A well known Parisian inspector becomes involved in an investigation while on holiday.
Mystery Man was never a champion of Chabrol, but I am amazed at what he left as his last film. The film is superficially framed as a detective story but as it progresses it slowly turns inside out as it becomes a discovery about the...
Invisible forces exert power over us in our sleep. A mercenary named Ink, on a literal nightmare mission, captures the spirit of 8-year-old Emma in the dream world. To save her, the dream-givers marshal all their resources, focusing on saving the soul of Emma's tragically broken father.
Paper on Ink is this good cinema. It has energy and imagination. It has internal self-reference: the storyteller in the thing has her audience as one of the characters, someone who appears in three persona unknown to each other. The way things are revealed and...
Changed Eye am interested in these awards, not because of who wins or why. Sure we all have our favourites, but the more we celebrate when someone we value is recognised, the more we endorse this notion of a competition. A competition in the arts? No,...
Tom, greeting-card writer and hopeless romantic, is caught completely off-guard when his girlfriend, Summer, suddenly dumps him. He reflects on their 500 days together to try to figure out where their love affair went sour, and in doing so, Tom rediscovers his true passions in life.
Death by Numbers how frustrating it is to have a movie that is near perfect in some respects but broken in others, especially when it has the potential to do things. This has the potential because it is a love story that bends the expectations for...
A grieving couple retreats to their cabin 'Eden' in the woods, hoping to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse.
Contagious Brokenness the road from me is a coven of Christian filmmakers. It is a school and the purpose is to make films that evangelise. This fascinates me; generally their stories are about fighting the devil, a narrative that encompasses both what is in the...
Ousted chef Wong Bing-Yi is determined to help Shen Qing at her restaurant "Four Seas". He trains a young chef, Lung Kin-Yat to compete against Chef Tin, the head chef at "Imperial Palace", for the title of "Top Chef".
Cabbage Soup time ago, I watched a mainstream trifle called “Kung Fu Panda.” The only appeal it had was the idea of discipline in ordinary things. The involvement of food was incidental and comic but it mattered. Food is not easy to film. But it is...
Stuttered Beginnings found this to be offensive in that mild way that occurs so often. Storytellers sometimes have to make decisions that cost the viewer something — the worst kind of cheat because it pushes the pain onto the unwitting. Is it a net good...
A teacher opens a time capsule that has been dug up at his son's elementary school; in it are some chilling predictions -- some that have already occurred and others that are about to -- that lead him to believe his family plays a role in the events that are about to unfold.
The Cleansing is everything. I saw this in a stressed state, looking for escape. I saw it in a grand old theatre with large, excellently tuned equipment. I saw it not knowing anything at all about it. And I loved it. Yes, I know people do not like...
Three women and one man - with an assortment of weaponry - wage war against giant mutant sandwhales in a barren digital landscape, all to achieve points within the virtual reality video game called Avalon.
Long Form Loop study long form film to see how it works. Some times what I end up seeing doesn't work. That is the case here; only the costumes matter, and one episode has resonance. Does that one episode qualify this as long form? Maybe....
The personal odysseys of some of the most influential advertising visionaries of all time and the stories behind their campaigns.
Capture love it when the matter and the form align. This is a documentary about the top creative folks in (US) advertising. It traces an explosion of influence from either putting creatives in charge or allowing the graphic/cinema guys to be up front — depending on...