Marigold

On an Old Testament basis, Jensen created a layered story in which visually uncharacteristically exacerbated motifs play the main role in Nordic cinema of the "great other" (God/ reality / symbolic order... whatever...), but hand in hand with them go the very typical "indirect dialogues". The characters talk, but the meaning of their speech depends on a symbolic plane - not in what is said, but in the subtle interaction of hints, silences and hidden meanings. Mads Mikkelsen's character, however shrouded in biblical stigmas, is purely human at his core, and his message that it is necessary to escape from reality at the cost of merciful deceptions softens even the sometimes "overly" monumental symbols. It's not about them, about some elusive entities and big ideas, but rather about that warm-frosty secondary life in which all the characters experience firsthand that each of us needs apple pie and closed eyes to turn the seemingly cruel absurdity of existence into a bearable game. Whether Ivan is Job (or just a blind man) and Adam enticed by Satan (or just a fool living a delusion), Adam's Apples tastes sour and you can't tear yourself away from it. There's a taste of hope, escape and sweet returns in the film. Not a dizzyingly deep, yet wonderfully "true" film about having no lasting truths and unshakable certainty. A black biblical tragicomedy.

Too much talking, too many dysfunctional shots, not enough truly impressive absurdities, and at the end, internationalism as the star of Bethlehem... nope, this is not the type of Hamer film I like. Though it's not bad, al least certainly not in the Christmas film category.

A poetic story about the fact that even if you miss your last train, it doesn't mean you can't jump into an exciting unknown. Hamer's style is unrepeatable, full of static visual anecdotes, absurdly dispossessed scenes, and pure Nordic silence that says more than many novels. O'Horten has the soul of a playful poet, and it is a film about sadness, loneliness and hope born of banalities. Watching the character of a "reserved" locomotive engineer transformed into a merrily cheerful vessel of optimism and hope in a matter of days is a pleasure over pleasure. Perhaps it was my love of the north and the Nordic humor of "nothing to say and little to say", but I held my breath and had a lump in my throat as big as when I watched Kitchen Stories. A modestly wise film.

Pioneering, unusual, confusing, funny and poetic. Lisberger made a film that was ahead of its time and looked at where contemporary cinema is going in full CGI. Certainly trying to be macho. However, fantasy is more than just big, bigger, and biggest.

The bearded Jeff can be nice. Computer Jeff is Guignol (almost like the Nordic model from the luxury perfume commercial in the lead role). To his detriment, Tron has a lot more Guignol in it than bearded men. As a visual story full of reflections and light contrasts, it is watchable, but unfortunately, in terms of the technical design there is only a pile of boring copies of real masters of imagination. Tron doesn't have one of his own, just the one on loan. And also not very luxuriant. But in this year's competition "pass", not "fail". P.S. Compared to the original film a fail in all categories, except the technical ones, of course.

Samurai fairness, where at the beginning two of them say they're going to fight at the end of the film, and half the film is a luxuriously filmed preparation for a battle that I have personally missed on screen for some time now. Miike is excellent, for example, in the way he introduces the villain and offers the synecdoche his villainy is terrifying and demonic. Thirteen Assassins has a truly old-world spirit, and blood and mud won't change that. It's a beautiful heroic epic about pride and devotion to the ideal, and I haven’t enjoyed an action movie this much in a long time. Woo and Chan can go bury themselves with shame, that's how you make a real rumble!

After an anti-capitalist action film, we now get a tender proletarian romance about departure, returns, incest and finding a way where everything seems to be over. A wonderfully heavy-weight performance by Gerard Depardieu and a digger named Yolande Moreau. The surrealism of everyday life, graves, zombies, masturbation and working-class philosophy. Kervern and Delepine did it again, and although I didn't leave the movie theatre all that excited, the film warms despite the blizzard. It may lack the explosively radical Louise-Michel core, but it's still kneads like that old machine. A good year. They don't make them like that anymore. Instead, they make 3D storyboards.

A humanist social drama that seeks to convince that compassion is a higher value than the law. (...) Thanks to the fantastic direction (sometimes even Greengrass-dynamic), I would also be willing to forgive the fact that, where it should argue, the film simply appeals to the noble feeling of a modern European. And I ask: who will benefit from this kind of emotion? The system is wrong, everyone can see that, but is artificially induced compassion really the best medicine? The fact is that from a filmmaking point of view, this path is the most workable, but the question remains whether it leads anywhere. Three dots is the only answer I know that comes to mind after watching "Illegally". It’s too little for such a serious subject.

To mess up the first-class theme that the story of a "boy of many identities" offers is truly a master piece of work. The multilayered and potentially absolutely riveting thriller spectacle was turned into an outrageously flat and, on top of that, a narratively goulash-like work without a head or tail, in which decent actors excel, but it also has an appallingly clueless director. Since Salomé wrote the script himself, he can only slap his fingers - he is like a small child who wants to prepare several surprises for his mother and eventually grinds them all out in front of her eyes. Unfortunately, I'm not the type of parent to cover my eyes and pretend I didn't see anything. I don't give a damn about the fact that it had great potential, Mr. Director.

What's going on in a dying brain? German Expressionism mates there with Ed Wood's story fog (second death, demon, virus, contamination), add to that some biomechanics, biopolitics, and paranoia. The symbols are deliberately centrifugal enough not to make sense, the dialogues resemble bookworm delirium, the space-time falls on its head and is generated completely against any logic... and the whole thing is shot largely by means that have not been used for decades, and it has an aesthetic that is inimitably concocted yet admirably consistent (perhaps the only thing that holds "conservatively" together in the film). In general, it is a work whose appreciation is probably a matter of a specific mental deviation that I (apparently) have. Because unlike everyone else, I liked the film, and in a strange telepathic way, I understood it, even though I can't reproduce it in words. I thank Tetsuo for selecting similar audience exterminations for the FFF.