POMO

This digital amateur movie suffers from a terrible lack of professionalism in places (particularly the use of original music). On the other hand, however, it scintillates with humor that could be the envy of more than one Hollywood blockbuster. A fresh, on-point and heartfelt and uncritical parody of Britney Spears and everything around her. It’s also an effective balm for the misery of her “real movie”, Crossroads.

With minimal dialogue, The Isle is a poetic, narratively very simple film in which everything is told through the actions of the characters. However, it is not a challenging work with strong symbolism, but rather a simple story shot with the minimalist concept of an independent film. Human sexuality and physical pain are important means of expression in it. This small film is unobtrusive but remarkable. That is, if you ignore the last two brief shots and don’t let them spoil the overall impression. In fact, those shots form a very contradictory and, on the director’s part, cheap and nasty interlude that adds a new, needlessly confusing dimension to the preceding plot.

Men in Black II is a misguided and spasmodic patchwork of spectacular scenes, a third of which could have been cut out and no on would have been worse off for it. But then the film would have been an “unusable” 60 minutes. I’m actually asking myself why I’m giving it three stars. Maybe just for the divine dog.

At first, I was quite bothered by the digital visual aspect and low-budget quality of Khaled. The film begged for a more dignified look and dark, high-quality symphonic music. As the minutes passed, however, I was fully mollified by the nicely intensifying screenplay and creative directing in combination with the cinematography, which enhanced the drama fantastically (see, for example, the shot of Khaled running down the corridor to the cellar with a frying pan in his hand). In this instance, the cheap digital image was no longer a detriment, but rather gave the film naturalistic authenticity. The young actor and, mainly, the UNIQUE subject on which this brilliant film is based are worthy of praise.

A girl reassesses her attitude toward life after she is hit by a car and narrowly escapes death. Sitting behind the wheel of the car was a successful young man who, though a proud defender of the law, leaves the scene of the accident like a coward. However, his remorse shatters everything on which he had based the values of his life. An elderly man, with whom the young man had been talking in a bar just before the accident, searches in vain for the source of happiness in life... etc., etc. Cultivated, intelligent, visually spare dialogic philosophizing with a bit of irony and fatalism. Though 13 Conversations About One Thing is an enjoyable alternative to Hollywood light entertainment, it comes across as a futile attempt at “would-be independence” and thus lacks the credibility and sincerity of similar European films.

Filament is a film about the hardships of a strange Japanese family. The father is a transvestite and finds pleasure in photographing his family and himself dressed in women’s clothes. And the son and daughter are adolescents with no future, living in a world as gray, heartless and formulaic as the world of their computer games. The cause of all of this is their mother, who abandoned them ten years prior and ran off with a “younger male”. This film is culturally distant, yet intimate in terms of its subject matter, beautifully enabling us to get to know all of the characters through their endearing weaknesses and long-hidden and ultimately expressed feelings. It’s a beautiful film about family cohesion, forgiveness, love and self-sacrifice. The sad and overly dramatic moments are lightened up with gentle, casual humor. The director doesn’t try to overdo it and wring tears out of us, instead preferring to stay on an easy-going poetic level.

The first half of Unfaithful is excellent. Adrian Lyne is a brilliant psychologist and he fantastically captures the development of a married woman who is torn by unbridled sexual passion and a guilty conscience because of her infidelity and “hurting the people she loves”. The scene on a train with the sex flashbacks is absolutely fantastic in this respect. And in the bathtub scene, the director superbly captures the alienation that the protagonist feels in relation to her husband. I devoured this excellent first half, shot in Lyne’s typically hypnotic style, with bated breath. In the second half of the film, however, the screenplay devolves into cheap, half-baked, self-parodying thriller clichés.

The arid, dusty plains of Iran without a drop of water. Minimal camera movement. No music. A world without emotion, without colour. A well-off middle-aged man intent on suicide, looking for someone in this environment who would be willing to bury him the following night for a hefty financial reward. It doesn't matter why he wants to die – and we won’t even find out. Abbas Kiarostami doesn’t like to manipulate viewers’ feelings, preferring instead to just let them observe and compose their thoughts. What makes this film so interesting that I couldn’t take my eyes off it? If I managed to find that out, the magic it possesses would fall away. In any case, this is the first film to make me feel thirsty when it was over.

A nice, deep, sad story. But as coldly and uninterestingly filmed as any Austrian or German TV series. A waste of the big screen!

We spend the whole time watching  a group of people (veteran actor, neophyte actress, successful producer, a chauffeur who wants to be a successful producer, etc.) as they search for happiness in life during the titular festival. The unsuccessful ones seek success, while the successful ones take it for granted and long for a happy partnered life and love. And there are a few gratuitous shots of billboards for Stigmata, Fight Club and Entrapment. But there is no humor and no satire à la Robert Altman. Only boring dialogue, which makes sense only in the last third of the film, when the characters start to take off their masks. Very weak.