Tag: Film Review

REVIEW: De Forbandede År 2 (2022)

Jesper Christensen and Bodil Jørgensen in DE FORBANDEDE ÅR 2 — PHOTO: Scanbox Entertainment Danmark.

Directed by Anders Refn — Screenplay by Anders Refn and Flemming Quist Møller.

When I wrote up and released my brief thoughts on part one of Anders Refn’s De Forbandede År (int. title: Into the Darkness), a film about a family of Danes during the German occupation of Denmark, I was rather underwhelmed. World War II films tend to find an audience over here, and, as a bit of a history buff, I wanted this hugely ambitious project to land with more than just a thud. “Hopefully, its sequel will be better,” I wrote, though I must admit that I wasn’t optimistic. 

The first film was powerful in moments because of how it highlighted a family in conflict because of the occupation. Some decided to become resistance fighters and rebel, while others decided to cooperate with the occupiers in an attempt to keep food on the table and keep some sense of normalcy, I suppose. I noted that the historical drama about the first half of the German occupation of Denmark held my interest and was interesting and ambitious, but, ultimately, it was a disappointment, and it felt both incomplete and rushed. Anders Refn is still at the helm for the second part of the Skov story, and, frankly, the end result is mostly the same. Jesper Christensen is the highlight, but the film is messy and overlong. 

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REVIEW: Argentina, 1985 (2022)

Ricardo Darín and Peter Lanzani star in Argentina, 1985 — PHOTO: Amazon Prime Video.

Directed by Santiago Mitre — Screenplay by Santiago Mitre and Mariano Llinás.

Santiago Mitre’s Argentina, 1985 is a historical courtroom drama about the true story of the Trial of the Juntas, which sought to bring to justice the ringleaders of the military junta that committed murder, kidnappings, and torture under Argentina’s right-wing dictatorship in the late-1970s and early-1980s. The film primarily follows Julio César Strassera (played by Ricardo Darín), the chief prosecutor, as he, along with a team of inexperienced lawyers, gathered evidence and testimonies that could possibly convince the court.

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REVIEW: The Pale Blue Eye (2022)

Christian Bale in THE PALE BLUE EYE — PHOTO: NETFLIX.

Directed by Scott Cooper (Hostiles) — Screenplay by Scott Cooper.

Netflix’s first major film release of 2023 is Scott Cooper’s (very late entry into the 2022 movie year) The Pale Blue Eye. The film, which is based on a historical fiction novel of the same name from author Louis Bayard, features an incredibly well-known author, Edgar Allan Poe, as a character that is integral to the narrative, and it should go without saying that the film does not come close to becoming even a little bit as notable as the author the creatives have built a fictional mystery around. That would be a tough ask, to be honest. Still, though, this is a pretty decent crime thriller, even if it won’t end up on many best of 2022 lists. 

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REVIEW: Mumbai Mafia – Police vs The Underworld (2023 – Documentary)

PHOTO: Netflix.

Directed by Raaghav Dar and Francis Longhurst.

To kick off the new year, you would expect that Netflix had a major 2023 film to release. Not so. Instead, their first major release of 2023, The Pale Blue Eye (review coming soon), is technically a very late 2022 film. But since they have released a new documentary straight to Netflix that I believe to be a 2023 release, I thought I would review it to get the 2023 list off and running. So, here we have Raaghav Dar and Francis Longhurst’s Mumbai Mafia: Police vs The Underworld, which, as you can probably guess, is the kind of documentary that gives the basic premise away right there in the title. 

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REVIEW: Stoker (2013)

Mia Wasikowska as India Stoker — PHOTO: Fox Searchlight.

Directed by Park Chan-wook (Oldboy; Joint Security Area) — Screenplay by Wentworth Miller.

A handful of years before he directed all episodes of the excellent and underseen adaptation of The Little Drummer Girl led by Florence Pugh and Alexander Skarsgaard, Park Chan-wook made his first film in English with the Hitchcockian thriller Stoker, based on a screenplay from Prison Break-actor Wentworth Miller (under a pen name). 

