The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie; computer-animated fantasy comedy, USA, 2026; D: Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, S: Chris Pratt, Anya-Taylor Joy, Charlie Day, Benny Safdie, Jack Black, Brie Larson

Kid Koopa Bowser Jr. uses a spaceship to kidnap Princess Rosalina from her observatory, and use her magical powers to fuel his giant weapon. Princess Peach and Toad leave the Mushroom Kingdom to save Rosalina, while plumbers Mario and Luigi stay behind and find a green dinosaur named Yoshi. The shrunk Bowser Koopa grows back to his huge size and meets up with Bowser Jr. Peach, Toad, Mario, Luigi and Yoshi reunite and travel in a spaceship by Fox McCloud to Fossil Falls galaxy where they battle and defeat the Koopas, whereas Peach discovers Rosalina is her lost sister.

One of the more routine sequels of the decade, "The Super Mario Galaxy Movie" divorces itself completely from its cinematic obligations and instead aims to be only a feature length promotion for video games. The result is thus tired: the frenetic pace is inversely proportional to its style and inspiration. It is just a fast, random collection of different lands every 5 minutes, characters falling, running, kicking of fighting, but without any essence to it. They are empty vessels in the wrong medium. It is a pity, because the 1st film had at least some effort and care to set-up jokes with a punchline, unlike here. This is an improvisation, not a movie. The authors needed better jokes, because simply empty rushing a hundred miles an hour to nowhere does not suffice. Some tiny bits are at least partially amusing (a Toad drops ice cream from his cone, so Mario uses his ice superpower to create him an even bigger snowball on said cone; Mario and Peach jumping over a bridge over lava near the castle, while Bowser Jr. watches them on the screen, where they look like video game characters; the Minions cameo...), whereas one moment is an unexpected expressionistic blast (Luigi uses Bowser Jr.'s paintbrush to draw a black silhouette, Mr. Watch & Game, who simply hits Bowser with an animated hammer on the head, Looney Tunes-style). The rest is below expectations. Yoshi is underused, but when you think about, all the characters are underused: they are nominally there, but their playful spirit and fun are absent. 

Grade:+

The Hunt for Red October

The Hunt for Red October; thriller, USA, 1990; D: John McTiernan, S: Alec Baldwin, Sean Connery, Sam Neill, Stellan Skarsgård, Scott Glenn, James Earl Jones, Tim Curry, Peter Firth

In 1 9 8 4, the Soviet Union dispatches a ballistic missile nuclear submarine Red October in the Atlantic Ocean, heading towards the US. Its commander is Lithuanian Marko Ramius. Soon afterwards, other Soviet combat submarines follow it. The US military staff in Washington, D.C. assume an attack on the American east coast is imminent, but CIA analyst Jack Ryan has a different theory: Ramius wants to deflect to the American side. The Soviet ambassador lies that Ramius has gone crazy and wants to strike, telling the US to sink their submarine. Ryan boards US submarine USS Dallas and sends signals to Ramius, who evacuates his staff from Red October feigning technical problems, and allows Ryan inside, seeking US asylum. A Soviet submarine fires a torpedo, but thanks to skillful maneuvering by Red October and USS Dallas, the torpedo is lured to strike the Soviet submarine and sink it. 

If you want to see Sean Connery playing a Lithuanian submarine commander who kills a Russian official named Putin, "The Hunt for Red October" is the right film for you, one of the last Cold War thrillers before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The competent director John McTiernan crafts a stylish, polished and suspenseful thriller thanks to aesthetic colors and a stunning, crystal-clear cinematography which make the film modern and fresh even today, whereas the charismatic Sean Connery is excellent in the role of Marko Ramius—in the first third, the movie keeps the viewers deliberately guessing, in uncertainty, as to what Ramius intentions really are: does he want to attack the US with ballistic missiles or just deflect to seek asylum? Alec Baldwin is also good as Jack Ryan, in his first film adaptation of a Tom Clancy novel, though there is not much of a character development or deeper psychological exploration than just that what is necessary for the bare minimum to keep the story going. Nonetheless, the story works at least for one engaging viewing, with some clever moments (the American submarine fires a torpedo at Red October, but then Greer (James Earl Jones), Deputy Director of CIA, presses a button and destroys said torpedo halfway, saying to a Navy official he was never there; the finale where the Red October and the USS Dallas maneuver to avoid a torpedo fired at them from a Soviet submarine, trying to destroy Red October so that its technology want fall into American hands, which reminds even a bit of the finale in "Star Trek VI"). A conventional, but effective and fluent thriller, so smooth that it will engage even viewers usually not that inclined towards these kind of films.

