Reviews

The well deserved winner of the 2016 Karlovy Vary Film Festival, the biggest east- European film festival. One of the best films of the year.

It's a private study of a couple's problems, the filmmaker himself, starting with their son who behaves erratically, his wife trying to escape the marriage, and it happens it gets dramatic as the wife's sister with her husband and daughter take shelter in their apartment. But unlike in real life external drama does not increase the conflicts, it rather enables lot of possibilities for external evaluation and discussions.

What makes the movie outstanding is besides the positive humanism the outstanding camera work. Despite being a almost low-budget intimate "kitchen-sink drama", which was initially written as a theater project, played by the real family members and friends, Szabolcs Hajdu's camera students from the university change roles in resolving scene by scene, with overall 13 credited directors of photography. You completely have to disguise all your misconceptions of the master of the camera. More people see much more, the perspectives are constantly changing. It reminds a bit on Kurosawa Kiyoshi's excellent student project "Barren Illusions".

I'm not too fond of the too American, soft ending, as in too many similar SXSW movies. I would have preferred a Romanian ending. But I have to admit, it fits the narrative better, even if if might hurt foreign sales.

Obviously a big story, a real life story, which started in Houston and affected the whole world.

Synopsis: "Mike Weiss (Chris Evans) is a talented young Houston lawyer and a functioning drug addict. Paul Danziger (Mark Kassen, one part of the director brothers), his longtime friend and partner, is the straightlaced and responsible yin to Mike's yang. Their mom-and- pop personal-injury law firm is getting by, but things really get interesting when they decide to take on a case involving Vicky, a local ER nurse, who is pricked by a contaminated needle on the job. As Weiss and Danziger dig deeper into the case, a health care and pharmaceutical conspiracy teeters on exposure and heavyweight attorneys move in on the defense. Out of their league but invested in their own principles, the mounting pressure of the case pushes the two underdog lawyers and their business to the breaking point."

To follow the morals or your instinct? The story does not take the easy way out. Will in the end the new revolutionary one-way Safety Needle win?

Obviously a great lead actor which I loved in one of my best remembered US films of the last decade, Chris Evans in "London" with his real-life long-time girlfriend Jessica Biel.

But the screen story obviously overdid it with the goodness-in-all-the-bad-mess "Half Nelson" bad guy hero stereotype. He looks like him, acts like him, and the whole counter- story is a half "Half Nelson" "I am a druggie but adorable mess". Ryan Gosling is great, Chris Evans looks better but should better not compete with him without a top script. Concentrate on the substance not on the side story please. If the production values where not that great, the actors and the story not that convincing I would have walked out, because you could easily predict every next step, and everything just smelled overscripted. Which is especially bad for a convincing real-life story.