A newly paroled Zulu man named Zama walks out of prison and into a waiting car driven by his best friend and former accomplice, Respect, who immediately recruits him as a hired muscle for a planned heist. Eager to rebuild his life and make a clean break from his criminal past, Zama walks away from […]
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 […]
An aging museum curator named Alloune (Sotigui Kouyaté) conducts walking tours of a historical internment and transfer port in Goree Island used during the slave trade, a vocation that often makes him a first-hand witness to the tourists’ emotionally wrenching experience. Haunted by recurring dreams of his ancestors, he becomes convinced that at the root […]