The 14 Directives of the sisterhood watched a number of films that are centred on choreographed ironic violence that failed to engage. I’ve also watched a number ‘female empowerment’ films — some of which are highly celebrated. One of these even was initiated by our...
Fourteen-year-old Charlie's life changes when Jasper takes his help to dispose of the body of his girlfriend, Laura. He decides to look for the murderer and falls in love with Laura's younger sister.
The Girls background, I am an American emigrated to Australia, someone particularly aware of embedded racism and misogyny in the US. It poisons the social contract that is behind the grand experiment that was the US. So I am curious about how similar dynamics have...
Settle into your chair and be transported to a place both familiar and alien; where a giant shop-girl can barely fit in her store, there's a weird green pod in every bedroom, and terrifying wood nymphs provide a heartbroken woman with the anatomically correct fruit everyone seems to covet. In the end we are left, like Alice, with the Red King's conundrum: are we dreaming them or are they dreaming us?
Nipple Dreams is quirky, erotic from an unusual direction, and quite sad until the end. I see some few summaries on the web, very few, and they get it all wrong. The narrative is not quite non-linear, but needs some untangling. The black and white scenes...
Max imagines running away from his mom and sailing to a far-off land where large talking beasts—Ira, Carol, Douglas, the Bull, Judith and Alexander—crown him as their king, play rumpus, build forts and discover secret hideaways.
A Calligraphic Camera Writes the Imagination is a huge success, and I believe that it will reach that status now called "classic," being experienced over and over in whatever ways that classics will in the future. I'll let others note the purity in the way that...
American expat Mickey Pearson has built a highly profitable marijuana empire in London. When word gets out that he’s looking to cash out of the business forever it triggers plots, schemes, bribery and blackmail in an attempt to steal his domain out from under him.
Movie Scripts likely Ritchie’s best. It has his comic characters oscillating between real and unlikely. It has a fully created world, less exotic than Wick’s but more accessible. Super-snappy dialogue. But most of all, it has the double, triple, quadruple con in layers, where the top...
Trying to leave their troubled lives behind, twin brothers return to their hometown to start again, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back.
Visual Music like Jodorowsky but instead of Chilean mysticism, African voodoo, or what we think so through prior films. Something culturally like ‘Snatch’, ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’, and ‘Kill Bill 2’ rolled together. Grand cinematic skill but in the small. Like another recent film (‘The...
A brilliant, eccentric detective must solve a murder in the White House residence — where the staff and guests at a state dinner are all suspects.
Layers history of film centres on an understanding of noir and how it has become a game between filmmaker and viewer. Central to that is the detective story. The pinnacle of that genre is Agatha Christie but no film has translated well until now. I...
Two lifelong best friends spend a weekend at a secluded cabin. Through intimate conversations and silent moments, they explore their deep understanding of each other's personalities and desires.
In the Story makes their own decision on when the narrative intrusion is morally clean. Assuming that the film is about some emotional event among people, the question is if are we viewing to add to our soul, aor are we viewing to take something...
A story of love and life among the landed English gentry during the Georgian era. Mr. Bennet is a gentleman living in Hertfordshire with his overbearing wife and five daughters, but if he dies their house will be inherited by a distant cousin whom they have never met, so the family's future happiness and security is dependent on the daughters making good marriages.
Juxtapositions amazed at how many people think of books as being encompassed by their stories. When that story appears in a film relatively unaltered, purists rejoice. How silly. Stories are there as frames on which all the meaningful stuff is draped. Or so it would be...
Two melancholic Hong Kong policemen fall in love: one with a mysterious underworld figure, the other with a beautiful and ethereal server at a late-night restaurant.
Discontinuous experiments in this film, and I took some trouble in sorting them out. The first thing you'll notice is the discontinuous camerawork, accentuated by low (never high) angles and strobeflashframes. This element by itself is sophomoric filmschoolism. Then you have the plot tags and storyline. The...
