Snow White

Snow White; fantasy, USA, 2025, D: Marc Webber, S: Rachel Zegler, Andrew Burnap, Gal Gadot, Jeremy Swift (voice), Tituss Burgess (voice)

Snow White works as a maid in a castle ever since her father, the King, died, and her stepmother took over as the new Queen. Citizens of the kingdom live in poverty. When the magic mirror on the wall says that Snow White is more beautiful than her, the Queen orders a hunter to kill Snow White, but he lets the girl escape into the forest. Snow White finds refuge in a cottage inhabited by the seven dwarfs, who become her friends. The Queen disguises herself as an old grandmother and gives Snow White a poisoned apple from which she dies. However, Jonathan's kiss revives Snow White who returns to the castle and becomes the new Queen after the old Queen dies upon breaking the mirror.

The live-action remake of one of the most famous and critically recognized animated Walt Disney films of all time, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", is naturally far below that level, but still an overall solid, innocent and honest family film with emotions, on par with other live-action remakes, Favreau's "The Jungle Book" and Condon's "Beauty and the Beast". Due to pre-production misinformation and the US culture wars, it became the scapegoat of ridiculous anti-woke counterculture fanatics (the scandalously malformed rating of only 1.6/10 on IMDb, when in reality it should have been a 5.5/10, signaling the abuse and misuse of the IMDb voting), which makes it more difficult to watch the film in a neutral, objective way without prior biases, but as it is, it is an easily watchable film where Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot actually delivered good performances as Snow White and the Evil Queen (though the latter is underwritten and doesn't get much to do except being mean). 

The live-action remakes of Disney's animated classics are unnecessary, and the bland musical sequences bother and feel shoehorned, whereas it was pointless to have CGI of the seven dwarfs instead of real human actors, though this film has its funny moments. One is when Snow White wants to confront the Queen regarding poverty in the kingdom, so they have this exchange: "Snow White, have you finished your chores? It's important we all do our share." - "Well, that's what I came to speak to you about, actually. Sharing." Cue to the Queen angrily lowering her spoon to stop eating from her luxurious table for a moment. When the guards bring a thief to the room, the Queen has this exchange with him: "Find his home and burn it to the ground." - "Funny thing is, I don't actually have a home." And that the movie can even be charming and sweet at moments can be found in the moment where Snow White gives her necklace to Jonathan before he departs, who says: "I can't accept this." - "I'm not giving it to you. I'm just giving you reason to return." The seven dwarfs have very little character development, which is a pitty, and thus some of the bonding with Snow White feels too mcuh like a shortcut. Nonetheless, Jonathan is a good addition, and the final 20 minutes give a new, unpredictable finale to the story. It's a flawed "Snow White", but it's still "Snow White".

Grade:++

Frieren (Season 1)

Frieren; animated fantasy series, Japan, 2023; D: Keiichiro Saito, S: Atsumi Tanezaki, Kana Ichinose, Chiaki Kobayashi, Yuichi Nakamura, Nobuhiko Okamoto

After spending 10 years fighting and defeating a demon king, elf magician Frieren and humans Eisen, Himmel and Heiter return back to a city that hired them. Frieren, who has a much longer lifespan and is a thousand years old, leaves to collect books with magic spells. Returning after 50 years, Frieren meets the old Himmel, who dies. Saddened that she never got to know him, Frieren goes to visit Heiter, who also dies, but leaves an adopted girl, Fern, to be her apprentice. Frieren and Fern travel across the land, and meet Stark, a clumsy dragon slayer. They also get another companion, Sein. They go to a city in the north to a tournament where Frieren wants to obtain the certificate of a magician of the first order from Serie, an elf with blond hair who is still angry that Frieren's mentor, the late Flamme, gave the knowledge of magic to humans.   

