Boston Hassle

A collection of 170 posts

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.

Reviews

Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival: Amal & Cat Call

Amal is the kind of film I expect to see a lot more of from French-speaking Europe over the next decade: well-intended, competently-made, and incredibly simplistic films that divide the rising Islamic community in Europe into either the good European progressives that hide all religiosity from the p

Reviews

Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival: Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell & Ten Months

INSIDE THE YELLOW COCOON SHELL (2023) — dir. Pham Thien An The winner of the Caméra d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell will surely join the ranks as the latest surefire Letterboxd-type cinephile slow-cinema favorite. A Vietnamese language film co-produced by Vietnam, Singapore,

Reviews

Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival: Hada & The Writer

The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PӦFF) runs in-person in Tallinn, Estonia from November 3-19. The Boston Hassle’s Joshua Polanski will be reviewing and interviewing live from Estonia as part of his multi-outlet coverage of the festival. Be sure to check out his website for updates on additional coverage.

Reviews

Boston Palestine Film Festival (2023) Dispatch 3: More Documentaries

The Boston Palestine Film Festival runs online from October 13 through October 22. The live component has been postponed due to the tragic current events in Palestine and Israel. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage. THE LAW AND

Reviews

Boston Palestine Film Festival (2023) Dispatch 2: Alam and Bir'em

The Boston Palestine Film Festival runs online from October 13 through October 22. The live component has been postponed due to the tragic current events in Palestine and Israel. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage. ALAM (2022) dir.

Reviews

Boston Palestine Film Festival (2023) Dispatch #1: Transnational Documentaries

The Boston Palestine Film Festival runs online from October 13 through October 22. The live component has been postponed due to the tragic current events in Palestine and Israel. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage. Here Joshua reviews

Reviews

Kim Seong-sik Debuts with Dr. Cheon and the Lost Talisman

I may be basic, but when it comes to Korean cinema, I’m a sucker for both Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho. (On the actor front you can add Gong Yoo and Kim Tae-ri, but that’s a different story.) Kim Seong-sik, the first-time director of Dr. Cheon and the

Reviews

The Beauty and Rewatchability of Event Horizon

With inspirations varying from Hieronymus Bosch and Warhammer 40,000 to the literal architecture of the Notre Dame Cathedral and Fritz Lang, Paul WS Anderson’s earliest great work Event Horizon (1997) more than holds up as it approaches its 26th year. It’s one of the great 20th-century space-horror

Reviews

Analogies of Continuity in The Marriage of Maria Braun

The opening and closing images of The Marriage of Maria Braun are some of the most biting bookends in all of cinema. An image of Hitler, operating like a visual overture, opens the film, accompanied by auditory wedding vows; it provides something of an interpretive key for the film. The

Reviews

My Animal Makes for a Captivating Debut

My eyes were first captivated by the seductive cinematography of My Animal in the opening scene of Heather (Bobbi Salvör Menuez) sitting alone on her floor watching the 1984 “Beauty and the Beast” episode of Faerie Tale Theatre as the moon rises. Covered completely in by darkness, only two changes

Reviews

The Trajectory of Emmanuel Carrère and Between Two Worlds

I first became interested in the artistry of Emmanuel Carrère through his 2018 genre-disintegrating novel The Kingdom. The book offered something completely original: an astute history of the earliest Christians filtered through the memoir of one of the French language’s great contemporary prose masters as he, now agnostic, reflects

Reviews

The Basic Predicament of The Moon

Many of the best survival-oriented movies work like a line of dominoes: their best bits catalyze one another, the action of one is impossible without the drama of another. In Uncut Gems (2019), a lightly disguised survival film, each and every action by Howard (Adam Sandler) is a reaction to,

Reviews

Afire, One of the Year's Most Romantic Films

The Berlin School’s prized filmmaker director and writer Christian Petzold’s new film, Afire, releases this weekend at the Coolidge Corner Theater. The German summer romance is bound to be one of the year’s most literary films, a claim that shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the

Reviews

Sympathy for the Devil and the Manic of Nicolas Cage

It took me fewer than 10 minutes to recognize Nicolas Cage’s Boston accent as “The Passenger” in Sympathy for the Devil, his newest venture into weird indie cinema. Unlike Pig and Mandy, his newest film is designed with at least a modicum of mainstream appeal. The premise is simple,

Reviews

Paradise Leaves a Tainted Impression

How much pain and injustice must one suffer to become radicalized?

Batdelger Byambasuren

Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival Interview: Batdelger Byambasuren and Tsogobayar Namsrai on Disorder

The Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival runs in person in Bucheon, South Korea from June 29 to July 9. The Boston Hassle’s Joshua Polanski interviewed director Batdelger Byambasuren and producer Tsogobayar Namsrai on their film Disorder as part of his multi-outlet coverage of the festival. Be sure to check

Reviews

Late Autumn and the Great Yasujiro Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu might be cinema’s greatest practical humanist. The great Japanese director made a career out of shomin-geki films, a genre centered on the ordinary lives of ordinary people—and he did so with a complete vision of the power of human connection. For Ozu the man, that understanding

BIFAN

Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival Interview: Director Franklin Ritch on The Artifice Girl

The Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival runs in person in Bucheon, South Korea from June 29 to July 9. The Boston Hassle’s Joshua Polanski interviewed director, actor, and writer Franklin Ritch on his film The Artifice Girl as part of his multi-outlet coverage of the festival. Be sure to

Reviews

The Career of Alan Mak and The Procurator

The career of Alan Mak makes for an interesting case study. Apart from the Infernal Affairs trilogy, which he co-directed with Andrew Lau (and was later remade by Martin Scorsese as The Departed), his filmography has been a bit lackluster. If it weren’t for the trilogy—and particularly the

Reviews

Extraction 2 Goes Big, Netflix's Best English Language Action Film

Netflix has something going for them with the Extraction series. In the inventory of their biggest-buck action flicks,* the roughly $75 million Extraction 2 stands out amidst the likes of the $200 million Red Notice and the $150 million 6 Underground. A sequel to the 2020 Chris Hemsworth spy engine,

Reviews

Flaming Hot As Cinematic Decay

It’s 2045. The studios have gone mad, it’s been ten years since the last non-IP based film broke the top five at the box office, and John Deere: The Movie is set to go head-to-head with Trojan on the prized July 4th release date. A dystopian future for

Reviews

A Cromulent Transformers Film

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts is the only perfectly cromulent entry of the bunch.