Filmmaniak

This is a completely precise work in terms of directing and acting, this time condemning racial hatred through the motif of right-wing terrorism. The story is slightly manipulative and in the end a bit hurried and therefore not completely satisfying, but everything until then is thought out and written well. The strong theme is used in a thrilling, emotional and brilliantly escalating storyline, and Diane Kruger really does an amazing job. There are many other films about this topic, but that doesn't matter. Quality is what’s important.

Many ideas and themes can be found in this “story" about how a group of German workers try to establish relations with the Bulgarian inhabitants of the village near which they work. However, there is no plot and the film is more of a sequence of scenes about how people are able to understand each other without knowing each other’s languages, or how to get on each other’s nerves. The slow-moving character study of many characters against the backdrop of the Bulgarian countryside is intelligently directed and successfully cast with natural non-actors, but at the same time perfectly unobtrusive, undramatic, unengaging and telling you nothing specific that will stick in your mind.

Technically, Jupiter's Moon is an absolute win. It is excellently crafted, with a perfect camera and artistic stylization, combining 70s American crime films and modern science fiction ala Chronicle, Children of Men and Inception, but it is always a film from a Hungarian perspective. However, the great introduction consisting of a raid on illegal immigrants, several excellent action/escape scenes and a remarkable theme, fail to obscure the incompleteness of the story, which goes in circles and has ill-conceived twists, and the initiated social commentary on the refugee crisis mixes with religious analogies somewhat unnecessarily. Even so, this is another example of how much Hungarian cinematography has been on the rise in recent years.

This is not a documentary commenting on the neo-Nazi community in general through the character of Dalibor; Dalibor is far too unique for that, so neither the neo-Nazis nor anyone else is likely to identify with him and his views. It is easy to laugh at Dalibor and his deeds, but there is also a lot of sympathy and perhaps pity in that laughter, and it is not possible to point a finger at him and call him a Nazi xenophobic asshole that deserves to be beat up. In addition to Dalibor's hateful and racist slogans and his off-the-wall video production, the film also reveals a lot of information from his private life, pointing out what this film is largely really about - people with problems and internally-unhappy people who are not satisfied with their lives, with their work and with what they have in their lives. However, they desperately want to belong somewhere, meaning they do not hesitate to join groups with somewhat more extreme views. These are opinions they usually obtained from "alternative" online media and from other, like-minded individuals, existentially dependent on television and social networks as the only available form of entertainment. There are probably a lot of these people in Czech and Slovak societies, it’s just that Dalibor stands out so much among them that thanks to him, watching this film is not only an exceptional insight into a certain area of society, but at the same time it’s sometimes outrageous fun. Every scene is a gem - but they also bring shivers down your spine.

Two intertwined stories, so different from each other that it doesn't even seem possible to connect them. Judge for yourself - on the one hand a serious drama about a Syrian refugee trying to get asylum in Finland and looking for his sister, who got lost somewhere near the Hungarian border, and on the other hand a grotesquely absurd comedy about an aging businessman leaving his wife, selling his shirt shop and buying a worthless, dirty restaurant with matching staff. Aki Kaurismäki was nevertheless able to combine the two events very naturally in the last third of the film into a funny and conscious comedic-dramatic mix, with opinions about the refugee crisis, as well as dry jokes that will knock your socks off. There are a few needless things (for example, the characters of three stereotypical skinheads), but these are really just details.

Casey Affleck dies at the beginning of the film and spends the rest of the story (except for a few flashbacks) under the sheets acting as a ghost. The first half is brutally boring (long static shots in which little happens predominate, whilst the four-minute sequence in which Rooney Mara eats a cake and sobs speaks for itself) and the second half is terribly confused and strange due to very wild jumps in time. If in any way I understood it correctly, then it was only because another character in the film explained it to me in advance. But really, who knows? There are about half a dozen brilliant ideas in the whole film, but each of them is used only marginally and then swept off the table. It's a pity. The film definitely has a strong atmosphere and it works as a bizarre festival film, but from a film perspective, A Ghost Story desperately falls apart and you would be looking in vain for meaning in it.

It is a pity that after the acclaimed and metaphorically rich parable Corn Island, director Ovašvili comes up with something so empty that lacks both a more thoughtful plot and image precision. The story wanders in constant circles - the president and his cohort roam and hide in snowy and muddy Georgia, hide in someone's home every quarter of an hour, listen to the person’s opinion about the president, and after a few days are either respectfully expelled or forced to leave the shelter due to the fear of being discovered, and off they go again a few kilometers away to the next building. It's neither political, nor mood-forming, nor metaphorical - it's just boring. There is also surprisingly more singing than speaking in the film. The pros are in the acting and in the shots of nature.

This is more so a superficial relationship study in which the daily suffering of doctors dealing with hypochondriacs, complicated acute cases, the unrealistic demands of new leadership, and hysterically distorted complaints of dissatisfied "clients" are shown more than the central couple's relationship problems. There are no big emotions or twists. Yet the plot flows smoothly and at a decent pace and the theme is interesting and touches on many remarkable questions, topics and motifs. However, only a few of them are resolved in the end.

Enthusiastic responses from Sundance announced that this may be the comedy of the year, but it’s no miracle - this independent romantic comedy is completely standard, and there are dozens to hundreds of similar films in existence. In fact, it is only moderately funny. However, it differs from the others with its Pakistani themes and cute origins, which is certainly a plus, as well as the unusual motifs of the mother separating her son from her family for disobeying cultural traditions, jokes about Muslim terrorists and possible metaphorical interpretations of the deadly consequences of lies among two partners.

From an audiovisual perspective, the film is top notch, and even the continuation of the development of the alien mythology is gratifying. But that's about it. Covenant repeats many of Prometheus's mistakes and adds a few new asides, which superficially seem to be innovations, but in fact distance the Aliens even more as iconic monsters from what they once meant. In the first film from 1979, the Alien was the embodiment of absolute and almost invincible evil, from which horror extended for miles. In Covenant, the Alien is degraded into a moderately effective deadly tool, which has no chance of scaring anyone, because this time the main villain is someone else, which puts the Alien on the side-lines (and it does not appear again until the last half hour). Otherwise, the heroes are mostly introduced only briefly and insufficiently. They once again idiotically move about an unknown planet without spacesuits. The film once again suffers from a long start and demented philosophizing, which begins with debates about the meaning of being and the purpose of life, ending with showing which of the debaters can play the flute better and quote literary authors better. This method of conceiving the alien saga seems a bit unfortunate to me...