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 […]

This movie’s idea of young queer love is so pure that it’s astonishingly beautiful, chaotically untamed, and dangerously fatal. As the multi-genre crossover is not so strange at all here, the blood-covered faces and innocent hand-holding gestures seem just two different sides of a coin. The camera is often extremely close to Pauline and Juliet’s […]

I expected it to have a dinner scene like the one in <August: Osage County> but it was more like a collection of sharp cold broken ice shards that melt slowly. The distant characters with their seemingly boring suburban lives burst and exploded into passion, compassion, tears, and death when an ice storm arrived and […]

This is a good example of how narrative, characters, and cinematography creates incredible synergy. From the beginning, I noticed that the camera is bold and showing off. And then the dramatic soundtrack followed. This naturally pumped me up as if I was watching the tennis match in the movie right there at the court. On […]

This is a different type of Rinklater movie in that it was more dramatic and entertaining than his other movies. But it had an element of philosophy in it as usual (well maybe a bit heavy-handed because there was a scene about this philosophical conversation). At the essence, the movie is about how and whether […]

Perhaps because I have never been to Finland, I did not know what to expect about a slice of an ordinary life of a Finnish person. Because of this, even though the movie is very much based on everyday elements, the whole time I felt like I was watching a movie set in a distant […]

Over-promise and under-deliver. The premise was interesting but it failed to develop it into an interesting story. Certainly, the sci-fi setting of growing a baby outside the mother’s womb was fascinating. I get dissatisfied with a film when a character personality or behavior changes dramatically without any plausible reason, this happened in this movie. There […]

This is not the greatest horror movie but at least it had an interesting plot line. I liked that the horror element came from the growing doubt between a married couple. The clever thing that they did was the doubt was not one-directional but it changed throughout the film, which was quite unexpected. Another clever […]

The hypothetical civil war in the movie is a bit of red herring. The movie is about the challenges and ordeals that photojournalists experience in a war zone, which unfortunately we see from our news almost everyday these days. The movie was intentionally vague about why the war happened. In our political divide, this could […]

It is not easy to stoke immense warmth and love through a film. It’s easier to create emotional moments such as sadness and shock. Sometimes this is done by separating what characters can see and what audience can watch. In this movie, the camera was so intimate with the characters that I felt that I […]