For this week’s You Have To See… we look at musician Plan B’s debut feature, the Brit-crime film ILL MANORS
The New Girlfriend
Managing to sidestep half-baked psychoanalysis and tired gender tropes, what Francois Ozon’s THE NEW GIRLFRIEND occasionally lacks in finesse it more than makes up for in depth.
Confetti Harvest
Clever enough to be engaging and composed visually with a subtle touch, Confetti Harvest’s overreliance on narrative cliché cannot derail what is an intelligent study of faith and expression.
Ned Rifle
Hal Hartley’s latest, Aubrey Plaza-starring NED RIFLE is both continually witty and achingly sad, bolstered by its superb cast.
“Mr. DeMille Is Ready for His Close-Up” – When Directors Step in Front of the Camera
In this longform piece we look at the strange, impressive and downright regrettable acting performances by feature film directors in films they themselves didn’t direct.
Gangster Payday
Lee Po-Cheung’s GANGSTER PAYDAY is a successfully blend of straight-up triad drama, culture-clash fable, and even wilfully cheesy Hong-Kong-rom-com, writes Jake Moody.
We Like Shorts, Shorts: The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes
Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes is very graphic, a confronting short film featuring scenes from actual autopsies. It is not for the faint of heart.
Lady Maiko
Masayuki Suo’s loose Japanese remake of My Fair Lady is charming, ludicrous, amateurish, languid, and fun, all in equal measure. In the final analysis, it’s a film entirely worth seeing, primarily as a curious and rare case study of what happens when a canonical Western narrative is appropriated in a totally different national and industrial context.
A Taste of Samurai Cooking – A True Love Story
A TASTE OF SAMURAI COOKING is a film that falls flat in most regards: awfully paced, poorly designed, and inexplicably uninterested in its main thematic conceit – the food – it ends up looking and feeling like a Japanese renaissance fair, an insipid and vaguely cringeworthy imitation of real history.
Snow On The Blades
With a protagonist-antagonist relationship resolved in such a ham-fisted manner and overreliance on tired samurai tropes of loyalty and stoicism, Snow on the Blades will enthral only those determined to enjoy its technical panache against their better judgment.