Filmmaniak

After the clearly fantastic Brawl in Cell Block 99, the film Dragged Across Concrete is dramatically more moderate and has also slowed down in brutality and compactness, but it catches up to these aspects through its broad-based storytelling style. The story can basically be summarized as a one-time surveillance action of two suspended police partners who, with the vision of big profit, get involved in a criminal enterprise, which gradually grows over their heads. However, S. Craig Zahler conceived the (great) hour-long story as a procedural crime drama with almost three times the length, in which each key character must have long exposition with a clearly defined history, motivations and family background (in Brawl in Cell Block 99 he had one such character, while here there are at least three, which dilutes the narrative dynamics a bit), even for those heroes who don’t necessarily need it (the whole ten-minute intermezzo with Jennifer Carpenter, culminating in a bank robbery, is in itself an excellent and highly impressive short film, but which has minimal importance in relation to the surrounding events). The cleverly directed, ingeniously constructed, penetrating and consistently honest complex film sometimes lacks pace (especially in dialogue passages) and, in the sense of sparsely dosed violence, also a moment of surprise, when scenes leading to something bloody can often be predicted in advance. Nevertheless, the plot develops unpredictably and all aspects of the film are very professional. Vince Vaughn has a much sleeker role this time, while Mel Gibson is a great teammate and one can also enjoy the criticism of exaggerated political correctness in connection with the police brutality hyped in the media. Compared to Brawl in Cell Block 99, the film is not entirely stunning and emotionally devastating, although that film sets a bar that probably can’t be improved upon.

An erotic sci-fi B movie that tries in vain to disguise itself as a deep art film. The pilot of a cargo spacecraft is tasked to take a trip to Alpha Centauri that will take several years, and because he is meant to travel alone, so that he is not bored, he is given a robotic companion (played by a porn actress) to serve as his co-pilot, psychologist and sex trainer. The man is bothered by her pre-programmed patterns of behavior, so he tries to erase part of the program to make her human. In this case, the question of whether robots are able to fall in love takes the form of a boringly directed, badly shot and superficial nonsense, in which there is no shortage of long repetitive and pseudo-artistic scenes in which nothing happens, either in the plot or even symbolically. The extremely simplified psychology of the characters is ridiculous, the acting below average, and the pace of storytelling is unnecessarily tired due to the overall lack of substance. At least the tricks (for a Serbian film) and the aesthetic approach to nudity are positive in some places. The film is clearly not pornography, it’s too cold for that, and it’s not exciting and there are no visible penetrations.

The plot is not bad - a man who works in a morgue is able to talk to corpses (which is extremely unused) and then he is cursed, because he reveals the secret of the dead and has his wife's lover killed, but she also dies by mistake. The rest is an unbalanced horror without tension, which revolves around one constantly repeated scheme, the film does not go anywhere and tries in vain to make up for the lack of ideas through jump scares that don’t work.

I consider the previous parts of the series to be interchangeable, slightly above-average adaptations of much more complex books, whose criminal plot usually suffered from the fact that the viewer was always one step ahead of the investigator duo in the main roles, with the exception of the standard search for the offenders of an old case, never tried to achieve anything deeper. In short, these were decent genre entries. This changes with the fourth episode, by far the best in the series. It begins with the obligatory finding of three old corpses and the search for their killer, but then grows enormously to unsuspected proportions in which conspiracies covered by real events play a role, parallels to the MeToo campaign, the theme of equality in a multicultural world and criticism of the institutionalized treatment of "fallen women". The characters finally undergo some development, fundamental enough that the eternally gloomy Carl is not constantly the same antisocial grouch. The story has unsuspected depth and well-thought-out situations with a good point, and the exciting storytelling has a constantly escalating gradient. The only thing that can be criticized is that sometimes it is somewhat routine, but otherwise it has absolutely masterful directing.

