March 29, 2010
Although true at times, Little Children never compels as the story suffers from the same shortcoming as In the Bedroom: it is merely an actors’ showcase.
November 26, 2010
A federal agent meets a spy, Ji-won, who had escaped from North Korea, they play a game of cat-and-mouse, keeping an eye on one another.
October 17, 2013
Shield of Straw My first film at Fantasia in 2013 was Takashi Miike’s Shield of Straw, one of the director’s contribution to the festival. Miike is a known workhorse, directing sometimes three films per year, in a myriad of genres and styles. Yet, there seems to be a connecting thread through his films, which feels harder to ascertain for me […]
March 22, 2010
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 […]
December 30, 2011
Underwater Love serves instead as an odd artistic work on sexuality, the film medium, and the way we’ve been conditioned to respond to it.