Monthly Archives: May 2020

Nikolay Kalman, director. 2016

Little Jack

“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks” 1 Thess. 5:16-18

All nature gives thanks to the Creator of the universe. But one little boy refused to thank God.

He lived with his mother and father in a poor house on the edge of the street. His clothes were worn, but my mother tried,
to make her son look clean and tidy.

She had to work hard to make ends meet.

Thanksgiving was approaching. Jack knew what was on their table
there will be traditional turkeys and no holiday treats. And the boy was very upset.

Thanksgiving! What should I be thankful for? he asked indignantly shortly before the holiday.

Suddenly a beautiful angel appeared before him and said:

– I am the Thanksgiving Angel. I’ll show you what you should be grateful for.

Angel reached out and touched Jack’s eyes.

– Oh my eyes! cried Jack. – I do not see anything! I’m blind! I had to thank for the sight!

In desperation, Jack wanted to run, but the Angel stopped him with the words:

– Jack, I know something else that you should be grateful for.

And he touched his feet. Jack felt he couldn’t move.

– My legs! Jack exclaimed with tears. I forgot to thank that I can walk!

– I see you have something else to be thankful for, Jack.

And the Angel touched Jack’s hands. His hands stopped feeling and acting.

– Dear boy, you have many things for which you should be grateful. Now you understand it
is not it? You lost your eyesight, arms, legs, but there is one more thing that I almost forgot about.

And the Angel touched Jack’s lips, and Jack lost the ability to speak.

– Do you hear me, Jack? I know what you hear. And that’s one more thing you should be thankful for
God. Although you have lost a lot, but you hear, and this is a wonderful gift!

An angel touched Jack’s ears and he stopped hearing.

Then the Angel touched his memory and Jack lost his memory. He didn’t remember his name. He didn’t remember
the name of their parents. He did not remember to whom he should pray. The name of Jesus is gone from his memory.

The angel disappeared as suddenly as it appeared…

… Jack opened his eyes. He lay in his warm bed. He looked around and was endless
happy to see! He heard the chirping of birds outside the window and was infinitely happy that he heard!
He raised his hands, jumped off the bed and shouted:

– Mom! How happy I am that I can see, hear, speak, walk, think!

Jack never forgot that terrible dream about the Thanksgiving Angel. And when the holiday came
Thanksgiving, he was the happiest and most grateful boy in their city.

“Be persistent in prayer, being vigilant in it with thanksgiving” Col. 4:2.

Reprinted from stories for Sunday School. Author unknown.

August 8, 2016

Sunday School Camp

From July 7 to 10, a Sunday School camp took place in a picturesque place in the mountains. camp theme
was the life and ministry of the great Old Testament prophet Elijah, and the motto “He who overcomes inherits all.”
The children studied the life of the prophet Eli, and the group leaders showed through stories, skits, and singing how to apply
acquired knowledge in the light of today.

In one of the performances, the leaders showed that the passion for computer games, the desire to be like
fashionable people of this age, as well as insatiability with money and careerism are similar to the idolatry of people
during the time of the prophet Elijah. The enemy of human souls enthralls young people with this, in order to destroy them later. But
God has other plans for every person, in which there is a place for love, joy, success and family
well-being. Children reacted vividly to all these skits and rejoiced at those who found the right way of life.

Every morning began with cheerful exercises and breakfast, followed by an hour and a half Bible
a lesson in which the children studied the life of the prophet Elijah and prepared for the evening service. And during the day it was
many interesting sports games, relay races and team competitions where everyone could show their strength,
dexterity and dexterity.

At the end of each day there was a service in the open air by the fire where each team prepared a Bible
performance or song. Also, the children listened to the word shared by the camp director Nikolai Kalman, as well as
the senior pastor of our church, Valery Petrovich Brutsky-Stempkovsky, who visited us one evening. Well
and as always, on the last day, no one but the smallest wanted to go home. May the Lord bless
our children so that they remember and fulfill in life what they learned in the camp.

Nikolay Kalman, director.

March 26, 2016

Greetings to all who serve in the Sunday School,

The winter has passed and all nature is awakening from its winter hibernation and the breath of the spring breeze brings us scents
flowering trees. Our hearts are also thrilled as one of the biggest holidays approaches.
year – the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. How winter could not keep fresh young flowers in the buds
and they, breaking the shell, delight our eyes, so death could not keep our Savior in a stone coffin.
He is Risen, giving us the hope that we too will be resurrected and will dwell with Him in the incorruptible glory of the Heavenly Father.

“What are you looking for the living among the dead? He is not here: He is risen” Luke 24:5-6

May the Lord bless you and give you the strength to work for His glory. May He live in your families
and blesses with his love and wisdom. Let His hand lead you to the bright heavenly Fatherland.

Nikolay Kalman, director.

December 14, 2015

“And the angel said to her: Fear not, Mary, for you have found grace with God; and behold, thou shalt conceive in the womb, and thou shalt bear a son, and thou shalt call his name:
Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father.” Luke 1:30-32

Dear friends!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

May God’s peace and joy fill your hearts. May the light of the Star of Bethlehem be reflected in our homes, which lit up the path to
our Savior Jesus Christ. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill towards men.

Let all of us find favor with God by serving him faithfully. Let’s not forget the most important present of all ….Jesus Christ
(Our Savior). He protects us from harm’s way and leads those that believe in Him to salvation. He forgives those who sincerely
repent. He gives us strength and loves us despite our many mistakes, weaknesses and pitfalls.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”
John 3:16

John Leontiev, Vice Principal

September 20, 2015

To all teachers, assistant teachers, methodologists, and especially our children, I wish God’s abundant blessings in the new school year.

One day Jesus put a child in front of his disciples and said: “Unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Matt. 18:3.
These children will stand before us throughout the school year and will not only be an example of childish purity and simplicity, but also an object
great spiritual work. We will all work to keep these hearts not only pure, but also filled with the Word of God.
We want our children to absorb this Word and act on it from youth to the end of their lives. This is our most
a big task and we ask the Lord to bless us in this work and give us strength, wisdom and patience to instill this Word in children.

May the Lord bless all of us in our hard work in His name in our Sunday School.

Nikolay Kalman, director.

July 16, 2015

Good afternoon dear teachers.

Church “Living Stones” invites you to attend interesting seminars that will help you improve your knowledge.
Seminars will be conducted by Natalia Svistun from Odessa from July 20 to August 8. She studies teachers
Sunday schools, and also writes programs, and we want to share her knowledge with you.
Please don’t miss this chance.
For more information, contact the Sunday School Principal.
Teachers who attend all lessons have the opportunity to receive a certificate.

May 31, 2015

Dear brothers and sisters, I greet you with the love of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Thank the Lord for His
great love and mercy, for the Son who came to this sinful earth, shed his precious blood so that we may have
eternal life in Christ Jesus. For His word left to us, for the entrusted work that we can do for the glory
Lord, working in His field. The Apostle Paul, in his second epistle to Timothy, in the second chapter, fifteenth verse, left
us instruction “Try to present yourself to God as worthy, a worker without reproach, who faithfully teaches the word of truth.”

Congratulations on completing another academic year. This year the Lord blessed us abundantly and gave us the opportunity to
serve Him. It is my desire and the desire of all those who serve in the Sunday School that our children stay in the House of Prayer and in
the study of the Word of God did not stop with the end of the Sunday School classes. Sunday School was very happy to help
parents to bear this hard work of teaching children the word of truth. Now, this summer, our desire is for fire and attraction
children to the Word of God did not fade away. We will be very glad to see your children both in the camp and in the summer school, and especially
at church services.

Also thanks to all the teachers and helpers who dedicated themselves to the service of the Sunday School. May the Lord reward you for
your efforts and will give you strength and wisdom to continue your ministry. We wish you a good summer with the Lord and His
beloved church and we will be waiting for you in the new academic year.

“Do not be weak in your diligence; ignite in spirit; Serve the Lord.”
K Romans 12:11

Alexander Prizhbilov

April 4, 2015

Christ is Risen – Truly Risen!

I cordially congratulate everyone on the bright holiday of Christ’s Resurrection.

Christ is risen – dispelling the fears and doubts of the disciples.
Christ is risen – giving life and hope to all mankind.
Christ is risen – giving a heavenly inheritance to everyone who believes in Him.

The angels said to the saddened women: “What are you looking for the living among the dead? He is not here: He is risen;” Luke 24:5-6.
And the fear left the hearts, and hope appeared again, and joy fills the hearts when the beloved teacher meets and says to them: “Peace be with you!”.

Let this joy of the Resurrection, like spring outside the window, grow and fill your hearts, and let it strengthen you in your work
which you are doing. May the Lord bless you all.

Christ is Risen – Truly Risen.

Nikolay Kalman, director.

February 11, 2015

BLESSINGS TO YOU ALL DEAR BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN CHRIST JESUS!

WE ARE VERY HAPPY TO HAVE YOU VISITED OUR SITE.

GOD BLESS YOU:
Consolation – in difficult times
With a smile – on a cloudy day
Joy – to inspire others
Beauty – for admiration
Prosperity – for your family
Confidence – even when everyone is desperate
Humility – to accept the truth
Love as the meaning of life

Lyubov Stoyanova, head teacher

Merry Christmas and Blessings in the New Year 2015 To all of you and your families

above, and these are, of course, gifts: to relatives and friends, friends and neighbors, and especially to our children. Live
anticipation of this celebration, participate in Christmas singing, and let all the gifts bring you
joy and satisfaction.

But our best gift came from God. This is His Son Jesus, born in
manger of Bethlehem. May each of you remember this gift from heaven and give glory to God for His
coming to earth.

The prophet Isaiah says: “For a child is born to us – a Son is given to us” (Isaiah 9:6).
And this is our greatest joy. Let every heart rejoice in the born Savior,
may every soul give glory to God for His Son, and may everyone on earth accept this
precious gift from heaven and bow before Him. Because the shepherds did it in their simplicity.
Since the kings of the East did this, realizing their insignificance before the King of Kings. Since it
did the people of faith Simeon and Anna, unshakably believing God’s promises.

May the peace of God fill your homes in the New Year 2015, and may the glory of God
sounds everywhere, and may the Lord send you health, prosperity and joy from His generous
arms.

I heartily congratulate all of you, the employees of our Sunday School and also
all those who visit our site and do this blessed and wonderful work of education
Christian children.

Nikolay Kalman, director.

School and nature. Sukhomlinsky VA

Lenin’s concern for nature as a national property inspires teachers, gives a special meaning to their work, the purpose of which is to cultivate a sense of the master of their homeland.

Many years of experience in educational work convinces us that nature is not only an object of knowledge, not only the sphere of active activity of our pets, but also a particle of their being, relationships, the whole structure of their life. Nature is an educational factor of great importance, leaving its mark on the whole character of the pedagogical process. Nature as the world in which a child is born, cognizes the surrounding reality and himself, facilitates educational work and at the same time complicates it, because it makes it richer, more multifaceted. Constant communication with nature and interaction with it becomes an essential aspect of the educational process.

The unity of mental upbringing, on the one hand, and physical, labor, moral, aesthetic, emotional upbringing, on the other hand, created thanks to the child’s constant and ever-expanding contact with nature with age, opens up exceptionally favorable opportunities for the impact of upbringing, in the narrow sense of this concept, on teaching, acquiring knowledge.

Entering a child’s life with the first sensations, perceptions, concepts, ideas, nature becomes for him a visual measure of values, a source of wealth. This fact contains huge opportunities for the formation of a harmonious, comprehensively developed person.

The education of a small person (his ability to succumb to the influence of elders) is achieved successfully only when he comes into direct contact with material and spiritual values ​​that play a huge role in the life of society, comes into contact not as a passive consumer, but as a creator, a creator who feels, understands his responsibility, his duty.

In any corner of our Motherland: on the busiest street of the capital, and among the fertile fields and vineyards of the south, and in the distant tundra – everywhere you can find creations of nature. But to find, you have to think, think and think. Today, thought, wisdom, the teacher’s scientific approach to his work play a decisive role in pedagogical creativity. At the same time, it seems to me that the scientist-teacher is now required, first of all, to provide deep scientific coverage of the most seemingly simple, most familiar facts and phenomena of school life.

Nature as a source of knowledge

The role of nature in educational work is determined primarily by vigorous activity, the participation of the child’s physical and spiritual forces in cognition. The world of nature becomes an inexhaustible source of knowledge due to the fact that knowledge enters the child’s head in a very complex way: through hands, through labor, through relationships with other people, through feelings and experiences that color activity.

Attaching exceptionally great importance to direct contact with nature in the development of mental abilities, inquisitiveness, curiosity, we strive to introduce children as much as possible into the world of work among nature, precisely where there are many problems, questions, both in natural phenomena and in human labor. secrets, generally discovered by people, but again and again discovered by children in the process of learning. The so-called problem-based teaching and learning begins in active interaction with nature. If I want the children’s thinking to be especially intense, so that they have a lot of questions (and the more incomprehensible is revealed when comprehending the understandable, the more inquisitive, inquisitive a person becomes), we go with the children to the site, to the garden, to the greenhouse and roll up our sleeves …

You can often hear the statement: today’s children receive much more information than they received, say, three decades ago, and that it is this circumstance, and not something else, that allows you to put children in different conditions in the process of mastering knowledge and put them before them new requirements. This is true only in a certain sense. The eyes of the child have always been wide open to the world around them; his mind, feelings always sharply and interestedly perceived what was happening around. If for a modern child it is interesting, for example, to watch how a helicopter flies, to compare it with an airplane, then for a child of the 20s and 30s something else was no less interesting. Today’s child cannot take into his spiritual world from the outside world more than his cognitive and creative powers allow him. If he notices both the differences in the structure of the machines around him and the varieties of television broadcasts, then he is unable to notice other things. The change in the quality of information, its ever-growing flow – this is what has come into the world of modern childhood, and, of course, it would be unreasonable not to take these circumstances into account in determining the further ways of developing education. Changes have taken place and are taking place in the nature of the flow of information from the surrounding world. The child now does not have to go to the primary source of thought and word. Technical means bring the world closer to it. You don’t have to go to the beehive, you don’t have to look into this amazing center of life – you can see the complex phenomena of this world on the screen … Within five minutes, the educational film will tell and show how a flower bud turns into a flower, and a flower into a fruit; one does not have to go to a living plant for many days, there is no need to wait for a fortunate combination of circumstances in order to see individual rare phenomena with one’s own eyes.

Is this good or bad? Both good and bad. Technical means create excellent opportunities for quick knowledge of things and phenomena, as if bringing the world closer to the child. But at the same time, they distance the natural world if direct communication with it is replaced by a “reduced”, “conditional” vision of the image of individual phenomena. Nature is immeasurably richer and more interesting than any “reduced” information about it. Living phenomena, living contemplation, active communication with nature cannot be replaced by any information carried by technical means.

In nature, simple and at the same time the most complex things, objects, facts, phenomena, dependencies, patterns are laid down in an accessible form for a child, information about which is indispensable, because it corresponds precisely to the world of children’s nature, because information about these things, objects is the world into which the child himself enters, in this world – the primary source of his ideas, concepts, thoughts, generalizations, judgments.

In other words, nature is the source and at the same time the world of the “childhood of thought”. The child has always been and will remain a child, childhood has always been, is and will remain childhood. The “childhood” of thought is just as necessary, inevitable and natural for the normal mental development of a person, as the stay of the fetus in the womb, like a toy. This should not be forgotten now, when a lot of new and necessary things are coming to school, but at the same time, some people are in a hurry to give up things that should remain as constant in our lives as air, sky, sun. Nature is the cradle of children’s thought, and we must strive for every child to go through the school of childish thinking. One has to pay dearly, very dearly for forgetting this truth. Inattention, inability to concentrate, inability to work independently, helplessness in solving mental problems – these serious shortcomings in the mental work of students are precisely the reason that the cradle of thought remained untouched in childhood.

Each elementary school teacher of our school has developed a certain system of travel to the origins of thought and native word. These peculiar activities in the midst of nature we call, for convenience, the lessons of thinking. Each lesson has its own topic, provides a specific range of things and phenomena for observation. Here it is very important not to bring down an avalanche of impressions on the child. The cradle of a child’s thought has the peculiarity that the child mentally goes deep into some seemingly insignificant detail, focuses all his attention on it, forgets about everything else, as if the scope of his observation is narrowed, of course, for a short time.

Here are the topics of individual such classes: “Awakening nature from a night’s sleep”, “How flowers meet the sunrise”, “How butterflies hide from bad weather”, “The journey of an ant from an anthill to a crumb of bread”, “The rays of the sun play in drops of dew” , “Which birds are the first to meet the sun in the village and in the steppe”, “Where do the bees fly early in the morning from the hive”, “Why the bumblebee could not stay on the buckwheat stalk”, “Twenty shades of autumn forest decoration – what to call them”, “How the lark whines ”, “What is heard in a flowering garden”, “Living and inanimate in nature”, “How life awakens in the forest in spring”, “How the forest prepares for winter sleep”, “The sun and a green field”, “How it grows from a tiny poppy seed beautiful flower”, “How a snowdrop breaks through last year’s foliage”, “Winter life under the snow”, “Oh, how difficult it is for titmouse in winter”, “Journey of a drop of water”, “Plants and animals”, “Life in water and on land”, ” Wheat grain and spikelet”, “Flowers and fruits of apple trees, pumpkins, roses”, “How a swallow builds a nest”, “Without water no life”, “Spring, summer, autumn flowers – how they live and die”, “As a thunderstorm approaches”, “Wheat, sunflower and rose expect rain”, “Every phenomenon has its own reasons”.

Teachers attach great importance to the fact that each of the named topics brings to the child a lot of discoveries made by him independently. The student recognizes himself as an active creative force, experiences a sense of pride from the fact that he saw all this himself. Already with eight-year-old children who crossed the threshold of the school a year ago, on a warm summer morning (at dawn) we come to the field to observe and think about how nature wakes up from a night’s sleep. I repeat: children come to think – this is the main thing. And the more students comprehend the pleasure of this work – to discover and think – the more organically their mind merges with their will. This is very important in school work: comprehension of this from one’s own experience contributes to the fact that the will disciplines the mind, a person from an early age learns to set intellectual goals for himself, develops the ability to force himself to think. I assure you that there is nothing more difficult and difficult in all our school work than to achieve that the student is able to force himself to think. These are the seven seals of many pedagogical secrets that are so difficult for a teacher to comprehend in practical work. If you want your pet to learn to force himself to think, give him the hard pleasure of this work, lead him to the path where he becomes a proud discoverer of causes, effects, connections between phenomena. Here we are standing on the shores of a huge sea of ​​blooming sunflowers, on the other side of us is a white sea of ​​buckwheat, apricots ripen in a shelterbelt, in front of our eyes are beehives in which, according to the beekeeper’s grandfather, bees doze, pouring ears of wheat leaned over the ground … The dawn is turning red, a fiery streak of the sun will now appear from behind the horizon, the children peer into this captivating world and notice amazing things: the flowering heads of sunflowers barely noticeably (but they still managed to notice it) tremble, preparing to turn to the sun, and then, two hours later, it is already quite obvious that “the sunflower is looking for the sun” (these are the words of small children). What is there in this amazing plant that makes it cling to the light? But not only the sunflower wakes up from a night’s sleep and meets the morning. Children see how an ear of wheat trembles (this is also their word) when waves of heat and light rushed from the east and flooded the steppe, how tiny buckwheat flowers straighten their petals, preparing to meet bees and bumblebees, how stalks of grass, richly covered with night dew, as all living things drink dew in the morning – indeed, dew does not evaporate, as children used to think, but is absorbed by the soil and plants. Something like this happens to the grass stalks – they seem to strain invisible muscles, shaking off drops of water, and the water can no longer hold on, the drops become powerless; why did they hold on like frozen glass icicles until morning?

And how many discoveries children make when they watch how stems, leaves, flowers help insects – all these insects, flies to get out of their nightly shelters! Children are surprised to see: the plants seem to specially prepare beds for the insects for the night, and then, when the insects go on their daytime flight, they clean the beds. Each insect has its favorite flowers, each seeks its own nectar; children notice that the plant seems to be waiting for the arrival of its friends, with joy it gives them its sweet food prepared during the night – why is this so? One, two, three, four days in a row, children see the same thing, and an idea arises in them: probably, in the fact that a flower gives its sweet food, and its life consists, if an insect had not flown, the flower could not live.

In the evening we watch how all living things in the steppe get ready and then go to sleep at night. Dozens of phenomena are revealed to children that convince them that awakening, wakefulness, fatigue, sleep of all living things – these amazing states of plants depend on many conditions: on whether the sky is clear or cloudy today, and on heat, and on soil moisture … Children see an anxious, restless dream and the same sad wakefulness of plants exhausted by heat; discover such states of plants, when they either bask in warmth and life-giving moisture, or tremble from the cold. Yes, a really unexpected cold snap makes plants shrink, they even change the color of their leaves (winter wheat, for example, under the warm sun turns green at all like under a piercing wind, the plant, as it were, puts on a dress that helps it protect itself from the cold).

From an early age, we teach children to look closely and listen to what is happening in the soil. Land, black soil – the most important natural wealth of the people; it is not only the source of life, but also the most active living environment. During the years of study in primary and secondary classes, children, figuratively speaking, read a large and fascinating book of soil life. Each touch of thought (yes, it is very important that communication with the surrounding nature be a touch of thought!) brings many discoveries. Already a second grader knows that the soil lives and breathes, needs food, water, air, light; the soil has dozens of good friends living in its lumps, but there are also dangerous enemies.

Exciting journeys in the field on that spring day, when the soil wakes up from its winter sleep, are very interesting. This is the one and only day of the year and not to be missed. The whole school is in the field – the field begins next to the training and experimental site. This mysterious, not quite clear phenomenon occurs on a warm sunny day; above the awakening soil – translucent steam, everyone in the village says so that day: “She sighed, she is already breathing.” Something happens in the mysterious cells of the soil, from which everything in nature awakens. The children noticed that on the very day when the earth woke up, a lark rises into the azure sky and sings its first spring song; as long as the earth sleeps, he will not rise and sing – why is that? This phenomenon attracts the minds of children both with its poetry and with some hard-to-understand connections embedded in it. It is on the same day when the earth awakens that the children smell the grass as a living being – the grass begins to breathe. Something amazing happens with the buds of trees – they begin to exude their unique aroma, the garden suddenly begins to “smell of life” (this is also a vivid childish thought). Waking up, the earth is waiting for rain. We help children see and feel this expectation as one of the most interesting phenomena of nature, on which many Others depend.

This cradle of thought, the book of nature, has an amazing property: the more discoveries a little man made, the deeper the thinker’s joy he experienced, the more incomprehensible things are revealed to him, the more questions you hear: why? as? what? – and the more cheerful, fresh spiritual forces striving to find out, to receive an answer. A drop of thought about nature gives birth to a mighty, full-flowing river of thought. The need to think becomes his being, nature. The child does not believe in anything just like that, but wants to experience everything, to verify with his own experience. In what at first glance seems completely obvious, he suddenly sees something hidden, he has a lot of questions, and questions are, after all, lights that kindle the gunpowder of thought, and from these lights, in essence, begins what everything is about. we, teachers, strive – so that our pet can make himself think. He has a particularly attentive, sharpened, inquisitive and interested vision of the world and an irresistible, I would say, insatiable need to think, explore, reflect. He has his own personal relationship with the book. For him, a book is as much a need as the living world of nature; in reading he finds great satisfaction and pleasure. Children brought up among nature feel the need for reading, which requires the effort of thought. They are not satisfied with the textbook. They read non-fiction simply out of a need to know, to think, to reflect.

The cradle of thought – thinking in the midst of nature – educates children with a high culture of intellectual feelings. Discoveries, in which the child realizes himself to be an active participant, awaken in him a feeling of surprise, amazement. The more unexpected the mystery that is illuminated by the light of thought, the more subtle the interconnections, the essence of which the child gets to, the more joyful surprise, amazement. Long-term observations have convinced me that this feeling contains inexhaustible energy of thought, the source of the will to knowledge, that is, again the same thing that each of us dreams of – the ability to force oneself to think.

In this regard, it is appropriate to recall the words of A. Einstein: “The most beautiful and deepest emotion that we experience is the feeling of mystery. It is the source of all true knowledge. To whom this emotion is alien, who has lost the ability to be surprised and freeze in sacred awe, that can be considered a dead man. In this poetic image is the true essence of what the teacher has to come into contact with at every step. The very essence of the desire to know is a subtle intellectual sense of amazement at the revelation of a mystery. On how subtly this feeling is developed during the years of childhood, the mental development of a person in general depends to a large extent.