Anime "Frieren" is a gentle meditation on the passage of time and how the deceased can live on in memory of people whose lives they affected, just told in a fantasy setting. A big problem is that the authors keep changing the direction of the story three times, which makes its tonal shift a little bit inconsistent—it starts out as a meditative, quiet contemplation on transience; then switches to a road movie where Frieren and her three companions travel from town to town and meet people; and then, suddenly, almost as if the authors got scared this will not be able to keep the attention of the viewers, they changed it to an action-battle subplot, with even some bloody moments. "Frieren" starts out there where "Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" ends, by presenting Frieren returning to a city with her three human companions Eisen, Himmel and Heiter after defeating a demon king in a campaign, which is only mentioned off screen. The mood, the patient character development and stunning animation give an outline of this anime, which is continued later on. Frieren, an elf with huge longevity, is even depicted as somewhat arrogant towards humans who live much shorter lives, obvious in episode #4, where Eisen has this exchange with her: "Don’t you want to take an apprentice with you?" - "That would be a waste of time. As soon as I would have tought him something, he would have already died." - "That’s not the point of a journey". - "It is for me. My time with you wasn’t even a hundredth of my lifespan". Later on, though, she develops more compassion and starts living in the moment by living with humans. 

Some inserted bits of humor are refreshing. For instance, in episode #5, "dragon slayer" Stark is introduced, standing still, seemingly to confront a dragon attacking a village. The villagers celebrate him as a defiant hero who confronted the beast. But then he admits to Frieren he was just too petrified to move at that moment, while the dragon was cutting rooftops, until it got bored a flew away. Episode #12 introduces Frieren's magic potion that dissolves women's clothes and which Frieren wanted to give to Stark as a birthday present, but Fern pours it on Frieren herself and it dissolves her clothes and leaves her naked, so she puts a blanket on. Episodes #8 and #9 are the first to offer a strange action de-tour, where demons Lugner and his assistant Linie use own spilled blood as solidified spears. This leads to one genius moment in episode #10: demon Aura has a "scale of obedience", which causes the person with stronger magic powers to control the weaker one, but Frieren suppresses her own magic powers to trick Aura into thinking she is stronger, but then the scale starts tipping in Frieren’s favor—and thus Frieren unleashes her true capacity and simply orders Aura to kill herself with a sword. After that, there is another bland road movie subplot, until the exciting finale with the tournament battle. This leads to two more brilliant moments: one is in episode #21, where Kanne cannot fight the powerful mage Richter because she depends on water for magic powers, so Frieren breaks the giant dome barrier above them, rain starts pouring down all over, and thus Kanne now has a trump card and uses this as a catalyst to defeat Richter in a giant magic water bubble. The other one is in episode #26, where Ubel outfoxed a magician with an invincible magic cape and a hood by simply cutting his cloth with scissors and then killing him from the inside with her magic powers. A undefeated clay clone uses her long hair to create spikes that pierce participants, but Ubel simply cuts the clone’s hair and thus finishes her off, Samson-style. Sadly, Frieren's two companions are absent from this finale. "Frieren" is composed out of three substories, but only the one featuring action and battle sequence truly rise to the occasion with ingenuity and inspiration, and thus it would have been better if the meditation and road movie substories had been cut way shorter than the undue weight they got.

Grade:++

Alpine Fire

Höhenfeuer; drama, Switzerland, 1985; D: Fredi M. Murer, S: Thomas Nock, Johanna Lier, Rolf Illig, Dorothea Moritz

A small desolate house somewhere in the Alps consists out of a family of four: father, mother, their deaf teenage son Bub, and teenage daughter Belli who teaches Bub how to spell and write. They feed pigs and chickens on the farm and try to manage their finances. Bub is acting more and more erratic. When the lawn mower shuts down and Bub throws it off the cliff, the father gets angry and Bub hides in the mountains from fear. Belli brings Bub food and they sleep together and have sex. Then they return back to the house. When Belli finally admits to mom she is pregnant with Bub, the father takes a rifle and aims it at Belli, but Bub intervenes and in the chaos the father is shot. The mother quickly dies, too. Bub burries their corpses in the snow and now leads the house with Belli.

Ranked in a local poll by film critics as the best Swiss movie of the 20th century, Fredi M. Murer's "Alpine Fire" is a 'raw', astringent and unglamorous ethnographic incest drama that plays with a combination of several disparate elements—it has both slow and powerful images, and is both minimalist and expressionistic at times. Filmed on only one location of the house on the mountains and featuring only four people (except for one brief excursion in which the family descends down to visit grandmother and grandfather at their house), the story slowly builds up a feeling of isolation which is embodied in the deaf protagonist Bub who feels sexual frustration, pressure, discomfort and a need for some relief. He acts peculiar, nervous, and seemingly incomprehensible, such as when he throws his sister Belli's radio in the water or when he lies on the ground to play with little pigs on the farm. Murer has a sense for aesthetic images supported by the stunning Alpine landscapes—for instance, the unusual frame of the father mowing the meadow on the highly steep hill or the tracking shot of Bub running across the long stone wall. 

