Othello

If we were at psych exams with William Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, we'd give her plenty of high-fives, because no graveyard, temple, ruin, dungeon, or haunted house can trump the night forest in its eeriness. And that's probably why even though it's basically the total foundation and crux of horror, Across the River simply works. Economical means, a single protagonist, deep woods on the Italian-Slovenian border, and two nasty little flesh-eating hookers. And while it's not found footage, the technical means and the way it's shot make it essentially found footage. There are definitely worse ways to spend your time.

It's always gratifying to discover that I'm not the only one for whom a mirror provides an endless well of terror. An almost, almost perfect haunting that's basically only falls short of full marks by the limits of that branch of horror, but otherwise it's gratifying to see an enlightened approach for the first time in a long time to such a washed-up sub-genre to which James Wan has lately been quite vehemently adding bleach instead of flavoring. While the foreign critics were quite enthusiastic about Oculus, the audience was yawning (but it still paid off quite well). Which is a rather interesting observation given how conservative the overseas horror masses are, but the fact remains that Flanagan's opus is anything but a crowd-pleaser. *SPOILER ALERT* He’s not in a hurry to get anywhere, he doesn’t explain the causes of the evil, he tortures the heroes, and the central mirror actually plays with them throughout the entire film, only to win in the end. Simple as that. Once the film closes in on the confines of the house, we find out very soon that nothing we're seeing may be as it's presented to us, and the inner game has essentially no set rules because, in short, the mirror is messing with the psyches of the characters through whose eyes we're watching the whole thing unfold. The flashbacks of the protagonists, like little children watching the brutal disintegration of their family, are perfectly interwoven with the contemporary events. The past known to the protagonists isn't explained at the beginning (only its denouement – the guy has been in juvie for 11 years and his sister has an obsessive plan to publicly expose and destroy the mirror) and evolves along with the current events, making the ending essentially two bravura intertwined plot climaxes, only to merge into one during a depressing complete ending. The parts with the chained-up animal mother are already pleasantly beyond the overseas horror certainties, and I wish Flanagan many more satisfied critics and ticket-paying, pissed-off fans for his next film. PS: there are no fucking orchestral jump scares! Hallelujah!

A formally utterly unique entry into the contemporary London underworld, blackly reveling in the travails of first-rate characters that is second to none. Right up there with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, without question the best and most uncompromising Ritchie, whose opening story exposition with Black Strobe's "I am a Man" I could play over and over again.

Korea's Magnificent 71, led not by Yul Brynner but by the Eurasian champion of gaping at the horrors of war. Not that I blame him. After all, filming with extreme resolution digital cameras requires that the film crew put their weight into the sawing. On one hand, the technology allows us to capture in sharp focus the finest flying specks of dust, not to mention explosions that throw thousands of tiny parts into the air that are no longer a blur, where each is in full focus and we can follow its trajectory comfortably as far as the length of the shot allows, but on the other hand we have to reckon with the necessity of absolute ultimata in terms of make-up, effects, costuming, and production design. If there's one place the film doesn't really fail, it's here. The ubiquitous dust, dirt, bloody pustules, worn guns, flying shrapnel, burning soldiers, and glorious explosions in the long shots leave the viewer guessing at nothing, and though it goes over the top a few times (an over-stylized shootout in the tall grass, almost funny gore), the eyes have their fun. And it actually quite masks the fact that the script was apparently written by a twelve-year-old nationalist after a three-day crash course in screenwriting, which means that while the film waves the epic history banner, it ends up pitting a literally bullet-riddled protagonist on a pile of corpses, machine gun in hand, against an arrogant bad guy in a white uniform firing a Russian PPSh-41 submachine gun single-handed.

A historical mess that truly makes me wonder what people who only know the basics about Solidarity will take away from it. The problem wouldn't be that the film counts on knowledge of the substance if it didn't try to look educational and make every scene sound so much like a master’s thesis. Don't get me wrong, I actually have quite a bit of respect for the 270-year-old Wajda for coughing up a film so young and dynamic, imbued with unobtrusive humor and Polish underground music, nevertheless, the "workers groan under the regime – strike/protest/wife/strike/police/protest/police/wife/strike – yay freedom" method is almost a testament to the fact that for most Poles the process of the fall of communism was an "I don't even know how it all happened, but we're heroes" experience. Which doesn't sound to me like the brief of most of the film's sponsors (whose parade lasts the entire first two minutes of the film), and that includes Telewizija Polska and Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, who have lately been banging the drum of Polish patriotism and popularizing Polish history with all their boots and might.

