From the opening sequence of 36 Quai des Orfèvres that shows intercutting parallel sequences between a band of thugs who break into a bar and physically abuse the proprietress and a pair of vandals who pry off a street placard and subsequently emerge in the private room of a bar with other drunken, trigger-happy carousers, […]
Shot in the occupied territories (in particular, East Jerusalem and the southern Gaza strip), and composed of a series of landscape shots of unidentifiable rubble and twisted rebar from razed Palestinian homes, bulldozed agricultural fields, and separation walls against a repetitive, dispassionate speaker articulating a series of open-ended questions on the meaning of the images […]
Shot from the austere interiors of a disused housing project that has been scheduled for demolition on the outskirts of Paris, Kamal El Mahouti, returns to the “home”of his youth in My Lost House where, in 1970, at the age of six, his family had immigrated from Morocco to France and lived at the housing […]
Down the Wire, 2004 (Pip Starr) A group of activists descend on the Woomera Detention facility on Good Friday in 2002 to protest the involuntary imprisonment of refugees at the remote camp in the Australian desert, leading to an impulsive act of civil disobedience. Starr’s short film is an inspiring portrait of activism, advocacy, and […]
A barge laborer named Joe (Ewan McGregor) discovers the body of a partially nude woman floating face down in the river and, together with his employer Les (Peter Mullan), retrieve her corpse from the water. Soon, traces of Joe’s seeming over-curiosity with the dead body begin to surface as he gently caresses the body in […]
Alternating between taut horror film and absurd comedy, Na Hong-jin’s The Chaser is an audacious, if over-contrived and diluted procedural thriller. Inviting comparison to Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder (much to the detriment of Na’s film) in its spiraling investigation of a series of murders, The Chaser also suggests kinship with Kiyoshi Kurasawa’s Cure in […]