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 […]
If there is a kindred spirit to Jacques Nolot’s Before I Forget a stark and brooding portrait of aging, mortality, and loneliness, it is probably Ventura Pons’s contemporary film, Barcelona (A Map), a rumination on architecture and empty spaces as a reflection of internalized, decaying emotional landscapes. This internal struggle is uncompromisingly laid bare in […]
For his debut feature, Isolation, filmmaker Billy O’Brien channels the spirit of Ridley Scott’s Alien and David Cronenberg-styled organic metamorphosis to craft an old-fashioned, by-the-book science fiction thriller. On an isolated, rundown farm on the Irish countryside, a farmer named Dan (John Lynch) agrees to participate on a research project designed to increase bovine fertility […]
If the visual expression of artistic process in Federico Fellini’s surreal and reflexive film, 8 1/2 were to be distilled into the spare, elemental cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, the result would likely be similar to Darezhan Omirbaev’s evocatively muted, endearing, innately affectionate, and poetic film, The Road. A pensive director named Amir Kobessov (played by […]
During the videotaped introduction to the film, Mamoru Oshii commented that the societies of highly developed economies have fostered a certain state of arrested development where young people, accustomed to privilege, find little motivation to move on from their current situation. This sense of stasis, cultural amnesia, and immediacy also pervades the consciousness of the […]
Alternately baffling in its unclassifiable lunacy, infectious in its inspired creativity, irresistible in its tongue-in-cheek audacity, and admirable in its visionary integrity, Mamoru Oshii’s deliriously off-kilter, rapid fire superlivemation animation feature, Tachigui: The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters presents an epic, cultural and socio-political survey of twentieth century history (and into the early […]