POMO

Gentle eroticism, wild sex, physical violence and a lot of humour, all dressed up in comedic and fantasy garb. Each character has a distinct nature and plays a clear role throughout the story, which is about an effort to prove innocence before the sentence is carried out. By Chinese standards, this is a perfectly normal, mainstream story about forbidden love that looks at sex with humor, at physical punishment with perverse pleasure and at romantic love with picturesque poetry. By our standards, it is very exotic entertainment and mandatory viewing for all fans of Chinese culture. You have seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but you surely don’t know that you can also have wild sex while flying between tree branches.

A great subject, filmed by two directors and the result is…on the one hand, a compelling drama with a strong but half-baked idea and, on the other hand, a sharp, chilling thriller that’s comparable to The Sixth Sense in its most suspenseful scenes. With more focus on the central character’s life story than on the haunting, The Eye could have been a blow to the soul. That said, it still works very well as a bit of shock therapy.

The Rock and The Matrix collide in B-movie video trash that really DOES NOT BELONG in the cinema. Half Past Dead is not an entertaining bad movie. It’s a boring and cringeworthy bad movie!

Pasolini’s soulless, sexist exhibitionism, which instead of a feature film rather reminded me of a long amateur music video with no rhyme or reason.

One thing that keeps me up at night is the fact that this film was made in the same year as Fulci’s Zombie 2 and Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust. After all, it’s a clone of both of those films’ screenplays, complete with the added theme of a mad scientist creating humanoid zombie-creatures on a mysterious island (a lá The Island of Dr. Moreau). Add to that a sexy blonde who constantly takes her clothes off everywhere, a hero in the mold of Harrison Ford/Belmondo, and lots of very detailed gore. It’s also nice to see cannibals and zombies together in one movie! As Italian trash, Zombie Holocaust is irresistible. It’s brutal and unintentionally funny, with an essential helping of sex. If you devour this genre and judge the appeal of similar films by the frequency of stupid dialogue, the extent to which the music is terrible and the number of litres of blood, zombies and cannibals, you’re in the right place.

Two Weeks Notice is a comedy that focuses less on what it’s actually about than on the charm of the lead actors. The film contains a lot of improvisation, mainly from Sandry Bullock, while Hugh Grant remains in her shadow. This sincere, immediate and endearing film is delightful as a pleasant way to pass the time.

The first third of The Recruit is great. The plot slows down in the second third and in the final third, it reaches a spasmodic and ineffective climax. It’s a thriller in which nothing is as it seems. And a thriller that doesn’t work the way it was intended. The fine cast can’t salvage it.

Not much space is given to identify with the main characters and thus only a weak argument can be made against the film’s questionable moral aesthetic: never mind that you’re a murderer – as long as you are capable of love, you’re going to heaven. Tom Tykwer doesn’t deny it. Some of the scenes – e.g. the dialogue in the church, the camera circling the tree and the ending – are amazing. But in order for the film as a whole to be amazing, it would have to be longer, more detailed and better developed in the first half. A missed opportunity to make an exceptional film based on an exceptional subject.

In terms of filmmaking, The Pianist is a skilfully told story that takes too long to crystallize and is too depersonalized for what it ultimately crystallizes (or rather doesn’t crystallize) into.

A Guy Thing is an extraordinarily unfunny and forced comedy with an extraordinarily stupid climax. The screenwriter must have written it while sitting on the toilet with some very serious intestinal problems.