Synopsis:
After helping a wounded gang member, a strong-willed female saloon owner is wrongly suspected of murder and bank robbery by a lynch mob.
Spunky female leads surrounded by the macho Wild Wild West: intimations of feminist potential -- how, when the film cannot even begin to suggest an alternative to gaucho fantasia? Some insist the film is an anti-McCarthyist allegory. One is better off looking for some faint signs of homosocial ambivalence in...well...gaucho fantasia itself?
Synopsis: An affluent and unexceptional homemaker in the suburbs develops multiple chemical sensitivity.
Viewing the film in COVID-infested 2020 (and dealing with paranoia since recovering from a transient ischaemic attack last year), this viewer was primed to be retraumatized by the film's subject matter: the omniscient fear of disease, and its worse cousin, hypochondria. Instead, director and screenwriter Todd Hayne's unsettling, sophisticated, and beautifully photographed suspense turned out to be less Camusian and more Ibsenian; bougie horror playing at body…
Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki's film "Ariel" (1988) dilutes cinema down to its bare emotional, psychological, photographic, and aesthetic minimum.
A masterclass in comico-philosophic reduction, the life of the lead character Taisto Kasurinen is revealed frame by frame, like individual tableaux vivants merely suggestive of logic and inner life. Its minimalism is more than a directorial affectation; it is an attitude toward the humanity it sketchily portrays. Though seemingly facile, silly, and undemanding, Kaurismaki's disinterested writing and direction veils Kasurinen's likeness…
Synopsis:
Júlio Madiaga, a 'provinciano', arrives in Manila to search for Ligaya, his loved one.
Ang panonood ng pelikulang ito sa kasalukuyan ay isang ehersisyo sa unheimlich at kontra-nostalgiang pagbabalik-tanaw, unheimlich dahil pagbabalik-tanaw na pagmasid-salukoy rin, kontra-nostalgia dahil nakaraan iyong nabalaho naman sa kumunoy ng ngayon. Di marahil nahulaan nina Brocka, del Mundo, de Leon, at Reyes na ang pelikula nila’y magsisilbing kulungan sa sinematikong haraya ng bawat kontemporanyong mamemelikula, sapagkat nagtirik ito ng mga permanenteng muhon sa pagsasalin sa…
