Category Archives: Review

Review

Review: A Serbian Film (2010)

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aserbianfilmDirected by Srdjan Spasojevi´c

Starring Sergej Trifunovi´c, Srdjan Todorovi´c, Ana Saki´c

There is a good reason why this is called A Serbian Film: Only the Balkan nation of Serbia could produce this landmark of transgressive cinema. With the nation’s terrible decadelong civil war a constant and unspoken subtext, former porn star Milosh (Todorovi´c) is lured back into the industry by enigmatic producer Vukmir (Trifunovi´c). Short of cash and intrigued by the suggestion of porn as art, he finds himself duped into a hell of depravity that would make Hieronymus Bosch blanch.

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Review

Review: Fireball (2009)

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fireballDirected by Thanakorn Pongsuwan

Starring: Preeti Barameeanat 

Extreme basketball doesn’t sound like the basis of a great action movie. But just for a moment, imagine Yao Ming going for three points when he’s taking an elbow slash to the face.

Fireball may be a bybrid martial arts/sports movie, but this is no Shaolin Soccer. Instead, it’s a gritty and stunt-heavy actioneer set in the wild world of fireball, a no-holds-barred street basketball game run by the local mob bosses. Forget dribbling fouls: This is five-on-five meets muay thai, and if players die in the game, that’s just fewer team members to split the winnings.
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Review

Review: The People Vs. George Lucas (2010)

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tpvglDirected by Alexandre O. Philippe

It made sense that this documentary was preceded at its SXSW screenings by the short <i>Star Wars: Retold</i> (retold by someone who’s never seen it). Even people who have never sat through George Lucas’ epic tale of a galaxy far, far away have been touched by its cultural impact.

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Review

Review: The Least of These (2009)

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Directed by Clark Lyda and Jesse Lyda

The T. Don Hutto Residential Center has become infamous as the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility up in Williamson County that used to house immigrant and asylum-seeking families as their appeals go through the courts. That makes Hutto a prison for children and parents, none of whom has been convicted of anything.

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Review

Review: Made in China (2009)

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Directed by Judi Krant

Starring: Jackson Kuehn, Dan Sumpter, Syna Zhang, Deng Jung

Novelties are the benchmark of a great society, proclaims starry-eyed inventor Johnson (Kuehn). But he’s no Da Vinci or Edison: His genius lies in the realm of sneezing powder, pet rocks, and Slinkies – the pieces of irrelevant crap that make someone a millionaire. Flying on a whim and a dream from Woodville, Texas (population 2,415), to Shanghai, China (population 20 million), to find someone to manufacture his closely guarded “humorous domestic hygiene product,” the sweet-natured Johnson falls under the sway of Magnus (Sumpter), an English snake-oil-dealing business consultant after his money.
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Review

Review: Joy Division (2008)

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joydivisionDirected by Grant Gee

Starring: Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris, Tony Wilson, Paul Morley

Joy Division is not a documentary about the band Joy Division. Or, rather, it’s not that simple. It’s about the English city of Manchester in the 1970s: the rain-soaked, crumbling, devastated, crime-infested and hopeless city that helped form the band and that they in turn kick-started culturally. Inevitably, it must delicately contend with the suicide of singer Ian Curtis and the still-raw wound of his relationships with his wife, Deborah, and his lover, Anik Honore.
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Review

Review: Mandrill (2009)

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mandrillDirected by  Ernesto Diaz Espinoza

Starring: Marko Zaror

For anyone that yearns for the days when heroes were cool and lantern-jawed, heroines wore cocktail dresses, and every punch sounded like a baseball bat smacking beef, fear not. Mandrill is here to kick some ass and wear a big fat tie while he’s doing it.

Mandrill (Zaror) is a hit man, the best in the business in all of Chile: But he’s also a man on a mission, seeking the one-eyed killer that slew his parents. Forget any Fugitive chest-beating: Inspired by his lascivious uncle Cheno and the cheesy Johnny Colt detective movies of his youth, he’s become a red-blooded pastiche of unflinching masculinity.

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Review

Review: Kaifeck Murders (2009)

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hinter_kaifeckDirected by Esther Gronenborn

Starring: Benno Fürmann, Henry Strange, Alexandra Maria Lara

Ah, the countryside, so serene and peaceful. Yeah, right, unless it’s the remote Bavarian village of Kaifeck. Like Tom Waits sang, there’s always some killing you gotta do around the farm.

Photographer Marc Barenberg (Fürmann) and his son Tyll (Strange) are on a tour of the Bavarian hinterlands. They’re looking for the last traces of rural culture and folklore, and they find that in spades in the mist-shrouded Kaifeck. There they still celebrate the old ways, like the annual Epiphany festival, where the locals dress as wild spirits or percheta to chase away the devil.
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Review

Review: House (1977)

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hausuDirected by Nobuhiko Obayashi

Part of the appeal of Japanese cinema to the occidental audience is that it is a little more likely to catch a viewer jaded by Western conventions off guard. And then there’s House.

The last film to see the inside of a US cinema that made this little sense was probably Transformers 2. Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 oddity has previously never escaped Japan, and there are probably good reasons for that: Not least that it’s completely insane, borderline incoherent, and shot with so much visual panache and mid-70s excess that it comes off like Ringu on a Pixy Stix-fueled hug-a-thon.

It’s in many ways a fairly conventional Japanese supernatural horror film. Seven schoolgirls travel to visit an infirm old aunt and start getting picked off, one-by-one, by the occult forces that lurk in her home. But Obayashi abandons any pretense of horror, instead shooting in a neon palate and day-glo mindset that may have inspired such more recent oddities as Happiness of the Katakuris or Big Man Japan.

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