Two Paragraph Review: The Last Duel (2021)

Life was not easy in medieval France, especially for women, The Last Duel tells us. Even if the setting and context of the particular incident that the film examines remain a clear-cut situation, the times of this historical drama show the full scope of danger that women of the day faced. The Last Duel is directed by Ridley Scott, so a strong cast is no surprise. The film stars Adam Driver, Matt Damon, and Jodie Comer, all of whom are stellar.

The movie is set in 14th-century France and tells the story of a knight named Jean de Carrouges, who is forced to defend his wife's honor in a deadly duel against his former friend and one-time comrade, Sir Jacques Le Gris. Over a Rashomon-like retelling of its main story, the film explores the nuances of the period and its sheer multilayered brutality. But, thanks to excellent actors and a great director, it does it in a very engaging and heartfelt manner, even when the actions of its characters are despicable from a modern perspective.

Movie Review: The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)

Often, great movies do present a powerful political message. However, when the whole point and purpose of a director/writer is to do just that, the results are often much less poignant. The trial of the Chicago 7 is the perfect example. Played by an incredible cast composed of excellent actors who went above and beyond to represent real people, the film still falls flat and renders itself irrelevant.  In my view, this is mainly due to the key man behind it - Aaron Sorkin.

Once more, Sorkin does what he does best - writing clickety-clack dialogs and making every individual segment of the film seem a bit too epic and historically relevant for my liking. It seems like he said to himself that he has to make a very impactful political piece of cinema. But that very obvious desire makes the film often shaky in connection to its very convoluted legal background (especially when it comes to the role of Bobby Seale and his plotline). Here, the film often shows some nodes of this complex legal case, but the connection between it and the implied tyrannical elements of the US government stays murky.  

However, a much bigger problem is the finalization of the whole story. It ends up as an ensemble collection of all manner of sappy “the good guys won in the end” courtroom drama cliches. It even features a slow-clap-people-rising scene, accompanied by a teary-eyed boy who just realized that his dad is a true hero. All that ends up on a level that would make Hallmark writers cringe. So, in other words, Sorkin needs to stop with this process of turning himself into Starbucks of smart-looking, but shallow and patronizing movies.

Two-Paragraph Review: The King (2019)

David Michôd is a guy who gets cinema. His Rover was an amazing film that came out of the blue to the international crowd, while Animal Kingdom planted his flag locally a few years earlier. The King is a continuation of this amazing talent and a broad range of interests. Here, he was able, along with Joel Edgerton, who showed his writing kung fu in The Gift, to explore "Henriad" of William Shakespeare in a way that includes no archaic language or archaic acting. Smartly, the movie steers clear of all of those Shakespeare tropes and focuses on the thing that made them into timeless art: it's exploration of human nature.

Instead, the plot is a historical drama that takes in the Battle of Agincourt and puts it front and center into an amazingly engaging movie. The star of the film, Timothée Chalamet, does a marvelous job and he’ll be praised for it for a long time. His Henry is one of doubt, reluctance, and introversion, but also calculated violence and cruelty. Here, Chalamet is really excellent, but an equal level of craft and skill is provided by everyone else, offering authentic characters stuck in a world that is nothing like our own. In its genre, The King is most certainly the best movie of 2019.

Film Review: Dede (2017)

Copyright: Corinth Films

There is a deep-rooted and ancient strength locked in the sight of mountains. These distant and seemingly eternal elements of our world seem to have seen it all - they have been a silent witness to humanity in all of its struggles, glory, and despair. Through all of it, the mountains and their frozen peaks remained unmoved by the stories of mankind. They simply witnessed them. In the Dede movie as well, the entire tragic story plays out framed by the mountain peaks of Georgia. Located in the heart of Eurasia, this country and its isolated province of Svaneti is the setting in which a simple yet heartbreaking story of the movie takes place. It starts with an event that is never mentioned or shown in the film - the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the onset of the Georgian Civil War. In Svaneti, two fighters arrive in a small village, looking for the women that promised to David, one of the pair. His comrade, Gegi, follows him, but knows that a difficult time is ahead - the girl in question, Dina, does not want to become a part of the marriage arranged by her grandfather.

Film Review: The Retrieval (2013)

Copyright: Variance Films

There is no doubt about it - this film presents a harrowing experience. It is set in a horrible time, when the American Civil war entered its last, but still very bloody phase. More importantly, it examines a horrible relationship of slave masters and their slave controlled by fear which wasn’t often presented in films.

Its story revolves around two slaves by the names of Will and Marcus, who are commanded by a slave bounty hunter Burrell to enter the area behind Union lines. There, their mission is to somehow lure an old runaway slave, and now a free man called Nate, back to the Confederate-held territory. There, Burrell simply plans to kill him.

Film Review: The Monuments Men

Copyright: 20th Century Fox

This wasn't the way to make a war film, or any other kind of film. The Monuments Men just doesn’t know how to connect the audience with its characters or its topic, although George Clooney tries desperately to do this. But, he does it by the old Hollywood playbook, first by introducing a merry band of men that are to form an Allied unit in the last stage of the 2.

World war, tasked with the protection of cultural treasures of Western Europe. Then Clooney, playing the lead character and directing at the same time (when you’re good looking you can do anything), further develops his Dirty Dozen Artists and Museum Curators, giving us the French guy, the Matt Damon guy, the Funny guy and the Cynical guy to somehow bind us to them.

This doesn’t work. There are too many of them, and it doesn’t matter that Bill Murray and John Goodman play them, they aren’t relevant enough to become important. Even worse, Clooney sends some of them to a secret mission in the German occupied France, and naturally this adds to the incoherence of the film.

Film Review: Hammer of the Gods

 Copyright: Magnet Releasing

To be honest, I didn’t expect much from this film. The trailer I saw a few months back looked like something I saw many times, starting with The 13th Warrior, and right up to the History Channel’s Vikings. But, Hammer of the Gods managed to sunrise me. It’s a low budget movie, it’s all action and adventure, but done in a very smooth manner.

It looks to me that Farren Blackburn, the director, alongside Matthew Read who wrote this movie, did a lot of research on the subject of modern depiction of the Viking culture. They made a simple plot, in which a young Nordic prince named Steinar arrives in England in 871, as a vanguard of a relief army, sent to help his embattled father, king Bagsecg. Steinar finds his ruler and parent on his death bed. Mortally wounded, the king orders his son to find his long banished older brother, and thus, find the new king.