Othello

Bearded women who ring alarms at work for demonstrations refuse to shave for men until they invent a way for you to lose your beard for good. And that's even if they're in the middle of a movie with a script that comes straight from the UN. Apart from that, Janžurová takes the first (polaroid) selfie in movie history. Well, tell me this doesn't look like the worn plot of some contemporary liberal with the demise of the Roman Empire in his lapel, terrified that emancipation will take away his acquired privileges. ___ Another one of Lipský's misfires, that stubs its toe on his inability to keep the rhythm of a comedy that according to the script, was supposed to keep building. But then there's the problem of not getting bogged down in messages about the horror of the atom, long stripteases (though I admit I'm not the target audience, as for me Brejchová is the visual equivalent of Monika Babišová), poorly lit shootouts, and multiple endings. Plus, I felt it was done under some pretty dull editor’s scissors, where lines like "You have some strange manners at that Princeton!" tend to slip past instead of potentially good jokes. Anyway, I don't give Janžurová movies less than three stars because the woman is just a fantastic bimbo.

The equivalent of a stoner party where every word is used as a pun and taken out of context just for an instant burst of laughter. At the same time, the film is quite surprising in its morbidity (you can’t put Otýlie Vranská back in the box), its naturalism (the slaughterhouse), and how manic it is in its infantilism. A great combination.

Typically heavy-handed subject matter for Iran, which also seems very much aimed at the European market this time. On the one hand, the somewhat forced litanies of the same cultural differences incomprehensible to Europeans over and over, such as those with dogs, forbidden male visitors, lawsuits against women for living improper lives; on the other hand, it has an often perfectly composed setting and an attempt to tastefully combine in one static shot ideally all the elements that need the given scene needs to communicate. And Maryam Moghadam does a really fantastic job of playing the life-torn single mother slowly getting back on her feet.

A privileged white colonization of foreign suffering made to accompany ethnic buffets and craft beer. Flee utterly resigns itself to appealing to anyone other than those who are already softened by the film before they see it and thus apparently quite oblivious to how poorly dramatized and lazily animated it is while watching it. The 2 frames per second maximum and the live-action shots at moments that would clearly require more animation work suggest that someone here was very lazy and very much wanted to have it done so they could be touring festivals with it already. Now some people are automatically excited about an animated documentary about a gay refugee from Kabul and others are disgusted at how a film about a sex refugee from Kabul could still get nominated for something, without either of them ever having had a reason to see the film. This hasn't helped anyone except the filmmakers. Personally, I'd be happy to take all the refugees in the world anywhere they want if only to get away from these films. I’m adding a star for the raw documentary footage of the coup in Afghanistan and post-communist Moscow.

Knowing that up to this point Lipský had only offered utterly broken socialist shit, Lemonade Joe's bravura in content and form may seem quite surprising. However, upon closer examination, it is clear that this is due primarily to the Brdeček subject matter, refined through hundreds of theatrical reprises, that still draws from the Czech grasp of Westerns as part of the tramp subcultures and pulp stories of the time. At the time of the film's premiere, the Lemonade Joe character was already nearly 25 years old and many local actors had already been associated with the character through the theater long before that. At the same time, this film is actually the first Czech stunt film (and at a time when stuntmen were trying to establish themselves as a profession, so they were going all out), which clearly gave the film a great deal of freedom during filming, as the guys were really falling down six feet on their backs and jumping off rooftops in heeled boots, so there was no need to resort to various editing tricks. And Lipský, if from nothing else other than his circus experience, was at least a director who knew that you could ask more of these people physically than others would dare. What I still don't understand is how this hitherto bumbling fellow came up with such perfect and for 1964 quite groundbreaking shot compositions (revealing the hidden information in the second schedule, working with reflections), which he almost always uses for a well-constructed joke. Which 1960s comedy that you're watching for the 50th time alone at home still makes you laugh out loud?

