An airport security guard finds her life upended by a sketchy/flirty pixie in green hair and fingernails in “Green Night,” a Chinese romantic thriller starring Fan Bingbing that gives international exposure to Ms. Trouble in Green, Korean starlet Lee Joo-young. Our heroine is one of those nameless global functionaries with a metal detector wand who […]
Jason Reitman takes us back to 1975 to the behind-the-scenes production madness of the first broadcast of SNL. Is it worth checking out for longtime fans of the iconic sketch comedy series? DC Bolling gives us his thoughts on Saturday Night!
NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH, a well-regarded British-made espionage thriller, arrived in England’s theaters in late July of 1940. World War Two had ‘officially’ started the previous September. This morale mission, directed by Carol Reed, landed a month after the debacle/escape of Dunkirk and two before ‘the Blitz’ got underway. The story is set a year […]
Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!!!! Jason Reitman directed this biopic of the 90-minutes before the debut of Saturday Night Live (called NBC’s Saturday Night) and the chaos that was ensuing. Of course, as with most biopics, not everything is exactly as it happened as many details are switched or moved around for dramatic […]
As revisiting Yasujirō Ozu’s “Tokyo Story”, whose 4K restoration version is being shown in South Korean theaters now, I was reminded again how it is sublimely gentle and bittersweet in the intimate depiction of the human sadness and melancholy observed from its family characters. While many of them just softly and quietly interact with each […]
“The Notebook”, which happened to be re-released in South Korean theaters in this week probably because of its 20th anniversary, is inherently sappy but undeniably effective as before. Yes, this is basically your average romance story, but it is still a well-made product which can actually engage us via its solid storytelling and several fine […]
Stunningly shot in black-and-white, Tseden shows immaculate control over his long take, slow cinema-style as a Tibetan sheep herder becomes stuck in a Kafka-esque scenario making his identity card, but an encounter with a hairdresser suggests the possibility of a new life.
Chinese film “Suzhou River”, whose 4k restoration version was somehow released in South Korean theaters a few days ago, is a gritty and bitter urban tale of romantic obsession. Like many of other contemporary Chinese arthouse films, the movie requires some patience due to its slow narrative pacing, but this rather modest work is impressive […]
Suzhou River (2000) ☆☆☆(3/4): A gritty and bitter urban tale of romantic obsession
‘Only those who have been at sea can grasp the enormousness of the world,’ we’re told during Lee Tamahori’s plush historical epic of deadly muskets and Christianity on the rocks; even a 21st century land-lubber can understand the wrongs of imperialism. We’re out and about in 1830, in and around the Tasmanian Sea, where there’s […]
Yepyeni bir öneriyle sizlerleyim. Evet sizin de bildiğiniz gibi dünyaca ünlü yönetmen Asghar Farhadi filminden bahsediyoruz. Neredeyse iki yıl arayla çektiği filmlerle ve başarısıyla bilinen Farhadi aynı zamanda bu filmin senaristliğini de yapmıştır. Farhadi filmlerine bakacak olursak genelde aynı oyuncularla film yapmayı tercih eder. Bu da oyuncuyu ne kadar iyi tanıdığını ve yaptığı bu seçimlerle […]
Sean Durkin’s THE IRON CLAW tells the tragic story of the Von Erichs in a subtle, perfectly sensitive drama.
Film Review: The Iron Claw (Cinematic Sense)
Shogun Season One (2024)Written by Rachel Kondo, Justin Marks, Shannon Goss, Nigel Williams, Emily Yoshida, Matt Lambert, Maegan Houang, and Caillin PuenteDirected by Jonathan van Tulleken, Charlotte Brändström, Frederick E.O. Toye, Hiromi Kamata, Takeshi Fukunaga, and Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour I must confess that of all the Japanese media, the stories surrounding this historical period typically leave […]
Editor Jacob Calta takes on Francis Ford Coppola’s latter-day sci-fi epic and tries to articulate what it is that made this such a fascinating and powerful watch.
Megalopolis (2024) – A Future in Latin
I loved The Substance for its audacity, confrontational nature, indelible performances and wicked sense of humor. It’s an unforgettably wild ride of excess. Recommended.
By John Corrado Saoirse Ronan takes on the role of a young alcoholic in The Outrun. It’s a role that allows the actress to deliver an incredible performance showcasing her full depth and range, as the drama depicts the addiction and recovery process as an ongoing journey. It’s based on author Amy Liptrot’s memoir of […]
Joker: Folie Á Deux will leave folks split on their opinions and we all know that doing sequels can be a bit dicey trying to recapture the magic. Lightning in a bottle didn’t go down this time, but if you like musicals, witnessing a Phoenix and Gaga duet is totally worth it.
Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents is not a heist film, but it does begin with an elaborate bank robbery. It is not exactly a thriller, either, though it borrows from plenty of the tropes you’d find in an exciting thriller film with a heist as its centerpiece. Elaborate planning, blackmail, prison politics, uneasy partnerships, paranoia of…
The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry is set between Berlin and a small port town overlooking the Red Sea, with a rather complicated history
One feels that thinking on a film by the Coen brothers, especially a comedy, is a fruitless exercise. Those guys design their work in such a way that it’s not merely immune to navel-gazing, it actually mocks the navel-gazers. And bless their hearts for it. As David Bazan has sung: You’re so creative With your…
Right from the first scene in Bergman Island, it is apparent that this is a movie made with a very particular audience in mind. You can tell that it will never crossover into pop culture or even into the conversations of casual movie fans, like a lot of indies playing in the festival circuit, do.…