas for points to make in that regard, so he at least comments on more complex social issues. Specifically, same-sex adoption. The dramaturgical intent with the viewer is clear, but in order for it to work, we would have to take the home-invasion situation very seriously (though it’s entertaining in the context of the genre, it just can’t be taken seriously) and disbelieve the intruders’ theory (which we have no reason to do, since anything is possible with such a bizarre array of characters, especially in a Shyamalan film).

“I went for a colonoscopy last month, and it was like looking at a painting by Jackson Polyp.”  Such a great start...and such a dull result. The central couple are pulled creepingly into hell through sinister symbolism, tantalising sexuality and a tragic accident. Infinity Pool is Lynchian in its dreaminess, Cronenbergian in its physicality and punk in the manner of Kubrick. The flashes of A Clockwork Orange are the last things to work in any interesting way in the second half of the film. The tremendous potential of the initial motifs remains undeveloped: it would have been great to work with the psychology of the central couple’s relationship (she doesn’t know what has changed and is horrified as she gradually uncovers it), to reveal the bizarre world of the island with its terrifying rules, and to metaphorically interweave the whole film with the motif of a burned-out writer’s search for inspiration. Instead, young Cronenberg and his protagonist are stuck in the unjustifiably antagonistic vanity of a bunch of people disconnected from empathy and their own identity.

The Whale is a balanced mix of intimate psychology and touching sentiment. It is engaging primarily thanks to its main character, the likes of which cinema has not seen before, as he is shocking in his appearance and studying his inner self is enjoyable. Brendan Fraser is excellent with incredible make-up and is supported perfectly by Sadie Sink in the role of his daughter. Their encounters overflow with unspoken emotions and anger over the hurt on one side and regret on the other. Yes, Fraser’s character pities himself too much and his discovery of the importance of sincerity in life is laughable, but even so, The Whale remains a beautiful and sensitive film that doesn’t lack artistic investment by its creator.