Othello

By focusing the story on a late high school community, the film held out hope that Schumacher would remember his first major directorial achievement, the bravura frat-pack flick St. Elmo's Fire. Unfortunately, however, the septuagenarian director past his creative zenith couldn't find the energy, not to mention that he was apparently no longer able to relate to the transformation of high school communities and their problems. After all, a quarter century has passed since Elmo. Twelve contains virtually every flaw and crutch in the narrative: omniscient voice overs, flashbacks, a huge number of characters who are not sufficiently developed, relationships between characters that are supposed to emerge from one characterization scene, it's not clear by the end what the film is actually about, and whatever starting point you choose in spite of all this comes off as horribly banal. A tragic fail.

Town Creek rides the wave of brutal thrillers from the late oughts and early nineties, when the New French Extremity wave was rampant in France (Inside, Martyrs, and Frontier(s), of which the film is in many ways reminiscent) and the vogue for dirty exploitation was at its peak in the US, the banner of which was most successfully carried by the Saw series and by Rob Zombie. Thus, apart from a few gory details, the pattern is mainly one of underexposure, fast editing, constantly changing viewpoints, and darkness. Unlike the canonical works of this wave, it doesn't contain any iconically brutal scenes, but there's a man-eating zombie horse attacking, and that sure as hell counts.

This film initially delights with well-written characters and an interesting and concise plot as the mundane trapping service member starts to get to know the hard-boiled detective in the book with the femme fatale in his bed, and with a pretty interesting twisted journey, which leads us to the finale, where everything jams, rattles, overheats, catches fire, explodes, sets the whole house and the orphanage nearby on fire, and ends in smoldering ruins. So maybe next time.

I gagged on my own blood. But I'm afraid there was nothing else that could be done with Webber's script (Andrew Lloyd himself is thrilled with the film). The Pilcher-esque script, the awful, pathetic music, and those lyrics, for goodness sake. An ordeal comparable to watching a two and a half hour concert of Nightwish, Within Temptation, or a similar haunted castle where the actors have to change their clothes every ten minutes. Knowing that the film is faithful to the original musical and was worked on directly with Webber, I vow to keep a respectful distance from this world.

Ford v Ferrari is interesting in the way it assembles its entire form through individual, seemingly unimportant details, to which perhaps an entire episode is devoted that seemingly has no point in itself. However, these episodes and details patiently and gradually build up a picture of what to focus on when everything in the film is at stake. In this way, the film avoids the usual problem of having the protagonists semi-pathetically explain to us what is actually going on in the finale to give the viewer a sense of direction. In the final race, it is assumed that the viewer has so far learned everything necessary to orient himself if he has been paying attention. And it's one of the many reasons why the races themselves then work so well. Not to mention how superbly filmed they are and how unassuming even in the most dramatic moments. There are, of course, those moments when, in a pinch, the top racer has to be told to ride like a dragon and suddenly he floors it and passes everyone. There's the badass wife character to keep it from being a bimbo slapped in there, there's Bale's pining for an Oscar even though he accidentally interpreted his character as a 1901 oil tycoon, but those are the compromises you have to put up with sometimes in a blockbuster. Otherwise, I'd want blockbusters to look like this. PS: with this film, I'm unfortunately forced to amend my favorite joke, "What do you call Jon Bernthal in a blazer? Will the defendant please rise" to "What do you call Jon Bernthal in a jacket? A marketer with a conscience."

This is what a movie must look like for people who are always complaining about things from their favorite books being left out of movie adaptations. And in doing so, it's the perfect proof of how false their argument is. Doctor Sleep [very aptly titled in the three-hour director's cut] is a literal adaptation in a killer TV treatment that could practically be described as a video book. The film is nominally divided into chapters (which I last saw, perhaps, in Sphere); most of the running time is taken up with two characters locking themselves into several minutes of static dialogue consisting of two shots. Then, in the finale, the film does stray from the book's premise, but only to follow an awkward virtual tour of the Overlook Hotel with one stilted quote after another. And really any recollections of the original Shining this film awakens make it look all the worse standing next to them. Because this is the complete anti-Kubrick.

What a crappy documentary. Most of the aestheticized footage chronicling troubled industries would be fine for the bosses of those companies to hang proudly above their desks. The communication the film establishes is often only with local workers at the very bottom of the industrial chain, instead of dealing with the higher echelons and the private/government nexus, the real culprits in the current environmental crisis. We can either mourn at the sight of the expansion of open pit quarries or we can finally admit the truth that there are some 200 specific people in the world and if we don't have a single photo of us holding the severed head of at least one of them, we have done virtually nothing to save the environment.

The ordeal of an aspiring courier, where the plot is driven by thugs, a cat o’ nine tails, and threats just to get to that yearned-for social thesis, whereas we know from Czech experience how easy it is to pull all those pesky problems into one when the courier is happily delivering parcels on the speed.

A bravura script that can even be pulled out of its wartime setting and worked with as a study of how easy it is to stand up to authority, which from a certain level can no longer take anything away from you. The mobilized Roland Bozz does nothing at all that is asked of him; if he does, it is only to prove the absurdity of the order in its literalness, ostentatiously showing his contempt for the whole cycle of war, demoralizing the unit and making a mockery of command. But he is not the Švejk figure of the uncertain disrupter. Colin Farrell here oozes that disgust and contempt for everything about the military in general, even though he has the absolutely perfect equipment to become a career soldier. Applying Tigerland to people nestled in unfulfilling jobs full of cretinous doctrines could prove the timelessness of virtually all the arguments made here. "What can they do to us, send us to Vietnam?"

A conservative and withdrawn detective finds a complicated path to a flamboyant transsexual and they end up becoming good friends. Sufficient annotation to set the stage for the world's worst movie, but that would not have been possible with the empathetic observer Schumacher behind the camera, who has always loved the mean streets, the blending of cultures, and generally fawned over people from the lower echelons of society. Flawless works mainly because every direction and opinion is given its own backdrop, and with a good selection of locations, (non-)actors, and proper casting here, it is able to build integrity for even the most lapsed physiotherapist. You can see it in the way everyone fits the part, the interactions work and the scenes that don't move the plot at all are a particular joy here. And Hoffman is, once again, absolutely incredible.