POMO

With the exception of the mammoth hunt at the beginning, this naïve CGI fairy-tale has absolutely nothing to offer and is not entertaining, not even with Emmerich’s expected trademark silliness. It’s been a long time since I felt that I completely wasted two hours in a theater. From the script to the actors, 10,000 BC is an utterly empty movie. Ugh.

Solid craftsmanship, but the content is so feeble and predictable that you will die of boredom. There have been hundreds of such films and this one does not stand out among them in any way. It’s good entertainment only for viewers who go to the cinema once in ten years. And for small children who are satisfied with the sight of a cute dog and a series of naïve jokes.

A decent series pilot that has no business on the big screen. Logical holes in the narrative vs. powerful moments of surprise and an intense climax, which, however, is only as long as the climax of a TV series episode. A small movie to accompany Super 8, which also didn’t warrant much attention. Not as good as the larger and original Cloverfield (if we’re talking about J.J. Abrams’s projects for the same target audience).

François Cluzet practically doesn’t leave the screen, successfully carrying the entire film on his shoulders – with his unreadable, stony expressions, he keeps the audience curious as to what he wants to do and how he’s going to do it. Not that much happens in the end, however, and the film remains just a well-rendered take on a real event, which for foreign viewers is not as interesting as for the French. For them, this was the media event of the year. I was happy to hear M83’s “Midnight City” in the end credits.

Eighty minutes of a drawn-out tangle of several events that lead somewhere, and we don’t know where until the last minute. The movie relies a lot on its sound component (which is unpleasantly aggressive in places) and the constantly accelerating editing. In the end, it turns out to be a self-serving trifle with a pseudo-philosophical “message”, but I still applaud the Polish for being able to pull off a thriller movie like this while being able to hold the viewer’s attention without being ridiculous.

After some time, I’m increasing my rating to a “subjective” five stars, because it’s exactly my cup of tea. Danny Boyle once again proves his originality and ability to engagingly tell any story through audiovisual orgies. In an intimate drama with a single character, he doesn’t shy away from strong camera filters, fastforward scenes, split screens or jumping from one flashback to another. These tricks might seem out of place and irritating in a different film of this genre, but they make 127 Hours a fast-paced, riveting story that is never boring while also never straying from the sharp focus on the psychological state of the main character. It is an excellent, almost extraordinary film that made me cry with happiness at the end.

Some films can give us an intellectual experience and others can give us an emotional experience. 12 Monkeys gives us both, presenting each in exemplary form and blending them into a perfectly harmonious form in the climax. It is a form in which one can find something new even on the tenth viewing, thus making 12 Monkeys a gem of the sci-fi genre.

Django turned upside down. An odyssey into the emotional and mental state that results from the loss of dignity and absolute humiliation, quietly conveyed in wide-angle shots of marshy Louisiana with music by Hans Zimmer that is reminiscent of his score for The Thin Red Line (Williams’s strings would have worked better here). The unimaginative but “safe” Hollywood narrative template keeps the film unnecessarily tame and moves it away from the original character we had hoped for from the film’s director, Steve McQueen. He made a huge mistake by casting the likeable Fassbender in the key and most complex role of the sadistic, evil and weak Epps. Even Benedict Cumberbatch would have been a better fit for this paraphrase of the character of Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) from Schindler’s List and, with a more believable embodiment of ultimate human evil, the last third of the film escalating in the final flogging could have been the most powerful movie moment of the year.

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.

15 Minutes is a movie in the style of Stone’s Natural Born Killers. Its greatest asset is the Czech actor Karel Roden, who brilliantly portrays the character of a deranged neurotic killer and criminal who does not solve his problems with his head but with a knife in his hand. He and Oleg Taktarov recreate the Mallory and Nickie duo of the Stone movie I mentioned. These two protagonists are rather hateful, but at the same time play the roles of icons, bearers and engineers of the idea of the movie. Unlike Stone’s work, where even those on the side of the law were exactly the same nut cases as the central pair of murderers, the evildoers in 15 Minutes find their opposition in truly American heroes with big guns and even bigger hearts. We keep our fingers crossed for them, as it is natural to do when we see such fights between good and evil – and that’s why we get a lot of slaps in the face, criticizing this consumerist and naïve, Hollywood cliché-riddled outlook. According to the movie, America, the “rules” for success in its entertainment industry and its entire legal system are all rotten and sick. What prevents the film from becoming something more than a bit of provocation is its genre vagary and slight internal contradiction. For a while, you are amused by the stupidity and naivety of a pair of European immigrants and then you are shocked by the brutality that takes place under the blade wielded by one in front of the other one’s camera. Later, you will fall in love with De Niro in the romantic scenes with his fiancée and then ... you will see for yourself. In short, 15 Minutes is a rather incoherent mix of contradictory emotions. It is questionable whether Herzfeld wanted to conceive his film in this way or whether the directorial conception of the project got out of hand.