The Wayward Cloud (Tian bian yi duo yun&lt, Taiwan, 2005)

Definitely a film for outre tastes as it combines bonkers musical sequences with explicit sex scenes, virtually has no dialogue and concludes with a deeply disturbing scene where the protagonist has sex with a comatose/dead woman on the set of a porn movie. I’m unfamiliar with director Tsai Ming-liang but he’s clearly an auteur and [...]

Burn After Reading (US-UK-France, 2008)

This blog is meant to be for films ‘with something to say’, but I can’t resist stating how crap the Coen bros. latest film is. Farce must have momentum and requires audiences to care about characters. This bunch of lame set-ups is as flaccid as a bad ’70s sitcom and the caricatures are either too [...]

Gomorrah (Gomarra, Italy, 2008)

Whilst Gomorrah is clearly a gangster film, representing the Naples Camorra, it also resembles the (so-called) fly-on-the-wall documentaries that trace a number of contemporaneous narrative strands about lives in, say, airports or hotels. These, however, use voice overs thereby disallowing them as ‘observational’ documentaries as their meaning is anchored. That said, if Gomorrah had had [...]

Snow Falling on Cedars (US, 1999)

Director Scott Hicks came to prominence with Shine (Austrailia, 1996), a melodrama about an unstable pianist (brilliantly played by Geoffrey Rush). Nabbed by Hollywood, Snow Falling on Cedars was his follow up. This is also a melodrama intermingling a murder trial, a young man bitterness at, apparently, unrequited love, US internment of Japanese-Americans during the [...]

The Spirit of the Beehive (El Espíritu de la colmena, Spain, 1973)

“Now without bitterness nor contempt
now without fear of changes;
only thirst…a thirst
of a little something that kills me.
Rivers of life, where do you run?
Air! it’s air I need.
What do you see in the dark depths?
What is it that makes you tremble and fall silent?
I can’t see! I look on like
a blindman face to face with the [...]

Fallen Angels (Duo luo tian shi, Hong Kong)

This is probably my favourite Wong Kar-Wai film. I love its portrayal of urban alienation and Chris Doyle’s cinematography is sensational. WIth its companion piece, Chungking Express (Chung Hing sam lam, Hong Kong, 1994), Fallen Angels offers a vision of Hong Kong as a hyper-real landscape on the brink (of Chinese takeover). Hong Kong, as [...]

Manufactured Landscapes (Canada, 2006)

This visually astonishing film starts with a Godardian 8-minute tracking shot of a factory at work. Unfortunately that’s as close as the film gets to politics as photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose work is the focus of the film, takes the naïve liberal position of letting people decide for themselves. The decision they need to make [...]