Othello

The most impressive bare-assed run in movie history, guys. The problem with Vanishing Waves is that it creates the illusion of a complex and broadly applicable film through its inaccessibility and formal approach (frequent long shots; objects in the center of the frame instead of people), but it's basically just an intimate statement by the filmmaker, particularly bold in the way it tries to visually expose the male subconscious. The more you look into it, the worse off you will be.

Expendables as a romantic comedy, with an incredibly distasteful Hugo Weaving clone in the lead. The French finale scene is pure motion elegance in both the filmmaking and the acting.

Whoa. Lasse Hallström is kind of my nemesis and with this I’m now truly done with him. This yuppie shit can only be of use to those for whom the exciting highlight of the month is a discount event at Kaufland and they'll shed tears of emotion as they embrace a supermodel and her little runs in the shadow of an evil cop who is the only character in the film who at least has some dimension. Well, one. Genuine evil, and along with The Host the biggest bucket of shit so far this year.

Broken City is a film notable for the fact that even the reviews focused primarily on its dullness are alarmingly dull. Yet beneath the surface of a tendentious neo-noir whose fundamental problem is that it's too fond of its hero lies a pure genre film with some nice stylistic play and excellent construction of most scenes (the meeting with the mayor after seven years, for example, is formal bravura). The problem is the interplay, a terrible heap of hastily sketched conflicts and an attempt to comment on just about everything. On the other hand, the excuse is that originally the city itself was probably supposed to play the main role, but like I say, someone simply liked the protagonist too much.

Ow! Pity half the budget was crippled by the dermatology clinic taking care of the director/screenwriter's foreskin, which was in a really underwhelming state when the script was finished, and thus the characters have to be transported to the desert for the rest of the film, where they practically just talk to each other like in some French film. I love filmmakers who try to convince me all the time that they're better than everyone else, and giving McDonagh American money to make another movie might start some kind of war. Meta-meta-meta-methadone.

An ambitious attempt at the ultimate cartoon, with a ruthless internal war raging throughout the running time. The war of a sophisticated reference film that will have critics stroking its cheek and whispering sweet nothings into its ear, with a spectacle for children of all categories, where the heroes' pants are falling down and there’s a lot of shouting and gesticulating. The already awful trailer is designed for the 8- age category, counting on the critic community to go to see the film out of obligation, thus reviews are assured and the kids will shout their parents down, with the latter more compliant than usual to attend because Time wrote that they'll really like it. Except I guess to say that no one thought of Rango as a family film until the end, the references are too detailed for that, the character speech absolutely adult, and the plot too depressing. Not to mention that in this cartoon the characters die instead of mending their ways or taking a break by the end of the film. But even the scouts at school can tell you how much they liked a particular film, not to mention that a good portion of them hang out on discussion boards and social media, where they try to mask their baby teeth with nicknames like LadyKilla18 or TheMaker or LIVINGDEAD. Of course, this was taken into account during production, and I believe that for every scene, something like "(and the chameleon does something stupid there)" was written in parentheses in the script, which offends my intellectual ego, which is otherwise proud enough to be offended by something. However, for all the anachronistic nature of the subject matter, one of Rango's points is actually famously contemporary: in a world of truth, the liar is king. Because the main character doesn't turn into a real hero, just adapts his acting to the right movie to make him a hero. And don't think he's doing it for himself, you too would surely rather swim at the beach than go off into some stupid sunset where there's nothing to do. Besides, what kind of bullshit is it to set off on a trip in the evening anyway?

Extreme chauvinistic drivel that muddles its thoroughly horrifically moronic Almodovar plot for two hours and puts it in a Yugoslavian war triple-wrapper to give it some value. Even formally it hurts, because the scenes don't build on each other, there was clearly more cutting than filming, I would have loved to see the characters loaded into a vat of acid one by one, and by the end the more the film played on my emotions the more I wondered what I was going to have for breakfast tomorrow. I think what amused me the most was that whenever the film didn't feel like itself, it pulled out some of the characters’ boobs so the viewer wouldn't dwell too much on further development.

The finale alone, with the motorbike, is something I had honestly been missing for quite some time. Since around about the scene with the circular saw in Frontière(s).

If it weren't for the cast, this thing would never have seen the light of day, because this overwrought crime-corporate drama without a single instantly dramatic scene just isn't worth anyone's time. Thank goodness, though, for the acting crisis of Gere, who realized that if he's doomed to romantic soft-light zoophilia (see Hachikō) at the end of his career, he'll quite possibly have something like "Uhh... Somebody" and thus combed through both of the scripts sent to him over the last five years to find the one in which he could scream more, i.e. give a performance. By which he meant pulling back from the nursing home Susan Sarandon, with whom in one scene I was begging God for mercy so her boob wouldn't fall out, and Tim Roth, who overacts like he's a five-year-old somebody stuck in front of a camera. As a result, some guy named Jarecki was given 12 million to adapt his actually good script, which manages to weave several storylines together in an almost textbook way, with no random situations and with characters acting logically and pragmatically. He puts his own grist to the mill from his position as director in the form of portraying a sick, alienated world from the fortieth floor up, with many scenes introducing a cold static shot of structures (but not a classic building -> i.e. this scene will take place inside) and ending with extreme long shots on the character. Another unique thing is the perception of the protagonist, who even though he's a bastard to look at him, the level of jobs he takes necessarily builds viewer empathy. The reason is that there isn’t really any specific main villain here, just the environment in which the protagonist has spent his entire life.

For almost 200 million to make a yawn like that is also an art in its own right. It is practically free of Singer’s dominance, because the film is subject to the total dictatorship of the green screen, which makes the whole thing look like The Prince and the Evening Star: Robert Zemeckis Cut. The enormity of the budget makes it clear how the production underestimated the energy drink consumption of the special effects studio staff (16 of them worked on this – effects studios, not staff), whereas the likes of Neill Blomkamp might have been able to take over the galaxy with similar resources. For real. And then the sporadic quality of the special effects was interesting, as I've seen rendered videos for PC games that looked considerably better. Peter Jackson had hundreds of people create masks, animatronic puppets, and location models, which were then post-produced by other people again; Brian Singer stood in front of a hundred and fifty chubby graphic designers, saying "I want those giants to conquer that city and the humans will win in the end. Wake me up when you get it," and went to check his account balance. And that's why this world is so fucked up. (3 stars because the giants conquer the city and the people win in the end)