Favorite films

Recent reviews

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  Goodbye South, Goodbye 1996

  ★★★★ Rewatched 05 Feb 2025

  𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐝𝐛𝐲𝐞 𝐒𝐨𝐮𝐭𝐡, 𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐝𝐛𝐲𝐞(𝟏𝟗𝟗𝟔)
  𝐃𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫: 𝐇𝐨𝐮 𝐇𝐬𝐢𝐚𝐨-𝐇𝐬𝐢𝐞𝐧

  Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s first film set entirely in present-day Taiwan, Goodbye South, Goodbye concerns two low-level gangster brothers – easygoing Gao (Jack Kao) and impulsive Flathead (Giong Lim) – who, along with their girlfriends Pretzel (Annie Shizuka Inoh) and Ying (Kuei-Yin Hsu), navigate the rural outskirts of Taipei trying to earn enough money to open a restaurant. The opening scene of Goodbye South, Goodbye really typifies the emotional and spatial disconnection that dominates the rest…

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  Abiding Nowhere 2024

  ★★ Watched 04 Jan 2025

  This guy(Tsai Ming-liang) & his Bonk/Monk partner both are re*ards! 2 stars for the Fujifilm camera project.

Popular reviews

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  Only the River Flows 2023

  ★★★★ Rewatched 04 Jan 2025

  Wei Shujun's 3rd feature is probably the best neo-noir film to come out from China in recent years since Diao Yinan's masterpiece The Wild Goose Lake(2019).

  Set in the 90s' rural China in the period between the end of the Cultural Revolution & start of capitalism the film follows Detective Inspector Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong) who along his team investigates a series of murder in the nearby village. Although on the surface he seems like an atypical noir lead, it’s revealed…

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  Lessons of Darkness 1992

  ★★★★½ Watched 04 Jan 2025

  Werner Herzog presents Lessons of Darkness as a documentary not necessarily from Earth, but frii"a planet in our Solar system", shooting postwar Kuwaiti landscapes and architectures as strange and inhuman. His aerial cameras sweep over sand, buildings, and burning oil wells with a detached lack of emotion. We observe this alien world from above, musing upon the destruction its population has wrought.

  Lessons of Darkness is barely an hour long, but damn, it's a great hour. It's a hypnotic, almost…

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