Category Archives: Movies

Review: It Comes at Night

Posted on November 22, 2018 by philipbrasor

At first blush, this fairly modest horror movie by upstart Trey Edward Shults feels like a pale reflection of A Quiet Place, which is probably this year’s most successful horror movie. Both films are about families hiding out in the … Continue reading →

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Review: A Ghost Story

Posted on November 17, 2018 by philipbrasor

Though not a Hollywood film in the least, David Lowery’s A Ghost Story plays with ideas about the paranormal that are fashionable among the bean counters of tinsel town, except that they’re in service to a story about loss and … Continue reading →

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Review: Mandy

Posted on November 10, 2018 by philipbrasor

Panos Cosmatos’s violent revenge thriller is like every other violent revenge thriller and yet unique, owing mainly to its stubborn insistence on describing a specific place and time that has no discernible purpose. Set somewhere in the California wilderness in … Continue reading →

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Review: Bohemian Rhapsody

Posted on November 8, 2018 by philipbrasor

In it’s own limited way, the biopic of the British band Queen is as narratively compromised as the group’s creative output was musically compromised. Leader Freddie Mercury was always open about how his approach to rock was not doctrinnaire; that … Continue reading →

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Review: Ten Years Japan

Posted on November 4, 2018 by philipbrasor

The “Ten Years” series started in Hong Kong in 2015 with an omnibus of shorts depicting the former British territory ten years into the future, and was notably dystopian in tone, which is to be expected, and not just because … Continue reading →

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Tokyo International Film Festival 2018

Posted on November 3, 2018 by philipbrasor

Here are reports I filed for events at TIFF this year. –History Lessons press conference –Before the Frost press conference –The Bra press conference –Three Husbands press conference (ignore the title) –The Father’s Shadow press conference –Just Only Love press … Continue reading →

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Review: Fahrenheit 11/9

Posted on November 2, 2018 by philipbrasor

The pleasures and edifications of Michael Moore’s latest broadside attack on the power elite comprise more of a mixed bag than any of his previous polemics, which tended to focus on a specific, albeit broadly characterized, subject matter. Though Donald … Continue reading →

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Review: Hotel Salvation

Posted on October 31, 2018 by philipbrasor

There’s an over-familiar quality to this movie about an elderly man coming to terms with his mortality that is both exacerbated and dismissed by its Indian setting. The story’s particulars—a man’s reckoning with the inevitable, his son’s reactionary intransigence, the … Continue reading →

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Review: Norman

Posted on October 29, 2018 by philipbrasor

Norman Oppenheimer (Richard Gere) is a freelance political fixer, and in popular fiction terms such a description conjures up visions of slick men in three-piece suits juggling cell phones and commanding transactions of millions of dollars in fees and payoffs. … Continue reading →

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Review: Searching

Posted on October 27, 2018 by philipbrasor

What’s immediately compelling about Aneesh Chaganty’s thriller is its cleverly curated mise en scene, which takes place on a computer desktop. The story unfolds in a series of screenshots depicting photo files, browser searches, chat messages, Tumblr posts, Facebook timelines, … Continue reading →

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