The man with the megaphone walks the alleyways, his mechanical voice echoing off the buildings. “Cigarettes are forbidden. Music is forbidden.” In the outskirts men with automatic weapons blast apart local fetishes, their clay bodies bursting over the sand. “Women…
Movie Review – “Wild Tales”
I remember how frustrated I felt the evening of the 2015 Academy Awards when Paweł Pawlikowski’s Ida (2013) took home the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. I found the film hopelessly generic and derivative of about half a dozen…
Movie Review – ‘The Lobster’
I keep seeing people describe Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster as a comedy. Though many elements are undeniably comedic, The Lobster belongs first and foremost to the horror genre; a fact all the more impressive considering it never seeks to deliberately…
Movie Review – ‘Tale of Tales’
All three of them end in blood: the story of the albino twins born to two different mothers by a necromancer’s spell; the story of the beautiful young princess accidentally bargained off by her foolish, distracted father as the bride…
Movie Review – ‘Jauja’
How odd: I feel like I shouldn’t like Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja half as much as I do. A mystery without an answer (or is it an answer without a mystery?), Jauja feels at times like an almost-Western, an almost-historical drama,…
Movie Review – ‘Tangerine’
The moment I stopped liking Sean S. Baker’s Tangerine (2015) and started loving it came about two-thirds of the way through. Fresh-out-of-prison transgender prostitute Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) crams herself into a club bathroom with Dinah (Mickey O’Hagan), another…