Category Archives: Movies

Review: The Iron Claw

Posted on April 5, 2024 by philipbrasor

To those of us who do not follow professional wrestling, it’s often difficult to separate the athletics from the theatrics, and one of the strengths of Sean Durkin’s feature about the real-life Von Erich family, who were stars of the … Continue reading →

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Review: She Came to Me

Posted on April 4, 2024 by philipbrasor

There’s an air of lofty criticism drifting through Rebecca Miller’s new film that feels at odds with its production design. Though the decor of the sunny, expansive Brooklyn flats where it’s set convey the kind of aspirational fantasy evident in … Continue reading →

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Review: Past Lives

Posted on April 3, 2024 by philipbrasor

Celine Song’s debut feature, which didn’t win any Oscars despite being the most acclaimed indie movie of 2023 in the U.S., may be the purest cinematic distillation of the Korean emigrant experience, even more so than Minari. Centered on a … Continue reading →

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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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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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