Among the children who come to both the preparatory group and the 1st grade, there are some slow-thinking, incapacitated ones. You cannot send them to special schools to study, because they are not mentally retarded and not hopeless in their intellectual development. For many years, these children have been the subject of our close study. The facts convince us that intellectual weakness, inertia, backwardness are always combined with emotional wretchedness, indifference, one might say, the primitiveness of the emotional world. Incapacitated children are first of all incapable of experiencing a thought – at first someone else’s, and then something that, nevertheless, must be revealed by their own exertion of mental efforts. Many years of experience convinces us that treating these children, and their upbringing most of all resembles treatment, requires subtle emotions. Our concern for these children is expressed primarily in their becoming smarter, and only then in their mastering a certain range of mandatory knowledge provided by the program. We teach them to be surprised, to be amazed, and the best school for this is the cradle of thought – nature. The fact that these children learn together with their peers, move from class to class, eventually successfully acquire knowledge (due to the fact that they become smarter), feel their human dignity, become good citizens, workers, fathers and mothers, is decisive. what matters is the cradle of thought — nature.

But the role of nature in mental education is not limited to this. A sharpened, attentive, inquisitive, interested vision of the subtlest relationships between natural phenomena is a powerful tool that sharpens the culture of children’s speech. The development of a child’s speech would be unthinkable without his active communication with nature. In a close, attentive look at the phenomenon of nature, the image, emotion and word merge in an organic unity. This fusion, in my opinion, is what in practice is called the activity of thinking. Nature is able to create a state of spiritual readiness of the child to perceive what you need to put into his mind, make it the property of his thought. In this regard, the classes are very interesting: “Twenty shades of autumn forest decoration – what to call them”, “How the lark sings”, “How a thunderstorm approaches”, “Wheat, sunflower and rose expect rain”, “How flowers meet the sunrise “. In these classes, the thoughts and feelings that excite the child are materialized in the word, and the word, if it has already entered the spiritual world of the child, becomes a stimulus for a new thought. Here, again, we are dealing with one of those subtle things by which a person makes himself think: he wants to say brightly, expressively, precisely—in the final analysis, say beautifully—about beautiful things. Searching for the right word is what it means to force yourself to think. After the “thinking lessons”, our students compose essays, stories, fairy tales. This work is for them one of the most desirable and at the same time intense varieties of that thinking, in which the will, the aspiration comes to the fore.

I am firmly convinced that the volitional side of the process of thinking (the ability to force oneself to think) is unthinkable without inspiration coming from the fusion of thought and feeling of beauty, beauty is primarily in nature, gradually it is discovered by the pupil in work, in human relationships, in the strength of the spirit , in the nobility of the struggle for lofty ideals. The first source of beauty is nature. Nature is the most precise measure of beauty, capable of becoming infinitely subtle. Nature, according to R. Emerson, cannot be taken by surprise slovenly or half-dressed, she is always beautiful. We regard the feeling and understanding of the beauty of nature as the most important prerequisite for a multifaceted active activity that elevates and ennobles a person.

Nature is a source of upbringing

Nature does not educate by itself. It would be in vain, leaving a person alone with nature, to expect that under its influence he will become intelligent, morally beautiful, kind and irreconcilable to evil. It educates only the active interaction of man with nature.

The fact that a person loves nature is not in itself an indicator of his upbringing. The role of nature in moral education cannot be exaggerated, idealized, considered out of touch with the spiritual world of man. The educational role of nature depends on what a person lives for, what he sees good and evil in, what he aspires to, what his ideals are. The role of nature as an educator is ultimately determined by the interaction of man with nature. But interaction is a very complex and subtle thing. It lies in the fact that the child sees and understands nature. “The joy of seeing and understanding is a wonderful gift of nature” – these words of A. Einstein have a deep meaning, but, in my opinion, they cannot be understood in such a way that the child brings the gift of seeing the world to school already ready-made as something invested in a human being already in the womb. The gift to see and understand is brought up, and this requires a lot of work. The meaning of this work lies precisely in the motivation for active interaction with nature.

Our students live in nature; a hundred steps from the school there is a collective farm field on which wheat is growing, sunflowers are blooming, beets are pouring with sweet juice, buckwheat is blooming. Amber bunches of grapes literally look into the classroom windows. We see our important educational task in that the impact with nature becomes a particle of the essence of our pets, enters into their spiritual world as the meaning and purpose of their existence and, which is especially important, is comprehended in close connection with the ideas that the working people. We live among nature, but this would not mean anything if we did not live among the working people and were not part of it. This is the meaning of our interaction with nature, that we strive to be the most sensitive, most receptive we teach children to see and feel the beauty of nature, we educate the mind and the gift of seeing the innermost secrets, we teach to speak clearly, accurately and beautifully – all this is not for oh, to contemplate serenely, and above all, so that they, today’s kids, become anxious, caring, restless hosts; with a real owner, joys are always troublesome, and pleasures are difficult, because they are achieved by labor, sweat, calluses.

We educate our pets to look at nature as a national treasure, passed down from generation to generation, the value of which is incomparable and incomparable with any other values. Our teaching staff considers it extremely important that the child, from the first steps of his conscious life, treats the fertile black soil, on which the child walks and which he may not notice, as a submariner treats the walls of his submarine: he lives as long as these walls are strong and invulnerable. This is one of the red threads of all moral, civil, patriotic education. And if we are talking about the protection of nature, then in the rural school, where nature is not only the environment and conditions of human life, but also one of the most important elements of the productive forces, the struggle for the protection of nature is primarily a struggle for the preservation of fertile soil.

A person can have a strong moral core only on the condition that the measure of everything that he does and strives for is the initial values, and these values ​​are the native land, our socialist system, wealth, carefully preserved and transferred to us by bygone generations . It is important to convince a person from an early age that the losses in the world of these values ​​are irreplaceable. We have two pictures hanging in the hallway of the school. The first picture is a wide, flat field on which wheat is earing. On the horizon is a high Scythian mound. The inscription reads: “So it was sixty years ago. ” The second picture is a ravine that cut through the field like a deep wound. The edges of the ravine threaten to collapse. The earth exposed clay, sand… It’s hard to guess that the picture shows the same field 60 years later. Only the mound on the horizon reminds us of this. Erosion has eaten away more than ten hectares of fertile soil. Under the picture is a caption: “So now. These ten hectares are lost forever. Think, children, teenagers, youths: wheat will never grow here. But if we silently look at this disaster, the elements will gobble up many more hectares. Let’s stop the destruction! Let’s save fertile soil. This wealth of the people is our wealth.”

We teachers were most concerned that children should not treat natural wealth, especially the land – this is the source of all other wealth – as someone else’s. On the contrary, everyone should see in the national wealth his own, concerning me personally, my family. It is necessary to teach to live in such a way that the child takes the fate of the national heritage to heart as deeply personal. So that the personal worries, anxieties, and grief of the child are primarily associated with labor for people. I am firmly convinced that the moral core of a person in general depends on what place in his childish and adolescent world is occupied by worries, anxieties, sorrows, desires, aspirations, arising not from personal needs, but from the interests of other people, from the interests of society.

Natural values ​​are not inexhaustible and endless. We managed to achieve that this idea stirred up the entire school team. We came to the ravine, the image of which the children saw in the picture. A long and difficult struggle began against the destructive forces. Of course, a significant proportion of the work was undertaken by the adults—the kolkhoz machine operators and us teachers, but still the work of the students was of decisive importance here. By their very nature, many labor operations were, as it were, specially designed for children – to prepare small pits for tiny seedlings, then loosen the soil around them.

The educational power of this work lies primarily in the fact that it is not easy and lengthy. Tomorrow you will not see the results of what you did yesterday, in the spring the contours of what you did in the fall are barely noticeable. But interaction with nature, in order for it to become labor, requires duration. Nature is slow, but not a single good effort invested in it remains ineffectual. For several years the ravine seemed the same as always; when we came to the outskirts of the village in the spring and looked from a distance, it gaped like a black wound. But then spring came, and the children saw the ravine differently: it was, as it were, girded with a green ribbon. The moments of contemplation of this beauty gave children, teenagers and young men a special joy. Hard work has become a part of their lives – this is the true meaning of a genuine active interaction with nature.

Nature becomes a powerful educational factor only when a small person, after three or four years of schooling, comes to the conclusion with amazement: the world around me has become richer, more beautiful, and this change of the world is my work, it’s me. Decades have passed. The ravine, which cut the body of the earth with a black wound, was overgrown with oaks. It seemed to have narrowed, disappeared, and nothing threatened the fertile fields around. And the new generations, crossing the threshold of the school, are looking for a new field of application of their forces, come to grips with the destructive elements, go through the school of citizenship, learn to understand the value of natural resources and labor.

The closeness of nature in the conditions of a rural school creates very favorable conditions for a person to start working life as early as possible. This is something more significant than the episodic performance of labor assignments or practical training provided for by the program. Labor life is an organic fusion in a person (already in the years of his childhood and early adolescence) of a thinker, creator, creator, worker of thought and a plowman, a sower, a shepherd, a machine operator, passionately in love with his work, expressing himself in what he created with his own hands. I want to emphasize that if a child from an early age has not become a worker of thought, if he has not been convinced from his own experience that seeing, recognizing, discovering the truth is the same hard work as digging the ground, but digging the ground and sowing grain, harvesting bread and picking grain by grain for sowing is as amazingly wonderful work as thinking, like reading a book, then there can be no talk of any kind of labor education.

We strive to ensure that the entire life of pupils is filled with creation in the natural world. We cannot imagine a full-fledged upbringing without each of our pets turning several tens of square meters of dead clay, a lifeless wasteland into fertile soil over the years of schooling. It is not easy, but necessary work. Thanks to him, a small person, to whom much is still incomprehensible, begins to comprehend the most important idea of ​​the socialist system: true joy opens up before a person when he thinks about the good of other people. It is impossible to convey this idea to the consciousness of a small person by other means. Our task is to ensure that from directly perceived reality, the child comprehends not only knowledge, but also moral ideas. These ideas are comprehended and become personal convictions of a small person only with his complicity – an active desire, a personal desire to do what is not only necessary, beautiful, but also difficult. Vigorous activity gives rise to convictions just when the difficult becomes desirable and is achieved at the cost of exerting one’s strength and overcoming obstacles. If the difficult does not become desirable, convictions cannot be nurtured. Caring for nature requires labor for a long time; and labor directly on the ground, and our teaching, educational.

Preservation and multiplication of natural resources in a rural school is the leading, main aspect of the working life of the team and the individual. The formation of the team, in fact, begins with the fact that children are united by concern for wildlife. According to the tradition that has developed at the school, a team of first-graders establishes their own small fruit nursery, takes care of the fruit trees planted in the first year of study. From the very first year of school life, care begins for field-protective forest plantations, which play an important role in the sparsely forested regions of the South. Already at the age of 10-11 years, children experience the first civic pride, seeing the values ​​created by their hands: small seedlings planted become branchy trees; fruit trees and grapes begin to bear fruit. The collective thought, the collective conviction that thanks to our work the world is becoming better, richer, more beautiful than it was, is a huge ideological force that unites children into a strong community. Long-term experience convinces us that only under the condition that this ideological unity exists does the collective become the most important center of working life. Only those who are proud of the fruits of their labor for society, the people, deeply experience the meaning of the moral concept “should”.

One of the educational tasks of the secondary school is to make work in the countryside, in the midst of nature, attractive, interesting, promising a spiritually rich, rich life already in the years of adolescence and early youth. In my opinion, teachers are mistaken who believe that agricultural work can simply be taught: from their fathers, they say, a teenager will learn the habit of working on the land … A school today is not a school at all if it is not dominated by the spirit of thought that captures adolescents and young adults with the prospect of living more than their daily bread. The thoughts and intellectual interests of the students should extend to the earth, to plants and animals, to that labor which from time immemorial has been accustomed to be called simple. For a young man who masters the riches of culture, who joins art, this work should not seem simple. Teaching and education should be such that labor, the object of which is nature, opens up to an inquisitive and inquisitive person as an exciting, interesting life of the mind. So that the decision to stay in the village is based on the conviction that there is something to think about on earth and life here will be as full and interesting as work in the laboratory, as the work of a doctor, teacher, designer.

The school sees its educational ideal in that its pupils strive to be Leninist true to true science, to their convictions, to be a truly enlightened person. In the unity of labor and thought lies the prospect of further improvement of the teaching and upbringing process in a general education school.

The person we educate strives for an intellectually rich working life. The possibilities for such a life in interaction with nature are inexhaustible. Nature, labor, thought are subjects of special investigation.

// Sov. pedagogy. – 1970. – № 5.

Stories of the finalists of the second season of the competition

Dudko Maria. Keys

So… Tick… So…

The voice of the old grandfather clock from the hallway already met me, but I could not open the door. Well, where are these keys?… Really lost? Only this was not enough, and so the day didn’t work out!.. Ah, no, here it is…

The clock struck eight when I stepped on the creaky parquet of the hallway. How I missed the quietness of my apartment! I just wanted to fall apart on a shabby sofa, and lie there until the morning … But instead, I trudged to the computer. While the old unit, inherited from the dinosaurs, turned on, I made myself coffee. Today you will need more than one mug. Article for the night, and inspiration from gulkin’s nose. They also threaten to make layoffs at work. You can not delay, otherwise the dismissal cannot be avoided. And it would not be bad to update the blog, otherwise the last subscribers will soon scatter. Eh…

I worked in the editorial office of a magazine that was in demand in our district, and in the city in general. The editor – Fedot Stepanovich – always put only the best into print.

The best. Yes. It means not me. For some reason, lately my writing has not been impressive at all. Even myself. Honestly, not surprised. It looks like I’ve lost the spark, like there was nothing to write about. It’s funny somehow: I live in a metropolis, where something happens every day, but I look as if into a void. Other people’s problems ceased to excite, everyone here is a drop in the ocean. So my news is gray, alien, distant and unnecessary, in general, to no one.

What did I write about? As I then still thought, about the important. About eternal, to some extent. I noticed that the people around were so closed that they seemed to stop seeing each other, let alone feel and understand. Everyone at some point withdraws into himself and loses the key to the door he entered. Locks up the heart. Puts on a mask. Indifferent. And silently walks along the gray stones of the pavement…

I just wanted to be heard… I thought I would become the key to the world on this side of the mask. I will help those in need with my word, I will teach people to listen and hear, I will save the world. .. But it seems that something went wrong. And now… Now I don’t even know how to save myself. So in response I get the cry of tearing paper and the famous last warning from the lips of Fedot Stepanych. Last chance. Tomorrow I will not come with a sensation – that’s it. Well… It looks like it’s time to forget about your reasoning for a while and plunge into the world of human intrigues. Write what will be read. What is expected of me. No not like this. What do you expect from an article in our magazine.

What are the stone jungles talking about these days? What is the wind of change carrying along their paved paths? The most discussed topic was a series of strange deaths, however, as is usually the case. For a long time now, criminals taken into custody have been dying one after another. The most different: from simple pickpockets to almost murderers, adults and still teenagers of fourteen years. Most of them haven’t even been sentenced yet. And they all have the same diagnosis – poisoning. What is still a mystery. This happened with some frequency in different parts of the city, but most often in our police department. And, by pure chance, none other than my older brother, officer Yuri Diskarin, worked there.

How I could use his help now… But no. My brother and I don’t get along. And they never got along. It just so happened … Probably, we are just too different. Yurik is secretive, distrustful. He never told me anything, he preferred to do everything himself, and I felt that he did not need me at all. I must have been a little jealous of my brother. He is successful, just the pride of the family, and I grab the last chance to stay at work.

…I’m grabbing my last chance to stay at work. Although … You can try to find out about the high-profile case first hand, so to speak. This, for sure, would interest Fedot Stepanych, but he would have to turn to his brother for help. Yeah … And once again become a loser in the eyes of a whole family. Hell no! Even for the sake of work, I will not ask for the help of this person!

Well, nothing. I prepared, collected materials, now I will write and saved! I manage myself. If only I could make it until the morning…

GO!!!

The sound took me by surprise. It was a signal that the factory was over, from the old watch in the corridor. The matter is fixable. I got up, went to the clock, opened the lid and reached for the key with a familiar gesture. Only the key was missing. What’s the strange thing? In my house, I valued order, but such incidents simply unsettled … What should I do now, look for this lost key? Looks like I’ll have to…

Casting a sad glance at the computer, I began to remember where I could put this old piece of iron. So I have already climbed several shelves, looked into the boxes and …

What is this? There was an envelope in the dresser. And, if I was ready to see the key to the winding mechanism among the socks, with my absent-mindedness, then there’s no strange message at all. Although, maybe I’m too naive? Oh, I don’t like it all. ..

Naturally, I opened the envelope and immediately recognized Yurik’s handwriting.

“I’m not sure I wasn’t followed. Check your mail. I never forgot your birthday!
Yu.»

What jokes? I knew that it was necessary to take away the keys from him when he moved in! Wait, there’s something on the back…

“KeyHole4u…”

I ran my eyes over the hastily written lines again. The text seemed devoid of meaning and meant nothing to me.

What is he? For henbane, it seems, it’s not the season … Just in case, I checked the calendar and made sure that my birthday is not today and not even in the coming days. The only thing that made sense was to check your email.

What am I doing with my time? Before my hand could close the text editor, a window popped up asking if I really wanted to do it. Here, even it mocks…

One letter actually arrived in the mail. So, why is Yurik doing this: invading my house with a strange note and tweeting on the Internet at the same time? After all, isn’t it easier to call? Of course, I would not jump with delight when something would make our little star descend to mere mortals, but why reinvent the wheel?

So I thought as I sipped my cold coffee while waiting for the text to load. Finally, the following lines loomed before my eyes:

“Hello, Egor.

I know you’ll be surprised by my letter, but I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t really serious. I wanted to call, but my new phone didn’t have your number. My number hasn’t changed, if you’re interested…

Let’s get down to business. We need to talk. But the conversation must be face to face. Come today at nine at the intersection of Pskovskaya and Myasnaya, there, in the courtyard of house 26, I will be waiting for you.

It’s about a series of prisoner deaths. Correction, about a series of murders… I thought it might interest you, I’ll explain everything when we meet, of course, if you show up… your fault. But I ask you to believe me one single time. You are my last key to hope. I expect you to read this letter and come.

Your brother Yuri Diskarin

Hmm…

Everything is more and more wonderful, as the heroine of a famous fairy tale used to say. ..

I re-read the message several times to make sure that I had really ceased to understand anything. Except, perhaps, for the fact that some kind of mystery lies in this whole affair, and Yurka for me now is the key to all answers. Besides, since he himself calls me to talk, I will not fail to interview the lead investigator … Unless, of course, this is a stupid attempt at a joke … But it is unlikely that he would write to me for fun.

And what, now it’s raining again, right?.. But he came home! Okay, I’ll figure it out quickly, and I’ll have another six hours for the article … I glanced at the clock, belatedly remembering that this was pointless. Another advertising message comes to the phone, helpfully suggesting that I need to go out if I want to be in time for a meeting. Having extinguished the monitor that had just woken up and abruptly grabbed my raincoat, which had not yet dried out after a day’s walk, I jumped out into the entrance.

Only at the car I hesitated a little. Isn’t it too easy for me to fit in? Just a couple of minutes ago, I was sure that for the sake of my brother I would not lift an eyebrow, and for my own sake I would not mess with him. What did this message do to me?

It filled me with a sense of self-importance. Finally, something depended on me, on me alone! Probably, I was driven by the desire to prove that I was worth something … But I didn’t want to admit such motives. From this, an incomprehensible annoyance settled in my head, but I stubbornly explained it only by the spent time taken away from writing the article.

Stopping at the appointed place, I looked at my watch. Another full five minutes … It was possible to leave later, although … as if it would give me something. Around no one like Yuri.

An unpleasant, vile fog reigned in the street. I hid from him in the car.

The sun has long since set behind the clouds, and the city has lit its fires. Lanterns, not stars. I sometimes thought about how this noisy world lacked stars. Each of them is unique, even though there are billions of them in the darkness of the sky. It’s the same with people, isn’t it? But we almost purposely forget about that, therefore we hide from condemning burning looks from the depths of the immense.

And just now the thought flashed through my head: how often do I myself think about others? It would seem that constantly …

I digressed from philosophical reflections to look at the time. Five minutes. There was no one even humanoid in sight, the yard was empty.

Ten… I’m checking my phone, mail. Not a line about being late.

Twenty! No, it’s not serious anymore! I shouldn’t have come… Nervously dialing a number, preparing a scathing speech. In response, only long beeps are heard. Okay… Let’s wait… You never know. He’s got a job too… Trying to calm down seems to be working until I remember that damned article never started! Where the hell are these fools?!

“I’m waiting another fifteen minutes and I’m leaving” – I angrily type a message and press “Send” furiously.

Time is running out and the message has not even been read! Twenty-five minutes… thirty… Still silence. There is no point in waiting any longer.

To clear my conscience, I call again. A melodious female voice is heard from the handset:

– The device of the called subscriber is turned off or is out of network coverage … – the lady says, slowly repeating the phrase in English.

– Damn you! .. – hissing irritably, I throw the phone on the next seat. – So… Okay… I warned you, I waited… waited longer than promised. Now you can go home with a clear conscience.

Looking down the road, I was surprised to find that I was not so much angry as nervous. It pissed me off even more…

***

There was less and less time left for work, and I continued to pace the apartment. Usually such a calm creak of the floorboards now mocked my poor hearing with all its might. It was by no means the article that occupied my thoughts, despite the fact that they would not forgive me if I screwed up such material. ..

Minutes passed slowly. I felt them even without the usual ticking of the clock. OK. I will be frank with myself, because my strength is no more, and then to work! All this is strange! What exactly? That I couldn’t get through. Yura does not turn off the phone and diligently monitors its charge, he should always be in touch, should I, as a brother, know about this. Also this line from that note, it is no coincidence that it is the very first …

So… don’t panic. What the hell is this blockhead in general so businesslike settled in my head?! Anything happens. Everything! Article. Only an article.

By an effort of will, I managed to sit down in front of the monitor and even write a couple of lines before I again plunged into thought. And yet… what could have happened?..

***

The days raced by like clockwork, but not mine. I never found the key, and I haven’t tried, to be honest, since that evening. They froze, showing half past nine, as if that day had not yet passed. I didn’t show up for work the next morning. I don’t believe it myself… how could I put everything on the altar for the sake of a person whom I was mortally envious of, whose disappearance I dreamed of… the one whom I had known all my life and with whom I was still connected invisibly?!..

And the apartment! Oh… if the old me had seen what my temple of comfort had turned into… however, he would have shot himself right away, leaving behind only the gloomy aesthetics of a broken creator… All the tables were cluttered with dirty mugs and fast food packages. The entire floor is full of shoe marks. Here and there were meticulously compiled lists of those with whom my brother could communicate, where he could go, who could wish him harm…

But none of that mattered anymore…

“- Egor Diskarin? – I heard a calm male voice from my phone this morning.

– Yes. I answered nervously.

– The police are bothering you – my heart threatened to break my chest. It must be from stress and lack of sleep … And in the meantime, in my head: “If only they could find …”.

– Your brother was found today at noon, – a slight pause, as if to realize what was said, – He is dead. The circumstances of death are being investigated. – just as calmly, as if nothing had happened, the man on the other end of the wire continues. – We offer our condolences. Today you should come to the department … ”

Followed by instructions and occasional questions to which I answered things like “yes”, “no” and “understood”. Be afraid of your desires. Found…

I spent the next half day in the same department. Some papers, some formalities, a funeral… And a conversation.

From that conversation I learned something that struck me. Yura was suspect. They said that he killed the prisoners by slipping poison into their food or something like that. There was not much evidence, so they only planned to arrest him, but now the main version of my brother’s death is suicide during an attempt to escape from justice. What heresy… But at that moment I could not object anything. Exactly like believing even a single word.

And now I’m back in my home again. Devastated, with only one thought in his head: “he is no more”…

What are words? A set of letters, a set of sounds, nothing more… But some become keys. This key with three heavy teeth will open one of the most terrible doors: the door of despair and pain. Maybe I should have phrased it a little more bluntly? But as? What would it change? There is only one key, no matter how you decorate it, and there is only one door, and you are standing on the threshold. You can’t go back. And the castle succumbed. Started…

I look around the apartment with a detached look, slowly falling into a rage.