Grade:++

Toto the Hero

Toto le héros; tragicomedy, Belgium / Germany / France, 1991; D: Jaco Van Dormael, S: Michel Bouquet, Thomas Godet, Jo De Backer, Mireille Perrier, Gisela Uhlen, Sandrine Blancke

Thomas, now an old man in a retirement home, recounts his life: as a little kid, Thomas lives with his sister Alice and brother with a Down syndrome, while their father disappeared on a plane during bad weather. Thomas imagines that he was switched as an infant in the maternity ward with his neighbor boy, Alfred. Thomas is infatuated with Alice and jealous of her affections towards Alfred. Alice wants to prove her loyalty by burning Alfred's home with a gasoline canister, but due to an accident, she dies in the fire. As a grown up, Thomas meets Evelyne who looks remarkably like Alice, but she is Alfred's wife. In the present, Thomas wants to kill Alfred. While hiding in a shack, he overhears that a gangster will assassinate Alfred in his home that evening. Thomas thus locks up Alfred, takes on his clothes and appears in his house. The assassin shoots through the window and thus kills Thomas instead of Alfred. 

The feature length debut film of the Belgian cinematic hope of that time, Jaco Van Dormael's "Toto the Hero" is an unusual and creative film presented in a dispersed nonlinear narrative that flip-flops between the childhood, adulthood and old life of protagonist Thomas, but it still seems as if he "polished" and improved this concept more in his later film "Mr. Nobody". The episodes involving these three timelines in Thomas' life are interesting, though somewhat inconclusive in the end without a stronger point. The best bits are surreal comical scenes which, together with this storyline told out of chronological order, make this ordinary story more extraordinary and fresh (the mother is seen with blood dripping from beneath her hat in a grocery store, the people all gather around her and call the ambulance, but then the clerk takes her hat off—and it is revealed she was hiding a piece of raw meat on her head; when her dad's plane disappears, the 13-year old Alice goes inside a church and threatens a statue of Holy Mary (!) by saying: "We came to warn you! If our dad isn't found, you'll have to answer to me!"; the old Thomas attaches a lightbulb with a metal foil on a lamp, and when the security guard turns it on, it explodes, causing a short circuit in the retirement home, thereby allowing Thomas to escape). The "twist ending" isn't that well thought out (the viewers are led to believe one thing already in the opening scenes, only for Van Dormael to have this subverted) whereas a couple of 'autistic' ideas and situations make the film less comprehensible than it should have been, though the director has talent and skill, showing jealousy, confusion and disappointment in life from cradle to grave, never allowing to compromise and create a pleasant 'feelgood' film.   

Grade:++

My Life as a Dog

Mitt liv som hund; tragicomedy, Sweden, 1985; D: Lasse Hallström, S: Anton Glanzelius, Tomas von Brömssen, Anki Lidén, Manfred Serner, Melinda Kinnaman, Lennart Hjulström

Ingmar (12) is a problematic boy who either fights with his older brother Erik or causes mischief at home, stressing his sick single mother. To help her relax, the relatives send Erik to one part of the family for the summer, while Ingmar ends up living with his uncle Gunnar. Ingmar joins the association football and boxing club, where he meets the tomboyish girl Saga, who likes him. When his mother dies, Ingmar stays permanently with Gunnar, but he also hosts a Greek couple, so Gunnar's his wife arranges that Ingmar stays living with the old Mrs. Arvidsson. During a boxing match, Ingmar barks like a dog, so Saga tells him his dog, which he left behind at his mother's home, is dead. Ingmar runs away and hides inside a summer house, as the double loss takes a toll on him, and Gunnar comforts him.

