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 […]
March 26, 2010
Behind the Mask supposes that the horror stories that haunt Elm Street or Crystal Lake are elaborate hoaxes which elevate their authors to legendary status.
December 16, 2013
The Lady Assassin, a martial arts blockbuster, is my first Vietnamese film. A light Sunday night screening at this year’s Fantasia Festival, it was attended by a notable number of people from Montreal’s Vietnamese community. Billed as a Vietnamese wu xia, in the film, a princess sold in marriage is taken in by a team of high-flying, ass—kicking, thieving assassins […]
November 28, 2010
In Bodyguards and Assassins, Chinese patriots pledge their lives to safeguard a revolutionary named Dr. Sun as assassins are sent to kill him.
March 29, 2010
Michael Clayton suffers from its intellectualism, just as Syriana (Stephen Gaghan, 2005) did, and never lets you connect to the stakes emotionally.