Foreign
Film Review – A Royal Affair
While beautifully put together, the costume romance A Royal Affair hits all the familiar beats without going beyond its genre’s expectations. As the title states, this is about an affair, and from the start, the direction things will go is fairly easy to figure out.
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Film Review – Holy Motors
Holy Motors is an experiment in the bizarre, but in a good way. With experimental filmmaking, one goes in with different questions. Can the viewer follow what is happening? Does the message the director is trying to get across work in this style? Am I…
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Film Review – Wake in Fright
We open on a shot of an empty horizon. Desert for as far as the eye can see. Slowly, the camera pans three hundred and sixty degrees. We see nothing but a continuous sea of outback. Brown and orange color the absolute flat space of…
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Film Review – Wuthering Heights
While I enjoy watching films and television, I will always think of myself first and foremost as a reader. And as a reader, I tend to have very strong feelings about books. My love for certain stories is very strong, and my loathing for other…
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Film Review – Tai Chi Zero
Since the 1960s, kung fu movies have persisted through an evolutionary series of sub-genres. They started as period pieces, then transferred slowly to a more modern-day setting, before taking off into the nether realms of science fiction and then circling back to period pieces again.…
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Film Review – Oslo, August 31st
Addiction, depression, and regret fuel 34-year-old Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) in Oslo, August 31st. He is a drug addict getting out of the treatment center for one day for a job interview in Oslo, his hometown. When following Anders over this day, we know from…
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Film Review – Chicken With Plums
Chicken with Plums tells the story of Nasser-Ali Khan (Mathieu Amalric), a concert violinist in 1950s Tehran. His treasured violin has been broken, and he cannot find satisfaction in any other instrument, not even a Stradivarius he has gone to great lengths to acquire. Life…
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Film Review – A Separation
Family and the issues surrounding what is best for one’s family are dominant themes of life no matter where you are in the world. In Asgar Farhadi’s A Separation, out on DVD yesterday, Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) are one of those families,…
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