A brilliantly thought-out crime story set in Barcelona in the 1920s, where half the city is on strike, police investigators are behaving like gangsters and anarchist riots are raging in the streets. Regarding the main protagonist, a police officer from Madrid who comes to the city to help search for the perpetrators of a train robbery, it is unclear almost until the end whether he is a crooked rat or a cunning good guy who wants to outsmart everyone and bring them to justice. These two views of the officer alternate often, as a result of which the film is an emotional roller coaster in which each of the many characters have their own dramatic arc, numerous storylines intersect and react to each other, and the complex story undergoes complicated developments and a series of surprising twists. The investigation goes in unpredictable directions, and a feminist level, criticism of the state regime and police forces, as well as multiple motives for revenge, have also been added. From the point of view of filmmaking, this is clean work (including action shootouts and fights), perhaps with the exception of the film’s sporadic technical limits (a car chase in which both cars are going about 40 km/h), but even those are usually largely superseded by a great, and probably quite expensive retro film set.

A powerful survival drama about human tenacity, determination and strength to survive at all costs, dominated by Mikkelsen with his top performance and a screenplay that is able to take full advantage of the seemingly hopeless situation, the bleakness of the Arctic environment and economical props. The consistently escalating tension and gradual tightening of the conditions that the heroically capable, persistent and good protagonist has to face in all respects capture your attention from beginning to end, even though the film finds itself on the verge of unbelief a few times.

An emotional documentary about enthusiasts who have embarked on the reconstruction of a cemetery in Spain, where the finale of the western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly takes place. The idea, effort and determination deserve full praise, because the film looks great, and even the documentary is engaging, even though it contains for the most part what you would expect from this sort of theme. However, all of this is done extremely sympathetically and honestly. In addition to the several years of hard work of the main actors, the film also captures the community of film fans (volunteers, crowdfunding for graves), and there is also commentary from members of Leone's crew (Eastwood, Morricone, extras-witnesses...), who spice up the film from time to time with a story from the filming.

The idea of demon hunters, already operating over the Internet and who to keep up with the times and be able to attack people via their mobile phones, does not sound completely bad in and of itself. But it shouldn't take the form of an over-embellished B movie patchwork (albeit with an obviously decent budget and relatively high-quality tricks), inspired by both Ghostbusters and Pokémon Go, set in a world without rules in which virtually anything can happen. Yet it's seldom enough to make it really fun, funny, or thrilling. The characters are annoying, the actors average and the dialogues awkward. The film does include a few nice directing ideas in places, but they don’t overcome the overall impression from the completely flimsy workmanship.

An outrageously entertaining parody of crime show from the 70's, which also draws on the Kung Fu genre, zombie movies, Mexican action movies with wrestlers and horror movies with occult themes. An off-the-wall bag packed with multi-level humor, riddled with all sorts of gags, using period and genre clichés to create unsuspected parody layers, and shot intentionally cheaply and like a B movie, with a grainy image, perfect retro stylization, cute sloppy background projections and actors intentionally overacting. Not all of the jokes land and are sometimes repeated, but with its cadence it almost doesn’t matter. The purposeful creators are consistent from start to finish on all levels. Similarly refined pastiche like Black Dynamite or The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.

This action thriller about the toughest gangs of the Asian underworld balances on the border between bloody entertainment and unpleasantly violent cruelty, when imaginative and technically perfect action shootouts and trick-based, make-up and choreographically embellished contact fights change from a juicy attraction for the hardy to an extremely brutal mutilation show. In terms of recent films it is perhaps comparable to The Raid 2, but it goes a bit further (the director was officially allowed to have free reign by Netflix, which he made exceptional use of). In the first half the story is a slightly chaotic jumble of constantly dying characters fighting each other on two sides of a barricade, between which they run all over the place and undercut each other, to the extent that the viewer loses interest in the protagonists and stops caring about how the film is going to end and is just looking forward to the next action sequence. Fortunately, this settles down in the second half. Who is against who is clearly defined, and the rest is a feverish massacre with physically intense action passages, which there are not that many of, but they are long and hellishly dense.