MrHlad

Jean Kayak is stranded in the North American wilderness and must learn to fend for himself. And even though he'll eventually turn into a courageous outdoorsman, hunting hundreds of beavers to buy his beloved a ring won't be easy. This frantic black-and-white slapstick combines the classic silent films of Charlie Chaplin and other legends with the poetics of Looney Tunes cartoons, the visual style of Karel Zeman, and the intense action of Wallace and Gromit. You've probably never seen anything like Hundreds of Beavers, and you definitely should.

I've seen the first Spiderverse several times and I reckon I'll make time for the second one sometime in the future, and not just once. I'm a bit jaded about it now, though. The second animated Spider-Man is awesome and even more imaginative, playful and wilder in terms of audiovisual style, and isn't afraid to mix different styles together. It works well with the music and is simply great to watch. Plus, it works perfectly in the moments when it slows down and tackles romance, drama and emotion. You'll just root for a happy ending for these characters, even though it's obvious from the start that the road to it will be very thorny. Still, I do have one problem with Across the Spiderverse. It's a little too wild at times. The first fight with the The Spot felt a bit confusing and overly fast, and the same is actually true of all the action sequences, which are bigger and have an awful lot going on. I also had trouble keeping up with it a little bit. Even with the first film, I felt like the final battle needed a bit of a looser pace to enjoy it with everything, but here they step on the gas a bit more (it's a sequel rule, so that's to be expected), and I barely managed to exhale after each major action sequence, telling myself that it looked great, but at the same time I had to admit that I probably missed a lot of interesting stuff. I'm a bit sorry about that, because I would have liked to enjoy the movie to the max the first time and not think at the wildest scenes that I might have preferred to flip through an artbook at my own pace rather than watch a movie that was just crazy wild at times. A bit too much for my taste. After a second viewing, hopefully I'll be clear on whether the new Spidey is great or "just" damn good. EDIT: So I went a second time and knew what to focus on and enjoyed it a star more.

Babylon can make a very impressive first impression. Within the opening thirty minutes, Damien Chazelle serves up physical humour that even Dumb and Dumber would be proud of and a wild orgy of fun filled with sex, cocaine, alcohol, loud music and plenty of reasons for anyone who despises Hollywood to despise it even more. The Wolf of Wall Street would probably walk away from this party disgusted halfway through. But this is where we meet several protagonists who will spend the next few years trying to carve out a little fame, fortune, wealth or respect in Hollywood. And far from all of them succeed. Babylon looks like a grand Luhrmann-type film at first glance, but it's only superficial. Chazelle knows very well how to make the viewer admire his depiction of Hollywood in the 1920s and 30s on the one hand and despise it on the other. He knows how to make his characters laugh, but at the same time make the viewer worry about them, wish them luck or watch their slow, unavoidable fall. And while it looks truly spectacular – not only during the lavish parties, but even during the actual filming of one small scene, which the director manages to turn into an absurd grotesque – at its core this epic drama is actually a rather intimate story of people who have been "there" for a while, had a chance to create dreams and didn't notice that their own lives were turning into a nightmare. Great film.

Ruben Östlund delivers a wry satire about contemporary society and people who are not prepared to lose their social status. But it is not intellectual onanism, it is an extremely entertaining and witty comedy that doesn’t take anything sacred, and apart from the great cast, original ideas and clever dialogues, it offers at least one scene that will go down in film history for its absurdity and escalation. One of the best films of the year.

1917 will be talked about as the war film that was shot in one take. Which it isn't, but we all know that, and I don't feel like anyone should mind. However, it would be a big mistake to just look at it as a technically perfect film where Sam Mendes and Roger Deakins fool around with the camera. The latter is, of course, amazing; 1917 looks like a computer game, with the camera managing to pan around the characters during dialogue, crawling along with them across the battlefield with cameraman looking for the craziest but still functional angles from which to capture everything. But the main star here is still Mendes as the narrator, who manages to get under the skin of both the characters and the audience in that "one shot". Initially, cold and distant, and like one of the soldiers, he treats the whole mission as just an order to be carried out, hoping to survive. Gradually, however, he begins to acknowledge the importance of the mission and very powerful and emotional scenes subtly, but eventually very intensely, surface. And for example the whole passage in the burning village or the very end are incredibly powerful moments. The film doesn't just look great. It's great throughout.

