Movie reviews

DC LEAGUE OF SUPER-PETS

Watchable. The beginning is excellent, all dog lovers will be delighted watching typical behaviours of Superman's pooch. But the film gets ruined by action: full of cliches, with superpowers which don't make sense. In Poland it's dubbed in Polish, in the original, Dwayne Johnson, Kate McKinnon, Keanu Reeves voice the characters. Creative language is used in the dialogues and captions, e.g.Big Belly Burger in the town backdrop. TV captions are shown too briefly to read them all, some dialogue is incomprehensible. There are a mid- and a post-credit - the latter is better.

SZCZESCIA CHODZA PARAMI

Watchable. I did laugh out loud a few times, e.g. at sex-suggesting poses or an error, but the whole plot is so secondary, it's much like American romantic comedies "Good Luck Chuck" and "Just My Luck" where a man confers good luck on women or a woman swaps her good fortune for bad respectively, with the difference here it's a man bringing bad luck to ladies. This one is in fact on the French licence for "La chance de ma vie" ("Second Chance") which I haven't seen. The same actors are cast as in all Polish movies - you feel bored as soon as you see the much too familiar faces. Music is often good but sometimes poor.

SIMONA

Watchable. A documentary tribute to a phenomenal environmentalist and animal lover, who actually graduated from animal psychology at the faculty of biology, Simona Kossak. It's a thorough biopic. The first half an hour is her family history, even interesting but could have been cut short. The same with the ending. The fascinating part is the one about animals: from funny stories like the controller who sat in an armchair thinking the owl on it's back was stuffed, through the mess in the house overrun by various creatures, to horrifying paw-smashing traps used by scientists in the past. Plenty of insight into people's appalling attitude to animals. That's marred and diluted by the family history but what ruins the film the most is music - truly hard to bear.

NOPE

Watchable. Genius Jordan Peele went awfully wrong this time. His movies get longer and longer. This one's overlong. 130 minutes that drag. Accidental cut, where Park's conversation with his wife is suddenly cut off for no reason and where the sequence of events often appears random. Worst of all, the monster looks like the billowing fabric it's made of. While the plot is original, a horror it is not. It's also poorly translated into Polish by Agata Deka

THE TWIN

Recommended. Opens with a start. Further the movie adheres to the full set of the golden rules of a supernatural horror. A cemetery is shown early on, there's an obligatory moving to a secluded house, old photographs, a devil (or incubus) figure, furniture covered with white sheets, a decoy in the form of a fake scare, a series of weird conversations, a nightmare, an odd memoir, a wish made, peculiar people in the village, an old woman warning, a local tradition - in Finland, not Sweden but the association with "Midsommar" is obvious, unrecognizable sounds, an astonishing child's drawing, a cult and then a long series of real spooks - it ticks all the horror boxes and therefore is predictable - at times I knew exactly what they were going to say. It's on the slow side. Still, it's scary as hell (pun intended). The predictability of the plot and even lines spoken only increase the tension. The finale turns the story around.

Reviewed from the distributor's screener, cinematic reception might differ.

JOHNNY

Watchable. Having glanced at a synopsis I thought I might walk out from it. Luckily the movie's engaging, even if a bit tacky, especially the pregnancy. Dawid Ogrodnik is superb as the mumbling priest, Trojan appears in his type of role. I was impressed by excellent cinematography by Michał Dąbal and directing by Daniel Jaroszek, nice video clip style fast forward sequences, but that Polish music (including Dawid Podsiadło, Luxtorpeda, Muniek Staszczyk - all famous among Poles) was awful, at times I was only waiting for a song to finish. The topic is typically Polish too: a terminally ill, a priest, a converted drug addict. It's the addict's own story, not the priest's. The family images in the restaurant in the final shots are authentic. Still, the film doesn't explain why he eventually had to serve his suspended sentence. There's also some inconsistency in how long he was to stay in prison - 3 years, while the priest had 0.5 years left to live. There are also too many endings. 

LE CHENE (HEART OF OAK)

Watchable again. You can look a fox in the eye or see a wood with the eyes of a predatory bird, hear an insect climbing up a tree, watch mice carrying their offspring in their mouth, rodents and birds cleaning themselves and each other. Cute and beautifully filmed. Soothing. Repetitive though.