POMO

For a small, indie thriller about one of today’s most disturbing real issues, A Desert is good. But we’ve already seen the same conflict depicted much more impressively and enjoyably in the fifth episode of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Too Old to Die Young. The expository build-up before the key twist is better than the execution of the twist itself. The scene that’s supposed to be the most shocking isn’t very shocking at all and the director completely avoids bringing it to a resolution in which the tension would take our breath away. And I’m afraid he avoided it not because he wanted to be original, but because he didn’t know to do it better. [Sitges FF]

A desert and a gas station with a weirdo and a confused girl after a car accident. The motif of intersecting time planes is not exactly original, but as always, it is reliably entertaining. And when the film’s pace starts to slow, clever connections are made, as in the films of Moorhead and Benson. At one moment, it even seems like a promising reflection on fateful “coincidences”, which touches the heart. But then the director strips the sentiment out of the story in the climax. [Sitges FF]

MadS breaks some kind of record in serving up a brilliant (!) exposition and then criminally failing to fulfil expectations. With its inverted dramatic arc, MadS is impressive in its strong technical ambitions of a continuous one-take film, kicked off with an extreme situation promising great development to come, only to lose its lustre in the second half with gradually diminishing ideas due to screenwriting incompetence. And wretched logic. What a shame! [Sitges FF]