Othello

At the time of the premiere, I went to see Tintin because its previews were quite reminiscent of the trailer for the video game Uncharted 3, which made me drool on my shirt and which I haven't played yet (because PC master race). Ten years later, the delayed film adaptation of that video game is finally coming to theaters, and I fell asleep at the trailer for it, but it reminded me how well the Peter Jackson/Spielberg collaboration keeps kicking. The Adventures of Tintin is a cartoon with amazing plasticity, great light work (supervised by Kaminski), color contrasts, and above all incredible action choreography. When combined with the popular retro styling of "Europe of the 20s-50s", Tintin is a walking companion on the shelf of adventure series from Indiana Jones to adventure games like Broken Sword or Lost Horizon.

With Scott Pilgrim I considered it part of the game, with Baby Driver I couldn't put my finger on it, and with Last Night in Soho it started to get downright annoying. It's that musical staginess drenched in studio lights, its artificiality accelerated by a digital camera with a high frame rate. If it's worked so far in Wright's previous films, it's because they were kind of musicals in the first place, except that Last Night in Soho has its entire plot built on trying to evoke the spirit of the Swingin' London era, and in this case you can have a wardrobe full of period dresses and tons of period props strewn about the studio, but it's still a totally obvious crying game. Logically, then, what works is one great dance sequence and the amazing Thomasin McKenzie, what doesn't work is, eh, well... the rest of the film. And Matt Smith doesn’t know how to inhale. I appreciate the very original twist that the main monster is actually the patriarchy, which I saw six times in genre films last year alone.

The premise is absolutely delectable. Unfortunately, with that in mind, I was looking forward to a far more cynical play and when I didn't get any, I started noticing how confusingly and clumsily it was filmed.

On the advice of a mysterious French family organization, Mossad assassins head to London in search of their target, the leader of the Palestinian Black September movement. There, however, the assassination is thwarted by undercover CIA agents guarding the leader in exchange for not attacking American diplomats. Later that evening, one of the assassins is killed by a Dutch assassin, apparently hired by the Palestine Liberation Front. God, I love the '70s! I find Munich (like Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's List) the perfect motif on which to pair Spielberg's choreography with Kaminski's experimentation. The numerous scenes and their detailed composition here create a view of a Europe riddled with agents meeting in restaurants, markets, and bars, where everyone has a purpose and takes a side. Even with this simplification and aesthetic stylization, Munich is a first-rate spy genre film (the spy team is like something out of a game) where almost every sequence is carefully crafted and has its own visual attributes. The risk of sentimental idiocy is condensed here to just one scene in which a sweaty Eric Bana has sex with a terrorist (I would have been so uncomfortable in the cinema), the rest is still Spielberg full of energy and ideas. Given the way the film looks and tells the story, it still more than anything creates the illusion that the world was the most interesting when it was the most dangerous.

A look at the banality of old age that conceals testimonials to some of history's greatest. The first and best part is actually a documentary variation on Sokurov's Taurus. An infirm Gorbachev in his darkened villa reminisces about his wife and his early youth, while we see a scythe leaning around every corner. It's cold outside and the walker catches against the threshold. The middle section is a flustered effort by Manskij to take one last opportunity to learn more about the political background to Glasnost, Perestroika, the military coup, and the transfer of power to Yeltsin, except that Gorbachev speaks ambiguously, in platitudes, bouncing off banal stories from the set, and it's impossible to tell 100% whether senility is speaking for him or if he is deliberately obfuscating for fear that history might catch up with him before he dies. In this case, he most resembles a demented grandfather who, on a family visit, hid his grandson's cell phone, which everyone is now looking for, while he smiles at what a joke he's made, though he no longer knows where he hid it himself. Manskij is at his best when he purely observes the action and lets the viewer form connections (The Pipe) rather than stepping in and asking vague questions (Putin's Witnesses). Gorbachev. Paradise, then, is a particularly interesting study of the proximity of death. As political commentary, it will probably disappoint most people.

A haunting in an Ikea catalogue, by which I’m not referring to the country of origin, but to the depth of the characters and the composition of the setting. The haunting itself isn't bad, but you've seen it all before and the only motivation I can see behind Danielsson and Mellander taking on such a hackneyed subject is to show that they have the technical chops to do it and Netflix or someone like them would reach out and they could see the world. However, if you hunger deeply for post-Insidious horror and enjoy sudden scream scares, you should seek professional help.

What do a ten-year-old child, a mentally handicapped individual, and a resident of the former Eastern Bloc have in common? In the context of Hollywood screenwriting, almost everything. They are, in fact, popular screenwriting crutches when a film needs to break through some rigid system by way of endearingly naive characters who explain to us with good-natured irony the beauty in the little things, the pointlessness of order and restrictions, or some other such Dušek. The Terminal had the potential to join my favorites on the list of movies that turn vast buildings into chaotic and autonomous organisms (Die Hard 2, Control, Subway, Delicatessen) full of oddball characters, forgotten rooms and secret passages, places where everyone has their mysterious calling. And yet the primary purpose of a film should not be to try to lure back to airport terminals the passengers who disappeared in fear after 9/11. It's not the only film with a similar purpose (see Up in the Air), but by trying to humanize the draconian screening measures at American airports it simply runs into screenwriting alleys you can't turn around in. The notion that at any time in the last 20 years, someone at a New York airport has made one of its chairs into his own flat, built his own fountain, had all the workers at the shops there winking hello at him, or as a junior immigration officer told a senior immigration officer that he could learn a little humanity from an Eastern European immigrant, is squeezed out of the fingertips by a team of people who clearly no longer have much contact with reality but feel they should be lecturing us about it. The scene where the protagonist, in some fit of spontaneity, makes a piece of wood paneling overnight and gets a job as a laborer gets my bleeding-ass screenwriting award.

You can see that once Spielberg sheds the weight of the heavy subject matter he usually has to comment on with sufficient deference, his seat loosens considerably and he finally starts to fully devote himself to the parameters through which he more or less made his name, namely choreography, set design, and the rhythm of the plot. You can feel the release and inner calm in every scene of this film, with Kaminski's years of experience with Spielberg naturally inscribed into it, so that any shot that passes here sort of casually wouldn't be something most filmmakers couldn’t put together in a lifetime or would build a film around.

I saw a rip of this film with the Portuguese dubbing somewhere online, and I'm starting to get the feeling that it was dropped in there on purpose like that, because this is such an unbelievable soap opera that I was embarrassed for myself while watching it. It went as far as checking to see if I had the right film on, and during one scene (Arthur's visit with a bouquet of roses and bows in the background) I waited with bated breath for the scene to drop like a dream or the protagonist's naive fantasy. From the middle of the film on, all that kept my attention was my hatred for him and my fabled maliciousness. But I come out the winner when I end up giggling at two hours of horribly lit mid-shots where the only thing missing is Petr Rychlý in a white coat, or filmmakers who clearly didn't give a damn, lost their sense of the most basic film language, and yet are cheerfully shopping it around to prestigious festivals. Really, put yourself out of your misery.

Anyone who's ever had the privilege must admit how this film manages to be as insufferable as any "househusband in his forties" (TM). You'll find a lot of those shots on the walls of ad agencies, and a lot of those catchy one-liners will be written in the moleskines of people who go to the cinema of the Present and look optimistically at the future because of the results of student polls. An unbearably gentrified film, therapeutically working with the time-honored premise of "solutions in the simplicity and directness of childlike optics". Well, that’s how it goes when children are written by adults.