In his lovely essay over at Lilok Pelikula, Richard Bolisay writes about the spectrality of the camera, or rather, the camera as the ghostly presence in Apichatpong Weerasethakul's haunted film, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee. It's a film set in ...Read More
Is it that time of the year yet? I thought I'd post my picks early, with two disclaimers: 1. My list isn't limited to movies made or released in 2009, but to the ones I only saw this year. (The not-always ...Read More
I've seen just about every Michael Mann film (some more than once, unfortunately) and I've never been particularly impressed. I'm probably in the minority when I write that Heat (1995) was a bloated mess, and that all I remember from ...Read More
I missed Geo's presentation on The Resistance of Philippine Cinema when he swung through town last month (I didn't know one had to RSVP!), but here, I guess, is the next best thing: a free screening each of Auraeus Solito's ...Read More
The peculiar thing about Billy Liar is how everyone looks so old. They don't, not really; it's just the way a 26-year old Tom Courtenay, in a fantastic performance, somehow looks old before his time -- I think it's the ...Read More
Prompted by a brief discussion on "crap" on Pivotal-film -- Ashes of Time Redux and My Blueberry Nights were inexplicably mentioned, though the latter is certainly Wong's weakest film to date -- I hereby submit Saw IV for consideration, as ...Read More
Someone asked me the other day why I hadn't written up a 2008 Top Ten list for this blog. I'm not sure, actually. I think it's because I was a little more wary of listing movies I'd only seen once ...Read More
This is more of a pointer to Barb's great review of The Human Condition: I was going to write a mini-review of the movie(s) too, then realized that the act of writing was probably going to be just as exhausting, ...Read More
Leading the charge in the recent wave of French-language gore (from good to bad, in order: High Tension, Frontier(s), and the dreadful Them) was the Belgian film Calvaire, all the way back in 2004. It's a particularly pungent and pointless ...Read More
Just wanted to point you folks to an interview with Wayne Wang I conducted for my American Pop column over at AsianWeek. Reviews of his two latest movies coming shortly... Read More
A sampling of topics from my e-mail and IM conversations of the last seven days: - the Joker as the Übermensch - Gotham = Baghdad - "Is Batman a Jack Bauer-like Republican vigilante figure, who takes the hatred of the world upon himself ...Read More
Almost five hours of movies (Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy 2: The Golden Army and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight) and four hours of sleep later, I find that I can barely string together a coherent review. (This is also a ...Read More
It hardly seems fair to compare Yung Chang's excellent debut documentary, Up the Yangtze, with work by a master filmmaker like Jia Zhangke, i.e., Still Life (2006), but the comparison is inevitable: Chang's movie is set further downstream, in Fengdu ...Read More
Barry Jenkins' Medicine for Melancholy is an uncommonly fine film, and easily one of the best I've seen this year so far. Indie romances don't always sit well with me, probably even well before Natalie Portman gave Zach Braff her ...Read More
There's a tiny whiff of the exotic about Lance Hammer's powerful debut film Ballast -- a drama set in the Mississippi Delta, with a non-professional cast -- but that fact works in its favor. Otherwise, the story's nothing we haven't ...Read More