Dead for a Dollar ★★★
◆ Directed by: Walter Hill
◆ Genre: Western [US]
◆ Lead role: Willem Dafoe
"Every movie I've made is a Western," director Walter Hill says of all his films, even non-Western ones like 48 Hours and Streets of Fire. This is undoubtedly true in his new Western movie which is the story of a bounty hunter who is asked to recover a woman who ran away from her husband with a black man.
He discovers that he was used to find the wife and the man so that the husband could kill them. At the same time, there is a Mexican gang intending to kill him and his assistant. It's not hard to expect it all to end with interlaced fight scenes.
The director's selection of some of his cast is troubling, given that Waltz has a style of acting that is not American and thus lacks proportionality. Even his accent is not correct. Dafoe is better but he provides his own interpretation of the character he performs. Other than that, a movie that admires the rest of the genre's aficionados.
◆ Final word: Good, though Hill directed better movies
The Eternal Daughter ★★★
◆ Directed by: Joanna Hogg
◆ Genre: Drama [UK]
◆ Lead role: Tilda Swinton
Tilda Swinton plays two roles in this movie. She is the mother and she is the daughter and they both travel to the Menzo Hotel in Wales on a journey of self-discovery. Both are tired and both have issues with each other.
This is the third part of director Hogg's trilogy, with the previous two films following a single vein of research and reflection on the lives of others. The two earlier films are The Souvenir and The Souvenir Part II.
Despite this, there is a difference in treating the subject here and adapting it before the end, to the extent that it begins to resemble horror films, although it does not fully engage in this genre. The film resembles some fictional and film works, but in the end it is independent in itself by calmly approaching the characters and the events alike.
◆ Final word: Swinton makes a good impression on her fans.
Athena ★★
◆ Directed by: RomainGavras
◆ Genre: Thriller [France]
◆ Lead role: Sami Slimane
A film of the kind that is eager to throw every scene in the face of its viewers, as if the director was standing behind a catapult machine in which he puts a pile of scenes screaming sound and sight and throws them towards the viewers.
It's about three siblings standing apart when an area in the southern Paris suburbs catches fire after the murder of an eleven-year-old boy.
The film seduces its viewers with the desire to leave a surprising impact behind every scene. This does not serve him as a plot or an issue dealing with the social and racial situation in which the film depicts the Parisian suburbs.
Definitely a hard-to-make movie (the Crowd Management second unit directors do their job well), but what's right in front of the camera is repetitive and doesn't give the viewer a chance to dig deeper.
◆ Final word: Despite the above, watch it on "Netflix" soon.
Bones and All ★★
◆ Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
◆ Genre: Horror [Italian-English speaking]
◆ Lead role: Taylor Russel
It is about a young girl (Taylor Russell) who meets her classmates for a soiree. She listens to one of them and leans her head on her shoulder. When her colleague raises her hand to point to her wedding ring, the girl pounces on her finger in order to amputate and eat it. From here and later the movie, as its first scene, is more disgusting than frightening. She meets another cannibal (Mark Rylance) and takes him to his house. She tells him that she is trying to get away from this habit (of eating human flesh), but he assures her that this is not possible, but that her need for food will gradually increase.
◆ Final word: Watching it is a waste of valuable time.
White Noise ★★
◆ Directed by: Noah Baumback
◆ Genre: Drama [US]
◆ Lead role: Adam Driver
This film participated in the competition of the Venice Film Festival and defamed it, especially since it was chosen to open the current edition. The film is based on a successful 1985 novel written by Don DeLillo, and Hollywood - as we wrote previously - sought to turn it into a film twice before the project fell into the hands of Bambak.
The irony is that the majority of book critics found that the novel was distinguished by its ability to address its idea in a style that suggests irony while presenting a serious situation. It's the situation when a family tries to avoid the possibility of death. Thus, it lives in a state of caution, embracing it as a protector from dangers, without seeing the effect on its own life. The film adopts the language of dialogue, trying to capture the art of irony, to no avail.
◆ Final word: Not suitable for entertainment or serious viewing.
Compassionate Spy ★★★★
◆ Directed by: Steve James
The film leaves its mark from the beginning: this is the story of the American spy Ted Hall who leaked to the Soviet Union in the mid-fifties secret and very essential information about the United States’ development of its nuclear weapons, which allowed the Russians to keep pace with this progress. For Hall (with whom the film conducts a lengthy interview), he still believes he did the right thing because "one country's possession of a nuclear weapon is a major catastrophe."
The movie (which also includes scenes that are acted out) brings up more ideas. It is about the cold war between East and West at the time and how the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs knowing that Japan had decided to surrender and – most likely that it wanted the bombing of Japan to terrorize the Soviet Union before finding out that this had obtained that precious information.
◆ Final word: Today brings us more information about how we got here.
★ Weak or normal | ★★: Medium with advantages| ★★★: Good | ★★★★: Excellent |
★★★★★: A masterpiece
