POMO

At the beginning, you think “maybe it won’t be just a clichéd story about Timberlake’s friendship with the little boy”, and in the end you’re glad that’s exactly what it was. Palmer is a little relationship movie with heart and an excellent Juno Temple in the supporting role of the endlessly high mother.

Even when I can’t have it in real life, the Florida sunshine in January is a delightful thing to see in a movie. And Lopez was also fun to look at. Otherwise, Parker is an absolutely average movie with a hackneyed plot. Considering how well he handled other, significantly bigger genre challenges in the past (particularly The Devil’s Advocate), it seems that Hackford just phoned it in this time.

The Little Things is an average buddy-detective flick with not entirely appropriate music by Thomas Newman and a detective who acts like an idiot in the climax. Washington and Malek are otherwise quite good together, the film isn’t boring and keeps you waiting for the thriller build-up and key plot twist, but in the end it is not in any way surprising. It’s worth seeing for Jared Leto’s bizarre, unsettling psycho character, which deserved a better screenplay.

Promising Young Woman is a revenge-flick product of the #metoo mindset in a pop package with a pleasing cast and more thorough characterisation of the protagonist than we are used to from thematically similar revenge-horror movies. Carey Mulligan is cute, but the mentions of “Oscar-worthy” acting are off base. Besides that, the film in no way goes beyond the creative boundaries of playful fluff, which is original only in its placement of the given theme in the A-list mainstreem. Conversely, the would-be screenwriting magic in the climax serves as confirmation of the film’s creative limits within the confines of a mere fresh teen drama. Plying the same waters, Assassination Nation was bolder and more stylish.

A farmer goes after the mobsters who killed his mother. An Irish accent, Nordic coarseness and strange black humour. The most interesting bad guy (the famous “round face” David Pearse) is unfortunately the first to be taken out and the top boss of the bad guys is ironically the film’s least cunning character. Besides the poorly conceived build-up in this respect, however, the film maintains a certain distinctiveness, thanks mainly to the well-acted, atypical protagonist played by the lesser-known Nigel O’Neill. Bad Day for the Cut is a bit of a festival film that delivers genre themes in its own way.

Miss Sloane has exactly what the similar Molly’s Game lacked – a more in-depth character study of the protagonist, including her private life. And Jessica’s acting performance deserves a deeper character focus! The lobbying and politics here may not appeal to everyone, but I personally find the controversial issue of guns in the US interesting (I’m for gun control) and this film offers a great insight into it.

This tranquil western road movie may not have a substantial dramatic plot, but it does have a humanistic heart. Simply Hanks. Its aim is to again show the slightly different corners and characters of the old American West and its code of justice and hardships in a more realistic way than Costner’s The Postman :-). But Greegrasse’s touch isn’t very apparent in it. Did she really direct it? James N. Howard’s return to the genre is nice, but due to the film’s minimalist approach, we can’t fully enjoy it until the closing credits.

Many of my friends and acquaintances don't understand how I can like horror movies. Why I voluntarily expose myself to something that is, in their opinion, negative and makes me anxious and scared. I try in vain to explain to them that horror movies are not negative for me, that they don’t make me feel anxious and that, at most, they put me a little “on edge”, which is even more true of the high-quality dramas that they watch. I try to explain to them that horror is genre entertainment, built on the director’s skill in playing with viewers and their emotions and, at the same time, with a filmmaking form that requires far greater innovation than the highest-quality relationship dramas. I can watch five horror movies in a day and thirty over the course of a film festival. That makes me enjoy them all the more and gives me an even bigger appetite for them. Because I want to dwell in their creators’ fantastical world of limitless imagination that only the sci-fi genre can match in terms of variety. ____ But what is horror to me, in the same sense of the word as it is perceived by those uncomprehending critics of the horror genre, are things like this miniseries. Built not on the imagination of creative and enthusiastic filmmakers, but on the real foundation of documentary filmmaking that uncovers an incomprehensible anomaly, a harmful element of our world personifying the ultimate disgust and evil. It’s enough for me to see things like this series once a year. Before this, it was the Hungarian film Son of Saul, which also reflects that reality, paradoxically without the “horror” label appearing among its official genres.

Dogtooth is a psychological study of the behaviour and perception of the world on the part of three teenage siblings whose parents never allowed them to leave the fenced-in grounds of their family home. Unawareness, solidarity, incest, animalism. And the parent’s perverse intention to thus protect their children from the “evil world”, an intention that must inevitably spiral out of control. Yorgos is a psychological animal with an absolutely unique, almost scientific approach to writing and directing extreme subjects, which he evidently enjoys immensely. With the conclusion of his experiment – the last shot of the film – he deliberately pisses off the viewer, sparks a wave of discussion and almost purposefully takes one of the prizes at Cannes. Cunning.

Though the second instalment in the franchise lacks the unique dark atmosphere and the weight of the curse that elevated the fourth film, the arrangement of the characters and their actions are sufficiently entertaining. Generally, the screenwriter’s idea of sending a horde of skeletal Templars on horseback into an enclosed square packed with people dancing and having a good time is cool. Of course there is no lack of the signs of trash filmmaking in the movie’s individual aspects, but overall it has a good, well-developed concept.