Filmmaniak

A film about two brothers whose lives are shaken by several events, including the unintentional serious injury of an elderly lady and the hospitalisation of their dying father somewhere in faraway Luxembourg. The tone of the film shifts vaguely between serious social drama and comedy rich with scenes and dialogue abounding with black humour. The narrative is similarly unfocused, as it initiates minor storylines and then abandons them, seemingly without leading to anything in particular. However, the ending brings the brothers’ journey to Luxembourg and offers a few pleasingly constructed twists, so the film ultimately redeems itself with verbal humour together with a series of fateful moments full of the ironies of life.

This mundane copy of the recent remake of Child’s Play is unimaginative, lacks suspense and isn’t scary. I was startled once when a dog barked at an unexpected moment. The actors are fine and there are some OK emotional moments here and there, but M3GAN is otherwise a rather silly horror B-movie on the now classic theme of spreading irrational fear of modern technologies among people who have no idea how artificial intelligence actually works. I don’t understand the enthusiastic response abroad.

After suffering a head injury, a small girl lies in a coma and her subsequent story is intertwined with her journey through a fantasy world in which she repeatedly escapes death and encounters various other creatures. The result is a surrealistic variation on Alice in Wonderland that was made by the father of the five-year-old girl in the lead role as his own original project over the course of six years. It is necessary to appreciate the film for its well-thought-out creative side and the rendering of the puppet animation sequences, which must have required a tremendous amount of hard work. The child actress in the lead role is excellent. The style of the animation and the dark atmosphere of Moon Garden are reminiscent of Mad God (though it isn’t as bloody and disgusting, but I still wouldn’t let children watch it, as some of the scenes are truly terrifying and intense). Unfortunately, it also shares with Mad God the fact that the viewer gets fed up with this load of visual ideas after a while, because there isn’t much else to rely on in the simple plot. The film will thus most likely remain in the viewer’s memory only as a likably bizarre sequence of psychedelic scenes interspersed with a hospitalised little girl’s recollections of both happy and agonising family moments.

Real handmade wooden crafts can hardly be replaced with “more modern” versions made of cheap plastic. The only positive aspects of Pinocchio are Tom Hanks and his clock, the splendidly dubbed Honest John (in English), the scenes with the whale (which the filmmakers turned into a sea monster with tentacles) and occasionally the tricks, which are very convincing in some scenes, but alarmingly bad in others. Almost everything in this film is digital and it looks ugly and artificial (the animals, the water and the unrealistic drinking of soda...omg). In comparison with the original 80-year-old animated classic, this version’s extra half-hour adds nothing interesting, instead horribly diminishing the conciseness of the opening exposition and changing the impression given by many of the scenes and themes (including Geppetto’s motivation for creating Pinocchio). From the moment of Pinocchio’s awakening, the plot is so excessively rushed and the individual acts so narratively sloppy (or changed for the worse) that the original moralizing message, which should have comprised the core of the film, is lost in the climax. Important characters (including the blue fairy) are introduced in one scene and then disappear from the plot, never to be seen again. Whenever there is a sung passage, you immediately find yourself hoping that it ends as soon as possible. The attempt at contemporary gags is annoying, misses the mark and makes no sense. The new Pinocchio has none of its forebear’s amusing playfulness or inventiveness, nor does it enchant with sudden wonder or disturb with dark undertones. It’s just sad and unnecessary.

On a certain meta-level, the film’s protagonists excuse the fifth Scream for being a mere recycling of several worn-out formulas and motifs (which it is), because that’s what devoted fans want. And it is possible that that might actually be enough for fans of the genre, particularly fans of this franchise. Nevertheless, such a hackneyed film that serves viewers practically the same thing as its predecessors and has no need to distinguish itself in any way is hardly saved by the fact that its creators are aware that it’s worn out and humorously point that out in places. The protagonists can endlessly make snarky comments about the various rules of the horror genre and all of the mistakes that horror-movie characters make, but what good does that do if they themselves can’t avoid making the same mistakes? To a certain extent, however, there is still some entertainment value in the game of guessing which character is the killer while the possibilities gradually dwindle. Otherwise, neither the new (and not particularly likable) characters, the return of old familiar faces nor the gory (though unimaginative) murders hold much appeal.