"My Life as a Dog" is an overrated coming-of-age film, but still has merits in depicting how sometimes people make stupid mistakes in childhood, which they regret later in life. The main stumbling point is that the protagonist, the 12-year old Ingmar, is insufferably annoying in the first half of the story, which makes the task of enjoying the movie difficult, since, through his mischief and peculiar behavior, he acts as an autistic Dennis the Menace: for instance, Ingmar accepts to put his penis inside a glass bottle, on the behest of his older brother Erik, but when it gets stuck, his mother has to break the bottle by smashing it on the wall; Ingmar randomly splashes his face with a glass full of milk during breakfast, and when his mother wants to wipe the table, she finds his bedsheets hidden inside the kitchen cupboard, wet from his urine, but she still uses it to wipe the table; while arguing with Erik who holds a gun at their dog, Ingmar spills a bowl of batter on the floor, the mom chases them both, and then they hold the door of her bedroom so that she cannot open them to get to them. Considering that their mother suffers from some sort of terminal pulmonary disease, and this stresses her out even more, this is hard to watch. The second half of the film thus becomes Ingmar's self-realization of his missed opportunities and errors, though he is still too passive to undergo any kind of redemption ark. The mother's death is handled remarkably subtle and unemotional, with Ingmar only being invited by a relative to talk to him in private, but without showing any melodrama. Yet, in the end, as Ingmar remembers both his late mother and dog, he realizes the only joint memory he will have of her will be how he caused her anguish and misery, as he was not mature enough to improve in time, which causes his emotional collapse in a very touching ending. A small standout is Melinda Kinnaman as Ingmar's tomboyish semi-girlfriend Saga, though it is weird as she is around 13 years old, but still shows him his bare chest in a controversial scene. The director Lasse Hallstrom injects the film with a lot of humor to ease the tragic subject, yet he is rather conventional, except in a few more imaginative scenes (Ingmar runs on the football field to kick the ball, but before he does he is shoved away by another boy who kicks it instead).  

Grade:++

Kanal

Kanał; war drama, Poland 1957; D: Andrzej Wajda, S: Wieńczysław Gliński, Tadeusz Janczar, Teresa Iżewska, Tadeusz Gwiazdowski, Stanisław Mikulski, Emil Karewicz

The last days of the Warsaw Uprising, World War II. Lieutenant Zadra leads a Polish military unit of 43 people, down from 70 just three days ago, among the ruins of the Mokotov suburb of Warsaw. Among them are also Jacek "Korab", composer Michal and Madry. They rest in ruined buildings, but then the Nazi German army attacks and encircles them, so Zadra reluctantly accepts to evacuate 27 of his remaining unit down in the sewage. Down there, some are lost and escape when they think they smell poison gas. A girl, Stokrotka, helps guide a wounded Jacek, staying behind the main group. They reach the end of the sewage, but the exit is closed off with bars, so Stokrotka lies to a half-dead Jacek that they made it. Meanwhile, Madry climbs up a manhole, but on the surface is met by a Nazi soldier who sends him towards corpses of other Polish soldiers. Zadra exits on the other side and shoots his Sgt. Kula who lost all his soldiers behind them, and then goes back into the sewage.

Rarely has there ever been a director who anchored his film stories so firmly in Polish history as much as Andrzej Wajda, ranging from Nazi to Communist occupation. His 2nd feature length film, "Kanal", is one of his best achievements, a black classic that depicts the failed Warsaw Uprising during World War II, and thus the whole tone is bitter, dark, depressive and lyrical to the end, illustrating that time period of Polish history where everything seemed lost and hopeless, like there was no future awaiting. In the opening scenes, as the military unit walks pass the camera in Warsaw in ruins, the narrator briefly describes most of the soldiers ("Officer Cadet "Ark", dreams of a hot bath; "Slim", "Ark's" aide, wants to build planes after the war..."), before grimly concluding: "These are the tragic heroes. Take a good look. These are the last hours of their lives." Everything is already elegantly established and foreshadowed in the first 5 minutes of the film.

