POMO

This intelligent and realistic road-movie buddy comedy offers a crazy ride and yet, at the same time, it stays down to earth and retains a human element. At the heart of the successful script are the characters written for Robert Downey and Zach Galifianakis, and the great chemistry between them. Galifianakis is no longer just a quiet, ridiculous character like the one he played in The Hangover.

A surprisingly bland and uninteresting thriller. Martin Campbell is “only” a professional action-movie craftsman, and the subject matter of Edge of Darkness needed a more distinctive take on the sad, depressing and urgent warning against the circles of powerful people. Moreover, the film barely contains any action and doesn’t offer any kind of breathtaking climax of the detective plot, which is more chaotic than interesting. Danny Huston and Ray Winstone are well cast in their roles, but Winstone’s character is horribly botched up (while it is evident that it was supposed to be the second most important character in the story). Mel Gibson is good but his performance is nowhere near what he did in Payback. The same could be said about the whole movie.

The creator of Enterprisse made black-and-white photographs move and called the result a “film”. It has some kind of a kinetic drive, but should that be reason enough to praise this?

Doug Liman created some decent conversations and the chemistry between Naomi Watts and Sean Penn hasn’t lost any cinematic drive since 21 Grams. But where is the entertainment potential in addressing a marriage crisis against the background of complicated political happenings in the White House when even American audiences have already forgotten all about those events? Fair Game is an example of a viewer-unfriendly, bland and boring film.

An adolescent existential drama that is neither as dumb nor as B-movie-ish as you might expect. Without a sophisticated screenplay and in the space of two square meters, it still manages to impress and engage the viewer, because it is believable, the portrayal of the characters is natural, their behavior is realistic and the suspenseful scenes (one of which is actually quite cruel) are well balanced with the dialogue scenes. I’m giving Frozen four stars for the good feeling I get from supporting a small, unobtrusive film that deserves it.

Get Him to the Greek is composed of stoned leftovers of nice humor from the much better and more well-thought-out Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But how can you not like a comedy with Jonah Hill and Russell Brand?

God of Love is a nice idea, with black-and-white visuals being a perfect fit for the streets of New York and Luke Matheny’s good self-casting and performance. And it has a nice message that, however, could have been delivered in half of the running time.

It would not be dignified to compare this movie to the Jason Bourne series. Let’s overlook the fact that Green Zone does not have Bourne’s entertaining drive, has no compelling music, and takes place from beginning to end in a location that looks like a single dark construction site and tells us nothing about its characters. It is easier to compare it with Ridley Scott’s thematically related Body of Lies, which I rated with three stars and which entertained me more. Green Zone is just a black-and-white militaristic exercise with a directing style that has been applied more successfully and with more vivid colors in other movies.

Grown Ups is another comedy with a “script”. Let’s line up today’s most popular comedians and let them improvise and have fun. Something will surely come out of it, something that will make more than a hundred million dollars in U.S. cinemas alone and we’ll all be happy. The movie has a poor plot and makes poor use of the individual actors’ uniqueness, and the most valuable character actor of the entire film, Steve Buscemi, plays the biggest idiot here. Thanks, but no thanks.

Getting to know the characters and the period atmosphere in the first third promises a great drama of Western European quality with Oscar ambitions. This potential, however, somehow fades away during the rest of the film. The writing of the list was supposed to be the key scene of the film that would turn the remaining running time into an unforgettable dramatic inferno. It turned out to be only a partial success. Nevertheless, the film remains very decent – the actors, costumes, set designs and camerawork are all flawless. I thought hard about giving it four stars.