Tag Archives: Willem Dafoe

Review: The Girl with the Needle and Nosferatu

Posted on May 14, 2025 by philipbrasor

As a movie addressing the psychological torment that can accompany and follow the act of childbirth, Denmark’s most recent contender for an international feature Oscar doesn’t hold anything back, but because it’s set in a time and place that feels … 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 Card Counter

Posted on June 15, 2023 by philipbrasor

In a recent New Yorker profile The Card Counter was described as the second work in a trilogy of films by Paul Schrader about “the man in the room.” As the article points out, almost all of Schrader’s scripts, whether … Continue reading →

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Review: Nightmare Alley

Posted on March 26, 2022 by philipbrasor

The Hollywood melodramas of the late 40s and early 50s had a discomfiting story-telling quality that seems exclusive to that particular era, meaning right after a war that many deemed “good” but which nevertheless haunted those who had seen it … Continue reading →

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Review: The Lighthouse

Posted on July 8, 2021 by philipbrasor

Robert Eggers’ previous movie, The Witch, was celebrated as a genre subversion. Touted as a horror film, it appropriated archaic speech directly from the source and grounded its terrors in experiences that only the truly God-fearing can suffer in order … Continue reading →

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Review: At Eternity’s Gate

Posted on November 8, 2019 by philipbrasor

It could be argued that we don’t need another biopic of Vincent Van Gogh, certainly the most cinematized painter of all time. And on the surface, Julian Schnabel’s treatment of the tormented Dutchman covers much of the same ground that … Continue reading →

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Movies April 2018

Posted on April 2, 2018 by philipbrasor

Here are the movie reviews I wrote for the April issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo last weekend (a little later than normal due to a printing error). Black Panther By now it’s difficult to separate the … Continue reading →

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March 2011 movies

Posted on March 3, 2011 by philipbrasor

Here are the movie reviews I wrote for the March 2011 issue of EL Magazine. The films are being released in Tokyo between the end of February and the middle of March. Amazing Grace Old-fashioned in its determination to provide … Continue reading →

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