Reviews

I can't believe people interpret this movie as normalization of the Nazi monstrosities and see a depiction of some "daily life", when the terror is present in literally every scene. A servant is washing his master's boots and the water comes out bloody; an older lady is dozing in the garden after a party and suddenly chokes on crematorium fumes; children are playing in a river and human ashes cling to their naked bodies... Even a frame with just a flower in it evokes only uneasiness, because you are completely aware what's happening behind the scenes.

I have two problems though. First, these signs of evil are actually too obvious and simplistic and apart from layering them one after the other, the movie doesn't do much more. (The juxtaposition with the scenes in negative is pretty unimaginative too.) Second, rather than banalizing evil, it's demonizing life in the face of someone else's suffering which is practically all life on earth. Even if you dare to argue that, ehm, unlike Nazis, you are not killing anybody, in our Christian-socialist-green culture you'll still be pronounced guilty by means of your ignorance, passiveness or even your insensible help (like the girl with the fruit). And I know no greater evil than to condemn the living because they live.

I'm sure... No, I know that school relations are interspersed with violence, but interrogations, searches - no way! And in a modern German school at that! At the same time, regardless of all the abuse they are subjugated to, the students also act like little Gestapo persons... As another commenter said, it's kinda surreal. The mathematical metaphor surprisingly promotes prejudice thinking and actually obliterates the narrow field in which the whole "liberal" ethic dwells. Normally, I would have liked that, but I'm sure it's not intended; that they accidently came to it while struggling to give an intellectual shine to their little story about pioneers and comrades.

At first I thought that the ending adds some kind of a dark undertone to the Zen background everyone's talking about, but then I realized that the whole movie is pierced with ambivalence, starting with the title taken from a song only seemingly about love, and that Hirayama haven't found piece only in simplicity, but also in hurt, chaos, unfulfillment, and his own imperfection. Which, of course, doesn't mean that he reacts to existential pain with positivism, but that he gives it the same right to exist, just like in the final frames his bitter tears coexist with his appreciation for the sunrise without any conflict.

Koreeda tends to be melodramatic, but kind of good melodramatic, so I normally like what he does. Not this time. The multiperspective structure, which is also an accurate representation of our fragmentary access to reality, might have worked nicely if only it wasn't filled with nonsense. Illogical developments even with the whole picture in mind, not to mention the unhuman interactions throughout. Imagine, for example, a mother and a son positioning themselves in such a way, so in the next scene they could touch without looking at each other and the director could convey problematic, but still sought out contact... But this days it's enough to brush on one of the approved topics and everybody is in awe. So why bother to actually make the movie?

The most unpredictable director takes on the left feminist awakening of a woman and lands in the biggest cliche there is. And cliches are the opposite of freedom - creative or social. This one goes like this: you discover your sexuality and emancipate from your father/the patriarchy/God. After the pleasures of the world you discover there's ugliness too, but instead of turning into a cynic, you go to the bottom yourself. There, your eyes open to the truth - with the help of a black lesbian woman, because all white heterosexual men lie - and you confront your father about the trauma he inflicted on you. Now, you are going to take his place, but instead of serving your own ego like men do, you will work to the benefit of society. I can easily see this as a parody, but I'm sure that if not necessarily its creators (I just don't want to believe that Lanthimos would do this), then its praising audiences are dead serious.

Two young men, one black, one white, are driving to a cabin in the woods among boar cries - wild fires are raging in the area. This environmentally alarming atmosphere will be the essence of this movie; a lovely canvas for killing of an ego and also - the perfect reason for it. Naturally, we will be killing the white man's ego who, with his neurotic behavior while immersed in the good mother nature, looses the viewer's sympathy already during these first frames. Next, the guys get into a playful fight for no good reason, but from the looks they exchange while their bodies rub, we understand that the colored person is also gay. Aside from deepening the political cliche in which the movie will be set, this scene is a sign for the cumbersome way it will be communicating its ideas.

