Marigold

I like Vinterberg - his sweeping genre magic and pulling the viewer's pink sock of emotion. This story merges all sorts of clichés, but I didn't feel even for a moment like the director lost control of it. This is a sophisticated game, not a wild ride into the unknown. A road movie grown from the roots of social drama and sensitively diluted with lots of pleasant genre admixtures. And, of course, guided by the captain's steady hand and his crew, traditionally deviated in every possible way.

A poor adaptation, both in terms of the formal aspects (boring, hollow, nonrhythmic) and intellectual (it resembles aspiring entries from a reader's diary rather than a truly functional interpretation). The characters get lost in the hopeless and awkward mush of dialogue, and when the protagonist wants to break a few of Ibsen's key ideas at the end, it sounds so rhetorical, ridiculous and un-anchored that the entire gravity of the film disappears. It's hard to find a drama about truth where the hero sounds like a delirious hysteric in a spurious village eco-story.

Season 1: well-done work that has issues mainly in melodramatic dialogues, but otherwise excels in weedy Atlanta and excellent twists (home for the elderly, digging graves, etc.). Some conflicts between characters are defined as bearable, others are completely forgettable, but the atmosphere is daunting enough for a person to go through the first season in the pleasant tension that similarly realistic visions of the end of the world evoke. [75%] Season 2: phenomenal start, the atmosphere of the first two episodes whipped to the max. Then, unfortunately, the redneck syndrome begins, and all the characters (with small Daryl-sumps) degenerate into rednecks chasing their own tails and saying the same things all the time. It’s been a long time since I've hated anyone as much as Dale and his skunk suffering. What would be enough for three episodes is stretched to a good 7 episodes (not counting the strong start and solid ending). Even new acquisitions will have to be defended in the next series, because almost nothing works out here. A very “dead" experience. [55%] Season 3: or how interest became passion and quite sympathetic characters become regular family members. Compared to the second season, everything is good - the beginning is not overdone, the individual situations are played out, the chemistry of the characters is variable, the situations and dilemmas are repeated only minimally (they benefited a lot from the removal of the love triangle), the return of Merle confirms the greatest foreign exchange of WD: the ability to unpredictably change attitudes towards the character on a very small area. The poetics of post-apocalyptic disruption go much further in psychological and ethical depth than any similarly oriented film. The way walkers become more of a facade in the conflicts of extinct civilization is chilling. If it wasn't for the fact that the last episodes of the series sometimes "pull time" a little (13 would be just right), I'd go into euphoric turns. Even so, WD is becoming something I enjoy, and Rick and Daryl are some of the best characters in current TV. [85%]

For some heaven, for others hell, purgatory for all. An intimate existential gangster film about guilt, forgiveness and rectification, which evolves in a riveting way from a romantic tourist tour of Flemish beauties to a distorted Bosch canvas. Brendan Gleeson's heavy-duty fatherly performance, Colin Farrel's affectively childish creation, and the old-fashioned principle embodied by Ralph Fiennes – and the carefully constructed theatrical dialogues around them, a fantastically embodied image and an intense atmosphere that is closely related to the way filmmakers use Flemish Gothic. McDonagh shows off his dramatic talent (in places, it's more of a theatrical play in a riveting film version), but at the same time he doesn't hold back the magic of cinematic speech (brilliant work with narrative dynamics). As a result, modest In Bruges grows into a complex cinematic metaphor, the Bosch punchline of which is as beautiful as it is chilling. Names like Ritchie and Tarantino may be heard here, but that doesn't change the fact that McDonagh is unpretentious and thoughtfully his own. P.S. I don't know why, but somehow I've got a desire for this guy to make a Bond movie... perhaps with Colin.

Schwentke would have to be more than just a learned craftsman to make RED more than just a solid film. It's pretty dynamic, but the style is taken from somewhere else, so it's definitely not consistent. The story is comic-book exaggerated, and in the film narrative it is terribly banal. But the old boys are great and are good at their jobs. In the end I had a great time, and I left with the belief that if an inventive helmsman got his hands on it, this cruise could give a lot. The way it is, it "just" entertains.

I'm not enticed, but there's one thing I liked about the film - its conception is totally "anti-Facebook", when it emphasizes the "weight" of the film language, the precise construction of dialogues and the rapid combination of space-time planes. As a result, it feels like a biased but distanced testimony about one social phenomenon, a group of people who today shape society as strongly as state apparatuses. I get the frequent comparisons to There Will Be Blood, even though Fincher is losing here all across the board. Zuckerberg and Plainview are characters who share their passion for fleeting essence, but in this respect, PTA managed to descend much deeper than David, who seems at times enchanted by superficial magic (e.g., rowing races, which are aesthetically riveting, but kind of out of concept) and, above all, limited by the fact that Sorkin, for obvious reasons, cannot be as controversial in Mark's psychology. The motivation for the whole social experiment sounds quite constructed after all. But all respect for the fact that for two hours I watched people I do not understand and despise in a way, and I had an excellent time and understood a lot. And without scruples, I say: Zuckerberg may be a weird son of a bitch, but he's definitely a big hot-shot. By being anti-social, he captured something that has been present in the human psyche and society since ancient times.

A more civil and less secretive Loners, but that in no way means that it pisses me off any less. On the contrary. Although the filming and acting are above local standards, I can't seem to identify with this analysis of antisocial lesbians and unpromising females off the main path. I don't know what's interesting enough about these people to watch their incompetence and ridiculousness without any catharsis for 102 minutes. But I repeat: decent for a contemporary Czech film.

An excellent metaphor for communism, which is essential precisely in what it does not display explicitly - nor are they symbols of leaders or demented masses of the people, but the mysterious hands of the surgeon-Demiurg, which are the true darkness of Švankmajer's film. Who's that? Perhaps the Great Second in the Lacanov conception, that dark, unsymbolized place of Reality that is driving us into the arms of all kinds of totalitarianism and their iconic faces. The Great Other has no face or body, yet still kneads our existence... Perhaps, as a result, this is not so much a mark of transformation by the phantom of totalitarianism, but the observance of any human effort to advance toward the truth by this "nonexistent" phantom.

The pinnacle. In the sense that all the partial motifs of the previous two films are combined into an incredibly strong and film-uncompromising whole, which shifts to the viewer's eyes with butcher's obviousness the filth hitherto suspected. Burič had been a generator of charisma in the previous Pushers, but here he literally enjoyed the counterpoint of the closed Northerners. His Milo has the Serbian theatrics, the hot-bloodedness and immediacy, and the hallmark of an untouchable godfather – all the more painful is his fall into a pit of solitude. The ultimate punishment in the Pusher series is not bullets or daggers, but helpless loneliness and isolation. In this regard the third film comes the farthest, has the most distinctive inner "arc" in the construction of the main character, and the ending is masterfully motionless and at the same time screaming the title feeling of the whole trilogy. A modern Godfather-junkie muddied by the Copenhagen periphery. Refn's trilogy is nothing less.

The second Pusher stands out for its greater passivity – Mikkelsen's Tonny was already in the flow of events and "patterns" in the first film. This becomes fatal to him in a story imbued with a certain perverted junkie "Oedipism". Mads is fascinating, locked within himself and heading for the final tragic gesture of purity amidst the filth. Tragic because it's a gesture that leads nowhere – there's no escape. In this sense, more radical and closed than the first film, which seemed to be moving away from the hopelessness a little after all.