Reviews

MissiePoo16 is a brilliant portrait of modern teenagers living their lives on social networking sites and communicating via chat-rooms and webcams.

The story of a teenage girl told to her webcam is witty and so believable. The art direction is very original and unforgettable. I loved the eclectic use of capitals, pink backgrounds, exclamation marks and online voting!!! I'm glad this movie got the GOLD of the Dutch Film Festival:-P

I would do more with distribution via online media, as this movie is just destined to be shown on YouTube, Revver and other video sharing and social networking sites.

I think Aranofsky himself is a genius - he shot such a solid and mature debut film with such a low budget. "Pi" reminded me "Stalker" by Andrey Tarkovsky. Similar style with unexpected angles and beautiful BW shots (the tempo in 1979 was much slower), surreal and disturbing atmosphere and even direct parallels - milk poured in the coffee in "Pi" reminded me the famous ink-in-the-water shot in "Stalker". Both films invite you to think further. Would we ever be able to comprehend the laws determining our existence? Could all those patterns and formulas discovered by the scientists ever explain the logic of our lives? Or are they just building blocks, randomly tossed by the nature? A conclusion we could derive from "Pi" and other films about scientists and great thinkers is that rational intelligence would not make us happy. So, I've switched off my brain and enjoyed the movie.

When I started watching Losses to be Expected, I didn't know it was from the same director as Hundstage. But after the very first striptease scene I knew it had to be Ulrich Seidl. He has a unique talent of revealing common patterns in the human behavior, and he is the master of depressing cinema. After watching Hundstage and La Pianiste van Haneke within one week, I have even decided to never watch an Austrian movie again. But this one is a good excuse to break the promise.

The main character of the documentary is the 60+ retired Austrian who's just lost his wife and is looking for a new one across the Austrian-Czech border. He is very lonely and needs somebody to share his last years with. He uses all the tricks to lure Paula, who lives in Czech Republic, into his nets. He shows her an Austrian supermarket, an Austrian shopping mall, takes her to a fair in the nearby town etc. Whatever the characters do is so recognizable, beginning with a conversation of the 60+ widows about the sex, and ending with complaints of a village idiot about the communists who failed to repaired his window and cupboard.

I liked the movie for its almost transcendental spirit, although I would cut it back from 120 to 90 minutes to keep the pace and to let it gradually grow to the climax. And I would definitely stop after the second striptease scene performed by the village idiot. But Ulrich didn't and kept repeating his scenes and ideas.

Oblako-raj stops where an average road movie starts - at the departure of the main hero. Kolya is so bored by his life in the suburbs of a large city that he announces his departure to Siberia. Actually he does not want to leave and is really afraid to make such a big step in his life. But after everybody in his direct environment welcomes his decision and sees him as a local hero, Kolya has no choice - he has to go…

Oblako-raj is a beautiful film about ordinary people, meant as a comedy and showing how many beautiful moments we experience in our everyday lives. And that it's much easier to stay than to leave for a new life. I loved the melancholic and very poetic ending and the title song.

This movie is about the most desperate and tragic situation in the human life. This is when our life is determined by external forces. Even the most basic form of happiness - being with you family, enjoying your child - were impossible in the Russia of Stalin.

Sometimes I think about people who were borne 20 years before World War II in Germany, Poland or Russia. I wonder whether they had a feeling that the life was extremely unfair to them. The feeling that your fate was determined by the time you were borne in, and that you couldn't do anything at all to somehow change it. If Mitya, Kotov and Marusya would not die then, they would have to wait for 50 years to be able to truly understand what happened to them and who was to blame for it.

I was puzzled why Mitya picked up the phone and agreed to arrest Kotov. Why didn't he stop his suffering immediately, as he knew that he had no other option than ruining lives of the people he loved. Was it his hatred towards Kotov and the opportunity to take revenge for being expelled for 10 years? Was it the last hope that his love to Marusya would reverse her marriage?

