Film Reviews
A quiet post-apocalyptic love story that uses Ethiopian landscapes as its setting and treats items of pop-culture and consumerism (Michael Jackson vinyl, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toy, plastic sword) as ancient relics.
Read MoreIt’s almost twenty years since Kiyoshi Kurosawa emerged with his first true masterpiece. While I do hold a special place in my heart for The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl (1985), Cure is most assuredly where the promise of his genius is maintained in every single frame.
Read MoreFrom Georgia and its tourism board, a well-executed and thoughtful piece of ugly cinema
Read MoreJapan's submission to the Academy Awards this year is a winner. In large part this is due to its star Sakura Ando.
Read MoreWhen watching Cop Car you figure that the beginning and the end were the first parts conceived for the film. Because you have a great premise and a climax that’s on the level of Coen Bros. in terms of its pacing and how it relays spatial information to the action. The starting point of two boys stealing the wrong cop’s car is going to lead up to what you would expect when all parties converge in the climax, and that climax is easily the standout sequence in the film, it’s best aspect that is not Kevin Bacon.
Read MoreSome of Ray's best actors are collected under the same roof of this haunting film from the Indian master.
Read MoreWhile watching this documentary, about the legendary Studio Ghibli, I fell in love with the image of Hayao Miyazaki hunched over his drawing board. There was old Miyazaki-san, in his 70s, cigarette dangling, wearing his old white smock, lost in his art as he created his cartoons...
Read MoreNot all good movies should have been great, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t watch them, and it doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy them either.
Read MoreI visit New York City a lot, and whenever I’m there I feel like I’m – what I describe as – closer to the source. I’m not sure what that means, but sometimes I think I lived there in a past life, not that I believe in that sort of thing. Anyway that may have something to do with why I like movies that take place there as much as I do. The city itself is a character, and there’s an inherent kind of vibe that comes along with those films, which you don’t easily get from other locations. It isn’t phony and it isn’t make believe, it feels more than real but not fictionally so. It’s as if the City lends itself to a movie in a way only New York can, in a way that improves the production by a few notches.
Read MoreThe teen death game genre has been used for social commentary as seen in Battle Royale (and in The Hunger Games or so I have been told) but what else can be said with this set up, where teenagers are forced to fight for their lives by being contestants in arbitrary game situations. Maybe it can be used to reflect teenage ennui/mundanity and make a teenage audience appreciate the mundane. Or perhaps it can be one more in a long line of pure teen fantasy where an individual, despite their boring lives, is found to be the messiah. There is some of both of these things at times in As the Gods Will but its real focus is on the death games, and thankfully as its other moments are not as intellectually evocative as it is viscerally so; unlike his Over Your Dead Body which accomplishes both.
Read MoreSometimes I wake up in the middle of the night panicked that people might not realize this movie has a director’s cut, which happens to be way better than the original. I’ll put it this way, when I first saw the movie Payback (1999) I hated it, but years later, when I saw the director’s cut, it became one of my favorite movies. I’m not kidding when I say the 2006 version is a 100% completely different movie as far as taste is concerned.
Read MoreCasey (Britt Robertson) is a teenage girl, smarter than most kids and equipped with a rebellious agency, pulled into a world unknown to everyone else. On this adventure she is told a few times that she’s a different and that she’s special when she asks the obligatory why me. This should sound very familiar to anyone who has ever seen a film, especially one aimed towards families and young people in general. But what’s unique about Tomorrowland’s teenage hero is that what makes her special is not any sort of power passed to her by her deceased parents, it’s the more “mundane” quality of her optimism that makes her special.
Read MoreThe film I thought of when watching Deathgasm, a metal in spirit and content horror comedy from New Zealand, is Joseph Kahn’s Detention (2011), in which the ADHD generation is spoofed in a way in which the ADHD can understand. This might be unfair to Howden’s film as Detention is a masterful barrage of sight gags and insanely quick simultaneous layers of smart dialogue. Deathgasm does just that just without the clusterfuck of genres, Deathgasm is through and through a film in which metal runs through its veins.
Read MoreOne of the best modern slashers that uses its premise and supernatural qualities of its killer character to comment on the nature of bullying.
Read MoreMiike's best film since Ninja Kids!!! it recalls the high level of thought and craft of Audition.
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The DVD commentary track is a frontier open to narrative exploration and much like the video game let’s play not many have seen it as a device for storytelling. Sometimes an actor will do a commentary in character, mainly for laughs rather than some sort of self-reflexive narrative continuation for the character.
Read MoreIf you are a fan, or just find it refreshing, of documentaries that wear artifice on their sleeves there are small details that should be of interest to you in The Nightmare.
Read MoreBefore the screening Bogliano stated that he wanted to make a more personal film and that he wanted to make a second feature in Mexico, his previous productions taking place in the US (Late Phases) and Venezuela (Penumbra, and the awesome Cold Sweat). Hopefully he continues wanting to explore what is personal to him because Scherzo Diabolico is his best work to date as it is given a strong starting point because of it: the pressure that you have to be successful when you reach a certain age...
Read MoreAt the heart of Gosha’s film Tracked (薄化粧) is the question about whether a man can break free from the horrible deeds of his past...
Read MoreOne of the best Korean films of the past five years. Part rom-com which uses genre shifts to comment on the nature of relationships.
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