Film Review: ‘The Two Faces of January’
★★☆☆☆ A sun-kissed adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel of the same name from Drive (2011) scribe Hossein Amini, The Two Faces of January...
★★★★☆ Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s first film in six years, R.M.N. is a multi-faceted, oft-bleak, and occasionally surreal portrait of racism and toxic masculinity in Romanian society. In its depiction of a part of Europe struggling to keep up with neoliberalism, R.M.N exposes the dark mirror of liberal, globalised western European metropolitanism.
★★★★☆ An acerbic social satire, Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva’s latest reflects a cultural malaise rooted in cultural ennui. More than a casual swipe at modern social trends, Rotting in the Sun exposes a kind of cruelty, alienation, and social stratification that is only as modern as the technology through which it expresses itself.
★★★☆☆ Chilean director Pablo Larraín has made the treatment of the great, the famous and the powerful his topic of preference, eschewing the lower end of the social scale that first made him famous with films such as Tony Manero and Post Mortem. Nothing has quite gone as far as El Conde, however.
★★★★★ Childhood friends Na-Young (Greta Lee) and Hae-Sung’s (Yoo Teo) young lives are irrevocably changed when Na-Young’s family emigrate from South Korea to Canada, until the pair reconnect twelve years later. Past Lives, a film about love, friendship and fate, is an astonishing debut from South Korean-Canadian director Celine Song.
★★☆☆☆ A sun-kissed adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel of the same name from Drive (2011) scribe Hossein Amini, The Two Faces of January...
★★☆☆☆ In Lynn Shelton’s Touchy Feely (2013), a massage therapist and holistics enthusiast finds herself developing a mysterious aversion to bodily contact. Eschewing the...
★★★★☆ A searing shot to the gut at last year’s Cannes Film Festival (what a shame it’s taken this long to make it to...
★★★★☆ “It’s [in] the mountains where the pure, raw talent comes out,” states ex-cyclist Greg LeMond as he discusses the monumental inclines that punctuate...
★★★★☆ It’s been sixty years since the release of Ishirō Honda’s monster movie classic Godzilla (1954), and the fearsome reptile has gone on to...
★★★☆☆ The fast-track to rock superstardom is an alluring proposition for the fame-hungry X Factor generation, and the trajectory of Ramona S. Diaz’s entertaining...
★★★☆☆ Stacie Passon’s debut film Concussion (2013) explores the modern ennui suffered by liberal cookie-cutter wives – with a twist that the female in...
★★★★★ Familial ties and their effect on our lives were always a chief concern of Japanese master Yasujirô Ozu, specialising as he did in...