The middle of the film, where a "fugitive" Bub in nature is visited by Belli who gives him food from the house, is highly poetic and subtle: they hug and fondle during the night, the fire burns, and then there is a wonderful, cathartic scene of their blanket on the meadow with a mountain in the background. Did the sex between the brother and sister happen suddenly? Not really, since there were subtle clues before—one scene at 45 minutes into the film indicates already something. In the first half of the film, the pressure is all on Bub—whereas in the second half, the pressure is all on the rest of the family, after the incest "twist". Nothing is presented as black and white, and Murer shows understanding for the shortcomings his characters found themselves in, so that even the brute father is not a real villain—in two seperate sequences, the grandmother tells to Belli everything about both the father ("Many nights your mother cried because of Franz's mother. She ruled the house till the end. All the children left home quickly. Franz was the youngest so he had to stay, engaged for 15 years. She didn't let another woman near as long as she lived") and Bub ("Nobody is to blame. For three years nobody noticed that he didn't hear. When he was small he laughed and screamed like all children"). It's an uncomfortable topic, but done with a lot of comfortable humanism, and as difficult it is to start watching this film—the longer it lasts, the more engaging it gets.

Grade:+++

Cognac

Tajna manastirske rakije; comedy, Serbia, 1988; D: Slobodan Šijan, S: Rick Rossovich, Catherine Hicks, Gary Kroeger, Dara Čalenić, Velimir 'Bata' Živojinović

A Yugoslav-American billionaire invested a fortune to restore a defunct monastery on a Yugoslav island because he is obssessed with its brandy which he didn't taste for decades. The mute monks who made it have disappeared, so the billionaire's daughter Ella travels from the US to the island to help re-create the brandy herself. Attracted by a large sum of money, numerous scammers show up pretending to be monks, including Bogoljub, their only requirement being that they don't speak. Bogoljub has to hide from his mother, Zorka, but when she shows up on the island and recognizes him, his cover is over. A gypsy band kidnaps Zorka by mistake, thinking she is Ella, to demand ransom to create an independent gypsy state, but Zorka saves herself. An old monk in the cave shows up and helps re-create the brandy with the final touch: igniting its surface in the glass. Bogoljub and Ella fall in love.

The director Slobodan Sijan ("Who's That Singing Over There?", "The Marathon Family") didn't manage to stand out with this overstretched and thin comedy which runs out of steam fairly quickly. "Cognac" (literal Serbo-Croatian translation: "The secret of the monastery brandy") starts out well, with at least one sympathetic and funny joke: while describing the life of the monastery, the American assistant says that the monks "never spoke or cried-out even during the direst emergency", as the flashback shows a monk trying to pick a herb on top of a cliff, but a rock breaks underneath him, so he just opens his mouth in "silent shouting" as he falls down into the sea, not ushering a single word. However, the main tangle where the rich American Ella travels to the island to restore the monastery but all the people showing up there are scammers pretending to be monks to get her money had much more potential than the rather routine story flow we got. Some jokes still manage to ignite (American Ella goes to a bank to exchange her money, but since one US dollar is worth a 1,000 Yugoslav dinars, the bank clerk gives her a full sack of money, so she goes: "The exchange rate here is great!"), but there is too much empty walk and the story drags. The authors wanted to make an "international film", so they majority of the dialogue is in English, and it features several American actors, including even Rick Rossovich ("The Terminator") who plays one of the fake monks who cannot say a word, whereas the locations on the Mljet island are wonderful. Unfortunately, the movie didn't have inspiration to conjure up better jokes (one missed opportunity, for instance, is the the underground cave laboratory to try to distill the brandy, which could have been used for several gags), and thus the last third feels especially faded and tacky, ending on a stale and pale note.

