POMO

Just no. This movie has Shyamalan’s typical signature in creating suspense (a spooky house with a spooky landlady), which tempts me to give it three stars, but unfortunately everything essential is amiss. The love motif doesn’t work, the relationship between the main characters is incomprehensible and there is no trace of interesting dialogue or a final point. The Happening is a bland, sometimes exciting and sometimes naïve farce, cooked in water salted with James Newton Howard’s music from Signs.

A hackneyed premise boosted with hits of LSD and a gay dwarf. The successful comeback of former comedy master Frank Oz has juice, is properly British, morbid and cynical, and maintains its quality even when one of the main characters gets feces on his face. Plus it has a not entirely mainstream cast, which is all the more interesting for that. I recommend serving this up after a weekend breakfast.

Constructed primarily on the premise of Eli Roth’s poorly made Hostel, Frontier(s) offers a tangle of plot twists slavishly copied from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre flicks. Add mutant children in the cellars and the treatment of a French historical complex from the rivalry with Germany. Brutal butchery with characters on our side whom we don’t care a fig about and characters on the other side that do not evoke horror, but embarrassment.

Untraceable is the maximum that the skilled genre craftsman Gregory Hoblit could get out of such a dime-a-dozen, unoriginal screenplay. Untraceable is a conventional, mainstream crime thriller, upgraded with the cruelty of the low-budget, fan-based morbid fun of the Saw series. Diane Lane is cool and the suspense works, especially in the climax. If you watch this movie with zero expectations, it will give you no reason to be disappointed.

This pleasant chill-out movie deservedly became a bigger American box office success than what it strived for. It is a lower-budget version of Ocean’s Eleven, bursting with youthful energy and music, and video-like editing combined with cool songs on the soundtrack. It also offers well-written and portrayed characters plus some kind of a wholesome message. In short, it is a little film worthy of a better three stars.

This film’s creators didn’t aim to please the masses with action or traditional thriller suspense, but conceived it as a minimalist, intimate drama about the feelings of two unexpectedly separated lovers. The Clearing is a nice film about a love that lasts a lifetime and forgiveness, relying on three excellent acting performances and a wise director who knows what he’s doing here.

A yellow-haired Franka Potente in a yellow floral-patterned dress runs through the tunnels of the London Underground, and instead of the date with George Clooney that she had planned, she’s on a date with a disgustingly deformed human mutant who enjoys raping women on a gynecological chair with a big, sharp machete. Christopher Smith fails to create even a hint of the oppressive atmosphere of the environment created by John Landis in only a few minutes of his An American Werewolf in London; and the first emotions come only with the onset of disgust and brutality. So it’s a similarly sad case as the more recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, in which we at least didn’t have to wait through the first two-thirds of the film for these “rewarding” audience emotions.

Fourth instalment of Indiana Jones franchise gets off to a great start and the rest of the film is decent – except for the last 10 minutes, which entirely undermine the whole thing. “We seem to have reached the age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.” The Indiana Jones universe has never taken itself too seriously and its possibilities are great, but they are not boundless and there are certain things I simply don’t want to see there. Who will we meet next? Mulder and Scully are knocking at the door... who is going to open it? Black-haired, flat-chested she-wolf Irina from the Soviet Union? The fourth Indiana Jones is a crazy cross-over with way too many pop-cultural references and a mediocre villain (Cate Blanchett’s only memorable moment is the line “You fight like a young man” :). May it be that the visionaries that used to show others the way have taken leave of their senses? This time, Spielberg has made me about as “happy” as Jackson with his recent King Kong. These blockbusters achieve equally amazing epicness, but they can never become true film classics.

Imagine Me & You is a decent, tasteful romantic flick made according to the time-tested recipe, but it is “different” only due to the fact that this time it involves two lesbians who are trying to find fulfilment in a romantic relationship. And these lesbians are more beautiful than you usually get to see in porn.

In Bruges is a stylish, strongly un-American, irresistibly incorrect, ultra-cheeky gangster flick that amazingly straddles the line between tragic tears and boisterous laughter. No wonder Martin McDonagh is a theater director. His remote Belgian town is just a makeshift backdrop for a well-acted play featuring twisted nut-jobs portrayed by actors who relish their roles, which are not very typical for them. A must-see for the fans of Tarantino, Ritchie and my favorite, Sexy Beast. Were it not for the villain Don Logan, played by the genius Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes would not have played his best character since Amon Goethe. In Bruges has the potential to gain well-deserved and lasting cult status.