Gruppo di famiglia in un interno aka Conversation Piece by Luchino Visconti
Written for the screen but staged like a play, it works terrifically in its self-imposed limitations. Carried by superb acting and cinematography, the family portrait with its generational and social...
View Article辣手神探 (roughly: Hot-Handed Super Detective) aka Hard Boiled by John Woo
Blu-ray 4K treatments alone, like for Face/Off in 2023, don’t count; remastered theatrical rereleases are what I’m interested in. I love the things I own that I collected in the past, like videos and...
View ArticleThe End of Oak Street by David Robert Mitchell
It’s stumbling along on its characters’ relentless idiocy and irrational impulses, not driven forward by anything resembling dramatic development. Everything’s explained to death without making sense;...
View ArticleThe Fast and the Furious by Rob Cohen
Guiltless snack. Crammed with hilarious clichés on the one hand, yet many of them freshly invented by it on the other. While coherence isn’t what the screenplay is ambitious about, some plot hookups...
View ArticleMutiny by Jean-François Richet
Decent camera work, satisfying action choreography, excellent sound design. Screenplay isn’t top-notch, and the scene setups for boarding and the finale are eye roll-inducing. “The protagonist is a...
View Article8番出口 aka Exit 8 by Kawamura Genki
Fantastic script that takes the game’s mechanics and weaves them into an emotionally gripping story while still preserving the vibes of an indie video game. Its entwined loops, a universal...
View ArticleThe Man Who Fell to Earth by Nicolas Roeg
The screening of The Man Who Fell to Earth I attended last night was preceded by an event with guests and talks about David Bowie’s Berlin period, and there was a lot of sentiment that 2016 had been a...
View ArticleTeenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma by Jane Schoenbrun
The most ironically adorably nerdy queer movie I’ve ever seen. Einbinder. Anderson. Fix. A fantastically layered surreal meta-meta-rewrite and reconciliation of period slasher movie motifs that is...
View ArticleOjczyzna/Vaterland aka Fatherland by Paweł Pawlikowski
Excellent direction, cinematography, acting, script, but not every dialogue line hits the mark. Some reviews call it a historical vignette, and indeed: brief, taut, coiled, and wired to unravel in the...
View ArticleOrgan Recital »Tempus fugit« by Ute Gremmel-Geuchen
Great organ recital by Ute Gremmel-Geuchen, a former student of Oscar Gottlieb Blarr’s (in attendance), with works by J.S. Bach, César Franck, and Norbert Laufer (also in attendance). Laufer’s »Tempus...
View ArticlePahanhautoja aka Hatching by Hanna Bergholm
Perhaps one or two jump scares too many, but well done in all other horror departments. At times reminiscent of Lynch’s dread inside the mundane and Wes Anderson’s cinematography. Some script...
View ArticleFuneral Casino Blues by Roderick Warich
Character-driven, camera-driven, mysterious, stylish. Fantastical journey along the edges of the real, the hyperreal, and the unreal. It’s almost as if it were the delayed final part of a tetralogy,...
View ArticleYön lapsi aka Nightborn by Hanna Bergholm
The Ents are evil. Cinematography and sound design are top. Not all assembled horror elements and motifs to support its theme fit together coherently. Dramatic structure and cut seem off but it’s the...
View ArticleLes musiciens by Grégory Magne
Bittersweet, fun, great music, passionate performances, lovingly executed. Almost no music-related as-you-know-Bobs so one remains fully immersed even as an (ex-)musician. At first, the...
View ArticleIce Cream Man by Eli Roth
Knowing zilch about it except it was horror, I wasn’t prepared for relentless splatter, but hey. No dramatic structure beyond or between the occasional plot point, and every set location overstays its...
View ArticlePossession by Andrzej Żuławski
It turned out I hadn’t known the movie at all, as I had only watched the U.S. release back in the day—a version from which 43 minutes had been cut to turn it into an easily marketable grindhouse movie...
View ArticleOrgan Recital by Oskar Gottlieb Blarr
Fantastic organ recital by Oskar Gottlieb Blarr, whom I know from way back when one of the things I did for a living, at a certain point in my life, was being a hired gun support vocalist for choirs...
View ArticleTuner by Daniel Roher
Wonderfully played romance/drama plus Hoffman at his absolute lovable best. Music movie about classical music (plus jazz) that makes me nostalgic for a bygone part of my life. Inventive heist thriller...
View ArticleBackrooms: Everything Must Go Edition by Kane Parsons
The Backrooms: Everything Must Go Edition adds a so far unreleased episode of the Backrooms web series as a stand-alone post-credit tie-in scene. It’s shot in handheld found footage style, making it...
View ArticleThe Odyssey by Christopher Nolan
Clever screenplay moves and original motifs in a continuation of ancient storytelling traditions. Greek Tragedy already reshaped characters, giving everybody from Odysseus to Orestes the boy howdy...
View Article