Reviews REVIEW: Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver (2024) dir. Zack Snyder Love sometimes demands such a heavy burden of self-sacrifice that one can even call the outpouring of that love violent.
Reviews Review: Neandria (2023) dir. Reha Erdem Turkish writer-director Reha Erdem isn’t a name many North American cineastes will recognize. Even those familiar with Turkish cinema would be forgiven for not having Erdem on their new release radar. That doesn’t stop Erdem with each new film from declaring his own relevance to the larger project
Reviews Review: Mai (2024) dir. Trấn Thành Vietnam’s box office appears to be one of the fastest growing audiences in Southeast Asia. Almost every year the country produces a new all-time box-office regent and the country’s newly minted highest-grossing film of all time, Mai, has also become Vietnam’s greatest success abroad. Director Trấn Thành
Reviews Buff Review: Infested (2023) dir. Sébastien Vaniček We don’t have enough spider movies. For how widespread arachnophobia is, there is a relative dearth of actually watchable spider horror. Beginning as early as 1955’s Tarantula, the few spider films we get center jumbo-sized arachnids — the sort you’re very unlikely to ever encounter in your bathroom.
Reviews BUFF Review: Fatal Termination (1990) dir. Andrew Kam Most movies have warts. But not all warts are made equal.
Reviews Review: The Manifestation (2024) dir. Geert Heetebrij I’ve always found the crypto bro a bit unsettling. The (rare) unaware crypto bro is the worst of the sort: a smugness multiplied by their own depravity of self-knowledge that disgusts in both self-absorption and aesthetic value. The Manifestation, the directorial feature debut from the Dutch-born and US-based Geert
Reviews BBFF Dispatch #4: Lovable (2022) dir. Staņislavs Tokalovs / Faulty Brides (2023) dir. Ergo Kuld Staņislavs Tokalovs must have been one of the Baltics’ busiest film creatives over the past few years because he has three separate entries in this year’s Boston Baltic Film Festival...
Baltic Cinema BBFF Interview: Staņislavs Tokalovs "I started to think, 'Okay, so I can either take the money and rewrite what he wants' — but I had to overstep myself — or I say, 'Okay, you go F-yourself?' It took me a couple of days, but I decided not to write it."
Reviews BBFF Dispatch #3: Everything Will Be Alright (2023) dir. Staņislavs Tokalovs / The Poet (2022) dir. Vytautas V. Landsbergis & Giedrius Tamoševičius “I will put a mask on you just in case,” Irina tells her mother at a V-Day event during the pandemic. “Okay, but why?”
Aurora BBFF Interview: Maarja Johanna Mägi "Well, this profession depends a lot on luck. If you happen to be in the right place and someone who just needs your type of acting will see you."
Reviews BBFF Dispatch #2: Melchior the Apothecary: The Executioner's Daughter (2022) dir. Elmo Nüganen / The Invisible Fight (2023) dir. Rainer Sarnet “Prove the righteousness of your path.”
Reviews BBFF Dispatch #1: Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (2023) dir. Anna Hints / Four White Shirts (1967) dir. Rolands Kalniņš The Boston Baltic Film Festival runs in-person from 3/1 through 3/3 at the Emerson Paramount Center and will continue virtually through 3/18. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage! Smoke Sauna Sisterhood “Water, take the pain
Reviews Review: The Monk and the Gun (2023) dir. Pawo Choyning Dorji There’s a great Nike commercial from 1989 with Bo Jackson where other athletes repeat the phrase “Bo knows…” followed by “football,” “baseball,” and so forth, with fragmented clips of him showing off his multi-sport excellence. When the hockey clip rolls, Wayne Gretzky shakes his head and just says “No.
Reviews Review: In Our Day (2023) and In Water (2023) In Our Day Few filmmakers can pop out feature films like bunnies in a petting zoo. Hong Sang-soo is one of the few. Keeping up with his release schedule might as well be a hobby, and even then a new title can come like a thief in the night. That
Reviews Boston Palestine Film Festival Review: A House in Jerusalem (2023) dir. Muayad Alayan The largely aloof Michael Shapiro (Johnny Harris) and his fearless daughter Rebecca (Miley Locke) mourn their recently departed wife/mother and move to Israel, in land that once belonged to Palestinians displaced in 1948, to begin anew.
Reviews Review: Freud's Last Session (2023) dir. Matthew Brown No film needs to be made. Some films make this more apparent than others. And Freud’s Last Session is one of those films. Avoiding both ideological substance and antagonism between its two leading thinkers, Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins) and C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode), while simultaneously avoiding a textual
Essays Year Ender: Top Ten Films of 2023 The best films of the year creatively resist the studio destruction of art and suppression of vision with bold statements of visual-sonic distinction
Reviews Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (2023) dir. Zack Snyder Snyder’s inviolable picture bids for a better Hollywood. If we’re lucky, it might even be a taste of what’s to come.
Reviews Fallen Leaves (2023) dir. Aki Kaurismäki The fleeting beauty of temporal happiness is no less beautiful.
Reviews Concrete Utopia (2023) dir. Um Tae-hwa At its most political, Concrete Utopia finds the fascist project essentially anti-life and destined for a systemic collapse.
Boston Hassle Interview: Concrete Utopia director Um Tae-hwa "This movie deals with the disaster, but the disaster itself is not the focus."
Reviews Review: R.M.N. (2022) dir. Cristian Mungiu In my undergraduate studies, I wrote a 15-page paper analyzing the racist rhetoric common to alt-right Twitter. The sheer number of hours I spent locked in that horrid corner of that horrid website still weighs on me to this day. My research even initiated a pessimistic change in my personal
Reviews The Archies (2023) dir. Zoya Akhtar Zoya Akhtar is one of my favorite working directors. Along with her brother Farhan Akhtar, an actor-writer-director mostly known for his work as a leading man, she has made a series of effectual, transcendental films. This is both her greatest asset and her biggest criticism: the films of Zoya Akhtar
Reviews Failed State (2023) dir. Christopher Jason Bell & Mitch Blummer Bell and Blummer give a stronger condemnation of neo-liberal economic failure and the dearth of a social welfare system than the traditional journalistic documentary would have been able to.
