Typhoon Club is based off a screenplay by Yuji Kato, director Shinji Sōmai crafts a coming of age tale without sentimentality for its disaffected youths. This is made clear in the opening scene as teenage girls having an infectious dance party at the swimming pool turn their attentions onto Akira […]
coming of age
It Lives Inside (2023): comfortingly uncomfortable horror with a twist (Review)
Spare a thought for the horror pseuds, folks like me who live to make strained sociopolitical interpretations of horror trends. The 21st century started off well for us, with the zombie revival and the torture wave mapping neatly onto post-9/11 anxieties. Why, though, is everything about exorcisms and possession all […]
My Drywall Cocoon (SXSW 2023)(Review)
The only Brazilian feature in competition at this year’s SXSW, My Drywall Cocoon has a director who may not be familiar to English-language audiences, albeit largely due to the timidity of our distributors. Caroline Fioratti’s debut feature Meus 15 Anos was a huge crowd-pleaser in Brazil, but crowd-pleasers tend not […]
Welcome To The Dollhouse (1996) A Nightmarish Descent Into Adolescence (Review)
The biggest lie we are told is that childhood and adolescence are innocent. Whether through bullying or the inevitable exploration of our bodies on a more intimate level, the innocence of our childish ignorance quickly becomes lost once high school begins. Welcome To The Dollhouse is a dark comedy about […]
Tenderness: The Past is a Foreign Country in Martin Šulík’s (1991) Debut (Review)
Released in 1991, Tenderness (or Neha as it is known in its native Slovak) is director Martin Šulík’s debut full-length feature, one which proved to be a groundbreaking production for post-Communist Slovakia. The film tells the story of Simon, a solitary young student played by Géza Benkõ, and commences with […]
Black Peter (1964) The origins of Czech New Wave’s greatest export (Review)
Bleak Night (2014)Simply put, Korean cinema at its very best (Review)
Korean cinema came out of nowhere in the early 2000′s, blowing up conceptions for what action thrillers can be. They were the perfect antidote to a Hollywood system that was (and still is) becoming increasingly one-dimensional. In turn, giving directors like Park Chan-Wook, Kim Jee-Woon & Bong Joon-Ho the chance […]