Othello

I was expecting maybe Nicholas Winton to make an appearance at the end. Otherwise, despite the effort and fairly capable direction and dramaturgy, Megan Leavey was a losing war beforehand because the problem is the premise. The very heroine doesn't have that many film-worthy situations or relationships behind her, and she herself isn't particularly interesting. The only theme here is the role of the army dog-handlers and bringing out their abilities. But a simple heroic/biographical method based on one person isn't enough for that, and the film can't do any better.

This movie has an incredible capacity for unwatchability. Everything in it is so colorless and dry that connecting to it is a superhuman task even for Shaolin masters of empathy who eat Lasse Hallström marathons for breakfast. Until the last action scene, there is not a single shot more interestingly constructed, character presented, or piece of information spoken. Nor is the eventual madness monumental enough to snap you out of an unpleasant apathy, comparable only to being handcuffed somewhere while someone tries to beat you for hours with the plastic hammer from the Little Builder set. In the end, it pokes the little horns of videogame action, where the fight with the Man in Black in particular is reminiscent of boss fights in videogames, aided in particular by frequent over-the-shoulder shots and a small operating space where the hero can only hide behind columns to dodge the increasing attacks of his opponent, using the interactive environment as the key to defeating him. Still, I can’t help but ask: is that enough? Whatever. Enough is just a word.

I can't even remember when I've enjoyed four stars this much. Admittedly the buddy element doesn't really work there, as Reynolds can't keep an eye on Jackson, who clearly could do whatever he wanted here, even with a crane, and it has a terrible selection and use of music, but where it does dominate is in the field of unapologetic action, which is plentiful in the film and great to watch. The problem with most action comedies is that they have directors forged in the comedy genre rather than the action genre, and they have to work with actors who are a lot of laughs, but getting them to kick a jacked-up hundred-pound stuntman in a way that doesn't demand suspension of disbelief just isn't possible most of the time. Fortunately, Hughes is first and foremost an action director who has experience with explosive choreography, so I can fully enjoy all the stunts, chases, and shootouts, the live streets in broad daylight, and they're multi-layered to boot. The tour de force escalation is then the chase in Amsterdam, with five elements chasing each other (goons, police, interpol, bodyguard, and hitman) using boats, motorbikes, cars, machine guns, and bazookas, not one at a time but all at once. The streets are treacherous, full of dodging civilians, cars, outdoor restaurants and bridges, and everything is used to the maximum with first-class choreography. And at the end of the film, perhaps as if out of obligation, a helicopter still sort of casually falls on a building, just to say they did. Hughes has managed to make excellent use of every dollar of his $30 million budget, and though he still hasn’t quite come up with a new Lethal Weapon in hand, it suffices for one of the most entertaining films of 2017.

Anyone who doesn't get sick of the "scary music and camera zoom – suddenly the music dies down – nothing for a while – jump-scare!" method repeated over and over again for the twelfth time has my envy combined with my contempt.

Even when you have one of the best action sequences (and I'm toying with the idea that it might be the very best) ever filmed, you have to have something else to go with it, and Atomic Blonde fits that bill sufficiently. At least for those who are still unapologetically fulfilled by the aesthetic of a broken body in an expensive dress, with a glass of vodka and a cigarette in the corner of her mouth.

The Distinguished Citizen has one of the best scripts I've seen in a long time, manages to uniquely balance comedy and drama (with both genres building off each other here, the humor coming from the plot and a well-written protagonist, while the drama often comes from when he ends up being the victim of the humor), has a great eye for various character, setting, and spatial details, is generally applicable to multiple contexts, and still shows off its subversiveness at the end. The full five stars would be totally deserved, if only... if only the film weren't so formally repugnant. The uninspired, ill-timed editing, the horrible lighting, the hideous look of a TV camera, in short, the visual punishment on such a level that it reeks of creative intention, which is one of the film's themes, trying so hard to slip the knots of its subject matter, i.e., depositing itself into the sarcophagus of academic acceptability. And yet it doesn’t do it consistently, as it makes haphazard use of formal shortcuts, afterthoughts, and music. It's a terrible shame, because otherwise I haven't come across anything more entertaining and apt in a long time.

