Category Archives: Movies

Review: The Great Escaper

Posted on October 9, 2024 by philipbrasor

Reportedly Michael Caine’s last film and definitely Glenda Jackson’s last because she died not long after it was completed, this widely reported true story is further proof that old British actors, male and female, can still not only find work, … Continue reading →

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29th Busan International Film Festival, Oct. 8, 2024

Posted on October 8, 2024 by philipbrasor

I’m sitting in Gimhae Airport now waiting for my flight, which is very early, meaning I’ll get home before lunch. As I think I mentioned last year (the year before?), several years ago the festival stopped providing transportation between the … Continue reading →

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

Posted on October 6, 2024 by philipbrasor

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

Posted on October 5, 2024 by philipbrasor

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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Review: Civil War

Posted on October 4, 2024 by philipbrasor

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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Review: Laapataa Ladies

Posted on October 3, 2024 by philipbrasor

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

Posted on October 2, 2024 by philipbrasor

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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Review: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Posted on September 27, 2024 by philipbrasor

Though Tim Burton is an artist in every sense of the word, we tend to approach him as a filmmaker whose work evinces joy because those works are fun to watch. This is the guy whose first feature was a … Continue reading →

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Review: Kinds of Kindness

Posted on September 26, 2024 by philipbrasor

Kinds of Cruelty would be a more accurate title for Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest movie, but in line with the director’s often skewed view of human foibles and how those foibles can be dramatized, he frames his uniformly unpleasant characters in … Continue reading →

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Review: The Roundup: Punishment

Posted on September 25, 2024 by philipbrasor

The fourth go-round for this ultra-formulaic police thriller series starring Ma Dong-seok is as predictable as the last two sequels, an m.o. justified by its massive box office returns in South Korea. Once again, burly battering ram police detective Ma … Continue reading →

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