Magic in the Moonlight

Woody Allen's version of "Pygmalion" is not a moralistic flop like his Blue Jasmine, but it is, in words of one critic, "undercooked." Dialogues are stale; characters are underdeveloped. It is fair entertainment for boring Saturday evening; that's about that. Talents of Colin Firth and Emma Stone (I did not know she can act) are fit into cut-out characters of this movie. Because Ms. Stone is obviously too old to serve as Allen's romantic companion for the shoot, he hired three female assistants to Colin Firth, which appear only in one episode of the movie.

Calvary

Director's desire to follow passions of Christ as close as possible deformed psychological veracity of the characters in the movie. But the actors' play is sublime.

A Most Wanted Man by Anton Corbijn.

A Most Wanted Man by Anton Corbijn is a most wanted antidote to the brilliant war propaganda series by Kathryn Bigelow (Hurt Locker and, especially, Zero Dark Thirty). Being more-or-less standard as cinematic fare it is great as a polemic piece about the modern warfare. Namely, the careerists aided and abetted by mindless squares always win leaving death and destruction in their wake.

         The hero played by untimely gone P. S. Hoffman represents traditional intelligence/police methods: hiring of recruits, imbibing them with sense of the mission and internalizing it with them, etc. etc. When he is about to let off the hook a broken Chechen terrorist, a crooked Swiss banker and a mullah willing to look the other way to terrorist funding going through his charities in order to get to the really big fish in the terror international, a CIA woman with steely eyes [1]  and German prosecutors arrest them all. Recruited son of the cleric is at large and will obviously become a jihadist if be believe the logic of the movie.


[1] She is played by Robin Wright and obviously modeled on the legions of State Department/CIA/NSC banshees: Wendy Sherman, Vicky Nuland, Condi Rice, Samantha Power, Meghan O'Sullivan, etc. etc.

Lucy

Whatever illogical turns this hack job of Luc Besson takes (enhanced brain capacity allows its bearer to violate laws of physics, there is a need to secretly smuggle the substance absolutely unknown to anybody, etc.) the most improbable of all is that lower-middle class girl from Pennsylvania drives the car in Paris for the first time in her life.

Grand Budapest Hotel

 S. Zweig (1881-1942)

This is a step down from his masterpiece, the Moonrise Kingdom. But if Wes Anderson were to produce masterpiece after masterpiece who would he then be? A freaking Fellini? Everything which is organic and sensual in Moonrise here is visceral and invented. Ours (and which is much worse) his emotional connection to his characters is tenuous as the pre-War life he nostalgically adores and even understands, to a certain degree, but never is capable to emotionally connect with. His cinematic imagery is falls flat wandering in the snowy expanses of the Eastern Europe.

Bond, James Bond

I realized why garish, illogical and frequently silly James Bond movies have such success. They are structured as a FAIRY TALE. I. e. the hero overcomes (imaginary but) impossible odds, beats the crap out of villain and gets the broad. This is precisely the adventures of a fairy prince.

The Monuments Men

It takes a lot of work to make Bill Murray not remotely interesting. George Clooney obviously spent too much time with his CIA cronies planning the dismemberment of Sudan (South Sudanese now free, how 'bout that?) that he got completely detached from a moviemaking process.

The movie looks like a cheap piece of Cold War propaganda with characters pronouncing poorly written bathetic monologues obviously borrowed from the Voice of America of the "Red Scare" period.  America is a force for universal good, Russians are the cartoonish enemy and Germans are so non-soldierly (children warriors or psychopaths) that they evoke compassion or disdain, rather than being presented as a dangerous foe. Of course, no American philanders, even in Paris, or drinks in excess. The only "our" guys killed are those "furriners" (Brit and Frenchman), who are even more schematic than the majority of characters and their death does not register as a tragedy.

The director of "Good Night and Good Luck" stooped to the level of McCarthy-level agitprop. So what? Christian Socialist Dostoevsky returned from the penal colony as anti-Semitic, Prussian-admiring imperialist. Jacobin General Bonaparte became the Emperor Napoleon and... a Catholic. Power, or the illusion of it, makes wondrous transmutations of character.

Massacres in now "free" Southern Sudan.