Grade:+ 

The Reenactment

Reconstituirea; satire, Romania, 1968; D: Lucian Pintilie, S: George Mihaita, Vladimir Gaitan, George Constatin, Emil Botta, Ernest Maftei, Ileana Popovici

A desolate café in a village, near a river. A van arrives with several people inside who settle there: the Prosecutor orders two student friends, Vuica and Ripu, to re-enact their fight when they were drunk at the same location, where they accidentally hit the waiter on the head and broke a small kiosk. The cameraman will record them to make an educational film about the dangers of alcoholism among the youth. A Sergeant also suprvises the filming and takes away the students' IDs until they finish. Problems constantly disrupt their process. The Prosecutor admits they will not go to prison, regardless of the outcome, but still insists they continue. Finally, when pressed to act more realistically, Ripu hits Vuica in the head for real, who falls down a hill. Stumbling and seeing all the people who return from a football match, Vuica falls on the mud in the ground and dies.

Included in a local film critics' poll as one of the best movies of Romania's cinema of the 20th century, satirical "The Reenactment" (also known as "The Reconstruction") is not only a metafilm experience, but also a meta-political and meta-sociological one. Based on allegedly true events, the director Lucian Pintilie pushes everything in the story to an as absurd level as possible, up until the bitter and dark ending. Already in the first scene (a film clapperboard is seen on screen, signaling the start of filming of a scene in the movie where protagonist Vuica falls in the mud and stands up, which is repeated six times), Pintilie alludes to the artificiality of these events and his intent to distil real-life messages from the illusion of art, and he keeps the viewers in anticipation—in the first 20 minutes, random weird scenes are presented (a waiter with a scar on his bald head lies on the table while a Sergeant watching him warns to watch out for the sun; a girl in a bikini swims in the river; a grandma pets a goose on her lap; a van with men arrives, but its car horn is stuck) almost as some sort of comical-surreal S. Leone-style opening, and the viewers are not quite sure what is happening. Only later do these align into a story of a Prosecutor forcing two students to re-enact their fight for an educational film about alcoholism.

Filmed on only one location (the exteriors of a café in a village), "The Reenactment" is an exercise in trying to craft a film out of the minimum, but Pintilie uses unusal camera angles, close ups, stylish shot compositions and other means to keep it interesting throughout. And comical moments constantly keep happening: an ambulance van rushes through the street and scares away geese from the grandma's farm, so the Prosecutor orders the two students to search for said geese in the forest and return them. The Sergeant and student Vuica have this exchange: "What will your father say when he finds out his son has been in jail?" - "Who says I have a father? He died two years ago in an accident. A tank came over him and he died. There was more dust than flesh in his coffin." The bikini girl asks Ripu to give her his bracelet from his arm; he obliges, she says it's "beautiful"—and then she throws said bracelet in the river, saying to the confused lad: "You are more beautiful like this." The wounded Vuica walks confusingly across a whole row of people who mock him because they think he is drunk, and one man even jokes: "Did you get drunk without soda? Or was the soda too strong for you?" Certain omissions reduce the movie's quality, though, including that such a restricted setting inhibits a greater development of the storyline and characters, and that it all becomes a bit stale in the last third. Nonetheless, the movie's subversive and biting allegorical sharpness was so strong that the Communist regime of Romania banned it and placed it into the bunker, since its universal theme gains an outline in the finale—the government targets a minor problem, decides to solve it, but in the end makes it even worse due to its rigid incompetence.

Grade:+++

Time of Violence

Vreme na nasilie; historical drama, Bulgaria, 1988; D: Ludmil Staikov, S: Yosif Sarchadzhiev, Ivan Krastev, Valter Toski, Rusi Chanev, Anya Pencheva, Vasil Mihaylov, Momchil Karamitev, Kalina Stefanova

Bulgaria during the Ottoman occupation, 1668. A Janissary regiment led by Kara Ibrahim, himself a Bulgarian kidnapped as a child and converted to Islam, is sent to the village of Elindenya, Rhodope valley, with the order by the Sultan to forcefully convert all Christians there into Muslims. The villagers, among them shepherd Manol, are summoned to the headquarters and given 10 days to decide to convert. The wedding between Manol and Sevda is interrupted when Ibrahim's soldiers show up, arrest everyone and send them to a prison for the last three days of their ultimatum. The women are raped, while those men who refuse to become Muslims are murdered publicly. When Ibrahim threatens to kill Manol's son, Manol feigns he will put the turban on his head, but then starts a fight with the soldiers and is killed. A boy brings the head of one of the last rebels hiding in the caves, Momchil, to the headquarters. When Ibrahim crouches to look at the head, the boy stabs him with a knife.

