Isherwood

When you have such a strong theme in your hands to film, is it really necessary to do it in such a way that not only the stalwarts will fall asleep to it and only the absolute hipsters appreciate it?

The perfect rape of the audience's expectations. I've never seen so many spectators leave a theater as I did during A Field in England. However, I don't deny that it's probably not possible to decipher it in any reasonable way.

This is exactly the kind of film you have to be in the mood for. Just like Cormac McCarthy's books. However, it is questionable whether there is a better way to enjoy such a slow film in a comfortable theater. This is because the great actors in such a simple story will have an even harder time when they’re being watched from the comfort of home, and that is a bit unfair of the director.

This is a great queer-themed film that avoids all the ills of genre films in a major way. But then it messes it up with the cheapest of endings, in which it hits a martyred tone in order to get emotion out of the audience; it’s sovereignly directed until then, full of simple and long camera shots, minimal dialogue, and a great ambivalent atmosphere.

A folk comedy and exactly the type of film Zdeněk Troška will never make. This is a film that has a lot of humor flowing from the screen. I have never seen such imaginatively-processed running-jokes. Yet what surprises me most is that most films like this lose steam in the second third, only to moralize in the final third. Here they keep it going to the very end. A standing ovation for the filmmakers is well deserved.

An alcoholic trip into the hell of the inner self, in which you have no idea what is, what was, and what is in name only. The film has its strong moments, especially when the protagonist is accounting for his own relationship with his daughter, but there is also a severe hangover at the end. You get a headache and a little stomachache, but then you grab a coffee and in a few hours it's gone.

The Sundance Film Festival audience wept and sent us Czechs a film that is supposed to make us feel that human rights are a bit out of the way overseas when different ethnic groups start to get at each other. Sorry, folks, but what I see in this is a perfectly calculated idyll about a reformed black man who got on the wrong train. The actors are without question divine and the direction is actually very assured, but I simply refuse to accept the pressure to ring tears out of the audience.

A perfect example of a festival art film, i.e., the type of film I was afraid of before I went to Karlovy Vary. It’s an endless road movie with a minimum of words and a repetitive plot. The montage of shots from the front of the train through various landscapes is amazing, whereas the rest is about convincing yourself not to leave the screening.

Historical significance should not mask filmmaking inconsistency. The film’s physical for the first hour, but after that I didn't care. The final caption is a viewer trap.

You wouldn’t want these people to be your family. It’s a great documentary that says one specific thing: Shawney Cohen loves his unconditionally. Although, as he admitted after the screening, showing the finished work to his loved ones was the longest 80 in his life. Sad fun.