POMO

This is my Promising Adult Woman! Original subject matter with modern definition of the characters, a clever battle of rock-solid egos, where no one is an angel and everyone deserves a punch in the mouth. A thriller and a gangster film, led by a female character as masterfully as Clint Eastwood did in Leone’s westerns and, at the same time, an accurate mirror held up to American society. Rosamund Pike hands in the best performance by an actress in an English-language film in recent memory – not with award-winning depth, but by bejewelling every scene with surgically precise facial expressions. She is the backbone of this boldly conceived mix of genre elements. The casting of Peter Dinklage seems bizarre at first, but gradually fits perfectly into the caricaturish concept of the film. I Care a Lot could have come off as a cheap novelty, but thanks to great directing and Pike, it turned out to be a little post-modern gem.

This crime flick is fantastically stylish in every possible way, with its gloomy atmosphere of Manhattan at night, alarming police mega-dragnet with a lockdown of “the city that never sleeps”, the noirish character of an honest, straight-shooting cop, music in the spirit of old “gritty” crime movies. And standing against that, the most transparent and predictable screenplay that I can remember. Everything that is merely suspicious to the protagonist is immediately so clear to the viewers that they think that just maybe, for such stylish filmmaking, it must have been done intentionally to serve a higher purpose. But that’s not the case and, because of that, the film turns out in the end to be just a naïvely short-sighted banality.

Wrong Turn is a laughable attempt to push the well-known B-movie slasher franchise in the direction of thematically more substantial horror flicks like Midsommar. And what’s more, it does so with would-be clever genre clichés in mold of The Cabin in the Woods. Unfortunately, this attempt is just as dumb as the preceding films, and not as entertaining as a guilty pleasure without the admitted stupidity. It’s watchable only out of curiosity as to what other unexpected twists will pop up to make the film seem innovative, even though it just mechanically borrows everything imaginable from everywhere (the final stylisation of the female protagonist into the archer from The Hunger Games confirms who the film’s target audience is supposed to be). But the ending left me a bit puzzled. It was brilliant, like Jordan Peele’s work at the time of Get Out. And for the first time in the entire film, Bill Sage didn’t come across as a cheap B-movie version of Ray Winstone.

Ron Perlman’s hairstyle and make-up in the opening scene give us a hint of what’s to come. And then everything in the film only gets better. Monster Hunter is a videogame-based ultra-farce with an utterly primitive plot, but it’s even more of an admittedly guilty pleasure that’s just straight-up entertaining. The explicitly dry humour made me laugh more than I do with most forced comedies. And with visual effects that only a few top-tier Hollywood productions can boast (Godzilla vs. Kong). Otherwise, Paul W.S. obviously steals from everywhere, from Aliens to Dune (or Transformers or Star Wars) to The Lord of the Rings, sometimes so blatantly (a group of soldiers walking across a stone bridge to a hellish mountain covered in burning lava) that it’s rather more a declaration of love for those films than a case of creative helplessness. Conversely, the monsters themselves are magnificent and the visual dynamics of the action are highly polished. And there is an abundance of that here. One slaughter after another. Plus nice locations. Despite that, take my third star with a grain of salt, because I’m giving it for the gut-punching sound. My downstairs neighbour is on vacation, so I’m running Atmos in the living room with an unmuffled subwoofer. And with this movie, it was almost an orgasmic experience.

A militaristic action movie without western stars, filmed (evidently) in the authentic setting of the ruins of a post-war Iraqi city. We spend the whole time with a unit of local soldiers who are the only ones to have abandoned the fight against ISIS. And we follow their mission with a classified and quite surprising objective. We get a superficial look into the film’s characters, but otherwise it is just starkly realistic, dusty infantry action, redeemed by a more spirited, emotional conclusion.

The Crew is a standard French crime flick in which the protagonists are “honorable thieves”, but the plan goes off the rails and they have to become killers in order to survive. Of course, the most charismatic of them draws the rest of the crew, including his younger brother, into a life of crime, and his own mother condemns him for it. And even he would prefer to give it up and get back together with his pretty ex-wife, but... Cliché stacked on top of cliché, but it’s entertaining as an action flick with a flowing plot.

Pacino turns in a great performance in a heist movie with a banal plot. Or am I, as a viewer, supposed to be thrilled by the twist when a young man in a bathrobe appears on the scene as his wife, for whose sex change Pacino is doing all of this? His real wife and especially his mother just complete the bizarre circle of characters that make this an unintentional comedy. The depiction of Brooklyn and the situation in the US at the time is praiseworthy, but as a human drama, this classic didn't impress me.

This B-movie thriller is handicapped by naïveté and poor directing (improbable situations, silly moments, inability to carry off certain suspenseful scenes). The film’s producer and lead star, Paula Patton, wants to draw attention to the issue of human trafficking in a genre flick with undertones of girl-power heroism, but she chose a very inappropriate filmmaking team to do that.

Finally, a clown who treats kids like they deserve to be treated. And who looks ugly and scary, at least in the final stage of his transformation. Its thus a shame about the absolutely mishandled balance between serious horror drama and unintentionally ridiculous B-movie bullshit. Or rather it’s not so much mishandled, but lacking self-awareness. Which is even worse.

The Dig is a beautiful, lyrically told film in which someone with determination makes the greatest archaeological discovery, someone unfulfilled finds the love of a lifetime, and someone extremely important to someone.... Set to piano music, feelings of anxiety from the onset of war and relaxed sunsets, and existential thoughts associated with art and its eternal nature. All of the actors are top-quality and the editing is atypical in places for effect. No one could say they didn’t like it, or vice versa.