Already at the house, the guys are informed that they will be sharing it with another guest - Nadja - so, for some unknown reason, they hide in their room till the next morning, while a wild sex scene takes place next door. Actually, I know why - this way we add yet another unsympathetic trait to the image of the cowardly white heterosexual male, and namely homophobia, seen in his unwillingness to share a bedroom with the gay man. Also, the situation presents an opportunity to create a mystery atmosphere around the next cliche character to be introduced - that of the fatal free spirited woman - and make her desired even before she's seen. The next morning she herself appears in the garden, dressed in a fiery red dress (yet another thing that's afire, how profound), hangs the sheets from the previous evening in the breeze and the cowardly white homophobe is already drooling.

The third positively depicted character against whom we will be judging the cowardly white drooling homophobe is the man who spends the night with the hippie - a bisexual lifeguard. The two men, of course, confront each other for the alpha role in the group and although the lifeguard defends his application with a cheesy sex story at the edge of vulgarity, the social sanction once again decides against the cowardly white drooling homophobe. And here, we've already gathered three characters who don't bring to the situation any contradictions of their own, but only serve as a blank - and exemplary - decor for the destruction of the protagonist's toxic ego. Women, bisexuals, and gays are having fun in a spirit of goodwill and free love, only heterosexual men stand grumpily aside pretending they are something more.

Without any grounds, of course. The cowardly white drooling homophobe - whose name, Leon, is spot on for someone who sees themselves as superior to other living beings - is just a mediocre writer. If not for another reason, but because his writing mirrors his toxic life views. In his novel's draft we read about a foul-smelling baby who ruins a love moment and thus understand that he's also a misogynist who values only the pleasant sides of his relations with women. His attempts to guess the baby's sex by the color of its blanket shows him as full of sexist prejudices too. And so on and so forth. Every scene that follows only adds further dark shades to his image till in the end you almost suffocate from the dirt - exactly like the wild fires gradually extinguish all the oxygen from the forest...

What should happen, so that all Leons in the world finally realize the enormity of the threat ablazing the sky before our very eyes, while they only worry about their stupid egos, penises, and great deeds? - asks the director heatedly like a little pioneer before his comrades and for his uninspired answer the jury at the Berlinale festival, a forum more politically biased even than the Oscars, gives him the Silver Bear. The year is 2023.

At Otis's new school "liberalism" has finally won. Everyone is now "different" and anyone who's not, eats their lunch alone. The new power couple might not be traditional, but their function to force their standards on others remains. Only now it's cool to be green, undergo hormone therapy, and reshape your body. The "progressive" show takes a "conservative" twist portraying its yesterday's heroes as the hypocrites and tyrants they actually are. Is it possible, or is it just a plot obstacle to be overthrown in the name of an even more "liberal" picture? These were my thoughts after S4E1. So naive. Of course they will assert that bullying people for the right reasons is "making the world a better place".

Apart from the solid presence of Margarita Stoykova, it's just another misery story, but without the emotional effect because it's so clumsily and so dishonestly told. For one, we see the protagonist's inner state directly depicted in her scribblings, but what's even worse, any kind of problematic behavior seems to serve some very presentable purpose. Why is that now, huh? If Dida was using her body to buy herself booze instead of English lessons, would that have made her any less pitiable? Authors and audiences who cannot stand a real anti-hero only demonstrate how deeply uncompassionate they are. And I'm sick of how these self-proclaimed saints appropriate all the important topics and effectively take away the opportunity for real discussion. If you want a truthful coming-of-age drama, Kids is the obvious option, but for a more girly take, see the Israeli Six Acts.

Ingenious character study with outstanding performances from Portman and Moore. Extremely feminist without pretending that women are innocent victims, but also not denouncing them as purely monstrous. Just an honest and thus spot on portrayal of their deepest feelings and motivations, no judgement attached. An aging housewife with simple origins and a younger professional from an intellectual family might seem like polar opposites, but this movie shows how they are practically the same woman, just caught in different seasons - May/December - personally, but also historically. And how they finally merge into the image of the snake is jussst brilliant.