And damn, how I was looking forward to getting that done. The posters, the trailers, the whole story (two barely-hairy people winning cancer and a heap of love), and the obligation to see this film sounded to me like the news announcing that a cacodemon has emerged from the depths of the earth and the country is in for a thousand years of agonizing tyranny. But hell isn't happening. While The Phallus in Our Stars mixes suburban teen melodrama with the gravity of terminal illness, and manages to wring just about everything out of the subject matter in a fairly merciless running time, the flip side of the film is a rather refreshing Reitman-esque comedy that thankfully allows the characters to do a lot more speaking and acting rather than letting themselves get dragged through the IV and stare at the wall in anticipation of the inevitable. The protagonists are not just tolerable, but instead likeable, intelligent, and self-deprecating. The tearful valley of the last half hour is survivable precisely because of the relationship we've made with them in the first hour and a half, where she cancer was still somehow all right and cool. Not to mention that it makes the immanent presence of death work, which in some places is pleasantly beyond the comfort zone. Faulty Stars has a lot of problematic scenes (the whole Anne Frank sequence, the eulogy, the letter ex machina) and a lot of very pleasantly atypical ones (Hazel's unsentimental father, the discussion with the writer in Amsterdam) and can be hated more or less just as easily as loved. It strikes me as ideal on a romantic level, especially as a counterpoint to Meyer's opuses, where everyone stares and sighs into the distance with a shattered soul at the curse of eternity, while here there is talk and jokes in a close encounter with the non-existence of life after death. If I were sixteen, I'd be all over this movie.

Outside of Locke, Steven Knight was the writer and director behind the ambitious but somewhat sympathetically infantile Hummingbird, starring Jason Statham, whose central motif was once again man, his principles, ineffable cyclicality, and the surrounding world, which is the enemy. The screenplay for Locke is basically brilliant, and I'll give a nipple for the fact that it was written in the introduction that film databases of the world would call the genre a thriller, of which it has some of the parameters (the action takes place almost in real time, a protagonist removed from his environment, dealing with hostility all around), but otherwise it's a pure drama about how a basically systematic protagonist decides to take an unexpected step and pragmatically carries it out according to his principles and procedures. It's terribly easy to keep a relative distance from Locke thanks to its ambition and an ending that few will probably find satisfying, except that you sort of have to admit that this is a genuinely bold move from director Steven Knight, comparable to the central character's struggle for his perceived soul.

Indeed, in theme alone The Hundred Year-Old Man mines from Forrest's ramblings and adventures, and even in the fact that according to the reviews, this film follows its example by being better than the book. Unlike that Oscar-winning retard's journey through America, however, The Hundred-Year-Old Man is thankfully spiked with Scandinavian nihilism, and in a nutshell tells the story of how the Century of Lies was whizzed through and determined by an individual actually acting with utterly guileless, selfless, and sincere intentions. This is especially prominent in the final flashbacks, when the protagonist is a double agent between the CIA and the KGB, supplying both sides with fraudulent information from the adversary, which is funny, among other things, because this section adopts the formal devices of spy films. But it's the flashes of already utterly absurd humor that are the most delightful, led by the year-long explanation of the escape plan to Einstein's retarded brother or the post-mortem conclusion of a gang member's journey with a random suicide bomber in Djibouti.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie that you can talk about so much and so well. Judging by some of the reviews already, some are already enthralled by the creative team's pious reverence for the Japanese original (atomic breath!), others by the director's method of following the peripeteia of the giant monsters always from the position of an anonymous humanoid, others by the transformation of the central character into a giant monster who deserves our love but is never able to return it. I too must confess that when, at the end, the camera chased the sinking Gojiru, but did not go underwater with it again, I was moved by my smallness and insignificance compared to a creature so perfect and wise, who would no doubt never have known of my feelings for him and I would have pursued him to the ends of the earth. And I’m not into chubbies. Edwards fully lives up to what we expect from an aspiring indie director when someone injects 160 million into his veins. It's packed with auteurism and individual ideas. I liked the incorporation of crucial scenes from modern video games (fighter jets falling from the sky à la Modern Warfare 2, a submarine being blown up in the jungle with an insectoid creature in the background – Crysis, soldiers jumping out of a plane into the rising sun – Battlefield 2), I loved the religious rapture of the pidihumanoids towards something so vastly unreachable, I loved every entrance of the giant lizard onto the scene (flares), I was tense during the silent scene on the railroad bridge, I enjoyed the incredibly destructive picnic of the ancient creatures in San Francisco. No point then in addressing the total lack of logic or the unnecessary main human storyline right after Bryan Cranston jumps in. The movie should have been shot entirely from the perspective of random bystanders. Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins (for her, of course, as usual) were practically unwatchable. But these are minimal compromises compared to what the film offers. I can understand the lower rating – this movie really doesn't shine when you watch it on a bus with your cell phone.

As If I Didn't See It. Check out the poster and keep yourself engaged for 40 minutes. Congratulations, you're almost halfway through the movie. The Bosnian-Serbian conflict is sadly starting to become my cinematic nemesis, because after the awful Twice Born, this is yet another whiny tryst of apathetic women in the same setting, where you can still see the unsteady hand of a not-very-talented debutante unable to trouble the cast and crew enough to achieve the rawness and authenticity of the scenes depicted. All of that is simulated here instead by the barn in the field and the main character's expression, which only raises the suspicion that she might be made out of rubber. In the end, though, the worst part of the film is the director's decision not to make any comment on the political background to the conflict, and unless you have some exposure to the period, you won't be able to tell what kind of oppression she is suffering under. Thus, it becomes not an account of the horrors of war perpetrated on women, but a purely ideological war of weak women against uncouth and stupid men.