POMO

Letters from Iwo Jima is a nice film. The Japanese view of the incident is darker, more accomplished and more meditative than the American view depicted in Flags of Our Fathers. And, mainly, it works internally. The spectacular action scenes are all the more impressive due to the fact that there is a minimum of them and we see them only from a distance, thanks to which the film maintains a powerfully intimate nature. The sentiment and simplicity are tastefully balanced with a beautiful visual aspect and the minimalism of Clint Eastwood’s music, whose dominant feature is a fragile piano motif. Another pleasing aspect is the filmmakers’ affection for the Japanese and, in contrast to that, their contempt for the American soldiers in some scenes. It’s a shame that Flags is such an unworthy sibling to Letters and drags this ambitious diptych of films down to the level of a quickly thrown-together Oscar frontrunner. If more work had been put into Flags, these two films could have gone down in history together.

This is what happens when a Korean sci-fi fan gets a mega-budget to make his childish dream come true.

This is not just an action movie, but a brilliantly shot and edited action movie with wonderful sound. It is the most powerful audio experience to be had at the cinema, even better than Spielberg’s War of the Worlds.

Childish yet intelligent, offensive yet touching. And always honest. Borat is a bit of a phenomenon, at least for its originality. I hope there will be a whole series of them and that they will all be at least this good.

Babel floats stylishly on the surface, but it fails to go any deeper. The content of the two main storylines comes across as half-empty, and the third storyline, though it holds the strongest potential, doesn’t add anything to them. If I gave 21 Grams four stars, I have to stick with three in this case. Nice visuals, great atmospheric music and good actors aren’t everything. P.S. Chieko should have jumped.

Creature from the Black Lagoon is a surprisingly imaginative and effective adventure movie that entertains, doesn’t offend and, mainly, doesn’t seem ridiculous, even after several decades. There is no verbose prologue, no attempt to put across rigid ecological ideas. Instead of that, there is a pretty girl in a swimsuit in the arms of a monster. The titular creature enters the scene immediately at the beginning, and the film offers a great atmospheric swamp location and an unpredictable plot. If Creature had kept up the suspense and charm of the first half until the end, I would have given it four stars. The repetitive attempts to escape the swamp and to destroy the monster wouldn’t have been hurt by a little inventiveness.

Indie nonsense in which everyone has sex with everyone, but men with women only rarely. And when they do, it’s with unattractive women or emotionally vacant dominatrixes. A nice mirror of our times, um... Softcore erotica during which you’ll die before you get hard.

Compared to the first one, The Beginning has a more action-oriented screenplay and a better ending, but the filmmakers forgot that a horror fan and a sadist are two different things. This is not a film for horror fans.

Though I’m a fan of the period and the genre, I can’t give this more than three stars. George Waggner’s The Wolf Man lazily moves in safe clichés. It’s predictable and there is nothing surprising about it, the Roma actress doesn’t know how to act and the foggy setting of a 20-square-metre forest doesn’t add to the film’s charm. Furthermore, the father/son drama doesn’t lend it a deeper dimension either. Perhaps only Lon Chaney’s performance makes this film a classic. If nothing else, at least Werewolf of London, made six years earlier, offers a screenplay written with more imagination.

A brilliant cast led by Kristin Scott Thomas. Masterful screenwriting combined with Robert Altman’s perfectionist directing. Gosford Park is exceptional in how engagingly it manages to tell a story about practically nothing and, what’s more, in a place as boring as an aristocratic mansion over the course of a single weekend. This is true of the first, better half before the murder. The second half is unfortunately too quiet and modest, and the ending is insufficiently satisfying. It would have benefited more from Hitchcock than the restrained intellectual Altman. That said, it is still a clearly above-average work that ranks among the best films of the given period (where James Ivory’s films reign supreme, particularly The Remains of the Day, in my opinion).