In one sequence, the Polish Army reaches a wounded woman lying on a stretcher, and a soldier asks her: "Are you badly wounded?", and she replies with: "No, it's nothing", as the medics lift the stretcher, the blanket falls down from her, revealing her right leg has been amputated. In another sequence, with the soldiers resting in a devastated building, composer Michal asks Lt. Zadra to make a phone call towards his family, and Zadra has this exchange with a man on the other end: "You have no windows? I forgot what they even look like!" In these and other small episodes, Wajda is able to efficiently show the psychological state of Poland during World War II, where people were dying, getting wounded, all the infrastructure was damaged, whereas the quality of life was basically zero. The first half of "Kanal" shows the Polish soldiers on the surface, while the other half shows them descending into the sewage, to try to escape via underground from the Nazi encirclement. There is no patriotism, nor heroism here—this is real life, unglamorized, de-propagandized, with civilians on the surface accusing the soldiers of abandoning them like cowards, showing war as dirty and heavy, in an explicit allegory of soldiers walking through the sewage water full of excrement. This underground sewage thus becomes a symbol of Dante's Inferno from "The Divine Comedy", a literal hell for soldiers trapped and outnumbered in a war against a stronger enemy. The most memorable episode revolves around a woman, Stokrotka, helping a wounded Jacek walk through the sewage, as she says two unforgettable lines: "My life story is longer than this tunnel!" and: "Do you think we will get our lives back?" As the movie asks: is it worth it to fight for justice and freedom even though you know it is hopeless and you will not survive? "Kanal" follows the people who said yes.

Grade:+++

One Battle After Another

One Battle After Another; action drama, USA, 2025; D: Paul Thomas Anderson, S: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Chase Infiniti, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Tony Goldwyn

California. Patrick, who is white, and Perfidia, who is black, are members of a far-left revolutionary group, French 75, who break into the Ota Mesa Detention Center and release the detained Mexican immigrants there, while Perfidia also holds military officer Steven J. Lockjaw at gunpoint, who gets aroused. Lockjaw blackmails Perfidia into having affairs with him as to not arrest her. Patrick and Perfidia become lovers and get a baby, Charlene, but Perfidia escapes the country when the police are after her for murder. 16 years later, Patrick assumes the fake identity of Bob and Charlene is called Willa, to hide their past connection with French 75. When Lockjaw, now a Colonel, wants to become a member of a far-right white supremacist secret society, he uses the military to hunt down Willa, his biological daughter, to kill her to hide the fact that he had a child with a black woman, Perfidia. Willa escapes and kills assassin Tim, and reunites with Bob. Lockjaw is assassinated by the secret society for interracial relationships. 

"One Battle After Another" is one of those movies that go for style over substance. There is not much of a plot in it nor narrative inspiration, as much as there is just pure cinematic fascination-infatuation with filmmaking in and of itself, even when just depicting ordinary scenes. It is not the best film by director Paul Thomas Anderson, but was still arguably the best film among the American films nominated for best picture at various awards—though several foreign nominated films were superior, for instance "The Voice of Hind Rajab". "One Battle After Another" has several flaws—for instance, its structure is messy and chaotic, a lot of complex social issues are just brought up or hinted at, instead of being elaborated properly (two scene of US soldiers walking between two giant fences containing Mexican immigrants at a detention center, but without having either Mexicans or soldiers as characters to say what they think about it; Willa is shown doing karate, but this is not used in the final act of the film, even though it would have been very useful), whereas it is a screenwriting error to remove the crucial character Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) from the story after 33 minutes and, incredibly, not have her return for the finale.

However, it is timely by touching the nerve of its time by showing the United States as torn between left and right-wing politics, that have become so incompatible and alienated from each other that they both went into extremism, in order to "counterbalance each other", in addition to a looming shadow of authoritarianism and militarization, while father Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and daughter Willa (very good Chase Infiniti) try to live in a healthy, normal way in the middle. The opening act contemplates at some problems regarding far-left politics in itself when Perfidia leaves Bob alone with their baby because she wants to put herself first, as opposed to him expecting her to take on a more conservative role as a mother. Equally as ironic is that the far-right, white supremacist military commander Steven J. Lockjaw (excellent Sean Penn) has an affair with the black Perfidia, triggered by his perverted fascination with dominance and power after she held him at gunpoint, thereby showing how even far-right and far-left politics need to cooperate to keep the society functioning, despite their disagreements. These themes about politics are always in the background, while the family triangle is the foreground. One highlight: the 4-minute car chase sequence on the "waves" of a hilly road, filmed in VistaVision and realized without any dialogue, is phenomenally cinematic, a hypnotic experience. That Anderson made it totally spontaneously is incredible. And it sums up the entire film: it is made by the cineastes and for the cineastes. Nothing else matters but the aesthetics, the thin story is just at its service.  

