Based on the remarkable life of James Brooke, EDGE OF THE WORLD is an introspective film about how an Englishman became the Raja of Sulawak. Such was his fame in Victorian England that Joseph Conrad used him as the model for the title character in his novel, Lord Jim, and rich women proposed marriage to… Read More »
CAVEAT
Click here for the interview with writer/director/editor Damian McCarthy. CAVEAT is a small masterpiece of mood and atmosphere. A southern gothic transplanted to a remote island somewhere off the coast of Ireland without losing anything in the cultural translation, it is all about suggestion and quick cuts showing what may or may not be externalization… Read More »
RIDERS OF JUSTICE
It’s impossible to pigeon-hole RIDERS OF JUSTICE. Part tragedy, part very black comedy, part action/revenge, it is nevertheless also a perceptive examination of troubled souls longing for surcease of sorrow for whom the usual therapeutic methods have failed. If that were all, it would be enough, but it goes further, essaying nothing less than a… Read More »
DRUNK BUS
Michael (Charlie Tahan), the nebbishy hero of DRUNK BUS, needs no metaphor to describe his life in 2006. He is living it. After four years of driving the endless loop that is the overnight campus bus route at the Kent Institute of Technology his whole exitance has become a treadmill. What started as a part-time… Read More »
TWO LOTTERY TICKETS (Doua lozuri)
In a puckish bit of self-reference, one of the characters in the Romanian comedy, TWO LOTTERY TICKETS, opines that Romania doesn’t make good movies anymore. They’re all doom and gloom, completely missing the essence of Romania. In his second film, Paul Negoescu sets out to change that single-handedly and does a tidy job of it.… Read More »
ENFANT TERRIBLE
At one point, late in in ENFANT TERRIBLE, the titular character of this bio-pic, omnisexual filmmaker and agent provacateur of the German New Wave, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Oliver Masucci), calls himself an uber-pig. It’s part boast, part confession, and part apology. As seen in Oskar Roehler’s stunningly oneiric film, they are all consistent with the… Read More »
UNDINE
At no point in Christian Petzold’s UNDINE do we encounter anything as pedestrian as a character discussing the nature of the supernatural creature at the heart of this exquisitely enigmatic, emotionally intense film. Rather, we are left to ponder just what the nature of our title character is on a more human level. Whether or… Read More »
PAPER SPIDERS
Husband and wife writing team Inon Shampanier and Natalie Shampanier wrote PAPER SPIDERS from personal experience, which gives it that extra gloss of authenticity. While it does not reflect the factual truth of the struggles they had with Natalie’s mother and her diagnosis of persecutory delusional disorder, it does convey the emotional truth of seeing… Read More »
ABOUT ENDLESSNESS (Om det oändliga)
In one of the series of vignettes that make up Roy Andersson’s ABOUT ENDLESSNESS, we find a city café where the patrons sit in carefully constructed isolation among one another, in the foreground, a dentist who we know from the previous vignette, is in a bad mood and plagued with problems. Snow falls. Christmas carols… Read More »
THE BOYS FROM COUNTY HELL
There is an air of Celtic melancholy running through the, ahem, deadpan humor of THE BOYS FROM COUNTY HELL. That touch elevates the, further ahem, stakes in this horror comedy that takes a few swipes at fraught family relationships, a sinking economy, and Bram Stoker’s relevance when a real vampire resurfaces. The supernatural is almost… Read More »
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