Lima

It's clear to me why this film was pulled from cinemas for several years because it didn't conform to the ideological norms of the time. Karel Höger is here as a bankrupt creature who drinks a lot, smokes like a factory, and as an ideologically defective person is not in the party, which is why he is subjected to bullying. The personal-party tug-of-wars didn't engage me at first, much less the frequent comradeship, as did the hanging around a certain miner, spiced with a little hint of his wife's infidelity. Fortunately, at around the 50-minute mark there is a turning point, a major flashback that illuminates why things have been happening as they have been, and the acting of Höger, a master of his field, and his beautiful sonorous voice give it all a certain emotional charge. He could play the alcoholic convincingly, and when you add to that a nice cinematography and an emotionally tense, touching ending, just as Václav Krška was able to do, satisfaction prevails in the end. But more in the "seen it and probably once is enough" category, the Socialist odour in the first half was too strong for me.

With the first notes of Iron Maiden, which I don't hear in movies, I knew this would be the movie for me. The path set by John Wick all those years ago started tire me with the fourth movie, with dozens of dead bodies dropping like bowling pins, and the whole thing feels unrealistic. Here, in contrast, they don't play with the dead, they skimp on the action, and when it does happen it looks believable, like guys who have no superpowers, just like a normal fight between regular family guys vs one slightly more trained guy. Actually, it's not even an action movie, more of a focused drama about police corruption, so the oft-mentioned comparison to the first Rambo is no that warranted. Aaron Pierre is a revelation, that stoic calm, stern look, charismatic voice, he can convey everything in the slight twitches of his face. And when he gets his moves going, it’s amazing. So it's clear. The great, and again underrated here, Hold the Dark was no accident, Jeremy Saulnier is worth continuing to watch.

I wasn't drawn in. I almost cared more about whether the main character, a private eye, would find his way back to his cheating wife, a minor subplot here, than whether he would bring back to his stepmother her wandering stepdaughter from Florida, where things really drag on lethargically and where I was only entertained by the fine sexual tension between the detective and the blonde femme fatale. That's the first hour, then from a certain point onwards it picks up some momentum and the corpses pile up, including the final climactic ten minutes, which in its overwroughtness feels more like a bit of B-movie drama than a very slowly told story up to that point. Gene Hackman is great here, as always, with a young Melanie Griffith almost unrecognisable. And it has a fine jazzy musical score at times, but .... I was expecting something better from the seasoned Arthur Penn.