Voted in one local poll as the best Bulgarian movie of the 20th century, allegedly based on real events from the 17th century, 4-hour monumental historical film "Time of Violence" by director Ludmil Staikov is an excellent historical depiction of forced conversions of Bulgarian Christians to Islam during the reign of the Ottoman Empire, with a remarkable sense for reconstruction of the mentality and way of life of the people of that time, to such an extent that their actions and behaviors seem easily recognizable even today. Through this story several universal themes are observed, whether political ones—colonialism, imperialism, collaborationism, forced assimilation, resistance of suppressed nations to survive—whether personal, humanistic ones—some individuals show integrity and honor, refusing to convert to Islam, while others give up faced with coercion in order to save their skin (Sevda converts to Islam to save Manol, but is killed by the soldiers when she insults Ibrahim; an orthodox Christian priest leads the villagers from the cave to convert to Islam). The leading antagonist is Kara Ibrahim (played by the impressive Yosif Sarchadzhiev) who is the embodiment of (religious) fundamentalism, showing how extremism slowly destroys everything in its way, starting with moderate people. This is illustrated in the disturbing sequence where Ibrahim and his regiment arrive to a town, guided by the moderate Ottoman governor Suleyman Aga, and spot a man on a roof of a building. Ibrahim has this exchange with Aga: "Who is he?" - "A carpenter. A foreigner." - "Religious or non-religious?" - "Non-religious." - "Sell him to me." Ibrahim gives Aga a small bag of money, then takes a gun and shoots the man on the roof. Aga then asks: "Why did you kill him?" - "So that everyone in the headquarters know that I have arrived".

Upon hearing that Ottoman soldiers have arrived, the villagers quickly send all their kids away so that they won't be abducted to become Jannisary, and dig a hole in the ground to place a huge vase there, and grain inside the vase, covering it with grass, to hide their food. The dialogues are surprisingly engaging and sharp. For instance, there is a sly comment about the Ottoman Sultan: "A desperate man with power, my friend, is the worst of all evils." When the Christian villagers are "bullied" into finally becoming Muslims, one villager teases Ibrahim: "I can't, Aga." - "What if others change their religion?" - "I'll see then, Aga. Let me be the last one." - "Isn't it all the same, Giaur?" - "It isn't, Aga. If I'm the last one, no one will be left to curse me after it." Despite this, nothing is presented as black and white: the moderate Ottoman governor is opposed to these forced conversions: "A green water melon, forcibly riped, isn't sweet!"; whereas Ibrahim, ironically, is himself a Bulgarian Christian who was abducted by the Ottomans and converted to Islam, meaning that he is now the continuation of his own injustice that wrecked his life, as he has intermittent flashbacks of his mother running after him. Even more ironic, a man who tries to assassinate Ibrahim in his room, turns out to be Goran, his own long lost brother, hinting at the cyclic nature of self-destruction. The director Staikov crafts several aesthetic images thanks to the fantastic locations in Rhodope mountains: one is the wonderful panorama shot of three flocks of sheep running across a yellow meadow on a hill, the other are the amazing frames of hundreds of people fleeing inside giant caves. Dark and bleak, but also contemplative, philosophical, "Time of Violence" still feels fresh today, has a remarkably fluent story flow from start to finish, and a sense for universality of cinema.

Grade:+++

May December

May December; drama, USA, 2023; D: Todd Haynes, S: Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, Cory Michael Smith, Elizabeth Yu

Actress Elizabeth visits an unusual wife whom she is about to play in a movie: Gracie, who had sex with her husband Joe when he was 13 years old, and she was 36. Gracie gave birth to their child in prison, but upon release she married Joe, and now they have three kids: Honor, Charlie and Mary. Elizabeth befriends Gracie and Joe, stays at their house, and studies their behavior. Joe has sex with Elizabeth, but regrets it. Charlie and Mary graduate, while Gracie tells Elizabeth to beat it. Elizabeth later films the movie on set.

