Toc Toc (2017)

Rating: 2 out of 5.

Toc Toc is a gratuitous case of basic commercialism—opportunity-within-opportunity, an obscene and un-self-conscious window, starting off poking and shaking treetops frantically with its yardstick. However, I am betrayed early on, in that even as its sweat and wrenching mettle traduce its humour, it goes swinging and jumping like it would be charged with sportsmanship, pure ease, all the while doing Dialectics like this were a Gaian sack of self-proliferating, Fabergé coconuts—hairy but true, copious and veracious.

Toc Toc, I charge, is nothing but a Bronze Calf, a bootleg totem, revived from somewhere far, far back in the chain of determination, caught embezzling aggressive psyche yet again. It quickly sinks from healthy Family time into miasmatic board game time, ripping idiosyncrasies from important hands (and showing like the Self equals bad hands without knowing how to say it), even striving to pull together the heady companionship of Biblicism using self-evidently implausible theatricality, which is a bit like miffing the leader.

Toc Toc tries but fails to convince the viewer that clients find loss of boundary sorely missed, propounding its cheap hypnotism that deep interest and social jab must, writ, become superego. Honestly, mental cinema of its kind is, very often, responsible for bad cases of recursion, for indoctrinating an outright epidemiology of cheating solipsism, for mistakenly presuming line of perception plus cathected phraseology does not equal magnitudinous psychoeducation. And in the same way the film characterizes aggression, it creates characters just to keep this involved, and then condemns its gimmick from public to private, from circulation to storage, in an artless, dubious haste. It shows itself to be post-Oedipal, pulling, not straining, muscles, shrinking too far down into the couch of fear, and to be completely equivocal about group and individual ego, which is arguably the path of most resistance to self-collected mastery.

The Death of Stalin (2017)

Rating: 3 out of 5.

The Death of Stalin is a miserable uninhibited sty hand-fashioned with an eo ipso diagnosis—up to, bleak and involuntary possession of posture and pate. Firstly, lining its façade rather than its skittish satire, like a vicarious chariot, it shows it is hard foremost to let the viewer believe it is not just a deliberate sketch or mock-up, as opposed to art. Its borderline treatment of human life is gullible and narcotized, sodden by salted wounds, which are left to close, to learn to weep, to weep their own—in precisely that missing order—when, in actuality, everything just evanesced into thin air, into post-karmic neoplasm.

It twists and jerks the arm of unsalvageable bogies and ancient travesties and coteries; I am felt holding hands with ringleaders the whole way through, with, indeed, great big assurance. Its prodigious sets and transcendent falter impart the niggling ticks letting moribund ethos as object—showing the ideology of a jack-sum torpedo, that is, something inspired and profuse muted by the ocean. It is the homonymic equivalent of some paroxysmal elbow cabal picking away at every last ineffable nest, like a poisoned amble which could not—its insuperable lapse—be its own. Sir Simon Russell Beale behaves and resembles a puffy flog of distended oral suspicion, Steve Buscemi a horny farmer-provocateur, and together they break unarmed jouissance to smithereens.