Author Archives: philipbrasor

Review: Nocturnal

Posted on September 11, 2025 by philipbrasor

This is the third Korean thriller I’ve seen in the last year wherein a male novelist and a book he wrote figure significantly in the mystery, except that in the case of Nocturnal (also the title of the fictional book) … Continue reading →

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Review: A Pale View of Hills and While You Were Sleeping

Posted on September 6, 2025 by philipbrasor

A dramatic device that I have become less patient with as it is more frequently wielded is the final-act plot twist, which often feels like an end in itself. In the case of Kei Ishikawa’s adaptation of Nobel Prize-winner Kazuo … Continue reading →

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Review: Oslo Stories: Sex, Dreams, Love

Posted on September 5, 2025 by philipbrasor

Not sure what it is about the Norwegian capital that inspires work that comes in threes. We already have filmmaker Joachim Trier’s Oslo Trilogy, but those movies were released over a period of ten years. The three feature-length films that … Continue reading →

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Review: Bird and September Says

Posted on September 4, 2025 by philipbrasor

Filmmakers create alternative worlds in their work by both design and necessity, but often in their endeavor to recreate naturalism they do the opposite and show us things we’ve never seen before. It’s difficult to determine what Andrea Arnold’s intentions … Continue reading →

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Review: How to Train Your Dragon

Posted on September 3, 2025 by philipbrasor

One of the disadvantages of advanced age is that the past is increasingly telescoped, and when it came to my attention that DreamWorks had made a semi-live version of its animated hit How to Train Your Dragon, I immediately thought, … Continue reading →

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Media watch: School teacher pedophile group seems to have been around a while

Posted on September 1, 2025 by philipbrasor

In early July, the education ministry called an emergency meeting with local school superintendents asking them “to strictly enforce teacher discipline and eradicate sexual violence against students.” The meeting was called in the wake of media reports that two public … Continue reading →

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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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