By all accounts, it looks like the key to enjoying this movie is not knowing the source material. Which is the case for me, and so I instead thoroughly enjoyed the gradual unfolding of the scope of the plot and its unexpected twists, which actually makes practically the entire first half of the film mere exposition. As long as I didn't recognize it in the process, though, I'm fine with it. I enjoyed the preservation of the noir naivety and boorish dialogue, as well as the adaptation of noir visual schemes under actual filming techniques. Nightmare Alley never feels like a faithful illusion of a point in time, instead it's very stagy and polished, which on the one hand relegates the plot to the cheap interiors of circus marquees, yet on the other hand invites us back into the most stylish office ever, which must have actually cost about the same as it would to build the Taj Mahal. Likewise video games circa 2010 (before the gritty look became trendy) such as FEAR, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, or Doom 3. Everything was shiny and looked unnaturally clean, including the dirt. I also often thought of Verbinski's A Cure For Wellness while watching it.

Taken as an unapologetic indie survivor burner from an aspiring debutante, I'm happy with this. Sunburn, mere non-specific references to the world beyond the desert, sandstorms, and a permanent feeling of being completely drained. Except I kind of think he's pining for Lighthouse. I mean, bleak limbo, hallucinations, animals munching on your liver, misanthropy in full force, and a former teen idol trying to rebrand himself (but on the Pattison scale he's currently at the level of The Rover). And the whole film can safely wreck itself against that comparison.

A showcase of normalization that perfectly serves the purpose of building the illusion of utter historical stagnation. Every day the sun rises, the counters are full, there's always a line in front of the deli, and everyone has to take a basket into the store. No one shows any ambition to step out of this static existence, and everyone enthusiastically accepts their role of polishing apples for the rest of their lives. This masquerade in a crowded lonely house, creating cute subplots like Stašová stressing or Hanzlík wooing, is just fun. Even though Menšík really needs subtitles here, and the makeup artist must have been applying powder to these characters while obviously drunk. But there is another side to the series, a dark, horror side. The interpersonal side. That's really the only variable in an otherwise immobile historical setting. Here, it is natural to count down the seconds from the wedding until the husband cheats on his wife, virtually all lasting relationships are more or less in ruins, and on the throne of life's ruin stands the sweet shop proprietor Anna – Jiřina Švorcová, a vamp of the grey normalization. Together with Haničinec they form safely the most asexual duo in the Milky Way. Two-thirds of the relationship is spent in Haničinec's Škoda MB, Švorcová's ever-arching eyebrows, a retarded son and manipulative daughter at home, plus a swaggering ex-husband who wants her back and she can't do anything about it because the kids love him. And I haven't even mentioned the fact that the whole thing is shot in a khaki color palette. So in the end, a show that was supposed to celebrate socialist normalcy and its little human stories is more of a suffocating psychological horror about how there is a natural bleakness to a rigid environment you can’t escape. Bravo Dietl!

Out of the plethora of Polish films about the crimes and injustices of communism, this still stands out thanks to its atypical work with scene sequencing and its believably grayed-out normalization atmosphere, but Matuszyński's debut was a film I immediately bumped into my top 10 upon finishing, a bar that his other film doesn't so much as share a zip code with. The Last Family was fantastic thanks in part to its utterly unique and radical angle on a life story full of ambiguous and complex characters. Leave No Trace is typical binary filmmaking with simple emotions, pitting nice people and ugly people against each other.

A modern-day version of Milius's Conan the Barbarian. That is, a proud barbarian meatloaf that doesn't elevate itself above its station with any subversion or edification, but instead basks in its mythic naivety and thus creates an inner world that reliably operates within the boundaries it sets. When you immerse yourself in it, it is a first-class experience. It's interesting and gratifying to see, a decade on, the cautious return of ambitious formalist blockbusters that model meta-reading (see Reeves's The Batman or Villeneuve's Dune) back into cinemas after it had been completely eradicated for some time. From that period, it's good to recall Immortals, for example, which has a lot in common with The Northman (it chronicles exactly that in-between stage where events straddle reality and myth and influence each other) and whose misunderstanding and failure de facto ended the career of Tarsem Singh.