Edward Yang’s The Terrorizers moves like a quiet storm, drifting through lives that barely touch yet leave lasting wounds.
A girl returns to her flat to find a note pinned to the wall. She doesn’t move for a moment, just stands there, staring at it, her silence pulling the air from the room. She steps forward, slowly, as if something might change before she reaches it. Translucent curtains shift with the wind, billowing softly, brushing against her skin as she…
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
"One morning I woke up, the sun was shining, it was spring… and Jack was dead beside me. Dead in bed."
A prophecy, an inevitability. These words settle over Eureka like a curse, whispered to Gene Hackman’s Jack McCann in the film’s prologue, though they may as well be an inscription on his tombstone. Nicolas Roeg was always drawn to the collision of time and fate — how past and present don’t simply co-exist but actively haunt one another. Eureka…
Fail Safe is a lean, relentless war thriller that grips from its opening frame. While Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (released the same year) leans into the absurdity of nuclear war, Fail Safe remains stone-faced, treating its scenario with a level of suffocating realism that feels all the more unsettling. Watching them back to back is a fascinating experience — two masterful directors taking the same source material and twisting it into wildly different shapes. In the long run, Kubrick’s film…
About twenty minutes in, Sterling Hayden’s General Jack D. Ripper sits behind his desk, a low-angled close-up, cigar wedged between his lips. He moves some papers aside, revealing a gun to Peter Sellers' ever-polite Mandrake. At that moment, nearly a third of the way through, I thought: this is interesting. The editing, the lighting, the framing, the dialogue — everything sharp and deliberate. A real war of words, shifting power dynamics. “Politicians neither have the time, the training, nor the…
There’s a deceptive lightness to I'm Still Here. It opens with laughter, music, and the warmth of a happy middle-class life, yet there’s something uneasy beneath it all. Eunice (portrayed with a rare, understated power by Fernanda Torres) is a housewife, living comfortably with her husband Rubens — a former congressman — and their many children. They host dinners, share moments of intimacy — dance, kiss, love — and move through a world where the dictatorship exists in the background.…
Mickey 17 feels like a novel that’s gone through several harsh edits; material shaved away, ideas hinted at but never fully expanded upon. What’s left is a film that moves at a breathless pace, packed with wit, visual spectacle, and Bong Joon-ho’s signature precision, yet it feels like it’s dancing around deeper questions. But, I had an absolute blast watching it.
At its core, Mickey 17 is another of Bong’s critiques of systems of control, but to simply label it…