– Damn! – comes out of the chest. How long have I not uttered this word, – Damn! – I repeat louder, clasping my hands sharply. My whole army of mugs is flying down to the sound of glass. A blanket of scribbled sheets covers them from above.

– Dunce! Brat! Freak! I scream, not remembering myself.

– Look… Look what you’ve done, you bastard! I lost everything because of you! Inspiration! Work! Dreams! How can I pay my bills now? I’ve wasted so much time on you, damn it, even the key to the clock… – the silence hurt my ears, so I continued to throw empty phrases, trying to throw out everything that had accumulated inside me. My voice broke, growled and wheezed, turned into hysterical laughter, and I didn’t even understand why I was so angry … At myself?

Yes… I was jealous of my brother in black! The pride of the family, a great future, office authority, lofty goals, a dream job – everything I wanted to hear about myself, I heard about Yurashi! I remained his little brother, always second, always underestimated. It was an axiom that everything was easy for him. But for some reason it did not occur to me that we were actually brothers. Our conditions were the same. And I seemed to be blind, I did not see what he had to go through. And what did I do when I got tired of being a shadow? Exactly. He erected that very wall, the wall of indifference. I didn’t care. And there is one more drop in the ocean. It was not Yura who closed himself off from me, but I from him. And what did it lead to? “He is no more,” and I can’t even say with certainty that I’m not the brother of the killer! And all because I don’t know! I don’t know how he lived all these years, I don’t know what was going on in his soul, I don’t know if he called me to stop the rumors in the bud, or to repent of what he had done even a little to his own creature, albeit such a vile one, how I … And I will probably never know, my key to this secret is forever lost … What a blockhead I am … What are all my arguments about feelings, words, stars, but all about the same keys worth now! How could I have changed the world when I myself could not find those vices for which I reproached mankind?! That’s why my articles weren’t being read. When changing the world, start with yourself, otherwise everything is empty words. Gray, alien, distant and unnecessary, in general, no one … Such words will not become keys … Keys … I return to them over and over again. Oh, this world is really crazy about them! We have the keys to everything, they are even where we don’t think to find them, because they have entered our lives so deeply that everything now rests on them alone, and we don’t even notice. Yes, and life itself is like a constant picking of locks! But even that is not important. The important thing is that there is no key leading from There. This is what gives meaning to all other keys. No matter how hard I try, I won’t start Yurik’s time again like the old clock. But who knows from what doors, I would have taken him away, if only I was there … It’s a pity, I realized it too late …

– I’ll never sit down to write again… – I said to myself, almost delirious, barely recognizing my own hoarse voice. After that, I fell asleep and didn’t think about anything anymore.

***

I spent the next day almost without getting up. Only in the evening I somehow tried to eliminate the consequences of my yesterday’s insanity … But the attempt was nipped in the bud, as soon as the very note that I found among the socks caught my eye … Surprisingly, all the time while I was busy looking for my brother, I almost did not remember her, as a thing that does not carry any meaning in itself. But there were so many questions connected with it! I re-read it. As expected, nothing new appeared … And yet … Why was she needed?

I immersed myself in the memory of the day when I lost the key to the clock, which was so silent for the last week… It seems that since that time I have not turned on the computer… How is it, my old man?

The legacy of the ancestors, as expected, grumbled and buzzed at my long absence, but in the end they had mercy and opened my e-mail page for me. Yurik’s letter has not disappeared anywhere. I didn’t reread it. One thing is a note with unclear text, and another is an invitation to a meeting that was not destined to take place . ..

“Check your mail…” echoed in my ears. The sudden realization made me jump. What if… This strange text on the back is nothing but a username?..

What nonsense… I’m chasing again, I don’t know what… Stupid assumption! But my hands can’t be stopped…

Hastily logging out of my account, I typed the characters into the appropriate box. But you need a password… Password… Another stupid thought… “I never forgot your birthday!” I enter.

Only one digit changed on the monitor, but I didn’t believe it. This eternity could not last for one miserable minute.

– It worked… – I said, looking into this luminous box in a frenzy. Another account. And only one letter.

The entire apartment fell into absolute silence as I read what was written here.

“Egor, I knew that you would solve my message! Help out, brother! I need you, we all need you!

For several months now I have been busy with the death of several criminals in custody. These are not just deaths, Yegor, these are murders. I’m sure I got very close to the solution. I have two prime suspects. But there’s a problem. Both of them are my work colleagues. And I don’t know if any of them acted alone or in concert. In other words, I don’t know who in the police force I can trust with regards to this case.

Also, I notice that I am being watched. Apparently, the attacker feels that I got too close, and will soon try to eliminate me. Well, that’s what I use to pinpoint the culprit. How? I told one of us about our upcoming meeting. If I guessed right, and he’s not a criminal, then you don’t have to read this, I’ll tell you everything myself. But, if I made a mistake, and you are still reading this, then most likely I am already dead …

Brother, now only you can solve this case. And only you can I trust him. To this letter I will attach documents in which my evidence is collected, there you will find the details of the plan, all the names, all the evidence. Publish them in your journal, let everyone know, and then the villains will have nowhere to go! I hope for you. I know you won’t let me down…”0796

For some reason, my heart skipped a beat. Brother… I won’t let you down!

***

Never say never. For the next few days, I did not let go of the keyboard. I know, I promised myself, for writing, no, no, but the last, last time! For Yurik! This will be my best article…

And it really became the best. Where did I get it from? Just my blog would not be enough for such an important mission. So I had to visit Fedot Stepanovich. I almost begged him on my knees to read my work. But he still read it. Read it and put it on the first page!

A few days later I had to go to our police station again. There, of course, there are again formalities, thanks, apologies … But they did not interest me. He was arrested. I wanted to talk to him. With a killer. I wanted to look into his eyes. For help in solving the case, I was even allowed to do so.

I was taken to a special room. He sat opposite me and froze with his cold gaze. But there was nothing in the eyes… He was… Empty. However, the first one spoke.

– Because I saw how souls died, – he answered my question before I had time to ask it, – Every criminal who was brought here did not set foot on this path from a good life. The world has treated them cruelly. It’s wild, but for some, crime is still a way to survive. Not for everyone… But I didn’t talk to everyone. Do you know why? Because they don’t listen, you know? And when I talked to them in this very room, they just wanted to be heard … And I listened to them, watching how the eyes on the contrary go out, and how hopelessness penetrates into the very heart. They had not yet been sentenced, but they no longer believed that something could be changed. Outcasts of humanity. They could only hide in themselves and wait for the end. Then I gave them the key to freedom. An ampoule with poison, as the end of all torment. You won’t understand, must be…

– And now, being in their place, would you like the same? I asked quietly. My interlocutor was silent. And I continued, – Do you know why? Because there is no key from there. And while you’re alive, you can still fix it…

We talked with him for a while, and then I went outside. It was already getting dark and the lights were on. The downpour threw fragments of stars right under my feet, and they flared for a moment with earthly human light, breaking on the wet asphalt. I silently walked along the gray stones of the pavement, finally throwing off my indifferent mask. Raindrops on my cheeks from something became salty. His image stood before my eyes. Indifference. The way I saw him once on Bolotnaya Square – not seeing, not hearing, impregnable. The source of human vices. I wanted to run away from him, and I even ran, as if it could help. God! Who would have known that it hurts so much to open your heart to the world! The dialogue with the murderer still sounded in his thoughts, and his brother’s voice echoed in his soul. But, if you were already hiding from all this behind a wall of indifference, then only after going through this pain you can go back, again know the truth. Insults, murders, wars… How many more lives will be shed before each of us conquers this evil in ourselves? The hearts of the people are closed and the key is lost. But what can I do?..

I thought about it already at the entrance, slowly going up the stairs. Perhaps… No, but I promised myself… And yet…

Keys. I could turn words into keys. I could write again. Opening people’s hearts and helping to cope with pain. No, I’m not going back to the editorial office. No articles. I will write a book. I can’t shut up now. “It’s decided!” I thought as I opened the door. But first…

Slowly, slowly, I picked up the key from the floor. He opened the glass door. Inserted into the well. And turned. The voice of the old grandfather clock in the hallway greeted me again. He said, fix it …

Tick… Tick… Tick. ..

110 most important films of the 2010s: Afisha’s choice – Afisha-Kino

June 3, 2022

Idea: Evgeny Tkachev. Texts: Evgeny Tkachev, Alexei Filippov, Natalya Serebryakova, Ekaterina Zagvozkina, Farid Bektemirov, Arseniy Omelchenko, Eduard Golubev, Yegor Belikov

June 3, 2022

By the end of the tenths, it began to be very feverish against the backdrop of social, gender, racial, epidemiological and industrial changes. What marked the passing era? The comic book boom, the rise of national cinematography, black (African-American and African) cinema, female gaze (female gaze and direction), Oscar victory for Asian cinema, post-colonial discourse and the rise of streaming services due to COVID-19cinemas are gone from our lives, and streaming is firmly entrenched in it, much faster than expected. So, a year ago it was difficult to name the killer of superhero blockbusters. Now his name is known – coronavirus. Summing up the results of the decade, Afisha has compiled a voluminous, but not exhaustive, of course, list of the most significant (not the best, but significant) films of the 2010s, which, in our opinion, are indicative markers of their time.

• Start

  Detective, Thriller, Sci-Fi, Drama

  Christopher Nolan’s puzzle (as they say) blockbuster, the apogee of his pseudo-intellectual creative method “. The story about a thief (Leonardo DiCaprio), who, together with his team, penetrates the brains of people, was presented as a new “Matrix”, but turned out to be a pretentious and incredibly stupid robbery movie. After this picture, it somehow became obvious that Nolan has a square-nested consciousness, and his younger brother Jonathan, a screenwriter who made a career on television with smaller budgets, is responsible for the depth in his films. Nevertheless, the visual side of Inception turned out to be so breakthrough and revolutionary (the same spectacular skyscrapers folded into an accordion only in Doctor Strange six years later) that this movie staked out Christopher’s status as the main thinker in the world of blockbusters, and it took exactly ten years to finally debunk that image: his next magnum opus, Tenet, flopped at the box office, even though the director (and not only him) understandably blames the coronavirus.

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• Toy Story: The Great Escape

  Animation, Adventure, Comedy, Children’s

  The Burning Bush of Pixar Animation the series, for a moment, came out in 1995!). However, its peak is still the third film (the only animated triquel to win an Oscar), in which the cowboy Woody and his friends first fall into a metaphysical hell (kindergarten), and then almost burn in a real hellish flame (from the danger of their saves naturally the hand of the Lord). It is also in this part that the farewell of toys to their owner, the boy Andy, takes place, and the story could have ended there, but against the backdrop of a femme turn in art, everyone remembered the shepherdess Bo Peep, undeservedly merged by the screenwriters, and the franchise also received a fourth, perhaps , the most feminist series.

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• Monsters

  Thriller, Fantasy, Drama

  Low-budget sci-fi that proves fantasy is not money but fantasy

  Feature-length debut for Gareth Bros. Bros. and Rogue One for Disney, but at studio capacity, it will never come close to the greatness of its first film. According to the plot, a research rocket with alien samples falls over Central America, as a result of which half of Mexico is quarantined, and the local fauna acquires a new species – giant octopuses. Under these conditions, an American photojournalist (Scoot McNairy) agrees to escort a frightened tourist (Whitney Able) to the safe zone. Made for pennies (the budget was only $500,000), this film is clear proof that it is not a lot of money that is needed to make fiction, but brains and fiction. At the same time, “Monsters” is not just fiction, but social fiction. Edwards needs giant alien octopuses in order to allegorically show the difficult relationship between South America and the United States (and also who the monsters are in reality on this planet). Ten years later, Andrew Patterson will pull off a similar formalist trick in Endless Night, where he will cross the Twilight Zone with a story of growing up.

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• Fang

  Drama

  A strange Greek film about children who think that a flower is a “zombie” directors with the appropriate residence permit, who filmed at the turn of the decades, and then fled to other countries and mediums: Yorgos Lanthimos became the main star of Plato’s homeland and left to shoot in English, Athena Raquel Tsangari moved to television (see the TV series “Trigonometry” about polyamory), the rest of the names are less sonorous. The absurd story about children who are raised by parents in isolation and a distorted view of the world (in particular, they call things by other than their proper names) turned out to be toothy and capacious enough for the smeared Greek flavor to sound original, but universal. The overprotectiveness and paranoia of elders, programming the potential of language and reality as a mosaic of pre-established matrices – Lanthimos bit the basic human institution so thoroughly and elegantly that not only the Cannes Prize (in the Un Certain Regard program) became natural, but also a renewed interest in Greek cinematography.

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• Social network

  Biography, Drama

  Biography of the founder of Facebook in the genre of a mocking feuilleton

  In past films by David Fincher, someone was cut off his head or at least smashed it in hand-to-hand combat. But at the beginning of the 2000s, he will make one of the most exciting films of the decade, in which there is nothing of the kind. The main characters are geeks, the struggle is at the negotiating table, surrounded by lawyers. Fincher was the first to understand everything about the new decade – all the most interesting things will go to social networks and desktops: scandals begin there, popularity and success are measured by likes, and if not all life is there, then at least half of it (later this idea will be brought to limit Timur Bekmambetov – see “Remove from friends”). The film asserts new characters (computer geniuses), new stars (Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield and Armie Hammer all get big movie tickets), and new ideas about drama. A special thanks goes to Aaron Sorkin for this, who once again proves that he is one of the most sought-after and time-conscious screenwriters in the world.

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• Boonmi’s uncle who remembers his past lives

  Fantasy, Tragicomedy

  The story of the illusory life, the triumph of Thai cinema

  A man named Boonmi suffers from kidney failure and will die soon . He decides to spend the last months of his life with relatives in the village. There he reflects on the causes of his illness, spoiled karma and past incarnations. On his dying journey, he is accompanied by the ghost of his dead wife and his son, who disappeared many years ago, who appeared in the guise of a beast. At the end of the film, Bunmi finds the cave where he was born for the first time, where he wants to end his current life. In the course of the story, various mystical events take place that reflect Thai mythology, including sex with a carp in a pond. Apichatpong Weerasethakun wrote the script based on the story of a real person named Bunmi, who once lived in the director’s hometown. The abbot of the local Phra Sripariyatteveti monastery, impressed by the stories of Bunmi, wrote and published at 1983 book “The Man Who Could Remember His Previous Lives”. Weerasethakun took as a basis only the concept itself and composed his own plot based on it, retaining the name of the protagonist. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the first such prize in the history of Thai cinema. The name Viracetakuna has even become a household name in its own way, denoting a man of genius.

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• The Tree of Life

  Fantasy, Drama

  Terrence Malick’s non-narrative film about life and death

  A child dies, it is hard for mother, father and brother to come to terms with it. Jack, one of the brothers (played by Sean Penn as an adult), tries to question God, but they take him back to the past. There, Jack is an 11-year-old boy who observes the world with purity and spontaneity. Mother (Jessica Chastain) teaches her son to be kind and selfless love, father (Brad Pitt) is tougher, hardens his character. Gradually, the family gets poorer and is forced to leave their home. With The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick began his experiments in non-narrative cinema. It only seems that the film has a plot, in fact it is very difficult to trace and isolate it between the frames of the setting sun, majestic trees, circling children, dinosaurs (!) and conversations with God. Malik seems to have had a hyper-ambitious idea – to show the entire cycle of life on Earth, from inception to the present day. He did not have time to finish the picture for the Cannes Film Festival in 2010, so the premiere took place on it a year later. The audience booed the film, which did not prevent him from receiving the Palme d’Or. And it’s true: the amazingly beautiful shots of cameraman Emmanuel Lubezki to the heartbreaking music of Alexandre Desplat can melt even the most callous heart. At the same time, Tye Sheridan plays the deceased boy – well, how can you not burst into tears?

  5

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• Melancholia

  Fantasy, Drama

  Perhaps the most perfect film by Lars von Trier everything annoys her. For those who, for some reason, have so far shied away from meeting the little-known Scandinavian author, this film, like Bergman’s “Shame” or Woody Allen’s “Match Point”, is a good reason to change the principles and inquire. Masterfully conceived, working more for a wow effect than an attempt to gut the viewer (many have traditionally had problems with this Trierian manner), Melancholia is almost an advertising brochure for the Dane’s bizarre 20-year career.

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• Rise of the Planet of the Apes

  Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Drama

  Successful reboot of a 1960s franchise, triumph of CGI technology

  but 20th Century Fox returned to the idea, appointing Rupert Wyatt to the director’s chair. The task is ambitious: “Rebellion” marked the beginning of at least a trilogy, conceived as a preface to the original story of Pierre Boulle and its film adaptations. The classic story is also likely to be reshot – this is not Star Wars, where 20-30 years can pass between trilogies. Wyatt laid the foundation for the future franchise, while avoiding revolutionary sentiment, biblical references and retelling the history of mankind in the format of a monkey theater (sometimes military operations). More precisely, all this in the film is still in microdoses, and the focus is on the friendship of the scientist Will (James Franco) and his experimental ward chimpanzee Caesar (Andy Serkis), on whom he is testing a cure for Alzheimer’s. What follows is a brief history of the acquisition of (civil) consciousness and the beginning of a new era in which the apes are not going to endure any longer. At the same time, it is obvious that monkeys are not only a possible past, but also a probable future of mankind. A classic test of empathy: is a person capable of defeating anthropocentrism in the face of total death.

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• Artist

  Romcom

  Silent black-and-white film about a Hollywood star, Oscar 2011

  Jean Dujardin in the title role. But when the silent black-and-white film won an Oscar in 2011, everyone started talking about Hazanavicius. He again shot his favorite Dujardin – this time in the role of luxurious handsome George Valentine, a silent film star, confident in his own irresistibility. One day, George meets Pippi Miller (Berenice Bejo), an awkward young actress, and makes her patronage in Hollywood. By coincidence, it is she who will play a fatal role in the fate of the movie star. For this picture, Dujardin received personal awards (best male role) at the 64th Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Globe. The public and film critics also noticed the rising star Berenice Bejo, who later starred in other Hazanavicius films. In addition, the dog Uggie became famous all over the world, who played George’s dog in the film, who saved him from a fire. Uggie got his canine Oscar, but, unfortunately, has already died of old age.

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  Buy tickets

• Nader and Simin divorce

  Drama

  The most awarded Iranian film (almost 60 international awards, including Oscar)

  Nader (Peyman Maadi) and Simin (Leyla Khatami) are getting divorced, but what begins as “Kramer vs. Kramer” or (from the more recent) “Marriage Story” quickly escalates into a condemnation of the Iranian system. Asghar Farhadi’s film is not about divorce, it is about its consequences. To look after his ailing father, Nader, a walking personification of toxic masculinity, hires a pregnant nurse (Sareh Bayat), who fails to do her job, he pushes her out onto the stairwell, she has a miscarriage, and Nader is accused of murder. The main question is: did the man know about the pregnancy? So we can say that Farhadi’s film is also a detective story with Hitchcockian suspense, but pretty spiced with social issues, as if with hot spices. Of course, this is a masterfully directed movie, but still somewhat manipulative: it knows what to press and what to hit, but they don’t give Oscars for anything else.

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• Banned Reception

  Action, Thriller, Fantasy

  The most beautiful femme blockbuster of the 10s

  After Watchmen and before the DC Cinematic Universe Zach “This is Sparta!” Snyder shot, perhaps, his most authorial project – a grandiose glossy comic-mochilovo “Forbidden Reception”, in which a group of girls, trying to escape from a mental hospital, ended up on the fields of fictitious battles. What cannot be taken away from Snyder is visual expressiveness. His “Forbidden Reception” looks like a visionary twin of Nolan’s “Beginning”, a dream of an extraordinary person. And the soloist in this hallucinogenic reality is Dolly (Emily Browning), who, with the power of her imagination, turns One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest into an action game with giant samurai, orcs, dragons, robots and Kaiser zombies. What is it, if not a forbidden reception?

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• Infection

  Thriller, Fantasy, Drama

  Soderbergh’s visionary thriller with a bunch of Hollywood stars

  . Then everyone shrugged their shoulders – well, horror story and horror story, Soderbergh is a master of almost any genre, nothing special. Ten years passed, and it turned out that this little thriller predicted almost everything (after all, the director had very good scientific advisers!). Naturally, Contagion’s views skyrocketed on iTunes, and it became the hottest movie of the late 2010s because it turned out to be the reality we all already live in.

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• Raid

  Action, Thriller, Crime

  Almost two hours of non-stop hacking

  A detachment of Jakarta special forces storm the house where the drug lord has settled. The plot of The Raid, in principle, can be described in one sentence, but the impact that it had on the action genre could not. Welsh director Gareth Evans (The Apostle, Gangs of London) came to Indonesia to first film Merantau with Iko Uwais, then with him, one of the most gripping, brutal and beautiful action films of the decade (the other is called John Wick) ), as well as to tell the whole world about such a national Malaysian martial art as pencak-silat. As a result, the Raid dilogy turned into a cultural phenomenon (and Judge Dredd, released a year later, looked like a plagiarism against its background), Iko Uwais became a new action star, and the team working on the film continued to shoot ultra-violent and bloody films: also on their account, “Raid: A Bullet in the Head”, which has nothing to do with the original franchise, and “The Night Comes for Us” for Netflix, which set a bar of cruelty that not everyone can withstand.

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• Cabin in the woods

  Thriller, Horror

  Revolutionary horror that turned the rules of the game upside down

  This also applies to horror films. “Cabin in the Woods”, which was advertised with the slogan “Do you think it’s a familiar story?”, It starts really familiar: a group of guys (bitch, jock, junkie, shy, and so on) find themselves in a cabin in the forest. However, what awaits them is not a meeting with a family of maniacs or an evil spirit, but something much more interesting. Director Drew Goddard realized even before the dawn of Netflix that we live in an age where entertainment is one of the main commodities. We love to get our nerves tickled while we sit comfortably in front of our laptop – reality shows and all streaming services work for this. But how far will we reach, indulging passions for sharp (and completely safe) sensations? The conceptual horror “The Cabin in the Woods” is a kind of warning and prediction: to the last.

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• Prometheus

  Action, Fiction, Horrors, Drama

  Haita Mighty Puperion Ridley Scott to the “Alien”

  When Ridley Scott decided to clarify the mythology of the “alien” of the prequels, fans of the universal and rendered. , and tensed up, although both of them hardly expected such a radical authorial gesture, in vain recorded by many as failures. In Prometheus, Scott ascends Olympus to zero humanity with its godlike ambitions (robots, artificial intelligence, space colonization!). Despite the stylistic similarities of fonts and interiors, Prometheus is anti-Alien in the sense that it describes an encounter not with the conventionally diabolical, but with the equally conventionally divine. The long-standing dream of mankind to see the creator turns into a nightmare, and for this the director chooses the detached intonation of the ancient tragedy with its helplessness of the rational in front of fate (popularly known as “problems with logic”). In The Testament, Scott continues to calculate the history of the Alien in accordance with the cultural matrices of earthlings: biblical references, equally skeptical of human pride, have replaced antiquity. But it turned out to be difficult to appreciate the beauty of the idea (to give the replicants stages of human history) and the scale of the author’s will (this is an absolute author’s blockbuster). From the prequels continue to wait for “Alien”.

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• Holy Motors Corporation

  Drama

  Denis Lavant tries on dozens of roles in Leos Carax’s film

  white limousine. The role of Monsieur Oscar is played by director Leos Carax’s favorite actor, Denis Lavant, who has been Leos’ alter ego all his directorial life. Taking on the roles of a banker, Alex’s killer (Alex Dupont is Carax’s real name), Monsieur Shit (known from the short “Tokyo!”), A dying uncle, a strict father, a man living with a chimpanzee, and so on, Laban, in fact, sometimes unbearable in his clownery, pretentious acting. It is clear that he portrays Carax himself, his sad sarcasm and sometimes flat humor in relation to the world order. The skeptical viewer will resist this session of soulful striptease, a deeply depressing outlook on life throughout the film. But just before the credits, everything falls into place – a photograph of Katya Golubeva and a dedication in Russian “To you, Katya. ” A few years ago, Karax lost his wife and, after 13 years of silence, made a new film that he dedicated to her. The film, which is like nonsense and which is accused of excessive cinephilia, is actually a bitter personal statement about how you can actually live when you have already died. Karax repeats in an interview that he makes films for the dead, and this is the saddest truth in the world. This film is temperature nonsense and this is the place where Carax lives. And the next morning after watching, the piercing song of Kylie Minogue sounds in my head – just like after watching another film by Carax, “Paul X”, the mind is cut by the heartbreaking voice of Katya Golubeva, wandering through the night forest.

