Inasmuch as Life During Wartime explores the limits of forgiveness, Bong Joon-ho’s Mother poses a sinister corollary in its tale of a parent’s unwavering devotion to her child. The price exacted is prefigured in the opening shot of the impassive, titular mother (Kim Hye-Ja) wandering through the countryside with arms flailing to the rhythm of […]
Screened at slightly more than the halfway mark of the festival, Bong Joon-ho’s The Host offers a particularly refreshing pause in the mind bending aftermath of the Inland Empire, a smart, offbeat, and competent horror film that effortlessly weaves the ingredients of a well-crafted monster thriller with an incisive, cautionary tale on environmental responsibility and […]
The fable of catching a tiger by the tail only to be bitten back serves as a wry allegory for the modern day booming economy of Ireland, dubbed the Celtic tiger, in John Boorman’s The Tiger’s Tail. A contemporary retelling of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, Boorman establishes the profound social disparity created […]
During a dinner party to celebrate the occasion of Professor Roth’s (Frank Morgan) 60th birthday, news of Adolf Hitler’s ascension to the position of German chancellor at the Roth home is met with fervent excitement by his stepsons Otto (Robert Stack) and Erich (William T. Orr), and his daughter’s suitor Fritz Marberg (Robert Young) who […]
At the end of an earlier Festival of Song contest, inmate and reigning singing champion, Norma García, a Mexican national serving a ten year sentence for unwittingly carrying contraband for a friend during a holiday trip to Spain, returns to her narrow cell after briefly basking in the limelight before a captive audience and bids […]
Something of a companion piece to Manoel de Oliveira’s No, or the Vain Glory of Command, João Botelho’s brooding and atmospheric Quem és tu? similarly explores the intersection of history and myth, empire and subjugation in its exposition on identity, nationhood, fate, and repression. Based on nineteenth century Romanticist author Almeida Garrett’s three-act play, Frei […]