What would happen to a grown woman who had sex with a 13-year old boy 20 years later? Todd Haynes' "May December" is a movie that tells this story after the paparazzi sensationalism, depicting it in a restrained, clinical and cold manner, showing this couple (Gracie, Joe) now married, with kids, as they are visited by an actress, Elizabeth, who studies Gracie to play her in a movie. The sole story is "spicy", but the movie isn't very cinematic. It's all rather stale after one gets used to the opening concept, since the storyline doesn't know what to do with this in the end. Natalie Portman as Elizabeth and Julianne Moore as Gracie are again excellent. The direction is competent, yet it needed more creativity and a better plot that would offer a higher amplitude of events than the rather routine one we got.

Grade:++

My Dear Theo

Z lyubov'yu z frontu; documentary, Ukraine / Poland / Denmark, 2025; D: Alisa Kovalenko, S: Alisa Kovalenko

On 24 February 2022, Goreshist Russia invades Ukraine, contaminating the land with occupation. Kyiv film director Alisa Kovalenko decides to follow her own promise in case of such invasion and joins the Ukrainian Army to defend her country, and takes her camera and microphone to also intermittently film the war front. Her unit battles Russian invaders in the Kyiv and Kharkiv Oblasts. During that time, Alisa writes letters to her 4-year old son Theo, confessing she misses him and doesn't know if she will survive the combat.

Excellent "unplanned" documentary "My Dear Theo" is assembled out of random episodes from the director Alisa Kovalenko's secret recordings from the front in the Russo-Ukrainian War, but almost every one of her frames are stylized, aligned and directed with such a concise guidance that it all can be analysed from any sequence on its own, showing the director's sense for cinema, even though she was surprised to stand in front of the camera instead of behind the camera. Whether these scenes are terrifying (random "flashes" of explosions on the countryside of a village seen over the horizon from afar), tragic (cows too afraid to get back in the barn from too loud explosions in the background as a farmwoman is trying to guide them back) or poetic (ants walking over the trenches), they all illustrate a broader picture of the historic event, and give enough context despite their disconnected nature. Kovalenko also inserted her own narration of her letters to her 4-year old son from the title, which gives the movie a metafilm touch. Despite all of the madness and death of the war, and the eerie feeling of uncertainty since the enemy is always outside the frame, only its crimes and violence visible, the movie is even able to find moments of optimism and humor (Kovalenko filming rabbits on a farm for her son via the mobile phone, joking that "battlefront rabbits are greeting" him; a soldier lamenting: "It's the 21st century, and we are digging trenches for the war instead of going to Mars!"). A fascinating film, a chronicle of a destroyed 21st century by politicians with neo-atavism, a contemplation on courage, honor, humanity and integrity during dark times, and valuable archive for future generations.

Grade:+++

Chainsaw Man

Chainsaw Man; animated horror series, Japan, 2022; D: Ryu Nakayama, S: Kikunosuke Toya, Fairouz Ai, Shogo Sakata, Tomori Kusunoki, Taku Yashiro

Teenager Denji is stuck paying off the debt of his late father by killing Devils, demons that sometimes appear in the city. Denji's demon pet dog Pochita has a chainsaw on its snout. When the Yakuza decide to switch sides and join the Devils to gain more power, their zombies attack and kill Denji in a warehouse. However, Pochita transfers his powers to Denji and merges with him, reviving him and giving him the ability to transform into Chainsaw Man. Denji is recruited by Makima and assigned to a special Division, which includes Power, Aki and Himeno, in order to fight the Devils. After an assassination attempt in which several agents are killed (including Himeno), Denji, Aki and Power manage to find the perpetrator and punish him.