I was intrigued by the promise for a social crime drama in the vein of Breaking Bad and Fargo, but this movie turned out to be something entirely different. What happens in Blaga's Lessons do not stem from a conflict with the world, but rather from within - from Blaga's very sense of rightness. There's no external event that sets her in motion; it's just her need to do everything like it should be done. The fraud she later suffers is again only made possible because the criminals refer to her morals and her sense of social duty. The private lessons she teaches once again demonstrate her black-and-white thinking, the immense significance she places on minor details and how severely she judges even the slightest mistake. Ultimately, exactly this stringent mindset is why it becomes so easy for her to break bad: she already believes she's no good because of something that, in fact, is entirely forgivable. This whole character study is probably an even better idea than the promoted one and the groundwork for its development is there. Unfortunately, for me, the movie worked only after some consideration and that robed it from immediate effect in the theatre. Also, it's very Blaga-like, if you will, to measure the character's own drama against "bigger" dramas like it's done here through the image of her foreign student, a war refugee.

I couldn't care less about historical "accuracy", history being just another interpretation of reality, only slightly different from fiction. It's like whining that a book adaptation is not a direct depiction of the book. Well, it's not and there's no need for it to be. This Napoleon here is an author's work from the 21th century and today we like to delve deeper into a "hero" or a "villain", so I expected exactly that when I entered the theater. I didn't want to know "facts" about the legendary commander, I wanted to see what Ridley Scott imagined his soul consisted of. For a moment, actually, witnessing a very frightened Napoleon before his first big battle, I thought he will deliver, but after everything that follows, I'm convinced the idea is not to show his human side, but his flawed one. So, we see a mother's boy much like in Beau is Afraid, almost devoid of reason, obsessed with his wife's crotch and these compulsive imperial dreams, vain, and oblivious of the deaths he causes. Now, I know some people say it's a leftist propaganda, but they forget that Napoleon is a child of the Revolution and that all its heroes are gravely ridiculed in the movie and exposed as mere power seekers. So, what's at play here is probably just the traditional Anglo-Saxon hatred towards their French enemy. Being confronted with all this, all I was left to enjoy were the battle scenes, through which I would normally sleep. So, if you ask me three months from now, I would probably say that Napoleon is about Russians spectacularly drowning in a frozen lake.

I love Sandra Hüller ever since Requiem and I'm at a stage in my life where couple dynamics is very relevant, so I was pretty excited about this one. Sadly, it didn't deliver. I support the message that people's relations are too complex to be easily judged and Hüller's performance is masterful, but it's not enough to save it all. The story is quite standard (with the addition of the obligatory non-traditional roles and sexualities), so we have two and a half hours to dedicate fully to the psychological depths. There is only a brush on the surface though. The kid character is unnecessary and unbelievable: he is allowed and able to make a philosophical argument in a courtroom, for crying out loud. I would never say "no" to a dog, but the truth is we don't need it either. All in all, a decent entertainment for when you feel under the season, but nothing more.

A light comedy for the holiday season with stereotypical humor. That's exactly what I expected after seeing the trailer and wasn't planning to see more, but after the "controversy" I had to. Well, I don't see anything controversial in the movie itself. It targets high-status groups, but that's indeed the rule and we have so many better attempts at it. Of course, a lot of other unconvincing movies get praised just because they promote the right political views, but I guess, it won't happen for this one. I'm not sure if I should attribute that to Polanski's history though, or to the fact that this movie is just hard to defend.

I expected a movie for my mother's taste: Juliette Binoche, dramatic love and hopes for an Oscar, but decided that I can sit through it because of my love for food. This movie made me hate food. Cooking in a castle, the menu of a prince - who cares?! They make even digestion seem false, while presumably praising the simple pleasures. And everything on the canvas of a boring love story between a feminist cook and a snooty chef, who pretends to care how stew fed the nation for centuries, while busting enormous quantities of all these exclusive ingredients to entertain his friends. There's also the predictable and at the same time unbelievable rising of a new culinary talent: a poor little girl who's not mature enough to appreciate some delicacies, but is somehow capable of guessing all the ingredients in a complex sauce from just one sip. With every scene I was like: nooo, you didn't actually make this movie! Nooo! But they did. The only things that slightly interested me were the aluminum antennae they put in soil to make it stronger and the way they ate some kind of small birds with their heads hidden under their napkins.

