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The Dead Don't Die (2019)
I can't believe it
This was one of the worst movies I ever watched. Despite a director whose work I admire and actors I like very much. It is most of all boring; no suspense, no humour (there are attempts but they fail badly), no characters that are not completely one-dimensional. Plus: the movie is pretentious; it seems as if Jarmusch wanted to throw in something intellectual and had characters talking about having read the script (which is completely unmotivated and not funny) and a voice-over by a hermit which is meant (?) to lend the story some depth by commenting on capitalist society. I really can't believe this ...
Us (2019)
Really not good
This movie aims at scoring on two accounts: it tries to be scary, and it tires to be clever and achieve philosophical depth. It fails on both accounts. This is not just a philosophical failure. It is an artistic one, since the story that is meant to connect both levels is messed up by the big plot twist in the end. It makes basically everything that happened before unintelligible.
Schmitke (2014)
An Air of Twin Peaks
This should be a great movie for you if you enjoy slow authorial cinema. It starts like a character study of an elderly, somewhat simple-minded and taciturn engineer of wind turbines. When the engineer is sent from the city he lives in to a small Czech village surrounded by woods and mountains, the movie slowly develops into something different, building up a unique haunting athmosphere in its exploration of the village and the woods. Very intriguing. Recommended to fans of David Lynch or Andrei Tarkovsky, and also to fans of Peter Kurth (once a member of the ensemble of the Thalia theatre in Hamburg).
The Future (2011)
A gem of its own
This movie is certainly not for everybody. It is slow-paced, exploring some nerdy characters, developing some quirky ideas. You have to be open to this to like the movie; if you are, the film is a real gem.
Dogville (2003)
Lars van Trier had had better moments before.
Perhaps you won't do justice to a film by comparing it with earlier works of the director. Perhaps it is sign of your growing older that you do compare. Be that as it may, I could not but compare, and "Dogville" comes off badly. In many details, it does not reach the qualities of its predecessors.
The acting of Nicole Kidman, albeit far from bad, is never as convincing as the acting of the heroine in Trier's "Breaking the Waves", Emily Watson. There are none of the touching moments that Watson could produce; she played her character convincingly as a victim of her nature, a nature that is partly just a gift of nature, but evidently also partly forced upon her by the influence and educational means of her environment. We do not get to know much about the nature of Kidman's Grace, unfortunately.
Most of the characters remain stereotypes throughout the film - which seems to be intended to a certain extend, due to the many allusions to Brecht. But still I cannot regard this as a virtue of the movie.
The worst thing about it is the end (this is NOT a spoiler) - the very end, I mean. After the plot is over, we are shown sad pictures of poor people living and dying in the States' thirties as well as the contemporary USA. The pictures are accompanied with David Bowie's "Young Americans" - here van Trier manages to give his movie a last and wholly unconvincing twist. With this scene he risks to turn the film into a clumsy and shallow expression of anti-American resentments. What a pity - though the film is not one of his best, it would have deserved better than this.