Letterboxd — Your life in film

The December Project: Film #43

Since seeing him late at night in Flickering Lights when I was but a young teenager, Mads Mikkelsen has been an actor I've observed closely, his leap into the mainstream with Casino Royale thankfully bringing his massive talents to a much wider audience. He's scarcely been better than in The Hunt, his performance here encapsulating everything the film has to say about the perils of small-town communities and mob mentalities. The pain and fear, the…

Review from Next Projection

It’s immediately tempting to compare Fill the Void, the attention-grabbing first film from Israeli director Rama Burshtein, with Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills, also released this year. Both films, after all, concern themselves with the microcosmic machinations of religious orthodoxy: Burshtein’s with Haredi Jews in Tel Aviv; Mungiu’s with Eastern Orthodox Christians in Romania. Where Beyond the Hills offers an exterior view of its subject, however, filtered through the sceptical eyes of its outsider director, Fill…

Review from Next Projection

There’s a terrifically ironic plot point in The Good Man, an otherwise misguided Irish film that premiered last year, where the affluent banker antihero uses his charity sponsorship of an African child to clear his own conscience, blissfully unaware that the very deals he is hatching are those whose consequences only exacerbate the need for financial aid. Such moralistic greed, even in charity, is typical of the Western world, and forms the bedrock of Pauline Chan’s…

Review from Next Projection

“The 18th film from Ki-duk Kim” proclaim the opening credits of Pieta, announcing auteurial authority with so booming a voice as to make entirely unsurprising the many ties that have been made between the film and its director’s previous efforts. Perhaps it’s appropriate that we should fixate so soon on the concept of creator, revolve as the film does around the idea of nature versus nurture as it studies the psychological complexities of an emotionless debt…

Review from Next Projection

Few professions are not, by necessity, utterly repetitive, the same tasks repeated ad infinitum, replayed day after day after day. It must be all the worse for teachers, whose year-long cycle might seem initially preferable, but which nonetheless pits them in a similar carousel of duties where the students remain the same age as they themselves grow ever older. It’s precisely this circularity that underlies The English Teacher, a colourful comedy focusing on the unshakeable optimism…

In my original review for The Avengers, I came to the conclusion that Marvel were not the evil overlords any Disney-owned company should be, but rather a studio that genuinely gives a shit, and is willing to take a risk with their properties on exciting filmmakers. Well, in as much as one can take a risk on movies with guaranteed profits... shut up. They continue this trend in Iron Man 3, handing the keys to the billion-dollar franchise to Shane…

Review from Next Projection

If the impact of a film is to be measured solely in terms of its success in emulating the psychological state of its characters, then there’s a case to be made for Mark Mann’s Generation Um… as one of the year’s most resoundingly effective movies. Yet few could argue convincingly for Mann’s feature debut as anything of the sort, its minimalistic narrative—tracing the path of a lost-in-life man and his two equally aimless female companions through…

Review from Next Projection

“It’s actually been difficult for me, seeing you be so sick,” protests Leif when his wife Ida, newly declared in remission from breast cancer, finds him in their living room with “Tilde from accounting”. It’s a line typical of the jet-black comedy of celebrated scribe Anders Thomas Jensen, who makes his fifth collaboration with director Susanne Bier since her 2002 Dogme 95 breakthrough Open Hearts with Love Is All You Need. Following in the Oscar-winning footsteps…

Review from Next Projection

Tucked away in a secluded abandoned bunker, amid rolling hills and winding roadways the like of which tourism advertisements are wont to tout as emblematic of the British countryside, an attractive blonde speaks numbers into a microphone. She is Katherine, and unlike Emerson—the quiet American assigned to watch over her as she performs her duty—she knows neither to whom she broadcasts nor why. This is The Numbers Station, a cramped-quarters thriller that pits John Cusack and…

Review from Next Projection

Against the brilliant white landscape of a snow-laden Norwegian town, a black figure appears, harshly contrasted with its surroundings as it moves—closer, slowly closer—toward us. It, we soon learn, is he: the young Thor Heyerdal, defiantly striding toward the camera amid a chorus of rising chords to stare it—and seemingly us—in the eye. So strange a juxtaposition between the cinematic immersion of the unbroken shot and the sharp subversion of the direct address is a fitting…

Review from Next Projection

We can learn a lot about America from the constitution of its action movie heroes throughout the years. From the white-hatted purity of the Ringo Kid to the war-scarred trauma of John Rambo to the fantasy superheroism of Tony Stark, the evolution of the action hero has mirrored the evolution of the American political and cultural climate. That’s a worrying fact when faced with the meatheaded, misogynistic mentality of Java Heat and its undercover protagonist, whose…