Monthly Archives: August 2025

Review: Love Lies Bleeding

Posted on August 28, 2025 by philipbrasor

My reaction to the overall visual and aural aesthetic of Rose Glass’s thriller was obviously affected by other recent movies that looked and sounded the same, in particular the work of the Safdie brothers and Mandy, the Nicolas Cage vehicle … Continue reading →

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Media watch: Loan or lease, you pay for it all in the end

Posted on August 24, 2025 by philipbrasor

Earlier this month Asahi Shimbun reporter Yotaro Hamada, whose specialty is social welfare, commented on an editorial he had written in July about Japanese opposition parties’ campaign pledges to reduce the consumption tax and social security premiums. Hamada insisted that … Continue reading →

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Review: Land of Happiness

Posted on August 23, 2025 by philipbrasor

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

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Review: Ballerina

Posted on August 22, 2025 by philipbrasor

The John Wick cinematic universe was built piecemeal in that it started out with a standard revenge story that was so popular it spun off its own underlying mythos. The problem with this methodology is that it was difficult to … Continue reading →

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Review: Parthenope

Posted on August 21, 2025 by philipbrasor

Paolo Sorrentino may not be the most characteristically Italian filmmaker, but he’s obviously the most self-conscious one, an attribute that could be extended to his status in post-New Wave European cinema. Many of the themes of his latest film, the … Continue reading →

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Review: Land of Bad

Posted on August 15, 2025 by philipbrasor

Not as awful as its title, this military actioner mainly gets by with the help of Russell Crowe in another of his late career moves into B-movie territory. He plays a U.S. Air Force officer named Eddie “Reaper” Grimm whose … Continue reading →

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Review: Jurassic World: Rebirth

Posted on August 8, 2025 by philipbrasor

I’ve never expected coherence from the Jurassic franchise, and the 7th installment didn’t challenge those expectations at all, though its development is at least linear. Whatever associations its story has with past chapters either don’t exist or flew over my … Continue reading →

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Review: I’m Still Here

Posted on August 7, 2025 by philipbrasor

It’s easy to see why Walter Salles’s adaptation of Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir of the abduction and murder of his father in the 1970s by the Brazilian authorities won the Oscar for Best International Feature. It’s earnest in its outrage … Continue reading →

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Review: The Voices of the Silenced and A Compassionate Spy

Posted on August 2, 2025 by philipbrasor

Co-director Park Maeui worked with her veteran documentarian mother, Park Soo-nam, on The Voices of the Silenced, a detailed review of the latter’s life and work as the former digitizes that work, which was originally shot in 16mm. Both Parks … Continue reading →

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Review: Kneecap

Posted on August 1, 2025 by philipbrasor

Sort of a musical biopic and sort of a piss-take on musical biopics, Rich Peppiatt’s movie about the titular Irish-language rap group messes with the audience’s expectations as he fashions a comedy of ill manners to make a point about … Continue reading →

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