Filmmaniak

In terms of all of the aspects of its production, this is a full-length television episode stretched to feature length film amounting to a farewell with the character of Doctor Martin in a bizarre crime story about finding a dwarf skeleton and searching for a treasure that includes Indians, Nazis, STB agents and a period circus. While the eternally grumpy country doctor and his wife deal with a trivial and artificially-escalated relationship crisis, the main role is sometimes assumed by constable Topinka, alias the biggest idiot in the entire film, and the audience cannot at any point credibly believe in his most basic of policing abilities. Most of the characters are a degenerate panopticon of stereotypical figures and scowling caricatures. The actors are in many cases made to grimace and unnaturally overact, and the story often treads on the spot, with visible progress about once every twenty minutes. Attempts at eventful or serious dramatic scenes are ridiculous and a parody of themselves, and the same is true for many of the dialogues. The crowning achievement is the final climax that is rich in groundbreaking, absurd twists. The desired humor is at the level of a special needs school and does not work at all, but on the other hand the audience can laugh in moments where the film was probably not supposed to be funny. Perhaps the film can only satisfy TV viewers who, without any sort of irony, are truly looking forward to the series spin-off (in production) with constable Topinka, unless, of course, the plot of the film seems too eccentric to them.

Dodgeball is a chaotic jumble of random fragments from different time periods, it is humorous only sporadically and much more often it falls into sentiment and melancholy. Its sound and atmosphere are quite reminiscent of Snowdrops and Aces after 25 Years, but as if the first Snowdrops and Aces never existed. It doesn’t really hold together and breaks up into isolated scenes, some of which raise the level of the film thanks to capable actors, while others seem like parodies because of how terrible they are.

Adam Sedlák is at the top of Czech cinema with a precisely created film on the European level. This is a perfectly escalating drama/thriller/horror with a clear artistic vision and an original and well-thought-out concept. The film also excels through an excellent musical component, which makes the film an even fiercer ride rather than being firmly directed. The film has strong acting and a gradual pace of storytelling, painfully as intense as a day's cycling after a night spent in an oxygen tent. Too bad it didn't keep going, and too bad it couldn’t have been even harsher.

Double Lover tells the story of the psychological roots of the sexual fantasies of a mentally complicated young woman, and it is also a sophisticated tribute to Brian De Palma's Sisters, Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, and Roman Polansky’s Rosemary's Baby, full of references and double meanings. In connection with the motif of twins, Ozon probably also liked to divide images, axially symmetrical shots and especially mirrors, which he inserts into every third shot, in order to draw sufficient attention to the illusory game with the viewer, which he does from the very beginning. He plays on the edge of reality and fantasy, digs into the inner marches in the mind of the main character and pulls props and hasty plot twists from his sleeve, which in some cases can be easily interpreted. However, many require plenty attention and thinking in order to analyze them, whilst others are probably just confusing. As a result, however, Ozone fails in telling the last third of the story, which seems convoluted and chaotic. There is tension in the relationship between the characters and the final point just complicates the psychological level even more. The director managed to improve the B movie theme of the original book thriller with erotic elements to an artistic European psychological drama that looks like Fifty Shades of Grey in a version for demanding and thinking audiences, but even they will still remember one single shot the most – one that is right at the beginning of the film.

I quite like Mr. Nárožný, but casting him in the role of a dangerous mobster was the casting mistake of the year. Otherwise, the directing and screenplay cannot be described as anything other than dilettantism. Everything from the acting to the editing and music is pathetic, and I can't think of anything I can highlight as at least a little bit positive. Maybe only Mr. Čtvrtníček and Mr. Steindler. But they can't really save the film by being onscreen for just a few minutes.

After the clearly fantastic Brawl in Cell Block 99, the film Dragged Across Concrete is dramatically more moderate and has also slowed down in brutality and compactness, but it catches up to these aspects through its broad-based storytelling style. The story can basically be summarized as a one-time surveillance action of two suspended police partners who, with the vision of big profit, get involved in a criminal enterprise, which gradually grows over their heads. However, S. Craig Zahler conceived the (great) hour-long story as a procedural crime drama with almost three times the length, in which each key character must have long exposition with a clearly defined history, motivations and family background (in Brawl in Cell Block 99 he had one such character, while here there are at least three, which dilutes the narrative dynamics a bit), even for those heroes who don’t necessarily need it (the whole ten-minute intermezzo with Jennifer Carpenter, culminating in a bank robbery, is in itself an excellent and highly impressive short film, but which has minimal importance in relation to the surrounding events). The cleverly directed, ingeniously constructed, penetrating and consistently honest complex film sometimes lacks pace (especially in dialogue passages) and, in the sense of sparsely dosed violence, also a moment of surprise, when scenes leading to something bloody can often be predicted in advance. Nevertheless, the plot develops unpredictably and all aspects of the film are very professional. Vince Vaughn has a much sleeker role this time, while Mel Gibson is a great teammate and one can also enjoy the criticism of exaggerated political correctness in connection with the police brutality hyped in the media. Compared to Brawl in Cell Block 99, the film is not entirely stunning and emotionally devastating, although that film sets a bar that probably can’t be improved upon.

