Monthly Archives: March 2024

Review: Godland

Posted on March 31, 2024 by philipbrasor

There’s a scene about halfway through this disturbing but frustrating Icelandic film that puts everything before and after in such plain perspective that it threatens to upend the whole meaning of the production. A young Danish clergyman, Lucas (Elliott Crosset … Continue reading →

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Review: Fanatic and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed

Posted on March 30, 2024 by philipbrasor

Oh Seyeon’s Fanatic is definitely a student project, since she was still studying film at university when it was first shown at Korean film festivals in 2021. As such it’s also a deeply personal film. Oh explores the mystery of … Continue reading →

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Review: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

Posted on March 29, 2024 by philipbrasor

Having passed through the original Ghostbusters craze phase unscathed and unenlightened, I came to the fractured franchise late and never quite got its blend of winking gross-out humor and imaginative but tame scares. There was always something under-cooked about its … Continue reading →

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Review: Oppenheimer

Posted on March 28, 2024 by philipbrasor

It was inevitable that Christopher Nolan’s multiple Oscar-winning biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, would play in Japan despite some earlier reports that no local distributor would touch it because of Hiroshima/Nagasaki; though it remains … Continue reading →

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Review: Love Reset

Posted on March 27, 2024 by philipbrasor

It’s been said by wiser cinema-heads than I that the romcom is dead, killed off by a post-modern critical attitude that doesn’t appreciate the irony that once made the genre appealing. My own take is that the classic trappings of … Continue reading →

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Review: Rheingold

Posted on March 26, 2024 by philipbrasor

One of the few intriguing elements of Fatih Akin’s biopic of the Kurdish-German rapper and media star Giwar Hajabi (professional moniker Xatar) is the title. The composite word comes up when Hajabi, as a child, accompanies his composer-conductor father to … Continue reading →

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Media watch: Local governments finance potential future mothers as marriages decline

Posted on March 25, 2024 by philipbrasor

Though the dwindling birth rate continues to be an important media topic, two recent news items, taken together, highlight one of the less remarked upon reasons for the lack of babies in Japan. At the end of February, the welfare … Continue reading →

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Review: Penalty Loop

Posted on March 24, 2024 by philipbrasor

As long as everyone is talking about Christopher Nolan, let’s look back at Memento, still my favorite movie by him because it’s such pure cinema, and not just in terms of what you see on the screen. The story is … Continue reading →

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Review: Paragraph 175

Posted on March 23, 2024 by philipbrasor

Originally released in 1999, Rob Epstein’s and Jeffrey Friedman’s documentary was another in the directors’ explorations of gay history and themes, with The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), The Celluloid Closet (1995), and the Oscar-winning Common Threads (1989) being their … Continue reading →

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Review: Call Jane

Posted on March 22, 2024 by philipbrasor

In 2024, almost two years after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and sent the question of abortion back to the states, a movie about how women accessed the procedure before it became constitutionally protected in 1973 will … Continue reading →

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