On the one hand, I'm glad the Russos broke the sequel rule of "cram more in than last time" and went a different route. But the truth is that this path is going more towards comic book fans than people who have no idea what Ant-Man's real name is... but they're not going to the cinema anyway, so what? Endgame manages to shock a few times in the first ten minutes, only to evolve in a direction that the trailers practically didn't even hint at. The directing duo conceived the whole thing in a much more intimate fashion this time around, relying heavily on fan service and clearly wanting to give each of the superhero veterans plenty of space. The humour is not absent this time either, but it's nice that the heroes are still aware that they screwed up last time and everyone has to deal with it in their own way. This more intimate mode suits the Avengers and makes things happen that even the most optimistic fans probably didn't hope for. Ironically, though, it's also the biggest problem, because it doesn't really start to get spectacular until the end. In sheer magnificence, Infinity War probably trumps Endgame, but I still felt like the whole thing could have come a little sooner. I enjoyed it a little more last time, but I can't imagine putting Infinity War on in a few years and saying I don't give a shit about Endgame. All in all, it works practically perfectly. And as a farewell to an era of cinema, more than worthy as well.

Yeah, it's awesome. It took me a while to figure out why, how and what for, but I'm excited. Initially, what bothered me about Dunkirk was a certain impersonality and the fact that we don't really know anything about the characters, but Christopher Nolan clearly didn't want that and pushes everything through extremely intense scenes that can be both action-packed and atmospherically depressing. The director's staging games keep you entertained for a full hour and three quarters, and the aerial battles and the destruction of giant ships look absolutely breathtaking in IMAX. And even though it's not Saving Private Ryan (and it doesn't want to be anything like it), the feeling of every one of the three hundred thousand soldiers fighting for their lives is awfully strong. An absolutely breathtaking experience on the big screen, and undoubtedly one of the best films of the year.

I'll probably take some time to figure out if Arrival is one of the best films of the year or the absolute number one, but it was definitely better than I expected. Albeit in a slightly different way. Although the story of humanity's first contact with visitors from outer space works as "science fiction", it's still much stronger on an emotional and personal level. I won't go into some sort of breakdown, but the trailers offered the bare minimum of that layer of Arrival, so the film can surprise quite often, and thankfully always in a positive way. The acting is top-notch and Amy Adams is going for an Oscar nomination. Technically, visually and musically this is an absolute brilliant film that may have been inspired by Nolan somewhere, Malick somewhere and Spielberg somewhere, but overall it holds together without the slightest reservations and can confidently rank among the best that has been made in the smart sci-fi genre. I want to see it again. And Denis Villeneuve goes into my personal top 5.

A gem where Damien Chazelle beautifully led me as a viewer. It all looks and sounds beautiful, but I had a problem adjusting to the fact that La La Land is too retro and a tribute to old musicals. But the director saves the strong emotions, the brutally truthful moments, and a slightly harsher treatment of the protagonists for the last third. That truly broke me. And it is precisely the contrast between the beautiful dreamlike world full of color and love and the reality that can be very cruel to dreamers that places La La Land among the films that simply must be seen.

What they promised us, that's what we got. Logan is more than a dignified farewell for Hugh Jackman and his most famous role, and finally a film that fans have been calling for for years. The rough action scenes, without much emphasis on nice choreography, and where extreme physicality and animal fierceness prevail, are very cool, but it is more of a drama than an action film. And a damn good one at that. The people behind this film understood that the announced "maturity" is not achieved through headshots and severed legs, but through characters and their behavior. Logan has never been this broken and interesting, and what happens to Professor Xavier is something you won't find it amusing at all, and the young Dafne Keen is an acting discovery on par with Haley Joel Osment. Add to that the excellent music, the western atmosphere, and the extremely intense finale, and you get one of the most interesting comic book movies ever made, which deserves to stand alongside The Dark Knight. A few years ago, we wouldn't even dare to hope for a film like this.