As a gamer myself, I am familiar with the bitter feeling whenever I stop playing a super immersive game after spending so many hours, and coming back to reality. It’s not caused by the desire to play more, but by a sense of disorientation, because what I thought real isn’t real any more. The idea […]
The structure of this film resembles the way a chef prepares and delivers a dish for a critic. We’re waiting with hope to see how the film is going to solve the conundrum of making a rat (aka the archenemy of the kitchen) a chef. And with just the right amount of narrative seasoning, it […]
I like Dardenne brothers films because they always shed light on those who live in the margins of our society where people often do not even care to look. This time we follow and observe four young girls who learn how to become mothers in a maternity shelter in Belgium. Unlike their previous films, this […]
This film is jagged, chaotic, uncomfortable, and devastating. Not because there is a great level of injustice or atrocity (well, maybe one would say there is), but because of the impenetrable and incomprehensible depressive state of the main character Grace. It’s not a single big stroke of gloom though. Like in life, like in a […]
The movie had interesting (unconventional and funny) characters, clever cinematography (symbolizing symmetry and asymmetry of the character relationships), and an unexpected ending, which truly saved itself – speaking of saving, Dylan O’Brien’s stellar performance also saved the movie. On the surface, the movie seemed to be about loneliness and grief, but in fact it was […]
This film’s strength is in its self-restraint. The dialogues are sparse, and the main character Lia, a middle-aged retired teacher from Georgia, who’s on a journey to find her long-lost niece, is a very stern character and she doesn’t speak much. In the process of looking for her niece, a trans woman, Lia slowly learns […]
I am a sucker for films about dreams and dreamers. Although the film felt like a collection of vignettes, it hit many different notes that were sufficient to show Shelly’s complex persona. I appreciated that aside from showing how chasing dreams requires sacrifice, the film touched on how it could make one a little selfish. […]
It made me gasp quite a few times, and sure, it was mesmerizing to watch Adèle Exarchopoulos playing an insolent and (almost literally) dead-inside brat. Nevertheless, the plot was shallow and spotty, which was unfortunate because I genuinely thought it had interesting elements. The last segment of the film also felt unnecessary and cheating. The […]
In a way, a revenge story is doomed from the start because there is never truly a satisfying ending. From the beginning, the film is quite forthcoming about what we’re dealing with, and the rest of the journey is about how we will resolve this. It feels as if we’re fellow passengers in the minivan […]
This not-so-subtle maximalist movie is a swan song for human labor, and perhaps for humanity as well. Like many shows and movies made by my country’s artists (a bit over-done at this point, to be honest), this one also excels at portraying how capitalism preys on people with good intentions, and how they become desperate […]
asymptotic 