Reviews

"Ad Astra" is the worst science fiction movie that I've ever seen in cinema. There are lot of cheap genre productions going straight to dvd, but with Brad Pitt as star-bonus "Ad Astra" was frozen until it was time to exploit the fame of new Tarantino-movie and the marketing of Pitt-stardom. Maybe the actor himself thought he might have a proper artistic role as an astronaut with plenty of inner soliloquy, but it's definitely not one of Pitt's memorable roles. And the performance of Tommy Lee Jones (as a crazy scientist) is something to share the sense of shame.

After "Lost City of Z" this film is really an astronomical misfire from director (and writer) James Grey. Without proper plot and serious character building "Ad Astra" is a vain and deeply failed venture to use outer space and astronauts as last signs of metaphysics. The car chase -action on the Moon and the spectacular intro feel like late attachments to prove something commercially stable for marketing (and for trailer). With extremely childish voice over and silly family drama "Ad Astra" is even worse than Claire Denis's "High Life" (2018).

"Everybody knows" is more like a tourist advertisement than a film. It's hard to understand motives of Asghar Farhadi to make such a film without any personal touch. His three previous films, available internationally, are great examples of cinematographic thinking. The local Iranian subjects have been adapted to film narratives and the half-public life of families been showed through clever choises of places and camera angles.

But not in "Everybody Knows". There nothing I can recognize as the style of same auteur. Some themes are familiar from previous film, like the question of trustworthy spouses. The plot, a crime mystery, offers nothing to wait for.

The famous actors of this film are just famous; they don't have any motivation to act "great" in such a lazy and under-scripted film. There must be hundreds of Spanish actors who could do the same kind of tv-melodrama in front of camera.

Waste of time.

Easy to watch, hard to digest. "Styx" is a good and soft-voiced political film, but maybe too long for its simple message about individual responsibility.

Or maybe there's just too much message and too little drama in this film. It has a great analogy of Europe as naval crisis between an immigrant boat, a private boat and coastal guard. The grand political scenario of immigrant politics is dramatized in scale of two boats. If you get a mayday message on sea then it is the kind of situation where you must help anyone in need. But the lonely sailor (Susanne Wolff) of the private boat must decide how long will she use her own small boat and believe in her own devotion (she's a doctor) to help +300 immigrants in a sinking boat miles away from African west coast.

The basis for this contemporary drama is much better than the dramatic outcome. The story is cut short, just the way it might have gone, to be as blunt as the migration politics in Europe. There's not much left for atmosphere or character building. The setup for central scene is much more interesting than the proper scene with conflicts between different types of floating powers (literally).

If you like to get more metaphors or thoughts to consider about European politics at Mediterranean, you may want to see Fire at Sea (2016) by Gianfranco Rosi.

"As I Open My Eyes" is a story about tense political situation (before Arab Spring) without a political message. It would have been too easy to dramatize this coming-of-age -story with extreme episodes of resistance against Tunisian totalitarianism, just before Jasmine Revolution in 2011. Instead, we follow quite familiar narrative that could happen' anywhere in Europe: young multi-talented woman, Farah has to decide if she wants to become a rock singer or to agree with her mother and go to medial school.

Most of the conflicts in this narrative are inside the family. Only lately do we understand, as well as Farah, that her career as a rock-singer has been protected by a family friend. When the real political situation is exposed and the band has to stop performing, the bigger conflict with the totalitarian police forces is even too familiar from many similar movies. It seems to be very difficult to find the right tone for this kind of situation: to show the psychological effects without exploitation of the subject and female characters. This film is trying to find a compromise between psychological and political realism, but there are too many characters in the way.

The last third part of the film is kind of lame considering what we have seen before, and there are some loose strings in the background story of Farah's parents, but still it's a film that will widen your cultural horizon a lot. The wild and beautiful songs that Farah sings are reason enough to see this movie.

I have to admit I was positively surprised how beautiful the CGI-images of simian life were and how genuinely functional mixture of paleofiction and sf the first 20 minutes of this film was.

And after that everything went horribly wrong. As an allegory this is the most openly racist Hollywood-film I've seen for ages, a b/ w 'species-war' where all the humans are white. The setting is the same as in 60's westerns where they were really trying to use the viewpoint of indigenous people, but the plot and characters are more simplistic. For example, they say that the virus has left alive only those who are 'genetically' best part of humankind, and then we see the society with mainly white characters?

How else should we interpret this movie than a racist nightmare story, when there are only black apes and white humans against each other? And why this worst human character has to be Dreyfus? To point out that the most unreliable soldier might have been noticed just because of his (jewish) name? And then - how should we see the meaning of the 'ape' ruler: is he really like Cesar or more like Malcolm X? The original Planet of the Apes had also it's racial subtext, but nothing has really changed in four decades, has it?

Surprisingly cold satire with too much empty dialog, but you must really appreciate the attitude: the message is against the feel-good-romances as well as against the gender-politics. If you feel betrayed just because Rachel W says everything you loved was actually art and performance under construction, the film was worth of seeing. And you should note that the "art gallery" in the end of the film has nothing to do with art itself... the meaning of this metaphorical place you can decide yourself.

It may not be a good example of play adaptation, but there really should be more films like this with good self- consciousness, and also more actors like Rachel W who understand the point of irony.

Everything in "The Brave" is somehow false. Slow storytelling and strained dramatisation with zero motivation for audience to care for characters is an awful combination. It's brave message about the status of native American minority is lost with a stupid plot of sacrificing oneself in a snuff film.

If you watch only the first half an hour of "The Brave", you may be satisfied to see something thematic in hollowness of characters and in the situations they are introduced to audience. Even the short discussion with Marlon Brando is almost tolerable if you keep thinking this is just meta-criticism against conventions of film realism.

