Reviews

If you've never seen Uncle Vanya, this is not the adaptation you want to know the play by Anton Checkov: it won't give you any idea of what the original is about.

Andrew Scott plays all the characters. A bold move, but that's not the problem. He is an actor good enough to try it. His farcical adaptation is the problem. All the characters are defaced by an endless sequence of childish, pointless jokes and mannerisms, like a 5th grader mocking his teachers and aunties, making them caricatures of the originals.

He tries to catch up with tragic ethos of the play in the end, with the final monologue by Sonia, but then it's too late: all empathy one could have for her, her uncle, or anyone else in the play was already destroyed before.

What is more enraging is that this failure is not due to acting incompetence. It would be understandable if it was. But no, I really believe Andrew would be capable of pulling this off, with a different, I'd say even opposite, approach. What a great opportunity was lost here!

If you never saw Uncle Vanya and wants to be introduced to Checkov's classic by a movie, try 'August'. It's an adaptation by Anthony Hopkins set in his native Wales, which he stars, directs, and also wrote the soundtrack for.

High level special effects, cinematography, sound, editing, art design, all wasted on a very cheesy script. Heart breaking, but it's impossible to have a good movie with such a poor script, no matter how good the other elements are. I won't give more details to avoid spoilers. I cannot even talk much about the acting, since the characters are so much stereotyped. It would be unfair to blame the actors, they did what their roles required, which wasn't much.

Having said that, it has some entretainment value, but better seen in a theater because of the visuals.

I am sure Korean cinema could do better on the writing side, having so many good ones in the last years.

Other reviews missed a key point of the movie: its take on the huge Brazilian social apartheid.

A commercial filming crew takes over the lobby of a decadent building in downtown São Paulo to use its beautiful elevator, a reminder of its glorious past. The crew art director gets stuck in the other elevator, together with two morgue workers, a helper and the corpse they were removing from the building.

The movie goes around the clash between the middle class filming crew and the poor, marginal inhabitants of the now decadent building. This relationship is brilliantly developed in the attitudes of the crew towards the tenants, which goes from disgust to downright manipulation: the tenants get mesmerized by the filming spectacle, forgetting they are only stuck on the floor, unable to get home, by the same crew that took over the spare elevator. But the poor are not idealized either: street smart, some take advantage of the visitors up to the point of theft.

The script is perfectly crafted along three story lines ran in parallel: the commercial filming, the Felliniesque group of five people (one of them dead) in the damaged elevator, and the crew assistant looking for help to fix it.

A final nice touch happens towards the end, when the identity of the dead man is revealed in a smart, unexpected, and almost poetic way.

The many details make this movie a little masterpiece, worth viewing a second time.

Young Man takes a class of gifted teenagers in an elite school after their former teacher tries suicide. He soon finds out that a group of them is engaged in strange and dangerous activities, and starts to investigate.

Good level of suspense is kept throughout the movie until its conclusion, with good direction and acting. The kid's motivations and goals become very clear at the end, so this is NOT an open ending movie (I figured it out before the third act). The script is not without it's plot holes, though, the main one being the teacher never even trying to contact the kids' parents.

I'm surprised by the critics and bad ratings of this movie. Cézanne et Moi tells the relationship between Paul Cezzane and childhood friend Émile Zola, and their clash of personalities throughout their lives. Zola, shy and a little naif. Cezzane, conflictuous, at odds with his family and upset by his initial insuccesses, tries to hurt everyone around him, friends and lovers.

The film is a character study of artists in general, and of Cezzane and Zola in particular, including their ambition and selfishness. The constant flash back and forward in time has a purpose, as each conflict has a link to something happened in the past. All the cast delivers, with a special nod to the superb Guillaume Gallienne as Cezzane. On top of everything, the cherry on the cake: beautiful cinematography and scenary of Provance.