After watched the film again & again I decided that he knew from the offset there was no way out. Mitya went to his old home because he wanted just one thing - to say farewell to his dream that the old times would ever return. The dream that made him betray his comrades in the 20th, and come back from France in the 30th.

I'm so happy that we live in freedom and that the iron curtain fell.

Syostry is a melancholic and touching movie, which gets quite close to the new Russian reality. The reality where a teenager girl dreams of becoming whether a sniper in Chechnya or a bodyguard for a new Russian (gangster).

Oksana Akinshina, who plays the older sister, has something inevitably tragic in her appearance (watch Lilja 4-ever by Lukas Moodysson). She reminded me Jean Seberg form the J.-L. Godard's Breathless and Juliette Biinoche from the L. Carax' Les Amants du Pont-Neuf. This movie is the second and last film shot by Sergei Bodrov Jr., who got a cult status (just like Victor Tsoy whose music he had used in Syostry), when he was reported missing in 2002 after the avalanche accident.

This is one of the few feature movies that have been made without a camera, cast and crew. Scorpion Gardens is an ingenious mixture of shots form a Soviet propaganda feature about a soldier surrounded by imperialist spies, and a documentary about the clinic for incurable alcoholics.

Sounds surreal, and if you are not at home in Soviet propaganda symbols, Scorpion Gardens looks as surreal as films of Luis Bunuel and Alejandro Jodorowsky. I found this experiment extremely funny, although I have to admit that not everybody in the house got it. Well, experimental movies are challenging, but this one is also rewarding.

If you have ever felt a complete stranger in a foreign country or just felt lonely (and sure you did), you'll love the film. Stranger Than Paradise is one of my Jarmusch favorites (at par with Down by Law).

Two melancholic characters, played or better said – lived – by John Lurie and Richard Edson, seem to be happy to just go with the flow without any particular purpose. But arrival of the Hungarian cousin creates purpose in their lives and makes the film very exciting. There are plenty of hilarious moments in this, in my view, very sad movie about being an outsider and feeling lonely.

10 of 10 for Jim Jarmusch, John Lurie and cameraman Tom DiCillo.

When I watched this movie I had a feeling that Lukas Moodysson used a hidden camera. Although the love story of two teenage girls in the Middle-of-Nowhere town is quite surreal, the film has plenty of very realistic shots. Shots that reveal what nobody is allowed to see - fears and uncertainty of teenagers with their desperate desire to be part of the crowd and at the same time to behave unlike others.

Fucking Ämäl creates a dream-like atmosphere of long forgotten feelings and still very realistic details (which is quite amazing since I've never been to Sweden, let alone spent my teen years there). I'm really curious what my son would think of the film when he'll become thirteen.

It's hard to believe that somebody could make a comedy about World War II and Holocaust without being cynical or stupid. But Roberto Benigni managed to overwhelm with his mix of horrifying reality and unparalleled optimism. The movie gets directly to your senses from the very first moment and makes you laugh, cry, hate and hope simultaneously.

I knew Benigni as a brilliant actor from, for instance, Jim Jarmush's Down by Law, but I didn't know he was such a talented director. To me, La Vita é bella is the best film ever that shows in a very subtle way how the war destroys people's lives, and at the same time proves that the life remains really beautiful.

You will remember Mauvais Sang because of: - its unique & very recognizable director's style; - visual experiments that have broadened the cinema art horizon (please don't forget that this film was released in 1986 and was copied since then in many other films and videos, which makes it less experimental nowadays); - high energy level due to variation in static close-ups and dynamic scenes shot by the moving camera; - love story that touches but stays far away from clichés; - plot that plays with stereotypes of a gangster film and leaves enough space for your imagination.

Visual ideas of Leos Carax can be encountered in, for instance, Romeo + Juliet by Buz Luhrmann, Delicatessen by Jeunet & Caro and a recent art house hit - Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain by Jean-Pierre Jeunet.