Change Your Image
amercuco
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
The Zone of Interest (2023)
It's the sound
On the one hand, this is a family drama about some boring German family and their everyday mundane life. One the other hand, it's a serious story about genocide, one's complicity in it, and one's ability to ignore and justify that complicity. Unfortunately, the story is very contemporary.
The movie never shows what's happening behind the wall, it never shows the camp, but sound represents the bridge between the mundane life of the family and the suffering happening on the other side of the wall.
For that reason, I recommend watching this in the cinema. If this movie wins an Oscar, it's going to be for sound.
Barbarian (2022)
Plot holes, illogical
The movie is not bad, ok, but all the inconsistencies and illogical nonsense really ruined it for me. Some things just don't make sense at all and are completely unrealistic and illogical.
The scene with the cops is especially annoying. Her car is literally parked there and she fails to mention it? She could have asked them to check her license plate and the cops could find out who she was. The same with the other car.
I like the camera work and the atmosphere though. It's very tense. I like the body horror parts as well. Overall, a decent movie and my score would have been higher if they didn't ruin it with poor story writing.
Servant (2019)
Interesting at first...
Interesting at first but later becomes boring, some of the decisions that characters make in latter episodes are unbelievably stupid. A grown up man takes the child out of his crib, leaves it on the floor and falls asleep in the baby's crib. Mom finds him inside and is totally fine with it? What the hell? Who does that?
Hector and the Search for Happiness (2014)
Meh
It's alright but nothing special, so typically Western and empty like one of those books that teach you how to be happy in 10 steps.
It's full of clichés and stereotypes and it's a bit insulting. Living in a poor, undeveloped or dangerous country doesn't not make people happy.
Joker (2019)
Joker the existentialist superhero
The movie is amazing, acting is superb, no childish action or CGI superhero nonsense. It's pure acting and pure cinema. Joaquin Phoenix should get an Oscar for this.
Everyone is comparing it to Heath Ledger's Joker, I don't think it's comparable. I mean it's the same character but that is all, it ends there, this is much deeper and much more serious, we should compare it to Taxi Driver with Robert De Niro who also plays here (was that intentional?). Joker is a 150 years old character, he's the Underground Man and the he was created by Dostoevsky. Watch it.
Booksmart (2019)
Superbad filtered through 2019
That's really all that this movie is. I mean it's not a bad movie, acting is not bad, it's done well but it's just too much Superbad coloured with a bit of 2019 politics and ideology. The characters resemble those in the mentioned movie, the story too, even the setting of the movie... Nothing special.
Sin (2019)
Horrible (no spoilers!)
Someone's upset by bad reviews and keeps reporting that they contain spoilers even though they don't. Neither this nor the review below contain any spoilers, so feel free to read them.
It goes to show how desperately they want to portray this as a good movie and deter people from reading reviews that they don't like.
Anyway, I just saw this movie at the Sarajevo Film Festival opening night and it was bad, it was really bad.
There is no plot, acting was horrible, especially by the main character (at times it reminded me of The Room! It was that bad), some of the side roles had 10 times better acting than the lead.
Characters lack background or any substance whatsoever, we never learn anything about anyone, they have no emotions or if they do them, it is so exaggerated and out of place that it just doesn't look convincing. You just keep asking yourself who these characters are and why they are here.
You suddenly get a scene where they introduce a new character and you think, okay something might be happening and the character disappears never to be seen again.
Most of the shots are still, camera rarely moves anywhere, there are no closeups or filming from different angles, the shots are so unnecessarily long and dull. Locations keep changing constantly. They use at least three apartments that are so obviously different and try to present them as the same place. It's so clearly visible that it's not the same apartment.
Some of the scenes look like they were used to fill the empty parts to make the movie long enough.
It seems like the idea was to introduce different parts of Sarajevo and Bosnian culture and somehow try to come up with a story that would fill in the gaps between tourist ads of Sarajevo. All in all, it's very disappointing. Bosnia has so many good movies and this is not one of them.
After the movie, there was a short speech and someone, I am not sure who, (maybe the host?) made a very funny self-patting comment, she said that the movie was obviously very good because majority of people remained in their seats. No one was interested in hearing anything the crew had to say about the movie. People started leaving right after the screening, it was kind of said.
Don't skip it, watch it, just to see what a bad movie looks like.
Aleksi (2018)
Shallow
If the had an intention to present a typical life of someone with borderline personality disorder, I would have given this movie a higher score, but they didn't do that.
The movie is shallow with poor dialogues (I'm a native Croatian speaker) and very annoying and unconvicing characters, it's impossible to relate or feel close to them.
The main character is just erratic, showing typical behaviour of a BPD person. The musician guy is horrible, he's a desperately clingy romantic. This is definitely not an arthouse movie and this high score is a bit surprising.
