December 16, 2013

HK: Hentai Kamen (Yûichi Fukuda, 2013)

Apart from the fact that it’s one of the most entertaining films of 2013, the best thing about HK: Hentai Kamen is the joy of having to explain its premise to people, to witness their flabbergasted stare and assure them that “it’s really, really good”. Actually, it is really good because its parody comes from a place of love for […]
November 28, 2010

Blades of Blood (Lee Joon-ik, 2010)

Blades of Blood is a Korean wuxia, a sword-fighting martial arts film set in the 16th century, during the Japanese invasion.
March 29, 2010

Gone, Baby, Gone (Ben Affleck, 2007)

WHAT IT IS: Boston: A private investigator is enlisted to find a little girl who’s been abducted in his old neighborhood. HOW IT IS: In his directorial debut, Ben Affleck borrows from many of the great living directors, from Eastwood to Van Sant. Most notable is the latter’s influence in the cinema vérité shots. A Bostonian himself, Affleck’s neighborhood seems […]
April 20, 2010

Sherrybaby (Laurie Collyer, 2006)

Held together almost entirely by the strength of Gyllenhall’s performance, Sherrybaby is one of the best independent movies of the decade.
March 22, 2010

City of God (Fernando Meirelles, 2002)

A reviewer compared City of God to Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990) and many parallels could be made between the two. As they both fall into the genre of gangster films, they depict violence in a raw, uninhibited way, in a realist fashion. City of God, with its documentary-style aesthetic—camera shakes, voice-over narration, etc., uses that realism to emphasize its story’s […]