Well, it sure would be fun even if the dad gets hanged and the mother runs off with musicians, but with this movie you also have to be able to shoot it. Nor is it just for grins that they say comedy is one of the hardest genres. FAQATT isn't just nonsense, and I believe the people behind it are otherwise quite funny, so the simple dialogue works relatively well here. The jokes are polished, they have a concept, but as soon as they have to make any kind of sketch or move the plot along with visuals, it's fit for the pillory. And I'm not just referring to the horrifically atrocious effects, which actually kind of belong in a guileless romp like this, but if you just compare it to the nuclear explosion of Wright's camera and creative editing in The World's End, which works with a very similar setting (sci-fi problems in the world of traditional British pub culture) and you know where we are. Then again, the already tired theme of "nerd who finds happiness (with a girl)" plot is getting a bit, well, tired.

The first half, sprinkled with centuries-old clichés, starring a rugged backwoodsman with a past who loves his son and a young, pretty, and inexperienced FBI agent in a forgotten hostile location, quite makes you feel the limits of the seats in the small Lucerne auditorium. But it's worth waiting for the devil out of the box, which flies out at the turning point of the film's second half. For Sheridan here lands his writing and directing blows. A brilliantly used flashback sequence, then, is not only itself an intense burst of painful, vicious violence, but also a means of drawing out the tension of the scene it has split. Its monumental bloody climax (with excellent sound) then multiplies the power of its impact in how it has already hooked the viewer with its development. Of course, it also wouldn't work without the excellent composition of that scene, where Sheridan proves himself a truly capable, professional director. That clever arrangement of the characters around the space, his framing, and the work with the actors just manages to create uncomfortable tension without needing the help of, say, music. As a reward for this scene, I then swallowed the whole thing the way Sheridan wanted me to, appreciating the treatment of that barren space on the edge of everything and the empty souls of its original inhabitants with nothing to build on. Even though after the first season of True Detective all such efforts are a bit half-baked.

Little more than a day after watching it, I have to admit that I haven't had such mush in my head after a movie in a long time. The fact that it comes after a 217-minute movie strikes me as the amusing symptom of a completely confused age where no one really knows what anyone else wants anymore. To name the film with a caption, I guess the most apt one for me is "The Most Americanized Chinese Sex Fantasy Ever". Subjectively, I find it hard to give a mediocre rating to a film where my jaw dropped during several scenes at their incredibly megalomaniacal detachment. Yet unlike, say, Marvel, Bay is able to accentuate this detachment with his directorial trademarks. The camera, focusing on people, is often perfectly placed, handheld but stabilized, so that it actually floats behind the characters from a slight angle and stands very close to them. It doesn't "zoom in" on people's faces and figures, but moves realistically just in front of/behind them. It then benefits from a sense of enormity when confronted with giant robots and a parasitic planet approaching Earth. Yes, we can laugh at the fact that, for example, a good half of the shots are into the sun, but when this installment of the series is so detached from everything, the over-colored visuals start to break the boundary of dreamlike experience, and indeed the chaos that remains in your head after the film is comparable to a long night of strange dreams, from which you remember only unrelated sections in the morning and it takes a while to shake off all the snatches and return to reality. To then attack the film on the grounds of its pointlessness (and it is pointless, the character of Optimus Prime is probably the worst creation since Morpheus in the Matrix sequels (on the other hand, damn, with the fifth Transformers installment you at least sort of know what you're getting into)) seems to me like a resignation to a certain type of experience that a film can bring us. So why the three stars? Weeell, you're not going to believe this, but it's short. It was supposed to be four hours long. Sure, you would definitely be leaving the cinema as a different creature afterwards, and would probably get hit by a tram on your way out of the IMAX, but there's an awful lot of motifs, characters, one-shot scenes, unfinished scenes, and throwaway details that I would have liked to have focused on. Give me a director's cut in which that amazing chase in London lasts, say, half an hour, and the scene between the NASA scientist and the arrogant government representative lasts, say, ten minutes, and I will explode with infantile visual delight, for which I make no apologies. And Bay is still at the top of the food chain when it comes to action scenes. Give him more action scenes. Give him all of them.

Two movies failed in theaters this year that you could say shot on money, The Great Wall and this. It's got expensive special effects, expensive actors, the usual plot structure, interchangeable characters (the irresponsible joker, his sidekick, the rational female counterpart, the mad scientist behind it all) and heaps of references. What it doesn't have, however, is even a second of creative investment. An incredibly uninspiring and mind-numbing CGI-fest where nothing matters because it lacks even an ounce of charisma. I've seen better dialogue at the cash register in Billa, better humor on TV Barrandov, a better story while writing this review. A richly deserved disaster at the box office. Considering the setting and sources of Universal's horror films, I'm glad even the Chinese won't save their glorious Dark Universe.