Othello

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A conservative and withdrawn detective finds a complicated path to a flamboyant transsexual and they end up becoming good friends.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.

As a great lover of Sonnenfeld's live action films, I had a hard time chewing through the thick and confusing character of Gomez; then, however, I found out that this was based on a completely original treatment, so I shut up. It's not stupid at all, but it's all the more visually awful (meant in a bad way). The film contains some great jokes, but kicks off with a final summation. The Addamses must always stand on the other side of suburban chauvinism and not live in mutual respect with it. And shove those cell phones and laptops up your ass here, too.

"Finally, a full-fledged follow-up to the cult second installment", part three. The usual representative of the digital action movie trend, with centuries of deserving actors and constant annoying quotes. I know we can't ask Linda Hamilton (who looks so worn out that I had to look it up to see if she'd had a heart attack) to jump out of a helicopter at her age, but does even a burning car that just lies there motionless have to be added in post-production? Halfway through the calm force of Mr. Schwarzenegger's elbow thrusts is a light reminder of his charisma in the first (and best, get over it) installment, but the way he's injected into the plot is such screenwriting strangeness that you'll end up wondering if you just misheard (and makes the character of Alicia the most un-savvy character since Libuše Šafránková in Waiter, Scarper!). I'd like to see an end to this trend where every movie like this has to have more characters than a gym after New Year's. Out of every Terminator: Genisys I’m putting every Terminator: Genisys on a scale from Terminator: Genisys to Terminator: Genisys.

I'd rather live in this world knowing that there's just a normal idiot behind this movie than knowing that the whole thing is a foul, calculated, purely output-oriented effort to extract money from youth through a combination of jump-scare horror, mobile apps, and pop references, all wrapped in a trendy female empowerment shell to give it a boost. Good thing we have a ruthless psycho sitting in on the state exams at FAMU, so nothing like that can happen here. I'm actually relieved.

A complete sandbox of random episodes and situations spliced together with running jokes and quirky characters. It's horribly shot (the camera for the most part never goes beyond the foreground), poorly edited, and with incredibly lazy and cheap CGI (even the dead bodies by the roads are digitally added), but the whole thing is pulled off by the foursome of Harrelson, Stone, Breslin and Deutch (!!!) who are just a joy to watch as they shamelessly cow in front of the camera. Thankfully, the film doesn't irritate with confused episodicity, as it never once attempts any coherence throughout. It's very likely that with a different cast it would have been intolerable. Interestingly, the "geek" character of Jesse Eisenberg is the one who has least survived the decade-long outage, who with his neurotic pop culture references, is fit only to be thrown over the walls to be torn apart and eaten by the plebes from among Big Bang Theory fans.

Perfect argument fodder against people who dismiss documentaries like this on the grounds that if they had come up with something interesting and important, we'd already know about it from other sources. The search for a deranged continent where the most powerful data is hidden in pencil somewhere under the floorboards of a Johannesburg slum is aided by an equally deranged protagonist whose method of working with witnesses makes me wonder if it bore any fruit. On the one hand, when, with his colonial hat and a cigarette in his mouth, he searches with his detector for buried plane wreckage, only to grab a spade after successfully locating it, kick it four times and find he's had enough, he pretty much fits right into the chaos. However, as is later revealed to us, the protagonist of the story is the quiet detective Göran, who, on the strength of an inherited iron plate supposedly belonging to the crashed plane, has dedicated his life to wandering Africa in an attempt to find evidence of the existence and activities of the paramilitary organization SAIRM, and now sails like the Flying Dutchman upstream on the Congo in search of secret laboratories that allegedly spread AIDS through vaccines to cleanse the continent of the black race. The scene where he shows the shot-up airplane panel to random students on the subway on the way to the FBI and explains to them why it's so important is one of the most moving moments I've seen in a documentary.

Watching the film, one finds it incredible, but it is the realization of a reworked script that its author Walker distanced himself from because he felt it was fundamentally watered down, something he had experienced since the production of Se7en, where Fincher had nonetheless stood up for him so his vision could remain intact. Here, Walker didn't accept the Dick Tracy-style notion of the private eye, who in his script is supposed to be more of a small-town bumpkin who spends his weekends bowling, and he didn't like the use of the voice over of the murdered woman, the unmasking of the main villain, or the deliverance letter at the end. All of these rewrites were the work of Schumacher, returning from his Mexican sabbatical where he had retreated out of exhaustion from the production of the last Batman. He was given the script to edit out of trust that he would give it a softer tone. Except that Schumacher returned from Mexico not only refreshed but also with a certain bitterness, so while he destroyed Walker's vision of the average suburban yuppie's inability to look into the abyss without being destroyed for life, he rebuilt it into a thesis about the elusiveness, irrationality, and ubiquity of sheer evil. With most of the film being spent searching and delving deeper and deeper into the sewer of illegal pornography, the structure of that evil is also created, with it being represented in its pure form by the Machine, who is used by director Dino Velvet to further his artistic ambitions, and exploited in terms of sheer mammon by Eddie Poole, who is followed by a host of other fish with the same motives. The awesome Elswit-esque grimness and faded shots of this autumnal tale, combined with a look at the declining pornographic landscape due to the advent of the internet, the constant presence of the ending (the empty giant house of a dead tycoon, the leaf-strewn grey home of the protagonist at the end of the street, as well as the main villain's home, which is even adjacent to a cemetery), and the setting of most of the film in the depopulated areas of New York or Los Angeles, closes the 1990s in a way. Everything is slowly shifting to computers, streets are being depopulated, meeting places are becoming desolate, old structures are breaking down, and everyone carries some scars from these wild years that they hope never to be reminded of. PS: 8mm was my childhood VHS classic that I used to watch about twice a week back in the day, and with the BluRay edition, some details I didn't understand at the time were finally explained, the most significant of which was that because of the cropping, it was impossible to see how The Machine actually kills Max. The shot itself was cut off for the sake of the rating and couldn't be seen on the video at all. Another mystery I can check off

Daniel Nekonečný's favorite movie. It certainly can't be accused of being condescendingly trashy, which are usually the reasons I resort to low ratings. After all, Schumacher's vision to bring Batman closer to his 1930s visual origins was declared from the outset, so from a visual standpoint, the result is simply part of an auteur's vision and not mere failure. This was mainly due to the rushed production, where after the success of Batman Forever, Warner Bros did everything possible to make sure that the next sequel would hit cinemas in two years, with the godless motivation of cashing in on the merchandising sales that were impossible to escape at the time (the marketing of this film cost 150 million while its budget was 160). The combination of rushed production, pressure from the toy industry, and the pursuit of a bold auteur vision resulted in an understandably epic fail. The characters speak almost only in double-entendre one-liners (to be used in talking action figures), and the flashy studio set design comes across as an over-the-top extravaganza created on an LSD high. What’s more, the actors didn't have time for any physical training, which would have been impossible anyway, because the costumes were so tight and impractical that no action moves could be invented with them. So the action scenes are just a confused jumble of quick cuts to close-ups in changing lights. Plus, the whole budget thing, with 25m invested in an uncooperative Schwarzenegger, leaving no money to make sure at the very least that his stupid icicles wouldn't flap when someone walked past them, is just a testament to the thorough failure of practically all the factors that make a film. Occasionally it works and it's a guilty pleasure. But this, unfortunately, is too exhausting to be worth it. And yet Uma Thurman, who doesn't give a damn about any of this and cheerfully enjoys her role to the hilt, never gets old in this one.