The story is illogical, unrelatable and told in the worst way possible - through a rationalized and lifeless confession in front of a psychiatrist. Everybody gives the worst acting performance in their life, especially the lady who plays the allegedly successful actress. Shakespeare is once again abused without any need or gain. The idea that God's new Son and flock are the yesterday's outcasts might have actually worked, but is not developed strongly enough throughout the movie to serve as a logical, let alone powerful ending.

Still, there's one scene that makes me think that Besson might actually not be asserting, but problematizing the shown ideas. In it the protagonist performs in a drag show as Edith Piaf: he opens his mouth and her voice comes out. No one seems to notice the fraud though, the audience in the club is in awe. But maybe the audience in the movie theater notices and here lies a message for them? If that's the case, all the other flaws of the movie can be seen as hints towards a different understanding: how unsustained it is to diabolize all men, to victimize and sanctitize all women, to free victims from responsibility for their harmful coping mechanisms and to praise them as fair instead.

Of course, that would make the movie only more clever, but not better, because the power dynamics problem does exist and although it should be addressed in a very different way than it is currently, it definitely shouldn't be minimized or denied.

This show is a phenomenon and should be taught at schools! And not only at film schools but also at regular ones. So that every little "serial killer" could see early on that "normal people are just delusional, F-up people". And maybe, just maybe transform our pitiful society of Georges, patched from empty phrases about the good, the right, and the beautiful, into something authentic and meaningful.

A special feature is the title art by David Choe who's also casted as Danny's cousin, Isaac. Seeing the last illustration, Figures of Light, I was so afraid that they will sugarcoat it but they stayed truthful till the very end. So rewarding.

A Hitler Studies professor who can only count to ten in German tries to navigate life amid common and personal disasters armed with all kinds of crap philosophies like: "bad things don't happen to good people" and "you are either a dier, or a killer". I like the concept of us waiting helplessly in the world's supermarket for death to come and I will probably make an effort to finish DeLillo's novel, but the movie did very little for me. The idiocy of intellectuals, the limitations of science, and the false sense of safety in society are all worth exploring and I have to say, it's done in a quite clever way here, but somehow it works only in theory. Some more compassion for the characters would also have been nice. Schade.

I'm so glad I watched Pearl first - my fav movie of the year so far, because after X I'm not sure I would have wanted to. It doesn't quite add up with Perl's much more complex character/story, and we learn very little about Maxine. Still, I loved some particular scenes like the one where old Pearl dresses up and tries to get her husband to bed or the one where we see the youngest wanna be star in her girl's panties saying "Sunday". Maxine floating in the alligator's pond like she herself is a vicious reptile is priceless. It's not enough for a movie though. Still, Maxine definitely stays on my list.

Being brought into the world by a mother myself I anticipated "Beau is afraid" as another possibility to reflect on the ambivalence of all that follows from that fact. Unfortunately, I found it to be more close to the therapeutic cliché than to the human experience. I also don't see the mocking tone fit for the topic. Still, people with mothers and mothers themselves should watch as there are so many who don't realize or at least don't admit that the toxic dynamics shown in the movie even exist. But please note that the streets are really dangerous and people really don't care - it's not mommy issues.

I liked how Zachary and Eleonora played and the look of the movie is very captivating although not necessarily realistic. But it's true that even if the world seems more and more fair, it's actually still ruled by power, no matter that the powerful change and you cannot always recognize them by the blood on their fists.

The story is nicely told and the end is logical but shouldn't have been accidental. I also don't particularly appreciate the repeating frames and lines; they are too intrusive and instead of rhythm create annoyance. My biggest concern though is that a person's value is seen as dependent on their literacy, which beats the purpose of inclusion.

Otherwise, I won't be surprised if a gypsy boss happens to be smarter and to have more integrity than the clowns who sell "culture". But I would expect to see it in his actions and not in his reciting from the complete works of whoever.