JFL

Only a malevolent saboteur or hopeless amateur could turn an all-star action film into an exercise in missed opportunities. Unfortunately, Jesse V. Johnson has written himself into the memory of martial-arts film fans as an incompetent who buried the film that was supposed to be the most spectacular hit of the new millennium. Furthermore, it actually could have been just such a hit because, unlike the geriatric and senile The Expendables, this film brings together the biggest names and strongest talents of the West and Far East who are martial-arts practitioners themselves. If this had been put into the hands of someone who knew how to shoot fight sequences, such as Isaac Florentine, let alone Chad Stahelski, it would have been adrenaline nirvana. Johnson, however, completely wastes both the skills of his actors and the work of the chief choreographer when he incomprehensibly sets the film’s climax in the dark and focuses more on his backlighting gimmick than on the attraction of the martial arts on display and the pairing of the stars against each other. Furthermore, here and in other scenes, he holds the camera too close, so that the skills of those involved and the dimensions of the scene cannot make a sufficient impression.

The motif of freedom is intrinsic to every road movie and every film about outlaws, but in the case of Queen & Slim, it takes on much more urgent contours, as the premise is rooted in a situation that poses a completely realistic threat to part of the American population. From the initial situation in which two ordinary people who are just getting to know each other over dinner become involuntary outlaws, Lena Waithe, who superbly thematicised the cycle of violence in her dramatic series The Chi, does not veer into the expected exploitational or genre conventions. Though she works well with the tension stemming from the question of whom the protagonists can trust, she focuses primarily on the central couple themselves and their gradually developing relationship. Thanks to that, viewers will not get a “black Bonnie and Clyde” (as is sarcastically mentioned in the film), but rather a spellbinding and tremendously stylish contribution to the lovers-on-the-run category that is not merely a variation on the theme, but a standalone work that additionally comments on the tragic aspects of racial tension in contemporary America.

Walter Hill can try to do his best with his characteristic visual style, which is updated here with some news-reports and sports-events touches, but unfortunately the script and characters do not give him much to work with. The first Undisputed gets credit only for being the start of a franchise, which had to be placed in the hands of direct-to-video craftsmen in order to mine from it that which the fallen stars of the genre were unable to muster, namely a proper trashy fighting movie that discards well-drawn characters and instead offers viewers solid physical action.

Scott Adkins as a living, breathing special effect. It is enough for the film to have him and a capable choreographer; nothing else is needed. The third instalment of the Undisputed franchise does not have as substantial a screenplay as the two preceding films in the series and was made with an obviously lower budget, but none of that matters, since all of it is offset by the preference for arena-scale storytelling and the full use of the main attractions. This time, Adkins is given room to showcase not only his charisma, but especially his physical virtues in contact choreography with other athletes in front of the camera. Director Isaac Florentine knows very well that he can discard everything else and invests what he saves on narrative and extras in the choreography and preparation of the fightscenes. Thanks to Adkins and the other athletes, he can indulge in long, breathtaking shots with an imaginative combination of punches and acrobatics that none of the contemporary blockbusters can pull off.

On the one hand, I Am Not Okay with This offers superbly depicted moments of adolescence, the search for oneself and navigation of the minefield of high school and family. On the other hand, however, IANOWT is essentially a formulaic series created on the basis of algorithmic results. Netflix knows exactly what people want, and it is not in any way stupid to ostentatiously play that up to the point that it slaps viewers in the face. Everything follows the checklist, from characters and stylisation to conflicts and the means of storytelling and layering individual episodes. There is not a shred of creativity or distinctiveness in it. Rather, it is just the fulfilment of the template spat out by Netflix’s algorithms involving viewer preferences and habits. It is absurd and, at the same time, inevitably telling how Netflix transformed its long-proclaimed progressiveness and creative freedom into completely formulaic and depersonalised pigeonholes that flawlessly target perfectly profiled viewer niches. IANOWT could have been an outstanding original series, but algorithms should not determine that viewers love ’80s retro and Stranger Things more than, for example, Ghost World. So, a contemporary story from indie comics is stuffed as far as possible into ’80s allusions and stylisation, the culmination of which is an utterly autotelic episode copying The Breakfast Club that, despite the proclaimed advantages of allegedly high-quality TV, does not come anywhere close to the original with its complexly developed characters. It remains only a quirk that degrades the many excellently observed anxieties of adolescence. IANOWT is the essence of what I like. However, that essence is not derived from empathy and creativity, as was the case with the films that inspired it, particularly those by John Hughes, but from statistics and analyses of proportions of popular works. Culture abandoned its reproductive cycles of remakes and retro that still had something distinctive and likable, and advanced into the era of algorithmic engineering, which produces perfectly pleasing replicants. The time has come to introduce the concept of the uncanny valley to culture.