The plot concepts of some anime TV series sometimes sound like April's Fools' Day. Sometimes the viewers just need to think of a preposterous idea, google it, and realize that it was already made into an anime. Did you ever wonder how it would look like if a teenager had the ability to transform into a superhero with two chainsaws on his hands and another one on his head? It can be tracked down in "Chainsaw Man", a bizarre blend between "Evil Dead II" and "RoboCop", reaching cult status. The title protagonist, teenager Denji, is cynically introduced in the opening of the first episode—as he is walking down the road, wearing an eyepatch, he narrates: "Then there's the kidney I sold, that was 1.2 million. My right eye was 300,000. Sold one of my balls... How much was that again? I think not even 100,000. And I still owe about 38,040,000 yen." He sleeps in a shed in the forest, having only his demon dog Pochita for company. This already establishes his unappealing situation he found himself in due to his father's debt, as a motive for him to yearn for a change of this status quo and get out of this misery as soon as possible. And he does, in a very bloody, gory, brutal way, after he is attacked by zombies, but saved by Pochita who gives him demonic superpowers—as is the case in most superhero stories, where the protagonist starts out at the bottom but then slowly climbs up to the top. Denji is assigned to a special division of Devil Hunters and given a partner, Aki. There's a lot of black humor and sly jokes in these opening few episodes. 

For instance, in episode 2, as they walk on the street, Denji randomly asks if their boss, Makima, has a boyfriend, so Aki just tells him to come with him, behind a back alley—where Aki kicks him and orders him to quit his job, ostensibly because it's too dangerous for him, since he is only after Makima's affection anyway. In a symbolic, lingering moment, Aki throws his cigarette at Denji's shirt, and extinguishes it by spitting on it (and Denji), with barely hidden contempt. To prove him he is not so weak, Denji then stands up and kicks him in the crutch. Later, upon returning back to Makima's office, Denji is holding a wounded Aki and says to her: "The guy's testicles were attacked by the Nut Devil, ma'am!" In episode 3, his colleague, girl Power, promises Denji that he can fondle her breasts three times if he is able to save her cat from a giant bat demon hiding in an abandoned house. Things go terribly wrong, the bat demon swallows Power and flies away, but then looks down—as Denji is hanging on to the demon's leg, saying: "Give me my tits back!" The whole storyline is full of these kind of humor and crazy style, but it also has stunning, incredibly detailed animation which gives it even a certain flair. Episode 7 breaks the high impression up to that point, though, and after it "Chainsaw Man" kind of loses its sense of humor and becomes just a routine fight-kill demons full of splatter violence at times. A really bad moment in episode 7 is at a dinner party, where a drunk Himeno decides to give Denji his first kiss, but due to alcohol, she throws up in his mouth. Disgusting and unnecessary. Later, after he passed out from alcohol, Denji wakes up in Himeno's room as she tries to have sex with him. He is tempted, but then remembers he only loves Makima and decides to save his "first time" for her. In a later episode, Himano dies due to a demon, which sends a rather somber message that sometimes it's better not to wait, but to indulge in some people's wishes while they are still alive. With only 12 episode, "Chainsaw Man" is concise and has no 'empty walk', yet its routine action second half drained a part of its freshness from the great opening episodes.

Grade:++ 

Good Children

Dobra djeca; drama, Croatia, 2024; D: Filip Peruzović, S: Filip Šovagović, Nina Violić

After the death of their mother, a brother and sister meet up again at her secluded house in Sveta Nedelja. The brother was living there, taking care of the mother, while the sister came from America back for the funeral. They clean up the house and she is angry when she finds lice under the mattress. They argue, make up, recall their childhood and enjoy in nature. He finally sells the house and moves out, while she leaves Croatia.

Despite attempts at meditative cinema in rural area, Filip Peruzovic's feature length debut film "Good Children" is too overstretched and too weak to engage from any cinematic azimuth. This minimalistic film (only two characters, located only on one location, with very little dialogue) deliberately leaves out some crucial information and thus wants to disentangle from any kind of narrative standards, leaving up to the viewers to fill out some gaps in the unsaid things between the brother and sister in the empty house. However, this way, it simply isn't engaging nor interesting, and becomes boring fairly quickly. It has a few aesthetic frames (brother and sister looking at the lights in Zagreb from the hill in the forest; the sister on a swing while the wind is blowing, announcing a storm; a lightning bolt in the night sky in the forest) which somewhat salvage the impression here and there. But the majority is just too thin to carry this as a feature, since this should have been a 25 minute film. When the only "highlight" that 'twitches' the grey mood is when a third character, a neighbor, shows up for guests in the living room, and there is a 10-minute static shot of him talking with the brother and sister, it just isn't sustainable without some intruige or interesting plot.

Grade:+