Matty

Judging from the visuals, this is a cheaply made documentary that says a lot but shows little, which doesn’t work so well, especially in the case of exploitation movies, in which more is shown than said. In terms of informational value, however, Schlock! is a successful work reasonably defined by the less discussed 1950s and ’60s.

Even pandas have to deal with identity crises. As sequels like to do, this one also goes more in depth. Po deals with who he really is throughout the film. He seeks inner balance through dialogue with his father, his master and other warriors, as well as through flashbacks to his childhood, without the pace slowing significantly. In a similar way, Greengrass skilfully combined continuous forward motion with an exploration of the protagonist’s soul in The Bourne Ultimatum (for which John Powell also composed the music). That may be a bit of a strange comparison, but Kung Fu Panda 2 is primarily a whirlwind of action scenes of epic-film proportions and less of an animated family comedy, though it contains constant joking, even where being serious would be appropriate. I wouldn’t be surprised if Po put bigger smiles on the faces of kung fu movie lovers than on the faces of younger viewers and their parents. Nevertheless, universal comprehensibility is ensured by cultural syncretism, when Chinese symbols and reality coexist with allusions to western consumerism and Japanese anime (which Po’s flashbacks recall with their style of animation). Kung Fu Panda 2 offers top-quality animation and a modest runtime, but it lacks the emotional complexity of Pixar movies. Compared to its predecessor, it’s neither worse nor better, but has a bonus in the form of the hopeful assurance that kung fu isn’t dead; it’s just been slightly panda-ised. Appendix: I’m rating the 3D (often used in POV shots, but in no way innovatively) and dubbed version. Given the names in the credits (Jean-Claude Van Damme as Master Croc!), it’s not out of the question that I would add a few percentage points for the original-language version. 75%

Modesty (he speaks about films by other Nouvelle Vague directors almost as often as he mentions his own), humanism (the same degree of interest in the characters as in the actors who portray them), a systematic approach crossed with absent-mindedness (at the end of the interview, his desk is wonderfully messy with carefully accumulated artifacts). Rohmer doesn’t say much about himself here, but you will still get to know him better from this film than from any superficial biography.

(SPOILERS ahead) It doesn’t take much: remove it from the time and place, and this story loses any chance of aging. Any new version will lack some of the power of the original. Undoubtedly. The film version is no exception. Together with the Catholic League, the censors felt it necessary to protect viewers untouched by real life against certain “obscenities”. In your free time, you would have to crack the most difficult intelligence-service codes to figure out from the dialogue between Blanche and Mitch that her husband was a homosexual. The rape scene ends without beginning. An important twist is indicated by the broken mirror into which Blanche had previously looked with less and less certainty. This is one of the few moments when Kazan remembers that he is directing a film, not a stage production. With material of such dramatic qualities, it isn’t necessary to come up with intricately composed shots. The characters and their dialogue are the be-all and end-all. Stanley Kowalski, the main star of the evening. A coarse, aggressive male defending his territory, but when he has no other choice, he is able to put on the face of the greatest penitent. That works on Stella. Though the ending, again forced by the censors, comes across differently, there is no doubt that her “definitive” rush upstairs, where the base Stanley dares not to go, will not be definitive. She will come back. Perhaps for sex, perhaps for love. Such that Blanche had never known. When Stella asks her if she has taken the streetcar named Desire, she has the upper hand, but she doesn’t admit what we are ironically told right at the beginning: the next station is the cemetery. Even if A Streetcar Named Desire is not the best adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play, which I can’t judge, it certainly ranks among the best acting textbooks with graphic illustrations. You have the unique opportunity to compare Marlon Brando’s first-class method acting and the theatrical acting of Vivien Leigh, whose grand gestures partially correspond to the performance style of her character, an actress on her own private stage, and partially show us that she is of the old school. Two worlds collided. One of the film’s great assets is the throat-constricting despair, into an even more impermeable version of which everything is headed. The other, which is actually the reason for the intense experience of the first, is the actors. Admiration. 85%

Blood, vomit, slime, beavers, kangaroos, monsters, lunatics, motorcycles, David Hemmings and kung fu. I want to see them! All of them!

Don’t let yourself be drawn in by Mussolini; he appears only in propagandistic news footage about halfway through the film, which I consider to be an imaginative way of handling his transformation from a man belonging to one woman (okay, a few women) into a man belonging to a whole nation. We no longer see how Ida Dalser subjectively perceived Il Duce, but how film cameras “objectively” captured him. Nevertheless, the narrative remains highly subjective, fluctuating a bit between fantasy and reality. Several powerful moments (the collage marked by futurism, watching Chaplin’s The Kid) are offset by several moments that are too obviously supposed to be powerful (the long and impressive but somewhat needless demonstration of how to shed tears in close-up). Towards the end, when Bellocchio is mainly trying to finish telling a touching story and uses fewer shots that could be exhibited in a gallery, the film becomes unpleasantly mediocre and ends a good twenty minutes later than would have been appropriate. It’s a shame that the content isn't as unconventional as the form...but when you’re dealing with history, it’s hard to just make stuff up. 75%

An almost academic look at a still underappreciated genre that expresses subconscious fear and anxiety with greater honesty than so-called serious genres. A treat for horror-movie lovers, who will see and hear their favourite directors, as well as for students of the film sciences, who will see and hear their favourite film theoreticians (if you would prefer not to immerse yourself in the texts of Tom Gunning and Carol J. Clover, who appear here, Colin MacCabe and Robin Wood also collaborated on the documentary). A d those who aren’t so keen on horror movies can at least be persuaded that these outwardly often perverse films are actually made by clever men for whom it’s really not just a matter how many limbs get sawn off or the length of extracted intestines.

It is necessary to tear down one myth so that another can be built in its place. For example, with the aid of five thousand of Castro’s troops. Four stories from the time of the Cuban revolution, as seen by Soviet filmmakers. Soy Cuba. If some of the shots in Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying made my heart pound (yes, that also happens to viewers without critical distance), his trip to Cuba gave me a continuous tachycardia. Unbelievably long and complicated shots and emotional camerawork, which immediately responds to the emotional/physical state of the characters or just flies through the space (the conclusion of the third part was the most WTF shot of the pre-digital age in my opinion). Soy Cuba. The obvious propaganda contained in every sentence of the poetic commentary, in the behaviour of every simply typologised character, in every ostentatious hand gesture, revealing in its melodramatic nature that Kalatozov didn’t try very hard to adapt the principles of socialist realism to the Cuban mentality, is not offensive today. Just as it wasn’t offensive at the time of creation, when the film, made with virtually unlimited resources, went almost unnoticed by anyone for nearly two years. It was the Americans (Scorsese and Coppola, among others), ironically caricatured in the film, who brought this mammoth work back into the twilight of the cinema. Soy Cuba. The unsophisticated symbolism (a white dove), the ponderousness, hollowness and pathos of the accompanying commentary (also the work of a Russian, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko), the victory of form over content and the aggressive manipulation of facts, at some moments directly “rewriting” actual news footage, the somewhat ridiculous pointing out of manipulation perpetrated by others (false reports of Fidel’s death) – these are all deficiencies that prevent this technically brilliant spectacle from getting the highest rating. Even if there were more drawbacks, even a hundred times more, get this this film for its cinematography, ideally in a version without the intrusive Russian dubbing…and be amazed. Soy Cuba. Appendix: The documentary Soy Cuba, O Mamute Siberiano will tell you more about the filming and subsequent rejection of Soy Cuba. You’ll just have to deal with its heavily nostalgic tone. 85%