Filmmaniak

A romantic story about a 16-year-old boy who, after running away from home, falls in love an orphaned girl in Tokyo of about the same age who is able to stop the rain and call the sun on request, but she always pays dearly for it. Honestly, it's an incredibly beautiful film about the power of love, the desire for freedom and the strenuous struggle with life in a big city that gradually disappears under the water build-up. The film can also be perceived as a metaphorical commentary on extreme weather fluctuations, which have been increasing in recent times. The film’s only disadvantage is that it very much resembles the director's previous films, especially the film Your Name, which was more story-rich, mysterious and emotional. At times, it almost seems as if Makoto Shinkai wants to repeat his success after his previous hit, and so he uses the same formula again (a young couple in love who are connected by a magical fantasy ability) and again decorated the film with his favourite motifs (a busy metropolis, rain, trains, a soundtrack, an impending catastrophe, the risk of the fatal loss of a loved one), with the assumption that it will again. It obviously does work, but this time the result is a little more transparent and straightforward and the drama must be replaced artificially, most often through various police chases. The ending could have been much longer and more surprising. Even so, Shinkai reaffirms his position as a master in working with details and poetic images, with dialogues, in faithfully capturing the environment and with a narrative that can grab the heart in the right places.

This is a sci-fi thriller about two rescuers who have recently gotten caught up in several cases related to a new drug causing people to sink into other worlds after using it. Another classic motif of the sci-fi genre is packed onto the attractive mysterious theme, which the film remarkably combines with an emotional drama about the friendship of two of the main characters and their difficult problems, and with action/horror passages that amount to “good value for the money". The film could have turned out to be a stupid Hollywood b-movie, but skillful directing, a clever script (except for one crutch), the great Anthony Mackie (he gets significantly more screen time than Dornan, and it's a pity that the film doesn't connect their characters more in the story) and the absence of pathos make the film an impressive authorial work, which, despite the presence of several clichés, is original and fresh.

The film is a social drama about a poor boy who naively falls in love with a classmate who is a gold digger, and he then joins up with a group of gasoline thieves to make money. This honestly-directed film get points for its natural actors, the authentic environment of the Mexican backcountry and a documentary-style camera. The film’s raw narrative and striking conclusion are helped out by a certain uncombedness and gradualness, while the side story with the police officer improves its dramatic level and amplifies the socio-economic message of the film. However, the film makes it seem like stealing gasoline and potentially risking your life isn't as bad and problematic as trying to date a girl who only agrees to a date in exchange for a new iPhone, which probably wasn’t supposed to be what the movie intended.

This is a blatantly funny social satire set in a pastel-coloured world, where all of the adults wear braces (unlike the children, who are treated as property), ride in golf carts, act quite out of the ordinary and conspicuously envy each other’s houses, gardens, swimming pools and offspring. The film does include the story line of one of the heroines who, after a series of bad decisions, tries in vain to break free from all-encompassing conformity, but otherwise it has no plot and consists more of thematically-connected sketches in which various everyday situations and petty bourgeois stereotypes are enriched by unsuspected, absurd and nonsensical points. The result is a surreal show of imaginative episodes, not all of which hit fertile ground, but they are amazingly playful and most of them are hilarious. However, humour is subjective, so it’s entirely possible that you won't like it.

A horror film with comedic elements about a filmmaking team producing a popular exorcism show on the Internet, and the latest live broadcast (with hired actors and pre-arranged tricks, of course) is suddenly disrupted by a real demon that nicely disrupts the viewership. The story, built on an attractive theme, disturbs the horror atmosphere with comic elements, the effectiveness of which, however, is slightly variable, as well as some acting performances, alienating elements and the fluctuating tempo of the narrative. The film, mainly focusing on the perniciousness of lies, the healing power of forgiveness and the fascination with horror and violence, nevertheless still contains a sufficient number of ideas and juicy scenes, is able to consistently entertain from beginning to end and has several surprising points and a purely adorable conclusion that is able to aptly take jabs in all of the right places.

The eponymous short story by horror legend HP Lovecraft about a meteorite from space which begins to remake the point of its impact on Earth into its image, has received a fantastic modern film adaptation, in which this purple-glowing meteorite hits a remote farm of a family of five, who are subsequently deprived of rational perception, gradually lose their minds and are exposed to their worst nightmares. The uncompromising, brutal, dreamily intoxicating, neon-psychedelic and distinctive vision includes radioactive monsters, magical rituals, a whistling well, alpaca llamas, Nicolas Cage's wonderfully hysterical acting, and even reflections on contemporary society's anxiety about the environmental crisis. A terrifying and intense film with an impressive camera, fitting music and an original "Lovecraft" atmosphere of deepening despair, helplessness and fear of a successfully rendered unknown evil, which is sufficiently specific and at the same time mysterious.

A horror with an ordinary theme (a man comes to renovate an old house he recently bought without realizing that it is cursed and haunted), but also with a relatively original concept that adds a specific mythology to the house and interprets the haunting as retribution for a moral mistake. The slow start evokes a disturbing procedural drama about the reconstruction of a dwelling, from the bowels of which various fluids mysteriously ejaculate and glasses fall out at the beginning, but over time the film becomes more brutal. The film is a remarkable and intellectually stimulating genre contribution, with the only bad aspect being that the film tries to disgust and make the audience laugh rather than be tense and frightening, and that the film’s point is more interesting than the characters and performances.

A psychological drama about a young pregnant housewife whose daily activities consist of cooking, cleaning, playing mobile games and a persistent effort to make her husband, who hardly notices, happy. The film is a portrait of a woman drowned in a distressing relationship with an oppressive and manipulative partner and his family, moreover in an environment where she feels incompetent, useless and inferior, and where she cannot do anything on her own to experience satisfaction from her own success. She thus begins to swallow various objects, first small ones, but later quite large and dangerous ones. The intimate film, based on consistently elaborated characters and the performance of Haley Bennett, with a perfectly hurt expression on her face, serves as a brilliant study of the origin of mental disorders and also functions as a social critique in this regard. In the last third, however, the film deviates a little from this concept and begins to look for the roots of the main character's problems elsewhere, which is a bit of a shame, as it reduces the intensity of the final catharsis and comes off as a missed opportunity.

The socio-politically engaged drama, which begins as an inconspicuous intimate insight into the life of a closed village community in the Brazilian countryside, gradually transforms into a captivating (almost) thriller, in which this community must come together to defend itself against oppressors. This is carefully constructed film, innovative in a number of creative approaches, follows a consistently slow pace of storytelling that slowly dispenses information, just enough for the viewer to be able to imagine everything necessary. The point is striking and well executed, and the culminating plot is accompanied by clear criticism and a number of metaphors referring to the hidden power of the common people and their history. Perhaps only the introduction of the film is too lengthy. In any case, it is a film with an original story, realized in an unprecedented form.

An inconspicuous-looking little film, which is in fact a well-written, brilliantly acted gem directed by a firm hand. In it, one of the directors plays the main role of a man who tries to cope with the recent disappearance of his partner in an empty house and also with an unknown monster, scratching at the door every night, which may be real or may be the embodiment of his sadness and fear. The regular alternation of two narrative positions, based on the alternation of days and nights, combines a romantic drama with a strong horror element, which serves as a metaphor for anxiety about the potential end of a relationship, and builds on the motif of uncertainty and real-life situations. The beginning is very slow, but then the consistently graduating story develops its qualities more and more and enthralls with long dialogue sequences and a famous, emotionally strong conclusion.