Category Archives: Movies

Review: The Monkey

Posted on September 18, 2025 by philipbrasor

The best thing about Osgood Perkins’ adaptation of the Stephen King short story is the titular toy, whose malevolent intentions are obvious just by looking at its sick grin and wide-open eyes. Unlike the windup monkey you’re more likely to … Continue reading →

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Review: Black Dog

Posted on September 17, 2025 by philipbrasor

Lots of cliches move the emotional gears of this Chinese film, which won the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. The titular canine is an extreme outcast in a former mining town … Continue reading →

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Review: Take Me Somewhere Nice

Posted on September 13, 2025 by philipbrasor

Alma (Sara Luna Zoric), who appears to be around 20 years old, is a Bosnian national raised in the Netherlands by her single mother, who brought her to Northern Europe with her father. At some point, however, the father decided … Continue reading →

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Review: In a Violent Nature

Posted on September 12, 2025 by philipbrasor

Horror movies are often predicated on ridiculously simple ideas usually having to do with not-so-innocent civilians intruding on the space of malignant forces. In Chris Nash’s debut feature, which picks and chooses its ideas from a number of well-known splatter … Continue reading →

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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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