Othello

Excellent in terms of Peele's creative limits, and in terms of the current creative limits of the contemporary mainstream it’s one of the films of the year. Anyway, who am I kidding, the movie itself is divine. If, like me, you're lucky enough to have seen the film as a complete "tabula rasa", you're in for a magical hour and a half of gradually unraveling mysteries in Hollywood Hills, during which various scripted red herrings and plot contrivances scramble around you, hilariously referencing the magical idiocy of 1990s American TV that Tarantino, for example, was so fond of talking about. After all, after his last film, I think Peele is much closer to him than to the oft-cited Hitchcock. It works as a genre piece, but with even a minimum of knowledge of American pop culture it starts to become apparent how insanely great the whole film is. The charm of big horse eyes, Harambe, the haunted aura of Hollywood ranches, cameramen measuring guns, Wincott pulled out of somewhere by his collar, a soundtrack that steals from both Morricone and Badalamenti, and a cloud that doesn't move for six months without anyone noticing. And Hoytema behind the camera. Yep.

When I was about 8-14 years old, I suffered from the fact that whenever something on TV appealed to me and I thought it was cool or importantly adult, without usually understanding what the movie was about, I would store various sections of the movie and its atmosphere in my mind and try to replicate them in my own work. That's how I remember when I was writing a story about a ritual killer on the streets of old Prague whose motivations date back to Nazi times (we had Se7en on tape, which I had ultimately ripped off, as did The Crimson Rivers) or a short story about how a mysterious figure returns to a remote village at the beginning of the last century and disfigured bodies start appearing in the fields (I had seen the trailer for Sekal Has to Die and the grim faces of the villagers in the middle of the suspiciously golden fields made it clear that the plot just needed a few disfigured corpses, plus I thought the title was cool). I consider the masterpiece to be an action story created after I'd seen Die Hard 3, which culminated in a scene where, during a fiery speech by the Prime Minister, a barrel of special chemical fluid flies through the window on either side of his lectern, and when they combine together they explode horribly. (...go ahead and laugh; what Netflix would give for that these days). Yeah and then you have the forty-three year old Jarchovský – a renowned, Czech Lion-winning screenwriter who has just seen a Nordic Drama (tm) and started waving his little hands and yelping while the credits are still rolling, and his wife knows immediately – she sticks a pen in one hand, paper in the other, and his big toe in his mouth so he can concentrate, and by midnight his work is finished. By morning Hřebejk has figured out that it has to be in a luxurious farmhouse under the cold orange lights of sunsets, sunrises, and decorative bulbs, so the peeling facade of idyll and better society can be seen. He automatically calls the last 6 numbers dialed to put together the cast and from that point on, God’s will be done. _______ There's something sadistically charming in knowing exactly what the actors are trying with comical urgency to achieve, how the director wants to be formally relevant, but still can't squeeze it out of the declamatory script, and ultimately you end up with some crazy scenes where a seemingly drunken pregnant Geisler screams at her newlywed husband in scripted fashion and a mega-important ten-minute close-up of the theater (not really film) actor Černý's face testifying that their kisses have always been salty from tears. I still have some sympathy for H+J here, because at least it's trying to be a bit naturalistic and unsettling for the Czech viewer, but surely there can be no worse combination than trying really hard at something intensely weighty only to end up dragging it into the ridiculous.

A strangely static Park variation on Basic Instinct, where I found at the end that I was focused on something other than what I should have been the whole time. Then I completely resonated with the last shot. PS: "After Parasite and Squid Game, another Korean phenomenon is taking the world by storm." – Man, it that really the best we can do?

The paragon of filmmaking ambition and actually the biggest contributor to the success of the American New Wave. Cimino pushes almost every important aspect of film narrative to the limit – he spends an enormous amount of time getting to know the characters, their backgrounds, and their relationships with each other. Virtually all of the actors are doing method acting, torturing, beating, and harassing each other. Plus, one of them is consciously counting down the hours before kicking the bucket. A cast of local non-actors, hundreds of extras in motion, all naturally lit as much as possible. It's a breathtaking cinephile experience. Except that in places the attempt at epic Coppola filmmaking just feels terribly forced. Plus, some sequences are oddly choppy, as if material is missing (the passage in the Vietnamese village) and the film doesn't quite know how to work with time-lapse yet. So it's a huge cinematic spectacle, but unlike the best works, it maintains a strange distance from the viewer because of this. It's as if it wants to be completely independent of the viewer without wanting to cooperate in any way. In the end, this story of friendship felt strangely alien and abstract.

TV series visuals, impotent record-scratch humor, and a tortured attempt at instant Japanese weirdness logically results in the most desperate train journey since the legendary Slovak Express. The film Bad Times at the El Royale often popped into my mind – for that too was an attempt at a Tarantino-esque screenplay with distinctive characters that failed on the grounds that, like here, it was written by a man who has spent most of his adult life in the back of an Uber somewhere scrolling through Instagram and doesn't know shit about how people work.

As with the previous film by the Cohn/Duprat duo The Distinguished Citizen, the funniest moments are hidden in various apt details, and it's very likely that everyone will end up laughing somewhere else. Sure, the very idea of a bit where a "non-conformist thespian intellectual" who despises awards practices publicly rejecting the Best Actor award in front of a mirror is fucking hilarious, and yet seeing it in such a static and academically oriented film suddenly feels pretty paper thin. For me, though, any passage with Irene Escolar, for example, who here perfectly captures the dreamy daughter of a millionaire trying to be an actress, is pure gold, and I kept thinking of the Spring Breakers press junkets with the bored wife of the director, Rachel Korine, trying to look focused and soulful and never getting asked any questions. But the static and consistent composition gives the film a certain irritating self-importance in places, in which it's Oscar Martínez’s character that's most fitting, because the film is told in his language. All while trying its hardest to mock him the most. But I don't think it does this intentionally.

It is generally known that life is divided into five phases – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Nick Cave has transitioned into the last one, which has taken away a lot of his mystery and added a few cheesy declamations, telling us about the beauty of the world and every person in it from the back seat of a car in the position of a man who has virtually complete freedom over whom he lets into his environment. He mentions quite aptly that he's beginning to feel like Warren Ellis is replacing him, and I think that's a good thing. The palpable charisma of the ubiquitous Andrew Dominik lifts this up quite a bit.

I don't know, but a film that manages to simultaneously deviate markedly from its subject matter and yet feel so theatrical and bookish just seems to me to have stumbled and knocked its teeth out somewhere. And then tries to blame it on the cops.

A film that reminded me why I got obsessed with Japanese cinema for a period of time years ago, and that motivates me to go back to it. A Japanese Aleksei German with a film where utter chaos feels completely natural. After all, it’s summertime and anything is possible.

From the two or three Turkish films I usually see a year, I always get the impression that this country suffers from a rare combination of artistic inauthenticity and isolation. This here Grain, for example, comes across as the project of someone who saw the complete Tarkovsky in the 80s and then no other films for forty years. The result is, of course, a complete mess with occasional departures to Jaroslav Dušek.