This review contains various thematic spoilers but only vague allusions to plot spoilers. Read at your discretion.
A Brighter Summer Day is a truth epic, a four hour journey into the abyss of teenage disillusionment. It's about the reality of growing up and the consequences of an aimless life. It's a quiet movie, of people kissing in the dark, with conversations happening between people offscreen, of themes muted in favour of shapeless ideas. It's paced like life itself, with threads…
Werckmeister Harmonies is a film of constant symbolism and allegory. It is the greatest philosophical and political allegory since Sátántangó, another film by master auteur Béla Tarr. Werckmeister Harmonies is Tarr's most exciting film (although Sátántangó remains his best) because it's the most brimming with ideas. Adapting the novel The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai, Werckmeister Harmonies more than matches the quality of the masterful original text. The film is more implicit in some ways, taking the dense metaphorical nature of the novel but…
Often I think to myself that Lav Diaz might be the purest fiction filmmaker alive, the one who most exemplifies cinema as an artform. His films have a beautiful simplicity, made with an understanding that the form exists as a way to capture acting as part of a landscape of life. A camera can only capture what is in front of it and therefore it accurately documents a staged reality. Conventions of length and drama are superficial. Cinema can be…
Dancing around death. Yes is an examination of the darkness within Israeli society. It is a satire told with maximalist stylings and an unsubtle approach. The opening scene has a man drown in a party only to get up and dance. Yes depicts Israel as a party nation, full of celebration and jubilation, where people go about their lives whilst violence and ethnic cleansing is carried out nearby. It's about deaths in Gaza being distractions from playing a game on…
Princess Mononoke is Hayao Miyazaki's epic, his greatest work. It is profound and complex, and dense in mythology and history. For a man whose career was solidified by the soft and sweet nature of My Neighbour Totoro, it was bold and ambitious to make a film this long, grim, and nihilistic. Princess Mononoke is Studio Ghibli's most thematically sophisticated work. It is also the finest original animated film in history. It is one of the most perfect films ever made…
Bad people are complicated. There is something dark at the centre of The Lost Daughter, a film which viciously tears apart the idealism we often have about motherhood. It is a film of mothers, but not one of love. Instead we see a rot, mothers who find children a burden. The Lost Daughter is an uncomfortable movie, with a constant unease and sense of dread. We wait to be given answers, for characters to be uncovered and exposed, and yet…
