Rocky (1976)

USA
directed by: John G. Avildsen
written by: Sylvester Stallone
starring: Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Burgess Meredith
seen on 21st February, 2020

I cried like a little baby, but not at the end, I cried during the scene of Rocky shouting loudly at the old man offering himself as a manager. The actual end seems a litte bit tired, like there wasn't enough time to finish it to perfection, but still finish it enough to be done with it and unleash it upon the world. I can't imagine this story needing any other instalment to tell it better or expand on its theme (and I probably won't watch any other Rocky movie because of that). I don't see it as a "sports movie", to me it's a new wave film: little dialogue, a lot of emotion, humanity dissected. Damn.

Life of Pi (2012)

USA/Taiwan/United Kingdom/Canada
directed by: Ang Lee
written by: David Magee + Yann Martel (book)
starring: Suraj Sharma, Irrfan Khan, Adil Hussain
seen on 20th February, 2020

Nonsense. I don't get the connection between Baron Munchausen and divine touch, at least not in anything the makers show us or how they show us. This seems like the kind of movie that loses all of its value once people start to admire another attraction... and there simply is no point in films like these.

Under the Shadow (2016)

United Kingdom/Jordan/Qatar
written and directed by: Babak Anvari
starring: Narges Rashidi, Avin Manshadi, Bobby Naderi
seen on 8th February, 2020

Best film ever. If I were to compare it to something, it would be Polanski's "Repulsion". Polanski uses atributes of the horror genre to depict psychological discomfort of his heroine, her distress comes deep from within her and societal pressure is a secondary character in his story, whereas "Under the Shadow" deals with the opossite situation: the heroine and her deepest self are being attacked from the outside, and the director translates and visualizes her suffering through understandable tropes of spooky movies. 

I read a bunch of comments online that said things like "the main character is being a real cow the entire time", as if they spotted a flaw in the film by being the brightest and the smartest, without also noticing that was the point of the whole thing. It's about frustration, about being tired, about being unable to defend oneself. There is a war going on around. WAR! The heroine is under constant attack as a citizen of her country, is under constant attack as a person with a political opinion in an unfree country, is under constant attack as a person yearning for self-realization, is under constant attack just for being born a woman. The film does not glamorize her behavior or her irritated reactions, on the contrary, she gets put through hell. I don't deny anyone the right to say they didn't like the film, thought it was bad or uninteresting, but I do not like to see someone watching a film about going crazy from something unimaginable and then criticizing the heroine for being crazy.