Mother! (2017)
Amazing!
This movie is just great. However it's not easy to get right away and if you don't get it, it might end up be very confusing or even stupid. Judging by the reviews here many people didn't really get it. Before going to the cinema drop all of your expectations, it's not a horror, it's not a sequel to Rosemaries Baby or a rip off, it's not a psychological thriller even though at times it certainly look like all of those.
This is a biblical or rather theological story. It's full of metaphors and symbolism. Maybe you won't see it in the beginning but as the movie progresses things become clearer. I almost walked out of the cinema in the middle of screening... but I'm glad I didn't. I'm not going to talk about form or technical stuff here, I will just talk about the essence of the story
SPOILER
So this is a story about God or Creator or however you want to call it and Mother or Nature or a goddess as he calls her few time during the movie. The creator and the caretaker, the male and female symbol. The house is Earth, the first visitor is Adam and his wife is Eve (she was created from Adam's rib which you can see in the scene where Adam is throwing up and God is hiding his injured rib) Their sons represent Abel and Cain. The child that gets ripped to pieces and eaten is obviously Jesus Christ. It's a story about the tragedy of humankind.
Don't bother reading reviews that obviously missed this completely, take my advice and go and see the movie, you won't regret it.
Ghostbusters (2016)
Objective review
This movie is great! I won't comment on other reviews because there seem to be a war going on and it doesn't have much to do with the actual movie.
So, it's good, actually it's excellent. I don't usually like remakes but this is something different. Excellent acting, excellent edgy humor, I especially liked Melissa McCarthy, she was brilliant as usual. I won't compare to the original because it wouldn't do justice to either, the original was filmed in different time but they are both really good movies.
So if you want to spend 2 hours relaxing, having fun, laughing definitely go for it. You won't regret it. And word of advice, before starting to watch leave your prejudices and expectations outside :)
The Visit (2015)
Incredibly bad
The worst thing is that this is incredibly unintelligent movie, it's insultingly unintelligent, its so bad it made me cringe few times. Acting is terrible, characters are annoying and very synthetic, they are not believable, very poorly developed, only the kid has few bright moments, terrible dialogues, really cheap and predictable jumpscares, overall really bad movie.
Initial idea is good but its really poorly done. I'm sorry but I don't recommend this.
Im not sure if I should have expected more, this is not this directors first bad movie, he made couple of bad ones before.
The Babadook (2014)
Jungian horror story
This movie is brilliant, the more I think about it the clearer it gets. It's not a horror movie, it's actually a psychological drama about grief, depression, rage, anger, resentment and all other difficult emotions.
The Babadook doesn't exist in reality, it exist in the mind of the main character. She has been trying to suppress it for 7 years since the accident that killed he husband. You can see that she feels resentment towards her son, you can see that thru the movie in her actions and words, just like the book said (If it's in a word. Or it's in a look. You can't get rid of ... The Babadook). She rejects her sons affection in few scenes. She's resentful and angry and she can't hide it, it wants to come out. Mother is devastated by her husbands death, she blames herself and her son because of the fact that he was born on the day of the accident and the accident happened while they were driving to hospital to give birth to him.
She keeps all her husbands belongings and memories of him in the basement which in my opinion represents her subconscious mind, she refuses to talk about it and gets upset every time someone mentions it. The world expects her to move one but she can't. So she's suppressing those difficult emotions, trying to be "normal" avoiding to face them but they can't be suppressed, the more she tries the monster becomes bigger and scarier. She actually created it, its not some paranormal entity, it's real. At one point she mentions the fact that she used to write children books before which can point us to the possibility that she's the one who made the book. No one ever actually sees the book except her and her son but it's not really clear if he can see what she's seeing or he's just getting scared by the story she's telling. Its seems that the book is a creation of her mind, of the part of her mind that she's not even aware of, the part that is about to get out. Her son is aware of this, he's aware of his mother's shadow and he's trying to protect them both.
The shadow or the Babadook is there all the time, lurking in the shadows, hunting her dreams, dictating her actions more and more until it completely overwhelms her. So eventually she faces the shadow head on, she acknowledge it's existence which made the shadow deflate instantly. After that shadow runs away and hide in the basement, into subconscious but this time mother knows about it and she doesn't try to suppress it, she goes there and face it every day, she take a bowl of worms there to feed it. She's aware of the fact that the shadow will never go away but now she learned how to live with it.
Its just brilliant, I don't know if the attention to details was intentional (I don't see why it wouldn't be) or not but the psychological aspect of this movie is just brilliant. Its a horror story with monsters and everything else that comes with the label but at the same time its real, it shows real humans and their emotions, problems of grief, depression, loss, difficulties of single parenting.
So kudos to the director. We need more woman horror directors that's for sure. And great acting by the protagonists there. just brilliant.