Grade:+++

Sinners

Sinners; horror drama, USA, 2025; D: Ryan Coogler, S: Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Jayme Lawson, Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku, Jack O'Connell, Delroy Lindo, Li Jun Li

In 1 9 3 2, African-American twins Smoke and Stack leave Chicago, abandoning their gangster lives to settle back in a town in Mississippi, where they buy a defunct sawmill to convert it into a night and dance club, and start an honest business. That evening, the night club has its premiere and attracts a lot of customers, while musicians Delta Slim, Pearline and Sammie perform. However, Irish vampire Remmick and his two possessed people show up, but are not invited inside. They still posses Mary, Stack's ex-girlfriend, and she enters inside, bites Stack and turns him into a vampire. The party guests leave. Smoke and his remaining friends battle the vampires and are able to eliminate Remmick. When the Ku Klux Klan appears in the morning, Smoke shoots them, but is fatally shot himself. Stack is spared and leaves to live with Mary in peace, while Sammie pursues a music career in Chicago. 

"From Dusk Till Dawn" meets "Mississippi Burning"—"Sinners" is a good, but considering all the nominations and awards, overrated film that once again proves that there is not that much more to add to the overused vampire genre. It's neither inspired as a historical drama nor as a horror, but it is at least more fun in that horror half when it drops all the pretentious aspirations and simply plays out like a suspenseful siege thriller. Considering that the vampire is white, and he possesses a white Ku Klux Klan couple to help him attack the night club run by African Americans, this could be interpreted as a symbolical depiction of how racism destroyed a black sanctuary in the Southern United States of the first half of the 20th century, wrecking their idyllic plans to be free of repression. However, themes alone don't make a movie. In the first half, "Sinners" is a historical drama, showing twins Smoke and Stack (very well played by actor Michael B. Jordan in a double role) trying to start an honest life in the town and open up their own business, a night and music club. The dialogue is standard there, but the standout character is musician Delta Slim, played brilliantly by Delroy Lindo, who has some of the best lines—for instance, upon seeing the young and inexperienced Sammie who aspires to be a musician, the experienced Delta Slim comments that he had "socks older than him", whereas when asked what he did with all his earnings, Delta Slim honestly admits: "I drank all my money!" A lot of characters are introduced in this half, but many of them are not that well developed to the end, as they are interrupted by the horror half of the film which doesn't care for character development anymore, just for fighting and kicking vampires. Writer and director Ryan Coogler surprises by constantly changing genres, refreshingly refusing to follow the genre rules, and thus blends in drama, gangster, musical and horror elements, but at the end of the day, "Sinners" is not as fun nor as creative as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer".   

Grade:++

Weapons

Weapons; mystery horror, USA, 2025; D: Zach Cregger, S: Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, Cary Christopher, Amy Madigan, Alden Ehrenreich, Benedict Wong

One night, at 2:17 AM, 17 elementary school children of a small town wake up from their beds and run away into the night, disappearing without a trace. The police and the townspeople are bewildered, but their school teacher Justine is suspicious of Alex, the only child from her class who didn't disappear, and observes his house. Archer, one of the father of the missing children, teams up with Justine. The school principal Marcus attacks and chases Justine in a store, but dies when he is hit by a car in the street. It turns out Alex's parents invited a distant relative, witch Gladys, who caught them under her spell, and forced Alex to bring personal possessions of his classmates, so that Gladys can cast a spell to send them to their house, so that she can suck out their energy and rejuvenate herself. Alex takes a curl of Gladys' hair, wraps it on her witch stick and places a drop of his blood on it, thereby causing all the children to attack and kill Gladys. The spell is therefore broken, and Justine and Archer find the kids. 

