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Having seen several Serebrennikov films, I was worried to watch this film. Serebrennikov I know is never afraid to use in your face symbolism and bend reality for a good scene or two.

This film mostly escapes from such tropes. It mostly keeps a low-key profile, filmed in high-contrast, beautiful black and white in German, Spanish and... Hungarian.

So, this is not about Mengele at his Aushwitz peak of evil performance, this is about Mengele escaping and hiding and getting old. There is a scene showing what Mengele was capable of, but it feels appropriate in the movie, as otherwise the viewer would be completely off the hook for deciding to watch a film about freaking Mengele.

Other than that, the film is a faithful adaptation of a non-fiction account of Mengele's life in exhile. There are some interesting twists in the story, so the less you know about them - the better.

In the end, I am not sure what the viewer is supposed to get from watching the film. It seems to try to reopen a discussion on whether Mengele was the product of German culture, psyche, philosophy. The way Nazi table talk contrasts with the chilled, relaxed Latin American way is difficult not to notice.

In the end, given that the film is consciously subdued, it provides an exploration of a story that is no longer well-known by the masses, although once - in the 80s - there was a detailed Time article that provided most of the film's plot.

It's a robust, strong work, faithful to the material and history, so would be interesting to amateur historians. It mostly doesn't go into the sensational, absurdist or crazy territory, which is a rarity for a film covering this period and this persona. And, in a way, this is both bad and good: by not showing all the horrors of Mengele's work, our human brains provide the benefit of a doubt to a character that was seemingly devoid of empathy and compassion. And in the end it is the viewer who needs to decide for himself - what it was that made Mengele do the things he did.

PTA is one of the most respected directors, period. He can easily cast the best actors. He can get blockbuster-scale budgets while essentially continuing producing auteur movies that concentrate on character development.

This is already the second adaptation of Thomas Pynchon for PTA. The first was Inherent Vice. It received its share of hate, but I like it. It was a stoner comedy that was mostly unfunny, but it was goofy enough. This one.. well, not so sure.

It's a satire that's mostly completely off. There are terrorists who do stuff just for the fun of it, terror is sexier than sex for a particular character. There's the world going slightly mad in parallel, there is a conspiracy that's tough to take seriously. Actually none of it is easy to take seriously. So what, it's not the first comedy that falls flat.

But it's amazing how much talent is wasted here. DiCaprio, Penn, Del Toro.. faithfully recreating a pedestrian script with no backbone. Is there a moral behind the story? It is probably this: older white people are freaks, the youth have to destroy what was build before them to move things along. All right, the movie is full of zeitgeist, but it doesn't crystallize things for you, it blurs them even more. Who should you sympathize with, who should you root for? Should you care about the plot if you don't care about the characters? Does a pedestrian, unimaginative plot help in any way?

The movie doesn't try to take itself too seriously. There are one or two decent jokes, mostly around cloak and dagger operation and middle aged parkour, there is a fetish obsession with Penn's weird haircut. Although every time he's on screen, you're just sad at how old he got.

This is a movie that you get in with high expectations and leave with disappointment and zero insight. It doesn't even have that Pynchon's flair of getting its readers to feel they are smarter than the rest.

If this is the revolution that the left is preparing for us, the only sane thing seems to be to vote R... just joking, I'm not adding fuel to the fire!

Ok, so it's been only 2 episodes so far, but it does look like an updated version of Girls. Which, really, is not a bad thing! It's an HBO show, so there are somewhat explicit scenes here and there, though pretty mild by modern standards. The characters are zany and quirky, the influencer culture and LA it-girls are interesting to watch. I think it should get grittier and have more LA inside jokes, much more sarcasm/irony, and a cameo or two, but I though it was a pretty good start. Waiting for new episodes, it could be a fun little series to watch! HBO - don't cancel it!