Category Archives: Movies

Busan International Film Festival 2023 press conference

Posted on September 6, 2023 by philipbrasor

It seemed somewhat telling that the first question from reporters attending the online-only press conference for the 2023 Busan International Film Festival was about the Zoom format itself. Prior to COVID, the press conference, traditionally held the first week of … Continue reading →

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Review: Tell It Like a Woman

Posted on September 2, 2023 by philipbrasor

This omnibus of shorts, all written and directed by women of different nationalities and centered on the unique problems that women face in the world, is predictably earnest in a kind of European way (the production is mostly Italian), but … Continue reading →

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Media watch: Struggling to keep the memory of the 1923 Korean killings alive

Posted on September 1, 2023 by philipbrasor

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Great Kanto Earthquake, one of the worst disasters to ever strike Japan, a country that’s had more than its share both natural and man-made. In the days following the quake, which was centered … Continue reading →

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Review: Asteroid City

Posted on August 31, 2023 by philipbrasor

At this point, what’s most impressive about Wes Anderson’s movies is how quickly he makes them. Woody Allen used to be the fastest auteur in the world not named Hong Sangsoo, but Allen’s films were simple in the first place, … Continue reading →

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Review: Daliland

Posted on August 30, 2023 by philipbrasor

Though I had misgivings about I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho, I think director Mary Harron did as good a job as anyone could have with the source material—the former, a retelling of the attempted murder of the original … Continue reading →

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Review: Hit the Road

Posted on August 25, 2023 by philipbrasor

When I think about Iranian cinema, certain adjectives immediately come to mind—allegorical, stark, allusive—but “breezy” isn’t one of them. In that regard, the offhanded narrative style of Pahan Panahi’s debut feature resembles that of no other Iranian director I can … Continue reading →

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Review: Next Sohee

Posted on August 24, 2023 by philipbrasor

The second film by Korean director July Jung, a former assistant to Lee Chang-dong, is conventional in all but structure, but to discuss that structure in detail would give away too much. Nevertheless, Next Sohee continually surprised me, and several … Continue reading →

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Review: Meg 2: The Trench

Posted on August 23, 2023 by philipbrasor

The enduring commercial viability of shark movies, almost fifty years after Jaws, mirrors the enduring commercial viability of zombie flicks, though no one, as far as I know, has ever compared the two. As terrifying adversaries go, both sharks and … Continue reading →

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Review: The Wolf House

Posted on August 19, 2023 by philipbrasor

Presented as an old film restored by the Chilean directors/animators Joaquin Cociña and Cristóbal León about a German colony with a very bad reputation, The Wolf House is a disarming excavation of proto-fascist tropes served up as surreal art. Based … Continue reading →

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Review: Crimes of the Future

Posted on August 17, 2023 by philipbrasor

David Cronenberg’s return to “body horror,” a genre he invented, after two decades of comparatively conventional, though by no means less disturbing, dramas has the same title as one of his earliest movies, so at first I wondered if he … Continue reading →

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