Film reviews and more
★★★☆☆ By transporting the narrative from a common day modern setting to a universe where anything is possible and new foundations for proper societal living are fundamentally obscured and changed, science fiction allows the audience to question their own ambiguous handling of impossible scenarios safely without ever having to worry about being in the same unfathomable predicament. Dean Israelite’s Project Almanac […]
★★★★☆ A quirky modern folktale from the Zellner brothers, Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (2014) is not only a testament to the transcendental powers of the imagination, but to filmmaking itself. After mysteriously unearthing a VHS of Fargo (1996), Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) becomes increasingly obsessed with the scene in which Steve Buschemi buries a suitcase of stolen cash near Brainerd, […]
★★★★☆ Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy (2014) finds the director channelling his Eurotrash obsession into a vision that is palpably his own. It’s a brilliant work of erotic esoterica that sashays beautifully from the kinky to the oneiric. Audiences who found the madcap Lynchian freak-out of Berberian Sound Studio‘s phantasmagoric final act to be a case of sensory […]
★★☆☆☆ The crippling nature of living with severe chronic pain is a subject that affects millions of people around the world and is severely under-represented in cinema. Daniel Barnz’s Cake (2014) attacks the subject head-on and explores the often embarrassing world of dealing with support groups, pain management instructors, healthcare workers, and one’s own paralysing self-doubt about what the […]
★★★★☆ Blackhat (2015) isn’t the Michael Mann cyber-thriller you may have been expecting. It’s a remarkable film about tangibility in the digital world and its auteur strips himself of any sheen and embraces a radical new blockbuster aesthetic constructed on stolen shots and ragged edges. The internet has created an artificial mirror of our world without borders, and Mann’s […]