POMO

A likable children’s adventure in 1980s garb, with fairy-tale music and shot in magical 16 mm. A hunt for eggs for mom’s cake, paintball gear, a conflict with a wanted gang led by a malicious sectarian, the beautiful scenery of the western American mountains. The acting is slightly dull (particularly the cowboy from the gang) as if it was part of the director’s game with the children’s naïve perception of reality. Weston Razooli loves movies, understands children and is fond of recalling his own childhood. Riddle of Fire is his love letter to all of that, with absolutely GREAT use of music from Cannibal Holocaust in the epilogue, thanks to which I was brought to tears. [Sitges Film Festival]

Godless is a sad drama pretending to be inspired by an actual event. For the people around her, the object of the titular exorcism – a fragile girl traumatized by a major tragedy in her life – is a harmless, suffering victim of fate, while her exorcist is a fanatical maniac and violent swine. The brief horror interludes in the form of demonic apparitions are intended to scare with their powerful volume, but they don’t work at all. The filmmakers try to pass Godless off as a horror movie, which is fraud, and they have no idea how to build an effective drama. [Sitges Film Festival]

A thriller about a family tragedy and revenge in which the emotions don’t work and which, with the later revelation of unexpected facts, turns out to be a religious sermon about atonement for making bad decisions: Failure to be guided by one’s conscience is a greater sin than not having a conscience at all. With the combination of its setting, theme and religious dimension, the film is very much tied to Spanish culture, which may be the reason that it left me cold as a northern European atheist. On the other hand, I can imagine that in the hands other conscience filmmakers, it could have been a culturally universal and effective drama with an interesting concept. It’s only a matter of the creative approach and the ability to tell a story for everyone (in the manner of American cinema). Two and a half stars [Sitges Film Festival]

I would have expected a sophisticated social satire from the South Korean envoy to the Oscars, especially now, just a few years after the brilliant Parasite. But Concrete Utopia is merely a technically polished post-apocalyptic genre movie with ordinary conflicts between the characters and a kitschy ending that tries for straightforward feeling without first building relationship emotions. It surely works as a blockbuster for the masses, as actor Byung-hun Lee is already a major-league crowd-puller, but the film is rather only for Asian audiences. [Sitges Film Festival]

In the history cinema dating back more than a century, we can count the number of high-quality arachnocentric horror movies on the fingers of one hand, or maybe both hands if we squint our eyes. And I am pleased that their ranks newly include this French spider spectacular.  However, the experience that it provides depends heavily on the extent of your arachnophobia, because it’s not about likable characters or nice landscapes. It rather takes place in an apartment block on a French social housing estate and its protagonists are rebellious odd-jobbers and adolescents whose survival will be of no concern to you until the final quarter of the film. But the apartment building has a brilliant circular design patterned on a spider web, the spiders multiply rapidly and actually look like real, live spiders (in a French genre film by young enthusiasts!), and more than one scene is so intensely scary that you’ll get goosebumps and hold your breath. The fourth star is for the cinema experience with good sound. [Sitges Film Festival]

Well-depicted psychological insecurity when a girl, seeking shelter from a storm, enters a stranger’s caravan and doesn’t know if its owner is or is not dangerous. An hour of dialogue during which the two check each other out and anticipate each other’s reactions, interspersed with the creaking of the caravan and the powerful sound of thunder, wind and rain. The guy is weird, unreadable and, mainly, paranoid, which after certain events leads to a hallucinogenic wilderness with a mix of factual cards on the table that the viewer will find confusing. And that’s a shame. [Sitges Film Festival]

A likable genre movie about a Malaysian schoolgirl who starts to turn into a tiger. And sometimes her eyes glow like those of an extra-terrestrial. The first half-hour, when she spends an ordinary day with her schoolmates staring at mobile phones and chattering about nothing, tries the viewer’s patience. However, the film starts to be entertaining with the onset of bullying at school and the initial metamorphoses into a predator. Not as horror, but as a child’s fantasy with sensitively depicted states of complicated female puberty. We sympathies with the protagonist and we can see her nervously tense transformations with endearingly naïve masks as a metaphor for her defense against the “bad people” around her. The film is set in the Malaysian jungle, which, in combination with the mythical aura of the tiger, gives the film a pleasantly exotic feel. [Sitges Film Festival]

An homage to French horror movies of the 1960s and ’70s (e.g. the films of Jean Rollin). Nice retro visuals and an appropriate soundtrack including dreamy vocals. But the film is bland in terms of plot. Two teenagers run away from a Catholic girls’ school to attend a party for adults at a chateau, where they experience their first contact with boys, one of whom happens to be a vampire. And that’s it. Exalted boredom with pseudo-dramatization and criminally underused potential. [Sitges Film Festival]

In the broad palette of festival films in which a lot of filmmakers push themselves or strive for something, The Last Stop in Yuma County is absolutely, wonderfully refreshing. It is coolly and confidently directed from the opening credits, with a game of one-upmanship superbly set in motion by the characters. It’s like a Tarantino flick set in a desert café, though without the brisk dialogue, but it’s just as well thought out, surprising, darkly humorously homicidal and beautifully played by the flawlessly cast “familiar supporting actors”. The connection between the film’s subject and the lyrics of the song in the closing credits is great. After Reptile, this is the next extraordinary American debut of the year! [Sitges Film Festival]

We don’t ever see many Luxembourgian films, especially not historical films from the dark periods of the country’s history. This gritty German-language contribution to the historical genre is thus all the more rare. The Last Ashes is surprising with its cold-blooded rawness starting with the black-and-white prologue. The squalor and tyranny can still be felt in the color continuation of the story about a determined (and pretty) avenger, though not as intensely. Despite the viewer-pleasing revenge motif, the film is heavy with dialogue and in the depiction of the characters; it could even be said that it’s ponderous, hobbling the viewer’s catharsis like one of the supporting characters with severed Achilles tendons. However, that heavy-handedness in some ways suits the cruel historical period and the dark tone of the narrative.