Marigold

Few filmmakers believe so much in the good of humanity and the power of film to make the world a better place. Few alcoholics have such consistency and detached humor. There is only one king of deadpan. Aki again occupies his unique position as a sentimental bastard and serves up the beautiful best of his tried-and-true moments. Around the fifth minute, I burst into tears of emotion and I never lost the feeling of being at home, in a place where the world can be tolerated despite its cruelty. I don’t know about you, by Fallen Leaves somewhat reminded me of Diary of a Country Priest, or maybe Godard. I’m going to go have my sixth second beer. Kiitos, Aki!

Gone are the saturated colors and boisterous choreography of Lester’s classic version. Bourboulon has his protagonists rooting around in the dirt and mud, D'Artagnan literally in the first scene. The humor is also gone, but that doesn’t mean that the trio, which is actually a quartet, lacks distinctive wit and charm. The cast is good, the sets are properly shabby, the costumes are dirty and the plot is rife with intrigues. The deviations from Dumas are defensible and it’s apparent that this new adaptation wants to bring more behind-the-scenes scheming into play and somewhat sideline the love motifs, which is fine. It’s a shame that some of the plot shortcuts have slightly confused logic, but after a few doubts about whether all that Protestant fun below Paris is only a needless digression, the feeling that everything can be made into an excellent spectacle in the sequel ultimately wins out. In the end, I'm bothered only by minor issues with the film, mainly the fact that Richelieu is an expressionless character. But everything else works. The one-shot action replaced the playful choreography with physicality and the musketeers soon settle into it.  A very respectable contribution to the Dumas canon!

Water in the first one, and now fire. Milady on fire, literally. Eva Green breathed even more tragedy into this character and further liberated her from the corset of the “villain” formula that we know from the classic Musketeer movies. Thanks to that, the canonical moments of the story are truly strong in the ending and Milady gives new energy to the seemingly unproblematic character of D'Artagnan (not to mention Athos, of course). Bourboulon utilises the same positive aspects as in the first film, i.e. a strong start, excellent action and dark urgency, which is cleverly disrupted by Portos and Aramis and their front-line wedding special. This time, the better-constructed climax also works. There is a certain amount of embarrassment (again) from some of the rickety donkey bridges and the somewhat enigmatic motivations for the chosen plot twists in the political storyline. Like Milady, Richelieu likably gains new dimensions to his villainy in this version. Incidentally, I am the last person who would criticise characters of a different skin colour in an adaptation of a Creole author’s work, but the “black prince” comes across a bit like the Poochie character in The Simpsons. I’m especially looking forward to the third part of this, the best Dumas adaptation!

A pungently toxic romance between a village Lady Macbeth and the submissive guy next door, who in terms of type is a reference to the social realism that I miss here. Despite being monsters, these two characters have a surprising number of layers and if one approaches them from a cynical distance, Mr. and Mrs. Stodola is actually, and primarily, a story about the turbulent marriage of a dominant woman and a man who devotedly loves her, but cannot handle her. Yes, we find ourselves treading on the ethically thin ice of romanticising unacceptable characters, but there is nothing cheap in this empathy, because it is derived from a good character study and precise directing. Furthermore, the dramaturgical switch to procedural description of the murders in the last third of the film works superbly as a contrast to the “romantic storyline”. Lucie Žáčková’s performance is one of the best seen here since the revolution and the effective chemistry between her and the peculiarly soft Jan Hájek is the driving force of the film as a whole. Mr. and Mr. Stodola is the Czech answer to Dahmer and, in my opinion, the best domestic film in a long time.

MH370 is a documentary that gives unnecessary space to people who don’t deserve it, because they are obvious attention whores and dubious manipulators. It’s nice that, after coming up with two utterly absurd hypotheses based on pure fabrications and technical inaccuracies, it allows the voices of sceptics to be heard, but there is a bit of twisted logic in letting the manipulators make stuff up and then have a few rational voices say that their speculations are contrary to the facts and aren’t even worth addressing. In fact, we learn nothing more than we would get from a single hour of the much more modest and better structured Air Crash Investigation. The voices of the actual investors, who were not involved in the documentary, are replaced by internet enthusiasts and experts who took part in this purely as a leisure activity. The documentary just repeats familiar revelations, complete with a series of annoying wild goose chases and muddled accusations about who is whose agent. Plus the emotional porn of devastated families who, in their desperate longing for answers, sometimes fall under the spell of people who know how to exploit the misfortune of others.

The best Brosnan movie of the 1990s inadvertently released in 2023. If I leave aside the slightly WTF technophobic foundation and the chaotic motivations and donkey bridges arising from it, this is a king-sized portion of superbly constructed and charismatic action in which the climax aboard a train is the dominant feature. This is probably what Nolan’s take on Bond would look like. That’s good enough for me. I'm looking forward to part two, aka The Hunt for Red October.