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REVIEW: Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022)

Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022). Daniel GimÈnez Cacho as Silverio. Cr. Limbo Films, S. De R.L. de C.V. / Netflix

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu — Screenplay by Alejandro González Iñárritu and Nicolás Giacobone.

Taking inspiration, whether conceptually or visually, from a lot of different filmmakers including Fellini and Malick, Alejandro González Iñárritu has gone out and made a visually eye-opening self-insert introspective dream narrative that is possibly going to be quite puzzling for most people (if, indeed, they ever choose to watch it and sit through it on Netflix). It follows a Mexican journalist and documentarian filmmaker who is trying to make sense of his dual identity during an existential crisis. That is a really short and simple way of summing up a film that tries to be so much more and which has an overwhelming runtime, but it perhaps doesn’t get to the kind of jaw-dropping visual ideas that the director throws out there. It goes places that can be tough to wrap your head around (e.g. a baby is pushed back into her mother moments after it was born), and these ambitious hallucinatory sequences may be the best thing about the film, even though it, along with the runtime, may be the very thing that discourages viewers from pressing play.

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Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy (2002-2005) | Retro Review

Park Chan-wook, one of South Korea’s finest filmmakers, is fast becoming one of my favorite directors. I first encountered the director with his 2016 feature The Handmaiden, a stylish and precise near-masterpiece, which then made me go back and watch Oldboy, which I thought was just as brilliant. Years later, I have now reviewed his so-called vengeance trilogy, which includes the aforementioned Oldboy. In this article, you will find reviews of the three films in the thematic trilogy known as the vengeance trilogy: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003), and Lady Vengeance (2005).

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REVIEW: After Yang (2022)

(left to right) Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith, Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja, and Justin H. Min in AFTER YANG — PHOTO: A24.

Directed by Kogonada — Screenplay by Kogonada.

Kogonada’s After Yang is a science-fiction drama about a family that has lost someone. After competing in a dance competition as a family, their second-hand robotic son, Yang (played by Justin H. Min), malfunctions. Hoping to get him fixed, the family father, Jake (played by Colin Farrell), sets out to find a way to fix him, even though they are advised to simply replace him with another unit. As Jake gets access to Yang’s memory bank, he gains a new understanding of who Yang actually was.

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RETRO REVIEW: Joint Security Area (2000)

Park Chan-wook’s JSA: JOINT SECURITY AREA — PHOTO: CJ Entertainment.

Directed by Park Chan-wook (Oldboy; The Handmaiden) — Screenplay by Kim Hyun-seok, Jeong Seong-san, Lee Moo-yeong, and Park Chan-wook.

Based on Park Sang-yeon’s DMZ, Park Chan-wook’s Joint Security Area, or JSA, tells the story of an investigation into the murder of two North Korean soldiers inside a North Korean border house in the Korean Demilitarization Zone. One North Korean soldier survived. So did two South Korean soldiers on border duty, one of which fled the North Korean border house while wounded. However, the North Korean and South Korean soldiers have reported conflicting accounts of what happened, and so Swiss Army Major Sophie E. Jean (played by Lee Young-ae) is assigned by the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission to lead the investigation into what exactly transpired.

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REVIEW: Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022)

Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc in Rian Johnson’s GLASS ONION — PHOTO: NETFLIX.

Directed by Rian Johnson — Screenplay by Rian Johnson.

In 2019, Looper and The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson released his original ‘whodunnit’ ensemble crime mystery Knives Out. It was a huge success as it received critical acclaim and notable Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Oscar nominations. The film also helped to bring new life to the ‘whodunnit’ genre. It was so successful that this year there are several of those stories including See How They Run and the Apple-series The Afterparty. The massive success also led to a bidding war for Johnson’s Benoit Blanc-led Knives Out sequels. That bidding war was won by Netflix (they paid a whopping $469 million) and they have released its first sequel today just in time for Christmas. It brings me great joy to report that Glass Onion is almost exactly as good as the original film that preceded it, even though it no longer feels quite as fresh.

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