Goldbeater

Marvel has gone the route of exploiting Eastern Asian culture and I would not mind if the final product was entertaining or at least interesting to the audience. This movie is neither. I got tired of live-action CGI comic book nonsense a long time ago, and Tony Leung and a few pretty choreographed scenes is not going to change that, unfortunately.

As with many French TV documentaries, this one suffers from its limited running time. You cannot really get a full picture of such an important historical event squeezed into under one hour. It requires at least a feature-length movie’s running time. In this respect, the French The Battle of Chernobyl from 2006 remains the best.

Shock Troops shows the genius of Costa-Gavras and a French casting extravaganza in a clumsily told story about French resistance fighters. The director traded making action-packed war movies for dark political suspense in his later productions which was the right move because his building of a coherent dramatic arc does not work so well in this movie. However, hats off to the filmmaking as some of the aerial shots, crowd scenes, and technically challenging scenes create the illusion of this being truly realistic, something today’s movies drowned in CGI sadly lack.

Sometimes a movie ticks all the right boxes for you to enjoy, but it somehow leaves you cold. That was my experience with X. Yes, the subject matter is great. It features good directing and visual effects and has some superb acting performances. It has also got some cool subplots even though it played out predictably and unexcitingly. It simply elicited no better response in me than an appreciation of solid filmmaking, which is a bit of a shame in this case because I expected a bit more from it.

Spike Lee is in great shape with this movie. Summer of Sam is an excellent period drama set in the 70s with a collection of believable and compelling human stories that run parallel to the rampage of a devious serial killer. There is actually little to fault with this movie.

Well, it was a total madhouse of a movie. Thumbs up for the camera work and the overall visuals, although on the other hand, it is clear that the movie is based on the novel and actors so theatrically recite the script, and so little of what they do and say seems truly believable. In terms of the history of Czech cinema, this movie is more of a curiosity than a functioning work of art.

Licorice Pizza is a pleasant two hours of nostalgia looking back to the crazy seventies. It follows the development of a young couple's love story told through a mosaic of mutliple different events, which I enjoyed.

I enjoyed this movie in the cinema as opposed to the recent Murder on the Orient Express, which left me completely cold because it was simply a pretentious flamboyant parade of stars with no added value. The filmmakers did not shy away from somewhat tweaking the plot of Death on the Nile. So even though I already knew the end of the story quite well, I ended up being slightly surprised by its development, where the tone of the movie became indiscriminate and somewhat pessimistic. Thumbs up for that.

The Last Race is a technically very well-made survival movie and definitely a strong above-average Czech movie, which deserves some appreciation. My only (albeit huge) criticism is directed at the chosen narrative style. Director Tomas Hodan seems to have been more concerned with how to harmoniously combine two timelines than making sure he effectively and comprehensibly narrated the critical moment of the whole drama. Instead, he withholds information from the viewer to seemingly shock them with a bizarre flashback within a flashback. The flashback made me incredibly confused and threw me off in an otherwise comprehensible narrative. Instead of feeling good about understanding the key moment, a series of pertinent questions flooded my mind (Where did Vrabata suddenly come from? Why did he go there in the first place and not tell anyone? Why did he give his coat away when he needed it himself? Where was the time continuity in this case? Why was he absent for most of the movie's running time when he is such a pivotal character? Why does Hodan needlessly sabotage his own movie with such a strange screenwriting ploy?). I think it was simply a completely unnecessary and stupid shortcoming of an otherwise good and very interesting Czech movie, to which I am going to award four stars in the end. It could have been better.

Robert Eggers has made his third movie, which is a bit different. It is not very original in terms of subject matter and plot structure because it is based on a real Scandinavian legend that was the main inspiration for Shakespeare's Hamlet. So, if someone called it an ambitious Conan the Barbarian on shrooms, I would not argue. Even though the development of the main characters' motivations and emotions in the movie's last third is strangely turbulent, it is still a very interesting movie. It is also visually compelling, and within the context of other cinematic releases globally, it is a refreshing venture that marks a minor step towards the mainstream for Robert Eggers, even if The Northman is certainly still not a mainstream movie. The Lighthouse remains my favorite of the director's movies so far. However, I enjoyed seeing this Nordic romp in the cinema and would have wished it as much commercial success as possible. However, there is as much chance of that as Amleth's life story not being an inevitable fatal tragedy.