"Weapons" is a good horror, but its initial mystery premise is so much better than its sole resolution in the finale, which is banal and falls into exploitation horror clichés. The opening set-up is wonderfully eerie and stimulating: 17 children wake up in the middle of the night, walk out on the street and disappear. Neither the police nor the parents have a clue what happened. This concept ignites interest of the viewers, and the director Zach Cregger crafts several stylistic solutions (the heroine, school teacher Justine, is initially only seen from the back, her face not shown), whereas at least one sequence is an example of elevated suspense (Justine falls asleep in her car while spying on Alex's home, and during the night the doors of the house open and a deranged woman holding scissors in her hand is seen exiting in the dark and walking towards her), but with time, as if "Weapons" starts depleting its sophistication, and the blunt scares take over (two jump scares in the first half, when Justine and Archer have nightmares, seem to be inserted just to keep the viewers' attention since the authors gave up to try to engage them narratively). The idea that the story stops and is presented through six different perspectives is ambitious, but at least two of them could have been cut since they do not contribute much (police officer Paul and drug addict James). "Weapons" is one of the rare movies that actually gets worse after the introduction of a character for which the actress playing it won several awards. Amy Madigan is a very good actress, but her character Gladys is a typical one-dimensional villain. There are certain multilayered themes here, since Gladys could be an allegory for the embodiment of various dangerous Tik-Tok challenges that influence kids to do damaging things, or a parasite (she appears right after Marcus and his partner watch a documentary on TV about a fungus that eats an ant from inside). But since all the characters are poorly developed, and the finale is standard bloodshed, "Weapons" is not able to grow into something more than a good horror, which the opening act hinted at. 

Grade:++

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Le Scaphandre et le Papillon; drama / art-film, France / USA, 2007; D: Julian Schnabel, S: Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josée Croze, Anne Consigny, Max von Sydow

Jean-Dominique Bauby wakes up in a hospital in Berck-sur-Mer and is informed by the doctor he had a stroke and is paralyzed completely, due to locked-in syndrome. Jean-Dominique can only communicate through his left eye, and two women, speech therapist Henriette and physical therapist Marie, devise a system of spelling aloud and waiting for him to blink for a specific letter. He was editor of Elle magazine, had a relationship with Celine with whom he had two kids, but left her for an affair with Ines. He thus decides to write a memoir about his life, recorded by his assistant. He had the stroke randomly while driving his son in a car, so he stopped on the road. Jean-Dominique dies from pneumonia ten days after his book is published, aged 44. 

After Amenabar's "The Sea Inside", the director Julian Schnabel took on an even bigger challenge of crafting a film around a paralyzed man who can only blink with his left eye in this film. That Schnabel is able to pull it through is already incredible: he does so much from so little at his disposal. His biopic based on true events, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is a film that is depicted in 2/3 of its running time only through the point-of-view of the protagonist Jean-Dominique Bauby, and thus his subjective perspective becomes the film's perspective—meaning that the actor playing him, Mathieu Amalric, is not seen on the screen for the majority of the film. The opening 10 minutes are the most powerful, as a doctor looks into the "foggy" camera in a hospital and asks for the patient's name. Jean-Dominique says his name, but the doctor asks his name again, and again, until the protagonist realizes he cannot speak, and that his words are only his thoughts. Jean-Dominique can only blink with his left eye—one blink means "yes", two blinks mean "no", shown again through his POV as the camera's screen "goes black" for a second—but two women therapists patiently spell out loud until he blinks at a specific letter, and they then write it down on paper, bit by bit, until a sentence is formed. As one woman reads out a sentence from Jean-Dominique's planned memoir, he cynically thinks to himself that they "spent five hours" just to complete it. Throughout the film, flashbacks of Jean-Dominique's life before the stroke are shown, combined with lyrical-poetic sequences of him imagining himself in a diving bell suit under the sea to illustrate his feeling of helplessness and fragility (among others, he is annoyed when a medic turns off the TV in his room just as he was watching a football match). "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is a very good contemplation on how bad life can get, asking us to be thankful for what health we have, but "The Sea Inside" is still better due to a much richer movie language used: the former is a monologue, the latter is a dialogue. One of those movies that are almost too depressing to watch for some viewers. 