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• The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

  Adventure, Fantasy

  Return to Middle-earth from the main Hollywood storyteller

  In the early 1910s, he did the same trick with the humble tale The Hobbit, with mixed results. Someone was sick of 60 FPS (a format that makes the movie look like a telly, so you can see false ears), someone seemed to drag out the second trilogy (after all, the idea to inflate a small fairy tale up to nine hours was initially doubtful). Be that as it may, even if The Hobbit is inferior to The Lord of the Rings, still no one else knows how to shoot an adventure movie like Jackson. The resurrection of the hedgehog, the fight on the barrels, the battle with the dragon and the song of the dwarfs that goosebumps remain in my memory; besides, the very first part – “An Unexpected Journey” – really turned out great!

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• Ralph

  Animation, Comedy, Family

  Disney’s premier cartoon of the 10s

  The story of Ralph the Goon, the legendary arcade game hero who is unable to accept his villainous role, the Keeks racers the game “Sweet fast and the furious.” Imbued with the spirit of the French existentialists, the cartoon speaks in childish language about completely non-childish topics, such as self-acceptance (“I’m bad – and that’s good. I won’t be good – and that’s good”) and the value of friendship. In the sequel, the heroes (the girl wants change, as expected) go to the Internet – an unimaginably beautiful space, as it seems to them, where Vanellope meets the same cheerful and persistent like-minded people. For a detailed study of the female theme in the cartoon, a flock of Disney princesses is responsible, who complain to the baby that their life in a fairy tale is getting better only with the arrival of a man, and then they make an important breakthrough: they take off their corsets and change into sweatpants and hoodies. But besides the liberation of princesses, which is extremely relevant in the era of #MeToo, their desire to get rid of patriarchal outfits, the cartoon has a more eternal theme, to which the authors of the cartoon approach from an unexpected angle. The strangest thing in the dilogy (in the second part it becomes more obvious) is the relationship between Ralph and Vanellope. They seem to be platonic, but they still have a sexual connotation (given the different ages of the characters – quite perverse). All this gives reason to speculate about whether true friendship between representatives of different sexes is possible without sexual attraction and whether true friendship is possible at a distance.

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• The Master

  Drama

  The story of the strange relationship between the leader of the cult and his follower

  Paul Thomas Anderson again loudly declared himself after a rather gloomy film “Oil”. In the story, the demobilized sailor Freddie (Joaquin Phoenix) with a mysterious past cannot find a place in post-war America. He gets a job in a photo studio, at his leisure preparing alcoholic cocktails that are dangerous to health. So one of those who have consumed the drink is poisoned, and Freddie has to flee from the atelier. He accidentally meets the charismatic creator of a religious cult, the famous writer and philosopher Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). To the surprise of the adherents of fashionable doctrine, their guru makes the aggressive outcast his closest assistant. As the new faith gains fans, Freddie begins to question what he believes in and who his mentor really is. The film was a commercial failure, failing to recoup the funds spent on its production. However, even before the release, critics called him one of the key contenders for the 2013 Oscars, although he ended up without awards. Actors Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman were recognized as the best at the Venice Film Festival, and director Anderson was also awarded the Silver Lion for Best Director at the same place.

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• Love

  Drama

  For strong as death…

  The most penetrating and sensual film by Michael Haneke, thanks to which the great Austrian cynic received the second Palme d’Or, which, by the way, , unprecedented luxury for the Cannes show. Eighty-year-old spouses Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and Anna (Emmanuelle Riva) are quietly living out their lives. But one morning Anna has a stroke, then another. After an unsuccessful operation, the woman is paralyzed, she begins to lose her mind, but before that she begs her husband not to send her back to the hospital for anything. Georges begins to personally care for his wife, but gradually he goes crazy from the burden of responsibility, claustrophobia – almost all events take place in the interior of a Parisian apartment – and, of course, love. By the age of 70, Haneke managed to rebuild his creative method and achieve a reference simplicity, as in the music of his favorite composer Schubert, which periodically sounds in the background of the film. No complex structure, postmodernism, flirting with the context and lofty talk about God – just painfully life process of unstoppable dying. But the heart of what is happening is still Jean-Louis Trintignant. The great French artist has already faced death, outliving both of his daughters: Pauline suffocated in the cradle, and Marie was crushed by a jealous lover. Therefore, the face of Trintignant, full of suffering and sorrow, especially in the most terrible finale, is not just a successful hit in the image, but a personal experience that is beyond art and makes Love one of the main films in general.

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• Spring Breakers

  Tragicomedy

  Harmony Corinne’s ode to the American dream under speed

  drugs (already in the 2000s, he would make a film with the eloquent title “Fuckers of garbage cans”). In the tenth, Korine returns with Spring Breakers. Now his characters are adults – four students (one of them played by Selena Gomez) who have spring break and want to have fun. Their new acquaintance, a gangster with gold teeth (James Franco), has the same goal. This is a movie about the American dream under speed, in which everything is twisted to the limit – acid colors (swimsuits, pool water, hair), dubstep, banknotes and shell casings flying in the air. This is an ode to hedonism, which not only does not recognize moral and legal boundaries, but thinks little about them – Korin himself came up with the best metaphor for him: in one of the scenes, his half-dressed heroines shoot into the air from an abundance of feelings. This is a movie about the desire to have fun forever, go on endless vacations and hide from responsibility, which in tenths swept the whole world.

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• Great beauty

  Tragicomedy

  Criticism of the bourgeois dog from the most glossy director Paolo Sorrentino

  journalist Jep Gambardella (Tony Servillo). In the center of a loud party seasoned with modern music, he observes the decay and decline of the bourgeoisie, which is a bunch of empty people. Jep Gambardella is a brilliant writer and bestselling author of The Human Apparatus. Soon he learns about the death of his first and, in fact, only love, who confessed in his diary that only Jep had been waiting all his life. From that moment on, Gambardella begins to think about the years he has lived, to ask himself the sacramental question: “Have I wasted this very life?” One of the most notable films of the 66th Cannes Film Festival. In 2014, the film won an Oscar and a Golden Globe in the Best Foreign Language Film category. Critics noted that the film is a free remake of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Paolo Sorrentino spoke about the bourgeoisness of the Italian capital, ridiculing its ugliness and kitsch, which do not give an outlet for genuine culture.

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• She

  Science Fiction, Melodrama

  Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with the voice of Scarlett Johansson

  Spike Jonze, in another of his fantasies, came up with the main drama of our time about love between a person and an operating system. Joaquin Phoenix, not yet the main actor of our time at the time, but a rising star, plays an author who writes postcards and letters for other people and in friendly, thoughtful and endlessly deserted interiors of the near future (the Hong Kong of the present is responsible for them), trying to heal from mental trauma, begins an affair with a voice assistant (in principle, this is not surprising – she speaks in the voice of Scarlett Johansson). Their final dialogues before parting are the end of Titanic for zoomers and millennials.

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• Through the Snow

  Action, Sci-Fi, Drama

  Post-apocalyptic masterpiece about a train without brakes

  from Donald Trump to Gennady Zyuganov, and above all the author of “Memories of a Murder”, warmly received by critics, but much less known. In 2013, he shoots his first English-language film – Through the Snow. Across the world, after a climate catastrophe, covered with ice, a train travels at great speed, its passengers are the last survivors on the planet. The train is an obvious metaphor for a class society (in another film of the tenth decade, instead of it there will be a skyscraper): in the tail, in the mud and cramped conditions, the poor ride, in the first class – the elite and government officials. The carriages are a little more than full of top-notch artists (Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, Octavia Spencer, Ed Harris, etc.), accompanied by director Song Kang-ho’s favorite actor. Bong Joon Ho made a movie that was both spectacular and edifying at the same time and pleased everyone – both critics and those who love to watch Chris Evans wield an ax.

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• It’s hard to be a god

  Fiction, Film adaptation, Drama

  Alexei German’s epic long-term construction

  Alexei Yuryevich German’s farewell magnum opus based on the story of the Strugatsky brothers, which he planned to screen for almost a decade mixed at the stage of dubbing (after his death, post-production was completed by his wife and co-author Svetlana Karmalita and son-director Alexei German Jr.). A long prehistory has become an integral part of the picture, which seems to have absorbed half a century of Soviet mythology – from the disfigured pioneers to the disgraced intelligentsia, from the new Middle Ages to the horror of the impending impersonality, including the new Russia (after the collapse of the USSR, the director experienced perturbations no less than under him ). The rest is like a classic late Herman: timeless black and white, addictive fixation on countless details, signature polyphony of the choral dialect, realism flowing into metaphor. At the same time – a feeling of total despair, which did not even come through in “Khrustalev, the car!”. The most impressive domestic project in terms of scale and design of a decade, or even several.

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• Boyhood

  Drama

  Coming-of-age in real time

  Boyhood took 11 years to film, from summer 2002 to October 2013. The film was a unique experiment and a project of Richard Linklater that has no analogues in feature cinema. After a love trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and After Midnight), Linklater took on the coming-of-age drama and filmed it in real time. The main role in the film went not to a professional actor, but to an ordinary six-year-old boy, Ellar Coltrane, who starred for 12 years and, according to the contract, could not be replaced by anyone else. The boy’s parents were played by Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette, and his sister was Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter. The picture was highly appreciated by viewers and critics and received three awards at the Berlin Film Festival at once (one for directing).

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• Only Lovers Left Alive

  Thriller, Fantasy, Melodrama

  Romance of two modern vampires against the backdrop of the “dead” city of Detroit

  Swinton) – meet in Detroit. They are married and have not parted for many centuries. According to Julien Bende, author of The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, the social function of the intellectual is to preserve the eternal spiritual values ​​of humanity and serve as a moral guide for people, showing them an example of activity that is not subordinated to practical goals. Throughout the film, Adam and Eve are an example of just such behavior, which does not prevent them from despising humanity and modernity for total zombification. They read books in all languages ​​of the peoples of the world, pour in the Latin names of plants and animals, anonymously write music and give it to Schubert. Extremely romanticizing the heroes, dressing them in rocker leather jackets and dark glasses, Jarmusch made them look like drug addicts. Like heroin addicts, after drinking blood, vampires experience the ultimate, indescribable pleasure (on the screen it is achieved by a zoom with departure), accessible only to them alone and unknown to the “zombie”. Jarmusch himself described his film as a “crypto-vampire love story”.

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• Stay in my shoes

  Thriller, Fantasy, Drama

  An alien silently hunts down her victims

  One night an alien creature with the appearance of Johans Scarf arrives in Scottish Glasgow. The alien’s task is to pretend to be a pretty fool, meet men, lure them into a dilapidated house and process them into nutrient biomass for the inhabitants of distant stars. For the rest of the film, Johansson (or the Thing in Her Body) drives silently on a white van to a pounding electronic soundtrack. The credits indicate that “Stay in My Skin” is an adaptation of Michel Faber’s science fiction novel “Under the Skin.” But the similarities between the works can be traced only in the main storylines: an alien who turns people into food. Otherwise, the picture of the visionary Jonathan Glaser (“Sexy Beast”, “Birth”) is not so much a movie as a video installation (or the almost two-hour Massive Attack music video, thanks to which the director became famous in Hollywood), a stylistic and aesthetic experiment that marries sci-fi and ” kitchen sink realism. In the center of attention is the body of the inimitable Johansson, which depicts an unemotional shell of something unidentified. Her gaze is cold and harsh, like a Scottish landscape, her movements are mechanistic, and her phrases (except for the key “Come to me”) are meaningless. This approach creates some kind of unusual sense of the documentary of what is happening. And only once Glaser deliberately destroys the structure he created, conveying bright artistic greetings to David Lynch. At some point, Johansson will meet a man who has neurofibromatosis, which makes him look like Joseph Merrick the Elephant Man. We won’t tell you what happens next, but this key scene in the film once again proves that science fiction directors (here you can recall the early Spielberg and Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival”) are not interested in aliens, but in the people reflected in their eyes.

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• Inside Llewyn Davis

  Drama, Musical

  The Coen brothers’ good movie about a loser with a cat memoir by folk singer Dave Van Ronk, about the New York music scene of the 60s. Oscar Isaac plays a loser with a guitar, living in debt, roaming the sofas of friends, desperately watching the success of younger competitors and forever alone – at some point, however, he is joined by a ginger cat with a meaningful name, which Davis and the audience will recognize will happen only at the very end. On the whole plotless, but the most spectator-friendly (cameraman Bruno Delbonnel filmed Amélie and the Coen novella from the Parisian almanac) and charming Coen cinema in a long time.

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• The life of Adele

  Melodrama

  Cannes winner about teenage lesbian love

  French melodrama directed by Abdellatif Keshish, based on the graphic novel by Julie Marot “Blue – the warmest” winner of the Palme d’Or 66th Cannes International Film Festival (for the first time, the leading actresses received the award for the best film along with the director). The name is not accidental, because one of the main characters, Emma, ​​has blue hair. This is a coming-of-age story that intertwines various themes related to adolescence. Adele is fond of literature, dreams of becoming a teacher and lives the life of an ordinary high school student. She tries to date one of her classmates, but in this strange and awkward relationship, she still does not find an outlet for her feelings. One day, accidentally ending up in a gay club, she meets a strange girl with blue hair. Then Adele learns that the stranger’s name is Emma. Soon she will become Adele’s first real passion. The release of the film marked a scandal with the performers of the main roles. Léa Seydoux and Adele Exarchopoulos accused Keshish of excessive violence on the set and grueling filming of long sex scenes, which Keshish reshot several times.

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• Gone Girl

  Detective, Thriller, Drama

  Tangled Spider-Woman Thriller

  Former film critic Nick (Ben Affleck) loses his beautiful wife, Emik (Rosamund Pye), which, first of all, , puts the whole city on the ears, and secondly, puts their dirty laundry on public display. Having filmed the inventive detective Gillian Flynn (first a crime reporter, and then a television critic), David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network) not only once again demonstrated his virtuoso command of directing, but also in defiance of the strong and independent Lisbeth Salander from “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” created a completely opposite female image on the screen, about which one soldier from a completely different film classic appropriately said: “I am afraid of three things: spiders, women and spider women. ” This story is about Spider Woman.

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• Mommy

  Drama

  The story of apple and apple tree problems repeated

  Xavier Dolan again after “I killed my mother” brings together Anna Dorval and Suzanne Clementel, a nervous teacher and offers them the roles of nervous mother and teacher Suzanne Clementel (Antoine-Olivier Pilon). Only now the story is getting heavier. The boy has a mental disorder that causes uncontrollable outbursts of anger that his mother is scared to death of. At the same time, her son’s love is so strong and fierce that she believes that this time she will succeed. She will find a common language with him, and together they will overcome everything. A home teacher comes to their aid, since the young man cannot study in a regular school. And it seems that everything is about to get better: they ride bicycles so happily, dance, cook dinner – Dolan knows how to show happiness in a warm and real way. But also, rest assured, he knows how to show tragedy. As a result, everything goes to hell: the mother betrays her son, because for her he remains “inconvenient”. In this melancholy-colored, sentimental and light-sad picture, Dolan confidently uses cinematic syntax, and also uses a 1: 1 aspect ratio (when the width and height form an even square). As a result, the screen in the film is both a keyhole through which we spy on the characters in a voyeuristic way (which, according to Hitchcock, is the main essence of cinema), and the framework in which the main characters are enclosed, and the space in which they are cramped. With this formalist trick, Dolan brings us to a heartbreaking finale in which we can afford to cry to the closing soundtrack of Lana Del Rey.

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• Fool

  Drama

  About the fact that there are two troubles in Russia: housing and communal services and officials eyes on it. Then the main character decides to tell everyone the truth. The most popular film in Russia in the 1910s: the acute social drama of Yuri Bykov (Major, Zavod), a truth-seeking director who, following Dmitry Astrakhan (and The Fool, of course, the ideological successor to Contract with Death), does not hesitate to write his own message (“PEOPLE, CHANGE YOUR WIND!!!”) in capslock.

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• John Wick

  Action, Thriller

  Keanu Reeves in stage stunt action

  By the mid-10s, nothing remarkable happened in Hollywood in an action movie until the release of Chad Stachon Wick and David Stachon Wick that breathed new life into the (stunt) action genre. The story of a former killer (Keanu Reeves), who lost his wife and avenged a dog, was without seven spans in his forehead, but its authors specifically relied not on the script (quite utilitarian), but on pure cinematic divertissement – fights without rules and control shots in the head , – which caused only one question: was it possible? In five years, the John Wick franchise has grown into a trilogy (and is not going to end), Leitch directed the equally perky femme action movie Explosive Blonde, and Stahelski helped Cathy Yan direct action scenes in Birds of Prey: The Amazing Story of Harley Quinn. Considering that another stunt action movie, Tyler Rake: Rescue Operation, became the record holder on Netflix, it is obvious that the authors of John Wick have opened Pandora’s box and satisfied the public demand for quality action movies.

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• Carol

  Melodrama

  Screen adaptation of the important book The Price of Salt, which tells the story of a lesbian romance x years. Young Therese (Rooney Mara) and wealthy elegant Carol (Cate Blanchett) meet on Christmas Eve in a huge store, where Therese moonlights as a saleswoman; a strange friendship quickly develops between them. The main advantage of “Carol” is that Haynes, a skilled playwright and generally a very sensitive author, made a delicate novel of education out of this friendship. Where anyone else would film a topical agitation for the rights of minorities, Haynes simply tells the story of first love, and this story turns out to be much more important than any political statement.

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• Birdman

  Tragicomedy

  Michael Keaton tries to take off in the Oscar-winning metafilm about cinema (and theater). Michael Keaton plays the famous former actor who became famous for his role as the superhero Birdman. Now he’s trying to resurrect his career with a Broadway production – how good of an idea that is, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Naomi Watts, and Zach Galifianakis discuss in tight technical passages behind the scenes. Art invades life, fantasy is indistinguishable from reality, so are the transitions between scenes, which are sometimes completely filmed in one take (behind the camera – cameraman Emmanuel Lubezki), on the soundtrack – continuous drumming (Aaron Glascock and Martin Hernandez). And Iñárritu, whose films had previously tried to take off, but never left the ground, succeeded this time – the magic works. “Birdman” marks another milestone that Latino directors are taking in Hollywood. The film receives five Oscars, including the main one, as well as a statuette for directing. A year later, Iñárritu will consolidate his success with The Revenant. In 2018, another Mexican will repeat his achievement: Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” will also take the main award of the American Film Academy.

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• The Babadook

  Thriller, Horror, Drama

  Feminist horror about a scarecrow from a book

  role in the horror genre. The story of Amelia (Essie Davis), who single-handedly raises her restless son, and then saves him from the Babadook monster from the book, works not so much in the field of childhood fears or revived fantasies. This is a full-blown statement about social expectations from the given roles (Amelia is a widow, mother and nurse in a nursing home), as well as a horror about the concept of family happiness: having a child was the insistent idea of ​​a husband who, by coincidence, died on his son’s birthday. So it is appropriate to consider the Babadook as the embodiment of that despair that settled under the bed of the heroine and her child in the most unfortunate circumstances. If they tried to “steal” the success of the debut from the director, copying her skills to Lars von Trier, for whom she worked as an assistant at Dogville, then The Nightingale approved Jennifer Kent in the status of a radical author – both in plot and in content.

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• Leviathan

  Drama

  Unwashed Russia and an Oscar nomination

  The story of the confrontation between a car mechanic (Alexey Serebryakov) and the mayor of a northern city (Roman Madyanov), who decided to annex the house lives with his family: wife (Elena Lyadova) and son. Another parable by Andrey Zvyagintsev about unwashed Russia, in which he decided to cross the ancient tragedy with everyday drama, for which he received the Golden Globe, the prize for the screenplay at Cannes and the Oscar nomination. As is often the case with our sharply social statements, cinema has divided society. Not for the first and, one must think, not for the last time.

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• The Grand Budapest Hotel

  Tragicomedy

  Wes Anderson’s adventure movie about old Europe, a celebration of design and geometric scenery

  Although the era of hipsters had zero preferences, cinema wins back their tenths. Wes Anderson holds the leading position: having stepped over the 40-year-old bar, he remains a big child, an adept of candy-doll aesthetics and a singer of neuroses. “The Grand Budapest Hotel is a kind of benefit performance for which Anderson gathers his most beloved actors. Adrien Brody artistically wiggles his mustache, Ralph Fiennes in livery flirts with Tilda Swinton with glaucoma – even the maid is played by Lea Seydoux. To fit all the stars on the poster, a small icon was drawn for each. And like the hotel, a triumph of decorativeness and hedonism, the film is a masterpiece of Anderson’s aesthetic, a film of unspeakable charm. But this escape to imaginary worlds, the refusal to grow up and go out into a cruel world is also about tenths.

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• Guest

  Detective, Action, Thriller

  War-wounded homage to Carpenter

  During the 10s, idolatry before the 80s lost its nostalgic charm (but still turned into a very common place!) the old-school vibe did not tire, and the horror maker Adam Wingard focused on the productive junction of decades. The icy breath of the seventies + the threat of the eighties hidden behind the philistine district – this is his recipe for treating guests. The Peterson family grapples with the death of their eldest son Caleb during the Afghan campaign, when his army comrade David (Dan Stevens) is on the doorstep with nowhere to go, and out of the kindness of his family, the family allows him to stay for a while. Visually, “The Guest” constantly reminds of “Halloween” (as well as “It”, where Mike Monroe was the soloist, who also starred here), and the story of the “maniac” is overgrown with important details that Carpenter put out of brackets. The horrors of war and the paranoid experiments of the American military not only did not make the world a better place, but also turned out to be able to turn law-abiding citizens into conservative and nervous monsters.

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• Tribe

  Drama, Crime

  Ukrainian drama filmed entirely in sign language

  Miroslav Slaboshpytsky’s feature-length debut is often called silent cinema of the 21st century and/or genre, much less aesthetics it does not prevail. There are no stylistic games either: in other words, this is not the formalism of The Artist and not a revision of the great cinematic tradition that Rian Johnson had with film noir in Brick. “The Tribe” is a picture entirely filmed in sign language, if not the first, then the loudest (sic!) at least in the new millennium. This is the outward noteworthiness of the project, which at the same time turns into a social drama about the options for the future for the students of a boarding school for the hearing impaired, and into an emery story of love, and into a reflection on the possibilities of human communication. The characters’ lines are not subtitled, and the actors rely on body language and situations. And within these situations, Slaboshpitsky also arranges realistic or, on the contrary, cinematic attractions: from a painfully realistic abortion scene to a bewitching fight in a ballet style against the backdrop of ruins.

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• Real ghouls

  Comedy, Horror

  The main comedy of the 10s is about vampires in the modern world

  New Zealand director Jackson) is making a low-budget vampire film, which is characteristically a comedy. The ghouls in it experience various crisis situations, conflict with werewolves and cannot get to the party because they do not pass face control. Taika Waititi’s film (he also wrote the script for it and played one of the ghouls) will be watched by many not after the release, but later, when he shoots one of the best blockbusters in the Marvel universe Thor: Ragnarok, a movie of a completely different scale, with a different cast and budget, but with the same humor. After Thor, Waititi is already one of the most sought-after directors in the world, but he will not change his style. His next film is Jojo Rabbit about an imaginary friend, Hitler (and in Russia, distributors immediately abandoned the idea of ​​releasing it in cinemas).

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• The Witch

  Mystery, Horror

  Uberrealistic horror about a 16th century witch, her relatives and their goat

  Authentic 16th century New England hellish horror movie driven out of a 16th century Puritan town bizarre interpretation of the New Testament, and she moves to the edge of the forest, where, they say, the witch lives. Soon, strange things really begin to happen: either the child will disappear, or the goat (with the harmless name Black Philip) will go berserk. Like any film about female witchcraft in the midst of religious discourse, The Witch by Robert Eggers is a story of awakening sexuality in conditions that were not intended for this at all (even in the slashers of the 70s it was easier). However, the debutant really grabs the nostrils not with an uncomplicated final twist, but with the meticulousness of mystical realities. A purpose-built house in the field with callused hands. Dialogues composed of real letters from 16th-century settlers. Depth of field, allowing you to see the texture of dresses, goat beard and gloomy forest. And now the bizarre devilry becomes no less convincing than some “Blair Witch” at the turn of the century.

