Category Archives: Movies

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: 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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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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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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