Only if you keep on watching... and you see the director (Johnny Depp) concentrating to his own character (Raphael) as a victim AND as a hero, you begin to see that there's another level of ethnic exploitation in these kind of indie films.

In a proper drama the characters are used to enhance each others qualities. With main actor also directing all attention is focused to his character, but mr Depp is not able to express what's happening inside his character during the oppressive and violent situations.

A stout, withdrawn character of an Indian with criminal background is a good choice for a director-actor who is used to do simple caricatures in Burton-fantasies - and even this is too much for mr Depp. Admittedly he is much more comfortable presenting ethnic antihero in "The Lone Ranger" than recycling an ethnic hero making ethnic love in ethnic sunset with an ethnic beauty (Elpidia Carrillo). YAWN!

"The Brave" is so far the only long feature film Johnny Depp has directed and I truly hope it will also be the last one.

Snowpiercer is an allegory of the global ecological situation set in a giant tech-noir train travelling around the frozen planet. Every carrier of the train is meant to represent a layer of society: poor "tailers", working class manufacturers, soldiers, rich owning class - but no middle class, which is typical for these kind of post-apocalyptic/post-ecological films. Surely the place could have been a space ship as well.

Train as a prison for the last tourists of Earth and prison as a playground for rich man's politics, these basic ideas have been dramatised well enough, although the Korean mixture of playful violence and class allegory is also disturbingly stupid. For science fiction fans there are a couple of wonderful scenarios, but first you have to watch a lot of clumsy, overacted scenes to get there… as if you were also a passenger in an unstoppable train. And there isn't any reason for a reasonable ending. "Die Bewegung ist alles"?

Allegorical references to class struggle are shallow, just like in "Elysium", another sf-movie about the post-ecological separation between lo-tech-poor and hi-tech-rich. You may have plenty of explanations what sections of the train are meant to directly represent some particular (national) society, but overall the manuscript is just a long, unbalanced combination of visual citations, especially from the French graphic novel.

It is sad to see good actors wasted in this kind of brainless film, but then again, they don't have to do much acting for their thin roles. I can see that Jamie Bell is trying to earn street cred in films like Nymphomaniac and Filth and Snowpiercer, but I can't understand why Tilda Swinton and Ed Harris waste their time. Or did they really believe this film have some political profundity?

This is a story how sid & nancy wanted to be vampires… or is it the other way round, every male vampire wants to be a rock star - and every female one longs to be an eternal groupie? At least Jim Jarmusch knew what he wanted: money for a film with two contemporary cool film stars, Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston. The magic word for film industry is still "vampire", so Jarmuch wrote a story where there are two lovers who "just happen to be vampires" (as Jarmusch has told in interviews).

Except that there's isn't really any story, any plot, any romance - and definitely no vampires. The characters of Swinton & Hiddleston are based on rock mythology rather than on vampire mythos. They do drink blood, but it's only a cheap metaphor and easy excuse to show drug-addiction with romantic allusions to the history of artistic use of opium. Only cool thing with this film is the title: ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE.

Most of the time S & H just recline lazily in different positions and occasionally talk about the beauty of instruments. They are multilingual, multitalented artists themselves, but there is nothing in their discourse to prove how wise or gifted they are. The references to the mutual history of vampire life are so stupid that the script sounds like it's written by a 12-year-old who thinks he (= JJ) has invented the concept of vamp film.

The stills of this movie may give an impression of a serious vampire movie. Camera-work is beautiful indeed, and T & S try to be seriously anaemic in their characters. But when the little sister vamp (Mia Wasikowska) jumps into story and acts like little sisters do, you finally realise how playfully boring this film about eternal boredom really is.

Yes, such a waste of time and talents.

As an analysis of power relations "Les Mains en l'air" is one of the finest child-films I've ever seen. The film is also an excellent example of how the French have made ​​the most interesting political films of 2000's - and it is possible by describing the situation of children.

List of the politically strong, originally intelligent films is staggering: Tavernier's "Ça commence aujourd'hui" (1999), Nicolas Philibert's documentary "To be and to have" (2002), Laurent Cantet's docufiction "The Class" (2008), and just alongside the previous films this Romain Goupil's film "Les Mains en l'air".

The frame story begins in year 2067. The central character Milana tries to explain to an alleged recipient (of her time) that it may seem unbelievable how in 2009 the children were grown in large groups. There is also another fantastical element: the children have their own cell phones with a ringtone (ultrasound) that adults can not hear.

If these ideas seem utopian to audience, it will have to think twice about what really counts as utopian in the actual story of escape.

Complete waste of time: an indie-film with heart of gold and also with all the weaknesses of amateur film making: empty dialogue, young sleepwalking actors, very slow narration. No technical flaws, though.

I saw this film as part of the AfricaFest-series in Tampere. I would really like to love a movie with such good intentions, but the story of exploitation and hopeless dreams of poor people has been told too many times with exactly the same crime plot elements.

The only reason to watch this film is the amazingly multi ethnic milieu of Mauritius. If the story of four young people had been told in 20 minutes, this film might fulfill its purpose as docufiction. But with 90 minutes...

This is a summer film with so low expectations of possible audience that every hoax (=the speculative magic trick done by four tricksters) is explained as soon as it's showed to happen. The old rival magician (Morgan Freeman) takes care of the explanations, but the final twist of the movie is so stupid and unnecessary that you start to think that maybe it's also part of the bigger hoax... how to get your money without giving really any substance to care for, not even the undercasted characters. After seeing "Now you see me" you will miss films like "Prestige" with real aura of enchantment.

Only good reason to watch this childish film is the pursuit sequence in NY. It's much more fluent in magic than any of the stage spectacles in this film.