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• Mad Max: Fury Road

  Action, Adventure, Thriller

  The return of the legendary post-apocalyptic with a feminist message the success of the original (playing on a sense of nostalgia), but also in many ways overshadow it by expanding the original universe. George Miller, the creator of the surprisingly different in form, but similar in spirit, franchises about the lonely post-apocalyptic rider Max Rockatansky and the shepherd pig Babe, despite a 30-year break from the action genre, showed that the old skills are not forgotten. Stunt stunts, practical effects and the yellow-red color scheme of a desert hell with minimal use of computer graphics (everything was filmed on location) provided an indelible, completely unique picture. And the division of the role of the protagonist between the title character (the aged Mel Gibson was replaced by Tom Hardy) and the warrior Furiosa (Charlize Theron), the only one who dared to challenge the dictatorship of the local patriarch, made the semantic part of the story more multi-layered. The social commentary on the inequity of the distribution of resources and the “war of all against all” shown in previous films in the series, was supplemented by criticism of the cult of masculinity and strong support for women’s rebellion against sexual violence and inequality, allowing Miller’s picture to be considered a cinematic harbinger of the #MeToo movement that appeared only two years later.

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• Puzzle

  Animation, Comedy, Family

  Breakthrough Pixar cartoon that still raises questions

  Pete Docter’s Oscar-winning work (Monsters, Inc., Up), inspired by the transitional age of his daughter . But at the center of the story is not the eleven-year-old heroine Riley herself, but what, according to the director, is going on in her head. Here they try to explain the work of the brain on the model of a fairy-tale city, where the five main emotions take turns at the helm of control. Two of them – Joy and Sadness – become the main characters of the cartoon, going on a dizzying journey through the mind of a teenage girl in order to restore her peace of mind. The witty trick, however, works the worse, the more conventions and rules the authors invent for their world, because everyone has their own ideas about what is going on in their head. Another problem is the inevitable humanization of emotions and the mechanization of people. The more alive the emotions, the more people become like puppets. Well, the main barrier between Riley and the audience is the average girl. In an attempt to make her image close and understandable to everyone, the creators of the cartoon populate the girl’s mind with the most universal memories from mass culture, completely depriving her figure of volume and individuality. The effect is exactly the opposite: in an attempt to please everyone, the heroine turns out to be close to no one. And the critics who praised the picture for opening up a new form (“To take on a film whose entire action would take place in the inner empire of mental space, no one dared yet”) turned out to be not quite right: more than twenty years before the “Inside Out” everything (well or almost everything) that happens in a person’s head has already been shown by the comedy series Herman’s Head.

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• Son of Saul

  Historical, Thriller, Drama, Military

  Brutal Hungarian drama about a member of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz corpses of Jews in a concentration camp. One day, among the dead, he sees a boy who reminds him of his son. The man decides to bury him with dignity and starts a chain of irreversible consequences. Anyone who is waiting for a tear-squeezing Holocaust drama like Schindler’s List will be greatly surprised. This is not a slow Hollywood requiem, but a dynamic and harsh Eastern European survival thriller, a real reportage from hell. Debutant Laszlo Nemes immediately won the Cannes Grand Prix and the Oscar for the best foreign film, and this is not surprising: he also has his own cinematic language (the camera, as if glued, follows the main character everywhere, immediately asking us the point of view ), and its recognizable author’s style. His next film, Sunset, shot in a similar manner and telling about the decline of European civilization on the eve of the First World War (it’s like Kubrick directing the TV series Empire Under Attack), will turn out to be even more powerful, but, unfortunately, will receive much less attention.

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• Unfriend

  Thriller, Horror

  A virtuoso desktop horror that spawned the screenlife fashion

  Technological experiments with film production are becoming more and more radical. Timur Bekmambetov did not just shoot a movie on an iPhone (like Steven Soderbergh) or in one frame (like Sam Mendes), but he came up with a whole direction – screenlife, or desktop cinema. Its first representative was the horror “Remove from Friends” by Levan Gabriadze, in which a ghost connects to several friends in a Skype call. The story that is told in the film not only takes place on the desktop, but also begins with a viral video: life is increasingly moving online and developing according to the laws of the Internet, where everything is linked. Then Bekmambetov will produce and shoot several more desktop films in various genres, from comedy to political thriller (Hack Bloggers is not part of the canon), but they won’t beat the success of the first one – Unfriended, with a budget of $ 1 million, collected over 60 million at the box office

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• High-rise building

  Thriller, Science Fiction

  Ambitious film adaptation of James Ballard’s novel about a self-isolated community

  This is a typical seventies dystopia about life in an ideal, at first glance, high-rise building. But, of course, everything will turn out to be much more complicated, and the skyscraper will act as a model of society (and partly a metaphor for modern Russia, as well as any self-isolated community), where ordinary people huddle in tiny cells, while the architect’s wife drives around the meadow on the roof of the house. horses. Paradise will quickly turn into an absolute hell – and this is not a spoiler: the moral decline of the high-rise residents is obvious from the first minutes. Like almost all 70s fantasy like The Stepford Wives, Ben Wheatley’s film has no well-defined characters, but a rich bestiary of eccentric caricatures, which the director did an excellent job of transferring to the screen. The episodic characters here are generally sometimes more interesting than the main ones, who drag a cumbersome plot with great difficulty. It is he, perhaps, who is the weakest side of the picture. The story often loses its rhythm and is divided into plot vignettes and etudes. But the sketches themselves are devilishly good. Much more important than the plot here is the stuffy atmosphere of an aesthetically verified dystopia, accompanied by a bright author’s irony. The dark solemn music of Clint Mansell also works well for her, plus two covers of the song “SOS” by ABBA – first by a baroque orchestra, and then by Portishead. Under the bewitching voice of Beth Gibbons, the picturesque horrors of the High-Rise look especially colorful.

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• Neon Demon

  Thriller, Horror

  N.V. visual point of view: he loves violence and glamour. On the screen, they turn into sparkles, neon and blood – preferably all at once and more. And the film “Neon Demon” is a triumph of his aesthetics. A young provincial (played by a minor at that time, Elle Fanning) arrives in Los Angeles and begins her modeling career. Competitors envy sudden success – so much so that they are ready to gobble it up. The film received mixed reviews – many scolded Refn for the fact that his cinema is pure form without content. But he already understood everything about spectacular entertainment: in tenths, the visual does not just dominate the content, it is the content.

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• Arrival

  Adventure, Thriller, Fantasy

  Monumental sci-fi about the benefits of humility

  Killer.” The screen version of the story of Ted Jiang, the star of the new sci-fi and a lover of thought experiments, allowed the visionary to rely on an authoritative source, which was corrected for the big screen and, in some ways, perhaps simplified. Like many inventors of visuals, Villeneuve, both before and after “Arrival”, had problems with fantasy in the area of ​​​​narrative. In the film version, the plot about aliens who suddenly got in touch with earthlings takes on a more delineated religious tone: 12 spaceships-apostles, similar to inflated sails, dispersed around the world. The governments of different countries are trying to get in touch with them, and the Americans turn to physicist Ian (Jeremy Renner) and linguist Louise (Amy Adams) for help, who manages to decipher the squiggles of an alien language. The aliens, whose life is simultaneous, that is, they already know every minute of their existence, brought to Earth the gift of painful knowledge of everything in advance, which will allow them to come to terms with big and small tragedies. This not the most intricate idea Villeneuve managed to clothe in such a form that one can truly experience a religious revelation.

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• Under cover of night

  Thriller, Drama

  Metathriller about marriage and revenge with Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal Firth, both in visual show-off and in plot twist. Thanks to the novel by Austin Wright, which served as the basis for a thriller about a failed marriage and a fictional terrible tragedy. The marriage of gallery owner Susan (Amy Adams) and writer Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) once broke apart. She seems to be happy, he is not very happy, but sends the long-suffering debut novel “Nocturnal Animals” (the original title of the film) to the court of his ex-wife. Under cover of night is often criticized for its vengeful connotations: both Edward’s book and his final act can be read as petty revenge for a broken heart. However, the visually colorful tape, relying on the external effect, describes two parallel disappointments: through the novel, Edward admits that he cannot fit into the patterns of harsh masculinity (according to this logic, his character must avenge the destruction of the family), and Susan understands that the status of a trophy wife – rich, mechanically happy, but lonely – it does not suit her either, no matter how her mother insists on it. These imposed roles – a brutal predator and an ice hunter – simply do not suit them, and in some ways they broke their lives.

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• Birth defects

  Tragicomedy, Crime

  California film noir like you’ve never seen before

  Paul Thomas Anderson travels back in time, this time set in the 1970s Thomas Pynchon, on which the film was made. A private detective nicknamed Doc (Joaquin Phoenix) is given the task of finding a dishonest millionaire, with whom, in addition, his ex (Katherine Waterston) is having an affair. The investigation quickly turns into a psychedelic trip, and encounters with increasingly eccentric characters do nothing to solve the mystery. This PTA film was perhaps the least praised by the audience and critics – and in vain. The director, following the original source, shoots a funny, ironic, absurd film – even though it is not always possible to trace the logic in this mosaic. Special praise for the performance of Joaquin Phoenix, whose character in this film is partly The Big Lebowski.

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• Lullaby to a mournful mystery

  Adventure, Fantasy, Drama

  Encyclopedia of the Philippine Revolution in meditative form The film follows the search for the body of Filipino revolutionary leader Andres Bonifacio, who was executed by his rival Aguinaldo. He was the author of a large number of poems, mostly patriotic, so the elegy was chosen as the form for creating the film. Poetic comprehension of ethno-cultural experience and a journey through the iconic pages of history, accompanied by national heroes, literary characters, mythological creatures. The film immerses viewers in a special meditative experience; it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2016. This is not the first time that Lav Diaz has introduced viewers to Filipino history through a multi-hour film (see Evolution of a Filipino Family).

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• Sieranevada

  Drama

  A three-hour Romanian epic about a wake

  The old movie-critical meme that the best Russian cinema is filmed in Romania is fully embodied in Christie Pieranevada The new Romanian wave, one of the main film events of the 2000s, may have rolled in all directions (Puyu himself has now shot a philosophical treatise, Porumboyu was skinning noir, and Judet filmed a bunch of denunciations), but before that, it managed to fix post-socialist life in tragicomic splendor, a fresco in half with sitcom. For such a masterful combination of sizes and intonations, it took only a typical apartment, familiar to almost everyone with minimal (post) Soviet experience, and an ensemble of relatives who gathered for the forties – a ritual of farewell on the 40th day with the deceased, whose eyes, as is commonly believed, and shows the events of the picture. The spirit blows where it wants to, and sees everything: accumulated family problems, clashes of views on the world, fur hats against smartphones, carelessness in line with stinginess, fragments of the old world under the feet of the new time. It seems that “Sieranevada”, deceptively named adventure, gives much more than any road or just a trip: it is a cave of treasures, in which are scattered gizmos and phrases “everything without which we cannot be imagined and even more difficult to understand.”

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• American cutie

  Drama

  Roadside portrait of America, seen through the eyes of a girl in love

  Andrea Arnold – British Valeria Gai Germanicus, but older and smarter. At home, she filmed dramas about women’s revenge (“Red Road”) and vulnerable chaps (“Aquarium”), rethought school classics (“Wuthering Heights”). In the US, she decided to use all the arsenal she had accumulated to tell about one-story America through the story of a young mulatto tore (Sasha Lane), who, having fallen in love with a magazine seller (Shia LaBeouf), leaves her younger sister and brother in the care of her acquaintances and goes with him and his co-workers (driven by Riley Keough) on a highway trip. This is a very tender, tactile and relaxed film, a story of one growing up and a portrait of the United States on the sidelines, which grow into a personal and political statement, because it has long been known that the personal is political.

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• La La Land

  Comedy, Musical, Melodrama

  Post-mumblecore musical with Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone

  Two dreamers meet in Los Angeles seeking to open their own jazz club: Ryan Gosling) and aspiring actress Mia (Emma Stone). In La La Land, Damien Chazelle (Possession, Man in the Moon) will say hello to the Umbrellas of Cherbourg and the mumblecore he came from (see Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench), put on a catchy dance number to the song “Another Day of Sun”, Ryan Gosling’s sad walk to “City of Stars” and cancel the happy ending. In the end, the film will really hurt, because the revisionist musical will turn into a bitter tale of lost time and longing for an unlived life. The perfect movie for a last date.

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• Toni Erdmann

  Drama

  Perhaps the main German cinema of the tenth century Christian Petzold, Angelu Chanelek and Thomas Arslan). Everything changed with the release of “Tony Erdmann” by Maren Ade (she is also considered a Berlin school, only the second wave). A film about a father (Peter Zimoniszek) who invents an alter ego for himself – businessman Toni Erdmann in a wig and with crooked teeth in order to regain the favor of his adult daughter (Sandra Hüller), was shown at Cannes, and then nominated for an Oscar. But the main thing is that, unlike other works of the Berlin school, it was released in dozens of countries (including Russia) and was a huge success. Perhaps the fact is that in an age of restraint and political correctness, people lack participation – funny, naive, sometimes burdensome, but human. “Toni Erdmann” compensates for his lack.

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• Deadpool

  Action, Adventure, Science Fiction

  Ernistic movie comic about a chatty mercenary and a broken heart , it is customary to show in the genre of “nothing sacred”. The same, it would seem, takes the R-version with Ryan Reynolds, who rooted for the project with all his heart. However, in addition to an important industry reminder that 18+ films – even about superheroes – can make good money, “Deadpool” also smuggles in the humanistic that has set the teeth on edge under the guise of sarcastic. Strictly speaking, the first solo film about Wade Wilson (Reynolds previously appeared with this role in X-Men Origins. Wolverine) tells about the psychological torment that falls on a person with a terminal illness. It is no coincidence that the film’s caustic promotional campaign was also in the nature of social advertising: disguised as obscene, Deadpool urged viewers and viewers to get tested for breast or testicular cancer. The sequel acted softer and turned towards the loss of loved ones, the topic is still more trampled, but continued its mission – to remind everyone of the numerous vulnerabilities through apparent invulnerability.

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• Moonlight

  Drama

  Cinematic Oscar drama about sexual identity

  does not convey the quality of the painting by Barry Jenkins, noted not only by academics, but also by critics. “Moonlight” is a triptych about the growing up and awareness of his own homosexuality of the African-American Chiron (Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes), who goes a long way from the Kid, always persecuted by classmates, to the brutal guy named Black. James Luxton’s camera seems to stick to the hero, looks and breathes with him – not in GoPro mode, but like a full-fledged nervous system. The emotionality and poetry of the picture are reminiscent of the works of Wong Kar-wai – Jenkins also does not shy away from sensual slow-mo, and these plans, colors and plasticity of faces say more about the self-awareness of the hero than in the most virtuoso dialogues.

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• Tonya against everyone

  Biography, Comedy, Drama, Sports

  Margot Robbie reincarnated as a scandalous figure skater ), which in the 90s became famous for a series of troubles at the championships and numerous scandals. For example, one day her bodyguard broke the leg of a rival skating rink in order to secure a place for Tonya on the Olympic team. Was Tonya herself involved in this? It is still not known for sure, but the film answers that it is not, and rather paints the figure skater as a victim of circumstances, surrounded on the one hand by a toxic mother (Allison Janney), on the other by an unbalanced husband (Sebastian Stan). And since this is not “Ice”, everything will end extremely tragically (and “Ice”, as practice shows, ends far from a happy ending).

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• Personal shopper

  Detective, Thriller, Drama

  Phantom quasi-thriller about the fact that man is a ghost to man selects outfits for a French pop singer and corresponds with either her late brother or a fan. The director’s indifference to genre conventions – whether it’s a thriller or a ghost movie – makes one suspect a revisionist gesture in The Buyer, but the metaphor here, I think, dominates (de) design ambitions. At every level of life, a person is able to feel on both sides of non-existence: the heroine Stuart communicates with an invisible poltergeist fan or conducts a delayed dialogue with her deceased brother, herself being a phantom in the square – an American in distant France, an assistant to a star, that is, a shadow in the retinue of heaven body. However, everything is illusory.

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• Get Away

  Detective, Horror

  Witty horror about liberal racism

  Directorial debut of comedian Jordan Peele (and now an important horror maker) in a couple of years, a true new classic storyline turned into a true brick-and-mortar journey African-American photographer Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) to the parents of his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) turns into a complex statement about (liberal) racism, and a masterful (albeit somewhat comedic) horror film, and a creepy story about meeting parents. “Get Out” is yet another heavy shell in the “new horror” treasury that made clear how social and poignant horror films can be – not if they try, but if viewers look closely. All in all, this is a well-crafted movie, nothing more, nothing less, sleight of hand and no cheating.

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• Wonder Woman

  Action, Adventure, Fantasy

  The first blockbuster directed by a woman

  Wonder Woman impressed both critics and Rotten Tomatoes on viewers (total fees exceeded 821 million dollars). However, despite all the hype and positive ratings, the film also found detractors: director James Cameron, for example, did not fail to speak out about the fact that although the Amazonian princess Diana advocates feminist ideas, she does not cease to be an icon of sexual objectification. Yes, as publicists rightly point out, “Wonder Woman” did not make some kind of revolutionary coup in the superhero movie genre. However, this is not bullshit. The fact that Patty Jenkins (Monster) is a director with ideas was clear from the American remake of The Killing, where she directed the pilot episode and the second season finale. There, Jenkins came up with an interesting visual trick – to give the camera a point of view, to make it seem as if the story is being told, in particular, from her point of view, or rather, from the point of view of a dead girl. In Wonder Woman, Patti also pulls off one amusing trick: like a real art-house director, she is in no hurry and announces the main conflict only at the fortieth minute. In the film, it is built on the clash of two worldviews: mythological and realistic. Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) is convinced that the god of war Ares is to blame for all the troubles in the world, and her lover, Captain Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), is the people themselves. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter which one is right. Another thing is important: until the moment when Wonder Woman understands what she is fighting for (her goal is initially noble, but extremely abstract), she will never find Ares. And when she does, Ares will find her himself. Thanks to this cunning dramatic construction, Jenkins managed to pass for not only the first director of a box-office film, but also the author of a really good movie.

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• Your name

  Animation, Anime, Fantasy, Drama

  Makoto Shinkai and the highest grossing anime hit in history

  m “Spirited Away”, “Howl’s Moving Castle” and “Ponyo Fish on the Cliff” were not moved by the hit of the adherent of sentimental photorealism Makoto Shinkai, once nicknamed the new Miyazaki out of laziness (his new anime “Weather Child” so far hung on the fifth line). Shinkai, of course, is an independent author with a recognizable pattern, although inspired by the master: his Catchers of Forgotten Voices is a pure homage to Miyazaki. Quite another thing – “Your name”. This story of a young man and a girl who, by a whim of fate, wakes up every few days in the bodies of a friend of a friend, fascinated the Japanese and world public, first with a sly way of getting to know each other through the knowledge of life, geography and bodies, and then with a tragic denouement, which refers to numerous tragedies, experienced by Japan. It’s hard to call “Your Name” the best anime of the decade, but you can’t argue with the box office figures either – a cultural phenomenon.

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• Star Wars: The Last Jedi

  Action, Adventure, Fantasy

  An underrated revisionist film about a galaxy far, far away

  after retelling A New Hope, visionary Rian Johnson, the director of Brick and Looper, got behind the wheel. He justified the newest hopes not for everyone: a fan of the Johnson franchise did not resort to the Abrams copy-paste remix, but to the good old revision, which he became famous in “Brick”. As if feeling that Disney’s insolence would only be enough for one project, and in the finale everything would be canceled, the director made all the bonds of a galaxy far, far away buzz. Externally, The Last Jedi is the most ingeniously filmed story in the universe (Johnson succeeds in visual gags), Luke Skywalker’s Jedi holiness was called into question – the topic of more than one article and even a thesis about Star Wars, which considered the rebels as a terrorist cell; social commentary – again the most poignant in at least licensed films; in addition to abstract allusions to the evil empire – a whole race through the capitalist utopia, hinting that many planets under the heel of the First Order are quite comfortable, as long as it does not concern the privileges of the rich. Finally, Rey’s biography promised to be more intriguing, but, “fortunately,” Abrams brought his grandfather back in every sense.

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• Detroit

  Historical, Drama, Crime

  Katherine Bigelow’s retrothriller about the 1967 riots in America

  ”) returned to the theme of rebellion, racism and police lawlessness. Her latest picture, the retrodrama Detroit, was favored by critics, but went under all radar, did not collect any awards and hype, and, in fact, went unnoticed, which, really, is a pity. This is a masterfully directed movie from a cinematographer at the peak of her creative form. According to the plot, in the summer of 1967 years in Detroit, an African-American riot broke out, which grew into racial riots. Formally, the reason for it was the closure of an illegal bar, in which more than eighty people (mostly blacks) celebrated the return of two veterans of the Vietnam War. But in fact, the pogroms were caused by the fact that the black population was tired of enduring discrimination. Bigelow continues to work with American history through its pain points. If the target of her previous film (the quasi-documentary thriller Target Number One) was the attack/11 and the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the perspective of the new turned out to be shifted to the events of half a century ago, which, however, do not lose their relevance (the racial riot in the United States this year is a confirmation of this). The sharply social “Detroit” is made with the documentaryism characteristic of the late Bigelow (her constant co-author – reporter Mark Boal was responsible for the script), but, undoubtedly, with much broader dramatic strokes. The focus is on the private and extremely tragic story of several black guys who became victims of white police brutality. Bigelow makes this tragedy as action-packed as possible, somewhere sacrificing credibility for the sake of suspense (and she knows how to escalate suspense like no other current director) in order to finally speak out in the most straightforward way in defense of the humiliated and offended.

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• Zama

  Drama

  Post-colonial drama about a journey into the heart of darkness

  Argentinean Lucrezia Martel made an exceptionally slow film in the age of popularity of fast editing. The protagonist is the Spanish official Zama, who was stuck in a wild South American colony in the 18th century. For years, nothing has changed here – the orders of the authorities are brought by an aborigine in a frock coat and a bleached wig, but without pants, the same bandit robs the mail, locals fish on the river, Europeans fan themselves and sweat. Everyone who could, fled from here back to the metropolis, but they did not agree to transfer Zamu; painfully waiting for the appointment, he gradually loses his mind. This viscous post- and anti-colonial cinema, similar to a vision or a nightmare that sucks like a whirlpool, was recognized by critics as one of the best films of the decade (and the Toronto Film Festival was simply the best), and Martel herself, after the premiere of Zama at the Venice Film Festival, was called to lead his jury.

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• Disaster Artist

  Biography, Tragicomedy

  Ed Wood for the New Generation

  The game became a vivid illustration of the expression “So bad it’s already good” and gave rise to its own little cult. 14 years later, famed Hollywood actor (and far less successful director) James Franco decided to pay homage to the film by filming the book Disaster Artist about its creation and personally portraying the eccentric and almost alien Wiseau. The project had every chance to slide into the Internet ridicule of the “Room”, which is already familiar to the Internet, but the authors managed to imbue sympathy for the main character, showing not only his bizarre manners, but also fantastic determination and fearlessness in the face of devastating criticism. As a result, the film turned out to be not only amazingly funny, filled to capacity with fan service for connoisseurs of The Room, but also extremely inspiring, largely repeating the motives of Burton’s Ed Wood. In The Unfortunate Creator, Franco clearly demonstrated that fame and success can come from a completely different direction from where they are expected, that the assessment of any art is subjective, and that sincerity and purposefulness are perhaps more valuable qualities for an artist than technical skill.

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• Call me by your name

  Melodrama

  Gentle queer drama by Luca Guadagnino

  The tenths finally establish our time as an era of inclusion. And while the majors are releasing a film with a female or black superhero, smaller studios are releasing dramas. Director Luca Guadagnino sends a travel postcard from Italy in the 1980s (one of the favorite and most reference eras of the 2010s), making a holiday movie about an American schoolboy (Timote Chalamet) who falls in love with a university professor (Armie Hammer) during his summer vacation. This is not a gay drama in the usual sense – there is no judgmental society or conservative parents, nothing interferes with relationships except circumstances. If you do not take into account the gender of the characters, this is a drama about first love and, perhaps, the tenderness with which it is told is the best inoculation against homophobia. Another merit of the film is that after its release, Timothée Chalamet becomes one of the main sex symbols of the generation.

