POMO

Amundsen is a nicely told story with an explorer’s spirit, high-quality CGI and make-up, and a remarkable performance by Pål Sverre Hagen. However, the film is a bit sluggish in depicting Amundsen’s complex nature, primarily through the character played by Katherine Waterston, who, together with Amundsen’s brother, guides us through his story. It's as if she was plugged into the screenplay as an unavoidable female element only to vindicate Amundsen’s positive human qualities. However, the film tells us the minimum about her relationship with Amundsen and rather depicts his relationship with another woman.

A properly filled-in plot template that’s entertaining, especially thanks to its characters. With its good villain(s), one dramatic moment and one joke that will make you laugh out loud, Spenser Confidential is fine a diversion, better than you would have expected.

Geostorm is an extraordinarily bad and silly disaster blockbuster in which absolutely nothing works. It lacks Emmerich’s perspective and empathetic work with the characters. The scientific dialogue and the plot in general don’t make even a bit of sense and the political conspiracy plot line is laughable, as are the nonsensical weather elements (a cold wind-driven mega-wave flash freezes people in bathing suits on the beach in tropical Rio? Huh?). It’s been a long time since I’ve had trouble finishing such a well-cast film.

Though Chaos is a bit of a guilty pleasure, it’s a nice film with an original sci-fi world, imaginative “dialogue” and a very likeable central duo. The motif of revealing heartfelt thoughts and revealed wishes is magical for sparking romance. Daisy’s shyness and unkempt blond hair won me over more here than in Star Wars, and Holland is perfect as a simple adolescent boy with no awareness of the truth, nostalgia for his mother and his relationship with his dog. Only Mikkelsen isn’t well suited for these negative roles; I simply don’t believe him.

Mortal Engines is a grand farce of colossal proportions with an exceedingly large multicultural cast. The tangle of characters and secondary motivations makes it impossible to focus on the main dramatic story line, let alone on the emotional experience, which is sketched out so well in the promising opening. That’s a shame, because the film’s fantastical world and its visual richness knows no bounds, and Junkie XL serves up an epic Ben Hur-esque soundtrack. It’s hard to say if it’s dragged down by the screenplay, the directing or both, but coming from Peter Jackson and the entire LOTR team, such a stumble is quite a surprise.

PVT CHAT is like the dissertation work of a New York Film Academy student who is not afraid to go a bit over the edge. There are plenty of penises and semen in this film about the manipulation of a young submissive by an internet dominatrix. The theme itself strives to create controversy through the open approach to it. However, the immaturity, naïve attempt at a thriller-style plot and mainly the empty dialogue are rather more evidence of the filmmaker’s frustration with the absence of a meaningful topic that he would have shot with real interest and enthusiasm. The scene of a long and spasmodic (as if friendly) fight at an art exhibition only confirms this.

Red Dot offers up the familiar theme of tourists hunted like wild animals in the wilderness, but spiced up with new twists. The unique Swedish locations and the film’s climax significantly improve an otherwise absolutely standard experience with at least one instance of illogic. The directing is sufficiently good and everything fits well psychologically, but in more experienced hands this could only have been a real hit, like the British film Calibre, for example.

Goosebumps. Every time.

This is my Promising Adult Woman! Original subject matter with modern definition of the characters, a clever battle of rock-solid egos, where no one is an angel and everyone deserves a punch in the mouth. A thriller and a gangster film, led by a female character as masterfully as Clint Eastwood did in Leone’s westerns and, at the same time, an accurate mirror held up to American society. Rosamund Pike hands in the best performance by an actress in an English-language film in recent memory – not with award-winning depth, but by bejewelling every scene with surgically precise facial expressions. She is the backbone of this boldly conceived mix of genre elements. The casting of Peter Dinklage seems bizarre at first, but gradually fits perfectly into the caricaturish concept of the film. I Care a Lot could have come off as a cheap novelty, but thanks to great directing and Pike, it turned out to be a little post-modern gem.

This crime flick is fantastically stylish in every possible way, with its gloomy atmosphere of Manhattan at night, alarming police mega-dragnet with a lockdown of “the city that never sleeps”, the noirish character of an honest, straight-shooting cop, music in the spirit of old “gritty” crime movies. And standing against that, the most transparent and predictable screenplay that I can remember. Everything that is merely suspicious to the protagonist is immediately so clear to the viewers that they think that just maybe, for such stylish filmmaking, it must have been done intentionally to serve a higher purpose. But that’s not the case and, because of that, the film turns out in the end to be just a naïvely short-sighted banality.