Grade:+++

Dara of Jasenovac

Dara iz Jasenovca; war drama, Serbia, 2021; D: Predrag Antonijević, S: Biljana Čekić, Anja Stanić, Zlatan Vidović, Vuk Kostić, Marko Janketić, Martina Kitanović, Alisa Radaković, Nataša Ninković

Jasenovac concentration camp, World War II. Dara Ilić (10), her two brothers and mother are among numerous Serbs who are brought to the camp run by the Nazi-aligned Ustasha dictatorship. The Ustasha guards kill Serb inmates, while Dara's dad is assigned to bury the corpses. After her mother and older brother are killed, Dara and her 2-year old brother are among the children who are brought to the Stara Gradiška camp. There the women work on the farm, under the supervision of Mileva, while the Catholic nuns indoctrinate children to convert them into Croats. Diana Budisavljević, head of a humanitarian association,  arrives from Zagreb to transfer children to safety. Dara's brother is sick and thus under threat of being killed, but is covertly smuggled to Diana's van for adoption. As the van leaves, Dara runs after it. An Ustasha woman shoots at her, but misses, so Dara boards the van are leaves with her brother.

The first narrative film about the Jasenovac concentration camp is a film that should have been made since it is an important contribution for the genocide studies, and thus one wishes that it had been better. "Dara of Jasenovac" chronicles the Ustashe genocide of Serbs through the crimes of persecution, murder, torture, looting, unlawful confinement and forced labor in Jasenovac in the first 45 minutes, after which it switches to the Stara Gradiska concentration camp for women and children, and some situations are honest, genuine and emotional, but the movie suffers from several flaws, mostly in the form of a few heavy-handed solutions and scenes of propaganda. It is also problematic that the title heroine, the 10-year old girl Dara (very good Biljana Cekic) appears in only some 30 minutes of the two-hours of running time. The opening act has weight: it shows hundreds of Serb civilians marching across a meadow, led by Ustashe at gunpoint, while one Serb woman makes eye contact with a Croat woman working on the field, secretly sneaks away from the column, gives her own baby to her, and then returns back to the column (touching, but a bit illogical since she could have simply stayed there in the bushes as nobody had seen her, instead of returning back). As the train arrives on the bridge, the Jasenovac inmates, who are throwing corpses into the Sava river, comment cynically: "Look, more work for us." - "Tomorrow you will throw me like that." - "Just work, maybe you will live longer."

The depiction of the state of things inside Jasenovac is well done—as the concertation camp lacked any machinery, all the people were killed one by one, with several shocking scenes—though the director Predrag Antonijevic cannot resist not to insert a few pretentious bits. One sequence is particularly badly done: during the game of musical chairs for the inmates, where the last one is killed, there is a stupid moment of an Ustasha man getting so aroused that he goes to have sex with an Ustasha woman in a car; an Ustasha shoots Dara's mother while holding an apple in his mouth; whereas a Nazi is shown so disgusted by the killings that he throws up—contrived, as if their perversion is not obvious enough, so Antonijevic has to exaggerate even more by inventing things not based on historical records. These banal "additions" reduce the film's feeling of honesty. Two best moments: Dara's father is assigned to bury corpses from Jasenovac on the field, and is shocked to see his dead wife and son among the corpses, which is emotional and devastating; the other is a long speech held by an Ustasha officer, but then there is a cut to an Ustasha guard killing one of the inmates in a row in the meadow, as the words of the first one are heard off screen, talking about "rights in the country", in a good contrast between his propaganda and reality, showing how there are actually zero human rights there. Martina Kitanovic and Alisa Radakovic are surprisingly effective and memorable as the two Ustasha women. The ending is clumsy and unconvincing, full of plot holes and illogical 'saved-in-the-nick-of-time' clichés, but despite this disparate blend of honesty and manipulation, "Dara of Jasenovac" is an overall good film.

Grade:++