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• Love is a disease

  Melodrama, Tragicomedy

  Produced by Judd Apatow, a romantic comedy with a twist

  One of the directors of the Judd Apatow series with star-storian Michael Shawlericon “Love” directed his “Love” and Deuces by Kumail Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan. But this is not a streaming melodrama at all, but a smart rom-com, taking, like 500 Days of Summer, a new height in the hardened genre. First of all, due to a plot feint in the middle of the film, when the love line suddenly turns into a poignant story of meeting parents: this happens after Kumail’s ex-girlfriend Emily (Zoe Kazan) falls into a coma, and he gets closer to her father (Ray Romano) and mother (Holly Hunter). Another feint is hidden behind the scenes: Kumayl plays himself, and at the heart of the tape is a semi-autobiographical story of the relationship between the actor and his wife Emily Gordon, who co-wrote the script here.

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• The Florida Project

  Comedy, Drama

  Amazing indie drama filmed in the backwoods of Orlando

  In the Magic Castle motel, the compassionate manager Bobby (Willal) mostly lives in Degin among them is the unemployed, colorfully tattooed Hayley (Bria Vinayte) and her carefree daughter Mooney (Brooklyn Prince), who makes friends with her peers: Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jansy (Valeria Cotto). While the children are enthusiastically playing pranks, and the Florida sun is shining so brightly, it seems as if nothing can disturb this summer idyll, but, as often happens in real life, the idyll will turn out to be imaginary, and financial clouds will begin to thicken over Hayley and Mooney. The Magic Castle is not just located next to Disneyland in Orlando – this is how director Sean Baker wants to emphasize that not everyone can afford to pay to enter the world of wonders, even though it is literally at hand. However, not so much social stratification and survival in the slums as life in all its manifestations interests Baker. He captures it on 35 mm film, without denying himself visual prettiness (an artistic step that takes on a new meaning if you know that the director shot his previous film “Tangerine” – aka “Tangerine” – on three iPhones) . However, the strength of the Florida Project is not only in the rich color correction, but in what is commonly called acting chemistry: Instagrammer Bria Vinaite and young talent Brooklyn Prince are real finds of the picture. Their duet composes a humane, heartfelt and incredibly touching story that can amaze even the hardened cinephile.

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• Ghost Story

  Fantasy, Melodrama

  Existential drama under the sheet of horror

  David Lowry is one of the hopes of American independent cinema, the strange angel of author’s high-concepts, no-yes and no independence shooting something for the giants (“Pete and his dragon”), so as not to starve to death. After the drama The Unsaints, he was labeled the heir/epigone of Terrence Malick, and Ghost Story both refuted and confirmed him at the same time. The story of how M (Rooney Mara) experienced the death of her music lover husband C (Casey Affleck), who was tied to the house in the form of a ghost under the sheet, which is your Carlson, only at the setting level correlates with classic ghost stories. Lowry brilliantly plays the horror of loss, but psychologism is not his main weapon. “Ghost Story”, in essence, is about the fact that everyone will die, and the music will be eternal – if not a loving heart locked in a house of memories, then this damn planet on which humanity was born and probably will be buried.

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• The Shape of Water

  Adventure, Fantasy, Drama

  Deconstruction of Hollywood myths from the humanist Guillermo del Toro

  Master of Magical Realism Guillermo del Toro dedicated his story of love to a German girl and Amazonian Amphibian Man (Doug Jones), a deconstruction of classic Universal horror films. The green gillman, referring with its design to the Creature from the Black Lagoon, here turns out to be not a monster, but a thirsty, sensitive creature (that is, the monster from Beauty and the Beast does not turn into a handsome prince this time, and the local Belle is happy and his foreign appearance). The main villain (Michael Shannon) is trying to be Pygmalion, not realizing that Galatea does not need him at all and is able to make decisions herself. And even Delilah (the name of Octavia Spencer’s character here is Delilah) opposes Samson not out of greed, as in the Bible, but to stop the coming destruction. Turned inside out myths allow you to look at the world from the point of view of another (be it a Russian scientist hiding his homosexual orientation, a dumb woman or a creature unknown to science with fins in the most unexpected places) and see that a true monster is only one who is confident in his superiority above them. The film’s victory at the Venice Film Festival and the Oscars 2018 can be considered a triumph of humanistic cinema (among the nominees for the main award were such diverse studies of humanity as “Get Out”, “Dunkirk” and “Call Me By Your Name”, and the best foreign film was “Fantastic Woman”), but “The Shape of Water” even in this series turned out to be the perfect symbol of a new hopeful era in world culture (and a clear example of how low culture, at least in terms of form, was legitimized as high).

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• Black Panther

  Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Drama

  Oscar-nominated black superhero movies

  Black superhero films have never been common. African-Americans could still count on the position of anti-heroes (like Blade, Spawn, Hancock) or minor characters (Falcon, Storm, Warrior), but the studios did not dare to make a big-budget blockbuster with a classic black superhero until 2018. Marvel released 17 (!) mostly successful projects with white actors before it justified the risks that involved an African-American cast. However, the idea of ​​handing over Black Panther to Ryan Coogler, who has already established himself as a researcher of the racial agenda in Fruitvale Station and Creed: Rocky’s Legacy, solved most of the problems. The film was shot with great respect for both African and African-American culture, introducing Shakespearean motifs and references to the confrontation between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, creating a new aesthetic subgenre – Afrofuturism and at the same time condemning the divisive rhetoric of US President Donald Trump. As a result, “Panther” became the best film of the year according to Rotten Tomatoes with a phenomenal 97% positive reviews, received $ 1. 5 billion in box office receipts and took pride of place in the history of cinema as the first superhero movie nominated for the main Oscar.

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• Lady Bird

  Tragicomedy

  A new icon of indie cinema: a retrodrama about a schoolgirl

  Before the release of Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig was known primarily as a regular actress and muse. After her directorial debut garnered five Oscar nominations, she has become a new femme movie icon. “Lady Bird”, filmed by Gerwig on his own script, largely autobiographical, tells about the difficult relationship between a high school student and her mother in a middle-class family in the American province (originally the film was called “Mothers and Daughters”). Gerwig, at the time of the mainstream trend towards feminism, makes films that are non-militant, about strong and often aggressively independent superheroines, but conventionally everyday – a story about ordinary women, written by women.

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• You Were Never Here

  Detective, Thriller, Drama

  Joaquin Phoenix vs. Everyone so with Kevin” and “Morvern Kallar”. For simplicity, the film is often compared to Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” or Park Chan-wook’s “Oldboy”, which gives some idea of ​​the film, but by no means exhausts it. Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) served in the Middle East, and also went through a difficult childhood and in civilian life earns money from murders to make ends meet and support his elderly mother. One day, a congressman asks Joe to save his young daughter, and this task turns out to be a portal to the terrible world of child sex trafficking, supervised by people in high offices. At the story level, You Were Never Here is a colorful thriller about the trauma that parents, society, wars and government consistently inflict on the hero and society. Visually – and this is the main plus of the picture, in addition to the Phoenix and the bloodied hammer – Ramsey is interested not so much in the shady landscape of political life as in the psyche of the hero who went through this meat grinder. Fragments of memories, visions, nervous breakdowns – the film seems to be sewn from separate scenes and experiences, reminiscent of shooting a bomb during an explosion.

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• Dunkirk

  Action, Historical, Drama, War

  Christopher Nolan’s best film about the Dunkirk ambush

  Author of Inception, Christopher Knight and Interstellar Nolan turns to the pages of world history. The film is based on real events and tells about the course of the Dunkirk operation at the beginning of World War II. France, 1940 More than four hundred thousand British, French and Belgian soldiers are blocked by the Nazi troops near the city of Dunkirk. They are trapped on the beach, with only the sea behind them, and the enemy ahead, advancing and squeezing the vise more and more. Is it possible to save yourself in such a situation? What to choose – a heroic death or an attempt to survive without losing a human face? Never before has Nolan been so close to an Oscar for directing. The film was nominated in eight categories and eventually took three of them – for best editing, best sound and best sound editing (that is, for audiovisual experience). As usual with Nolan, his favorite actor, Michael Caine, took part in the film (his voice is heard in the radio message), and the overall impression of the picture can be summarized as follows: the feeling that he himself went to war.

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• The Fatal Temptation

  Western, Drama

  Cannes’ Best Director Revisionist Fem Thriller by Sofia Coppola

  silence”, Sofia Coppola, one of the smartest directors in the world, made a remake of Don Siegel’s misogynist thriller Trapped, which seems to have nothing to do with the storms of the present. During the years of the Civil War, the inhabitants of a women’s boarding house in the South of the United States pick up a wounded northern corporal (Colin Farrell) and help him, but soon the enemy, who abuses his hospitality, himself becomes a prisoner. Coppola, under the guise of lace bonnets and talk about morality, shot a picture that women, if given the opportunity, can be just as dangerous and truly toxic as men.

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• Ashes – the purest white

  Melodrama

  Chinese crime elegy about the vicissitudes of love

  The best Chinese director Jia Zhangke shot another elliptical epic about the changes in the life of China, collecting the most popular motifs from his previous work. This film is a saga about the mafia Bing and his fighting girlfriend Qiao. When competitors attack her lover, Qiao takes up a gun, which subsequently ends up in jail. After serving five years, she is released, but, as it turns out, her bandit boyfriend is not waiting for her. Cao endures many troubles and humiliations and almost completely believes that Bin will be with her. However, fate disposes differently. The film premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. Jia Zhangke is one of the most famous Chinese directors today, belonging to the sixth independent generation, who portrays modern China boldly and without embellishment, often without any government funding.

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• Mandy

  Action, Thriller, Horror

  Nicolas Cage takes revenge on a gang of occultists

  1983. Lumberjack Red (Nicolas Cage) and his wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) live quietly in the countryside near a forest. However, evil has settled in the forest next to them: a religious cult in the company of a hellish biker gang. Mandy is walking through the woods, where she is seen by the sinister cult leader Jeremiah. He orders the bikers to kidnap the girl, drugs her and gives her a ritual burning. Red has no choice but to embark on the path of revenge. Nicolas Cage’s comeback as a deranged widower who saws off heads left and right. In this film by Panos Cosmatos, blood flows like water and drugs are swallowed up in three-liter jars. Panos Kosmatos, by the way, grew up in a director’s family and made his directorial debut in 2010 with the film Beyond the Black Rainbow. Film critics liked the picture so much that they compared Kosmatos with Tarkovsky, Lucas and Granrier. Mandy, on the other hand, became a cult film among fans of independent Sundance cinema – it premiered at Sundance.

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• Under Silver Lake

  Thriller, Comedy, Drama, Crime

  All LA Secrets

  some damn thing. This time the film takes place in Los Angeles, where an aspiring loser actor (Andrew Garfield) falls in love with a neighbor (Riley Keough), only to find out the next morning that she is missing. Her search leads him to the mysterious other world of Los Angeles, under Silver Lake, where homeless kings, dog killers and secret societies of the rich operate. Conspiracy theories should help to understand what is happening – the clue to them is hidden in the works of pop culture. This is a delusional, paranoid, truly geeky movie that tries to crack the codes of mass culture and find a big meaning behind them, that is, it does the same thing that any fan does. Mitchell diagnoses our time, when, thanks to the unprecedented popularity of movie comics (see The Avengers), being geeks has become fashionable as perhaps never before.

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• Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

  Animation, Adventure

  The best Spider-Man avatar – famously drawn and invented

  In the 21st century, Spider-Man took on the big screen three times: Garfield, Andrew Maguire Tom Holland – everyone had their own charm, genre, landmark. However, the most memorable phenomenon of the heroic teenager – not only in the 2010s, but perhaps in the new millennium in general, if not in history – was the animated version. Instead of a white teenager strangled by templates, there is an insecure African-American Miles Morales, instead of one-time stylizations (under the low-budget wampuku by Sam Raimi and John Hughes by John Watts) – an eclectic fusion of styles, from manga to graffiti, from comics to video games. Finally, instead of the hackneyed theme of teenage duplicity superimposed on the basis of a superhero life, there is a story about the fear of being a hero, a dizzying adventure into the very heart of the horror of doing something wrong and the realization that “it” will never happen anyway.

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• Roma

  Drama

  The story of the collapse of family relationships and love for one maid

  Mexico City, 1970. An indigenous girl with the short name Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) works in the home of a middle-class family – a wealthy doctor and his wife. Her duties include raising four children, caring for the grandmother of the family and cleaning the huge mansion. After a date with a local guy, Cleo becomes pregnant, and the child’s father masterfully escapes to the provinces to practice martial arts harder. At the same time, the husband leaves the mistress for his mistress, leaving a large house and four children to their fate. The lives of the heroes are broken by student riots during the Catholic holiday on June 10, 1971 years, when the demonstrators were first beaten and then shot by the paramilitary pro-government group Los Alcones. The world premiere of Alfonso Cuarón’s tape, a black and white aesthetic elegy, took place at the 75th Venice International Film Festival, where it took part in the main competition program and received the Golden Lion. Later, two Oscars were added to it: for the best film in a foreign language and the best camera work. Cuarón, along with Alejandro González Iñarittu and Guillermo del Toro, now make up the premier Mexican trio in Hollywood.

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• Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

  Detective, Fantasy, Drama

  Interactive movie

  , to continue the show in the traditional way would be boring, and its creators ventured on a long-awaited trick: to make an interactive movie on the Neflix streaming service. Immerse Black Mirror viewers inside Black Mirror itself. It turned out that this approach works. Opening the fifth season, the full-length episode “Bandersnatch” gives a completely new, exciting and amazing experience. The film has a nesting doll composition, which is also called misanabim in art. In the course of the action, you can make a choice for the main character, and which option you choose depends on how the plot develops further. The main character, in fact, is also busy in the film – a young developer Stefan Butler (Fionn Whitehead from Dunkirk), who is designing a multi-variant video game, taking Jerome F. Davies’ Bandersnatch quest book as a source of inspiration. But as practice shows, work on such a work can end very badly. For example, Davis went insane while writing the book and beheaded his wife. Stefan is close to the same insanity. And then it’s time to remember that in fact Bandersnatch is a character in Lewis Carroll’s fairy tale “Alice Through the Looking-Glass” and the poem “Hunting the Snark”, a meeting with which promises madness. More than five hours of footage was filmed for the film. The shortest version of the passage takes forty minutes. In total, Bandersnatch has eight different endings. At the same time, the time for making a decision is limited. If you are unable to make a choice, it is accepted by default. The funniest thing about the movie is getting out of your comfort zone and feeling paranoid about Big Brother watching you (it’s no coincidence that the movie takes place in Orwellian 1984), and the episode when the “fourth wall” collapses in the picture. This moment when the main character asks you what Netflix is, and you try to explain it to him as best you can, is priceless.

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• Book of Image

  Documentary, Drama

  An experimental film by Jean-Luc Godard in which he explores the history of cinema

  The Book of Image is an montage without a plot or actors. Godard glued it together from fragments of films, stirring up the entire history of cinema. Frames from Jean Cocteau here are replaced by Sergei Eisenstein, Nicholas Rey – by Gus Van Sant. Structurally, the “Book of the Image” is divided into six parts (five chapters plus the finale, five fingers on the hand plus the whole hand). As in his previous film Farewell to Speech, Godard quotes an essay by the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont “Thinking with your hands”. The hands that appear on the screen more than once are the connecting chapters in his picture: 1) “Remakes”, 2) “Evenings of St. Petersburg”, 3) “These flowers between the rails in the confused wind of travel”, 4) “The Spirit of Laws” , 5) “Central Region” (as a film by Michael Snow). The film was presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018, but the jury did not figure out how to evaluate it, so they obtained permission from the festival management to present the director with the first special Palme d’Or in the history of the show.

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• Favorite

  Biography, Historical, Tragicomedy

  The tragedy of women in the male world in the entourage of the XVIII century

  , also written not by himself, but by two little-known screenwriters (the script appeared 20 years ago, but lay on the shelf for a long time – the producers refused to put on a picture with three women in the lead roles, citing the fact that no one would go to such a movie; curiously, that Soviet cinematographers turned out to be more perspicacious in this sense: the domestic television show “Glass of Water”, which tells about the same events, was released back in 1979). Before us is a costume drama made in the spirit of Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon”, which tells about the struggle of two favorites for a place at the throne and in the bed of the English Queen Anne. The result turned out to be shocking in a good way: bold camera decisions like filming with a “fisheye” that causes the effect of claustrophobia, aesthetic division of the script into chapters and the seeming incompleteness of the narrative, superimposed on witty dialogues, a gripping plot and completely outrageous acting (not only for the entire female trio , but also by Nicholas Hoult), both critics and audiences liked it. However, the main advantage of the picture, probably, should still be considered its subtle, unplacarded arguments about the fate of women in the male world. Punchy Abigail (Emma Stone) several times hints at the routine of rape in her life, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), despite her outstanding abilities, is not considered equal by male lords, and even the queen herself (Olivia Colman), who rules one one of the strongest states in Europe, cannot escape the restrictions of the patriarchal world, and her tragedy remains incomprehensible to anyone except a close friend.

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• Shadow

  Adventure, Drama

  Zhang Yimou returns to the world of flying daggers

  Three Kingdoms era. After the defeat in the war and the loss of the city of Jing, the bloodless Pei kingdom, led by the ruler Pei Lian (Ryan Zheng), desperately clings to the concluded peace treaty. However, many want revenge – including the warlord Jing (Deng Chao), who never recovered from a terrible wound, so he is forced to hide in secret chambers, putting in his place a specially trained double, a “shadow” (Deng Chao). He must start the war again, but for now he begins to play an increasing role not only at court, but also in the heart of the general’s wife (Sun Li). Following the colorful, but indescribably stupid blockbuster The Great Wall, filmed, as Zhang Yimou himself admits, for children, the classic of Chinese cinema returned to the roots to do what he does best – a philosophical historical drama of transcendent beauty. “Shadow” is not inferior to the great Ymou trilogy (“Hero”, “House of Flying Daggers,” Curse of the Golden Flower”), and in some ways even surpasses it. The master here goes for a bold experiment: he refuses bright colors in favor of gray undertones of Chinese calligraphy. Only the faces of the actors glow through the monochrome range and the incessant rain. The work of the actors, by the way, is worth noting separately: Deng Chao (who has a real benefit performance here) advantageously sets off the eccentric and hysterical Ryan Zheng. And the Shakespearean passions that Imou carves out of a little-known story help them to reveal themselves to the fullest.

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• Us

  Thriller, Horror

  Jordan Peele’s second horror film from horror of racism to class injustice

  “Us” is also US, USA), again in ironic horror. The peace of a middle-class family (Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke, two children) is disturbed when doppelgangers enter their house – dressed in identical red overalls, unable to speak and armed with a pair of scissors. It soon turns out that their family is not the only one visited by mysterious strangers. Peel, who is considered one of the main directors of the African-American film wave that rose in the 1910s, this time speaks, rather, not about the problems of race, but of classes. “We” is a story about two Americas, ordinary and underground, which is eager to take revenge – a literal metaphor and, rather, a social manifesto.

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• Roll into the asphalt

  Action, Thriller

  The harsh skating rink of men’s cinema

  S. Craig Zahler’s third film (“Bone Tomahawk”, “Fight in block 99”) became, perhaps, the most serious work in his still poor, but bright filmography. To the already familiar brutality and naturalism, a rather detailed conversation was added on the topic of the crisis of classical masculinity in the world of tolerance and #MeToo. In the director’s homeland, in the USA, the film predictably annoyed both the right and the left, which is generally characteristic of Zaler as an artist. In his unwillingness to take sides and a suspicious squint at the world around him, anyone, if desired, can find a reason for personal resentment. It is worth saying that the author chose a team of actors to match the theme: the company of his two-meter muse Vince Vaughn was made up of veterans of the “male” cinema Mel Gibson and Don Johnson, as well as the unrecognizably made-up black militant star Michael Jai White from Undeniable. Together they play an ascetic neo-western in modern settings, proving that even today’s toothless America can for some time become that very last frontier that tests the heroes for the strength of muscles, nerves and moral principles. The rhythm of the stingy dialogues is set here and there by punctuation marks from the sudden deaths of the characters who let go of the well-aimed phrase. This also works for some not deliberate, but tangibly spilled suspense in the picture, thanks to which a solid timekeeping of two forty flies by in one breath. And one should not expect simple answers to difficult questions from Zahler: instead, the film spits in the sand and wanders into the sunset, leaving a trail of blood in its wake.

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• Can you forgive me?

  Biography, Comedy, Crime

  Black comedy about a writer who forges letters from celebrities now it could be imagined), in which a plump, untidy woman walks on the screen, whose whole house is covered in cat poop, not a penny in her pocket, and on her shoulders a coat stolen at a party, but at the same time it is impossible to tear yourself away from the picture. Probably partly because this is the true story of writer and journalist Leigh Israel (Melissa McCarthy). After writing a couple of biographies and quarreling with everyone because of her bad temper, she was practically at the bottom in the company of a sick cat. To cure her pet, Lee has to gather her will into a fist – and earn extra money on fake letters from celebrities: Dorothy Parker, Louise Brooks, Ernest Hemingway and others. One can argue endlessly about how much Israel deserves forgiveness, especially since she died shortly before the premiere. But the merit of Melissa McCarthy, who played her, lies in the ability to show that a romantic hero who has fallen to the bottom and risen spectacularly does not have the privilege of gender. Talent and adventurism are inherent in a person regardless of gender – and if earlier films about unfortunate, but not devoid of humor and ingenuity of creative people were shot mainly about men, now the trend has reversed. The heroine may embody the worst qualities (slovenliness, drunkenness, inability to communicate), but now she, like a man, has the right to rise from the ashes. Let him drink a bottle of whiskey along the way.

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• Parasite

  Thriller, Tragicomedy

  The main film of 2019: a South Korean poor family leads a rich family by the nose

  slums of the poorest district of Seoul. They live in complete poverty: they connect to Wi-Fi from a nearby store without asking, homeless people constantly urinate at the window of their basement dwelling. They have no money to fight the ubiquitous cockroaches, and they drive disinfection sprayed on the street into their miserable apartment. Their only small income is making cardboard pizza boxes. But the Kims, by deceit and cunning, get a job in the house of the rich. Hiding kinship with each other, resourceful crooks take advantage of the bounties of their deceived employers. Of course, without their knowledge. Cannes Palme d’Or and Oscars 2020. “Parasite” is not only a social drama by activist-director Bong Joon Ho (“Snowpiercer”) obsessed with enduring class strife, but also a sitcom, a picaresque novel. Parasite is not propaganda or a documentary. “I’m not going to teach people how to change lives,” says the director. The first time in Oscar history that a non-English-language film won the top prize.

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• The Lion King

  Adventure, Musical, Family

  Cringe remake of the classic Disney cartoon as if with real animals – and The Lion King surpasses all other attempts to retell the tale in the format. Realistically rendered on a computer animals are rummaging through the (un)natural habitat, but at the same time, for some reason, they speak and, all the more, sing. Instead of a solemn presentation of a technological breakthrough (and this is partly it), The Lion King rather reminds of the importance of melting down cultural artifacts, not copying. In the source, yes, Hamlet, yes, Kimba the White Lion, yes, the standard musical formula, but each scene is a show-stopper that is beautiful because of its choreographic and color unnaturalness. Jon Favreau, still considered an important figure in studio production after Iron Man, had only one – not requiring songs – concept: using record naturalism, he tried to demonstrate the “circle of life” when antelopes eat grass, lions eat antelopes, and then die and become grass. But the scene with the dung beetle, which illustrates this simple wisdom, is ridiculously small for a serious author’s contribution.

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• Solstice

  Detective, Horror, Drama

  Not only a white horror, but also a black comedy

  Dani (Florence Pugh) has a horrific death of her parents and sister, who suffered from bipolar disorder. Ready to leave her, Christian (Jack Raynor) becomes a hostage to the situation, and instead of parting with the girl, he takes her with him on a trip to Sweden, where he and his classmates wanted to study local customs. However, this does not lead to anything good: the inhabitants of the Khorgi commune turn out to be pagan sectarians practicing terrible rituals, and the camera at the entrance to the province of Helsingland will turn 180 degrees, thereby demonstrating that the inner world of the main characters will soon turn over in the same way. Director Ari Aster (“Reincarnation”) loves visual metaphors, and he can also be suspected of foppishness, but what you can’t refuse him is the ability to create his own world on the screen. Shooting a blindingly white, daytime and rural horror is not exactly an original idea, but the director has a cool concept beyond that. Solstice is a very impressive movie that can be read as a modern reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, or as a story about liberation from codependent relationships and finding a new family through sacrifice. Be that as it may, this is an extremely moving film that not only stays in your head for a long time, but also invites you to seriously think about the fact that the worst horror in the world is not monsters, but relationships.