Sisu is an unhinged action flick with an abundance of exaggeration that will decidedly not bring joy to fans of realistic period depictions and historically factual information, but it might please fans of bloody B-movie guilty-pleasure entertainment grounded in westerns and one-against-all stories in the style of Rambo, John Wick and Taken, and which in a few places is reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds and Tommy Wirkola’s Dead Snow. Lovers of black humour, Nordic landscapes and expansive tundra – or amateur surgery – will be in their element. Conversely, it’s not for viewers who can’t stand the sight of people’s (and horses’) bodies getting blown to pieces while attempting to cross a minefield. The numerous variations on mowing down Nazi soldiers are often rather inventive (have you ever seen a protagonist kill his enemies under the surface of a lake and suck in the air escaping from their slit throats so that he doesn't have to resurface?) and the two protagonists standing on opposite sides of the barricade are almost perfect to the point of being fascinating, which makes it practically impossible to take your eyes off of them. The film starts off with a serious tone, but it loses all sense of seriousness at an accelerating rate as the absurdity of the individual scenes gradually increases. Jalmari Helander has not only proven himself to be a filmmaker with interesting ideas, but also – for the first time – a solid storyteller, screenwriter and director, in whose presentation the gritty tale of the gold prospector and fighter Aatami has its own memorable face, which is also due in part to the film’s distinctive stylisation and cast.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has more action, more locations and more characters, all of which is definitely a change for the better in comparison with the first one, which was relatively lacking in these aspects. This is nice family entertainment, if you don’t find Sonic and Jim Carrey pulling faces annoying (which can easily happen). The movie goes by quickly and a certain literalness and predictability can easily be forgiven, considering the target audience. Otherwise, it’s still true that Sonic’s speed is used mainly to set up gags and only rarely for the practical resolution of a difficult situation. The formulaic work with the plot is a shame (I’m the only one who knows the location of a hidden powerful artifact that definitely must not fall into the wrong hands, but rather than keeping it to myself, I will of course go there and thus unwittingly reveal the location to the villains) and there are several face-palm moments. Sonic and his friends are incompetent bumblers in a dance competition, but a few seconds later they are suddenly freestyle world champions? Robotnik’s servant has no idea how to operate the giant robot, but within moments he has read the whole manual and is instructing Robotnik himself on how to do it? The human characters get their hands on alien technology, which they regularly discard after using it once, when it proved to actually be useful? Sure, these are minor details, but there are a lot of them, and if each one diminishes the believability of another scene, it’s going have a significant impact on the overall impression made by the film.

This well-made debut works with the subject of morality and existential fear, but because of its sluggish pace, it smoulders very slowly  and even the suspense builds only minimally. For that matter, the film is given more spark by the tense relations between the Taiwanese officers and the Filipino engineers on the cargo ferry than from the situations arising from the motif of the migrant secretly concealed in the bowels of the ship.

Taking place across the Japanese countryside and major metropolises, Suzume is a visually impressive and slightly romantic fantasy road-movie in which a mythological storyline packed with magical ideas and inspired by actual Japanese natural disasters is combined with a subtle and emotionally charged story about growing up, devoted platonic love, feelings of guilt and parenthood. Makoto Shinkai still adheres to his trademarks without giving the impression that he is repeating himself. Authentically written characters and a number of charming details and subtle humour add surprising depth to the fantasy narrative. There are also demons that awaken repressed thoughts in us, mischievous cats that delight in destruction, the funniest cabriolet with a broken top and the best three-legged chair in the history of cinema.

In the visual aspect, Vesper offers a rather imaginatively rendered sci-fi dystopia, but in terms of its plot, twists and specific elements strongly inspired by Hollywood narrative techniques, it gets tripped up by narrative naïveté. It tries to appear more spectacular than it can manage, but thanks to its effective tricks and, in places, atmosphere, it is certainly impressive on the European level. Subjectively, however, it is terribly long and verbose; many passages should have been deleted (for example, the compassionate browsing through a picture book with animals could easily have ended after the cat and the owl) and the literally stale final point is also a shame.