Filmmaniak

An excellent solo performance by Tom Hardy, who drives a car for 90 minutes and no one but him appears in the film. His life is falling apart, his mistress is giving birth, his disgraced wife is crying and vomiting, and 218 trucks are supposed to bring him as much concrete in nine hours as is needed for the largest concrete construction in the history of Europe. The dialogues take place on the level of gradually escalating telephone calls and are excellent (on the other hand, Hardy's monologues are slightly stilted and not as interesting). Formally, it's a bit like the film Buried (which entirely takes place in a coffin for a change). Director and screenwriter Steven Knight was able to handle a difficult topic extremely well, and with the small space given to him he played out a fully functional and realistic drama that is a lot of fun the entire time (and has its funny moments).

I wasn’t expecting that much of a surprise. This is an absolute hit that is well filmed, well-acted and excellently written. The dialogues are realistic, the characters fully believable and the story, the main motif of which is the clash of materialistic and spiritual thinking, almost shocks with its thoughtfulness and intelligence. The charming and touching plot is actually simple, but it is done with surgical precision. It is a pity that the trailer reveals three-quarters of the film, as the plot is not very predictable and the film manages to keep its focus up to the halfway point (a similar theme was looked at perfectly, for example, in The Cloud Atlas). Definitely wait for the full ending after the closing credits; otherwise, you will miss the cute point.

Obviously, making a feature film with just three cuts must have been extremely challenging. The inexhaustible number of characters, wild parties, night tram rides and demonstrations in the streets all work much better than I expected (and when I compare Hany to other pictures from abroad filmed with a minimum of shots, this Czech film is clearly ahead of the pack). It is a bit of a pity that Hany lacks a more pronounced plot arc and instead offers "only" short snippets of various situations with which it sets a mirror for current generations, and expresses itself through banal dialogues to fundamental topics (violence in humans, boredom culminating in aggression). The film then processes them in a way that tend to be rather awkward in Czech films about contemporary youth, but that is not the case here. If there is hope and fresh blood somewhere in the contemporary Czech film world that promises an influx of enthusiastic pulsating energy, it is definitely the creative team of Michal Samir and Matěj Chlupáček.

Ok, the fight sequences here are some of the best I've ever seen. The choreography of the fights is unique and it is worth noting that The Raid 2 is a really violent, even brutal film (not for those with weak nerves). At the same time, it is very serious and does not contain a single attempt at a joke - the talented and capable director apparently tried to take his film to the next level and make it more serious and mature, but he would need a better and more sophisticated screenplay for that. In this way, The Raid 2 is somewhere halfway between an entertaining B movie action film and an ambitious gangster-crime drama. It does a much better job with the former. Some of the dialogue scenes even tend to bore (150 minutes is really a bit too much). But it is definitely a strong, bold and uncompromising guarantee of a unique experience.

Miroslav Janek's documentary admittedly resigns in terms of using the official biographical data and instead offers information about the former First Lady through archival footage and the personal confessions of people who knew Olga Havlová, or at least had something to do with her (her former bodyguard also gets to say his piece). The result is a retrospective collage that says less about Olga herself, and more about dissent in general and the atmosphere of the places where dissidents get together. But Havel is also in the film. Otherwise, Janek's documentary is far too careful, sliding on the surface and offering nothing that would make it extraordinary or attractive for repeated viewing. It seems as if the filmmakers struggled with a lack of material during the filming and were thankful for whatever they got, so long as it was at least a little bit about Olga. The documentary is decent, but Olga cannot be compared to the excellent Citizen Havel, a film that Miroslav Janek finished after Pavel Koutecký passed away.

Disobedient are the types of films in which there is no point in analyzing its characters or the plot. The plot in this film is practically non-existent - the simple story about a young Serbian couple trying to go against the grain and return to their childhood is made up of very isolated episodes. The central duo, on the other hand, consists of two not-very-sympathetic and unpredictable fools, who play a strange psychological game with each other without any rules. In the film, only the Balkan rural environment and the shaped body of the main protagonist are interesting. Otherwise, this poetic, emotional and aesthetic-image-based road movie on wheels is relatively useless and unfriendly for the viewer. For how simple a message the film communicates, it communicates it for a really long time and in an unattractive way.

Amazing film. Unbelievable as it is, Singer managed to overcome the previous X-Men: First Class and created a perfectly consistent, precisely constructed, intelligent, and well-thought-out epic spectacle that is fun, exciting, and breath-taking from the first minute, without containing even a single dead spot. Films that are this extremely well shot are rare. I applaud.

Instead of an exciting racing film, an everyday road movie arrived in movie theaters with the most common and predictable story of revenge and the most ordinary romantic plot. The chases and racing scenes do have energy, but everything else is hopelessly uninteresting. The characters lack charisma, the film lacks insight, tension and humor, and the creators' quest for realism is a clear step back after the last two parts of The Fast and the Furious series. Desperately dull and uncool.

A remarkable film that is original and unique. It is interesting how it forces the viewer to imagine things much more perverse than those that actually take place in the film (due to the terrible quality of the image, it is often not possible to know what is actually going on in the film). However, its technical processing is repulsive and makes the film almost unwatchable. This was certainly the director's intention, but it is an intention that absolutely does not match up to what I expect from a film. The opening suicide scene is very impressive, but the rest is just abstract, surreal and confused avantgarde nonsense.

Maybe it's a revolutionary teenage comedy that ignores the rules of the genre and serves the viewer everything and tells it how it is. Maybe it's a revolutionary film about problematic adolescence in a dysfunctional family. In any case, these two genres do not work in combination. I haven't been so torn about a movie in a long time, because on the one hand it's an excellently acted and excellently filmed comedy, during which I laughed and actively said WTF in many places, but I also shook my head in many places and didn't understand what was happening and why. On the other hand, I've never seen a movie in which four guys masturbate over a pizza, squirt sperm in slow motion, during which a waltz on the beautiful blue Danube river was playing.