Watching Past Lives is like staying in a meticulously tidy, clinically clean apartment in which one never begins to feel at home. It’s a film that lets you know exactly where it wants to take you emotionally, and its strategy – from the music to the shooting – is so clear and seamless that I couldn’t get into the game that it plays. Part of the problem is that Celine Song leaves the most dramatically satisfying content until the last third, so everything that comes before it is just a neat overture. The improbable love triangle in Past Lives is thus rather more sweetly illustrative instead of cutting to the marrow. Sure, a New York romance with a Korean twist is appealing. I understand the hype, but this film fades away too quickly in this lifetime, let alone the past ones. Return to Seoul, which has a similar concept, appealed to me more.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s greatest hits (coloured and expressively remixed). At its core, Poor Things is Dogtooth part II with the layout of an emancipation drama. Here we have a similar constellation – father-creator, who tries to protect a woman-child from the dangers of the world and foster in her a pure being, which makes him a god and a tyrant. Here we have a heroine who moves strangely, which reflects the twisted nature of the world and the attempt to free herself from conventions that others have imposed on her. Where Dogtooth ended, however, Poor Things begins. Bella and her journey of initiation through the world are reminiscent of a sexual and social bildungsroman with several stops along the way to discovering that her body belongs to her and her alone. This is a realisation that the heroes and heroines of Lanthimos’s previous films came to only painfully and with difficulty, usually ending in an embarrassing misunderstanding. The clumsy rebellion against convention, the arbitrariness of social rituals, the ego of men who try to remake women in their own image – in Poor Things, these Lanthimos trademarks are made more digestible because the film externalises them and caricatures them to an even greater extent. Nevertheless, it doesn’t sacrifice a certain amount of unpleasantness and the ability to put the viewer on the edge of their seat. I would place Bella and her escapades in schools instead of sex-education classes. Everything essential is there. Unfortunately, I only half believe Yorgos’s inner Zeman/Jeunet. I have always seen him as a brutalist and cinematographer Robbie Ryan as a realist. I find their pastel colouring books to be borderline kitschy – “attract with originality” recklessly overlaps with “make faces in every close-up”. Lanthimos’s originality has always consisted not in any spectacularly eccentric outward presentation, but in creating a picturesque initial situation, twisted realism and working with actors as if they were living marionettes. Of course, the actors are magnificent; I would point out the wonderful cameo by Hanna Schygulla in the role of an old woman who doesn’t shy away from talking about her sexuality. We can interpret Poor Things in various ways and probably every interpretation will have its own vague truth. Personally, I interpret the film as a metaphor for Lanthimos’s work, which began with warped and manipulative experiments on human material in an ugly laboratory and grew into comprehensible and mainstream catharsis in colourful settings. In my heart and soul, I will always have a greater affinity for his older, scarred dystopian freakshows about people dragged along by conventions than for his pathological fairy tales about poor wretches who have become masters of their own bodies and fate.

A slowburn detective thriller that sometimes uses its slowness to surprisingly humorous effect. In some aspects, the serious Del Toro appropriates a bit of the Coens’ irony of aimless existence. All of the parallels with Villeneuve and Fincher are appropriate, which can paradoxically be to the film’s detriment. Its tone is less bleak and the twists are rather predictable and, if any objection offers itself, it’s that Singer’s cuts and sudden pauses toward the end of film smack of stretching out the runtime. We can all anticipate what’s coming, but the film deliberately leaves us hanging for a while by jumping into another storyline. In that, it’s obvious that this is the director’s debut. Otherwise, Reptile is Del Toro’s show. His brooding, derisive detective fascinated with the water faucet quickly gets under your skin and drags you through a story that lacks the slightly sharper dramatic edge that would allow Reptile to grab you and not let go. That said, Netflix got lucky in the acquisition this time.

No, this really isn’t just a collection of vlogs. In fact, Manskyj elevates Titarenko’s raw footage of hell and limbo into an artfully rhythmic and graduated account of the war’s impact on the ordinary lives of a few volunteers in a medical unit. At the same time, he manages to sneak in a full range of interesting secondary topics, dominated by his long-time obsession with “the traces of empire”, into the regular alternation of footage from the battlefield and documentary scenes from the rear. The infernal scenes from the front form a chilling counterpoint to the raw testimonies of Ukrainian and Russian identity from the idyllic environment of the rear. The quiet power of Eastern Front consists precisely in the fact that it does not try to stylize or incite, but instead lets authentic scenes and utterances resound. After the initial feeling that it was going to be nothing more than topical reporting, I left Eastern Front with an oppressive, hopeless feeling that endlessly scrolling through Twitter videos doesn’t really provide. This is the kind of documentary that was needed!