Monthly Archives: October 2024

29th Busan International Film Festival, Oct. 7, 2024

Yesterday I helped two women from Vietnam work the subway ticket machine and we rode the train together to Haeundae. They work for a Vietnamese film production company and were going to the Westin Hotel to help set up the … Continue reading

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29th Busan International Film Festival, Oct. 6, 2024

The high point of my Saturday at the festival was interviewing Shonali Bose and Nilesh Maniyar, the directors of the Competition Documentary entry, A Fly on the Wall, which is about a friend of theirs, Chika Kapadia, who, after being … Continue reading

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29th Busan International Film Festival, Oct. 5, 2024

The assassination of President Park Chung-hee in 1979 has received a lot of cinematic attention in South Korea recently, as if some kind of floodgates were opened. Several years ago there was The Man Who Stood Next, which thoroughly probed … Continue reading

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29th Busan International Film Festival, Oct. 4, 2024

One immediate observation after one full day at the festival: Chanel and Netflix seem to have taken over. As I mentioned yesterday, Chanel, in addition to sponsoring the Asian Film Academy, now gives out an award to a vital female … Continue reading

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Review: Civil War

Alex Garland’s extrapolation of the current U.S. crisis of cultural division to its most extreme ends is very disturbing not just because of the ultra-violence on display but also due to its purposeful vagueness. The second American civil war is … Continue reading

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29th Busan International Film Festival, October 3, 2024

My very slight favored status as a reliable press participant at the Busan International Film Festival—I’ve attended every edition since 2001, except for two years during the pandemic—has not been recognized this year. No free accommodations, no advance ticket bookings, … Continue reading

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Review: Laapataa Ladies

The Hindi title translates as something like “lost” ladies, though technically speaking the two females in question are misplaced by dint of negligence, a notion that makes this otherwise strained comedy interesting in terms of what it has to say … Continue reading

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Review: Late Night with the Devil

For their first movie set in the U.S., Australian horror maven-brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes hit on a novel idea that would seem to require a sensibility they weren’t born to. Late Night with the Devil is essentially a real-time … Continue reading

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