Grief, at least on this planet, spares no one. Not even a magnificently bejewelled, bouffant-haired, Chanel-coutured First Lady of the United States, who is naturally expected to project impeccable poise and delicate self-control in the public eye. Which makes it more traumatising that even the most gracefully composed of our historical figures can suffer the […]
If the likes of Mud, Interstellar, Dallas Buyers Club, True Dectective and The Wolf of Wall Street haven’t convinced you of The McConaughey Effect, something must be wrong with you. Go see your GP, or a shrink, or simply watch those films again to remind you the potent resurgence of the once typecast and perennially […]
Let’s get that damn elephant out of the room. The private lives of our silver screen stars theoretically have no place in the judgement of the cinematic products we consume, but it’s hard to deny that Robert Zemeckis’ World War II espionage drama Allied could possibly fend off the unfortunate brunt of the Brangelina divorce, the two astronomic […]
Just when you thought J.K. Rowling hadn’t milked those gloriously prosperous udders of the Harry Potter royalty cow enough, the prolific writer pulls a volte-face on that “no more Harry Potter stories” rigmarole and launches gazillion-dollar magnets on our asses. First, there’s the acclaimed Potter spin-off play The Cursed Child and now, we have the live-action […]
I cannot begin to tell you, dear reader, how much I actively despise the existence of this movie. Not only does its title scream of horrid selfishness (‘me’ comes before ‘you’, even before ‘us’ or ‘everyone else’ that it might as well be titled Me Me Me Me Me Before You), but it’s so egregiously made, conceived with such […]
Divorce ain’t easy. Same in real life as it is in movies, the conscious uncoupling of the human species are most likely prone to jealousy, selfishness and bitter break-ups rather than getting their shit together, patch up and move on to something that resembles maturity and wisdom. But it wouldn’t really make great cinema if […]
Anyone au fait with the cinema of Nicolas Winding Refn must know by now that the man doesn’t do safe, in the same practical way as, say for example, his fellow Danish provocateur Lars von Trier doesn’t do tame. Refn’s brand of hyper-stylised, ultra-violent filmmaking has carved up critical trenches and turned wolves out of […]
There’s rarely anything out there that feels as deeply as Carol. Todd Haynes’ achingly sublime, artful evocation of love is a rarefied, nearly-extinct breed of cinema that breathes life into the classically refined and restrained form of filmmaking that’s either typically underrated or simply hard to come by these days. For Carol serves as an invitation to ignore […]
It must be hard being labelled as a “provocateur” these days. In this hardly shockable 21st century, to be a filmmaker of outrage must come with such exorbitant amount of pressure that you’re constantly trying to outdo your previous work or push to the extremities all in the name of provocation just to live up […]
Hell hath no fury than a transgender woman scorned. In Sean Baker’s gloriously scathing, but not inhumane, revenge dramedy Tangerine, a recently unleashed jailbird tears through Santa Monica boulevard like a rampaging firebrand, barely leaving any pimp, passerby, taxi driver and sex worker unshaken in a quest to hunt down the one woman (with “vagina […]
The fact that some of the greatest filmmakers of our time have essentially built careers on women going absolutely nuts on screen is worth mentioning since this might just be the turning point for Alex Ross Perry’s professional life. Perhaps it’s early days to declare this, but his latest work, the demented, deliriously savage Queen […]
For those expecting for the new heir to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Zhang Yimou’s Hero in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Assassin, look elsewhere. This isn’t the crowd-pleasing, epic-making brand of Chinese martial arts movie made to win awards and please everyone. Sure, Hou was crowned Best Director at Cannes earlier this year, but […]
It’s easy to see When Marnie Was There will touch a lot of emotional chords, and not only because it’s Studio Ghibli’s final effort (in the interim, at least), but also because its themes of memory and loss bear such poignant resonance. Hiromasa Yonebayashi, a Ghibli name overshadowed by stalwarts Miyazaki and Takahata, adapts a Joan […]
It’s no secret that the world’s wealthiest, tax-free organisation aka the Vatican preserves the sacrament of priesthood like it’s the Holy Grail, sending so-called disgraced priests into faraway homes in the farthest of isles to face penitence for their mortal sins – most of which involves child abuse. Alex Gibney’s explosive documentary Mea Maxima Culpa […]
There’s no stopping Jia Zhangke. After his gloriously vindictive A Touch of Sin, China’s foremost filmmaker pounces back into the festival scene not with blood splatter but with fountains of tears. Yep. Our tears, precisely, as Zhangke gives those tearducts some serious workout with his take on the traditional weepie, this maximally ministered melodrama Mountains […]
Arguably Shakespeare’s most morally fucked-up play, Macbeth has enamoured some of cinema’s greatest filmmakers, from Akira Kurosawa to Orson Welles and Roman Polanski, each to their own producing dark visions of the Scottish tragedy to varying levels of artistic potency. Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood remains the most enigmatic, most otherworldly of them all, relocating the drama to […]
We all should really know by now that, at least in Hollywood’s own mental frame of reference, if you’re stranded somewhere (whether on Earth’s terra firma or on another planet deep in space) and you’re not an American, no one gives a shit. Sorry to break it to you, darling, but you might as well muster all […]
Ten-year olds would love Joe Wright’s Pan. It makes for a perfect Saturday matinée show in a cinema swarmed with barely tempered kiddywinks, their saucer-wide eyes lapping up the giddy visual spectacle and the unbridled cheesiness of its plotline. Here’s a movie that fulfils the adventure narrative formula (a formula that wouldn’t probably occur to ten-year […]
Thank goodness South Korea continues to blaze world cinema by making thoughtful, engaging and complex dramas like this. Refreshingly anti-Manichean and morally ambiguous, July Jung’s debut feature A Girl At My Door eschews easy, lazy categorisation, creates layered characters and defies a simplistic narrative that befouls our current cinematic landscape. In Jung’s perceived social space, […]
You know you’re courting controversy when your film opens with a fifteen-year old teenage girl enthusiastically exclaiming “I just had sex today. Holy shit!” like it’s a middle-finger gesture to all those who think teenage girls can’t have sex, especially censorship boards and society in general. That’s exactly what Marielle Heller does in her bold, unglamorous […]