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• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

  Tragicomedy

  Quentin Tarantino’s Return to Top Shape

  Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film, in which he pulled the same alternate history stunt as in Inglourious Basterds ”, only now not in the fields of World War II, but in a dream factory. Two white men – an actor and his stunt double (Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt) – save Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) from members of the Manson Family in a turning point in 1969. The beauty of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is that it can be interpreted in any way: as the story of the reconciliation of Old Hollywood with the New, and as the acid fantasy of a cinephile who has lost his mind, and (if one resorts to the inevitable Freudian interpretation) as a story about the separation of two men, in which the metaphor for the pain of this separation is the massacre of “damn hippies”.

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• Avengers: Endgame

  Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

  The finale of the superhero franchise that crowned the movie comics in Hollywood as the most profitable movie in the art

  the world will be a superhero blockbuster from Marvel (not even a movie, but an intermediate result of a franchise that has grown to gigantic proportions), but here you need to understand that the studio came to this success slowly. At first, she taught viewers to watch movie comics as a movie series, consisting of several seasons or, if you like, phases. Then she began to complicate her universe and setting, introducing new (inclusive) characters, previously little known outside the geek community. Solo films about Black Panther (an African American) and Captain Marvel (a woman) became possible only 17 films later, when film comics had already become the most important of the arts in Hollywood and the world. Clearly, we are now living in a post-Marvel era, where even leftist franchises are trying to make blockbusters in the vein of Marvel and flirt with its aesthetic (recent example: Men in Black: International). However, despite the fact that over the past two decades, movie comics have become pretty wiser and began to talk about serious topics, this sociocultural “miracle” has its drawbacks. As in almost any series, in the MCU the functions of directors are reduced to the functions of employees, and the true demiurge of this universe is producer Kevin Feige, who makes an average, compromise product, where there is no room for radical experiments yet (see “Joker”). Of course, the final Avengers is breathtaking, but it is more the pleasure of a stadium concert or, as Martin Scorsese put it, an attraction.

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• The Joker

  Thriller, Drama, Crime

  The loudest comic book film in which the Joker is a hostage of the gene and society City. He works as a street clown, sees a psychiatrist and takes care of his sickly mother all his life. Despite his apparent psychiatric diagnosis and negative thoughts, he has the most harmless dream of becoming a famous stand-up comedian. Mom assures Arthur that he was born to bring joy to people. In the evenings, they watch the funny Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) show together and habitually argue over mayoral candidate Thomas Wayne. However, the unforeseen happens: Arthur accidentally kills hooligans molesting him on the subway. Then death follows death, Arthur takes revenge on all his offenders who do not take him seriously. So from a ridiculous clown, Fleck turns into a formidable villain of Gotham – the Joker. Three-time Oscar nominee Joaquin Phoenix played one of the best roles of his career and won a well-deserved Oscar and Golden Globe for it, the film was directed by Todd Phillips, previously known for the nihilistic comedy trilogy The Hangover. At the Venice Film Festival 2019kinokomiks received the main prize – “Golden Lion”. The picture divided the audience into fans and haters. Some are sure that this is the best comic book movie, while others are skeptical about the Joker cult.

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• Portrait of a Girl on Fire

  Historical, Melodrama, Drama

  Costumed melodrama and manifesto of the new women’s cinema share it with men). In 2017, the branch was awarded to Lynn Ramsey for You Were Never There, in 2018 to Alice Rohrwaker for Lucky Lazarus, in the past to Celine Syamma for Portrait of a Girl on Fire, a costumed melodrama that not only became the locomotive of the female gaze, but also raised like a banner by the manifesto of the new women’s cinema. The plot is as follows: Marianne (Noémie Merlan) is an artist, which is not quite an everyday occurrence for the end of the 18th century. She receives a difficult order: to paint a portrait of a girl named Eloise (Adele Haenel, who has become one of the symbols of women’s struggle against sexual violence, harassment and femicide), which will then have to be sent to her potential groom. However, when the artist arrives at the estate on the coast of Brittany, the obstinate model flatly refuses to pose: she does not want to get married, to put it mildly. Therefore, Marianne is forced to introduce herself as a simple companion and follow Eloise along the deserted beaches as a shadow in order to somehow fix the features of her face in her memory. But the further, the more she realizes that she feels for the object of the image something much stronger than simple interest and even friendly sympathy. It should also be mentioned that in the same Cannes, Syamma’s film received the Queer Palm Branch for the best coverage of the LBGT theme in cinema, but it would be unfair to place this wonderful film only in such a framework, because even the theme of emancipation that sounds here is not the only one, although definitely leading. In the story of the artist and her model, the myth as old as the world of the creator who fell in love with his creation is revealed – and what difference does it make what gender Pygmalion and Galatea are, if in the finale this breakthrough costumed melodrama will break your heart under Vivaldi. Burn, my dear, burn.

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• Dylda

  Drama

  The director’s new film “Tightness”: a story about sisterhood in post-war Leningrad from the Greek “violet”, brings up a three-year-old boy Pashka (Timofey Glazkov), about whom everyone thinks that he is her son, but this is not so. Pashka was left to her by her friend Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina), with whom they fought together at the front, only now the anti-aircraft gunner Iya was demobilized after a shell shock: it happens that she falls into a stupor for some time. During one of these innumerable seizures (and just before Masha’s arrival), the girl accidentally crushes the boy to death. This tragedy will have an unexpected impact on their relationship. Speaking of “Dylda”, one cannot but mention its artistic design. As in the formalist “Closeness”, where each character and scene had its own color, Kantemir Balagov again plays with the color palette, saturating the picture mainly with green, red and ocher. And if ocher, according to the director, is “the rust of life,” then green (it belongs to Iya) and red (it belongs to Masha) must be life itself. “Dylda” is a very beautiful movie, and for someone, perhaps, its polished picture will become a problem, as well as in places overly literary Zvyagintsev, or rather Platonov’s dialogues – nevertheless, all this should not prevent you from watching one of the most significant Russian films of the 10s.

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• The Irishman

  Drama, Crime

  Martin Scorsese closes the gangster theme in the movie trade unionist Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), about whom Danny DeVito had already made a film with Jack Nicholson in the early nineties, and his bodyguard Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro). In his old age, Sheeran confessed to the murder of Hoffa, but whether he was the killer has never been proven – however, Scorsese has little interest in historical truth. For him, Charles Brandt’s non-fiction novel I Heard You Paint Houses (slang for “painting houses” means “killing people”) is just a starting point. The great American director shoots an elegant elegy about the time that kills everything, the deep silence that reigns around the fragment of the statue of Ozymandias. It is worth warning that in terms of tempo, structure, dialogues, unhurried development of events, this is a very archaic, old-fashioned movie with a signature Scorsese tragic worldview. Now such tapes have no place in cinemas, so The Irishman was symptomatically released on the streaming service Netflix, which paid off a record amount of $ 150 million for the picture (they say, however, the budget has grown to 200 million at all). A significant portion of this money went into the rejuvenation of the actors on the screen – and this is perhaps the most controversial part of the film: in places The Irishman looks like a circus with false noses. But if you close your eyes to this rejuvenating CGI, you will see – no, not a masterpiece, but a very good movie, which will especially appeal to Scorsese fans. This is a final, important statement by the author, the meaning of which boils down to the fact that if The Goodfellas and Casino were the tell-tale headshot of a gangster drama, then The Irishman is the final nail in the coffin.

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• Atlantic

  Mysticism, Drama

  Post-colonial elegy about the love of a guest worker and a virgin

  The film tells about the love of the worker Suleiman and the 17-year-old girl Ada, patriarchalism and also echoes of the mythical colonists about zombies. Suleiman sails to the open sea (Atlantic Ocean) in search of a better life and work, Ada is married to the unloved. Atlantic is a very poetic, innovative film that mixes many genres. This is a melodrama, and a horror, and a detective story, and a mystical existential film that speaks in simple terms not only about eternal philosophical matters, but also about the social context. Here the sun rises, here the ocean plays, here the souls of the beloved strive to unite, but … they are prevented by class inequality. Mati Diop’s cinema embodies the hottest topics on the global agenda today: feminist and African American. In 2019At the Cannes Film Festival, the film “Atlantic” received the Grand Prix.

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• Marriage Story

  Tragicomedy

  Scenes from married life in a modern way

  Charlie Barber (Adam Driver) is a successful theater director in New York. Now his troupe is working on a play that will star his wife Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), a former teen film actress. The couple is going through family problems – and eventually decides to divorce. Nicole flies off to live with her mother in Los Angeles, and Charlie is left stuck between the two cities, immersed in a complicated divorce process in which he has to fight for his son. It is no coincidence that critics compare this film by Noah Baumbach with Scenes from a Married Life by Ingmar Bergman. The picture has the same bitter aftertaste of everyday family quarrels and mutual grievances. At 9At the 2nd Academy Awards, the film received 6 nominations, winning the statuette for Best Supporting Actress (Laura Dern, who plays Nicole’s glib lawyer).

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• The Nightingale

  Adventure, Thriller, Drama forced male directors to make room. In The Nightingale (two special prizes at the Venice Film Festival in 2018), she enters another primordially masculine territory – the western, where she arranges fierce mayhem in the spirit of S. Craig Zahler. Actually, “Nightingale” looks like a female answer to “Bone Tomahawk” and “Roll into Asphalt”; ossi-exploitation filmed in a Tasmanian forest belt. The picture tells about the times of the Black War, when the British colonial authorities in Australia staged a genocide of the local population. At the same time, Irish ex-convict Claire (Aisling Franciosi) tries to get her well-deserved freedom from British lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin), but he only takes advantage of her helplessness. Intoxicated with power, the soldiers first rape the girl, and then kill her husband and newborn daughter, after which the heroine turns into a fragile angel of revenge and follows the trail of offenders in the company of an unfriendly eccentric aborigine Billy (Baikali Ghanambarr). Despite the overly frontal leftist pathos, the meaning of which, as you might guess, comes down to criticism of colonialism, and the cumbersome, overloaded finale, in which, of course, non-white cisgender men will meet the dawn of the new world, the film has the main thing – nerve, rage and lively energy that captivate and captivate. It may not be the best movie in the world, but it’s certainly one of the most impressive.

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• First Reformed Church

  Thriller, Drama

  Diary of a Country Priest + Taxi Driver

  Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke), like a curate from a film by Robert Bresson, keeps a diary – and, like Travis Bickle in a Martin Scorsese film, preparing to commit a rash act wrapped in dynamite. Leading figure in New Hollywood, Paul Schrader wrote a book based on The Diary of a Country Priest, and a script for Taxi Driver. So it was a matter of time before he mixed these two works into one. “The First Reformed” is a real confession of his lyrical hero, a restless loner who opposes the system, society, and sometimes the whole world. This is Taxi Driver of the 21st century, but with an unexpected ending: at the end, the camera, as if in The Bodyguard, will spin around two kissing people – and it will become clear: it is not necessary to sacrifice yourself to save this world.

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• Education

  Comedy

  Breakthrough coming of age comedy – girly answer to Super Peppers and John Hughes enter the territory cultivated in the 1980s by the great John Hughes, the “Sartre of school hell. ” We have seen such stories about nerdy boys dozens of times, so Wilde makes the main characters girls – two school friends: the shy lesbian Amy (Caitlin Dever) and the body-positive control freak Molly (Bini Feldstein). Both terrible nerds who skipped parties all year and crammed textbooks to get into college. However, when it turns out that their careless classmates and classmates also ended up in college (while not forgetting to have fun), the girls decide to come off by all means at the graduation party – with sad, as in such cases, consequences. This is a witty, timely, homerically funny movie in some scenes, which works with hackneyed paths in a new way thanks to the female gaze, “female gaze”. There is a lot of energy in this, of course, there is talent, but still, Wilde and her screenwriters (despite the wild enthusiasm of critics) in places lack the wisdom of John Hughes, who knew how to strike at the very heart by simply putting teenagers opposite each other.

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• Bliss

  Horror

  A grandiose art horror about an artist in hell

  which for the most part were about real evil. Here, evil is also in abundance: according to the plot, the talented, but unassembled artist Dezzy (Dora Madison) falls into a creative stupor and cannot finish the picture for which she has already been paid a fee. In search of inspiration, she goes for stimulants: first she tries a drug called Diablo, then she has group sex with a couple who seem to have come out of the movie Only Lovers Left Alive. It helps – Dezzy starts painting again. But there is also a side effect: the artist does not remember anything, and the corpses around her begin to multiply exponentially. Probably, it would not be superfluous to say that “Bliss”, like “Velvet Chainsaw”, is an art horror, which in somewhat condensed, but truthful colors shows how the artist, like a vampire, parasitizes on close and not close people, does not see nothing but his inflated ego, and always draws stories about himself. Of course, this cannot lead to anything good, but this is the price you have to pay for talent. After all, what is art, really? It is the force that tears you to pieces.

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• Dow

  Biography, Drama

  More than a movie

  At the same time a film and not a film at all, cinema after art and cinema instead of art – “Dau”, no matter how you put it, does not fit into a concise wording. At first it was a biopic about the Nobel physicist Lev Landau, including his intricate free relationship with his wife, based on her memoirs. However, the idea quickly outgrew not only the original idea, but cinema in general: non-professional actors (not even actors, but rather performers at the largest immersive performance in history), who simultaneously played someone from a fictional past and, at the same time, remained themselves first of all , lived for three years (!) in a cyclopean scenery called the Institute, erected in Kharkov. “Dau”, which had almost no spectators, except for rare famous guests, who also became participants in the action, is not a film, but a complex of complex works and experiences. Not only about how to survive in the midst of mortal love and in a totalitarian society of any era, but also about how cinema finally replaced supposedly real life with itself. About “Dow”, which thoroughly quarreled the film criticism community and sharply raised ethical questions about how it is possible and how not to make a movie, after the premiere they began to talk less, but, it seems, only for a while. Most importantly, now everyone (and not just the “privileged” visitors to the Paris exhibition) can see it online.

  5

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• The Waves

  Melodrama, Sports

  A breathtakingly beautiful movie

  Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a high school student who lives in a wealthy African-American family, is engaged in wrestling (Alexa Harrison Jr.) ), also black. The guy has great prospects, but his plans for the future are shattered when he first finds out that he has a serious shoulder injury requiring immediate surgery, and then – that his girlfriend is pregnant. Unable to find a common language with Alexis (she wants to keep the child, but he does not), as well as with his demanding, rather even toxic, father (Sterling K. Brown), the young man makes one fatal mistake after another. As a result, all this leads to irreparable consequences. However, when we have already prepared for the fact that the prison drama awaits us in the second half, the picture makes a police U-turn and changes the angle of view. The main character is Tyler’s younger sister, Emily (Taylor Russell), whom no one (including the audience) has paid attention to before. Thus, director Trey Edward Schultz (“Krisha”, “It Comes at Night”), on the one hand, contrasts the destructive male energy with the creative female one, and on the other hand, conceptually brings to the fore a person who also deserves a separate chapter in this sad story. However, despite such a sharp plot twist, the story itself in the film may seem banal – and partly it is. This is a family drama that adds little to the well-known thesis that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” But as often happens with great directors (and Schultz still aims for great directors), the main thing in the film is not the plot, but the author’s intonation. “Waves” is a masterfully conceived and absolutely masterly filmed movie, an extremely formalist thing.

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• Land of the Nomads

  Drama

  Chloe Zhao’s milestone film, which still hung between the author’s independent cinema and Marvel

  Road movies are an exclusively American genre. All other exercises in it, filmed in other countries, always look like an homage to the cinema of a country divided into states, but at the same time without borders: ride it wherever you want, achieve whatever your heart desires. In any case, such is the stable cinema myth built by the USA about itself. The painting “Land of the Nomads”, even at the time of its premiere at the covid Venice Film Festival 2020 (where it predictably received the main prize), seemed to the first viewers to be a ready-made neoclassic, brilliantly refutes this legend. Yes, the road stretches under the wheels to the horizon, but where to go along it if the metaphorical traveler has no starting point? Frances McDormand actually played here herself, an eternal wanderer, who, by a funny coincidence, eventually became the most expressive age-old American actress, but she could not have become, but turned into such a Fern – lonely, without family and address, who buried her husband and disappeared the city they lived in, a woman living in her own caravan. Partly for reasons of economy, partly because it cannot be otherwise. “Land of Nomads” by Chloe Zhao (“Rider” and Marvel’s “Eternals”) is an extremely philosophical and poetic movie without end and beginning, does not answer the question of where to go along the road of life, but shows what the deteriorating America, the land of free and courageous, but rapidly impoverished pilgrims.

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• Munk

  Biography, Drama

  A grandiose production drama about the screenwriter of “Citizen Kane”

  We should not think that we have a biopic about the famous Hollywood screenwriter Orajdan Kanewich, the author of Herman Urajdan Kellman Mankewich . Not at all. This is not really “Trumbo”, but a much more voluminous, polysyllabic, truly polyphonic work, in which there was a place to talk about dirty political elections, and about the ubiquitous fake news, and about the responsibility of the creator for his work, and about the hypocrisy of Hollywood industry, and, in the end, about the right of the author to be included in the credits. At the same time, to tell the story of Munk (Gary Oldman), the Finchers (written by journalist Jack Fincher, David’s father, who died long before the premiere, in 2003) use a flashback structure mirroring the original and a quixotic trope. They have Munk himself, an idealist fighting with windmills, as Don Quixote, Sancho Panza as stenographer Rita Alexander (Lily Collins), Dulcinea de Toboso as actress Marion Davis (Amanda Seyfried), and the evil magician Feston as media mogul William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), from which Charles Foster Kane was written off. At the same time, director Orson Welles (Tom Burke) seems to have landed the role of Miguel Cervantes, the man who will tell this story to the whole world. It is no coincidence, by the way, that we meet Munk after a car accident, when, like Quixote of La Mancha after another trip, he lies down in a country house and tries to finish the script for Kane (then it was also called The American). Close people will dissuade him from this venture – his wife, “poor Sarah” (Tuppens Middleton), brother and director Joe Mankiewicz (Tom Pelphrey), Marion Davis, her nephew Charlie. In the same way, Quixote was dissuaded from his eccentric exploits by his relatives, but, like the Spanish don, Munk will be adamant. And as a Spanish don, he will give a revealing speech at the festive table, and in this episode Fincher will demonstrate such mastery of the director’s technique that it will become obvious: “Mank” is not only one of the main films of the year, but, perhaps, of the entire decade.

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“Russia is a country of impotents, and it’s sad…”

The first female urologist-andrologist in the TASSR about mothers-in-law who destroy families, chlamydia as a bacteriological weapon and the misfortune of single men

representatives of the stronger sex, how sexuality affects political activity and why the hopes of girls through oral sex to gain eternal youth are doomed to failure. A specialist in “male” diseases, the famous Kazan doctor Lyubov Mumladze, in an interview with BUSINESS Online, talks about the social nature of the health of the strong half of humanity.

Lyubov Mumladze: “I have such a good expression: society always hits a man in the balls backhand and in a big way. Therefore, everything that is happening in our country now is the destruction of the population.
Photo: Irina Erokhina

“LOW TESTOSTERONE IS A SOCIAL PROBLEM”

– Lyubov Savvovna, sometimes in the press you can find references to studies, most often foreign ones, according to which Russia is almost the leader in the world in terms of the number of impotents. Yes, and you bring rather horrific statistics to the media. What, everything is so bad with our men’s health?

– What are you, I haven’t named the most terrible numbers yet, otherwise they will say, they say, Mumladze frightens everyone. Many years ago, I went to Moscow to VDNH, where the annual exhibition-conference “Men’s Health and Longevity” was held, at which for the first time horrific figures were given in an accumulated form about men in our country, about their health, life expectancy. It was then that I heard terrible numbers, which, while working at the reception, I only guessed. Not only is Russia in first place in terms of completed suicides among men, in completed suicides among minors … Men live very little here, 15 years less than women. We are at 96th place in terms of standard of living, in terms of quality of life – this says a lot.

I have such a good expression: society always hits a man in the balls backhand and with a swing. Therefore, everything that is happening in our country now is the destruction of the population. The death rate exceeds the birth rate. Low testosterone is a social problem. Low testosterone means a weakening of masculinity in all its manifestations: social, interpersonal and emotional.

– Explain what you mean.

– There was an institute in Sukhumi where they studied human physiology on primates. I remember one experience. The alpha male of the pack had high testosterone, while the subordinate males had low testosterone. But if some young and impudent grew up, began to beat the leader and stood in his place, and all the females of the pack began to belong to him, then testosterone in the young one soared, while in the former alpha male it fell sharply down. This suggests that society plays a huge role in the potency and implementation of male functions. Therefore, when we have problems with unemployment in our country, when men do not have the opportunity for self-realization, then, naturally, a depressed state leads to the fact that the production of many hormones begins to be suppressed. First of all, the instinct of self-preservation is turned on, naturally, the instinct of reproduction goes by the wayside, as a result we have what we have today, that is, national hypogonadism …

“30-year-old guys are in no hurry to get married. One of my patients said: “Lyubov Savvovna, who should I marry? There are a lot of girls, but there is no one to kiss the hand. ” Explained a lot in one sentence…
Photo: pixabay.com

— What is it?

– This is a deficiency of male hormones generated by society. Then I want to talk about women. Do not think that I am a misogynist, but when you sit at the reception and work with men, you hear from them a lot of interesting things about what is happening in their families, about relationships with the opposite sex, then your own philosophical perception of the profession develops. 30-year-old guys are in no hurry to get married. One of my patients said: “Lyubov Savvovna, who should I marry? There are a lot of girls, but there is no one to kiss the hand.” One phrase explained a lot of things …

I don’t know how mothers raise their daughters today, because not everyone can walk on the catwalk, not everyone can marry a prince. But the girls are cut off from today’s realities, having seen enough TV shows and movies about a beautiful life. Therefore, it turns out that their ambitions exceed what life provides them today. As a result, everything goes haywire. It’s no secret that many young girls cohabit with 40-year-old men for money, such, let’s say, disguised prostitution. One young man told me: guys of my age, that is, 26-year-olds, do not shine with their peers, because they are all with “daddies”. This also has a depressing effect on a man, that is, he is left with no choice, he cannot even find that one for himself, take care of her in order to fulfill himself sexually and family.

In addition, all these Americanisms, the Western way of life alien to our culture, raise a lot of questions in Russian society. The same gay culture is alien to us. I have been working as a doctor for almost 40 years, I remember when I worked as a venereologist in a dermatology dispensary, homosexuals came to us with venous diseases and what kind of attitude they had. Today, the West is calling for tolerance, but with all that, it hides that Europe, which has sheltered millions of young and strong men, refugees from Africa, is being overwhelmed by a wave of rapes, and not only women from 12 to 80 years old, but also boys are being raped. , young men. They are silent about this.

We, of course, do not welcome such things, because in our culture we have an ambiguous attitude to this problem, therefore, I hope, we will not get to the point that two men through a surrogate mother will acquire a child in order to make him a sex toy and give it to your friends for fun. And this can happen in gay families…

“Tatarstan is in one of the first places in terms of divorces, and 80 percent of young families break up in the second year of life”
Photo: pixabay.com

“THE HUSBAND-SON-LAW IS EXPIRED IN SHAME AS A WASTE, GOOD PERSON”

— And we also have a lot of seemingly complete families, but a man leaves far and for a long time to earn money…

more —

more about a million of us are in prison, and these are young healthy people who spend their lives behind bars.

– But there are much more prisoners in the USA, statistics say so…

– But there are much more people living in the USA than in our country. I repeatedly spoke from the TV screen about violence in the family, which leads to its breakup. Tatarstan is one of the first places in terms of divorces, and 80 percent of young families break up in the second year of life. What does this say? About the fact that young people, without thinking, without weighing thoroughly, enter into marriage. This, as I understand it, is a hasty decision, and often these are marriages on the fly, and it is difficult to say how an unexpected child adapts to this life, integrates into it and how parents will treat him.

In addition, Russia is a country of a female family in which the mother and her daughter bring up children, and the husband-in-law is expelled in disgrace as a worthless, good-for-nothing person after having fulfilled his biological role. That is, a woman gave birth to a child, which means that a man needs to get out of the house. This also causes some harm to the mental and physical health of a man, because, in my opinion, single men are like street children. Yes, today’s civilization gives him the opportunity to arrange his life, but the fact is that a person is a creature of society, and all the same, no matter how puffed up a man is, that he feels good, somewhere in the hidden corners of his heart there is anguish. Either big or small. After all, you still want home comfort, a warm female hand in the house. And a lot of men become single after 50 years. And this is also a problem of our modernity, naturally, they withdraw into themselves, cease to be in society, do not take care of their health and focus only on work …

– Do you want to say that diseases of the genitourinary organs come from here?