A grief-laden look back at Czech identity and history in the negatively formative period between 1945 and the early 1990s. It is simultaneously amazing and unfortunately sad that the most thought-provoking reflection on how this era shaped not only individual lives but also the identity and morality of the nation is provided by a unique animated project.

In her new film, Mira Fornay focuses on the dynamic of dominance in partnered relationships, or rather the games associated with it and the roles that we adopt when playing them, up to the point of losing our own identity. She works with these issues – appropriately for their nature – in the form of an absurdist drama in which nonsense and Dadaism meet the video game logic inherently contained in the fable of the cock and the hen (the principle on which the vast majority of RPGs are based), as well as the narrative constructs of Run Lola Run and Edge of Tomorrow (whose alternate title Live Die Repeat was surely the inspiration for the foreign festival title Cook F** Kill). An essential role here is played by the accurately observed setting of ordinary small-town relationships, enhanced by the aesthetic of Sun, Hay and Strawberries, though it radically refuses to slip into the accessibility and cheerful joviality of that aforementioned Czech classic, instead tenaciously following the path of creative experimentation. It is not at all easy to resist the superficial rejection of the film as being irrationally bizarre, because in addition to the attributes described above, its creator intersperses the film with a number of enigmatic and, at the same time, provocatively radical and ridiculous elements. Nevertheless, the film embeds itself in the viewer’s mind thanks to its clear distinctiveness and indisputable purposefulness and forces us to reflect on it in a way that leads us to fully appreciate it. Cook F**k Kill is one big WTF and Mira Fornay is a creative lunatic, but behind all of the madness there is a method, logic and an unexpectedly powerful statement about the nature of relationships and the tangle of unavoidable tragedies and regret that arise from it all.

Compared to Zeitlin’s spellbinding debut Beasts of the Southern Wild, Wendy is not as pure, but as an adaptation of "Peter Pan", it is absolutely phenomenal. If Disney approached its live-action variations of the classics in a similarly distinctive, creative and unconventional manner, cinema would be much more diverse and inspiring. Of course, Wendy does not have the first film’s spark of creative eruption and revelation of talent, but it is fascinating as an apparent dream project and unique retelling of Barrie’s original "Peter Pan", which is due entirely to the director’s touch. With his style of fantastic realism, Zeitlin creates another beautifully earthy fairy-tale for adults about a girl with an indomitable spirit. He combines the theme of growing up in the sense of the loss of illusions and dreams with environmentalism as the main source of magical power in an otherwise modest adaptation to fantasy elements. At the same time, he supports these main storylines by inventively combining and altering some of the motifs of the original work on which the film is based. In some scenes, Wendy is enchanting and pulsating with tremendous energy, and in some adaptation solutions it is inspiring, while remaining wildly unruly, even obstinately boisterous, as well as charming and picturesque with its grungy romanticism. The film unavoidably polarises the audience, but in the end, one can see not only creative uncompromisingness in rejecting superficial appeal and accessibility, but also fidelity to the original work, which itself divides readers into those who believe and those who do not.

The actors’ maxim “Never go full retard” gets an unexpected director-screenwriters’ equivalent in “Never go full Lech Majewski”, or what happens when someone creatively snaps and, in addition to that, gets access to drones, a green screen and deranged actors willing to do anything under the illusion of working with one of the greats. The pompous lack of good judgment has taken on an entirely new dimension, which is concurrently clumsy, obstinately serious and foolishly absurd. In his epic about the world’s wealthiest tycoon, a troubled author and an Indian legend about a child of stones, Majewski brings shame to the eccentric masters of world cinema, such as Ed Wood, Damon Packard, Neil Breen and Tommy Wiseau. Valley of the Gods has become the undisputed holder of the title of the Most Bizarre Film of this year's Film Market in Berlin, where a leading candidate for first place was a promo for the French mainstream high-concept film L’origine du monde about a guy whose heart stops and a witch tells him that he must look at his 60-year-old mother's vagina or else he will die within three days.

If anyone is to copy David Cronenberg, then at least let it be another Cronenberg. The apple not only didn’t fall far from the tree, but also fell into the paranoid cyber-thriller genre and even invited Jennifer Jason Leigh along for the ride. The truth, however, is that while the father (in the first half of his creative career) realised his potential through biomechanics and grotesque apparatuses, the son rather keeps the body and technology separate and deals with the connection of minds, not only thematically, but also formally through edited collages and expressive tableaux.