Month: April 2015

Movie Reviews: 4/13/2015 to 4/19/2015

April 19, 2015

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Movies reviewed this week: X-Men: Days of Future Past.

A Serious Man, 2009 - ★★★★½
December 29, 2024
It is a very slow motion apocalypse. This is a community that’s lost cohesion a while ago, right? The kids don’t respect their parents, the students universally disrespect their teachers, and the adults don’t respect each other. Sy makes a pretense of respect which is false on the face of it and false underneath as […]
Born of Fire, 1987 - ★★★
December 28, 2024
Peter Firth is so out of place in this. There’s this lovely hallucinatory apocalyptic story with a big chunk of baffled squinty white bread in the middle. According to Jamil Dehlavi in the interview on the Severin disc, poor Firth kept asking what his motivation was and Dehlavi kept telling him to roll with it.And […]
Beauty and the Beast, 1978 - ★★★★
December 28, 2024
That’s one of the great expressions of high atmosphere. The gloom and the mud are all the more oppressive given that the gothic mansion was clearly once a shining palace; the setting has been cursed to monstrosity just as much as the Beast himself. No wonder he places such value on his roses.The danger in […]
Undine, 2020 - ★★★★
December 27, 2024
The story of a building which was destroyed and replaced by a replica intertwines with the story of a relationship which was destroyed and replaced by something new. One is healthier than the other. Both are stories centered around Berlin. Even about Berlin.It’s significant that Undine Wibeau (Paula Beer) lives in what was once East […]
Eighteen Years in Prison, 1967 - ★★★½
December 27, 2024
My favorite of the four 2024 Radiance Tai Kato releases. The prison movie is a device to convey the psychological anguish of losing World War 2 with such cruelty. Some people, like Noboru Ando‘s Kawada, maintain their integrity. Some, like Asao Koike‘s Tsukada, do not. This underlying conflict, plus Kato’s usual highly kinetic filmmaking, produce […]