– When they ask me, for example, about prostatitis or impotence… Well, you can’t unequivocally describe everything, because how many patients there are so many scenarios for the development of the same disease. Plus, each person has their own comorbidities. Therefore, it is impossible to treat in general practice according to standards. According to the standards, it is possible to treat in case of operational need, resuscitation …

In general practice, when a doctor encounters a patient who has come for an appointment for the first time, of course, it is necessary to feel the patient literally through and through. I sometimes sit for hours with a person who came to an appointment in order to understand him, what he came to me with. I need to comprehend how he lives, with whom, what problems he has, habits, sexual behavior, whom he loves, what he enjoys. As a result, the problem clearly emerges. For prostatitis, there are internal and external causes. External ones, as a rule, are “bad girls”, and internal ones are the poor health of the man himself: focal foci of infection in the form of tonsillitis, sinusitis, bad teeth, hemorrhoids, anal fissures, paraproctitis that haunt the male sex. And not, as men think, they say he sat on the curb and caught a cold – this is all a trigger mechanism, the problem itself has been sitting for a long time.

Very often, prostatitis is discovered in an active way, when a man comes to an appointment and he has prostatitis. We begin to understand, do tests for infections, the state of health of his second half is always clarified. I usually watch a couple, because very often women are markers of certain diseases that can be very hidden in men.

A special topic is chlamydia, because there are diseases that can be used as biological weapons to destroy an entire nation. I would include trichomoniasis and chlamydia among these. After all, it is unicellular protozoa that are the very reservoir of chronic infections – bacterial and viral, which contribute to the chronicity of any infection in the human body. Due to phagocytosis ( process by which cells capture and digest solid particles, – approx. ed. ), which Trichomonas possess ( genus of anaerobic excavated parasites of vertebrates – approx. ed. ), they can swallow inside themselves, keep any infections, including chlamydia, for years, and release them in small batches after death into the human body. But the fact is that in Trichomonas itself, chlamydia live in protected forms, so very often they cannot be detected. You have to use other methods.

Unfortunately, there are patients who start googling because the doctor wants to profit from them, tries to deceive them, not realizing that if you come to the doctor, no doctor is interested in deceiving. Still, people go to a medical institute with a certain type of character and spiritual qualities, so I don’t think that doctors, especially urologists, begin to deceive. They don’t need it, but if a person has some kind of infection, you need to trust the doctor, because only a specialist can make a correct diagnosis. It is necessary to be treated, but our people are very sophisticated, they love to blame someone, that is, everyone will be to blame: doctors, teachers, journalists, everyone is to blame, but not the patient himself. And the fact that every citizen is obliged to take care of his health, people forget about it: no one is engaged in prevention. In our country, people do not consider it necessary, because they don’t even go to free medical examinations.

– This prophylactic medical examination often takes place very formally …

– This is screening, thousands of people, like at the front, where the “sick – healthy” triage is going on. There, analyzes are made on what today forms the deadly diseases of civilization: in the first place – cardiovascular diseases, in the second – oncology. Therefore, they force the cholesterol to be checked. Now there is another misfortune – osteoporosis. The lack of ultraviolet radiation in our region leads to the fact that quite a lot of people with osteopenia and osteoporosis, as a result of this, people have problems with bones and spine. I have experience when people broke their limbs, and traumatologists did not investigate, did not send people to check vitamin D, calcium. They begin to treat with their own methods, but how to treat if the callus does not form, by analogy – what to build from if there are no bricks. From the air?

Another feature of our region is iodine deficiency in the kidneys and thyroid gland diseases that lead to erectile dysfunction and infertility. The main diseases of civilization – oncology, hypertension, osteoporosis, diabetes mellitus – do not hurt anything, plus thrombosis, which is formed due to a sedentary lifestyle. People don’t move, people don’t walk, it would seem like sitting in front of the TV in the evening – they took a hand in hand, took a walk, our city is beautiful. Hiking is the key to health. If you walk 5–6 kilometers every evening, it will already be good, although an adult man needs to walk at least 10 kilometers, then there will be no problems either with the heart or with the vessels. We must educate the citizens of our country, educate a healthy generation, and a healthy generation begins with a healthy understanding of one’s life.

“Unfortunately, young people marry without knowing sexual etiquette, sexual hygiene, the characteristics of the male and female organisms”
Photo: pixabay.com

“THE SHEPHERD WHO GARDES SHEEP IN DAGESTAN IS MORE SEXY THAN SOME MEN RIDING LEXUS”

– Successful rich people, as it seems to many, do not experience problems with men’s health. Is it so?

– A shepherd who tends sheep in Dagestan is sexier than some men who drive Lexus, Maserati and other executive cars. Sometimes a man furnishes himself with shocking things, and this just speaks of his immaturity as a person. I once laughed when I read how one man makes golden toilet bowls for himself, and our patriarch ordered a gilded chair in Italy. Well, why does a patriarch, the spiritual mentor of a country like Russia, need a gilded chair? I saw the Pope driving in an old car, and everyone can shake hands with him. We live in the era of marketing and consumption. Alexander the Great, who conquered half the world, passed away, showing his empty hand to his army, he did not take anything with him. Great people said that when you go to the grave, you will not take anything with you, but the memory of great deeds remains. No one remembers which chariot Tutankhamun rode, although everyone knows the horse of Macedon, because Bucephalus was an amazing horse in itself, but after all, no one knows about our Alexander Nevsky or Vladimir Yasnoye Solnyshko what they rode. What our contemporaries move on or what someone ate – in the future this will not be interesting to anyone. They will ask for business.

– So what is the connection between show-offs and the state of men’s health?

– There is a connection, show-offs are often not confirmed by physiology, but, on the other hand, there are clear characteristics of alpha males. That is, a trained eye will always see a successful man. And it’s not even about Rolex, he can have a completely simple watch. You know that Henry Ford rode a bicycle to work, not his executive cars, and many such people – the same Rothschilds, Rockefellers – preached asceticism in their families, their children grew up not particularly spoiled.

I mean, I’m a really successful man and look different. If this is a wealthy person, he is very confident in his movements, he speaks very confidently, clearly builds thoughts, clearly knows how to position himself in any situation, and, in addition, it is even important how he stands. A very important element is the male stance, how he spreads his legs, how he holds his hands, his whole external entourage speaks volumes. He can be dressed in simple jeans, in a simple T-shirt, but everything will be immediately visible from him. That is, you recognize the queen even in rags, here the same thing.

And the boys with complexes who grew up in poor families had unloved children who were offended by their parents, relatives, neighbors, boys in the yard . .. They hide, then grow up, somewhere they were lucky to grab something, and off they went – went: my yacht is longer, my football club is cooler. This is such a stupid competition. That is, pleasing oneself, persuading oneself – how great I am, how wonderful I am. And I have questions for them: what have you done for your country? Once, when we were on an excursion to Pavlovo, I was amazed there when I saw monuments to Russian patronage, the buildings erected by them still stand. And what do we have now?

Therefore, potency is directly related to society. You can eat pumpkin seeds in kilograms, tons, smear with androgel, inject testosterone, do replacement therapy, but if a man has not realized himself in society, this will not help much.

“If a woman wants to have good sex at night, she should give a man the opportunity to come and lie on the couch after work, and not nag him for it”
Photo: pixabay. com

“THE MOTHER-IN-LIGHT IN JOKES IS NOT IN VIEW!”

– You say that the environment affects men’s health, but not everyone cares about the opinion of society. It is said that dying yogis considered themselves happier than some healthy people.

– Mental health is completely different, the same yogis live in a slightly different dimension, they are far from our realities. Have you ever seen a working yogi? Why should he work when he falls into a state of samadhi, he can stay there for years. My very good friend Anatoly Mikhailovich Yeldashev, our well-known local historian, philosopher, historian of Tatarstan, he considers such states as alcoholism, drugs, “internal emigration.” A person, of course, made a passport for himself, went abroad, emigrated from the country, and we still have a state of “internal emigration”, when people, in order to escape from the realities of today, go into alcoholism, drug addiction or become yogis.

– But, for example, scouts are trained, specially taught to be indifferent to external factors, they can knock out a chair, crack something on the head, and he, as if nothing had happened, should continue the conversation. So everyone can be taught this.

– Well, this is a profession, these are also people, but with a certain mentality. Take “17 Moments of Spring”, no matter how Stirlitz was a superhero, nevertheless he carried in his soul the image of his beloved wife. Every man should have an icon – a woman – and, in fact, she is. For someone it is real, and for someone a man can love and carry in his heart all his life, without ever having physical intimacy. And we know such facts in history. People converge if this is purely physical contact – this is sex, but when growing in souls – this is already love, already the highest manifestation. It is not for nothing that the Greeks divided the relationship between a man and a woman into bodily love – charita – and heavenly love – agapi, but for some reason we in Russia still have not learned. When we say “love”, we don’t understand what it is: either it’s bodily contact, or maybe love is when they sit and look into each other’s eyes, getting complete satisfaction.

Everyone is different and depends on how developed a person is as a person. I read who is the sexiest among us, it turned out to be a small breed of monkeys who have all contacts through sex. They quarrel – have coitus, fall in love – again coitus, raise children – coitus, everyone has each other through coitus, and at this stage there is complete mutual understanding, love and peace, tranquility. But we are not monkeys, but people…

– Maybe a husband and wife also use physical intimacy as a solution to any problems?

– Well, yes, if the wife does not say to take out the trash. I had such a patient whose erection stopped appearing on his wife because, as he said, he had a fixation with a trash can. “When I look at my wife, instead of a woman, a trash can appears in my head,” he said. When they went to bed, his wife’s first question was: “Did you take out the trash?”

Unfortunately, young people enter into marriage without knowing sexual etiquette, sexual hygiene, and the characteristics of the male and female body. Girls, in order to understand their husband, need to study male physiology, psychology well and realize that a man needs rest lying down, in a horizontal position. When a man is in a horizontal position, he is like a lion – he rests, when he moves, he works, for him this is a load position. Therefore, if a woman wants to have good sex at night, she should give the man the opportunity to come and lie on the couch after work, and not nag him for it.

After all, men and women are different creatures, that’s why those women who start to measure strength or something else with men look funny. A woman will never do a man’s job better than a man. For example, if you take motorists, there are a lot of women driving now. But if you look closely, then yes, ladies drive cars, but all our working vehicles are only men, and women are the main reason for accidents! Therefore, men do rough men’s work, and women still have to be women, take care of the family, cherish children, husband, respect a man in him, and not make scandals and bring her mother into the house, who begins to build a son-in-law and destroy the family. Unfortunately, many women after 50 years old, left alone, subconsciously strive to destroy their daughter’s family in addition. And many achieve this. How many such cases there were, the mother-in-law does not appear in jokes in vain!

“Testosterone is raised by movement, sports training, feelings, emotions, proper nutrition”
Photo: pixabay.com

“I HAD A PATIENT WHO HAD GONORRHEA 30 TIMES! WHAT’S GOOD?”

– Not only mothers-in-law can destroy a family …

– I had a patient, he was already under 60, and his wife, who was only a couple of years younger, began to blackmail him by saying that he was already old, useless, nobody needs… Come on, buy me such and such a fur coat, otherwise you won’t have sex, change my car. Everything is like in Pushkin’s fairy tale about the golden fish… The story was terrible, because a man came to me for help, thinking that he was impotent, since his wife says such things, they say, not a single woman will look at you. This is a variant of such domestic violence, when a woman verbally clogs his masculine essence in a man. And then he came to me with the certainty that he was impotent, but it turned out that the man was anywhere. He told with sadness that he was coming home and looking for a corner where to hide from evil eyes. But then we developed a whole program with him, as a result of which he married a young and beautiful woman who had loved him for a long time. I warned him: don’t get married right away, ask her if she will give you a baby or not. If a woman loves unconditionally, then, of course, dear, I will give birth to a child, I love you. That’s when you marry her. And so it happened, the young woman unconditionally gave birth to his son, he bought a large apartment, made it socially protected, and they are happy … This is a famous person in our republic, now he is happy, and I am happy.

Indeed, people come to an andrologist not only to get an injection in one place or to put a magic pill. Sometimes you have to talk for a long time, clean out the brains from the garbage that was stale there due to, say, domestic violence, and a man somehow begins to look at his life with different eyes. I remember when I was leaving the profession of an andrologist from among venereologists, one of my teachers, Leningrad professor Sergey Sergeevich Liebikh, told me a wonderful phrase: “It’s good that you are an andrologist woman, because in your head there will not be that plateau on which you will sit all the male sexopathology that you will have to listen to for the rest of your life.” In fact, this is so, there is a clear examination in the head. I have patients who were treated abroad: in American, French hospitals, famous ones, but nevertheless these people anchored with me and understand that we have normal doctors in our country, and this is shown by my many years of practice. I have patients who have been observed by me for several decades, thank God, they are alive and well.

— How to explain the fact that there are people who do not lead a very healthy lifestyle, but intimately everything is fine with them?

– This is all for the time being, the fact is that the possibilities of our body are not unlimited, but the fact that such a male “has” all women in a row . .. It is clear that a decent woman will not go with such a man, so he catches infections , everything starts to inflame and hurt, but he does not pay attention. I had a patient who had gonorrhea 30 times! Well, what’s good? I had patients who brought themselves to the point that articular syndrome developed, there were cases when comrades dragged their sick friend on a stretcher. All why? Because the person was sick, but did not pay attention to himself.

— Academician, surgeon Fedor Uglov, who lived to be 104 years old and performed operations at the age of 100, spoke about the benefits of abstinence…

— Uglov was a man, so he could preach such things from his own point of view, from his belfry. We have discussed this topic millions of times. At one time, when I studied with Professor Liebig in St. Petersburg, I met a group of St. Petersburg psychics who worked under an agreement with Interpol, looked for missing people, documents … Just about saving energy, the disputes were desperate. I believe that a man loses a lot of energy and vitality when he uses the services of prostitutes and when he gets into bed with a woman who does not love him. Where there are mutual feelings, there will always be complementarity, an exchange of energy, and female energy is crazy, and a man who is in love and in love in return will always have more strength than a man who leads an ascetic lifestyle.

Any man, including Professor Uglov, God rest him, was a good person, but in my practice there are men for whom the norm is one sex a month, and he is happy, it is enough for him, there are men for whom the norm is three times a day… But they are both equally happy. Each of us has our own special sexual constitution. If we look at the history of the church, the only function they always wanted to manipulate is sex: then you can’t have sex, then you can. But after all, sex is the most uncontrollable function of a person, and being free in sex, a person feels happy and free. But if you deprive him of everything, then there will be problems, because the body works on the principle of feedback. There is a request – there is a response, and the function is executed. There is no request, and testosterone drops, like monks. The spinal centers of ejaculation and erection work according to general laws: the function has passed and the recovery period is definitely underway, after a while the man is ready again – and again the recovery period. There will be no exhaustion.

– How to raise this same testosterone?

– Testosterone is raised by movement, sports training, feelings, emotions, proper nutrition. There are, of course, men, since childhood they have problems – insufficiency of sex hormones, but this is already replenished with medication. When I worked at the RCH, we collaborated with pediatric endocrinologists from the RCCH, and they transferred these children with congenital hypogonadism to me in various forms. Of course, these guys will have problems with offspring, alas and ah …

“You need to dress appropriately for the weather, men should try to wear cotton and layered underwear”
Photo: pixabay. com

AMERICA KILLING BAYSTRIKS, UNDERWEAR IN THE COLD SEASON AND THE MEDICAL DAMAGE OF ADULTERY

— Do you think impotence will eventually lead to the extinction of mankind?

— Of course, as well as sexual immorality and all kinds of other sins. If we take the canons by which we lived in Soviet times, or take the canons of Islam, Christianity, then they are all the same. This suggests that humanity has developed laws that contribute to the preservation of humanity as a species. And when they step over these canons, it turns out a very bad thing. Don’t steal, don’t kill, don’t commit adultery – it’s not just like that, everything is written in blood.

— In Islam, for example, as in other major religions, adultery is considered one of the deadly sins.

– Yes, there is nothing good in it, because it is a great deception. How can you have a relationship with a married person or a married woman?

“Morality began to decline in the early 90s with the destruction of the Soviet Union. So we achieved: beer, chips, chlamydia … ”
Photo: pixabay.com

– Variety is good.

– A babai from the Cheremshansky district once came to see me and says that he has disharmony with his wife in sexual relations. And I ask him to tell me how you live with her, and he: we just live, I am from above, she is from below. And I told him: what if it’s the other way around? He doesn’t say anything: “No, this is my masculine vanity will not tolerate.” This is what caused the disharmony. By the way, he overcame himself, and everything worked out.

— What should a man do if he suspects problems with this part of his health?

– If a man suspects some kind of problem, say, with urination, with erection, with pain in the perineum, anus, in the glans penis, testicles, lower abdomen, you should urgently go to the doctor, and not sit and wait , maybe everything will pass. Our urologists are good, competent, the most important thing is prevention. It is easier and cheaper to prevent the disease.

– Men probably need to take care of themselves even in winter, and some of them wear only trousers, flaunt autumn boots …

— In winter, I force all my patients to wear underwear, of course, it is clear that the scrotum is a natural refrigerator for spermatozoa, but not so much that the testicles knock against each other with a dull thud and then the man comes with inflammation. It is necessary to dress, but I also want to talk about baths. In the practice of Japanese geisha, there was such a means of preventing unnecessary pregnancy: before having bodily intimacy, they put men in barrels and soared. And while he was steaming, the geisha sang songs to him, danced, and because of his steaming, spermatogenesis slowed down. After such a barrel, there was a night of love without fear of getting pregnant. That is, the temperature of 80 degrees and above in the bath stops spermatogenesis. So, if you steam, do it at a temperature of 60 degrees. And you need to dress according to the weather, men should try to wear cotton and multi-layered underwear.

A strange paradox, like a man is closer to nature, and at the same time, men kill this nature, mother earth… We live in a world made by men’s hands, by a man’s mind, everything around us was made by men. I always scold women: they do not know how to respect men, even if only because he was born a man. Pay attention, take any Caucasian, look at how he stands, walks, talks . .. Because he did not have time to be born, and around him there is an atmosphere of adoration and love – the boy was born! And why do our Russian men walk around stuffed, unsure of themselves, doubting, with a bunch of complexes? Because my mother raised me wrong from childhood.

I once said to my patients a lot: if you have sons, bring them here to talk. The most terrible thing is when they break his masculine essence in a boy, they break this “I’m a boy, I’m a man.” In life he will be an insecure person who is easy to intimidate, bend, who will never defend his position. That is, his testosterone, the hormone of aggression, will be low. Remember how a 14-year-old boy was killed in Greece a few years ago, the whole country rose up there – the government was changed. And in our country they burn children in Winter Cherry, they shoot them in Kerch, and everyone is silent … What does this mean? About the fact that Russia is a country of impotents, and it’s sad…

MYSTERIES FOR KIDS – Balu Development Center: School, Kindergarten, Courses

MYSTERIES ABOUT NATURAL PHENOMENA (AND NATURE): SUN, WIND,
SKY, EARTH, RAIN

Feed – lives, Give drink – dies. (Fire)

Runs, runs, does not run out,
Flows, flows, does not flow out. (Water in the river)

There is water all around, but there is trouble with drinking. ( Sea )

Silvery fringe
Hanging on the branches in winter.
And in the spring on weight
Turns into dew. (Hoarfrost)

I am small as a grain of sand and cover the earth,
I am from water and give birth to it myself,
I lie like fluff in the fields
And shine like a diamond in the sun. (Snow)

Black cloth climbs through the window. (Night.)

There are three brothers: One eats – does not get enough, The other drinks – does not get drunk, The third
walking, not walking. (Fire, earth, water)

There is an invisible person: she does not ask to enter the house, but before people she runs, in a hurry. (Air)

Run, run – do not run, fly, fly – do not fly, the edge is visible, but not
you will reach. (Horizon)

The blue tent covered the whole world. (Sky)

The blue field is strewn with silver. (Stars in the sky)

Peas scattered in the evening. I got up in the morning and there was nothing. (Stars in the sky)

The box fell apart, no one can count: neither the priests, nor the clerks, nor us fools.
(Stars in the sky)

One shepherd tends a thousand sheep. (Moon, month)

A bull with strong horns is walking along the high road. (Month)

Born with horns, and then loses them. (Moon, month)

A saucer floats across the blue sky. (Moon)

A coil is rolling – neither an animal, nor a bird, nor a stone, nor water, you can guess
never. (Moon)

The golden capsule does not sink in the sea and does not burn in fire. (Moon)

Small, curvy, light around the world. (Month)

Shines, but does not heat. (Moon, month)

Without a head, but with horns. (Month)

Walks at night and sleeps during the day. (Moon, month)

Who will be born twelve times in a year? (Moon, month)

They catch up with each other, but hide from each other. (Sun and moon)

It burns without fire, flies without wings, runs without legs. (Sun or cloud, river)
catch. (Earth, road, wind)

The sister will not roll up the hem, and the brother will not catch the horse. (Wind and road)

I break everything, I rip everything off, there is no mercy for anything. (Whirlwind)

The night sleeps on the ground, and in the morning it runs away. (Dew)

Flies without wings, runs without legs. (Wind)

He waved his sleeve – he bent the tree. (Wind)

He whistles, bows after him. (Wind)

Flying is not a bird, howling is not an animal. (Wind)

A golden apple rolls on a blue saucer. (Sun)

At the dawn of the Zaryan, the Vertnyansky ball rolls. No one can get past him.
(Sun)

We cry without it, but when it appears, we hide from it. (Sun)

Egor will ascend the hillock – above the forest, above the mountains. From the hillock descends for the grass
hiding. (Sun)

The king will call, the king will blink, he will call someone. (Thunder)

No one sees me, but everyone hears me. And anyone can my faithful companion
see but no one hears. (Thunder and lightning)

The horse runs, the earth trembles. (Thunder)

He knocks loudly, shouts loudly, and no one understands what he is saying. And the wise men
to know. (Thunder)

It will knock in the sky, it will be heard on the earth. (Thunder)

The bear roared over all the mountains, over all the seas. (Thunder)

A raven croaked at a hundred cities, at a thousand lakes. (Thunder)

The ox roared for a hundred villages, for a hundred rivers. (Thunder)

A gray stallion neighs in all kingdoms. (Thunder)

I have neither fire nor heat, but I burn everything. (Lightning)

Peas scattered on seventy roads, no one will collect them: neither the king nor the queen,
nor the red girl. (Grad)

They waited, called, but he showed up – everyone ran away. (Rain)

Large, fractionally frequented, watered the whole earth. (Rain)

He came from the sky, went to the earth. (Rain)

The gates have risen – the beauty of the whole world. (Rainbow)

The red yoke hung across the river. (rainbow)

An ornate arc rose across the fields, across the meadows. (Rainbow)

Can draw without arms or legs. (Frost)

Draws without hands, bites without teeth. (Frost)

An armless, legless old man built a bridge across the river. (Frost, ice on the river)

MYSTERIES ABOUT THE SEASONS

The cold has come.
Water turned into ice.
Long-eared gray bunny
Turned into a white bunny.
The bear stopped roaring:
The bear fell into hibernation in the forest.
Who’s to say who knows
When does this happen? (Winter)

The tablecloth is white
The whole world is dressed. (Winter)

In what month do people talk the least? (In February)

She is covered with white paper and there are no leaves on the trees. What kind of madam is this? (Winter)

She was white and gray,
She came green, young. (Winter and spring)

She comes with caress
And with her fairy tale.
Magic wand
Wave,
Snowdrop in the forest
Bloom. (Spring)

Snow on the fields, ice on the waters,
The blizzard is walking. When does it happen? (In winter)

Who whitens the meadows with white
And writes on the walls with chalk,
Sews downy featherbeds,
Decorated all the shop windows? (Winter)

The snow is melting, the meadow came to life.
The day is coming. When does it happen? (Spring)

I am woven from the heat, I bring warmth with me,
I warm the rivers, “swim!” – I invite.
And you all love me for this, I… (Summer)

Though she herself is snow and ice,
And she leaves – sheds tears. (Winter)

Twelve brothers roam one after another, do not bypass each other. (Months)

RIDDLES ABOUT PLANTS: TREES, FLOWERS, FRUITS, VEGETABLES, BERRIES

Who has one leg, and even that without a boot.