A remarkable yet rather simple satire about fame and its transmutations, renown on social networks, internet celebrity, over-sensitivity in today’s world and cancel culture. Nicolas Cage excels in the role of the ordinary bored professor who suddenly starts to appear in millions of people’s dreams. It’s as if he is a living meme who is capable of being funny, scary, sorrowful and embarrassing. It’s also worth mentioning the entertaining dream sequences and surrealistic atmosphere, though the whole high-concept metaphor is only partly effective, as it doesn’t go very deep and is exceedingly literal.

This film’s focus is on the unexpected understanding reached between a middle-aged theatre director and a young private chauffeur, who could be his daughter and has been assigned to him against his will by the theatre company. Thanks to the trust that is gradually built between them, they are able to confide in each other their traumas and secrets, which are part of a complex, multi-layered story about, among other things, the relationships of couples and lovers and the pain of losing a loved one. The whole movie takes place against the backdrop of rehearsals for Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in a multilingual version (including South Korean sign language), while dialogue from the play is often present in other parts of the film. Despite the fact that the plot really gets going only after more than 40 minutes (when the opening credits finally appear), the length of the film is not a hindrance at all. Drive My Car is superbly written and directed from start to finish and excels not only due to its emphasis on the formal, genteel communication between the characters, but also for its many remarkable and imaginative scenes and the inclusion of several fascinating dreamlike micro-stories.

An erotic sci-fi B movie that tries in vain to disguise itself as a deep art film. The pilot of a cargo spacecraft is tasked to take a trip to Alpha Centauri that will take several years, and because he is meant to travel alone, so that he is not bored, he is given a robotic companion (played by a porn actress) to serve as his co-pilot, psychologist and sex trainer. The man is bothered by her pre-programmed patterns of behavior, so he tries to erase part of the program to make her human. In this case, the question of whether robots are able to fall in love takes the form of a boringly directed, badly shot and superficial nonsense, in which there is no shortage of long repetitive and pseudo-artistic scenes in which nothing happens, either in the plot or even symbolically. The extremely simplified psychology of the characters is ridiculous, the acting below average, and the pace of storytelling is unnecessarily tired due to the overall lack of substance. At least the tricks (for a Serbian film) and the aesthetic approach to nudity are positive in some places. The film is clearly not pornography, it’s too cold for that, and it’s not exciting and there are no visible penetrations.

A film with a nonsensical and incoherent plot full of bizarre coincidences and errors in continuity. The film’s script is so theatrically broken and inconsistent that it is not only impossible to defend the meaning of many (often very bizarre and incomprehensible) passages, but it is also impossible to unravel the motivations and behavior of the vast majority of the characters, not only within the film as a whole, but often also within individual scenes. Moreover, this so-called black comedy is not funny at all on any level, simply because it does not contain a single joke (verbal or visual) and its source of humor seems to be only the speech of the main characters (very limited vocabulary + "dude" after every other word), and Jiří Lábus's testicles in a marginal role. The main characters are unsympathetic, stupid, vulgar and semi-literate idiots, and the only thing interesting about them are their illegal crimes, during which (sometimes quite violently) they hurt random people (without any comedic stylization). Nevertheless, the film tries in vain to get the audience to cheer for them, to build a positive relationship with them and later to sympathize with them and be afraid for them, which catastrophically misses the mark. In addition, everything happens with the absence of even a hint of morality. The characters constantly commit acts that do not provoke any appropriate reaction (the protagonists of the film are never reported for their actions, none of the characters become better people during the film, if someone breaks a promise it doesn’t matter, when someone deceives someone else and they find out, they bring the person into their group instead of punishing them). The film in fact celebrates the ideologically-insane characters and alibistically justifies their illegal actions by choosing various targets for them, such as poachers or rich businessmen, which the film then presents as "the greater evil", compared to whom the main characters are supposed to be perceived as good people fighting for a better world. The final caption announcing that, according to the BIS annual report, paramilitary groups are forming in the Czech Republic, is supposed to give the audience the impression that the content of the film has something to do with real events and the current situation in the Czech Republic, even though it all takes place outside of any believable reality.