Filmmaniak

Don't expect an action thriller. This film is mainly a social satire about privacy on the Internet and the lives of teenage Americans on social networks. The film wants to be perceived as sharp and piercing, but instead it is as shallow as photos of Instagram models posing in front of a mirror. Through a story about five high school girls about the victims of Internet hackers hacking an online repository and leaking private user data to the public, the film holds up a mirror to America and the debauched, cheeky lifestyles of its troubled youth. However, instead of criticizing it, it actually supports and defends it. Although the film culminates in the last fifteen minutes with a modern witch hunt (that is why the story takes place in Salem, hint hint), during which there is finally some action, the audience has to wait a long time to get there. We have to suffer through an hour of dialogue, in which the eighteen-year-old protagonists are repeatedly presented as unsympathetic, conceited trollops with the fashionable taste of luxury prostitutes who are rude to everyone, but when someone dares to be rude to them, they cry and act as if they’ve been hurt. The tragedy lies in the film's futile attempt to persuade the viewer to cheer for the girls. Worth mentioning are the directing and camera, which in some places are quite imaginative, a couple of nicely shot scenes (the robbery of a family house in one shot) and aptly directed criticism of hypocrites who condemn other people without knowledge of context and arguments, and yet themselves have something to hide. The film amounts to postmodern, flat entertainment visually corresponding to the most recent Purge films, which will be appreciated especially by those who can identify with the protagonists.

A young and pretty nun has the gift of seeing the auras of people, and after her mother's suicide, she returns to her birthplace with her sister and injured father, where an ancient secret is rotting. But none of this is important (auras, father, mother, sister, or a house with secrets), because the film throws away all these motifs in the middle (nothing much happens until then and all of the horror attributes appear only in the form of dreams and delusions ) and moves the other half to a completely different location, where it plays out an occult hallucinogenic ride with the devil, exorcisms, drugs and ritual sex, all of which sounds good, but it's done confusingly and in a dull way (except for the last twenty minutes or so). The film has a confused concept and story with a lot of ambiguity, and it is in fact supposed to be the first part of a planned trilogy, so it is possible that it will come back and explain things in future films, but unfortunately this does not play much of a role when reviewing Luciferina.

The plot is not bad - a man who works in a morgue is able to talk to corpses (which is extremely unused) and then he is cursed, because he reveals the secret of the dead and has his wife's lover killed, but she also dies by mistake. The rest is an unbalanced horror without tension, which revolves around one constantly repeated scheme, the film does not go anywhere and tries in vain to make up for the lack of ideas through jump scares that don’t work.

The idea of demon hunters, already operating over the Internet and who to keep up with the times and be able to attack people via their mobile phones, does not sound completely bad in and of itself. But it shouldn't take the form of an over-embellished B movie patchwork (albeit with an obviously decent budget and relatively high-quality tricks), inspired by both Ghostbusters and Pokémon Go, set in a world without rules in which virtually anything can happen. Yet it's seldom enough to make it really fun, funny, or thrilling. The characters are annoying, the actors average and the dialogues awkward. The film does include a few nice directing ideas in places, but they don’t overcome the overall impression from the completely flimsy workmanship.

The film is quite weak if you take into consideration Dupieux's filmography, especially after the excellent Reality. A simple comedic concept with an absurdly protracted police interrogation and an even more absurdly protracted witness testimony is done in an embarrassingly primitive and superficial way, without imaginative satire, breaking of expectations or any added value. The characters are intentionally idiots, but they produce little humor and the director also begins to steal from himself (blending the past with the present, physically deformed police officers) and his final point this time also has no power. It’s possible to sit through the running time of less than an hour and a quarter, but one would simply expect something more striking, subversive, sophisticated and complicated from Dupieux.

Only a torso standing on its head remains from the original horror story about a student who reveals a dark conspiracy inside a dance school, unnecessarily supplemented by a second narrative line in which an 80-year-old German psychoanalyst investigates the disappearance of one of the dancers on his own and searches for his long-lost wife. The duality of the plot is also symbolized by the environment of Berlin divided into two parts in 1977 (when the original Suspiria was in cinemas), where the story was moved due to references to RAF terrorism and post-Nazi ideology. The result is confused and poorly edited video art, which permutes the motifs of the original film in its own way and thus differs significantly from the original, including its overall tone. The burnt out colored background of the school from Argent's version has been replaced by a boring gray, the visually impressive parts are just the sequences in which Guadagnino tries to shock the audience, and this time you won't even remember the music. The new Suspiria is a film about the awakening of femininity and female power, used to humiliate men and the fight for supremacy in a matriarchal community, in which the lead male character is played by a woman, and where dance equals sexual experience. However, the film is drowned in an unnecessarily stretched and slushy storytelling, in which gradually escalating tension and anxiety alternate with flashy and unconstructed brutality and straightforwardness, manifested in the fact that the film definitely does not try to hide who the dance school teachers really are and lays its cards on the table right from the beginning.

At first glance, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again has the same ingredients as the first part, but the result is much worse. It has an even weaker plot and dialogues, its story is told in a very ignorant way and it is directed boringly and unimaginatively. The first storyline is about the main protagonist from the first part sending out invitations to the grand opening of his hotel, after which the invited guests arrive and then a party follows. In the second storyline from the past, her mother acts like a girl who sleeps with every good-looking guy who sings a song to her. The first Mamma Mia! was in fact terribly stupid and superficial, but it had such an innocent joyful charge and energy that it was easy to accept it as a non-binding and undemanding summer break, excuse its naive plot, primitive candy dialogue and lazy dance choreography and instead enjoy the sea and Greek exteriors and listen to ABBA. Exactly this charge and energy, however, are missing in this sequel, and therefore there is nothing to excuse its shortcomings. The only things that are a bit worthwhile are some of the actors and the mentioned songs, which tighten up and revive a lot of things the second time around, even though some of them were heard ten years ago in the first film.

A slightly funny, undemanding comedy, whose main problems are too little humor and its exaggerated length. The story is a pool variation on The Full Monty with the message that sports success will solve all your problems, except that the writing and directing are much worse. The introductory one-hour exposition (before training starts properly) is terribly tiring and the metaphors revolving around the wheels and squares are completely out of place. The spectacular final 15 minutes is quite a satisfying redemption for that misery that came before, but it's weird that the swimmers perform choreography that you've never seen them train before.

The theme is remarkable and the first half hour goes by surprisingly fast, but then the story stops completely, starts to spin in a circle and mainly stops moving towards anything, except perhaps for the main protagonist’s unexciting efforts to break out of the fraudulent routine into which his surroundings drew him. One good idea spread over ninety minutes and without a point.

An Argentine family goes on holiday to Brazil and… nothing happens. Or rather, things start happening with relationships (both parents have an open marriage, so the mother is hit on by the Brazilian host, whose ex-wife is enchanted by the father, the daughter starts a fling with the son of the host, and the son then disappears for half of the film so that he’s not an unnecessary third wheel), but in the end the status quo is still held up. The film would be a pleasant respite if, in addition to the sea and sunny beaches, there was also a more interesting story, more acute conflicts or at least humor. Unfortunately, there’s none of it.